French Encounter Research Articles

Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

In most narratives of contact between Native Americans and European newcomers, communication begins with gestures, pantomime, and rudimentary sign language before increased familiarity enabled speech. Céline Carayon's Eloquence Embodied shows how this familiar sequence of events oversimplifies—and often ignores—the rich variety of nonverbal communication that occurred in the early modern Americas, including signs, ceremonies, gestures, and performances. Instead, this study of the first two centuries of French colonization in the Americas from 1500 to 1700 argues that, rather than evolving from “basic” nonverbal to more “sophisticated” verbal communication, “colonial America was the site of rich intersections between effective traditions of embodied expressiveness” (6–7). Furthermore, far from fumbling from one misunderstanding to the next, French colonizers and the Native Americans they met generally managed to understand each other quite well.Carayon's chronological framing means that French encounters with Indigenous people in Florida, Brazil, Guiana, and the Caribbean receive significant attention alongside the more frequently studied St. Lawrence Valley and Illinois Country. As a result, Carayon's account of Indigenous experiences with French colonizers includes Beothuc, Guale, Yao, and Tupi-Guarani speakers as well as Iroquoians and Algonquians, a choice that greatly strengthens the book.Each chapter in Eloquence explores a different theme while also proceeding in chronological order. The first surveys the use of sign language in the Native America, using a vast array of imperfect French sources to detail “complex” nonverbal communications systems across the hemisphere, including “what might have been a full-fledged sign language system in the circum-Caribbean region” (104). The next chapter examines traditions of nonverbal communication in early modern France against the backdrop of elites’ interest in “civility” to achieve refinement and unity of a linguistically and culturally diverse kingdom and is followed with an exploration of how Indigenous people chose to greet and communicate with French newcomers, mediated through the Europeans’ depictions of these encounters. Chapter four shifts attention from expressions of friendship to cross-cultural expressions (and interpretations) of trustworthiness and deception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and five probes French and Indigenous attitudes towards language learning and multilingualism, with knowledge of unspoken cultural values and taboos as valuable as spoken tongues. Chapter six argues for the ongoing importance of nonverbal communication as an accompaniment to diplomatic oratory in the late seventeenth century. Carayon's conclusion briefly compares seventeenth-century English nonverbal exchanges with Native Americans before suggesting avenues where other scholars might fruitfully use “nonverbal features of Early American encounters to shed light” on various aspects of colonization (433). While making clear that she views the French as more adept than their European rivals—especially the English—in nonverbal communications with Indigenous people, she rejects the idea that such skill “produced a uniquely benevolent style of colonialism” (433).Carayon draws on a broad tranche of evidence, and her choice to include French colonization efforts in Florida, the Caribbean, and South America in her analysis gives added weight to the book's contributions. Overall, Carayon's argument—that French colonizers and Native Americans drew upon deep traditions of nonverbal communications to bridge their linguistic divide with less trouble than previously thought—is persuasive. Eloquence Embodied makes clear that scholars should jettison the idea that spoken language obviated the importance of ritual, sensory, and other embodied communication in later colonial counters. For all these reasons it will be a standard work in the field for some time.

The French Encounter with India in the late Eighteenth Century: Anquetil-Duperron and Coeurdoux

In the course of the Eighteenth Century the relations between Europe and Indiaevolved towards an increasing European interference in the internal affairs ofthe Indian potentates: this development brought about significant changes in theperception of the Indians by the Europeans. In particular, the end of the EighteenthCentury was a turning point in the interest of the cultured French elites for theIndian world: this period saw a movement from the universalism of Enlightenmentauthors and antiquaries towards the orientalism of specialist scholars. Fascinationand curiosity towards the Indian customs and religions were revisited by the works ofthe two French pioneers of modern Oriental studies, the antiquary and adventurerAbraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) and the Jesuit Gaston-LaurentCoeurdoux (1691-1779)

