Cultivating Empire Through Print: The Jesuit Strategy for New France and the Parisian “Relations” of 1632 to 1673

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ABSTRACT Cultivating Empire Through Print: The Jesuit Strategy for New France and the Parisian Relations of 1632 to 1673 Bronwen Catherine McShea 2011

In accounts of French colonial activity and cultural encounters in North America in the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries typically appear as ambivalent toward the political, economic, and "civilizing" aims of French empire builders in Paris and Quebec. They also appear as relatively accommodating to indigenous ways of life and concerned to safeguard Native American Christians, by means of segregated mission "reserves," from a morally corrupting French civilization. Such views are challenged by reading the Relations from New France (1632-1673), authored by Paul Le Jeune and other missionaries, in the light of their original, Parisian milieu of publication and reception, and by examining the metropolitan history of the mission enterprise. In partnership with their powerful publisher Sebastien Cramoisy and coteries of French government officials, wealthy nobles, and merchants, the Jesuits of New France were precocious proponents of a Paris-centered civilizing mission to other parts of the world by means of an expanding, French-imperial state and economy. Their program, urged very publicly in Paris, had implications for poor, socially marginal populations within and emigrating from France as well as for missionized Native Americans.

These Jesuits were committed, for

religious and secular reasons, to cultivating a trans-Atlantic, imperial culture of French "civility," material consumption and aesthetic tastes according to new elite, urban

standards, and deference to new political and social hierarchies. As is seen especially in their steady, if largely unsuccessful campaign in France for a war of conquest against the Five Nations Iroquois, the missionaries at times favored violence and coercion to achieve this vision of French hegemony in North America.

The Relations not only raised

awareness about the missions among pious Catholics and potential donors, but also propagandized on behalf of royal power and marshaled colonial experiences to influence the agendas of wealthy and educated elites interested in social and cultural change both within France itself and abroad in the expanding network of French overseas possessions.

Cultivating Empire Through Print: The Jesuit Strategy for New France and the Parisian Relations of 1632 to 1673

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University In Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by Bronwen Catherine McShea

Dissertation Director: Carlos M.N. Eire

May 2011

UMI Number: 3467520

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

v

Dedication

viii

Introduction: A Metropolitan View of a Colonial Mission

1

I.

The mission and the Relations in the existing scholarly literature

9

II.

Plan of the dissertation

23

Chapter One: A Mission for the Jesuits of Paris

32

I.

A young Jesuit in Bourbon Paris

34

II.

Sebastien Cramoisy: "King of the Rue Saint-Jacques"

48

III.

The Jesuit mission to New France before the Cramoisy Relations

61

IV.

The first Cramoisy Relations

74

Chapter Two: Introducing "France" to the "Poor Miserable Savage"

80

I.

"At the best, their riches are only poverty"

85

II.

"Voila, their fine eating"

94

III.

"The cabins of this country are neither Louvres nor palaces"

106

IV.

Natives as Carnival "maskers," "sorcerers," "jugglers," and "charlatans"

119

Chapter Three: France's Mission to the Poor and the Sick

131

I.

"I mocked their superstitions"

136

II.

"The dawn of a mild and peaceful prosperity"

153

III.

A hospital from the "heart of Christianity"

164

Chapter Four: Working for France's "Powerful Genius"

178

I.

Le Jeune's entree at Court

184

II.

The Relations as wartime propaganda for the Crown

201

in

III.

Le Jeune's political mission in France and the coming of the Iroquois Wars

214

Chapter Five: Navigating the Beaver Wars and the Fronde

229

I.

A martyr for Christ and for imperial France

234

II.

Underreporting the news from New France

252

III.

The Relations as Frondeur propaganda

267

IV.

A new crusade for the "heirs of Saint Louis"

279

Chapter Six: Paris Lost

290

I.

A house divided

297

II.

The end of the Parisian Relations

316

Conclusion: The Secular Aims of a Catholic Mission

334

Bibliography

350

IV

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Yale University, first of all, for its generous support of graduate study in history and so many other fields in the arts and sciences.

I am indebted to more

individuals at Yale than I can name, including members of the support staff of the Graduate School and Department of History, the librarians and access services staff at Sterling Memorial Library, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and other campus facilities, and of course a number of my fellow graduate students for their cameraderie and encouragement. The Graduate Registrar in the History Department, Marcy Kaufman, has my special thanks for her tireless, seemingly superhuman efforts each day on behalf of students and faculty alike. Among the excellent Yale faculty from whom I have been privileged to learn, and without whom this dissertation would not exist, my advisor Carlos Eire has my very warm gratitude, not only for his sustained guidance in many stages of my scholarly and professional development, but also for his great humanity and good humor as a mentor. Charles Walton and Jay Gitlin have also been very generous with their time, guidance, and interest in this project. I thank all three for poring over many chapter drafts and for much crucial feedback. Other faculty with whom I studied contributed in important ways to this project by imparting to me over Yale seminar tables their historical knowledge and modes of inquiry and scholarly presentation.

Among these are John Demos, John

Merriman, Steven Pincus, Ronald Rittgers, and Stuart B. Schwartz. I am indebted to a number of scholars outside of Yale, including Fr. John O'Malley, SJ, of Georgetown University who generously read an early draft of the dissertation and offered useful and encouraging feedback. Jean Frederic Schaub of Paris' v

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) introduced me to key readings and discourses on "barbarism" and "civility" in early modern Europe in a fascinating course he offered while visiting Yale for a term. Fr. James Heft of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies and Brad Gregory of the University of Notre Dame have also been generous with their enouragement of my scholarship.

Important germs of

inspiration for this project were planted during my years at Harvard Divinity School: Patrick Provost-Smith, who was then Assistant Professor there, introduced me to the Relations from New France and to many interesting topics in the early modern history of Christianity in global contexts. I am grateful, as well, for the background I acquired in the study of "lived religion" in lecture courses with David Hall, Robert Orsi, and others. Some financial support for the dissertation was provided by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where I was able to examine original editions of the Relations and many other seventeenth-century Cramoisy imprints.

Assistance for

research trips to Paris and Rome was provided by the American Historical Association, the American Catholic Historical Association, and the Society for Reformation Research. I am grateful for the assistance I received from Fr. Robert Bonfils, SJ, and his assistant Isabelle Dumigron at the Archives Jesuites at Vanves, France; from many staffers at the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris who were patient with my timidity in speaking French and aided me in locating key primary sources; and from Fr. Jose Antonio Yoldi, SJ, Mauro Brunello, Francesco Stacca, and Olga Palmas at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu in Rome. Mauro assisted me in locating manuscripts crucial for the project, consulted several sources for me long after I left Rome, and was especially gracious about my stubborn ignorance of the glorious Italian language.

vi

Then there are those to whom I am more personally indebted.

I thank my

parents—my first history teachers—Maureen and Kevin McShea, for nourishing me in every possible way over all the years of my life, and for their unflagging love and patience, including during my moodiest phases while working on the dissertation! I am grateful also to my siblings Brendan, Colleen, and Thomas, who first got me interested in French North America long ago while we pretended—for some mysterious reason—to be characters from The Last of the Mohicans. In those games, the French were often the "bad guys." Sibling rivalry may partly explain the desire, later in life, to write about the French in understanding terms. I thank, too, my dear, departed brother-in-faith, James Maschoff (1977-2010), who in friendship imparted to me some of his great store and love of historical, theological, and philosophical knowledge in ways that informed the early development of this project. I am grateful to other friends who have encouraged me in my labors in important ways, including Anne Louise Antonoff, Kate Brubacher, Elbridge Colby, Fr. Christopher Collins, SJ, Ronald Distajo, Victoria Gardner, Boleslaw Kabala, Christopher Killheffer, Hanja Kochansky, Patricia Snow, and Kristin Williams. Finally, I wish to acknowledge a beloved mentor and friend, Louis Miller, with whom I studied European intellectual history his last year at Harvard as Assistant Professor. At a point in my college education when I was quite insecure about the value of my own thoughts and my capacity for academic work, Louis attended them with the seriousness and care of a true teacher. He helped me discover my unexpected vocation to scholarship. These past years, his friendship and example have helped sustain my spirit in it. In thanksgiving, I dedicate this labor to him.

vii

For Louis Miller

vni

INTRODUCTION

A Metropolitan View of a Colonial Mission

Near the close of the year 1655, a courier was attacked by a band of robbers on the road from La Rochelle to Paris. While able to salvage most of the letters and packages scattered in the attack, the man was unable to salvage several important items intended for Father Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit priest who resided in the French capital. One of these was a lengthy manuscript, penned by the superior of the Jesuit mission across the ocean in Quebec, which was scheduled for publication early the coming year at one of the premier printing establishments of the Ancien regime, Chez Sebastien Cramoisy.1 This would be the first time in more than two decades the Jesuits of Paris would have no drafted Relation from New France to present to their reading public—a situation that Le Jeune, who was the Parisian procurator of the Canadian mission, was determined to avoid. However brief or haphazard, something had to be sent to Monsieur Cramoisy so that New France would not disappear completely from view among the men and women of means and influence the Jesuits counted on for support. At this time, the kingdom was still recovering from the recent crises of the Fronde, and the French political and financial elites to whom the Relations were addressed were preoccupied with events and personalities much closer to home. There were new political alliances within Europe, such as the peace with Cromwellian England, which promised to open up Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901), 41:211. Hereafter, Thwaites's critical edition and English translation of the Relations and other documents will be cited as follows: JR 41:211.

1

new channels of commerce. There was also the intensifying war of words between the Jansenists, their sympathizers, and their detractors.

And of course, there were the

political dramas playing out between an increasingly assertive Louis XIV and various members of his government, as when the teenage king embarrassed the cooler-headed Cardinal Jules Mazarin, earlier that April, by bursting into the great chamber of the Parlement de Paris, with a riding crop in hand, to rebuke the members for recent affronts to royal authority. Drawn from two letters that Le Jeune had received from Quebec that year, and including some of the procurator's own prose, a handsomely bound, octavo-sized volume appeared on schedule, and was available for purchase, at Cramoisy's bookstore in the Latin Quarter, which was a few steps from the Seine on the bustling Rue Saint-Jacques. The volume, entitled Copie de deux lettres envoyees de la Nouvelle-France, was ten by sixteen centimeters in size like the prior Relations, but only twenty-eight pages long, as compared to the more typically lengthy, 184-page volume of the previous year. Slim as the book was, in producing it on schedule, Le Jeune fulfilled one of his chief responsibilities as mission procurator. Since 1632, when Le Jeune and Cramoisy inaugurated the book series, the Relations had given the missionaries access to an elite audience of royal officials, parlementaires and other nobles residing in Paris, wealthy financiers and merchants interested in overseas commerce, and other clergymen and professed religious, including

2

Richard Wilkinson, LouisXIV(London: Routledge, 2007), 25.

Lucien Campeau, SJ, Monumenta Novae Franciae, 9 vols. (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1967-2003), 8:763. Hereafter, Campeau's critical edition of the published and unpublished documentation of the mission will be cited as follows: MNF 8:763.

2

brother Jesuits who sometimes were moved by the books' contents to request Canadian postings. The Relations were published partly to inspire Masses and other Catholic prayers and devotions to assist the missionaries in their work in North America. They were published, too, to inspire gift-giving of an earthly sort. Year after year, Le Jeune and his colleagues used the popular book series to request money from private donors and from the Crown, material support for laborers and artisans to help build up the French colony, and detachments of well-armed, royally provisioned French soldiers to fight the Five Nations Iroquois, whom the Jesuits came to believe were the chief obstacle to their work in New France. For over forty years, the Jesuits who staffed the Canadian missions and administered them in Paris employed the Cramoisy Relations to cultivate metropolitan French interest and action, not only on behalf of their religious activities, but also on behalf of a French-Atlantic empire. They hoped this empire would cohere not only through common fidelity to the Catholic Church, but also through fidelity to the French Crown, through commerce, and through shared, refined sensibilities regarding what it was to be "French." In the pages of the Relations and other documents they left behind, the missionaries showed themselves to be highly self-conscious of their "French" identity, and more so over time, as is suggested by the aggressive imperial rhetoric from the Relations published early in the period of Louis XIVs personal rule.4

In the

voluminous paper trail they produced, they exhibited decidedly Gallican attitudes regarding the French Church's stature within Christendom and its relative independence

4

JR 45:179-183, 189, 195-199. See Chapters Five and Six.

