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Fertility in France and New France: The Distinguishing Characteristics of Canadian Behavior in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Yves Landry
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Extract

Like american historians of the colonial period, historians of New France did not neglect, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, the problem of differentiation between the inhabitants of the New World and the metropolitans from whom they descended. It is thought that with the decline in French immigration after 1675 and the rapid Canadianization of the population, the relative isolation of the colony favored the creation of a particular type of French people, whose originality was reflected in such domains as physique, character, language, military strategy, and so forth. Was demographic behavior one of these particularities, or even oppositions, as the French officer de Bougainville noted in 1756: “It seems that we are a different nation, even an enemy” (Filteau 1978 [1937]: 252)? More specifically, how did reproductive behavior adapt to the living conditions prevalent in the St. Lawrence valley during the first century of European settlement?

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Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 577 - 592
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1993 

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