Francis Parkman - France and England in N America, Part V - Count Frontenac, New France, Louis XIV

Arrival • Bright Prospects • The Three Estates of New France • Speech of the Governor • His Innovations • Royal Displeasure • Signs of Storm • Frontenac and the Priests • His Attempts to civilize the Indians • Opposition • Complaints and Heart-burnings.

Frontenac was fifty-two years old when he landed at Quebec. If time had done little to cure his many faults, it had done nothing to weaken the springs of his unconquerable vitality. In his ripe middle age, he was as keen, fiery, and perversely headstrong as when he quarrelled with Préfontaine in the hall at St. Fargeau.

Had nature disposed him to melancholy, there was much in his position to awaken it. A man of courts and camps, born and bred in the focus of a most gorgeous civilization, he was banished to the ends of the earth, among savage hordes and half-reclaimed forests, to exchange the splendors of St. Germain and the dawning glories of Versailles for a stern gray rock, haunted by sombre priests, rugged merchants and traders, blanketed Indians, and wild bush-rangers. But Frontenac was a man of action. He wasted no time in vain regrets, and set himself to his work with the elastic vigor of youth. His first impressions had been very favorable. When, as he sailed up the St. Lawrence, the basin of Quebec opened before him, his imagination kindled with the grandeur of the scene. "I never," he wrote, "saw any thing more superb than the position of this town. It could not be better situated as the future capital of a great empire." 12 12 Frontenac au Ministre , 2 Nov. , 1672.

That Quebec was to become the capital of a great empire there seemed in truth good reason to believe. The young king and his minister Colbert had labored in earnest to build up a new France in the west. For years past, ship-loads of emigrants had landed every summer on the strand beneath the rock. All was life and action, and the air was full of promise. The royal agent Talon had written to his master: "This part of the French monarchy is destined to a grand future. All that I see around me points to it; and the colonies of foreign nations, so long settled on the seaboard, are trembling with fright in view of what his Majesty has accomplished here within the last seven years. The measures we have taken to confine them within narrow limits, and the prior claim we have established against them by formal acts of possession, do not permit them to extend themselves except at peril of having war declared against them as usurpers; and this, in fact, is what they seem greatly to fear." 13 13 Talon au Ministre , 2 Nov ., 1671.

Frontenac shared the spirit of the hour. His first step was to survey his government. He talked with traders, colonists, and officials; visited seigniories, farms, fishing-stations, and all the infant industries that Talon had galvanized into life; examined the new ship on the stocks, admired the structure of the new brewery, went to Three Rivers to see the iron mines, and then, having acquired a tolerably exact idea of his charge, returned to Quebec. He was well pleased with what he saw, but not with the ways and means of Canadian travel; for he thought it strangely unbecoming that a lieutenant-general of the king should be forced to crouch on a sheet of bark, at the bottom of a birch canoe, scarcely daring to move his head to the right or left lest he should disturb the balance of the fragile vessel.

At Quebec he convoked the council, made them a speech, and administered the oath of allegiance. 14 14 Registre du Conseil Souverain. This did not satisfy him. He resolved that all Quebec should take the oath together. It was little but a pretext. Like many of his station, Frontenac was not in full sympathy with the centralizing movement of the time, which tended to level ancient rights, privileges, and prescriptions under the ponderous roller of the monarchical administration. He looked back with regret to the day when the three orders of the state, clergy, nobles, and commons, had a place and a power in the direction of national affairs. The three orders still subsisted, in form, if not in substance, in some of the provinces of France; and Frontenac conceived the idea of reproducing them in Canada. Not only did he cherish the tradition of faded liberties, but he loved pomp and circumstance, above all, when he was himself the central figure in it; and the thought of a royal governor of Languedoc or Brittany, presiding over the estates of his province, appears to have fired him with emulation.

He had no difficulty in forming his order of the clergy. The Jesuits and the seminary priests supplied material even more abundant than he wished. For the order of the nobles, he found three or four gentilshommes at Quebec, and these he reinforced with a number of officers. The third estate consisted of the merchants and citizens; and he formed the members of the council and the magistrates into another distinct body, though, properly speaking, they belonged to the third estate, of which by nature and prescription they were the head. The Jesuits, glad no doubt to lay him under some slight obligation, lent him their church for the ceremony that he meditated, and aided in decorating it for the occasion. Here, on the twenty-third of October, 1672, the three estates of Canada were convoked, with as much pomp and splendor as circumstances would permit. Then Frontenac, with the ease of a man of the world and the loftiness of a grand seigneur , delivered himself of the harangue he had prepared. He wrote exceedingly well; he is said also to have excelled as an orator; certainly he was never averse to the tones of his own eloquence. His speech was addressed to a double audience: the throng that filled the church, and the king and the minister three thousand miles away. He told his hearers that he had called the assembly, not because he doubted their loyalty, but in order to afford them the delight of making public protestation of devotion to a prince, the terror of whose irresistible arms was matched only by the charms of his person and the benignity of his rule. "The Holy Scriptures," he said, "command us to obey our sovereign, and teach us that no pretext or reason can dispense us from this obedience." And, in a glowing eulogy on Louis XIV., he went on to show that obedience to him was not only a duty, but an inestimable privilege. He dwelt with admiration on the recent victories in Holland, and held forth the hope that a speedy and glorious peace would leave his Majesty free to turn his thoughts to the colony which already owed so much to his fostering care. "The true means," pursued Frontenac, "of gaining his favor and his support, is for us to unite with one heart in laboring for the progress of Canada." Then he addressed, in turn, the clergy, the nobles, the magistrates, and the citizens. He exhorted the priests to continue with zeal their labors for the conversion of the Indians, and to make them subjects not only of Christ, but also of the king; in short, to tame and civilize them, a portion of their duties in which he plainly gave them to understand that they had not hitherto acquitted themselves to his satisfaction. Next, he appealed to the nobles, commended their gallantry, and called upon them to be as assiduous in the culture and improvement of the colony as they were valiant in its defence. The magistrates, the merchants, and the colonists in general were each addressed in an appropriate exhortation. "I can assure you, messieurs," he concluded, "that if you faithfully discharge your several duties, each in his station, his Majesty will extend to us all the help and all the favor that we can desire. It is needless, then, to urge you to act as I have counselled, since it is for your own interest to do so. As for me, it only remains to protest before you that I shall esteem myself happy in consecrating all my efforts, and, if need be, my life itself, to extending the empire of Jesus Christ throughout all this land, and the supremacy of our king over all the nations that dwell in it."