French Encounters with the Ottomans, 1510–1560 by Pascale Barthe

French Encounters with the Ottomans, 1510–1560 by Pascale Barthe

Does Love Know No Borders? Culture-Crossed Lovers in Les amants désunis and Les nuits de Strasbourg

Cross-cultural love has been a contested site of encounter in literature since the colonial period and has met with prejudice and contestation of various forms, both in colonial and postcolonial societies. Despite an uneasy acceptance of love, or even its categorical rejection, the couple is a recurring archetype in the literature produced by writers of both European nations and of those places colonised by Europeans. The stakes involved cut across questions of race, purity and hybridity, as well as nationhood, and bear the historical imprint of the pseudo-scientific understandings of racial hierarchies and miscegenation, especially in the latter's meaning of the mixing of different races through procreation. Even though uncomfortable precursors such as Pierre Loti's Le Mariage de Loti or Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste have staged colonialist figurings of mixed-race couples, a good number of contemporary Francophone writers have penned novels centring on love in both their autobiographies and novels. Through a reading of two novels by Algerians writing in French, this article will trace some of the reasons why love is such an obsessive, recurring archetype and why it should appear in contemporary francophone texts as a site of cultural and political tensions. Both novels present couples struggling to love each other against the backdrop or in the wake of war: the lovers of Assia Djebar's Les nuits de Strasbourg live with the consequences of World War 2 and the Algerian War of Independence, and Anouar Benmalek's Les amants desunis are separated first during the War of Independence and then during the Algerian civil conflict of the 1990s.Cross-cultural love in the colonial imaginaryI use the term cross-cultural in this article so as to account for the many factors that may complicate a loving relationship across cultures, including ethnic differences as well as differences in political and social power, language, religion, family organisation and the status of women. This should not be understood, however, as a desire to downplay the significance of the concept of or colour in social reactions to relationships, since the notion of different human races was vital to justifying and maintaining power over colonised peoples during the period of the second French Colonial Empire (1830-1962). Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, in her essay on metissage in Franco-Algerian relations, highlights precisely this point when she states that colonial societies used skin colour as an organising principle: souvent bien sur, le propre de la societe coloniale etant de s'organiser en fonction de la couleur, c'est la categorie de race qui sert a organiser, a legiferer, a phantasmer les unions mixtes.1The prejudice and condemnation that bi-racial relationships have engendered are most evident in cases where legal jurisdictions outlaw such mixing. Thirty-eight states in the United States, for example, had introduced laws against interracial marriages by the 1930s, and such unions continued to be outlawed by thirteen states until 1967.2 In the French encounter with its colonial peoples, despite an historical colour-blindness - in other words, the political effort to disqualify race as a category on which to claim rights or to interact with the state3 - miscegenation and the children that issued from such unions were sources of moral outrage and attempts to control sexual behaviour through judicial processes. Under Louis XV, for example, an edict of 1731 forbade interracial marriage in order to avoid staining the white race.4 This rejection of racial mixing, which was based on a political and pseudo-scientific - as well as an emotional - fear of the degeneration of the white through the existence of mixed-race children, was strongly voiced in France in the writings of Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who claimed in 1887 that miscegenation within France was resulting in degeneration and depopulation. …

European Southeast Asia Encounters with Islamic Expansionism, circa 1500–1700: Comparative Case Studies of Banten, Ayutthaya, and Banjarmasin in the Wider Indian Ocean Context

This paper addresses the importance of commercial expansionism and cultural exchange in maritime Southeast Asia as both were foundational to Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British encounters with Islamic traders and regional ports of trade circa 1500–1700. Portuguese conquest of the Islamic sultanate of Melaka in 1511 and their subsequent imposition of restrictions on Straits of Melaka transit set in motion the relocations of numbers of multiethnic Islamic, South Asian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian traders and seafarers to emerging regional Islamic and Buddhist ports of trade. Local conversions to Islam and alternative developments of networked Buddhist institutions paired with that era’s economic and political opportunities in support of functional regional polities (represented in case studies of Banten, Ayutthaya, and Banjarmasin), which negated initial European East India Company ambitions to dominate regional trade.

