Ghost Empire How the French Almost Conquered North America

Subjects:

• History » American History -- Colonial Era

Related Web Pages:

• Visit the author's website.

Reviews:

• Marchand's storytelling does remind readers that the footprints of La Salle and other French visitors and residents have all but vanished from what was once the French empire in North America. Recommended. Undergraduate and general collections.
  —Choice January 2008
• Ghost Empire: How The French Almost Conquered North America is an outstanding survey which tells of explorer LaSalle, murdered by his own men but a key figure in claiming land for France in 1682. Had history not gone differently, a French-speaking empire might have extended a thousand miles beyond Quebec, Catholic in religion and strong in Native rights issues. In presenting the story of LaSalle's achievements and speculating on what could have been, an exciting alternative history is created which weaves past and present in a powerful account of conquest, culture and change. A top pick for both college-level American history collections and any general-interest public library strong in lively, thought-provoking American history surveys.
  —The Bookwatch September 2007
• Marchand describes the 17th-century explorations of North America by Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, combined with his own travels tracing after the figure that, had he not been murdered by his own men in Texas in 1678, could have given birth to a French empire across North America. The figures encountered by La Salle in the 17th century and the figures encountered along La Salle's path some 300 years later by Marchand are used to explore how French America could have looked, had it come to pass.
  —Reference & Research Book News May 2007
• French North America, a country that might have been but never materialized, inspired Marchand to take to the road and seek its traces. With his itinerary guided by the explorations of La Salle in the 1680s, Marchand combines various moods of writing in an original way. His structure is a straight-up travelogue to a dozen-plus sites of French colonial forts and settlements, starting in Texas, where La Salle came to grief in 1687, reverting to Montreal, and continuing through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River....[M]archand fits his commiseration with amateur historians and reenactors between layers of reflection on habitant culture, its Catholicism and its relations with Indians. Further deepening the philosophical mood are Marchand's ruminations on his Catholic faith and his reconnection with his French Canadian ancestry. If it's possible for people to internalize their history, then here is an inveigling and thoughtful example from the book critic of the Toronto Star.
  —Booklist April 1, 2007

• Endorsement From John Lukacs
  Professor of History (retired) Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia
  Author of Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred: Philip Marchand's achievement amounts to historical literature of a very high order. In its way, it is an example, or even a forerunner, of a new genre: a compound of historical reconstruction and of its writers emphatic participation in his subject. The result is masterful and authentic. The sense of what happened and what that meant (and still means) is more than informative; it breathes through the climate of Marchand's fineness of learning and writing.
• Endorsement From David Plante
  Professor of Creative Writing, Columbia University
  Author of The Family, Difficult Women, and American Ghosts: North America has its forgotten histories, and most prominent among them is of the French and their close relations with the natives of the continent. Philip Marchand's Ghost Empire makes the ghosts of that history vivid, not only in terms of the haunting past, but in terms of the haunted descendants. A French North America was a world that might have been, a world fascinating for what it promised and what, by its defeat, was lost. Ghost Empire is a revelation.

PDF Catalogs:

Greenwood History Spring 2008.pdf