3

from the Papacy.5 When they wrote about the Church they were serving, the Jesuits always identified it with France; adjectives such as "Roman" and "universal" never appeared in the Cramoisy Relations in association with the religion being cultivated in North America. Significantly, a large percentage of the Jesuits associated with New France in the era, and nearly all the leading figures of the mission, belonged to the Jesuit Province of Paris—officially called the Province of France, although it was only one of five provinces in the French Jesuit Assistancy at that time. As young men, these Jesuits had been formed socially, intellectually, and aesthetically inside the more elite spaces of Paris and other French cities, and as French Catholic missionaries they were determined to cultivate not only new Christian societies, but what one mission superior called "a great Christian empire" that was, at its heart, "a beautiful French kingdom."6 From the early 1630s through the early 1670s, the Jesuits of New France were consistently committed to the "Frenchification" of North America, both by means of their own missions and by means of the French settlements, political order, and social and economic transformation of Canada which they continuously urged metropolitan authorities and wealthy elites to pursue. They themselves employed the interesting verb "to Frenchify [franciser]" in positive terms in the 1660s and as late as 1672.

Their

agendas of Frenchification were generally drawn from newly established, elite and urban

See Chapter Four. Cf. Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590-1615) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 6

See Chapters One, Two, and Three. My translation. Francois Joseph Le Mercier, SJ, Relation de ce qui s'est passe en la Nouvelle France, es annees 1664 & 1665 (Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy and Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1666), 3: "Mais non plus grandes plaintes n'estoient pas tant...nous ne pouvions faire un beau Royaume Francois de toutes ces terres, que ce que des Barbares nous empeschoient d'en faire un grand Empire Chrestien." 7

JR41:27, 29; 55:187.

4

norms of civility, habits of consumption, tastes and aesthetics, as well as political and economic relationships associated both with the rise of a strong, centralized royal administration and the development of French commerce at home and abroad. In their understanding, the more secular goals of Frenchification were both foundational to, and expressive of, their religious mission to make faithful Catholics out of the Montagnais, Hurons, and other indigenous peoples of North America, and to make France itself, known since Capetian times as "the eldest daughter of the Church," the most gloriously Christian realm on earth, enviable for its religious piety and also for its political power and the wealth and general happiness of its people. This is not the image of the Jesuits which prevails in accounts of seventeenthcentury French activities and encounters in North America. The missionaries of the Society of Jesus in New France typically appear as ambivalent toward the political, economic, and "civilizing" programs of French empire builders in Paris and Quebec. They also appear as relatively accommodating to indigenous ways of life, shielding Native Americans in their mission "reserves" from the corruptions of French civilization, as if they imagined that the Christianization of North America could unfold without the systematic importation of French or generally European social and political structures. Scholars have tended to characterize the seventeenth-century Jesuit vision for New France as Utopian, agrarian, and puritanical, and rarely as assertively French, imperial, and urban in orientation.

Allan Greer, for one, suggests that the Jesuits in Canada

consciously drew upon the model of the Jesuit reduction in Latin America, which he describes as a "disciplinary utopia" in which the priests succeeded in imposing "an exacting regime of Christian prayers, sexual repression," as well as the best elements of

5

"European-style agriculture on the natives."

Peter A. Goddard states the Utopian

position in bold terms: "Le Jeune represented Canada as a place for the realization of a collective spiritual Utopia....

Le Jeune's Canada would not be dominated

by...mercantile or political concerns, which would simply reproduce the moral turpitude of France itself."9 Somewhat differently, James P. Ronda claims the Jesuits saw New France and its natives as "raw material for a purified European society in America." Most influentially, James Axtell has referred to "the Jesuit vision of a new Jerusalem of holy farmers" which was "more than a commercial comptoir," and has emphasized the Jesuits' commitment to setting up agricultural reserves in which they would be able "to impose major reforms on native life...free from cosmopolitan interference or colonial contamination."11

Axtell argues that while the Jesuits were

initially interested in forming agricultural settlements that mixed natives and French settlers, by 1635 "a note of ambivalence crept into the Paris-bound relations," due to Le Jeune's fears of bad moral examples set by some of the French emigrants to New France. Axtell thus interprets the founding of the mission at SiUery in 1637, and other mission villages established to restrict native interactions with French settlers in the region, as a

Allan Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 6. 9

Peter A. Goddard, "Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity?" in Decentering the Renaissance: New Essays on Canada, 1500-1700, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 191. 10

James P. Ronda, "The European Indian: Jesuit Civilization Planning in New France," Church History 41:3 (September 1972), 385. 11

James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 39; Cf. Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 163.

6

move away from an initial commitment to, as he puts it, "Frenchifying" the natives. This is today the standard view of the Jesuit policy in North America in the seventeenth •

1^

century, echoed in textbook accounts as well as more academic discussions. Characterizing the Jesuit vision for North America as Utopian or puritanical is not, in itself, erroneous, but in fact the Relations from New France and other documentation from the period reveal that Le Jeune and his colleagues remained very optimistic, on the whole, about New France and France's becoming, together, a kind of new, glorious realm abounding not only Christian morality and piety, but also dotted with prosperous, growing towns, supported by industry as well as agriculture, and characterized fundamentally by a spiritedly patriotic, royalist political culture. Le Jeune, the major spokesman for the mission, did not characterize mercantile and political concerns as secondary or merely instrumental to the spiritual aims of the mission to North America. Far from it, there were moments in which he wrote about such concerns with a kind of religious fervor.14 These Jesuits were enthusiastic supporters of commercial, colonial expansion, so long as it promoted national or public interests above private ones, and not simply insofar as it might serve, instrumentally, the advance of Christianity. Daniel Richter, who has not studied the Jesuits per se, comes closer to the mark than most in characterizing their strategy when he writes that although "the Jesuits' reputation for tolerance and willingness to adapt Christianity to the traditions of their converts is deserved," in New France "they... foliowed in less extreme form the doctrine 12

Axtell, The Invasion Within, 60-62.

13

See, for example, Greer, The Jesuit Relations, 13; Goddard, "Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought," 191-193; Christopher Vecsey, The Paths of Kateri's Kin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 25, 51-53. 14

JR 9:131-133. See Chapter Three.

7

that the English ministers called 'civility before sanctity'.... Jesuits professed to allow Indian converts to retain customs that were compatible with Christianity, but in practice few...measured up."15 An even better characterization of the Jesuits' approach, certainly through the time the Relations ceased publication in the early 1670s, is that the missionaries understood civility and sanctity to be dynamically related, as forming both materially and spiritually a kind of organic whole. In their view, in the more trying periods such as that of the Iroquois Wars, civility and sanctity could to a degree mature independently of one another, but in general, civility and sanctity required each other's maturity for the overall health and flourishing of society. For these Jesuits, a healthy Christian society was a highly advanced, European, and ideally a French society that certainly had the flexibility to incorporate ideas and ways of living of populations brought into its imperial orbit, but only in ways that enhanced, and did not vitiate, its fundamental "Frenchness." A key reason why scholars interested in the mission have misjudged the Jesuits' steady commitment, over time, to the expansion of French social, cultural, and political forms into North America is that the Relations and other relevant sources have not been examined, in any sustained and precise way, in the light of their original metropolitan milieu. Additionally, the intriguing metropolitan history of the missionary enterprise itself has not been explored in its own right.

The Jesuits' attitudes toward Native

American societies and the policies they pursued in North America have generally been assessed in isolation from the complex French, largely Parisian world that was the primary ground of the missionaries' human experience. The mission was conceived and Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 109.

8

developed over time, financially and ideologically, in this world. It was this world to which the Relations were always directed—and very consciously on their authors' part. To better understand what the missionaries were doing on the ground in North America, why they wrote what they did, and how their attitudes may have changed over time with regard to "Frenchification," a detailed study of the world they only physically left behind—and to which some of them happily returned as older men—is needed. If examined not simply as evidence about New France but about a larger, trans-Atlantic, colonial and metropolitan world, over a forty year period, the Relations and related sources diffract to us much more interesting, full-bodied images of the mission and its personnel and supporters than those we find in the scholarly literature at present.

I.

The mission and the Relations in the existing scholarly literature On the whole, the literature concerning the Jesuit mission to New France is the

achievement of historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians in the vein of Axtell who have highly developed expertise in life on the ground in colonial North America.16 The Relations themselves have been most familiar, for a long time, to scholars who employ them to construct narratives about French colonization, histories of specific Native American populations in contact with the French, and accounts of cultural conflict and the evolution of new, North American cultures forged on what Richard White calls "the

Relevant studies in this vein include Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Apsects of French-Amerindien Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Axtell, The Invasion Within; Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987); Elisabeth Tooker, An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615-1649 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991); Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

9

middle ground."17

Generally, given their immediate interests and expertise, these

scholars read the Relations and similar sources in relative isolation from their metropolitan context, often treating their European, Christian, and male authorship and subjective biases as hurdles to be scaled, rather than as their most salient, historical features.18 Additionally, many of the assumptions in this literature about the world from which the Jesuits came—and about the Jesuits themselves as Frenchmen, Catholic priests, European males, and as literate elites—seem to stem from insufficient familiarity with the expansive bodies of academic literature on the Ancien regime, early modern Catholicism, and European social and intellectual history in the era. Occasionally, scholars fall into traps of misrepresentation and stereotyping about the Jesuits, not unlike those they have been working conscientiously to correct where Native Americans are concerned. An example of this appears in Carole Blackburn's Harvest of Souls (2000).

Blackburn is admirably determined not to allow the

missionaries' discourse any "independent existence apart from the social actors and events it describes"—by which she means, typically, Native American actors and events to which they were party.19 Yet she does not apply the same principle to the European, French actors, events, and ideas that appear regularly in the sources and which, indeed, constitute the very edifice of the agenda-laden subjectivity she attempts to deconstruct. 17

Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 16501815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 18

On the problem of the Jesuits' biases, see especially Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000), 6-12. For feminist readings of the Relations, see especially Karen L. Anderson, Chain Her By One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (London: Routledge, 1991), and Carol Devens, Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 19

Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 2.

10

In her analysis, Blackburn depends on a very questionable reading of European intellectual history: the Jesuits, she claims, viewed the world according to a preEnlightenment, pre-"culture" conception of time and history, and were bound to a prescientific biblical narrative about the world's peoples and about difference in general. More recently, Emma Anderson's study of cultural conflict and of one missionized Indian's struggle for a coherent personal identity in the tense religious environment of the early Jesuit missions does a better job incorporating important details from their specific French, metropolitan milieu into her narrative, yet she falls back, too, on a tendentious reading of the Jesuits' Catholicism as defined above all by its numerous, far-fromEnlightened "fear-filled dictates."21 On numerous occasions, the content of the Relations defies such characterizations. It will be shown in this dissertation that the Jesuits in question—in cultural, scientific, and at times even explicitly religious matters—at times anticipated their "enlightened" nephews, pupils, and enemies in France of later generations more than they resembled their medieval forefathers or even many of their Catholic peers, clerical and lay. It is insufficient to interpret the missionary sources with reference to preconceived ideas about what it meant to be French, Roman Catholic, male, a colonizing European, and a Jesuit in the early modern period. Echoing one of Ann Laura Stoler's insights regarding a later period of French colonialism, a guiding principle of this study is that colonialism is not a story in itself, as if it can be narrated in isolation from metropolitan

20

Ibid., 48-49.

21

Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge: Harvard Uiversity Press, 2007), 2.

11

social, cultural, economic, and political phenomena.

In a remark that could be applied

to much of the scholarship on the French missions in North America, Stoler says that even when scholars interested in colonial subjects have "examined European images of the Other, it has been to better explain the impact of perceptions and policy on people...and on anthropology's ethnographic subject: the colonized. And even when examining the politics of colonial discourse... texts are often assumed to express a shared European mentality, the sentiments of a unified, conquering elite."

There is, as Stoler

argues, a real need to study the "colonizer" as well as the "colonized," because both are part of an "historically shifting pair of social categories that needs to be explained."24 The Jesuit missionaries, and the Jesuits of France, did not constitute a stable category within French society before, during, and as a result of their involvement in New France.

