The Marquis de Montcalm, Defender of Quebec
In the struggle for the New World, writes Arnold Whitridge, France had no more gallant soldier.
It is not often that public opinion in any nation sides with the intellectuals; but Voltaire was certainly speaking for the French nation at large when he declared, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, that France could live happily without Quebec.
Along with his fellow Encyclopedists, the most brilliant men in France, Voltaire had no use for colonies. ‘An empire is like a tree,’ said Montesquieu, ‘if the branches spread too far, they drain the sap from the trunk. Men should stay where they are; transplanted to another climate their health will suffer.’
Canada was the bête noire of the Encyclopedists. Among themselves, these learned men might disagree on every other subject; but on the subject of Canada they thought as one. Why should France become involved in a ruinous war overseas just because a few restless merchants in Normandy had hoped to make money over the fur trade?
Unfortunately, France was already involved in a ruinous war that had spread all over the world, a war in which, as Macaulay reminds us, ‘black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America’.
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