“A King in Every Countrey”: English and French Encounters with Indigenous Leaders in Sixteenth-Century America

Beginning with Columbus’ 1493 report of kings among the “Indians,” European expeditionaries regularly perceived Indigenous leaders as kings during the first century of colonialism in the Americas. English and French narratives of the sixteenth century, following the models of early Spanish and Portuguese accounts, brought to light the existence of Aboriginal monarchs throughout the Americas, from the Arctic to Brazil and from New England to California. Popular compilations of travel accounts only cemented the trope in the European imagination. The ubiquity of such kings in early English and French colonial writing reveals the conceptual frameworks through which colonizers perceived the New World and the logic of the strategies they devised to conquer it. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, English and French views diverged, with the latter demonstrating a general reluctance to use the term “king” for Native American leaders. By contrast, English sources would continue to employ the vocabulary of kingship for this purpose into the nineteenth century.

Notes on the Alternative

The recent publication of two books dealing with the American counter-culture between the 1960s and the 1980s, and its repercussions on today’s art, brings ways of thinking about the notion of alternative back into play. Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces 1960 to 2010, edited by Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski, and Caroline Maniaque-Benton’s book, French Encounters with the American Counterculture 1960-1980 actually both shed light on an alternative and little known history o...

Review: French Encounters with the American Counterculture, 1960–1980 by Caroline Maniaque-Benton

Caroline Maniaque-Benton French Encounters with the American Counterculture, 1960–1980 Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011, 244 pp., 51 color and 58 b/w illus. $99.95, ISBN 9781409423867 This handsome book investigates an intriguing and novel topic: the French attraction to American “alternative architecture,” which was prompted by the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and which is being revisited by historians as a harbinger of today’s sustainability movement. The book’s protagonists were young Frenchmen, mostly recent graduates of the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts and architecture students, who discovered America’s alternative architecture through publications and road trips in the western United States, including visits to iconic settlements such as Drop City (pictured on the cover of the book). These young travelers became prominent educators (Pierre Joly and Marc Vaye), practitioners (Francois Lombard and Jean-Louis Veret), writers (Patrice Goulet), and publishers (Jean-Paul Jungman and the founders of the Editions Parentheses). Maniaque-Benton interviewed them around 2000 and pored over their personal archives and book collections. Extensive quotes from these interviews, as well as reproductions of travel photographs and book covers, bring substance and vivacity to her account. Readers will notice that the book’s cast of characters includes no women, with the exception of a cameo appearance by Agnes Varda. In 1967, the movie director shot a twenty-two-minute film, Uncle Yanco , in the Sausalito houseboat community, “a place of pilgrimage for European architects who were attracted to these strange and wonderful constructions” (27). One is left to wonder whether male bonding, as experienced by several protagonists in tandem or as a trio of travelers, was integral to this rite of passage through a distant and exotic culture. Chapter 1, “Framing the Debates around Technology,” accounts for the rich and complex historical context behind this initiation into American counterculture, which took place at a time when France’s “aversion to American imperialism” (3) was extreme and when architectural training in Paris became pluralistic, as the previously centralized Ecole des Beaux-Arts atelier system …

Colonial Allure: Normal Homoeroticism and Sodomy in French and Timucuan Encounters in Sixteenth-Century Florida

Colonial Allure: Normal Homoeroticism and Sodomy in French and Timucuan Encounters in Sixteenth-Century Florida

The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire , 1713-1763 (review)

