ABSTRACT
The epic of the rise and fall of New France has excited the interest of historians for over two centuries. It has provided French Canadians with a heroic heritage that has at once served as their refuge and defence, and has supplied such notable North American historians as Francis Parkman, Reuben G. Thwaitcs, and George M. Wrong with the theme for their most important works. The great cardinal, intent upon strengthening France’s precarious position in the New World, created in 1627 the Company of the Hundred Associates for the Colonization of North America. Anglo-American historians, including Gipson, have limned France as an absolute state, a Hobbesian leviathan, ready to act with all the vigor of a twentieth-century totalitarian regime. Marcel Trudel, a contemporary of Fregault’s and Professor of the History of Canada at the University of Laval, has also written extensively on the theme of French-Canadian survival during the period of conquest.
