268. Colonising Canada: Why Does Quebec Speak French? (Ep 2)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durimple. So in the last episode, we did this rather stuttering start to France's adventures in Canada. But we're going to dig into that a bit more because it's not the end of their story. And what I think is so interesting about this, and I hadn't realised earlier, is that this is all long before the British have got started here. The French are way ahead of the British at this point. And the British are very much, or the English, are very much the Johnny-come-latelys to the story of the colonisation of North America. and it's a whole chapter that I was completely unaware of before this.

1:04So we talked about Cartier last time. Do you remember Cartier and his fool's gold errand? I feel so sorry for Cartier. Behold my diamonds. It's quartz. Behold my gold. No, it's not. It's pyrite. Pyrite? So sad. And he's not the only person who gets fooled by this. People go to Canada and they expect to come back laden with chests full of basically paperweights and junk, which they're told is all a load of rubbish they've risked their lives for. But what they do have is a new driving force, which is kind of unexpected because not gold, not diamonds, not the gateway to China, which is very, very sweet, Cabot.

1:39I found China. You haven't. It's not there. But it's fish and fur, fish and fur. So, you know, France felt it had burned its fingers a little bit with Cartier. Those early French attempts at colonization were pretty disastrous because you know what? They never counted on the weather being as cold as it was. And I was reading that the weather in Canada was colder than anywhere in Europe. So they'd never experienced anything like this on their own continent. And it all came as something of a shock. There's those letters, aren't there, talking about seven feet of snow in their first winter, and they've never seen anything like that.

2:16Yeah. And, you know, just being snowbound, your ships are frozen. So you have to find a bay that is going to stay liquid and it doesn't crush your ship's hull. So it was really unclean weather for them. We dwell on the voyages last time. Cartier, who we talked about last time, Jacques Cartier, also did try and put down roots. The roots just didn't go deep enough in the frozen ground and they didn't stick. And I just wanted to talk about maybe one or two early settlements. They're both French. One is in what we know as Canada and one is in what we know as America now. So you've got, first of all, Charlesbourg Royale and Fort Caroline, which I'm just not even going to try and french fire.

2:56These settlements were created in Cartier's time but abandoned in failure. And I'll talk about the first first. So Cartier set up this base, something a bit more solid and a bit more permanent than sort of sheltering in a cave with a fire. And it was near present-day Quebec city. And this is the first time they try and put down some kind of permanent settlement. It's backed by King François I, and it's led by another François, Jean-François de la Roque de Robéval, to give him his full name. I'm enjoying your French pronunciation. I know. I'm enjoying it too. A bit too much, actually. Do you want to do that again?

3:32It was so good. Yeah, actually, I really, really do. Jean-François de la Roque de Robéval is his name. This colony is on a rock. It's sort of wooden and on a rock. I mean, I sent you sort of early pictures. Not just on a rock, it's on the most enormous cliff face. This colony on the rock, rocky outcrop, I'll choose to call it. Mountainous, mountainous. It faced really brutal winters because, you know, however high your settlement, you're still going to have to deal with the weather. And the winters were brutal. There's scurvy and disease because, as we said before, the French, you know, this is not a place for lemon trees.

4:09And they do count on ships bringing them stuff to keep them alive. And that's not easy. They're also surrounded by the Mi 'kmaqs, the Iroquians, who are quickly getting the idea, maybe tipped off by Cartier's frequent kidnapping of their senior staff and their senior chiefs and family, that these people do not come entirely in peace. Yes, there's an increasing conflict. Yeah. So, you know, you've got sort of Cartier writing bitterly about this experience. You know, the worst winter we've ever seen with snow deeper than a man is tall. And he writes this back. So actually not really very surprising that the entire colony was abandoned by 1543.

4:53But that isn't to say that the French have given up on the idea of colonization. It is very much in their minds because, you know, they realize very quickly that you can't just be a visitor here. You need to have your own resources because the tribes, they think, are fickle because the tribes sometimes object to kidnap and so on. They're a bit moody, so we have to have our own sort of anchored place. They do this with the Charlottesville disaster, but they also do this, and I didn't know this, in America too, in Fort Caroline in Florida, around about the same time, 1564. And that one would only last for a couple of years.