Reviewed by: The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 Jesús F. de la Teja The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763. By Paul W. Mapp. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. 480. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. ISBN 9780807833957, $49.95 cloth.) At the end of the French and Indian War (or Seven Years' War), Britain stood as the only imperial power east of the Mississippi River while Spain remained the only imperial power west of the great river—the notional empire of the Comanches notwithstanding. In this sprawling retelling of how Spain and Britain wound up as the only Europeans standing and how France fell victim to its colonial ambitions, Paul Mapp takes us not only to the contested regions of western North America but to the Falklands in the South Atlantic and the Juan Fernández Islands in the South Pacific and to Siberia and China as well. His argument is that as long as historians remain focused on the geographic space of North America they cannot fully understand the role of the largely unexplored part of the continent on imperial decision making in London, Paris, and Madrid. In the end, he concludes, the French became disenchanted with the potential of western North America to provide access to Spanish sources of wealth in the years leading up to the war while the British reached the same state in its aftermath. Spain, of course, had no choice in the matter; its acceptance of trans-Mississippi Louisiana at the end of 1762 was a purely defensive move in the face of Britain's sweeping victories to the north and east. Much of what The Elusive West tells us, as the author readily admits at times, is already part of the standard historiography. The book's innovation consists in broadening the context to make French, British, and Spanish diplomacy with regard to western North America more understandable, if not always more reasonable. A substantial portion of the book is consequently devoted to explaining how the judgments of European policy makers were informed by an imperfect understanding of the geographical relationship of western North America to more valuable places such as Mexican and Peruvian silver-mining regions and potential Pacific trade routes. Developments and contrasts in the collection and processing of geographic information among the imperial powers in North America, [End Page 80] and even in Asia, receive considerable attention. A particularly insightful section delves into how the influence of Locke and Newton (replacing Descartes) on French thinking in the mid-eighteenth century led to Paris policy makers wanting empirical evidence for the fanciful claims of earlier geographers regarding access from the interior of North America to the Pacific Coast and to Spanish territories. To the degree that the facts did not support them, "The old marvels were dropping out of written evidence of foreign office deliberations" (382). Readers of this journal will be most familiar with the latter part of the book, where matters come to a boil in the decade of the 1750s, although they are bound to be disappointed with the minor role that Mapp assigns to Texas. Mapp does a very good job of explaining the strategic thinking of British, French, and Spanish statesmen based on short- and long-term objectives. However, although some of the major Spanish-French encounters in Texas are briefly discussed—the French trader Blancpain's capture on the lower Trinity River, the Norteño attack on Mission San Sabá—his arguments are mostly built around French encounters with New Mexico. Curiously, the founding of Texas in response to French activities in trans-Mississippi Louisiana is missing from Mapp's narrative. The Elusive West is an impressively well-researched and thoughtful work, even when its narrative rambles so far afield from the plains and mountains of western North America that it becomes difficult for the reader to see all the connections. The book will amply reward those patient enough to stick with it to the end. Jesús F. de la Teja Texas State University-San Marcos Copyright © 2012 The Texas State Historical Association

