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CHAPTER 3

Relating the New World Back to France

The Development of a New Genre, the Relations de Voyage

The Popular Success of the Relations de Voyage

Because colonization has been excluded from the paradigm of France’s cultural self-understanding, one might reasonably conclude that the seventeenth-century French reading public was kept in the dark about its own policy of assimilation. Logically speaking, the nation’s colonial contact with sauvages in the New World could have been kept entirely secret because it took place on the far side of the Atlantic. After all, as Marc Lescarbot put it in his 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, the two nations were “separated … by a sea so wide that men have apparently never had either the ability or the daring to cross it to discover new lands until these last centuries.”¹ Given this distance, one might assume that the sauvage was consigned to the margins of French thought. But in fact quite the opposite occurred. The French church and state aggressively diffused information about the nation’s colonial contact with the New World, eager to make the reading public aware of what was happening in remote lands.²

The relations de voyage were pivotal texts in bringing the New World sauvage into the French reading public’s imagination. This chapter examines the relation de voyage as a genre, emphasizing its relational goal of bringing news about the colonial encounter back home to the motherland. In showing how the French reading public was aware of the nation’s colonial endeavors, the chapter grounds this book’s overarching argument that the nation’s colonial discourse was finely interwoven with its cultural debates, and helped shape France’s emerging cultural self-understanding. Moreover, this chapter helps ground my claim that the New World constituted an important pole in opposition to the Ancient World.

The relations de voyage were relational, in the religious sense of religare, with a Latin root meaning to fasten or tie together.³ A relation can be a report about events as disparate as wars, theatrical productions, or conversations. But Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) defined the relation primarily as travel reports.⁴ Furetière observed that more than thirteen hundred relations about travel were in print by the late seventeenth century.⁵ Hundreds described the New World, although the bulk of them were devoted to other parts of the world. While many writers entitled their travel reports relations, others simply called them “histories” or “voyages,” as in the history of a mission or of a voyage.⁶

France’s relations de voyage were expressly designed to capture the reading public’s imagination and became widely diffused among the cultivated elite. The relations offered a developed narrative style, with detailed portraits of the Native Americans’ psychology and sociocultural customs. These reports often sketched scenes that read like a novel, with human interest stories that gave a human face to the other, alive with dialogue, character development, and action. The story about the Frenchman who pursued a Native American woman in marriage that I mentioned in the introductory chapter exemplifies one of the most sophisticated narratives. The readability of the French relation differentiated it from its counterparts in England, Spain, and Holland, which were not generally written for a wide, general public. Thus, several centuries later when Thoreau wanted to read about life in the wilderness, he turned to France’s Jesuit Relations rather than to the relations of his own British tradition, as Gordon Sayre has noted.⁷ The British travel accounts were written in a dry, factual, list-like reporting style, focusing on information about the land, geography, and agricultural resources. The Spanish accounts were written for administrators and were narrowly focused on technical issues of management and resources.

The French relations succeeded in reaching a wide audience. They took France’s reading public by storm, becoming more popular than novels, according to Jean Chapelain, a member of the French Academy, who had observed that travel accounts held the French imagination captive and were all the rage. In 1663, he noted: “Our nation has changed its reading tastes and instead of novels which have fallen out of favor with La Calprenède, travel narratives have become so prized that they are now very popular at court and in the city.”⁸ The relations stirred up such great interest that some were occasionally excerpted in the newspaper Mercure François. Others were compiled into anthologies. For example, in 1674, voyager Henri Justel compiled a Recueil de divers voyages faits en Afrique et en Amérique qui n’ont point este encore publiez. He prefaced this anthology with the statement that “the current taste for Relations and Voyages has become so widespread” that some information about Africa and America is “shared by almost all Europeans in even the smallest detail.”⁹ In short, these popular texts stimulated the reading public’s awareness of France’s colonial explorations and encounters.

The relations were so popular in France that they nourished other genres of writing. If the relation cultivated novelistic features of plot, character development, and dialogue, the French novel in turn borrowed many features from the relation. A good case could made for seeing the novel as emerging, in part, from the relation. Many novels framed their narratives as relations, as did Denis Vairasse’s Histoire des Sévarambes (1672), which began with the narrator’s observation: “I took an incredible pleasure in reading the books about Travel, the relations about foreign countries and all that has been said about the new discoveries.”¹⁰ The narrator then described how, contrary to his parents’ wishes, he traveled to the New World. On his voyage back, he met a severely wounded Captain Siden who had lived there for fifteen years. The Captain recounted the tales of his adventures in the form of a relation, which constitutes the novel’s story.

If some novels imitated the relations, Descartes’ Discours de la méthode reads like a travel narrative.¹¹ Descartes created the persona of a wandering explorer of truth who learns more from travel than from books written by “a man of letters in his private study, concerned with speculations that have no impact on the real world.” Rather than accept theoretical truths, Descartes’ narrator prefers “to look at no science other than the one that can be found in the great book of the world.”¹² In the text, Descartes’ thought process is motivated by the diversity of customs found in other nations, which seems inspired by the relations as a genre.

The relations influenced many other different forms of writing. For example, in 1609, a French magistrate, Pierre de Lancre, had presided over the most important witchcraft trial of the century in the Labourd region. Afterward, he wrote a text, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, to understand why this French region near Spain supposedly had more witches than any other part of the country. He framed this text as a relation, as if he were traveling to a foreign land and describing its manners, traditions, beliefs, and daily life in a way that corresponded to the relations of foreign lands and peoples.¹³ The relations also helped shape another form of writing—the dictionary. They served as one of Furetière’s major sources, enabling him to name and conjure up in considerable detail the world of the other in his Dictionnaire universel.¹⁴

It seems likely that the relations de voyage inspired the rise of a very different kind of writing, one that featured the fictional foreigner. Sylvie Romanowski’s Through Strangers’ Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France analyzes this genre, exploring texts about foreigners from Persia, Peru, Africa, or the New World who come to France to observe and criticize its customs.¹⁵ This genre flourished in the eighteenth century. For the most part, the fictional foreigners were used to articulate and uphold the idea that French culture was universally valid, thereby supporting the nation’s colonial endeavors.

The Relations de Voyage and the Catholic Reformation