5:30And I like the story, and it's not strictly in our remit of Canada, but it is the French trying their best, but a different branch of French and for different reasons. So these are the Huguenots. These are the Huguenots, exactly. They turn up. Interesting, no? I didn't know this. Did you know this? I didn't know this. I didn't know any of this. Why don't you just tell people who the Huguenots were? Because, you know, we know, but not everyone will know who the Huguenots were. The Huguenots are the French Protestants who at this period are suffering increasing persecution and to the point of being shortly after this besieged in various strongholds and driven out of the country.

6:03And many come to Britain. East centre of London. East centre of London was a Huguenot enclave. Exactly. But many others now setting off for the New World. And these guys go to Florida of all places. This is before Louisiana. We're talking 1564. And these Huguenots, under two men called Jean Ribaud and René de Laudanilla, I'm not going to stop. I can't. So they sort of find Florida. They're driven by this desire not to be killed by the Catholics, because that's happening a lot to the Huguenots in France. And they want to make this Protestant haven somewhere else in the New World. They are so determined to make this work.

6:39They even go to France's arch enemy, Elizabeth I, and they say to her, you know what, Liz, do you want to pay for this colony because it's entirely Protestant backed? I mean, I know we're French and I know Anita pronounces our name really well in that French accent, but we're willing to do business with you. Elizabeth I, she's quite interested at the beginning, but they back away because they think, oh, she's going to make a swear allegiance to her and to the flag. and we will be dragged into a war that we can't fight. And we just got away from that. And then they end up being confronted by an entirely new Catholic enemy who are the Spanish.

7:14Tell us a bit more about that. So a little bit later, in 1565, you've got Spanish forces under Pedro Menendez de Avilés. How about that? I mean, Mark's out of 10 for our listeners. Do it again. Do it again. God, I feel you need a run at it. Go for it. Pedro Menendez de Avilés ended France's American dream when they massacred the settlers and actually razed the fort. And this is all, again, Catholic, anti-Protestant savagery. They're slaughtered as heretics. Yeah, that's what one survivor says. Yeah, we thought they were our friends. We were betrayed under flag of truce. So all these inter-Christian, jagged rivalries ever since the Reformation are now playing out in this completely new theatre in North America.

8:00And you've also got the Dutch turning up around this time too, who had an entirely new element. And you've got the Dutch founding settlements to the south of the French in New France and aligning often with the enemy tribes of the tribes that the French are aligning with. So there's a whole patchwork of Catholic-Protestant rivalry playing out alongside rivalries between the indigenous tribes in this region. So it's complicated and fascinating. It's European politics being superimposed on local politics. and so you've got this swirling vat of allegiances and breakup of allegiances and it is really kind of shifting sand but do you know why the French persist?

8:43The French persist even though this is quite a hostile territory for them in what we now know as Canada what they will very soon call New France. Well climatically very hostile for Europeans who are not used to this level of snow and ice and so on. Yeah 100 % you know they're sick of dry fish you know it's not easy to be here But do you hear it? The beaver is calling. This is why they can't go away and can't let it go, like they do in Florida. You know, the Huguenots just do it. The French can't leave the beaver. Oh, gosh. But you've got to explain to us why the French are so keen on beaver, in case our listeners possibly get the wrong idea.

9:18Well, I don't know how they would, considering you've done such a fulsome explanation. So, look, this all goes back to the fur trade in Canada, which sort of begins informally with European fishermen off the grand banks of Newfoundland. So just like, you know, we said the Vikings came over. The children of Eric the Red were making a lot of money financing their conquests of Greenland through seal and walrus pelts. And tusks, walrus tusks, which they sort of used as ivory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. But beaver is what they find in large numbers in North America. And this comes at exactly the same time as beavers are being wiped out.

9:53And all this is because of hats, isn't it? This is because everyone wants a beaver hat. Let me get to that in just a moment. But they came for the fish. They left with the pelts is the story of this. So it's sort of a cod war. One thing that I haven't been able to work out from my reading is how is the fish preserved? If you're fishing in Canada, you just salt it. Salt, yeah. And how do you serve a salted cod? What is that? Just like a sort of herring or something? What do I look like? Delia Bloody Smith? I don't know. You just don't get to stop it. If a fish goes off in two days, you can just pack it with salt.

