Antoine de Montchrétien" This essay examines how the French experience in Florida contributed to the monde inversé motif of Antoine de Montchrétien's Traicté de l'œconomie politique (1615). Montchrétien reversed expectations by treating American natives as neither barbarians nor innocents but as people with potential for greatness, suitable partners for the French in achieving a glorious future.
The minds of the earliest explorers of the New World had been conditioned by the Greek and Roman classics emphasized in Renaissance education. They expected to find the marvels described by Pliny and Herodotus. As contact with the mainland increased in the early decades of the sixteenth century, those who met the indigenous peoples had to deal with realities the ancients had never considered. Two contrasting viewpoints emerged. The first saw the indigenous peoples as bloodthirsty monsters whose religion and lifestyle were almost certainly inspired by the devil. The second envisioned them as noble innocents whose simplicity made them the easy prey of greedy Europeans. Spanish writers first enunciated both the discourse of American savagery and that of American innocence, but the two sets of stereotypes were rapidly adopted by their French competitors. While French writers were quick to endorse the "Black Legend" of Spanish rapacity and American virtue, many also had their own version of the bloodthirsty image of New World natives, shaped by the French encounter with the Tupinamba cannibals of Brazil. Both visions of America and its peoples thus were available for manipulation by the dramatist and political thinker Antoine de Montchrétien in the early seventeenth century. Montchrétien stepped away from both, reversing expectations by portraying the people of America neither as monsters nor as innocents but as people similar to the French and their natural friends and allies.
The first French explorations in the Americas were of course carried out by Italians working for François Ier. Giovanni Verranzo's 1524 letter to his royal employer records encounters with several native groups in the course of his voyage along the North American coast. The hospitality and simplicity displayed by these people aroused amazement, amusement, and some degree of condescension in the explorer, but for him they were clearly uncouth human beings, not monsters. Jacques Cartier's ventures into northern America in the 1540s led to less positive conclusions. His would-be colony failed, in large part due to degenerating relations with the peoples of the area. For him they became sauvages, 'savage' or 'wild men'. The same is true for the other early writers, such as Jean de Léry and André Thevet, who acquainted their readers with the Brazilian cannibals. Sauvages and barbares are the [End Page 96] common adjectives for the natives, even in the Protestant Léry, who knew them well and seems to have preferred them to his Catholic French associates. The majority reaction seems adequately summarized by an anonymous 1583 pamphlet that recounted the victories of French mariners over the "Mores" and "sauvages" encountered on a voyage to Florida and Brazil. The author concluded: "Je croy (si Dieu n'a pitié d'eux) qu'ils seront fort fascheux à réduire à la religion chrestienne et à grande difficulté on leur pourra oster ceste miserable coustume de se manger les uns les autres."1
All these narratives, as well as those of the Spanish and English explorers, would have been available to Antoine de Montchrétien when he sat down to compose his Traicté de l'œconomie politique in the summer of 1615. It is likely, as well, that a delegation of Tupinamba Indians from the last attempted French colony in Brazil had drawn Montchrétien's attention when they passed through his native Normandy the year before.2 Montchrétien perhaps is best known today as a playwright whose works form part of the transition from Renaissance to Baroque in French drama. His plays, however, were the products of his youth. The Œconomie politique, the work of his maturity, deserves more attention than scholars have given it. Published in Rouen in October 1615, it appears to have originally been intended as an addition to the debate over national policies attendant upon the meeting of the Estates-General in 1614-1615. However, the book grew into a massive tome that sprawled in many directions and appeared too late to influence the Estates at all. The chancellor to whom he presented it may have contemplated the Œconomie politique's recommendations, but few others appear to have done so, especially after Montchrétien's support of the Huguenots and subsequent death in the rebellion of 1621.3 That was their loss. The dramatist, cutlery manufacturer, and self-styled Sieur de Vatteville had produced an innovative set of economic recommendations; the Traicté is also one of the great early statements of French national sentiment.
