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Champlain's Dream

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This is a biography of epic cultural and geographic sweep. It entwines itself into the histories of France, England and North America, illuminating by countless fascinating details while never losing the thread of its larger narrative.

The subject is Samuel de Champlain (~1570 to 1635), soldier, explorer, colonizer, diplomat and leader of men. In recounting the facts and deeds of Champlain's life, Fischer finds a theme in Champlain's humanism, in his strong Christian piety with very little ecclesiology and in his dream of la Nouvelle France as the place where men would grow beyond the wars of religion that devastated the France of Champlain's youth. The facts alone are gripping (Champlain made dozens of voyages to North America, was an intimate of two French kings, fought corporate board battles as well as hostile Mohawks, made a fortune, gave it away, founded the city of Montreal, explored and mapped much of what is now eastern Canada and New England, etc., etc.) and Fischer's thematic thread gives it a very inspirational cast without ever flinching from Champlain's errors and weaknesses.

Part of the book's charm is in its incidental illumination of other historical personages (Henri IV of France, for instance, and Cardinal Richelieu). Also delightful is the detail of its minor, surprising episodes; for instance, the account of Champlain's 1609 battle with Montagnais, Huron and Algonquin allies against Mohawk foes, clad in wooden armor and marching in close formation, or Champlain's use of siege engines against an Onandaga fortress in 1615.

Fischer's prose is lucid and never distracting. The book is profusely illustrated with maps, sketches, paintings and photographs that together give the reader a very strong sense of having been a witness.

David Hackett Fischer's new full-length biography of Samuel de Champlain is pure nectar to the serious reader of history. Full of life, vivid, entertaining, fascinating and full of insight, this is biography at its best. Painted on the vast canvas of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe and North America, we see a fully developed portrait of a fascinating and complex individual who played such a key role in the unfolding of North American culture and civilization.

This biography is worthy to stand beside the best of our generation: John Adams, The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1), The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932. Oddly, it also calls to mind the fictional work of Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1), The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) and The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3) by Neal Stephenson with its fascinating scope and historical detail.

Among the plethora of insights gleaned from Fischer is his description of the French quality of "prevoyance," which has no exact corrollary in English. Prevoyance is not so much the ability to foresee the future as the ability to prepare for the unexpected in a world of danger, complexity and uncertainty. Champlain is the prime example of the quality of "prevoyance," Fischer shows. We follow this prevoyant man from boyhood in the harbor towns of the Gulf of Saintonge in the Bay of Biscay, with its teeming, crowded ports full of people of all nations, where he is exposed to many different economies, cultures and languages. We accompany him later in his years of soldiering and participation in the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth century, then on the quasi-military exploring expeditions to the New World with Frobisher, where Champlain is deeply offended by the atrocities committed upon the native peoples (chronicled, by the way, in a series of remarkable paintings produced by Champlain and included in full color in this beautifully produced volume). Later, we follow Champlain in his adventures in Paris court of Henri IV, where Champlain held the title of "royal geographer" as he worked in the basement of the Louvre. And finally, we return over the Atlantic with Champlain where he takes up his lifework of building New France and founding the great French capitols of the New World.

This book amply testifies of the arrival of Fischer in the topmost rung of working biographers not only of our day but perhaps of the last century. He not only has the archivist's mastery of the vast corpus of source documents, but the rare talent to create a man out of the sources. Reading this book is as transporting and joyful an enterprise as reading a great novel. Worthy of five stars, and more!

On the 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain's founding of the first successful French colonies in North America, historian David Hackett Fischer takes on the sensitive subject of a European's dream for the New World. To create a New French nation that would be a tolerant, productive and improved version of Old France was not just Champlain's dream; it was his obsession. His persistence in the face of near-constant political and environmental obstacles and the degree to which he achieved harmony and integration with the Indian populations are extraordinary. "Champlain's Dream" attempts to reconstruct the life and values of this man who was a soldier, mariner, explorer, cartographer, writer, painter, ethnographer, naturalist, courtier, and, above all the Father of French Canada.