10:23Yes, salted fish lasts for ages. I mean, go to any hostile climate and salted fish will last. Pickled fish, salted fish. I mean, I think it's salted fish at this time. Have you ever eaten salted fish? I've never eaten salted fish. Have I eaten salted? I mean, an anchovy is a salted fish. If you think today you have pickled herring and stuff, but they're not pickling it. Salting it. I mean, I'm saying, I'm shouting anchovy at you, but it will be your idea in about 30 seconds. Ah, anchovy. See? Our anchovy is salted fish. Jesus Christ. It's so wearing. It's so tiring. But look, they came for the fish.

10:55And the French fishermen who are coming to Newfoundland, where the stocks are plentiful and the fish are humongous, they're from either France or the Basque region. And what they learn really early on, so this is before New France, there's even an idea, this is early in the 1500s, that if they trade metal goods and cloth, particularly with the Mi 'kmaq and Inu peoples, they will get animal pelts, especially this beaver. And let me tell you about hats now. Now I want to, I just want to tell you about fish and then hats. fur and the kind of pelts that come back are highly prized in Europe because they are the absolute bedrock of making felt hats so first of all you'll see if you go and look on the google you'll see fashions that go back to I mean maybe not the 1500s but they're making them but certainly the end of the 1500s and the 1600s so there is this this huge fashion right from the mid to late 1500s and it will go on for 200, 300 years of making the finest hats from these pelts.

12:00Now Paris, of course, they have the best furriers in Europe and they go crazy for this type of high quality, very warm, very easy to manipulate beaver pelt. And so suddenly these fishermen have gone over to bring fish stocks back in whichever salted stroke preserved form that they do manage to, they realised they could make so much more money by bringing back pelts. And the more they bring back, the more the craze for these beaver wool, they end up calling this, this process by which they make these sort of felted hands, from the 1530s becomes a mad thing. So Parisian and London merchants just can't get enough of these things.

12:42This also is why you get shortly after this, the founding of the Muscovy Company, which is trading exactly the same products with Moscow. The beginning of Western trade with that whole region begins at this point. And it's this that provokes the very first chartered company. The Muscovy Company is the one that inspires the Levant Company, which in turn inspires the East India Company. And so for all that we've been joking about it, it's actually an incredibly important driver of economic change and the fur trade and the need to get these high-fashion items, these high-cost items to Western Europe drives an entire economy.

13:19Just like we've seen how what you might have thought was a sort of fairly ephemeral thing, getting a little sugar in your tea, creates an entire slave economy. This fashion for felt hats, which starts in France but spreads to Holland and England and the rest of Europe and becomes part of the making of a gentleman and the perception of a gentleman in Western Europe at this time. You can't go in the streets without a hat. And in fact, when Europeans go outside Europe to places like India, they are known as hat wearers, to be well. Yes, to be well, exactly that. But also biodiversity collapse because what they've done, first of all, Willie, is that there were beavers around Scandinavia and indeed around Scotland and Britain.

14:00And there is such a craze for this that they completely deplete the sources of beaver populations around the British Isles and Scandinavia. And so you've got, I mean, there's a historian called Harold Innes who writes all about the fair trade in Canada. So it's an old book in 1930, but back then he was considering how much you would make a single beaver pelt from the new world, he wrote, could fetch up to 20 times its weight in manufactured goods. So, you know, this was if you had a ship and you wanted to fill the cargo with stuff that's going to make you rich. Forget about the iron pyre, which means nothing.

14:35Even forget about fish, which is a limited profit return, and do fur. Had there not been this fashion trend, as you say, the Muscovy Company wouldn't have happened, and the French crown would not have invested seriously in this thing called New France because they see by the In the early 1600s, fur has overtaken fish as the dominant export from New France. So there is money. It's extraordinary how these utterly ephemeral things like sugar and fur hats shape entire geopolitics and lead to the extinction of whole Aboriginal tribes. A reshaping of continents. Reshaping entire continents on the basis of a whim of fashion.