To be sure, the literature on the Jesuit missions has not neglected

differences of opinion between the missionaries, yet even scholars who are interested in the cultural aspects of the Jesuits' discourse tend to stop at importing into the colonial context predetermined narratives about that which was European or Roman Catholic in the early modern period. They have, so to speak, imported to New France European phenomena such as the Council of Trent and contemporaneous French devotional movements, rather than asking whether Jesuit involvement in New France can actually change the way we understand the Catholic Reformation, the French Jesuits' relationship to it, and the relationship of religious missions more generally to social, political, and 22

Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 12.

23

Ibid., 23.

24

Ibid., 12.

12

more secular cultural matters.

The work of scholars such as Goddard and Peter A.

Dorsey moves in a positive direction toward a metropolitan reading of the texts, and yet it stops short of marking what was distinctive and most interesting about the relationship of a very specific group of French Jesuits to Tridentine, and explicitly Roman, Catholicism. Also, these studies tend to reinforce historiographical dichotomies between religious subjects and themes in the Relations and the more "worldly" social, political, and economic components of the Jesuits' program for conversion and colonization. Such categorical divisions rarely help us get at the attitudes of the missionaries, for whom the sacred and the secular—and the spiritual and material—were dynamically related. Helpfully, Takao Abe argues that scholars should focus on the corporate authorship of the Relations by the Society of Jesus, rather than assuming the remarks attributed to specific authors, such as Paul Le Jeune, were not edited and shaped by the interests of the Jesuits in France. Yet Abe, in his work of expanding the view of the mission beyond local, or colony-specific contexts, is less concerned with the Frenchimperial context of the mission than with more global, comparative views of Jesuit missions of different national origins. He is interested in the Society of Jesus as an international organization, and is by comparison generally unconcerned with the secular and national networks of power that made specific missions possible.26 25

See especially Peter A. Dorsey, "Going to School with Savages: Authorship and Authority among the Jesuits of New France," The William and Mary Quarterly 55:3 (July 1998), 399-420; Goddard, "Augustine and the Amerindian in Seventeenth-Century New France," Church History 61A (December 1998), 662281; "Canada in Early Modern Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity?" in Warkentin and Podruchny, Decentering the Renaissance, 186-199; "Two Kinds of Conversion ('Medieval' and 'Modern') Among the Hurons of New France," in Spiritual Conversion: The Christian Mission in the Colonial Americas, edited by James Muldoon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004), 57-77. 26

Takao Abe, "What Determined the Content of Missionary Reports? The Jesuit Relations Compared with the Iberian Jesuit Accounts," French Colonial History 3 (2003), 69-83; Abe, The Jesuit Mission to New France: A New Interpretation in the Light of the Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

13

Greer has made important headway in showing the relationship between metropolitan French actors and their worldviews with those active on the ground in New France in his "dual biography" of Kateri Tekakwitha and her Jesuit hagiographer, Claude Chauchetiere 27 However, despite his explicit concern to avoid generalizations about the French Jesuits and their religion and culture, Greer's descriptions of their world and mentalities could stand much more elaboration with regard to precisely which part of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century they concern After all, this was hardly a static period with regard to evolving ideas and trends within French Catholic thought, Jesuit and otherwise

Additionally, Julia Boss in a helpful way examines hagiographic texts

from New France, including the Relations' narratives of the "martyrdoms" of Jogues, Brebeuf, and several others, as physical links uniting an "imagined community" of French Catholic "holiness" across the Atlantic Ocean 28 Yet a much wider view of this community of "holiness" can be taken in order to account for its material existence beyond printed books and into the highly urban world of social and political networks centered at Court, in great private homes, and in the reception rooms of well-endowed religious houses

Furthermore, the view of the Relations as "devotional literature,"

emphasized as well by Christopher Vecsey, fails to account for how substantial portions of the texts concerning economic, agricultural, political, and even military matters would have functioned as "devotional " 29

Greer, Mohawk Saint Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2005), 59-88 28

Julia Boss, "Writing a Relic The Uses of Hagiography in New France," in Colonial Saints Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500-1800, ed Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (London Routledge, 2003), 211234 29

Vecsey, The Paths of Kateri's Kin, 8

14

Many of the early Relations, for example, contain lengthy chapters proposing long-term strategies for French colonization in North America

These chapters include

proposals for the development of more settled, productive agricultural settlements among the "wandering" Montagnais people as well as the already sedentary Hurons

Yet they

also included urgent requests to their readers to support the clearing of New France's forests on a vast scale, for the purposes of French shipbuilding, and also to encourage peasants and other members of France's laboring classes to emigrate to North America to help develop the country economically

Not infrequently, the Relations compared the

rural situation of France's peasants and urban poor, especially beggars, to the situation of North America's indigenous populations, liberally applying adjectives such as "poor" and "miserable" to populations on both sides of the Atlantic An interesting example of this appeared in the Relation published in 1636 It is a commonplace in scholarship on the Jesuits in French America—as in Spanish and Portuguese America—that the missionaries were involved in "reducing" hunter-gatherer populations such as the Montagnais and Tupi-Guarani into permanent, agricultural settlements Despite the Jesuits' reputation for accommodating non-European cultures to a greater degree than other missionary orders, on the whole they regarded the lack of sedentary agriculture and especially animal husbandry as a mark of cultural inferiority

30

In this vein, Le Jeune wrote New France will someday be a terrestrial paradise if our Lord continues to bestow upon it his blessings, both material and spiritual But, meanwhile, its first inhabitants must do to it what Adam was commanded to do in that 30

Taenen, Friend and Foe, 191, Denys Delage and Mathieu d'Avignon, "We Shall Be One People Quebec," trans Michel Lavoie, Common-place 3 4 (July 2003) http //www common-place org/vol-03/no04/quebec-city/ Campeau mentions a biblically rooted cultural prejudice among the Jesuits and many of their French contemporaries from the story of Cain, "l'agnculteur," and Abel "Peleveur" (MNF 3 38)

15

one which he lost by his own fault God had placed him there to fertilize it by his own work and to preserve it by his vigilance, and not to stay there and do nothing Viewed in isolation, the remark seems an unsurprising example of early modern Christian idealism regarding the virtues of the agricultural life as it had been intended by God for Man in Eden It also seems an unsurprising example of early modern Western European chauvinism toward nomadic populations, the same that was applied to Jews and gypsies, all manner of seasonal laborers, and pastoral populations in places like Ireland and the Balkans

However, the passage in broader context includes several very interesting

items Just before the remark about New France as a "terrestrial Paradise," Le Jeune had been encouraging eventual, not immediate, emigration by large numbers of French peasants to the New World

He played up the "misery and poverty" of their existence

and wished they would be far less sentimental about their birthplaces and would brave the journey to America And he appealed to social elites in France to pass on the word to illiterate peasants There are so many strong and robust peasants in France who have no bread to put in their mouths, is it possible they are so afraid of losing sight of the village steeple, as they say, that they would rather languish in their misery and poverty, than to place themselves someday at their ease among the inhabitants of New France, where with the blessings of earth they will far more easily find those of heaven and of the soul ? But to whom do I speak? To people who cannot know what I am writing, unless more capable ones than they tell it to them These I beg to do so, in the name of God and of the King, for the interests of both are involved in peopling this country n 31

JR 9 189 Cf MNF 3 269 "La Nouvelle-Franee sera un jour un paradis terrestre, si Nostre-Seigneur continue a la combler de ses benedictions tant corporelles que spintuelles, mais ll faut, en attendant, que ses premiers habitans y fassent ce qu'Adam avoit receu commandement de faire en celuy qu'il perdit par sa faute Dieu l'y avoit mis pour Fengraisser de son travail et le conserver par sa vigilance et non pour y estre sans nen faire "

32

JR 9 187 Cf MNF 3 267-268 "II y a tant de forts et robustes paisans en France qui n'ont pas du pam a metire souz la dent, esi-11 possible qu' ris ay aent si peur de perdre \a veue du clocher de \eur vrViage, comme Ton dit, qu'ils ayment mieux languir dans leurs miseres et pauvretez que de se mettre un jour a leur aise

16

This passage raises a number of important questions How widespread an emigration by French peasants to America did the Jesuits envision? What degree of influence did they have with elite readers, and also at Court, in urging long-term and potentially mass-scale shifts in the French population for the sake of turning New France, across the ocean, into a "Paradise'"?

What, indeed, were the Jesuits' attitudes toward agriculture, and the

supposed virtues of a stable existence rooted in the soil, if they looked askance at peasants' attachments to their own lands and villages—and their parish churches'—and wanted to place them on alien soils prepared for them by the labors of Native Americans, who themselves were being taught, and sometimes forced, to become attached to newly deforested lands they were unaccustomed to viewing as "theirs" in any legalistic, European sense? Beyond this, too, it is noteworthy that Le Jeune described the condition of the typical French peasant as miserable and poverty-ridden, a characterization he would also often apply to the Indians of North America he encountered, and whose food, dwellings, and material culture he found generally to be rather offensive to his tastes, sense of propriety, and standards of cleanliness. While he glorified agriculture as the occupation ordained by God for the human race in Eden, he did not look with romantic nostalgia upon the rural corners of France His "Paradise" would not be characterized by rural simplicity but by an abundance of "material" as well as "spiritual" blessings that wealthier French readers would recognize as real prosperity What did it mean for Jesuit

parmy les habitans de la Nouvelle-France, ou avec les biens de la terre lis trouveroient bien plus aisement ceux du ciel et de Tame ? Mais a qui est-ce que je parle? A des personnes qui n'ont garde de scavoir nen de ce que j 'ecns, si plus capables qu'eux ne leur en font le recit Je les pne, au nom de Dieu et du Roy, car vl y v& de Vinterest des deux que ee pais se peupk."

17

missionaries who were vowed to poverty, and who represented a Church that had always taught in one way or another, despite abuses over the centuries, that holiness could be found in simplicity and poverty, in imitatio Christi, to be criticizing on a large scale the attitudes and living conditions of France's peasants? Were they concerned about a just distribution of the earth's resources or the fruits of human labor?

Or were they,

differently, advancing a new cultural critique against subsistence-level rural economies, an attitude that could drive new wedges between social ranks and classes and in a period of great economic shifts, including urbanization, in seventeenth century France? Is it possible—different from the "medieval Christian concepts of social order and holy harmony" attributed to the missionaries by one scholar33—that the Jesuits were committed to new urban, class-specific, French definitions of "poverty" and "misery" that would be used to justify large-scale social and economic changes in rural France as well as in the still-wooded spaces of the New World? These are the types of questions that motivate the present study. To address them, we need to bring the Relations into the history of Le Jeune's native France. The first superior of the Jesuit mission at Quebec, who was eventually appointed as procurator in Paris for all the missions in New France, was a cosmopolitan figure as seventeenthcentury priests go. Before he was sent to the New World, he had already led a mobile existence within France. Born into a Calvinist family in Champagne, he spent time in several of the new Jesuit colleges throughout France, first in Paris for his novitiate, then at the College Henri IV at La Fleche for philosophy, then teaching rhetoric at Rennes and Bourges, studying at Paris again, and then working in Nevers, Rouen, and Caen before

33

Ronda, "The European Indian," 385.

