Agricultural and horticultural authors in the sixteenth century had laid claims that these sorts of labors were particularly virtuous, translating an act that could be conceptualized as one of Adam’s punishment into a site where God could be encountered and where His designs could be made legible, and where one could expect rewards of pleasure and beauty.23 These were places, therefore, of both pleasure and toil, and accounts of these landscapes demonstrated the possibility of creating the “third nature”—a skillful display of the subtle manipulation of natural agencies—that renaissance and early modern gardens championed.24
In this way, colonial narratives framed French colonialism less as imposition than as redemption and extended a project that had thus far targeted the environments of rural France for improvement into the Atlantic world.25 Imagining effective husbandry as an encounter that cultivated farmer and farmed alike, it encouraged both confidence in the ability of French colonists to weather the influence of New World environments and a belief that civilization would allow for the expression of latent identities—a possible Frenchness—in both place and peoples. It offered French colonists and colonial promoters an image of themselves and their project that differed substantially from the bloody conquests of New Spain and Peru and that allowed them to imagine sovereignty over New World possessions and control over American peoples as recompense in a consensual and mutually beneficial exchange of lands, goods, and cultures.26 For the cultivator could not be a conquistador, and the manifestation of his (for this figure was invariably male) will was imagined as operating far more subtly, offering a glimpse at an understanding of the importance of the agency of both the cultivator and the cultivated to the success of colonization.27
Narratives of cultivation in New France translated French practices of mesnagement, or stewardship, flourishing in France across the Atlantic and into American soils.28 In France, the reclaiming and improvement of agricultural and horticultural lands by French cultural and political elite was part of a broader strategy of political centralization that produced a robust visual and material culture of royal authority in early modern France that drew upon the metaphor of a benevolent patriarch who enriched both his own holdings and his subjects.29 These produced frequently formal landscapes that were sites of political practice where new visual and practical forms of power were articulated and experimented.30 Texts on gardening and estate management had begun to proliferate in France after the middle of the sixteenth century following military adventures in Italy, both introducing classical authorities on the subject and developing a French aesthetic and landscape theory.31 During this period, gardeners and landscape designers hired from Italy produced gardens such as Fontainebleau and invented the French mannerist style.32 The French formal garden was born in the seventeenth century in gardens such as the Tuileries and the Luxembourg palace through royal support and horticultural innovation that emphasized the aesthetic beauty of purposeful design and utility.33
In France and England, authors were reengaging the georgic tradition of Virgil and other classical authors that valorized the active management of estates by their noble owners.34 The horticultural theory that emerged in late sixteenth-century France celebrated the empirical roots of botanical knowledge acquired through the virtuous labor that expanded patriarchal authority in French rural landscapes. In the 1600 Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs of Olivier de Serres, a leading horticultural theorist patronized by Henri IV, we can see how the practice of mesnagement brought the disparate concerns of epistemology, agricultural improvement, and authority into a productive relationship. Serres proposed understanding agriculture as a science that observed and adapted to local environmental conditions.35 It was a “science more useful than difficult, provided that it was understood by its principle, applied with reason, led by experience and practiced with diligence.”36 Serres had escaped the ravages of France’s wars of religion on his estate and had there learned practices for effective estate management that he felt were a moral obligation ordained by God. “For as much as God wants us to content ourselves with the places that he has given us,” he wrote, “it is reasonable to take them from his hand as they are and serve him the best as possible trying to remedy their defaults through artifice and diligence.”37 What he developed at his estate could be applied to the state, with the king conceptualized as a bon ménager of the kingdom. These writings were particularly resonant in a France still feeling the effects of economic and cultural disruption that had characterized much of the sixteenth century.38 Particularly relevant to the ambitions and concerns of Henri IV, Serres drew upon classical texts to argue that the management of people and the management of place were twinned and inseparable.39
Serres’s calls for a nation of nobles who understood their role as effective managers of their estates, influenced heavily by readings of classical authorities such as Virgil, mapped neatly onto a larger seventeenth-century debate about the relationship between France and its Roman past. Sixteenth-century French humanists had claimed the Gauls as their colonized ancestors to chart a new intellectual course distinct from an inherited Roman past.40 French theorizations of empire were heavily inspired by a Roman model (as all European nations were, to some extent).41 As French intellectuals debated their cultural debt to Rome, an agricultural discourse enabled them to refigure differences between Roman and French culture (otherwise often understood to be deficiencies in the French) into an evolutionary model that figured cultivation as a principal civilizing act.42 Even if colonialism could occupy an ambiguous place within the thought of Serres and his adherents—the Duc de Sully, for example, saw colonialism as a drain on French population and an overextension that defeated the effective management of French territories—in stepping into the role of their former Roman colonizers, colonial promoters in France argued that their nation would itself be bettered.43 Colonialism would work alongside the cultivation of French arts and sciences to produce a nation that surpassed its classical counterparts.44
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Lescarbot’s Histoire described a particularly momentous presentation of American flora to the French court that had taken place in 1607. This had been a crucial moment only three years after the first colony in Acadia had been founded and only two years after Port Royal had been established in 1605. The colonists—Lescarbot among them—had just recently learned that their monopoly on the fur trade that had been granted to their benefactor and leader, the Sieur de Monts, had been revoked in the face of opposition from Atlantic merchants in France.45 In August of that year, the colonists at Port Royal had been forced to return to a king and a court that seemed uncertain about how or even whether to support colonization in North America. It was Jean de Poutrincourt, a close friend of de Monts and lieutenant governor of his colony in Acadia, who “presented to the King the fruits of the land from which they came” when they arrived in Paris. Alongside geese and other fauna from North America, it was “the grain, wheat, rye, barley, & oats, as the most precious things that one could bring back from any country,” that he delivered to king and court.46
In the context of disputes over the colony’s direction, experiences of cultivation were forwarded as a symbol of the promise of the colony and proof of the moral authority of its founders and leaders. There was nothing “curious” about the wheat, rye, barley, and oats that Poutrincourt brought back from Acadia.47 These were not rare plants valuable to collectors, nor were they of any medicinal benefit beyond the calories that they could provide. These were among the humblest plants that could be brought back from New France, but in this Lescarbot suggested that Poutrincourt had echoed the Romans, who had likewise translated such a harvest into symbols of triumph in their own newly claimed regions, dating back to the foundations of Rome itself.48 He was, Lescarbot would reflect, akin to the “good father Noah, who after having made the most necessary agriculture in the sowing of wheat, put himself to planting the vine.”49