Montchrétien had lost little of his literary skill by the time he began composing the Œconomie politique. This is especially apparent in the way he manipulated images of the monstrous and the noble to contrast France's corruption at the hands of her European neighbors with the honesty of America and the heroic (and profitable) role France might play there. The theme of the monde inversé plays a major role in Montchrétien's argument. He shows that France's situation in Europe is an almost demonic inversion of what it ought to be. He does not embrace the religion-dominated view of European politics that was still common in his day. His France is surrounded by enemies, who seek to bring her down out of greed and envy, and those who share her religion are among the worst. [End Page 97]
There can be no doubt that Montchrétien loved his country or that he displayed an acute sense of the difference between French and foreigners:
L'estranger a ses dieux à part (disoient les Payens mesme), le citoyen les a communs. L'estranger n'a lien quelconque d'amitié qui nous touche; le citoyen et le subjet nous sont comme frères de sang. L'estranger a le ciel et le sol séparez de nous. Le subjet l'a commun avec nous. Mesme air le rafraichit, mesme ciel le couvre, mesme terre le soustient.4
France is the homeland of all the virtues. "L'honneur, la courtoisie, l'industrie, l'artifice, ont choisi leur domicile avec nous. Ils s'y plaisent; et y demeureront tousjours si nous-mesmes ne les en chasons" (Montchrétien 281). The author urged Louis XIII:
Et faire partout reconnoistre que la France, à meilleur tiltre que l'Ithaque d'Homère, doit estre appelée la mère des hommes vaillans et prudens. Qu'à bon droit elle se vante d'estre la Reine des Régions Chrestiennes, l'eschole de la Civilité, la boutique des Arts, en un mot la gloire du monde. À laquelle, non seulement toutes les terres, mais toutes les mers doivent obéisance.
(Montchrétien 146)
But France for all her excellence is a body disordered, a kingdom cast into chaos, and she herself has invited the entry of the foreigners who prey upon her. Formerly, Montchrétien says,
Elle estoit semblable à une belle et pudique Dame, laquelle, par la modestie de ses ornemens, tesmoigne sa vertu et sa continence, recule les desirs des amoreux, et donne la chasse à toute affection illegitime. N'ayant de la beauté que pour plaire à son epoux, et du soin que pour entretenir commodément sa famille. Mais, maintenant qu'ayant quitté ceste première simplicité, elle fait éclater l'or en ses habits, les brillans en ses cheveux, les perles en son col, les diamans en ses doigts, chacun, attiré de loin par cest estat pompeux et magnifique, luy vient faire l'amour, et tasche en la caressant de luy prendre quelque chose.
(Montchrétien 298)
The wounds self-inflicted by France's tolerance of free trade and resident foreign merchants were bleeding her dry. Montchrétien called the latter
des pompes qui tirent et jettent hors du Royaume, non l'égout ou la sentine du vaisseau (si l'on ne veut appeler ainsi les richesses), mais la pure substance de vos peuples. Ce sont des sangsues qui s'attachent à ce grand corps, tirent son meilleur sang, et s'en gorgent. Puis quittent la peau et s'en déprennent..
(Montchrétien 303)
Turning to another metaphor, Montchrétien painted France, with her economy dominated by foreigners, as a world truly turned upside down, the dark shadow of a kingdom in proper order. He cried: "Il n'y a plus de place pour nous; non pas chez nous-mesme. Nous y sommes estrangers, réduits à ne rien faire. Et les [End Page 98] estrangers y sont citoyens, induits par nostre cessation forcée à travailler et faire nostre proper œuvre" (Montchrétien 305). This inversion of the natural order of things leads to disaster: "Et, cependant, nostre République, abandonée du soin de tout le monde, se morfond, s'affoiblit, se gaste, se corrompt […]. Et, que diray-je de plus: se despouile elle-mesme son ornament et sa gloire, pour la transporter ailleurs, avec sa richesse" (Montchrétien 331). France has brought herself low by greed for luxurious novelties and the invidious ideas that come with them. Montchrétien drew the obvious conclusion. "La doctrine estrangère empoisonne nostre esprit, et corrompt nos mœurs," he wrote. "Ce qui est estranger nous corrompt" (Montchrétien 113, 377).
