The Philosopher's Breviary: Jean de Léry in the Enlightenment

Abstract

IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, France did not remain a stranger to the conquest of New Worlds. Several attempts at colonization were made, from 1555 to 1565, first in Brazil under the direction of the chevalier de Villegagnon, and then in Florida, under the administration of Jean Ribault and Rene de Laudonniere.' These ventures, which repeatedly ended in failure, nevertheless aroused great interest in Europe, much more than did the voyages of Jacques Cartier. Colonies located in tropical countries, unlike Canada with its harsh winters, exercised an undeniable power of fascination. Moreover, the daring colonial enterprises in Brazil, and still more so that in Florida, had greater strategic importance than New France on the Saint Lawrence. By positioning himself near the Caribbean, Admiral de Coligny planned to strike the Spanish empire at its most vulnerable point, directly threatening the route of its galleons. But in both Brazil and Florida, the final catastrophe was proportionate to initial ambitions. The destruction of France Antarctique in Rio de Janeiro in 1560 and the worse disaster in Florida in the autumn of 1565, when a thousand colonists were methodically slaughtered by order of the adelantado Menendez de Aviles, figure among the most bloody episodes of the rivalry between European imperialisms at the dawn of the modern age. These attempts at colonization were all carried out by Protestants. Under the protection of Coligny, they were led by privateers like Ribault and gentlemen like Laudonniere, all partisans of the Reformation. Both Normandy and Saintonge, areas where the new religion had followers even among the common people, sent colonizers and equipment. We know in this matter the role played by the city of Dieppe, the Norman in the expansion across the seas. Through the Protestant diaspora, news of these attempts soon reached cities such as London, Geneva, and Frankfurt, but it primarily stayed within the reformed milieu. We can see the formation of a mythology of the conquest of the New World in a series of texts that Marcel Bataillon has suggested we call the Huguenot corpus on America.2 These testimonies and commentaries form a continuous chain-from Jean de Lery's Histoire du Bresil and Urbain Chauveton's Histoire nouvelle du Nouveau Monde to Theodore de Bry's collec-