18

sailing to North America

As someone who had risen to prominence in the Society

from provincial origins, his attitudes not simply toward the American Indians but also toward material wealth, abundance, poverty, agriculture, and other things must have been shaped by the worlds he was socialized into as a young Jesuit The Paris known to Le Jeune, his superiors, and Cramoisy was that of the sparkling new Tuileries palace and of Henry I V s Grande Galerie at the Louvre This Paris was still being built up, literally, into its Bourbon grandeur It is this Paris in which a history of the Canadian mission and the Relations should begin Scholars today who take for granted the pioneering work of James Axtell, Richard White, and others understand that the history of French Canada in the seventeenth century has come a long way since Francis Parkman asserted that France's "monarchical administration

at the height of its power and at the moment of its supreme triumph,

stretched an arm across the Atlantic and grasped the North American continent " 35 While it influenced historical narratives about French Canada well into the 1980s, the nineteenth-century historian's vision of French power is no longer the bugbear it once was, stretching, as it were, across the ocean to Canada, triumphing with its superior European culture over Native American savagery, and eventually crumbling before Anglo-America's backwardness

triumph

over French,

Roman

Catholic

tyranny

and

social

It is well understood today that New France had many distinctive

qualities, and was not simply the offspring, monstrous or otherwise, of the Ancien regime, with its decades of benign neglect of North America, followed by decades of 4

Pouliot, "Le Jeune, Paul," Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online (Toronto University of Toronto, 2000) http //www biographi ca/EN/ShowBio asp?BioId=34488 35

Fiancis Parkman, The Old Regime in Canada (Boston Little, Brown, and Company, 1878), vn

19

ineffective governance by representatives of royal absolutism, characterized above all by culturally insensitive policies of "Frenchifying" Native Americans and unruly French traders and settlers alike

The New France of Axtell, White, James Ronda, Cornelius

Jaenen, Susan Sleeper-Smith and others was forged on frontiers and borderlands, on "the middle ground," and in the intriguing and often violent contest and intermingling of cultures It often had very little to do with "old France," and certainly very little to do with the glittery, power- and glory-hungry regions of Bourbon Paris and Louis XIV's Versailles

But perhaps it more to do with them than it is now customary to assume, and

in much more interesting ways than Parkman and his generation could have known In exorcising the specter of Francis Parkman from the history of North America in the seventeenth century, scholarship in the vein of Axtell and White has in some ways been too successful

It has pulled up anchor so decidedly from Europe and sailed so far

into the Canadian interior that the French side of the colonial story has been left frozen in time, at a safe, remote distance

Yet this history—as a crucial chapter in the neglected

imperial history of early modern, Bourbon France—badly needs updating and to be put into conversation with recent studies of seventeenth-century political culture and intellectual life, as French historians Gilles Havard and Cecile Vidal have recently been urging 36 Without this work of bridging the historiography of colonial North America

Gilles Havard and Cecile Vidal, "Making New Fiance New," Common-place 7 4 (July 2007) http//www common-place org/vol-07/no-4/havaid/ See also Havard and Vidal, Histoire de 1'Amerique franqaise (Pans Champs Flammanon, 2003), 13-14, and Vidal, "The Reluctance of French Histonans to Address Atlantic History." The Southern Quarterly, Special Issue 43 4 (2006) Havard and Vidal lament what they call the "French amnesia" that set m among historians within France following the era of the Third Republic legardmg the first French colonial empire, and that it has been difficult to wnte a French history of New Fiance because a deeply held sense of French national identity militates against it Most of France's North American empire, aftei all, was lost to the Bntish before the Revolution of 1789, "the matrix of the French nation-state and the founding event for contemporary French identity" ("Making New France New") Indeed, one cannot speak of "impenal France" without its bemg assumed one is referring to the First or Second Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III Fortunately, a growing number of

20

with that of the Ancien regime, scholars of French history in the same period, interested in the story of Bourbon imperialism overseas and the activities of French traders, missionaries, settlers, and other emigres, may continue to overlook an array of studies about early Canada which are less peripheral to their interests than they might assume To raise the question of what the Relations reveal to us about the missionaries as Frenchmen, as Catholics, as members of the Society of Jesus, and, in turn, what the Relations tell us about French society as it was simultaneously influencing and being shaped by the Jesuits, is not at all to undervalue the important work still being done about events and peoples "on the ground" in colonial North America Quite the contrary, the great sensitivity exhibited in such scholarship to specific events, social and political conditions, and the cultural perspectives of Native Americans who encountered the French inspires this new effort to read the Relations and related sources with complementary sensitivity to their metropolitan context It is hoped, here, that a closer look at the French context only underscores the fact that there is still a great deal more to be gleaned from the Relations by scholars of colonial North American subjects Few scholars with a complementary understanding of early modern European mentalities and life on the ground in France for the Jesuits—and also, say, for the French peasants, street beggars, and Carnival revelers to whom they sometimes compared Native Americans—have examined the fascinating body of printed and unpublished sources available about New France

Notable exceptions include Dominique Deslandres and

several scholars concerned with French literature and religious experience in the period However, partly for disciplinary reasons, these scholars tend to elide the concrete, social scholars, including Brett Rushforth and Christopher Hodson who are working on an important study of the French Atlantic, are beginning to address this problem in earnest

21

and political contexts in which the Relations were produced and consumed as books Considering that the Jesuit enterprise itself was supported by many of the same French elites who were occupied with key political, social, and cultural movements of the day within the France itself, it seems crucial that scholars more familiar with the Ancien regime take a closer look at the colonial sources, especially when the sources were highly successful, influential publications within France itself

Furthermore, some of these

metropolitan movements are very live topics in the history of the Ancien regime, such as new, large-scale efforts by wealthy financiers and political officials to combat the social effects of urban poverty and disease

Colonial sources such as the Relations have the

potential to advance scholarly discussions in these areas as well, as will be shown in some surprising ways in the pages that follow

Dominique Deslandies, Croire et Faire Croire Les missions frangaises au xvue Steele (1600-1650) (Pans Fayard, 2003) This study stands out for its pioneering account of the missions in New France in their laiger, trans-Atlantic context, linking them to the Jesuits' and others' interior missions within Fiance Deslandres argues, too, for a kind of "ethnohistory" of the missionaries themselves (14), although her work is generally restricted to religious themes such as the Jesuits' implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent and the spirituality they shared with devout humanists such as Francois de Sales The growing body of Jiterary studies of the Relations includes Rerni Ferland, Les Relations des Jesuites un art de la persuasion procedes de rhetonque et function conative dans les Relations du Pere Paul Lejeune (Quebec Les Editions de la Huit, 1992), Alain Beauheu and others, Rhetonque et conquete missionnaire Le Jesuite Paul Lejeune (Sillery Septentrion, 1993), Pierre Dostie, Le Lecteur suborne dans cinq texts missionnaires de la Nouvelie-France (Samte-Foy Les Editions de la Huit, 1994), Yvon Le Bras, L'Amerindien dans les Relations du Pere Lejeune (1632-1641) (Samte-Foy Les Editions de la Huit, 1994), Dominique Deffain, Voyageur frangais en Nouve lie-France au XVIIe siecle etude htteraire des relations du pere Paul Le Jeune, 1632-1641 (Tubingen M Niemeyer, 1995), Gordon M Sayre, Les Sauvages Amencains Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), Mane-Chnstme Pioffet, La Tentation de I'epopee dans les Relations des jesuites (Siltery Septentrion, 1997) Studies that employ substantial material from the Relations to examme the more strictly religious concerns of the missionaries and the religious experiences of missionized Native Americans include James P Ronda, "'We Are Well As We Are' An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions," William and Mary Quarterly 34 1 (1977), 66-82, Abe, The Jesuit Mission to New France, Vecsey, The Paths of Katen's Kin, Luca Codignola, "Few, Uncooperative, and 111 Informed'? The Roman Catholic Cleigy in French and British North America, 1610-1658," in Decentering the Renaissance 173-185, Goddard, "Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought Backwater or Opportunity?" in ibid , 18.6-199, Deslandres, Croire etFaire Croire, Greer, Mohawk Saint, Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith

22

II.

Plan of the dissertation In this study, close-up considerations of the language and subjective content of

the Relations and related texts will feature prominently, as in many of the recent, more literary studies produced mostly by Francophone scholars. However, setting this study apart is a driving concern, while pursuing close readings, to remember all along the way that the Relations and other sources are—as physical objects and as texts—artifacts of the Parisian Jesuits' mutually advantageous partnership, through Cramoisy and others, with the increasingly centralized, imperially ambitious, and image-conscious French monarchy and its collaborators in France's mercantile and financial sectors. While most discussions of the Relations tend only to note Cramoisy's role in their production in a passing way, if they mention him at all, in this dissertation, the Jesuits* relationship with Cramoisy is of central interest.

This is justified by the printer's special relations with Cardinal

Richelieu's royal administration, the colonial trading monopoly called the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France, Jesuit leaders both in Paris and in Rome, and circles of moneyed elites in Paris, Dieppe, and Rouen who not only helped finance foreign missions, but were also much engaged with philanthropic projects in France, such as the founding of charitable hospitals for the poor. The title, "Cultivating Empire Through Print," alludes to the fundamental argument of the dissertation, that the Relations were integral to the Jesuits' Frenchimperial as well as missionary strategy for New France. They were not simply reports to the Jesuit superiors and the mission's supporters in Europe which happened to be unusually thorough and detailed simply because of a Jesuitical knack for scientific observation and proto-ethnographic study. Staffed and directed by the central, Parisian

23

province of the Society of Jesus in France, the mission was a relatively large enterprise for the French Jesuits By 1638, there were already more Jesuits in Canada than in cities such as Orleans, Amiens, and Dieppe 38 Also, it was supported and in many ways governed according to the interests of the Crown, the royal governors in New France, and specific coteries of financial and merchant elites based primarily in Paris and Rouen The Cramoisy Relations were both an expression of, and a tool for reinforcing, these political and financial relationships While the driving interests of the dissertation are largely intellectual and cultural, the social and political milieu in which the Relations were authored, published, and distributed as literature, along with the mission enterprise generally, will form the primary ground of this study A more chronological and narrative approach, rather than a thematic one, is adopted out of respect to the changing authorship of the Relations over time and to the changing—sometimes violent—metropolitan political and cultural conditions that affected what the Jesuits chose to include in their public remarks about New France

Forays into such subjects as Jesuit conceptions of "poverty" will have

better traction if they remain on the solid ground of dates, names, facts, as well as specific texts, especially the Relations that appeared each year in book form, examined largely in their order of composition and publication On this point, a cue is taken from Robert Darnton, who writes that "book history" is of particular advantage in the telling of intellectual history, because it helps in "minimizing anachronism " 39 38

Archivum Romanum Societaties Iesu (hereafter abbreviated as ARSI), Franc 33 1, Historic/1630-1656, f 138 Out of 689 Jesuits, including novices and scholastics, recoided as residing withm the Province of France, 22 resided in Canada The number seems small on its face, but the reconstituted mission at Quebec was only six yeais old at this point Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York W W Norton, 1996), 181

24

Throughout the dissertation, the Cramoisy Relations will of course furnish the bulk of primary source material that is considered. However, just as the Relations will be read in a new way in the light of specific metropolitan political conditions, they will, as well, be brought into conversation with a range of other primary sources from the period. A number of unfamiliar printed works by Cramoisy will be featured, along with untranslated printed sources and manuscript sources related to the mission that either have been compiled for critical editions such as Lucien Campeau's nine-volume Monumenta Novae Franciae, or which have been located during searches at libraries and archives in Paris and Rome. The Relations will also be put into conversation with printed sources circulating in France in the same period printed by other publishers in and outside of Paris, authored by Jesuits and their friends, more impartial observers, and, of course, opponents of the Jesuits, ranging from members of rival religious orders such as the Franciscan Recollets to Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists. Following this introduction, the first chapter, "A Mission for the Jesuits of Paris," will feature crucial background material on Le Jeune, Cramoisy, and more generally the Jesuits of Paris and of French missionary activity in North America up to 1632, upon which a focused analysis of the Relations in their metropolitan context can then unfold. Chapter Two, "Introducing 'France' to the 'Poor Miserable Savage'" is an account of the early Relations and their intriguing relationship to the "civilizing process" in Bourbon France, especially as it was favored by a growing, metropolitan elite composed of royal officials, wealthy bourgeois, and noble financiers interested in a more politically and culturally unified kingdom.40 It will be suggested that the missionaries' assessments of

Cf Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Socwgenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans Edmund Jephcott (Maiden Blackwell Publishing, 2000)

25

Native American culture as "savage" and "uncivil" were based on newly evolving, still unstable elite standards in France of what a supposedly "French" way of life should look, taste, sound, feel, and smell like.

