The Age of Self Discovery: Inventing France in the Early Modern Americas

Abstract

Debates about migration and cultural contact have sparked controversy in France, as elsewhere, in recent years, but the issues at the heart of such debates—displacement, identity, and contact with the unfamiliar—are far from new. This dissertation asks how encounters with foreign others shaped how early modern French writers portrayed France. It examines accounts by Jean de Léry, René Goulaine de Laudonnière, and Samuel de Champlain to investigate how narrations of encounters with Indigenous populations in the Americas influenced French self-understanding from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Drawing from psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies, I define identity-formation as a process of disseminating ideas about how a group’s practices unite members and distance them from outsiders, and I demonstrate how this process is at work in Léry’s, Laudonnière’s, and Champlain’s accounts. Léry’s detailed analyses of Indigenous ways of living use outsiders to show a French society united by (the potential for) Christianity but divided morally. Laudonnière’s lack of specific information about the Timucua in Florida paradoxically portrays the French as a distinct, clearly-defined cultural community. Champlain describes missionary efforts in Quebec which depict (unrealistic) unity among the French. This analysis can help to understand influences on French identities at a time of great upheaval in France. It also illuminates the role foreigners can play in a society’s self-understanding(s)—a question which remains central in the twenty-first century.