In The Chevalier de Montmagny, Jean-Claude Dubé documents the extraordinary career of Charles Huault de Montmagny, first governor of the colony of New France. Born in Paris in 1601, and educated by the Jesuits, Montmagny studied law at the Université d'Orléans, joined the Order of Malta, and enjoyed a colourful career as a Hospitalier privateer in the Mediterranean, before arriving in New France in the spring of 1636. While Montmagny wasted little time in applying the experience he gained fighting the Ottoman Turks to New France's disputes with the Iroquois, he has also been credited with playing a key role in both ensuring the survival of the colony and the entrenchment of a religious elite. His exploits caught the imagination of Cyrano de Bergerac, who later cast Montmagny as a character in his novel L'autre monde. This well-documented study - which in its original French edition was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award in 1999 - adds an important dimension to our understanding of the social, religious, and political history of New France.

For years, schoolchildren heard the story of Jean Nicolet’s arrival in Wisconsin. But the popularized image of the hapless explorer landing with billowing robe and guns blazing, supposedly believing himself to have found a passage to China, is based on scant evidence—a false narrative perpetuated by fanciful artists’ renditions and repetition. In more recent decades, historians have pieced together a story that is not only more likely but more complicated and interesting. Patrick Jung synthesizes the research about Nicolet and his superior Samuel de Champlain, whose diplomatic goals in the region are crucial to understanding this much misunderstood journey across the Great Lakes. Additionally, historical details about Franco-Indian relations and the search for the Northwest Passage provide a framework for understanding Nicolet’s famed mission.

The French explorer, surveyor, cartographer, and diplomat Samuel de Champlain (c. 1575-1635) is often called the Father of New France for founding the settlement that became Quebec City, governing New France, and mapping much of the St. Lawrence and eastern Great Lakes region. Champlain was also a prolific writer who documented his experiences in the Americas, including his travels, impressions of the New World, and encounters and alliances with native peoples.

Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.

This volume contains the papers presented at the French Colonial Historical Society's fifteenth annual meeting held in 1989. Contents: La Pens?íee rÈvolutionnaire et la question coloniale: De l'anti-esclavagisme + l'aboltionnisme; Les Archives de la Guadeloupe; Condorcet et les Colonies; Marronage, voodoo, and the Saint Domingue slave revolt of 1791; Robert Challe: Une Chronique Martiniquaise; Pacific de Provins and the Capuchin network in the French Colonies in Africa and America; La carriËre mouvementÈe de Charles Huaulet de Montmagny; Le chevalier de Boufflersau SÈnÈgal et la chevalier de Tourville + Saint Domingue; The Interaction of French and British antislavery, 1789-1848; Les Portraits de Victor Hugues dans Le SiËcle des LuminiËres d'Alejo Carpentier; Orphans of War: United States Diplomacy and the French West Indies; The Pointe CoupÈe Slave Conspiracy; Desertion, treason and the concept of loyalty on the frontier of New Imperialism's New Clothes: The Mandate System in Tropical Africa. Co-published with the French Colonial Historical Society.

This book on Guillaume Coppier (1606 1674), the early 17th-century French traveler, indentured servant, colonist, mariner, moralist, baroque chronicler, antiquarian, humanist, sometime pirate and slaver of sorts, is essentially a reading of Coppier, the man and his chronicle. Coppiers Histoire et voyage des Indes Occidentales, et de plusieurs autres rgions maritimes, & esloignes (History and Voyage to the West Indies and to Several Other Maritime and Faraway Regions) was published in Lyon in 1645. Given its objective and context, this effortpart amateur historiography and translation and part novice commentary and interpretationis also a survey of past appraisals of Coppiers chronicle. Like all such endeavors, this essay informs on the essayist; it is a sort of voyage, and a long one at that.