After an imaginary slumber: visual and verbal imagery of ‘awakening’ Africa

After an imaginary slumber: visual and verbal imagery of ‘awakening’ Africa

(Re)writing Self and Other in Early Modern French Travel Literature

(Re)writing Self and Other in Early Modern French Travel Literature Scott D. Juall University of North Carolina Wilmington Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues, an illustrator who accompanied René Goulaine de Laudonnière's largely Huguenot expedition to Florida in 1564, created the image that appears on this issue's cover.1 The engraving, which depicts Amerindian Chief Outina consulting a sorcerer for help in defeating his enemy Chief Potanou, provides a gateway to many of the topics addressed in this volume.2 The sorcerer's contorted body and puzzling gestures, as well as the enigmatic symbols inscribed around a shield borrowed from a member of the French expedition, provide a glimpse into French encounters with another system of belief. The sorcerer's use of supernatural powers to foresee the number and constitution of Potanou's army is meant to benefit both members of his own tribe and their new French allies before they confront a common adversary in battle. Yet the treaty of friendship established between Outina and the French is threatened by the alliances the French have also created with Chief Saturiouna, one of Outina's principal enemies, and a number of tribes loyal to him. Motivated largely by economic interests and related political stakes in Florida, the French resort to scheming and plotting with several rival Amerindian peoples in order to gain direct access to the precious metals of the Appalachian Mountains, a territory held by Potanou and neighboring allies. The multiple, inconsistent alliances between the French and local tribes are further complicated by unrest within the French colony. Members of the expedition are divided among competing factions owing to disagreements over the colony's administration; the group's cohesion is also weakened by a lack of provisions and financial support from metropolitan France. Moreover, the French Protestants vie with the powerful Spanish for control of this region of Florida, a territory added to Spain's bourgeoning overseas empire by the Treaty of Tordesillas some seventy years earlier. Dubious alliances with numerous competing Amerindian tribes, disintegration of the French colony, and fierce competition with their European opponents ultimately spell defeat for the French in Florida. The failure of Laudonnière's expeditions to the New World is largely the result of irresolute relationships between self and Other—a predicament amplified by the multiplicity of adversaries, both Amerindian and European—which result from transforming conceptions and attributions of alterity in political, religious, economic, socio-cultural, and linguistic spheres. Le Moyne's engraving [End Page 1] thus provides a poignant example of some of the complex versions of encounters with otherness that the period's travelers confronted and that this issue's contributors analyze. The volume is devoted to studies of a variety of early modern French travel narratives and visual materials that depict encounters with alterity during a period of discovery, exploration, and colonization of lands—mostly unfamiliar—across the globe. These voyages, motivated by a number of interests from national and imperial to commercial and religious, reflect profound transformations in the early modern European human experience. The period's travelers undertook their voyages during a remarkable expansion in European consciousness from a Mediterranean world towards the eastern regions of Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Far East; westward to the New World; southerly to Africa; and, in a self-reflective gesture, towards a rapidly changing Europe. Early modern French travel writing also reveals a transformation from medieval to early modern epistemological systems and from a feudal to an imperial model of politics. Contemporary French travelers moreover broadened their theological perspectives from Roman Catholicism to additional religions emerging in sixteenth-century Europe and a broad spectrum of other faiths practiced throughout the world. These elements are reflected in the multiplicity of travels and themes addressed in the issue: depictions of monstrous beings in the New World, linguistic difference in Jerusalem and Brazil, questions of nation and empire in Asia Minor, European and Ottoman cartographic collaborations, French ethnographic accounts of...

The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (review)

