Cardinal Richelieu in Henri Motte’s “Siege of La Rochelle,” 1881
Note from Stephanie: Hello everyone and welcome to the third and last of our 3-part series, based on a panel presentation given this past spring at the Canadian Historical Association annual conference in Regina, SK! You can read the first paper of the series here, and the second part here. Today’s essay is mine! It feels strange introducing my own essay, so without further ado, please enjoy this short analysis of how the digital humanities helps break away from traditional historiographies and shed light on clandestine communities of New France.
Note from Andrea: Stephanie is too modest! I’m super pleased to have the chance to share some of her great work with you! Enjoy!
French Canadian history has always been locked in a struggle to define its history and separate it from its nationalism. Even when discussing the origins of French settlers in New France, Leslie Choquette had to contend with a nationalist mythology which contradicted her own work:
“Yet for right-wing Frenchmen writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French Canadians (or those who resisted the gathering exodus to New England, at any rate) embodied the classical values of a less decadent age: travail, famille, patrie, and, last but not least, the Catholic Church. Such writers, in their zeal to reclaim Québec’s virtuous habitants for la France profonde, insisted on the rural and Catholic provenance of the French-Canadian ancestors.[1]”
The history of Huguenots[2] is long and complicated – too complicated to discuss here in any depth. For a long time, many people believed that there were no Huguenots in New France, a viewpoint that is still held by some. This attitude in due in large part to the French government’s active hostility against Huguenots as well as their refusal to allow anyone not of the Catholic faith to settle in New France. While Huguenots were guaranteed certain rights by the Edict of Nantes (1598), by the 1620s, religious civil war broke out again, creating not only bad feeling but also a wave of war refugees. However, research by scholars such as, Marc André Bédard, J.F. Bosher, and Leslie Choquette, has shown that there were small communities of Huguenots scattered across the French colonies of the New World. [3]