Remarkably, Champlain excelled at most of those things, yet we don't know what he looked like or have more than an inkling of his personal life. He wrote volumes about his voyages and observations of North America, enthusiastically promoting his vision for New France, so we are left to understand the man from what he said about the people and places around him. Fischer's diligence in describing the physical environment of his locations begins with Champlain's home town of Brouage in Saintonge, where he was born around 1570 to a haute bourgeois sea captain. This descriptive prose is a recurring feature, perhaps inspired by Champlain's tendency to do the same.

Champlain first visited the New World as an agent of King Henri IV, for whom he gathered information about New Spain. In 1600, he traveled the rivers of what is now Quebec to establish contact with the Indians and document the land, with a mind to establishing a settlement, the first attempt at which would be in Acadia in 1604. A great deal of detail is devoted to the rigors the colonists faced, the carefully-maintained relations with Indian tribes, and Champlain's exploratory voyages. Focus shifts back and forth from those activities in New France and Champlain and his sponsors' tireless efforts to secure trading monopolies and support from three successive monarchs in France: King Henri IV, Queen Regent Marie de Medici, and King Louis XIII.

Some readers will find the detail about European politics, Indian politics, and every person or place that Champlain met excessive. I appreciated the information, and I found Champlain's ability to avoid an endless cycle of retaliatory violence with the Indians particularly fascinating. I am more familiar with British-Indian relations, and my tendency has been to consider the European and Indian concepts of justice mutually exclusive, leaving all options either unconscionable or unfeasible when an incident occurs. But Champlain was able to find solutions that were acceptable to both cultures, even as the Europeans held to the concept of trial and punishment and the Indians to law of retribution. To me, this indicates that Champlain understood the Indians and was respected by them. It takes no small amount of intelligence and confidence to mediate such delicate situations, where emotions run high, and consequences can be dire.

David Hackett Fischer set out to find a middle path between hagiographers and debunkers with his study of Champlain. I don't think he quite succeeds, because he idolizes Champlain and expresses that too often. But Champlain accomplished a great deal, and "Champlain's Dream" is an information-packed account of his deeds. The man, himself, remains distant, but I suppose that's inevitable. The supplementary material is a treasure trove of information as well. The biography is followed by "Memories of Champlain", which discusses how his many biographers and critics have viewed Champlain through the centuries. There are 16 Appendixes, including an a chronology of voyages, views of Champlain's writing, viceroys and generals of New France, trading companies, Indian nations, ships and boats, and more. There are 16 pages of color plates and black-and-white illustrations throughout the book.

This is a critical book for anyone who is interested in getting a different view from the typical Anglo-American viewpoint of the history of North America. Fischer is a very passionate and considerate writer who approaches his history from a passion for the man who really went on to create New France.

We get to see and read the view of Champlians upbringing, the things that shaped this marvelous individual. He was ahead of his time in compassion for his fellow man, all men according to Fisher, as we read his feelings for how Indians and African slaves. He shows us how Champlain would work to get along and bring along those indigenous peoples that he came across in his work in New France. Champlain is seen talking with those in forced labor as he travelled to Spanish America from 1599 to 1601.

He is like the Thomas Jefferson of his time, very well versed and capable of many things, from sailing to administration and business. He was a writer, an historian, a cartographer. Champlain was beyond his day and had a lot of desire to bring peace and beauty to a new land. He grew up in a time of religious strife, his own town going back and forth between Catholic and Protestant control over a very short period of time. He saw atrocities where inhumanity was the norm and lived beyond that time to an era of relative peace.

A great chapter is that of Henry IV where you get the feeling that Fischer is leading to maybe writing a whole book about that marvelous individuals life.

Basically, if we in the USA read from our perspective all the time we limit our ability to see things from the eyes of others. This book does not criticize or impugn any other countries, he states facts but is passionate about his feeling for how Champlain viewed his world.

In a time when we need real heroes to look to in times of difficulty, this book about Champlain's Dream is so very timely. This book will become a classic in my view and may even set a standard for biographies and histories for years to come. If you have a friend who is Canadian descent, this is a great recommendation or gift idea. Also, anyone you know who just loves history must have this in his or her library.