Their published commentary in this respect had

implications for many populations in France, not only for Native Americans. In the third chapter, "France's Mission to the Poor, and the Sick," it is shown how commentary in the early Relations' regarding Native American "poverty" and "incivility" related to the overarching religious aims of the Jesuit mission. The Jesuits' religious agenda, especially as can be discerned in their critique of Native American "superstitions" in the early years of the mission, was as much an agenda for social transformation as it was an effort to expand the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church and to save souls. This agenda emphasized especially the particular responsibility of the wealthy and politically powerful in alleviating widespread material poverty and epidemic disease, and it was both consistent with, and sometimes anticipated, newer metropolitan, elite modes of thinking on the subject. After Le Jeune and his colleagues' social and religious vision for France and North America has been sketched in detail, its connection to Cardinal Richelieu's vision for a politically centralized, culturally unified, and increasingly imperial French state are considered in Chapter Four, "Working for France's 'Powerful Genius.'" In partnership with the royal governor of Quebec, the missionaries not only pursued an aggressive strategy against the Five Nations Iroquois and Dutch, but they conceived of this strategy in imperial terms, arguing that France would benefit in the long term by devoting resources to a politically and militarily secure French-colonial regime in North America. Also, in intriguing ways, the Relations seemed to have served as political propaganda at

26

home in France for Richelieu's state-building efforts in Europe, during the years of France's involvement in Thirty Years War. This metropolitan, political function of the Relations, transcending the immediate goals of the missionaries themselves in North America, has not been examined before. Moving forward to the era when Le Jeune was elevated as Parisian procurator of the mission, the Relations authored during the era of the Hurons' defeat by the Five Nations Iroquois, which coinciding with Anne of Austria's troubled regency in France, are examined in Chapter Five, "Navigating the Beaver Wars and the Fronde.'" The crucial topics of Jesuit "martyrdom" and self-representation during this period are discussed, along with important details about the Jesuits' political strategy during the Iroquois Wars and the new difficulties the mission superiors faced in securing metropolitan support for this strategy. During these years, the Jesuits and Cramoisy adopted a new publication strategy in France, presenting mainly what they called the "most remarkable" tales of Jesuit suffering and martyrdom in the mission field, downplaying progress that was being made in New France, despite the defeat of Huronia, in the advance of French "civility," and despite their continued, more private commitment to such goals. The sixth chapter, "Paris Lost," includes an account of the final decade and a half of the Cramoisy Relations, coinciding with Le Jeune and Cramoisy's golden years in Paris. In some respects, this was a golden period for the Jesuit mission to New France itself, following the appointment of a Jesuit-friendly bishop for New France and the advent of direct royal rule over the colony by Louis XTV, the new royal intendant Jean Talon, and the controller general Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Also in this chapter, the sudden

27

suspension of the Relations' publication in 1673 will be considered in the light of political and ideological tensions between different groups of French Jesuits at the time, and between Louis' France and the Roman Papacy A metropolitan history of the Jesuit mission to New France, the Cramoisy Relations, and the missionaries themselves as Frenchmen of the seventeenth century, is not a straightforward task, for the surprising reason that the Society of Jesus in early modern France is itself understudied The historical lacuna is surprising considering how the Jesuits, with their periods of influence at Court and over the consciences of numerous French elites, have long been the stuff of legend in discussions of the Ancien regime It is historically commonplace to make reference to the Jesuits' power in France through royal confessors such as Pierre Coton and Francois de la Chaise Also well known are Blaise Pascal's blistering attacks on Jesuit moral teachings, and the Society's role in controversies that dominated French politics and religious and intellectual life well into the age of Voltaire

Yet contemporary studies that examine the French Jesuits of the

period in direct, discrete terms are few 41 Joseph Bergin writes that the Jesuits' "history in France can hardly be summarised without serious risk of misrepresentation, and it does not help that, despite some recent scholarship, they remain little studied beyond the

Currently, the best studies in English are Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, A Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1988), and Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans Jean Birrell (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1989) Several titles of note have appeared in English which concern the Jesuits of the early and late Enlightenment-era in France Catherine M Northeaset, The Parisian Jesuits and the French Enlightenment, 1700-1762 (Oxford The Voltaire foundation, 1991), Nicholas Dew Orientalism in Louis XIVs France (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2009) Useful French surveys include Alam Guillermou, Les Jesuites (Paris Presses Umversitaires de France, 1961), and, occasionally, Jean Lacoutre, Jesuites une multibiographie, 2 vols (Pans Editions du Seuil, 1991) Otherwise, those interested in the French Jesuits m the penod must look to older sources, to thematically focused monographs on topics such as education in France or the Jansemst controversy, or to general histories of the Society, by John O'Malley and others, which tend to dwell on the foundmg era of the sixteenth century or on the modem Society

28

polemical frameworks inherited from their chequered history "

Scholars in search of

close-up views of the Jesuits of Paris in the Ancien regime still must rely upon Henri Fouqueray's Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus en France (1910-1925) and other plodding, institutional histories and bibliographies compiled by diligent French and Belgian Jesuit scholars of a bygone era 43

These resources contain a wealth of

information waiting to be dusted off, sifted through, and brought into the light of contemporary historical narratives and approaches, but they are inaccessible to those who know little French or do not have the privilege to browse the stacks of great research libraries or the Jesuits' own archives and reference rooms in Rome, Paris, Montreal, Saint Louis, and elsewhere Another historiographical challenge in analyzing the Jesuits participation in French imperial politics is to overcome the legacy of institutional histories of the Society of Jesus, in which the focus is on the religious order as such, rather than on the ways Jesuits influenced, and were influenced by, the larger societies to which they belonged An increasing number of scholars, following in the footsteps of John O'Malley, are blazing new trails in the study of early modern Jesuits, and in the area of Jesuit mission history, several recent studies have been of special inspiration in developing this dissertation, such as Dauril Alden's impressive study of the Jesuits' Portuguese

42

Joseph Beigm, in Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580-1730 (New Haven Yale University Press, 2009), 112 43

Especially useful for this study are Henri Fouqueray, SJ, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus en France des origins a la suppression, 5 vols (Pans Bureaux des Etudes, 1910-1925), Pierre Delattre, SJ, Les Etabhssements des jesuites en France depuis quatre siecles, 6 vols (Enghien Institut supeneur de Theoiogie, 1949-1957), Carlos Sommervogel and others, Bibhotheque de la Compagnie de Jesus, 12 vols (Louvam College Philosophique et Theologique, 1960), which is the most recent edition of a nineteenth century compilation, and, finally, Camille de Rochemonteix, SJ, Les Jesuites et la Nouvelie-France au XVIIe Steele d'apres beaucoup de documents inedits, 3 vols (Pans Letouzey et Ane, 1895-96)

29

Assistancy in the early modern era, The Making of an Enterprise

In the area of French

Jesuit studies, many avenues of inquiry remain wide open Such lines of inquiry are all the more intriguing because of the rise of French royal absolutism in the seventeenth century and other unique political conditions that affected colonial missions considerably, as well as the complicating influence of Gallican thinking on the French Jesuits' relations with the Society of Jesus at large and to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church There is a need both to enlarge the scope of Jesuit history—to see in what ways Jesuits shared in their secular contemporaries' concerns, sometimes in ways that transcended or even opposed the interests of the Society at large—and to narrow the scope of Jesuit history, that is, to study concrete connections between Jesuits and specific places, people, and movements that shaped the imaginative and physical landscapes in which they moved day to day To this end, sources such as the Cramoisy Relations need to be rescued from a long line of scholarly interpretations that have taken their Jesuit authorship entirely for granted and which have presumed too logical and clean a lineage within the Society's family tree of unpublished and published relahones and Litterae annuae 45 Approaching the texts from the French, metropolitan perspective, it becomes

John W O'Malley, SJ, The First Jesuits (Cambridge Harvard University Press 1995). Gauvm Alexander Bailey and others, eds , The Jesuits Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (Toronto University of Toronto Press, 1999), Daunl Alden, The Making of an Enterprise The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540-1750 (Stanford Stanford U Press, 1996) See also Liam Brockey, Journey to the East The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (Cambridge The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2008), Trent PompYun, Jesuit on the Roof of the World Ippo'uto Desideri's Mission to Eighteenth-Century Tibet (New York Oxford University Press, 2010) Another study with much that is of mterest to students of Jesuit history is David A Bradmg, The First America The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1991) 45

See for exampLe Codignola, "Few, Uncooperative, and 111 Informed," 182, and Douglas Letson and Michael Higgms, The Jesuit Mystique (London Harper Collins, 1995), 41 Little progress has been made since Lawrence C Wroth called them "simply a small group set apart by special circumstances from the innumerable communications which, through four centuries and a half, the missionaries of the Jesuit order

30

quickly apparent that the books published at Chez Cramoisy were far from representative of an already established, maturing tradition of Jesuit communication about missionary endeavors

Much more interestingly, they belong to a very particular moment in the

history of the Jesuits' relations with the French Crown and new, expanding networks of influential French men and women who believed that the pursuit of a great and beautifully "French" Catholic empire was the path to a better world—a world that encompassed Heaven and earth, as well as several continents

have been ti ansmittmg to headquarters from all parts of the world" m James C McCoy, Jesuit Relations of Canada, 1632-1673 A Bibliography (Pans Arthur Rau, 1937), m An exceptional voice is literature scholar Yvon Le Bras, who has noted the unusual character of the series, especially with regard to its publication by the same Parisian printing house for so many years (L 'Amerindien dans les Relations, 17) Cf Pouliot, Etude sur les Relations des Jesuites de la Nouvelie-France (1632-1672) (Pans Desclee Brouwer & Cie, 1940), 3-7, Campeau, MNF 2 135-138, Greer, The Jesuit Relations, 5

31

CHAPTER ONE

A Mission for the Jesuits of Paris

Paul Le Jeune (1592-1664) was nearly forty years old when he began his missionary career, receiving orders in March of 1632 from Barthelemy Vimont, the provincial of the Jesuit Province of Paris, to leave France and take up the post of mission superieur at Quebec, the small French trading settlement founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608 Since the early nineteenth century, Le Jeune has been the subject of several short, biographical sketches that dwell, naturally, on the salient moments of his career as an active missionary priest in TNorth America 46 A number of monographs have appeared in recent years, authored mostly by Francophone scholars of literature, treating Le Jeune in his own right as a man of letters, but which do not, given their focused interest in language, explore in detail the historical circumstances of his career and writings 47 Most of his life was spent in France, not in Canada, and his sixteen years at various locations in New France were surpassed in number by twenty-two years in the city of Paris alone, first as a Jesuit novice from 1613 to 1615, then as a scholastic and new priest at the College de Clermont from 1622 to 1626, briefly from 1641 to 1642 as an envoy from Jean Bouchaid, SJ, Le RP Paul Le Jeune, SJ, et la fondation des missions des Jesuites en NouvelleFrance, 1632-1642 etude des methodes missionnaires (Rome Pontificia Umversitas Gregonana, 1958), Gilles Chausse, "Le Pere Paul Le Jeune, S J , missionnaire-colomsateur," Revue d'histoire de I'Amerique frangaise 12 2 (1958), 56-79, 217-246, Pouhot, Paul Le Jeune SJ, 1591-1664 (Pans Fides 1957), F Frexsencwirt, SI, "Notice, suv la vie du R P Paul Le leuue," Lettres Spintuelles ecntes, a plu&ieurs personnes de piete (Pans Victor Palme, 1875), i-xxiv, Ferdinand Denis, 'Veux Voyageurs francais Le Pere Paul Le Jeune, La Revue de Paris 4 (1834), 5-22 Pioffet, La Tentatwn de Vepopee dans les Relations des jesuites, Le Bras, L'Amerindien dans les Relations du Pere Lejeune (1632-1641), Dostie, Le Lecteur suborne dans cinq texts missionnaires de la Nouve lie -France, Beaulieu, Rhetorique et conquete missionnaire, Ferland, Les Relations des Jesuites

32

New France seeking aid against the Iroquois, and, finally, as Parisian procurator from 1649 until his retirement in 1662. He remained in the French capital until his death in 1664. Paris was at the heart of Le Jeune's experience of the world. Neither he nor the Relations from New France can be understood, historically, without a fuller appreciation of what that means. If Le Jeune is the most important Jesuit in this story, the most important layman is Sebastien Cramoisy, the Parisian publisher of the Relations.

His name is usually

mentioned in passing in scholarly treatments of the missionary texts, yet his relationship with the Jesuits of Paris in large measure determined the audience to whom Le Jeune would have access in France. Cramoisy was arguably the most powerful French libraire and imprimeur of the seventeenth century, and his life and career—bound willingly and successfully both to Cardinal Richelieu and the Society of Jesus—were critical for the early development of absolutist political culture in France and for the Parisian Jesuits' close partnership with the Crown in their enterprises at home and overseas.