In so saying, he adopted a new political metaphor based on the contagion theories of Fracastoro and Paracelsus.5 While differing in detail, these medical theorists agreed that disease could be caused by seeds that penetrated the body, destroying the natural balance of the humors. Fracastoro based his conclusions on observation of the new disease of syphilis, an epidemic in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. France thus appears as a living body, a woman whose excessive friendliness to foreigners has allowed them to drain her lifeblood and infect her with an illness whose cankerous sores are the outward symptoms of internal moral decay. Her children are left homeless, helpless and hopeless against the enemy who is overwhelming them.
The French called syphilis "the Italian disease," just as Italians called it "the French disease." The names had a practical origin, in that the first recorded appearance of syphilis seems to have been in the French army besieging Naples in 1495. However, as the disease spread throughout Europe it acquired a variety of attributions, each people crediting it to outsiders deemed their greatest sources of moral corruption or political threat. Anti-Italianism was a major theme of French political discourse in the sixteenth century, and Montchrétien framed his arguments in the demonizing terms of that invective. He did not, however, name Italians as the economic leeches who were draining France dry; his main complaint about them blames Italian glassmakers for taking over the French industry (Montchrétien 115). The greater culprits come from the north, from England and the Dutch republic. He analyzes their misdeeds in some detail, but these can be summarized under the twin headings of unfairness and ingratitude: unfairness because they refuse French merchants the same freedom to trade in their homelands that France so liberally offers them; ingratitude because they learned their manufacturing skills from France and now employ them to destroy her.
England looms particularly large in Montchrétien's vision of France under siege by diabolical aliens who turn her own skills against her: [End Page 99]
L'Angleterre nous en est un exemple suffisant, laquelle, depuis nos guerres civilles, faisant profit des confusions de ce Royaume, s'est si bien instruite par l'adresse de nos hommes qui s'estoient jettez chez elle comme en un port de repos, que, maintenant, elle pratique avec gloire et profit ces mesmes Arts que nous avions longtemps gardez comme en propriété, de l'ouvrage desquels nous seuls l'accommodions […]. Nos homes encore vivans chez elle, et leurs enfans, luy sont comme des trophées de nostre dépouille.
(Montchrétien 85-86)
More than that, the English (and the Dutch) established their commercial fleets with French help. They now return the favor by mistreating French merchants who want to trade in England; they suffer far more constraints than English merchants do in France.
Et faisons voir à l'œil et toucher à la main comme nos marchans ne jouissent point de mesme liberté et égalité de commerce chez eux. Comme, pour le mauvais traitement qu'ils y reçoivent, ils sont contrains de s'en abstenir, et de leur laisser au rebours faire tout par deça. Au grand prejudice de nostre manufacture, de nostre traffic, de nostre navigation, et du bien général de tout le Royaume.
(Montchrétien 338)
The exorbitant customs duties and other restraints on commerce have been set up to drive outsiders away, for "Toutes ses loix buttent au profit particulier, tant du citoyen que de la République" (Montchrétien 294).
The French were experiencing the same sort of ingratitude and exploitation elsewhere. The Flemish and the Dutch had also learned from French Protestant refugees and were using that knowledge to prey upon the homeland of their mentors. "Ce que je dy d'Angleterre," Montchrétien concluded, "je le tiens dit pour la Flandre, et principalement pour la Holande" (Montchrétien 86). Not only do these dangerous foreigners prevent the French from trading with them, they also abuse the privileges so generously offered them in France. Though France is perfectly capable of dying her own cloth, the English have flooded her markets with inferior colored fabrics (Montchrétien 106). They have taken over France's paper mills and even bring in English artisans to run them, though this is a clear violation of the law (Montchrétien 95). The Dutch have made destruction of the French weaving industry their particular endeavor, while the Flemings undercut French printers by flooding the market with cheaply printed books (Montchrétien 112).
