Luca Codignola

Competing Networks: Roman Catholic Ecclesiastics in French North America, 1610-58

This article focuses on the ecclesiastics of French origin and examines the geographical, family, and educational background of the priests who left for North America; the rationale behind their departure; the length of their stay and the careers of those who returned to Europe; and, finally, the influence of information about the New World on their choice. The years between 1610 and 1658 included the Jesuit missions in Canada and Acadia, the Capuchin and Recollet missions in Acadia, the Ursulines and Augustines Hospitalières in Canada, and the French dévots’ initiatives. All active members of the Catholic Church who were involved in the evangelization of French North America were influenced by a general atmosphere of religious awakening and regarded North America as a low priority in the overall aims of the church. Only 179–82 male and 25 female ecclesiastics at all levels (204–7 as a whole) went to North America in this period – just over four a year. This scarcity runs counter to the traditional view of a vast ecclesiastical movement towards North America suggested by those historians who are often blinded by the surviving literary sources. The group allegiances of these ecclesiastics produced rivalries that were much more significant, in practical terms, than their common membership in the Catholic Church. It is too much to say that there was no cooperation among the several Catholic networks in North America but hostility between religious groups was a salient feature of these missionary endeavours.

Future encounters: learning from the past?

Historians may well be accused of adding a rather sombre note to a debate that takes the necessity (but not the inevitability) of space discovery and exploration for granted such as it is presented in this book. Among historians of the early Atlantic world, such as myself — let alone anthropologists, ethnologists, and political scientists — discovery and exploration have recently become unfashionable, if not altogether disreputable, subjects of study among historians. Even the term “discovery” and its apparently more correct substitute, “encounter” have fallen into disgrace, because such terms allegedly give only a European point of view. In fact, I have myself used the term “encounter” for this article simply to avoid the wrath of the scholarly community — although I still prefer the world “discovery,” which is at least explicit. Indeed, the notion of “encounter,” as applied to Christopher Columbus’s 1492 navigation and the so-called “meeting of the two worlds,” implies that “encounter” first took place between Europeans and American aboriginal peoples, as if other encounters between communities, ethnic groups, nations, peoples and cultures had not taken place prior to 1492 — a notion that is patently false.

French Catholicism in New France

In New France, the European community consisted of a single body of lay Catholic men and women who were held together, under Gods guidance, by the sacraments administered by the clergy. The latter comprised a number of secular priests and the male and female members of the regular orders. The male members of the regular orders were ordained priests who had also pledged themselves to some special vows. In principle, the same description applied in France. The relationship between Church and crown, the role of the Church within the crown, and the crowns obligations toward its Catholic population were the same on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In the early days of French expansion (1608–59), there had been two major differences between France and New France. The most significant one was that the small Catholic community of New France lived side by side with the Indian nations. Although the Indians vastly outnumbered the French, it was then believed that the Indians could become part of the overall Catholic community by way of religious conversion. Until 1659, the second major difference was the absence of a bishop, that is, a member of the clergy who was not only in a hierarchical superior position, but who also possessed some spiritual faculties that allowed him to administer certain sacraments that simple priests – secular or regular – could not administer, such as the power to ordain new priests or to confirm lay members of the community.

The Swiss community in Genoa from the Old Regime to the late nineteenth century

Abstract Drawing on extensive and original archival research, this article is the first to reconstruct the origins and historical development of the Swiss community of Genoa from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. During these four centuries, the Swiss were constant and significant agents of the Genoese economy and society. The Swiss presence in the city dates back to the mid 1500s, when Swiss soldiers were the predominant component of the army of the Republic. In the 1700s the Swiss community broadened its economic scope and varied its social configuration. It consisted of both a well-established Protestant, élite of merchant-bankers and textile entrepreneurs and a lower layer of craftsmen, confectioners, street vendors and servants. By the end of the 1700s the Swiss élite was such a thriving and well-integrated group that in 1799 Genoa was selected to be the seat of the first Swiss consulate of the Italian peninsula, the second in Europe after Bordeaux (1798). From the Restoration (1815) to Italian Unification (1861), the Swiss merchant-bankers and textile industrialists continued to be active promoters of the citys economic and trading system. In the decades after Unification (1861–80s), Swiss capital investments moved into new economic sectors (steam-shipping and maritime insurance) that contributed to the modernization of the Genoese and Italian merchant fleet. During the nineteenth century the Swiss community created its own social spaces and identity within the city – a church, a cemetery, a school, and a charitable foundation. As in many other northern Italian cities, the consolidation of the communitys external image did not weaken the Swiss élites integration with the local Genoese upper class.

Laurens Van Heemskerk's Pretended Expeditions to the Arctic, 1688–1672 :A Note

ments mentioning the Dutch explorer, Laurens van Heemskerk, and his expedition to the Sea of California and Northern Florida. The story, little known among historians, is worth piecing together.1 The main facts are: first, Heemskerk never reached North America, either in 1669 or in 1670; second, the French Crown believed him when he said he had reached it, and hired him to beat the English to Hudson Bay; and third, the Holy See and influential Catholics in Paris also believed Heemskerks story, and on that basis made plans to convert the natives around Hudson Bay. Meanwhile the successful expeditions of two Canadian fur traders and explorers, Pierre Esprit Radisson and Medard Chouart Des Groseilliers, enabled the English to establish the Hudsons Bay Company in 1670, and set off the long search for a North-West Passage.