This year - 2008 - marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec or New France, as it was called then. There is an exhibition in Quebec commemorating the founding called Champlain's Dream, appropriately named after this book, an excellent biography of the founding father. David Hackett Fischer is an historian who, though not exactly popular, is widely read outside academia. His most famous work is Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History), a very interesting study of the American appropriation of certain Britsh subcultures during the 17th century (Puritan, Scots-Irish, etc.) In the present work he tells the story of Samuel de Champlain and his attempts to create an enlightened New France. Champlain was a polymath: a soldier, a sailor, cartographer, ethnographer, naturalist, artist, writer, and political leader. It could be said that he was a Renaissance Man who was well on his to becoming a man of the Enlightenment.

Champlain was born in the "cosmopolitan town" of Brouage on the west coast of France. He was born into a wealthy Protestant merchant family and lived at peace with Catholics, even during the religious wars. He had learned tolerance growing up in this milieu. French king Henri IV, with whom the family had ties, was also a Prostestant and favored religious tolerance. It was not until the invasion of France by Spanish Catholic extremists that both Champlain and Henri IV were forced to convert to Catholicism. Their new faith was not dogmatic but rather a Christian humanism that was receptive to new ideas and the pursuit of knowledge in order to better serve God.

The second most influential event in Champlain's early life was the opportunity to accompany a Spanish fleet to New Spain. There he witnessed firsthand the cruelty with which the Spanish treated the Indian population. He was determined that New France would treat its subjects with more dignity and respect.

It was in 1608 - 400 hundred years ago - that he was recruited by Henri IV - due to his considerable polymathic talents - to explore the waterways of the St. Lawrence and establish the colony of New France. He quickly established ties with the local tribes: the Montagnais, the Algonquin, and the Huron. This, however, incurred the wrath of the enemies of those tribes: the Iroquois League. There were numerous battles between the French and the Indians in which Champlain participated. Fischer's account of Champlain's arquebus (primitive shotgun) is very good. It was a muzzle-loaded hand-cannon that scared the daylights out of the Iroquois. Champlain was more interested in scaring them off than conquering them.

Although Champlain was tolerant and humane for a person of his place and time, he was still a colonialist who demanded that the Indians become Christians and that they submit to the French political system. Champlain's dream of bringing Enlightenment values to the New World failed because Enlightenment never completely took hold in France, nor had he himself completely accepted them.

Champlain's Dream is an exhaustively researched book on the life of Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer and founder of three distinct nations in North America - Quebec, Acadia and the Métis. Fischer writes in a simple and straightforward style tracing Champlain's childhood on the eastern French coast, describing the small town of his birth and the politics of the French court, to his involvement in the French religious wars and to his early explorations and untiring development of French North America. Arguments are always backed up with meticulous documentation and a willingness to discuss the strengths and weakness of various sources. The following are the themes or observations which are the most important in Fisher's biography, but also the ones I found to be the most eye-opening.

* Champlain operated according to the principles of French Humanism and Roman Catholicism that that saw all humans - including Indians - as worthy of respect since they too had immortal souls imbued with reason.
* Champlain was driven by his grand design, one which saw Europeans and Indians living together in a spirit of peace and cooperation. He promoted many young Frenchmen to live with the Indians to learn their languages and ways; he earnestly listened to Indians and actively used their suggestions to support peace; he supported inter-marriage between the two peoples; he encouraged the adoption of Indian children (Champlain's adoption of a Montagnais orphan, Bonaventure, saved him from an imminent execution, as was the custom during this time).
* As evidenced from the banning of the Anti-Coton, Champlain's ideal of order and hierarchy had an unfortunate consequence. It stifled the development of the dynamic flow of ideas and consequently slowed the growth of Quebec.
* Champlain was much influenced by the easy acceptance of different cultures in the seaport towns of his childhood along with his experiences of the French civil wars. It left with him a lasting desire for the honest tolerance of others despite ethnic and religious differences.
* Unlike Champlain's respectful treatment of the Indians, the Spanish and English treated them with contempt. The former enslaved and brutally treated the natives. The latter wanted nothing to do with them or, failing that, tried to subject them.
* "Savages" or "savauges" does not have the same meaning it has today. It did not describe a brutal, barbaric and inferior people; rather, it meant forest-dwellers. It had no pejorative significance. To this point, `Indiens', or people of the Indies, was the word Champlain used to call the people of the West Indies. The gentlemen of New France, including Champlain, were, "quicker to recognize the humanity of the Indians than that of their own servants and laborers" (p. 209).

