Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France by Bronwen McShea

Abstract

Reviewed by: Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France by Bronwen McShea Gabrielle Guillerm Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France. By Bronwen McShea . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 378 pp. $60.00. Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France . By Bronwen McShea. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 378 pp. $60.00. The Jesuits and their famous Jesuit Relations loom large in the historiography on New France, yet Bronwen McShea managed a tour de force by illuminating a forgotten facet of this history. Looking at the North American French Jesuit mission over almost two centuries (1611–1800), she argues that its 320 priests were enterprising empire builders advancing the transatlantic expansion of the "Most Christian Kingdom" (France). While the latest scholarship on New France Jesuits has primarily focused on North America, McShea adopts a French Atlantic approach that emphasizes how France's political, social, and cultural developments as well as the Jesuits' connections to the metropole shaped the North American Jesuit project. Apostles of Empire begins by analyzing the first four decades of the Canadian mission and its worldly ties and goals. French Jesuits made [End Page 85] their order's customarily special vow of obedience to the pope, but their mission was distinctly French. To work in France and its empire, the Jesuits must be French and take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. Even if securing the Crown's support for the French Catholic expansion proved challenging as rulers prioritized European diplomacy and costly warfare over New France, Henry IV and especially Louis XIII and Richelieu were instrumental sponsors of the Jesuits. Parisian benefactors, especially the influential printer Sébastien Cramoisy, also facilitated Jesuit imperial ambitions. One project was to import French charitable institutions (e.g., hospitals) that Jesuits regarded as the embodiment of their Catholic faith and a way to win indigenous converts; another (unsuccessful) one was to conquer Iroquois territory for France by defeating the Dutch-Iroquois alliance. McShea is at her best when exploring how layman Cramoisy and Jesuit Paul Le Jeune designed the yearly Jesuit Relations as a propaganda tool for empire. Reading each Relation in light of the events and developments unfolding in France and New France at the time of publication, she shows how the two Frenchmen carefully crafted the narrative to resonate with the French audience's concerns and experiences in order to secure military and financial support for French Catholic expansion. The book's second part demonstrates how North American Jesuits remained committed to the French imperial cause even as they increasingly lost the metropole's assistance after 1673. From the ending of the Jesuit Relations' publication (1673), to the Court and lay people's waning interest, and the concurrent 1763 fall of New France and French suppression of the order, the Jesuit enterprise in North America suffered a major reversal of fortune. But missionaries on the ground pushed further into new territories (the western Great Lakes, the Illinois Country, and the Gulf of Mexico), cultivated alliances with Natives by adapting to their ways, and contributed to imperial warfare by serving as ambassadors and military chaplains. North American Jesuits, McShea shows, tended to be more imperialist minded and hawkish than the Crown itself. A short review cannot do justice to McShea's fine analysis or the multiple sub-arguments she develops. The study's broad and inclusive framework is a feat and effectively illuminates how French Jesuits helped create an "untidy world of politics, social pressures, and war" over two centuries (xxvii). Rather than simply focusing on well-known Jesuit martyrs and explorers, the author recovers dozens of little-known Jesuits. We thus learn about Étienne Lauverjat, who circulated intelligence and arms, and cultivated pro-French sentiments among the Abenaki of Panouamské during the Anglo-Abenaki wars in 1720s Maine to the point that Boston set a price on his scalp. Unlike the much-studied [End Page 86] Sébastien Râle, who achieved the rank of martyr after his assassination during the same war was publicized in print, Lauverjat survived and went into oblivion. Further, only by weaving the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and looking beyond Canada to other North American Jesuit missions...