Before

examining the mission and the Relations themselves in light of trans-Atlantic cultural, social, and political movements of which they were a part, it is important to know who Cramoisy was and to whom he was connected. In this chapter, Le Jeune's formative years as a Jesuit of the Province of Paris and Cramoisy's early career as a Parisian printer will provide a gateway into the metropolitan world of the Cramoisy Relations. A brief history of the Jesuit mission to New France prior to Le Jeune's appointment as its superior will then be presented, explaining why the Jesuits were preferred and eventually granted a missionary monopoly by the French Crown despite claims by another religious order to spearhead the enterprise. Finally, an

33

account will be offered about how the Cramoisy Relations came into existence, what distinguished them from Jesuit publications from other missionary contexts, and to what degree they shared in a larger, corporate Jesuit vision of the mission in view of several earlier writings, published and unpublished, by Jesuits working in French Canada.

I.

A young Jesuit in Bourbon Paris In his first published work, the first of the Cramoisy Relations, entitled Brieve

relation du voyage de la Nouvelle-France (1632), Paul Le Jeune declared that, on the day his provincial ordered him to leave France in the spring of 1632, "the joy and happiness [he] felt in [his] soul was so great," that he believed he had "experienced nothing like it for twenty years."48 Two decades earlier, Le Jeune had been a young man of twenty, discerning his vocation to the Catholic priesthood and seeking admission into the Society of Jesus. It was around that time, as well, that in preparing for his new life as a Jesuit, he uprooted from his native province of Champagne and moved to the city of Paris. To understand the world from which Le Jeune came, and how his origins informed what he would observe in North America and report back to France, it is crucial to encounter him not as a missionary, but first as a young Frenchman who happened to become a Jesuit, who was chosen by his provincial leaders to serve overseas as a mission superior in the young colony of New France, and who in that capacity became a published author with remarkable speed compared to other Jesuits in similar positions. In this way, we will notice important details, typically passed over by scholars who are eager to cross the Atlantic Ocean with Le Jeune and his companions, about the

48

IRS-.9. C1MNF2-.29&.

34

metropolitan world with which the mission to New France was interrelated, and to which the Relations themselves were always addressed Le Jeune was born on July 15, 1592, at Vitry-le-Francois, a village in the province of Champagne close to Chalons-sur-Marne, which has been described as "a small city with some 10,000 inhabitants" and which was "typical of many declining manufacturing towns" throughout northeastern France in the period 49 At sixteen years of age, probably in 1607, Le Jeune, who had been born into a Calvinist family, was received into the Roman Catholic Church

Little else is known about Le Jeune's origins other than this

fact, and so far little has been made of it by scholars interested in his writings and mission work All accounts of Le Jeune's early years agree he entered the Society of Jesus as a novice in late September, 1613, at the age of twenty-one How he first encountered the Jesuits or decided upon joining them is a mystery, he left no personal account either of his conversion or of his decision to join the Society

Given the small social world of

Chalons and its surrounding villages, it is possible that, as a boy, Le Jeune knew, by reputation or personally, the young Louis Lalemant, later famous for his spiritual teachings, who was born in Chalons-sur-Marne in 1588 and was the son of the bailiff of the local Comte de Vertus 50 Lalemant joined the Society of Jesus at Bourges in 1605 and, perhaps not by coincidence, eventually became Le Jeune's spiritual director at Rouen during the latter's tertianship from 1628 to 1629 Le Jeune's early conversion and

4

William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96 For more on Chalons, see Comte Edouard de Barthelemy, Histoire de la ville de Chalons-sur-Marne et ses institutions (Chalons E Laurent, 1854), Georges Clause and JeanPierre Ravaux, Hcstotre de Chalons-sur-Mame (Roartne Horvath, 1983), J-F Boulanger and others, Chalons (Pans Beauchesne-Editeur, 1989) Henn Bvemoid, Histoire htteraire du Sentiment Rehgieux en France depuis la fin des gwerres tfe religion jusqu 'a nos jours, vol 2 (Grenoble Editions Jerome Millon, 2006), 450

35

interest in the Jesuits may have been influenced by Lalemant's example Several accounts place Le Jeune erroneously in the novitiate at Rouen, but most recent accounts place him in the Parisian novitiate 51

Documents at the Archivum

Romanum Societatis lesu place Le Jeune definitively in Paris by the beginning of 1615 at the latest 52 The confusion appears to stem from the fact that he did his tertianship, the standard delayed third year of the Jesuit novitiate, at Rouen in the academic year 1628 to 1629 Whether Le Jeune entered at Paris or Rouen may, at first, seem a small concern However, when we consider his origins in a village in Champagne, a move to the capital city of Bourbon France—whose population was approaching possibly as many as 400,000 in Le Jeune's day—would have made a dramatically different impression on a young Champenois than Rouen with its population of less than 70,000 53 Like many other young men of his generation, Le Jeune experienced life as one who had left behind the quieter, provincial world of his family of origin for the wider, cosmopolitan world of the Society of Jesus and their new colleges and ministries—a world that, perhaps especially in Paris as in Rome, was particularly dynamic and full of opportunities for intelligent, ambitious clerics From the days of Peter Abelard and Saint Deffam, Un voyageur franqais en Nouvelle-France au XVUe siecle, 4, Pouliot, "Le Jeune, Paul," Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http //www biographi ca/009004-119 01-e php?&id_nbr=421, Campeau, "Le Jeune, Paul," Diccionarw Histonco de la Compania de Jesus (Rome Institutum Histoncum Societatis lesu, 2001) 3 2305 52

Archivum Romanum Societatis lesu (hereafter abbreviated as ARSI), Franc 22, Catalogi breves 15581639, f, 115, lists a "Paulus le Jeune" as "Novitiatus Pansiensis," noting that he entered on 22 September 1613 There is no name similar to Le Jeune's listed amongst the novices at Rouen in this period In ARSI, Fianc 11, f, 40v, Le Jeune is listed among the "novitn scholastici" residing at the "Domus probatioms Pansiensis " ^ Cf James B Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1995), 30, Philip Benedict, Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France (London Unwm Fryman, 1989), 132 Cf Roland Mousmer, Paris capitale au temps de Richelieu et de Mazarin (Pans Pedone, 197%), 159-164, Jean lacquart, "Pans First Metropolis of the Early Modem Penod," m Peter Clark, Capital Cities and their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe (Hants SCOLAR Press, 1996), 105

36

Thomas Aquinas, Paris had for centuries been a magnet city for scholars and clerics on the make hailing from far outside the lie de France. The city's history was legendary in ways that would not have been lost upon a young man with a clerical career on his mind, a history that held a particular charm for young Jesuits: Paris was, of course, the place where Ignatius Loyola, while a student at the University of Paris, formed the Society of Jesus with six friends in a small chapel overlooking the city atop the butte of Montmartre. This occurred, by Ignatius's own account, on August 15, 1534, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.54 A Lynn Martin has pointed out that despite the Society's strong "identification with Spain," it owed "its formation to France and to the University of Paris.55 Indeed, four of the Society's first ten members hailed from different parts of France and areas within the French sphere of influence: Paschase Broet from Picardie, Jean Codure from Provence, and Pierre Favre and Claude Le Jay from Savoy, all of them educated at Paris. The Jesuits in France, as elsewhere, owed their remarkable success, especially in the establishment of preparatory colleges all over the kingdom, to the patronage of powerful elites. By 1547, only a few years after Pope Paul i n had formally recognized the Society as a religious order, the Jesuits had won the protection of Guillaume Du Prat, the Bishop of Clermont.

By the end of his life, Bishop du Prat had overseen the

establishment of three Jesuit colleges, at Billom and Mauriac in his diocese in the Auvergne, and at Paris itself, where the college would bear the name Clermont in his honor. By 1575, there were already fifteen Jesuit colleges throughout France, patronized

54

O'Malley, The First Jesuits, 32

55

Martin, The Jesuit Mind, 1

37

not only by Du Prat but also by Cardinal Francois de Tournon, Cardinal Georges d'Armagnac, Charles de Guise who was the Cardinal of Lorraine, Bishop Robert de Pelleve of Pamiers and Bishop Nicolas Psaume of Verdun, Archbishop Antoine d'Albon of Lyon, as well as the Duke of Savoy, the Duke of Nevers, and several others.56 These colleges depended, as well, on the donations of numerous private benefactors. In Paris, the Jesuits faced fierce opposition despite their origins in the French capital. Bishop Du Prat's plans for a new college were frustrated, for several years longer than he lived, when members of Parlement who were Gallican in their sympathies, as well as the Archbishop of Paris and, unsurprisingly, officials at the University of Paris, protested against the strange newcomers with their Spanish connections and their famous "fourth vow"' of obedience to the Pope.57 The first Jesuit provincial in France, Broet, was only able to go forward with the plan after the religious climate of the city was affected by alarming displays of Calvinist resistance at the failed Colloquy of Poissy, leading the Parisian parlementaires in February 1562 to grant the Society legal rights to own property and pursue its ministries actively in their jurisdiction.58 During the French wars of religion, when many Jesuits collaborated with the Holy Union or Catholic League, based in Paris and directed by the powerful Guises who were enthusiastic patrons of the Society, the order's relationship with Parisian officials and the monarchy, especially under Henry III, suffered severely.59 When a former student of the Jesuits failed in an assassination attempt on the new king, Henry IV, in 1594, the Parlement de Paris seized 56

Ibid, 18 Ibid , 1-2, Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 112-113

58

Martin, The Jesuit Mind, 2

59

A Lynn Martin, Henry III and the Jesuit Politicians (Geneva Droz, 1973), 137-144

38

the opportunity to banish the Society from its jurisdiction in January 1595. This action was imitated soon after by the parlements of Normandy and Burgundy.60 Eric Nelson argues convincingly that the Jesuits of Paris, paradoxically, insofar as their future security in France was concerned, benefited greatly from this period of exile, which lasted until Henry TV issued the clement Edict of Rouen in 1603. Henry had an interest in rehabilitating the Society partly to demonstrate the sincerity of his conversion to Catholicism, but also because he wished to assert royal power over and above the wishes of Gallican members of Parlement who argued that the King's general policy of clemency toward League members violated ancient French legal principles concerning the prosecution of treason.61 The Jesuits agreed, strikingly, to a stipulation in the Edict of Rouen that all members of the Society "working in France be French citizens and that every Jesuit take an oath of loyalty to the monarchy upon entry into a French foundation."62 This article in essence overlaid the famous "fourth vow" with a kind of fifth vow (in a manner of speaking) to the French Crown—a requirement that, ironically, made the Jesuits of the early seventeenth century in France an unusually national, rather than international, body of male religious, and one that in Paris especially took particular pains to prove its loyalty to France. Nelson remarks how even though the Society was an "unlikely partner" for Henry IV, given its international organization, its "global vision," and its professed loyalty to the Tridentine Papacy, nevertheless a strong partnership was forged between the Crown and the Jesuits in the early decades of the seventeenth century.

Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 113. 61

Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy\ 57-69.

62

Ibid., 78.