Reviewed by: The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean Pratima Prasad Doris Garraway . The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 412. When literary scholars venture into territory that has largely been the province of historians, they tend to adopt a posture of defensiveness. Refreshingly, this is not so in the case of Doris Garraway's The Libertine Colony. Broadening the scope of the literary, Garraway studies representations of the colonial Caribbean from the 1640s to the 1790s in French missionary relations, ethnographies, travel accounts, novels, dictionaries, and adventure narratives. While interdisciplinarity and generic diversity constitute some of the strong suits of the book, its scholarly contribution is more far-reaching. An invigorating and imaginative analysis of creolization in the Ancien Régime French Caribbean, The Libertine Colony traces the centrality of the "roles of desire and sexuality in mediating colonial power relations" (24). Elaborated fully in the last two chapters and arguably most compelling sections of the book, Garraway's central thesis of the "libertine colony" maintains that illicit interracial structures of desire were fundamental to practices of exclusion and domination in the colonial French [End Page 131] Caribbean. Delving into works by Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Baron Wimpffen, and Moreau de Saint-Méry, among others, these two chapters investigate the ties between Saint-Domingue's racially segregated caste system on the one hand, and the persistent networks of desire and sexuality between white men and women of color on the other. Garraway demonstrates the ways in which French discourses on Saint-Domingue repress and displace miscegenation rather than prohibit it, thereby enabling exploitative sexual relationships. Moreover, by projecting the stigma of miscegenation onto the "concupiscent mulatto woman" (233) and other mixed-race subjects, colonial texts legitimate white male desire and sexual power. Like cultural historian Françoise Vergès, who has analyzed French colonialism in the Indian Ocean through the metaphor of the family romance, Garraway offers a persuasive psychoanalytical perspective of sexual politics in the colonial Caribbean. For instance, she locates the fantasy of an incestuous family romance in writings about Saint-Domingue, that is, "evidence of white male desire for both black and mulatto women, whom they imagine as their symbolic daughters" (277). The first three chapters of The Libertine Colony address not so much interracial sexual contact in the Caribbean, but other libidinal economies of colonial desire. Here the discourses of libertinage refer to anxieties in colonial texts about the threatening and uncontrollable nature of the creolizing process. Garraway deftly mines the writings of French missionaries such as Du Tertre, Breton, and Labat, pirate writers like Oexmelin, and Blessebois' novel Le Zombi du Grand-Pérou. These early chapters explore the tensions between violence and desire in French encounters with Island Caribs, early colonists' libertine resistance to the colonial social order, and the erotic subtext in narratives of the spirit world. By all accounts, The Libertine Colony is Garraway's first book-length publication. Yet it has none of the rough edges of a first monograph, reading like the work of a seasoned scholar. Garraway's research is comprehensive, her readings astute, and her approach innovative. The Libertine Colony makes an important critical intervention in the fields of Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, European colonial history, and French and francophone literary criticism. Pratima Prasad University of Massachusetts-Boston Copyright © 2007 L'Esprit Créateur

Travel literature in French colonial and postcolonial encounters

If, as Christophe Campos has suggested, we accept that the disciplinary coherence of French studies “cracked” in the 1960s, then the rapid emergence of Francophone postcolonial studies as a credibl...

Queer Nation, Female Nation: Marguerite de Navarre, Incest, and the State in Early Modern France

Carla Freccero is chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California,Santa Cruz. Her books include Premodern Sexualities (1996), coedited with Louise Fradenburg, and Popular Culture: An Introduction (1999). She is working on a book about early modern French colonial encounters and has recently completed a book titled Prolepses:Queer/Early/Modern.

The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530-1880 (review)

Mweze Ngangura’s Pieces d’identite (Congo/Belgium, 1998), whereas Sheila Petty teases out the relationship landscape and alienation in Clando (Cameroon, 1996) by Jean-Marie Teno. Other essays include articles on Montaigne’s Essais (Colin Dixon), Aristotle and Renaissance travel narratives (Todd Reeser), Le sopha by Crebillion Fils (Sharon Diane Nell), La bete humaine by Zola (Michael Lastinger) La petite Fadette by George Sand (James Hamilton), the writer as nomad in Le Clezio’s works (Isa Van Acker), a well-argued essay on Merimee’s Carmen (David Ellison), and a thorough exploration of Perec’s urban Parisian geography by Derek Schilling. Jacqueline Dutton documents representations of Australia in French texts and Thomas Vauterin on the representation of the forest in French-Canadian novels of the 1930s; Annie Jouan-Westlund analyzes Doubrovsky’s writings as a Frenchman living in the US, while Claire Keith examines a French textbook’s use of cartographic imagery to teach primary school children language and literature.