To this point Montchrétien would seem to be portraying Catholic France surrounded by Protestant enemies who seek to bring her down, a powerful and readily comprehensible image based on the religious conflicts begun in the previous century and continuing into his own time. But his is a political rather than a religious viewpoint. France's traditional enmity with Catholic Spain holds good for him, in spite of Louis XIII's forthcoming marriage alliance [End Page 100] with the Spanish princess Anne of Austria. Not only does Spain abuse French merchants by charging a forty percent customs duty on goods they bring into Spain, but it also subjects them to the scrutiny of an Inquisition "bien plus soigneux de leur salut que de celuy des Anglois et des Holandois" (Montchrétien 352). Furthermore, "ceste servitude est suivi d'une autre, à sçavoir de la disposition entière et libre en tout temps de nos navires et de nos hommes" (Montchrétien 353). The English and Dutch are as free from these arbitrary seizures as they are from the Inquisition (Montchrétien 353). So France stands alone, with enemies on every side. She has foolishly taken them to her bosom and been seriously weakened thereby. Only resolute royal action can restore her health and lead her back to the straight path towards her destined glory.
Montchrétien displays a mastery of the techniques of polemical literature as practiced in early modern France. His elaborate metaphors establish a clear and vivid dichotomy between France and the outside competitors who seek to bring her down. He makes an even sharper contrast between the kingdom's current disordered condition and the glory to which it can aspire if Louis XIII and the queen mother will follow his prescriptions. A black and white world view inevitably loses the grey nuances of reality, but the creation of such firm divisions simplifies the choice between a world upside down and a world made new, between the path to perdition and the path to redemption.6
For Montchrétien the path to redemption ran west to the Americas, where France's innocence could be restored and her honor recovered, in large part through her relations with the natives. The theme of America and its native peoples runs all through the section "De la navigation et ses utilités," the third part of the Œconomie politique. Montchrétien seeks to persuade his royal audience of the value of augmenting the French fleet and of the exploration and colonization to which such action could lead. While he does give brief consideration to the possibility of a French crusade in North Africa, in emulation of the Portuguese and Spanish, he is far more interested in seeing France best her rivals through expansion in North America. And just as France, when economically and spiritually healthy, is far superior to her European neighbors, so her relations with the peoples of the Americas ought to be vastly more equitable and affectionate.
Montchrétien did not adopt the vision of Americans as natural slaves and devil-worshipping monsters. Nor did he show them as passive innocents doomed to destruction at European hands. He reverses his readers' expectations by downplaying the exotic and the savage and portraying natives of the Americas as courageous and friendly people who could, with just a little encouragement, become the friends and partners the French so signally lacked [End Page 101] in Europe. His attitudes echo Montaigne's in many ways, though he has reversed the great essayist's opinions for his own purposes. In the famous essay "Des cannibales" (1:31) Montaigne first suggested that in some ways the natives of the New World could be considered superior to Europeans. He wrote, "Nous pouvons donc les bien appeller barbares en esgard aux regles de la raison, mais non pas en esgard à nous, qui les surpassons en toute sorte de barbarie."7 By the time he composed "Des coches" (3:6), Montaigne was ready for a fuller discussion of the interactions between Europeans and Americans. He embraced the positive view of American nature and recounted with indignation the fates of Atahualpa and Guatemoc, last rulers of the Inca and Aztec states (Montaigne 3:6, 890-91). Most interesting for understanding Montchrétien is Montaigne's regret that America had not been discovered in Classical times. He wondered what might have happened if the superior civilizations of the Greeks and Romans had had the opportunity to implant their virtues in the fertile soil of the Americans' naturally good natures:
Quelle reparation eust-ce esté à toute cette machine, que les premiers exemples et deportemens nostres qui se sont presentés par delà eussent appellé ces peoples à l'admiration et imitation de la vertus et eussent dressé entre eux et nous une fraternelle societé et intelligence!
