Reflections on New france, part 6: The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement and Bishop Laval

If Montreal’s founders – the lord Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve and nun Jeanne Mance – had been given a vision of a Montreal gay pride parade in the future, they might have packed their bags and left the island to the Iroquois who also claimed it.
Maisonneuve and Jeanne-Mance are always referred to as “pious” [...]

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Reflections on New France, Part 5: Sex in the Colony

“To make a law and not enforce it, is to authorize the thing you would forbid” – Cardinal Richelieu.
When Cardinal Richelieu decided that only Catholics could be a part of his new colony, it may have lead some to the mistaken impression that a utopia of good Catholics was being founded. In some ways, the [...]

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Reflections on New France, Part 4: The Jesuits and France’s Clergy

During his exile in England, the legend goes, the great Jesuit-trained French writer and philosopher Voltaire went to dinner at the home of the English writer Alexander Pope. Pope’s mother noticed Voltaire was squirming in his chair. She asked if there was something wrong.
Voltaire answered, “ I was buggered so often in my youth by [...]

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A Much-Needed Clean-Up

I had go back and re-write a couple of articles, particularly the story of the drummer and the story of Nicholas Daussy, Seigneur de Saint-Michel.
In the case of the drummer, it was because I’d found additional information in my researches. With Daussy, the problem was more troubling — the historians whose work I’d [...]

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Reflections on New France, Part 3: France’s Nobles

To say that life for nobles in France was different than life for commoners would be an enormous understatement, but nothing illustrates this better than the difference in how the law treated each class. The laws surrounding homosexuality are a perfect example of the quite conscious double standard built into the law.
At the top [...]

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