L Ann E Avec Le Sacr Coeur

Tu sais, mon vieux Jean-Pierre is inspired by the work of archaeologist Jean-Pierre Chrestien (1949–2008), who worked hand-in-glove with a generation of researchers in helping to unearth unexpected and always interesting aspects of New France. Contributions focus first upon the door to New France in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland and Acadia. A second set of essays move further up the St. Lawrence and into the heartland of the continent. The final section examines aspects of Canadian culture: popular art, religion and communication. The essays share a curiosity for material culture, a careful regard for detail and nuance that forms the grain of New France studies, and sensitivity to the overall context that is part and parcel of how history proceeds on the local or regional scale. Happily we can now dispense with old-fashioned and facile generalizations about the allegedly absent bourgeoisie, the purportedly deficient commercial ethic of the habitants and the so-called underlying military character of the colony and get down the business of understanding real people and their possessions in context.

Missionnaires au quotidien à Tahiti immerses us in the everyday life of Catholic missionaries sent out to the Tahitian islands in the period 1834 to 1914. Using the correspondence of the 167 members of the order of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, an attempt is made to define the social and geographic origins of the Picpucian people. Priests and friars are followed in their education, from the apostolic school to the first Pacific vicariates. Right from the first days of established contact, we see the management of the day-to-day affairs of these eternal travellers, by turns vicars and planters, schoolmasters and builders. Within the framework of a very hierarchical ecclesiastical structure, we watch the elaboration of a social project that quickly extends beyond the bounds of a narrow theocracy. It is on this societal model that a large part of Polynesia rests today.