15:18Indeed. The more you look at this history, the weirder and more shockingly sort of random it is. No weirder than sugar in your tea and tea for opium. I mean, it's just, you know, these are tiny dominoes that lead to enormous cultural and… Suffering and massive cultural waves. But in steps this man who is going to formalize the presence of France, New France in Canada. We've got another French name for you here. I'm revving for it. Samuel de Champlain. Samuel de Champlain is his name. So he's important for many reasons. interesting for many reasons because he's one of those people who sort of comes up from nowhere.

15:57He's not landed gentry. He's not someone who has even a drop of blue blood in his veins. He was a French explorer. I mean, if you've heard of him, you'll know him as an explorer, navigator, cartographer, soldier, geographer. But he was also an ethnologist because he took copious notes of the people that he met. So some of the first contact stuff that he writes down and sends back is absolutely invaluable to historians. He's also a diplomat. So let me tell you his foundation story, shall I? This man, Deschamps-Blanc, makes between 21 and 29 trips across the Atlantic Ocean. And he's partly, the reason he's able to do this is because he crawls into the ear of one Cardinal de Richelieu.

16:40I mean, we say Richelieu if we've watched the movies of The Three Musketeers. I'm sorry, but you're not going to do that. And I'll do that. Cardinal de Richelieu. So he has sort of crawled into the Cardinal's ear and he said, look, I've made so many voyages. There is so much money to be made. And Richelieu, who's kind of the foreign secretary of France at that time, wants to make money. And he sees that the British are spreading their tentacles across the globe and he does not want France to get left behind. And so he gets into the ear of the king. And that's why a lot of these things are funded and he's able to do what?

17:14Cabot couldn't. Cartier couldn't. People who come back on perceived, yes, you did very well, but you've not made us money missions. They don't get funded for 29 trips across the Atlantic Ocean. Just to make this clear, this is before the founding of the Virginia Company. This is before the British have landed with their serious settlements on the East Coast of America. So hadn't realized the chronology. I mean, they're not far behind the Spanish and the Portuguese. The French are in there pretty quick in the 16th century. And that is part of national pride. And that's why Richelieu takes it very seriously and puts money into these campaigns.

17:55But you've got de Champlain, who founds then Quebec City and New France on the 3rd of July 1608. And not so far from the last failed French colony. Yes, which was just a mess. Cartier has abandoned colonies not far away. Yeah. So, I mean, just a little bit more about this man who is interesting and a pioneer. So, he sort of grew up surrounded by the sea. He was born in 1567 in a place called Brouage. It's a small French seaport on the Bay of Biscay. And if you listen to Radio 4's shipping announcements, you'll be familiar. He develops this passion for navigation. and it's influenced by his father who is a captain and his uncle who has spent a life on the oceans.

18:41And though these men are of little means, they are his heroes and he learns through them seamanship, navigation and crucially map making. Map making at this early period of time, when this is all virgin territory, is absolutely invaluable where people who've come before are absolutely convinced that China is through the waterfall. His map making is going to transform the way people look at this area of the world. So in 1599, he sails with the Spanish fleet and sees their holdings in the Americas. And just again, for those who don't know this history, at this point, the Spanish have not only captured Mexico and great chunks of Latin America, but they have really got the mines going.

19:26And there is now a flood at the end of the 16th century of gold and silver coming across Atlantic every single year. So much so that the price of gold bottoms because there's now, for the first time in European history, massive amounts of gold everywhere. And a lot of this gold is making it through to the Ottoman Empire and to Goa and the Mughals. This is a complete revolution in the world economy. There's never been so much gold and and precious metals in Europe ever before. And this is what the British, sitting on their island, looking jealously at the incredible wealth of the Spanish and the Portuguese, are raiding.

20:09And remember that whole world that we talked about when we were discussing the founding of the East India Company, when Drake and Raleigh are what the British politely call privateers, but which the Spanish rightly call themselves pirates. They're licensed pirates and they're raiding at every opportunity. There's enormous quantities of gold and silver crossing from the mines of Latin America. And so this is what Champlain's seeing. He's seeing, I mean, it's like, you know, someone today visiting Silicon Valley and seeing all the wealth of that area of California. This is the biggest honeypot in the world at this time.