39

This partnership would remain strong and extend also to good relations with many parlementaires despite the clouds of suspicion that would dog the Society throughout France after 1610, when the King was assassinated by Francois Ravaillac When the young Le Jeune arrived in Paris to begin his novitiate, the capital city had a special luster for young Jesuits, since the Society was enjoying the many fruits of its rapprochement with the Crown After 1603, Henry reopened Jesuit colleges that had been forced to shut down in 1595, channeling new resources of money and protection for their activities, and he established eighteen new Jesuit schools throughout the kingdom He took a personal interest in the new College de La Fleche near Angers, where Le Jeune and numerous other missionaries sent to Canada would undergo part of their intellectual and spiritual formation64

The college was housed in a magnificent chateau that

dominates views of La Fleche to this day, and within a year of its opening in 1604, a thousand students were enrolled 65 In Paris, Henry delayed the reopening of the College de Clermont for several years while negotiating political tensions with the Parlement, but in the mean time he permitted the reestablishment of Jesuit novitiates at Rouen and Lyons and the creation of a new level of Jesuit bureaucracy in his realm, the Assistence de France, which oversaw the five Jesuit provinces of the kingdom, including the new province of Toulouse The Jesuits in fact created the French assistancy in gratitude to the

63

Ibid, 7

64

Philippe Haudneie, "College royal de La Flectie, I'espnt missiotiaaire et le Canada " Encyclopedie du patrimonie culture! de VAmerique franqaise (2007), http //www amenquefrancaise org/fr/article95/College_ioyal_de_La_Fleche,_respnt_missionnaire_et_le_Canadahtml 65

William V Bangert, SJ, A History of the Society of Jesus (St Louis, MO The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972), 123

40

King for the Edict of Rouen After Henry's assassination in May 1610, highly placed members of the Jesuit Province of Paris moved quickly to demonstrate loyalty to the Crown and their commitment to upholding liberties enjoyed by the French Church in its traditional posture of relative independence from the Roman Papacy In 1612, Jesuits including Barthelemy Jacquinot, who eventually would serve as Le Jeune's provincial, signed a formal declaration in favor of the special "liberte de l'eglise Gallicaine " 67 The Jesuit Superior General at the time, Claudio Acquaviva, opposed this action and formally reprimanded Christophe Baltazar, the Parisian provincial, "informing him that his action had caused the pope great sorrow and that it would have been better to close Clermont rather than sign such a document"'68

Jesuit historian William V Bangert emphasizes that the

Parisian Jesuits at this time, led especially by Pierre Coton, "were ready to sign with their blood" statements such as "the kings of France are the oldest sons of the Church, endowed with rare and signal privileges beyond the ordinary status of the other kings on earth" and that "it is unlawful to refuse obedience" to their decrees 69

While such

statements did not formally contradict any of the principles of Bellarmine and Suarez on the power of the papacy in temporal matters, they nevertheless "have a resonance which calls to mind the [absolutist] language of Bossuet at a later date "70 By 1614, far from 66

Guillermou, Les Jesuites, 39

67

Declaration of the Parisian Jesuits to the Provincial of Pans, ChnstofLe Baltazar, 31 January 1612, ARSL, Gal 62, Ouvres et epreuves de la Compagnie de Jesus en France, 90 Bangert, A History of the Society ofJesus, 128

Ibid Cf P Blet, "Jesuites et liberies gallicanes en 1611," Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 24 (1955), 168-170

41

what the Papacy and the Jesuit General in Rome wished to see, Gallican magistrates in Paris—once inflexibly hostile toward the Society—were citing the Jesuits' self-regulation under French law "as a model for ensuring that no French royal officer or cleric promoted subversive ideas concerning royal authority."7 It was in this climate of political optimism about the relationship between the Jesuits and the governing elites of France—royal as well as parlementary—that Le Jeune began his novitiate. The Jesuit Province of Paris was not only politically advantaged in 1613, but its new and renovated establishments in the city also made Paris an especially attractive, lively place for young men of curiosity and ambition to be formed as Jesuits. Le Jeune entered a brand new house of novitiate, situated in the faubourg of SaintGermain and within the vicinity of the city's bustling, ancient Latin Quarter. The new Parisian novitiate had almost been established much further away from the center of the city, up on Montmartre nearby Ignatius's chapel. In 1608, the abbess of the royal Abbey of Montmartre had offered to cede to the Society of Jesus the lands upon which the chapel stood, but General Acquaviva declined the offer, approving instead the creation of a provisional novitiate inside the Maison Professe de Saint Louis—the Jesuits' real headquarters in Paris—on the busy Rue Saint-Antoine.

Then, in 1610, Madame

Madeleine Luillier, dame de Saint-Beuve, convinced one of her nephews, Jacques du Tillet, the baron de la Bussiere, to purchase the Hotel de Mezieres in Saint-Germain, close to the Church of Saint-Sulpice, the original, Romanesque structure of which would be destroyed and undergo massive reconstruction beginning in 1646. Eventually, the novitiate would expand into several other houses, courts, gardens, and dependencies in its

Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, 228.

42

quartier, but when Le Jeune arrived there, it was entirely housed in the original Mezieres building, enjoying the fruits of financial and personal support of the late King Henry IV, Queen Marguerite, the young King Louis XIII, and, importantly, the Benedictines of Saint-Germain-des-Pres and their Abbe commendataire, the Prince de Conti, who exercised episcopal rights over the faubourg

72

Had the Parisian novitiate been erected on Montmartre, overlooking Paris from a high, grassy, and atmospherically monastic distance on the very spot where the Spaniard Ignatius had formed his international band of companions, the young Le Jeune would have had a very different experience of Paris than surely he must have had while settling into life at the Hotel de Mezieres in the rapidly developing areas around Saint Sulpice and Saint-Germain

73

Here, he was close to the heart of old Paris on the Left Bank, as he

was close, too, to the administrative heart of the French kingdom during the period of the Prince de Conde's machinations against Marie de Medici, the calling of the Estates General in 1614, and the boy-king Louis XIII's declaration of his majority

Also, the

novitiate was located a few blocks south of the Seine—full, in those days, of boat traffic, and lined with fisheries, waterwheels, and mills74—at a point at which the great, sparklingly new version of the Palais de Louvre stretched imposingly across one's line of vision Paris as Le Jeune encountered it as a young man was in the midst of dramatic visual, physical changes, first and foremost changes sponsored by the Crown not only the completion of the new Louvre, but also the development of new commercial"Delattre, Les Etabhssements desjesuites en France depuis quatre siecles, 3 1307-1308 Rene Pillorget Nouvelle Histoire de Paris Pans sous les premiers Bourbons, 1594-1661 (Pans Hachette 1988), 16, 24 35-36 James H S McGregor, Paris from the Ground Up (Cambridge The Belknap Pi ess of Harvard University Press, 2009), \64

43

residential centers such as the Place Dauphine, the laying-out of the first, centrallyplanned royal squares (the Place de Vosges being the most famous of these), the construction of new bridges and stone quays, and also major land-reclamation projects in the Seine such as the creation of the lie de Saint Louis from the two, smaller islands, the lie de Notre Dame and the lie de Vaches, which, prior to 1614, was used as a place for pasturing cows. Just as Le Jeune entered the Jesuit novitiate at Paris when it was very new, he returned to Paris, after several years at La Fleche, Rennes, and Bourges, in 1622 for theology studies at the College de Clermont when it, too, was in the first years of a resurrected, flourishing life after the period of Jesuit exile under Henry IV. Clermont, which had opened in 1563, was situated close to the Sorbonne in the heart of the Latin Quarter on the Rue Saint-Jacques, where it remains today in the form of the Lycee General Louis le Grand. For a number of years following the Edict of Rouen, Clermont's reopening was delayed due to opposition by influential members of Parlement and professors at the Sorbonne, but by 1618, King Louis Xffl's Conseil Royal decided that the reestablishment of the college was crucial so that talented youth from good families throughout the realm would continue to come to Paris for their education. In his decree of February 15, 1618, Louis complained of a veritable brain-drain from Paris of talented students who, no longer able to attend to their secondary education at Clermont, were being sent elsewhere and, subsequently were not enrolling at the University of Paris to finish their studies. The public interest, he declared, could not tolerate this situation.76

75

Ibid., 155, 160, 164, 167.

76

Decree of February 15, 1618'. "Sa Majeste, bien informee qu'avant que Ledit. exercice eust cesse audit College, non seulement la jeunesse de ladite ville de Paris, mais aussi de toutes les parts du royaume et de

44

Le Jeune's years at Clermont in Paris from 1622 to 1626 were crucial for his professional formation Also at Clermont at that time were the Parisian brothers Charles Lalemant (1587-1674) and Jerome Lalemant (1595-1673), along with Barthelemy Vimont (1594-1667) from Lisieux, who had entered the Society at Rouen the same year Le Jeune had entered at Paris, and who eventually would succeed Le Jeune as mission superior at Quebec The Lalemants were the sons of Sieur Gabriel Lalemant, a lieutenant criminel of the French capital's early police force who also judged cases brought to the city's criminal court 77 Charles, along with Vimont, had met Le Jeune first at La Fleche during the former's theology studies and was serving as the principal of the boarding school at Clermont before being posted overseas to New France in 1625 to serve as the first superior of the Quebec mission Jerome, who would also later serve in Quebec as superior, was by 1623 already a young professor of theology at Clermont, where he had recently completed his own theological studies 78 There is no evidence that Le Jeune particularly desired to go to Canada during his years of formation as a Jesuit, but there is some evidence, from his years at Clermont, that he had hopes of being posted overseas for missionary work In 1625, after he had been ordained to the priesthood, he was emboldened to express his wishes to the Superior General of the Jesuits at Rome, Mutius Vitelleschi (1563-1645), who seems to have been

plusieurs provinces etrangeres, estoit mstruicte en ladite Universite se trouve quasi deserte, estant pnvee de la plus grande partie de toute ladite jeunesse que les parens envoyent studier en autres villes et hors le royaume, faute d'exeicice suffisant en ladite Universite pour les sciences, dont sadicte Majeste recoit, et le public, un notable pie]udice " (Delattre, Les Etabhssements desjesuites en France, 3 1140) John Gilmary Shea, History of the Catholic Missions Among the Indian Tribes of the United States (New York E Dumgan and Biotliei, 1855), 191, Campeau, Biographical Dictionary for the Jesuit Missions in Acadia and New France 1602-1654, trans William Lone, S J (Midland Steve Catlin, 2004), 177 78

Toid, 179

45

impressed with Le Jeune very early in the latter's career

In his reply, dated June 16,

1625, the General praised Le Jeune's desire to participate in missionary labors "especially among barbarous peoples where, in human terms, there is no comfort, or at least very little of it," and encouraged the young theology student to continue along the paths of charity and obedience until the will of the "good Jesus" for his future was brought more clearly to light 79 It does not appear that Vitelleschi was in personal contact with any other young Jesuits still in formation in this period with connections to the Canadian mission, which suggests that Le Jeune already, while still in his studies, enjoyed a high profile within the Province of Paris

Importantly, Vitelleschi also

corresponded several times in the same period with Charles Lalemant, who was officially ordered to depart France for Quebec in the spring of 1625 80 The choice of Lalemant as superior was the prerogative of the Province of Paris, not of the General in Rome

Le

Jeune was party to such developments during his years at Clermont Le Jeune's time at Clermont also brought him near to powerful people outside the Society, from families of high rank and ample resources that were critical for the early missions to North America Jean de la Bretesche (1570-1624), Le Jeune's spiritual director, was very close to the powerful family of the Henri de Levis, the young duke of Ventadour, whose uncle was Henry II de Montmorency (1595-1632), the viceroy of New 79

MNF 2 78 "Vividum istud pmmque desidenum, quod Reveientia Vestra suis ad me Uteris exposuit, mihi fuit gratissimum et m eo ipso digitum Dei et benevolentiae afflatum et voluntas de multis gravibusque labonbus Dei causa exhaunendis, praesertim inter barbaras nationes ubi secundum hominem aut nulla aut perexigua sit consolatio Quare faciendum ent Reverentiae Vestrae ut divmum donum perfectius in dies conetur agnosceie et magna cantate divino amon respondere Mihi autem totius rei curam et solicitudinem relmquat et omm ammo sit mtenta ut in us religiose Deo inserviat m quibus a supenonbus occupabitur Est eiiini obedientia divmae voluntatis mterpies miiilque fieri a Reveientia Vestra potest aut dd mentum suum aut ad bonum aliorum opportumus quam ut ems ductum in omnibus sequatur Ita sperandum est fore ut bonus Iesu voluntatem suam nobis apenat, ut de Reverentia Vestra id statuatur quod ent ipsi utihssimum " °MNF 2 65, 75-78, Campeau, Biographical Dictionary, 111

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France from 1620 to 1625, a powerful military commander and also governor of Languedoc and eventually, for a short time, a fractious marshal of France

