Some dailies allow their columnists the freedom to write silly things. An example is the recent attempt by Ross Douthat to display some of his erudition and acute historical insight.
He poses the question: What if France had won the Seven Years’ War? He answers it by proposing a Panglossian result.
He may be forgiven, perhaps, for suggesting that the war – known to most people as the first, first world war – was a singularly Anglo-French affair fought chiefly in North America. Its world-historical significance comes, he writes, from the fact that ‘the French and Indian War determined whether th[e] continent-spanning America would come into being at all’.
He may also be forgiven for indulging in a bit of woke-infused Francophilia:
The French empire in North America represented an unusual model of European colonization: The combination of the smaller, scattered population, the harsher climate and the distinctive vision of figures like Samuel de Champlain and the French Jesuits all contributed to a friendlier relationship with Native American populations than obtained in the English colonies.
‘Friendlier’ indeed. As anyone who has read Parkman will know, the French and the Indians partook in so much friendly exchange, after a while one could barely tell them apart!
But Mr Douthat may not be forgiven for proposing ‘an alternative timeline, a history in which New France endures and a more, well, “French and Indian” civilization takes shape in the Great Lakes region’ … where ‘the power of the church and the Catholic ancien régime in New France, relative to the greater egalitarianism, democracy and secular ambition in the English colonies … helped foster a more humane relationship between the French colonizers and the Native American population’.
Please tell that to the angry people now in Canada burning churches following the discovery of mass graves filled with their kin. Please tell that to some of the Indian nations that had once populated upper and lower Louisiana. Please tell that to the ghost of the disgraced Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (otherwise known to some people as Napoleon III), who saw fit to invade Mexico in order to create a truly ‘Latin’ America spanning the entire hemisphere. ‘Humane relationship’ is not the term that comes to mind to describe this history.
But no, Douthat instead warns against ‘a kind of cynicism about almost every aspect of the past, where the reader of history is encouraged to basically root for nobody, and the emphasis is always on the self-interest lying underneath every expression of idealism’. He prefers to see the best in any scenario, so that one may ‘cultivate the appreciation of the past that seems essential to sustaining historical memory’.
A tender thought to ponder in our age of amnesia.