Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV by Francis Parkman

First published: 1877

Type of work: History

Time of work: 1620-1701

Locale: Canada

Principal Personages:

• Louis de Buade, Count Frontenac, Governor of New France from 1672 to 1682 and from 1689 to 1698
• Anna de la Grange Trianon, Countess Frontenac, his wife
• Le Febvre de la Barre, Count Frontenac’s successor, 1682-1684
• Jacques Brisay, Marquis de Denouville, La Barre’s successor, 1685-1689
• Francis Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, Bishop of Quebec, Count Frontenac’s rival
• Bishop Saint-Vallier, successor to Bishop Laval
• Sir Edmund Andros, the English governor of New York, New Jersey, and New England
• Sir William Phips, Governor of Massachusetts and leader of an expedition against Quebec
• Baron de Saint-Castin, a French adventurer
• Father Pierre Thury, a priest hostile to the English
• Otreovati (Big Mouth), a spokesman for the Onondaga tribe

Analysis

Francis Parkman is one of the trio of great nineteenth century American historians, the other two being William Hickling Prescott and John Lothrop Motley. Of the three Parkman has stood best the test of time. His superiority lies in his approach. He is less rhetorical and florid in style, less likely to draw sweeping philosophical conclusions from his evidence, and more successful than his contemporaries in evoking history and making it live.

Born a sensitive, sickly son of a Boston Brahmin family, he nurtured extreme hatred for physical weakness. While still a student at Harvard he got “Injuns on the brain,” as he said and was never able to cure himself of the affliction. After graduating he went on a trip, along the Oregon Trail, which covered seventeen hundred miles. From this trip came material for his first work, THE CALIFORNIA AND OREGON TRAIL published in 1849, and he contracted the beginnings of the diseases that plagued him for the rest of his life, arthritis, near-blindness, and painful headaches, all complicated by neuroticism. Though unable to write more than a handful of pages a day, Parkman subsequently turned out volume after volume chronicling the great drama of the colonization and development of the North American Continent.

COUNT FRONTENAC AND NEW FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIV is the fifth in the historical series known collectively as FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA, published in eleven volumes from 1851 to 1892. This volume, like the others, reveals Parkman’s biases and prejudices. He disdained commerce, was not enthusiastic about democracy but hated tyranny, loved the past because he believed himself “a little medieval,” and was a political reactionary. As he said in THE OLD REGIME IN CANADA, “My political faith lies between two vicious extremes, democracy and absolute authority.” He did not “object to a good constitutional monarchy, but prefers a conservative republic.” Further, he obviously had greater respect for Englishmen than for Frenchmen, for Protestantism than for Catholicism.

COUNT FRONTENAC AND NEW FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIV, which covers the years 1620 to 1701, focuses on the actions of its central title figure, who according to Parkman was “the most remarkable man who ever represented the crown of France in the New World. From strangely unpromising beginnings, he grew with every emergency, and rose equal to every crisis.” The volume dramatically attempts to show “how valiantly, and for a time how successfully, New France battled against a fate which her own organic fault made inevitable. Her history is a great and significant drama, enacted among untamed forests, with a distant gleam of courtly splendors and the regal pomp of Versailles.” He tries to tell the story “not in the interest of any race or nationality, but simply in that of historical truth.”

Count Frontenac, descended from Basque parentage, came to America twice. The first time, in 1672, he came as Governor and Lieutenant-General for the King, partly it was said so that he could escape the terrible temper of his wife and so that he could have some means of livelihood. He was then fifty-two years old, and, as Parkman says, “keen, fiery, and perversely headstrong,” age not having in any way weakened the “springs of his unconquerable vitality.”

The “springs of his unconquerable vitality” immediately precipitated him into trouble. He loved pomp and circumstance and cherished the tradition of older liberties than those that prevailed at the French court. He longed for reinstitution of the three estates, clergy, nobles and commons, and their influence in national affairs. Therefore on October 23, 1672, these three estates of Canada were convoked. Immediately the reaction from the French court was firm and negative. Count Frontenac was cautioned always to observe the order of government prevailing at Versailles, and since the States-General had not been convoked there, the governor was not to be so presumptuous again.

The troubles of Count Frontenac were just beginning. As soon as Bishop Laval returned from France, the inevitable clash occurred between them. The governor was jealous of his power, while the ecclesiastics desired to exercise, along with their spiritual authority, absolute control over temporal affairs in Canada. The clash grew more intense and wider. In 1682 Count Frontenac received his recall from the King. He left behind him the memory of an able and energetic man who would return again should danger threaten.

Count Frontenac’s return to Canada came in 1689 when the warrior-politician was seventy years old but scarcely diminished in vigor and determination. Canada was in deep trouble with the Indians and with the English to the south. King Louis was beset by his Continental troubles and was tired of the fractious colony.

The history of the days of Count Frontenac’s second stay in Canada must be written in blood, chronicles of intrigue, hatred, stupidity, clumsiness, and eternal fighting. Louis directed him to capture New York and New England, and to slaughter all non-Catholics. The scheme failed and the English in turn attacked Canada. In 1690 the English, under the command of Sir William Phips, directed several skirmishes against the French and finally lay siege to Quebec. This attack would have succeeded had Phips not been so stupidly headstrong as to ignore the only possible path into the clifftop fortress that could insure his success, a path that was to be used later by General Wolfe with resounding success. Finally the English were forced to lift their siege.

Count Frontenac was hailed generally as the savior of Quebec by the grateful citizens. But his clash with the Church was renewed as soon as external threats were for the moment stilled. These waxed and waned, depending upon how events developed with the English, and the conflicts between these two nations remained always at the boil, precipitating constant battles and threats of battles, uncivilized massacres and bloodshed, keeping always before the Canadians the black specter of war. Through it all, however, he managed to stave off defeat.

Count Frontenac died in 1698, when he was seventy-eight years old. Up to his last breath he maintained full composure and his mental faculties. He was a hero to most Canadians, especially to the humbler classes. To one of the higher classes, who also valued him, he was “the love and delight of New France.”

Appropriately, Parkman’s history comes to a close just after the death of this man. Determined to be objective and to let the facts speak for themselves, the historian withholds greatness from Frontenac. An energetic and imaginative man, though vain and too much given to pomp, Frontenac, in Parkman’s eyes, can be least forgiven for the “barbarity of the warfare that he waged, and the cruelties that he permitted.” But he was not nearly as barbarous as many people urged him to be.

Greatness must not be given him, Parkman says, “but a more remarkable figure, in its bold and salient individuality and sharply marked light and shadow, is nowhere seen in American history.”