(Montaigne 3:6, 888)
The reality was far otherwise. "Au rebours, nous nous sommes servis de leurs ignorance et inexperience à les plier plus facilement vers la trahison, luxure, avarice et vers toute sorte d'inhumanité et de cruauté à l'exemple et patron de nos moeurs" (Montaigne 3:6, 889). Montaigne did not exhibit the strong sense of national identity that informed Montchrétien's thought a generation later. For him all Europeans share the guilt for the corruption and destruction of the Americans. The opportunity is lost, the kings cast down, with no chance of alleviating the situation in the future. All that is left to do is wonder at the physical remains of the American civilizations and regret the destruction of their ways of life (Montaigne 3:6, 893).
This is where Montchrétien reverses the earlier writer most sharply. Montaigne looked to the Golden Age of the past and a future inevitably worse than the present. Montchrétien is focused on a future that can be better than the present, in which Montaigne's "fraternelle societé et intelligence" can yet be achieved. What are needed are not Greeks and Romans, though Montchrétien comments that the Romans would not have wasted the opportunity, but French people being their best selves. Indeed, he can pay the New World natives no higher compliment than to say they resemble the French—"nos semblables," he calls them (Montchrétien 196). In so saying he steps away [End Page 102] from the savage/noble innocent dichotomy that dominated the discourse on the Americas and their peoples. For him they are human beings who share many traits with his compatriots.
Like the French, they are all born to freedom; like the French, they value courage above all. The valor of the natives is portrayed most clearly in Montchrétien's narration of the French efforts to colonize Florida (including modern southern South Carolina) in the 1560s. He comes at last to Dominic de Gourgues's efforts to punish the Spanish force that destroyed the original settlement. He comments: "Je ne veux point icy passer sous silence ce que nous devons à la recommendation de ces peuples Sauvages, et entre autres d'Olocatora, jeune Paracoussi, lequel encouragea le Capitaine François de geste et de parole. Et luy promettant de faire un beau devoir en cest assaut" (Montchrétien 164). And Olocatora kept his word, being first over the wall when the combined French and native force attacked the Spanish fort.
Even the natives' faults parallel those of the French. Montchrétien finds them "peu laborieux," a trait he also deplores in his countrymen. "Ils sont assez subtils d'esprit […] mais ignorans de nos Arts, soit de paix ou de guerre […]. Bref, s'il estoit possible de leur oster ce qu'ils ont de mauvais, et de mettre au lieu ce que nous avons de bon (c'est à dire de leur donner nos vertus sans meslange de nos vices) ce seroient de braves hommes" (Montchrétien 196). He several times addresses his countrymen as "braves François." Thus the parallel is complete: the indigenous peoples of the Americas can be considered Frenchmen manqués.
This is certainly an idyllic vision of France's potential relations with the New World peoples, and one that reversed the reports of much that had already transpired. In order to achieve it, Montchrétien had to ignore a number of facts and a number of authors who had actually been to the New World, as he had not. He was clearly familiar with the French, English, and Iberian ventures, since he summarized them in the first part of "De la navigation," but he chose to omit anything that could be construed to the discredit of the natives. He criticized the Spanish mistreatment of Americans, but not the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. The Villegagnon expedition to Brazil and France's in fact extended contact with the Tupinamba cannibals he left out completely, even though, as noted above, Montchrétien was probably well aware of the Brazilians since a delegation of Tupis from the attempted French settlement at Maragnan (Maranhão) visited both Paris and his native Normandy at the very time he was writing the book. Indeed, in yet another reversal of reader expectations, he chose to accuse his countrymen, rather than the Americans, of cannibalism—at least metaphorically (Montchrétien 380). [End Page 103]
He likewise chronicles Cartier's voyages, but not Cartier's degenerating relations with the tribes of the St. Lawrence basin, though he briefly condemns the Sieur de Roberval for mistreatment of the natives (Montchrétien 161). He gives the most space to his discussion of the abortive Laudonnière/Ribaut expedition to Florida in 1564-1565, a full five pages in the original text.8 Here the idea that the French would mistreat the natives appears as a calumny uttered against Laudonnière by those in the colony hostile to his leadership. It is demonstrably false, as evidenced by the eager welcome given to de Gourgues when he arrived on his punitive expedition three years later (Montchrétien 164).
