| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter Moogk. La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada—A Cultural History. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 2000. Pp. xix, 340. $25.95.

This is not cultural history of the postmodern or modern kind. Neither a study of discourse nor of mentalité, it is rather a meditation upon what nineteenth-century historians still unashamedly labeled "national character." As such, it is best understood as a contribution to Canada's long-running and anguished debate about the "two solitudes," the disparate worlds of French and English Canadians. 1

Peter Moogk traces the "distinctive character" (p. xiii) of French Canadians primarily to the legacy of New France, defined—in contrast to that of the British colonies—as "compassionate authoritarianism" (p. 86), ideological conformity, dogmatic thinking stemming from a civil law tradition, and social conservatism. This emphasis on the fundamental difference between French and British colonization, while a staple of the historiography since Francis Parkman, goes against the more recent trend toward Atlantic history and adds to the old-fashioned flavor of the book. In the 1950s and 1960s, similar arguments about the French propensity for rigid, abstract thinking and incapacity for self-organization and lobbying were used to explain France's economic backwardness—until France ceased to be economically backward. Should Canada ever succeed in resolving its perpetual constitutional crisis, this book, too, may lose some of its raison d'être. Yet there is much of value to be found here. As a succinct compendium of much recent scholarship, it will prove useful to anyone with an interest in early Canadian history. . . .

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