"Poor Savages and Churlish Heretics": The Jesuit Mission to Canada and the French Wars of Religion, 1540-1635

My dissertation connects the Jesuit missions in Canada to the global Jesuit missionary project in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by exploring the impact of French religious politics on the organizing of the first Canadian mission, established at Port Royal, Acadia, in 1611.After the Wars of Religion, Gallican Catholics blamed the Society for the violence between French Catholics and Protestants, portraying Jesuits as underhanded usurpers of royal authority in the name of the Pope-even accusing the priests of advocating regicide.As a result, both Port Royal's settlers and its proprietor, Jean de Poutrincourt, never trusted the missionaries, and the mission collapsed within two years.After Virginia pirates destroyed Port Royal, Poutrincourt drew upon popular anti-Jesuit stereotypes to blame the Jesuits for conspiring with the English.Father Pierre Biard, one of the missionaries, responded with his 1616 Relation de la Nouvelle France, which described Port Royal's Indians and narrated the Jesuits' adventures in North America, but served primarily as a defense of their enterprise.Religio-political infighting profoundly influenced the interaction between Indians and Europeans in the earliest years of Canadian settlement.The initial failure of the Jesuits to entrench themselves in Canada allowed an increasing number of Huguenots to trade in New France without a strong missionary presence to counter them.Although we often iii imagine French Canada as a place where Indians primarily interacted with Jesuit missionaries, the entire first generation of Indians in constant contact with French settlers operated without missionary pressures.In places where there was a limited missionary presence, such as at Port Royal in 1611-13 and Quebec after 1615, the Indians, acutely aware of divisions among the French, struggled to balance secular proprietors who taught them that baptism merely represented a diplomatic alliance and missionaries who believed it meant giving up native cosmologies.My work uncovers an essential link connecting the origin of the Jesuit missions to North America, Jesuit missionary activity within Europe, and confessional conflict.In contrast to other historians who assert that the early Jesuits used religion as a means to conquer Indians for France, I show that Jesuit conversion of Indians should be seen as a means for vanquishing heresy by renewing Catholicism worldwide.Through archival research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, and the Vatican Film Library in St. Louis, I found that after evangelizing Indians, Biard used this training in his attempt to combat Calvinism in southeastern France.Port Royal's other Jesuit missionary, Fr.Enemond Massé, instructed future missionaries and accompanied them when they returned to New France in 1626.Under Massé's guidance, the younger missionaries overcame the anti-Jesuit sentiments that persisted among Canada's proportionally large Huguenot population when Cardinal Richelieu excluded Protestants from settling in French America in 1627.They opened the collège de Québec-North America's first college-to educate elite Canadians, instruct North America and encouraged me to tackle the problem of religious tensions in the early years of New France after I completed my master's degree.Ken Andrien co-advised my major field exam in Atlantic World, thus giving me the strong background in Latin American history required to fully appreciate Atlantic history.Similarly, Joe Miller provided a background in African history and helped me understand more clearly the role Africa played in fashioning Atlantic societies and how the Atlantic shaped Africa.I thank Wietse de Boer for helping me develop a full understanding of broader historiographical trends early in my career and for serving as a reader for my master's thesis.Despite entering his course with no prior exposure to the language, I thank Mark Wright for teaching me Latin in a little over a year.I would like to acknowledge all of the other

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