In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780-1860

Abstract

In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in AngloAmerican Imagination, 1780-1860. By Edward Watts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 288. Index, notes, bibliography. Cloth $59.95; Paper $19.95). American attention to French has been paid only intermittently and, when it has been paid, has often been ambiguous. This is all more intriguing because two nations have shared basic values rooted in Enlightenment. Illinois historiography has roughly paralleled this pattern, with Clarence Alvord's discovery in 1905 of Kaskaskia records (1720-1790) in Randolph County courthouse spiking interest in France's Illinois Country, only to lapse after midcentury, then recently to regain historians' attention. Edward Watt's In This Remote Country contributes to this rebirth of interest and brings a welcome complement of symbolic history to facts of French colonialism and frontier French through early American nationhood. Delving within and also ranging far beyond Illinois, Watt's fresh insights into how Anglo-Americans before Civil War perceived French broadens understanding of French as well as, of course, their American observers. Watts divides those who wrote about French into their detractors and their proponents. George Bancroft, who was in vanguard of American romantic historians and writers, simply depicted frontier French as somehow than white, as part of continent's prehistory, and so interesting only as a curiosity, as setting stage, at best, for corning purity, virtue, and power of Anglo-Saxon empire. (p. 9) White cultural dominance and republicanism set Anglo agenda; consequently, French were taken for lessers. Both French marriage and inbreeding with Native Americans and French unwillingness to practice large scale land usage - either speculation for private profit or commercial farming - consigned French to an inferior status. The French also practiced Roman Catholicism, which disqualified them as future players, too, because that faith, it was believed, demanded unquestioning obethence to papal authority. Anglo-Protestants believed republicanism depended on a nation of independent, rational thinkers. This broadly based presumption of values underlying behavior belonged to Anglos-Protestant rationale for self-assigned righteousness, manifest destiny, and classification of all non- Anglos as subordinate. In fact, this tells us much about how Anglos viewed themselves in early national period and, as a result, how they stereotyped other groups. Writers singled out French again for comparison later in early national period to raise doubt about wisdom of AngloAmerican cultural triumph. Watts argues that the French were used by writers to ask their readers to imagine that nation had options - imperial nation or peripheral commonwealth - and that their destiny, like that of French, might be in peace and pleasure rather than in conquest and confrontation. (p. 12-13) These critics idealized French as being less materialistic, racialized, more democratic, more exciting, and ultimately freer than Anglo-American civilization. (p. 13) Anglo-Americans could fulfill their Revolutionary ideals without lusting for land in Mexico, expanding slavery westward or pursuing wealth through industrial corporations. General readers should take caution about some of Watt's prose. He occasionally expects readers to bear up under burdened vocabulary that, over last decade, crept into historical scholarship. The Anglo-American perspective on French is a Whiteness is a problem of narrative. According to culture studies scholars, whiteness is a complex of ideas developed in late-nineteenth century to distinguish and define, for political purposes, an Anglo-Saxon identity from other groups. Anglo-Saxons wielded this identity to explain their existing dominion or extension of it over other ethnic groups. …