Montchrétien seems to have taken the factual base for his vision of noble Floridians from the first chapters of Marc Lescarbot's Histoire de la nouvelle France, whose first edition appeared only five years before he started to write the Œconomie politique. While the history of the colony would have been available to him from other sources, in some cases his phrasing is so close to Lescarbot's as to make the derivation obvious. Montchrétien wrote that the greatest reason for venturing to the Americas was "Pour aller fair connoistre le nom de Dieu nostre Créateur, à tant des peuples barbares, privez de toute civilité, qui nous appellent, qui nous tendent les bras, qui sont prests de s'assujettir à nous. Afin que par saincts enseignemens, et par bons exemples, nous les mettions en la voye du salut" (Montchrétien 195). Lescarbot's earlier version, directed like Montchrétien's to Louis XIII, ran thus:
Et nous, nay en la conoissance du vray Dieu et sous une loy toute de charité, n'aurons pas le zele, non de civilizer seulement, mais d'amener au chemin de salut tant de peuples errans capables de toutes choses bonnes, qui sont au-delà de l'Ocean sans Dieu, sans loy, sans religion, vivans en une pitoyable ignorans? Quoy, Sire, noz Roys voz grans ayeuls auront-ils epuisé la France d'hommes et de tresors, et exposé leurs vies à la mort pour conserver la religion aux peuples Orientaux; Et nous n'aurons pas la meme zele à rendre Chrétiens ceux de l'Occident, qui nous donnent volontairement leurs terres, et nous tendent les bras il y a cent ans passez?9
Lescarbot also finds the Americans "semblables" to the French, though to him the similarity seems to lie in the American peoples' being, like the French, sinners in need of salvation (Lescarbot 217).
Montchrétien omits, however, most of Lescarbot's detailed picture of the native people—leaving out in particular anything that might redound to their discredit. For example, Lescarbot devotes several pages to Floridian shamans—whom he calls "devins"—drawing clear, if unspoken, parallels between them and the 'witches' of contemporary Europe (Lescarbot 251). Montchrétien says nothing about the religion of the natives, beyond noting [End Page 104] their willingness to become Christian. Neither does he follow Lescarbot north. He makes no mention of Champlain or the struggles of the contemporary French colony in northern America, which take up the greater part of Lescarbot's work. Montchrétien's picture of American natives is a skilful piece of synecdoche, letting the Floridians, partially portrayed, stand for the whole.
He may have chosen to make the Floridians his exemplary Americans because their relations with the French had been the most amicable, perhaps because they were so brief, and thus could be portrayed in the best light. The corrupt and predatory ways of France's European neighbors had to be balanced somewhere, so that the potential of the Americans represented France's best chance at redemption. By opening the way to salvation and civilization for them, France itself would be purified and renewed in God's blessings. And it would be rewarded in a very practical way, by the opening of "des grandes et inépuisables sources de richesse" (Montchrétien, 197), both in France and America.
At this point the American natives vanish into the rosy mists of Montchrétien's vision of lively trade between "les sujets d'un et de l'autre costé" (Montchrétien 197). They simply seem to become part of the renewed and extended trans-Atlantic France he envisioned. If such indeed was the image he intended to convey, in this as in other ways Montchrétien was ahead of his time. Policy formulated by Richelieu later in Louis XIII's reign and by Colbert under Louis XIV attempted to absorb native Americans into the Quebec colony through conversion, acculturation, and education of their children. But because of the disparity in numbers between settlers and natives, because natives often preferred to remain part of their own culture rather than join the French, and because, above all, of the ravages wrought by smallpox and alcohol, the results were far more mixed than Montchrétien had imagined.
