In Louis XIV’s New France, colonial authorities attempted to reproduce French regal authority in novel ways, often by performing typical metropolitan political rituals. When these practices were transposed into the St Lawrence Valley settlements, where a small French population lived alongside a substantial Indigenous presence, they took on new meanings.

The colony of Canada replicated many features of the developing French absolutist state. Yet while the king likely knew more about his colony than he did about most parts of metropolitan France, this transatlantic setting imposed new constraints on absolutist authority, from the challenges of distance to an Indigenous population that largely lived outside European norms. Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada examines royal power as it was represented in ritual (ceremonial entrances, Te Deums, processions), in rhetoric (political disputes over cabals and factions), and in objects (portraits, royal busts, currency, buildings, maps, and censuses). Colin Coates describes the successes and failures the French authorities experienced in exporting their political practices. He reveals how those authorities’ understandings of Indigenous political culture shaped ideas of the proper relation between rulers and the ruled.

This book traces the establishment of a colonial political culture that continued to shape the lives of the French in Canada long after the Sun King’s death in 1715.

COLIN M. COATES teaches environmental history and Canadian studies at York University. He is past president of the Canadian Studies Network-Réseau d’études canadiennes and was a member of the executive of NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History and Environment.

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“Coates’s new book asks an important and underexamined question: how did the French monarchy during the reign of Louis XIV mobilize symbolic practices and discursive strategies to assert its legitimacy in its overseas settler colony in Canada? This wide-ranging study examines the ways in which political rituals, festivals, art, information-gathering, and cartography served to create a French political community that spanned the Atlantic.” Paul Cohen, University of Toronto