Throughout his account, Fischer writes with great respect and admiration when describing Champlain and his numerous accomplishments. In the last chapter and Conclusion, he contrasts the meaning of several concepts, including individuality, honour and duty, between Champlain's and today's times: our ideals ring hollow and trite when compared to Champlain's lofty standards.

David Hackett Fischer is rapidly becoming my favorite historical author. He always writes with passion, scholarly insight, and exhaustive research. This book is no exception. It is clear that Hackett cares deeply about the subject matter and the importance of this particular figure on North American history. Hackett never loses sight of the "big picture" while supplying the reader with rich and fascinating details about early 17th century life in North America and France. I knew absolutely nothing about Champlain and the settlement of New France before I reading this book, but I soon came to know and appreciate this very special and important historical figure. Highly recommended.

After reading a couple of good newspaper reviews, I bought this book for my mother for Christmas. I am french-canadian and Champlain was important in our history book. To say that she likes this book is a huge understatement; she says that a good book like this one is a rare find, she doesn't how to reciprocate, she keeps asking me how did I come accross such a fortunate discovery. She is revisiting her history with an enlightened view. She says that the maps, the lists make this book very thorough yet easy to understand and the story is captivating. The best gift I ever gave her (it is on my reading list also).

Michèle

I own nearly all of David hackett Fisher's published books, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Champlain's Dream. My mother is from Quebec, and I spent many wonderful sumemrs there as a child wandering all over that beautiful city. Cartier, Champlain, Montcalm, Wolfe -- all were larger-than-life figures who brooded over the city from their place in the pantheon of history.
This book is an accessible, cheerful narrative of one of those great figures. Bravo, DH Fisher.

This book is a massive, sweeping undertaking in the best tradition of historical writing, pulling together events, personalities, the philosophical zeitgeist of the time, and the cultural impact viewed from our times. David Hackett-Fisher portrays Champlain as unique among the explorers/colonists of North America in taking an open, humanistic, cooperative and curious view of the Native American tribes he interacted with. He sought alliances for mutual benefit, not conquest. He viewed the 'Indians' as fully his equal in competence, intelligence, ability to adapt to the environment, and personal power and dignity. He kept his word, honored his agreements, and was respected in Indian oral traditions hundreds of years later.

Hackett-Fisher gives a glimpse of what might have developed had Champlain explored further south, and planted a colony at NY prior to the Dutch--might this continent have developed in a very different way?

In following Champlain's life, Hackett-Fisher writes an easy to read and compelling narrative. It is a pleasure to read. The book is a lavish work. There are illustrations and maps galore. The places mentioned in the text are actually present on the maps, a pet peeve of mine. There are illustrations of historical artifacts such as an Iroquois war club, and fascinating asides, such as this club was often used for a final strike to put a dying warrior out of their misery--thus the invention of the phrase coup-de-grace.

This story of the founder of New France portrays a man far ahead of his times, and with attitudes towards 'the other' that we would still do well to emulate. Champlain's life and Hackett Fisher's book illustrate history as compelling moral story with lessons for our time. A teriffic book.

One other less happy thought from this writer's point of view. It seems that now, when one writes a serious work of history, one writes the book, and then has to write almost an entire additional book defending why you wrote the original book the way you did. The 'historiography' section of this book is virtually 250 pages in length itself, with analysis of preceding historical viewpoints, bows to their contributions etc. For this non-professional historian reader, this was too much. Whatever happened to writing one's book, giving a note to sources, and publishing journal articles about how you arrived at your interpretations? This reader found the Appendixes, from A through N, unnecessarily detailed and tedious.