French Encounters with Material Culture of the South Pacific

French Encounters with Material Culture of the South Pacific

The Calumet and the Cross: Religious Encounters in the Lower Mississippi Valley

FATHER JACQUES MARQUETTE CARRIED two religious symbols on his journey down the Mississippi: a cross and a calumet. The first was an icon at the heart of Marquette's own faith-the symbolic connection between a loving God and a sinful world. The second was a native symbol-an ever present bond between a protective spirit and his grateful children. Marquette's carrying of a calumet symbolized the connections the French and Indians had established by 1673. Yet Marquette and French colonials' misunderstanding of this and other native symbols and rituals would continue to color their encounters with native peoples. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the French encounter with the Quapaws. But that encounter would also be shaped by the Quapaws' own misunderstandings of French Catholics and their symbols and rituals. Most discussions of the Quapaws' encounter with European religion have focused on the French failure to convert them to Catholicism. Over twenty years ago, W. David Baird argued that the Quapaws were friends rather than converts. Morris Arnold and George Sabo III have more recently echoed that characterization. Arnold goes so far as to say that there is ample indication that no significant Christian influence was brought to bear on the region's indigenous population during Arkansas's colonial epoch.1 Yet the Indian encounter with Christianity bears further examination, for if the Quapaws did not convert, they nevertheless made aspects and agents of Catholicism important parts of their society and culture. For Indians, religion was much more malleable than it was for European Christians. While Europeans hoped for a wholesale adoption of ritual and belief, native peoples of North America tended toward a more selective appropriation of Christian elements, with the object of gaining the spiritual power Europeans could provide. This was especially true in the case of the Quapaws. The Quapaws incorporated missionaries and their symbols into their culture and participated in Catholic rituals. They did not do this as part of a process of conversion to Christianity, however, but as a means to strengthen and maintain their own nation. Rather than feeling they were under assault by the missionaries, they welcomed the introduction of new spiritual power as a gift, which they actively pursued. To their minds, such incorporation was essential. The continuing biological onslaughts of epidemic disease from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century and the resulting decline in population from about 7,500 to less than 1,000 made it imperative that they assimilate other peoples and their spiritual power in order to sustain a viable nation.3 By 1673, when Marquette first floated the Mississippi, the four villages of the Quapaws were located along the Mississippi River. They had established one village, Kappa, on the east bank of the Mississippi. Two others, Tongigua and Tourima, sat on the west bank and a fourth, Osotouy, at the mouth of the Arkansas. This arrangement of settlements permitted the Quapaws to regulate travel up and down the Mississippi. Enemies could be turned back from either direction, while potential trade partners upstream could be warned of dangers farther south. This put the Quapaws in excellent position to be middlemen between the lower Mississippi and the pays d'en haut, the upper country of the Ohio River valley and the Great Lakes. The Quapaw villages on the west bank also guarded the entrance to the Arkansas River. This gave the Quapaws access to prairie and woodland hunting grounds upriver, while hindering such access on the part of competitors. According to Paheka, a Quapaw elder in the 1820s, the Quapaws took advantage of their strategic position, fighting and pushing out their rivals. They blocked upriver inhabitants from trade on the Mississippi as well.4 Such was the situation in the lower Mississippi valley when Father Marquette began his expedition with Louis Joliet and their five companions. …

France in America

I continue to believe that national histories have a place in the university curriculum alongside courses on transnational themes, Western civilization, and world history. Indeed, they provide essential training in the historical depth and perspective needed for teaching and learning at other levels. In addition to teaching such broadly based courses as Western civilization or world history, a historian might offer, for example, a course entitled Autobiography and History (with a focus on French figures), Anthropology and History, or France in America—to name three I have given over the years in addition to those in my specialty, modern French history. So, how should the French historian tailor his or her expertise to meet a wider topical, temporal, and geographic scope without simply using French history as a case study to make a generalization already established in a more general course or to identify French variations to broad transnational historical issues (i.e., race, class, gender, religion, family, economic development, political change, or cultural mutation)? In this essay I will argue that we can devise a course that contributes to many of these transnational issues without being misled by our knowledge of French history into expecting certain preconceived responses and outcomes. Throughout, the goal should be to demonstrate over a wide range of issues how a new environment challenged and transformed the received wisdom and customary behavior of people born and raised in France. When I first thought about French encounters outside the metropole, I was convinced that ‘‘Frenchness’’ would remain strong and that

The French Encounter with Africans. White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880

The French Encounter with Africans. White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880