At

Bretesche's funeral late in 1624, following conversations with Jesuits at Clermont, the young duke was persuaded to purchase his uncle's viceroyal office from the Crown It was this action, accompanied by Ventadour's clear expressions of support for the launching of a new Jesuit mission in New France, which marked the turning point for all the members of the Society who were biding their time and waiting for a signal to begin preparations for a Jesuit mission stationed at Quebec, including Vitelleschi in Rome, who, until 1625, issued mostly expressions of caution and discretion regarding New France to the Jesuit provincials in Paris 81 The duke immediately turned his home in Paris, the Hotel de Ventadour, situated close to the Jesuit novitiate in Saint-Germain, into a busy center of activity devoted to New France, frequented by Samuel de Champlain, prominent merchants, and also leading Jesuits of the Province of Paris 82 While Le Jeune was studying theology at Clermont, just down the street on the Rue Saint-Jacques lived a young marchand libraire named Sebastien Cramoisy

The

young printer had connections to the Richelieu family of Normandy and was much patronized, for the publishing and purchasing of textbooks, by professors and students at the Jesuit college At this time, he was printing and selling a number of translations of Jesuit missionary letters from Japan and China 83 Also, just prior to Le Jeune's return to

81

MNF 2 59-75

" MNF 2 63, David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream The European Founding of North America (New York Simon & Schuster, 2008), 394 1

Nicolas Tngault, ^,Histoire des martyrs duJapon depuis Van 1612jusques a 1620, trans Pierre Monn, SJ (Pans Sebastien Ciamoisy, 1624), Relation des cruels Martyres que 118 Chrestiens ou environ, endurerent au Japon, Van 1622, tiree principalement des letters des Peres de la Compagnie de Jesus qui resident la (Pans Sebastien Cramoisy, 1624), Histoire de ce qui s'est passe a la Chine, tiree des letters

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Paris in 1622, Ignatius of Loyola and the famous missionary Francis Xavier, who was with Ignatius at Paris at the founding of the Society, were canonized as saints by Pope Gregory XV on March 12

Cramoisy was asked by the Jesuit faculty of Clermont to

publish a commemorative work describing in detail the festivities held later that summer at the college in honor of the occasion 84 Cramoisy also printed a biography of Ignatius that same year 85 It is unknown whether Le Jeune himself fingered through these texts— although he alluded to details about China and Japan in the early Relations that may have been gleaned from them86—but Le Jeune's proximity to Cramoisy in the 1620s makes this is a good place to pause the future missionary's story and to introduce the man without whom the Relations would never have existed in the serial, multivolume form known to so many readers to this day

II.

Sebastien Cramoisy: "King of the Rue Saint-Jacques" The publisher of the, Relations was known in his own day as "the king of the Rue

Saint-Jacques " In one of the few studies that exist concerning his life and career, he has been described as "a substantial citizen" of Paris who "saw the publication of over 2,500 books, quite apart from the [numerous] official publications" he produced in service to King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, their successors, and other French government escrites es annees 1619, 1620, & 1621, adressees au R P Mutio Vitelleschi, tians Morm (Pans Sebastien Cramoisy, 1625), Histoire de ce qui s 'estpasse au Japon, twee des letters escrites es annees 1619, 1620, & 1621, adtessees au R P Mutio Vitelleschi, trans Monn (Pans Sebastien Cramoisy, 1625) 84

Solenmte de la canonization de saint Ignace et de S Francois Xavier, Apostre des Indes Faicte a Paris au College de Clermont le 28juw dejuillet (Pans Sebastien Cramoisy, 1622) 5

Pierre Monn, SJ, La vie du glorieux S Ignace de Loyola, fondateur de I 'ordre de la Compagnie de Jesus (Pans Sebastien Ciamoisy, 1622) ^ JR. 5 105, 6 23, 8 271

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officials

Indeed, between 1625 and 1660, Cramoisy independently and in association

with others "brought out one tenth of all the books published in Paris " Considering there were about 75 printing establishments in Paris at the height of Cramoisy's career, such a corner on the Parisian book market is impressive 88 Greater familiarity with Cramoisy— who he was, who he knew, what circles he moved in, who depended upon him for their public influence—is crucial for understanding the origins and success of the Relations as a publication effort as well as the success of the mission itself in securing metropolitan assistance. Heretofore, serious attention has been paid to Cramoisy only by Henri-Jean Martin and a small number of bibliographers and historians interested in the physical production and dissemination of books in early modern Europe Cramoisy does appear elsewhere, briefly, as an impersonal, insignificant presence in a number of discussions of the Relations and, in passing but not insignificantly, in the work of French historian Louis Chatellier and Canadian historian Marcel Trudel From these studies, along with confirmation from Jesuit archival sources that Cramoisy was particularly favored by the Society of Jesus both in Rome and in Paris, Cramoisy's connection to the Jesuits of New France emerges as much more than an impersonal business arrangement as publisher of the Relations

He appears to have

played an active role in launching the Relations as a series, and for reasons that go beyond motives of piety or profit and which suggest that the Relations were part of a

Henri-Jean Martin, Print, Power, and People in 17l -Century France, trans David Gerard (Metuchen The Scarecrow Press, 1993), 223 88

Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martm, The Coming of the Book, trans David Gerard (London Verso, 1976), 127, Martin, The French Book Religion, Absolutism, and Readership, 1585-1717, trans Paul Saenger and Nadrne Saengei (Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7, 196 In 1640, there weue about 200 printing presses running in Pans and about 70 workshops many of which operated seveial presses

49

broad-based effort among Parisian elites spanning the three estates—clerics, nobles, merchants, financiers, and civic leaders—to advance the political and cultural ambitions of the expanding and centralizing Bourbon state Well before the Jesuit Le Jeune moved into his residence at the College de Clermont on the Rue Saint-Jacques in time for the academic year 1622 to 1623, nearby on the same street the young and ambitious publisher Cramoisy had turned the modestly scaled printing business he had inherited from his maternal grandfather, Sebastien Nivelle, into a thriving establishment. Chez Cramoisy, which was then both a residence and a working print shop, occupied the grand Maison de l'Ecu de Bretagne close to Clermont and the Sorbonne Cramoisy lived there for almost his entire life together with his growing family, expanding the offices and operations of his grandfather's librairie and turning the original print shop into the business headquarters of an increasing number of local presses. According to Henri-Jean Martin, Chez Cramoisy was quite large and in good bourgeois style was modestly but very tastefully furnished and decorated.89 Cramoisy was born in Paris in 1585 to a marchand bourgeois father, Pierre Cramoisy, whose family was well connected to Hercule Francois, the Due d'Anjou and Alencon, the brother of King Henry in. Cramoisy's mother was Elisabeth Nivelle, the daughter of the Parisian libraire Nivelle, whom Cramoisy succeeded in 1606 at the young age of twenty-one.90 Simply by virtue of his family connections, by 1612 Cramoisy was already "one of the most influential booksellers in Paris," and by 1621 he was the official

Martin, "Un grand editeur pansien au XVIIe siecle Sebastien Cramoisy," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1957), 179, 188 "M Jacquet, "Cramoisy (Tamille)," Dictionnaire de biographie Jrangaise (Pans Letouzey et Ane, 19322001), 9 1161

50

printer for Henry, the Due de Lorraine. Lorraine's first wife was a sister of King Henry IV, and his second wife was Margerita Gonzaga, whose family included Medicis and Holy Roman emperors. Under Lorraine's patronage, Cramoisy attempted to set up a satellite branch of his publishing business at Pont-a-Moussons, close to the Jesuit college at Metz where, Martin speculates, he "no doubt...looked for business and reckoned to publish books more cheaply than in Paris" before the local Stationer's Guild "put an end to that enterprise." Regardless, his business in Paris was doing very well, producing several dozen new titles each year.91 A number of these titles were textbooks for the Jesuit College de Clermont a few doors away but also for other Jesuit colleges within France, in the Low Countries, and in German territories. Martin explains that Cramoisy produced scholarly works by Jesuits such as the prolific, historically-critical humanist Jacques Sirmond and the theologian Denis Petau as well as numerous Greek and Latin grammars, thesauri, and phrasebooks. He also "provided 'ad usum collegiorum Societatis Jesu' texts of all the classics," which guaranteed "rapid and regular sales."92 In 1625, he published an apologetic defense of the Society of Jesus by Thomas Pelletier, entitled Apologie ou defense pour les Peres Jesidtes. It is probable that Cramoisy's relationship with the authorially ambitious Jesuits went a long way toward his establishing himself internationally as a printer. We know, for example, that Cramoisy did a great deal of business with the printer Moretus in Antwerp and with Leonard and other booksellers in Brussels.93 91

Martin, Print, Power, and People, 223

92

Ibid, 224 Cf Rochemonteix, Les Jesuites et la Nouvelle-France an XVIIe siecle, 3 412-413, Bruno Neveu, Erudition et religion auxXVIIe etXVIIIe siecles (Pans Bibliotheque Albin Michel, 1994) 93

Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 223-224

51

It is not unlikely that the young Paul Le Jeune, who had a facility for language and an interest in literary pursuits, frequented Cramoisy's librairie while studying theology at Clermont from 1622 through 1626, and that, at least by the summer of 1625 when Cramoisy had definitively abandoned his efforts near Metz (the Due de Lorraine had died the year), he may have been on personal terms with Cramoisy as were, undoubtedly, Le Jeune's theology professors such as Petau. The two young men had something very important in common: just as Le Jeune had already by June of 1625 been in personal contact with the Jesuit General, Cramoisy, too, established a personal correspondence with Vitelleschi early in his career.94 Martin explains that Cramoisy began to serve the General "in many little ways" as "virtually [the Jesuits'] official printer," and that, in exchange, "the General would recommend Cramoisy to any of the order who sought a publisher." Martin adds that their correspondence was "marked by an extravagant courtesy."95 Archival sources in Rome confirm that Cramoisy received an unusually high number of personal letters from Vitelleschi and his successors. Between 1628 and 1666 (Cramoisy died in 1669), at least forty-seven letters were sent from the General's office to Cramoisy, most of them effusively worded thank-you notes for copies of Jesuitauthored books that Cramoisy forwarded along to Rome. The earliest recorded letter dates from September 1628 and discusses works of the French humanist Louis Richeome, although Henri Fouqueray was able to establish early in the twentieth century that Cramoisy's correspondence with the General's office began at least as early as February

94

MNF 2:78. Cf. ARSI, Franc. 4, f., 195. Martin, Print, Power., and People, 224

52

1626, when he received six copies of the Italian Jesuit Antonio Santarelli's Tractatus de Haeresi, the subject of a controversy between the Jesuits and the Sorbonne.96 What is unusual about the number of letters, however spread out over several decades, is that Cramoisy appears to have received many more of them from the General than did any other non-Jesuit individual in France—a list of personages which includes Cardinal Richelieu, Queen Anne of Austria, the Prince de Conde, and various royal officials, churchmen, and other prominent leaders of French society.97 It seems from these letters that Cramoisy served an unofficial, mediating role between the Jesuits in Paris and the General's office as a trusted, politically connected, internationally regarded agent of various Jesuit publishing projects.

Interestingly, it does not appear that the General

discussed Canada or Le Jeune's Relations before 1635, and the letters do not illuminate anything new on the subject, which suggests that the Society's central offices in Rome had little or nothing to do with the project. As important as Cramoisy's reputation was among the Jesuits, that reputation would not have served the Parisian Jesuits' hopes for the Canadian mission very well on its own unless an association with him guaranteed access to French political authorities and financial elites who were interested in colonial and missionary endeavors in North America. In fact, Cramoisy was very well placed in these respects, as developments in his career and publishing record in the 1620s and beyond make clear. 1624 marked a turning point for Cramoisy, just as 1624 to 1625 marked a turning 96

ARSI, Gal. 46 I, Epist. Generalium ad Externos 1613-1672, f., 116v. Cf. Fouqueray, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus en France, 4:140-141; Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus. 122.

97

ARSI.. Gal. 46 I, Epist. Generalium ad Externos 1613-1672, f., 116v, 118v, 119v, 120v, 127, 134v, 135v, 136, 140, 144, 146, 147, 149v, 164v-165, 167v, 171v-172, 176, 190v, 202v, 206, 233v, 238-238v, 242v, 25 lv, 273v-274, 276, 282; Gal. 46 II, Epist. Generalium ad Externos 1613-1672, f., 293, 295v, 298, 324, 330, 334-*, 337-337v, 339v, 342, 344, 348, 349\, 37 W, 377^, 383, 386, 402-402\>, 42