20:46Well, and because he's not a blue blood, he's not immediately put at the top of the triangle to come and make this happen for France. another man is given a fur trading monopoly in the region. But he is given carte blanche to go and explore the St. Lawrence River for the first time. He comes back to New France and he goes out and he's being funded again and he goes further afield. And what's interesting about him is that he starts forming relationships with the local tribes. So he makes friends with the Inu and the Wendat, the Huron people of the region. And what he says is that, you know, look, I searched for a place suitable for our abode.

21:27I found none more convenient or better situated than the point of Quebec. And what he realizes is that he's not going to make Quebec last. He's seen the other places rise and fall. And he knows how hard it's going to be. He needs these tribes. So he tries to make sort of relationships with them. Rather than kidnapping them, throwing them on board, or locking them in a brig, he starts to make these treaties with them. Historians from Europe have often viewed this entirely from the European point of view. But there's quite an interesting new generation of historians in North America who are of indigenous descent, and who are rewriting history very interestingly, from the point of view of the indigenous.

22:07And as they see it, the tribes here are finding the French useful allies. It's not a one way thing. It isn't just that the French are coming in. They're not passive. No, they're not passive. These guys are choosing to make the French settle here because it's in their interest, because they see the French weaponry. They see these guys who at this stage are turning up still with suits of armor, those heavy late 16th century sort of conquistador pauldrons and so on, which are very effective against the weaponry of tribes. There is an argument that these guys are manipulating the French and taking the French, offering the French what they want in order to manipulate them and drag them into their own wars and their own very hot conflicts with neighbouring tribes.

22:54So you're absolutely spot on, and this is crucial, because as he's sort of founding his Quebec city, he's doing it on Innu land, and he's only allowed to do it because the Innu leaders invite him to come and stay. They invite him. That's the key point. He doesn't expect to get this invitation. And having struggled over the ocean and everything and expecting a hostile land, they are invited in at this point. They are. But as you say, this is a quid pro quo at this point. So they're not passive natives who are just kind of being swept along. What they say is, you know what, if you're coming on board, you fight our fights.

23:25So fight the Mohawks. And if you fight with them, we will bring you the beaver pelts, but you've got to give us some good stuff and fight with us because we need to defeat those people because they are our enemies and have been for years. And so he gets pulled into these conflicts. You know, he said, you know, the Inu Algonquin Wendat delegation explained that they were wanting vengeance against the Mohawks and the Haudenosaunee, who they'd fought for a long time because of the many cruelties they have committed. And so they say to Champlain, you know, if you want to stay here, if you want a foothold here, and if you want those beaver pelts, fine.

23:59But we go to war together. So he's pulled into native politics. Because I certainly always read this as the sort of, you know, Europeans coming in and having their way and choosing to do basically what they want. But you can read this in a completely different way, whereby they're pawns in a very complicated chess game that's already going on in this area. So you've got them on one side, but then the Dutch say, okay, if that's the way you want to play, the Dutch say, okay, we can be friends with the Mohawks then. Let's see. And then again, you've got this sort of drawing of lines that exist in Europe, but are also sort of superimposed on lines of enmity, which already exist in Canada.

24:38And again, for those who don't know this history, the Dutch are in what will become New York, which is then called Manhattan, and that entire area of the Hudson River. And so you've got a rival Protestant settlement just to the south of where these Frenchmen are setting up. So it's like three-dimensional chess. You've not only got all the different European rivalries between different nations, who are arranged in a sense in two different sides of the board as Protestant and Catholic, but you've also got this very complicated chess board of enemies' enemies between the Innu, the Algonquin, the Wendats, the Mohawks, and you pronounce it rather than me because I'll make a mess of it.

25:20Haudenosaunee. Haudenosaunee. Beautifully done. I mean, I hope so. So, but you know, bit by bit through this diplomacy, native diplomacy, as they called it then, Champlain starts to establish his total authority, at least at Quebec. And he's able to explore, he's able to map, and all of this stuff is fantastic, except he's really into the exploring and making first contacts. And it is in 1620, the king says, could you stop the exploring now and concentrate on the administrative tasks because we need to get some money out of here. It's all very well. You're going up and down and shaking hands with people and making, well, what does it mean if we're not getting any kind of wealth.