Le Pays des Illinois

Abstract

S TUDIES in social history over the last twenty-five years have revealed the close relationship between village England and the New England town. Early New England towns may even be said to have been reformed and improved versions of the early modern English manorial village, corrected according to the countryman's view of the need for social and institutional change. Continuity, it is now realized, was a pervasive early modern value, most certainly at the village level. This persistent localism with its customary themes reflects a general, broader view of life characteristic of the early modern period.1 Social history has shown us, for instance, that much of what was once attributed to Puritanism in New England was, in fact, rooted in English rural social practice.2 But if continuity is an essential component of villageness, does this pattern of transatlantic village continuity hold true beyond the area of English culture? Work on the colonies of England's imperial rivals has so far produced few analogies to the New England experience. There is, however, at least one good analogy, little known and, until recently, almost unstudied: French colonial Illinois.3 Beginning about I700, unauthorized French emigrants established six nucleated villages on the east bank of the Mississippi below present-day St. Louis. These villages contained, c. I 7 52, approximately three thousand people, of whom perhaps one thousand