Recollecting French America: A Personal Chronology

Work in progress.

In different registers and tones, this work tries to recollect and then re-inscribe into our collective memory some of the most important places and traces of a people who once formed the heart of a New World in North America: the French, from their arrival in the sixteenth century to the eventual diaspora and cultural rebirth of many of them throughout different parts of the continent. In exploring this body of words, readers will often find no more than a simple story of a complex past, a story of lost heritages, adventures and deeds. At other times, they may discern the shape of a personal reflection on the particulars of contemporary history and culture in their relation to the past or future. At still other times, this essay will resemble its author, his life and his humors, not because of any presumed human exemplarity à la Saint Augustine. Montaigne or Rousseau, but because of a number of coincidences accidentally linking his life to a vast French Empire he wishes to recall, anew.