As its title suggests, this monograph, based on the author's 2011 Yale PhD dissertation, argues that the Jesuit missionaries who served in New France from 1632 until the demise in 1800 of the last priest of the Society, Jean-Joseph Casot, in a Quebec that was by then a British colony were, above all else, on a mission civilatrice to make its indigenous inhabitants French Catholics. The pre-eminent commitment of the missionaries to empire rather than to penitential suffering and martyrdom in return for saving the souls of the ‘poor miserable savages’ of New France has been disguised, according to McShea, by an anachronistic reading of the main sources, the annual letters or Relations which were published in Paris from 1632 to 1673 and of material not only in French but also in Latin and Italian from the period 1601–1791 which was translated into English and collected by Reuben Gold Thwaites and printed in seventy-three volumes as Jesuit relations and allied documents (1896–1901). Instead of focusing on the deeds of heroic derring-do of the likes of such martyrs as Jean de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, we need to pay attention, McShea argues, to more prosaic figures such as the tireless propagandist Paul Le Jeune (1591–1664), who, after serving his time as mission superior in Quebec, returned to France, where he looked after the financial interests and other administrative chores relating to the running of the mission in Paris for several decades. Central to Le Jeune's labours, first as active missionary and then as lobbyist and fund-raiser for the mission amongst the metropolitan elite of Paris, was his authorship (and later editorship) of the annual Relations, which he began composing from 1632. These reports were printed for the next forty-one years by the city's leading printer, Sébastian Cramoisy, who was known in his day as ‘the King of the Rue Saint-Jacques’, and his heirs. Cramoisy was very well placed to assist the Jesuits in their attempt to recruit the financial support of Paris's elite, since he enjoyed the confidence of Cardinal Richelieu, whose niece, the duchess of Aiguillon, was an important early patron of the Jesuit missions to New France. The year after the printing of the first Jesuit Relation, Cramoisy became an imprimeur du roy and in 1640 he was appointed director of operations of the new Imprimerie Royale at the Louvre (a forerunner of the Bibliothèque nationale de France). Cramoisy's significance for the Society of Jesus and its mission in New France was such that between 1628 and 1666 at least forty-seven letters were sent from the Jesuit father-general to the printer. Central to Le Jeune's rhetoric was his presentation of the indigenous peoples of New France as being not only in need of spiritual succour but also of French civilité (civility) and honnesteté (social graces) to bring physical relief, for example, from a dreadful diet that was compared by the Jesuit to that shared by the indigent French peasants with respect to whose life-style the Parisian metropolitan elite readers of the Relations prided themselves on their superiority. Here the long-established trope of ‘the Other Indies’, to refer to those ignorant souls from the backwoods of the Old World who were in essentials no different from the unconverted peoples of the New, was being given a new twist. So it can be no surprise to discover that Jogues, martyred by the Iroquois in 1646, was also author in the year of his death of a report for colonial officials, the Novum Belgium, which can best be described as a prospectus for potential investors concerning the commercial potential of the mouth of the Hudson River (now Manhatten) as a port and fort. When he died Jogues was effectively working as representative of the governor of New France with the Mohawks. Almost a century later, the Jesuit missionary Sébastian Râle met a similarly violent death – in a hail of musket shot – at the hands of English militia at the so-called Battle of Norridgewock in 1724. There had even been a bounty of £100 placed on the Jesuit's head because Râle was seen as having played a key role in mobilising the Abenakis and other indigenous allies of the French to harass Anglo-American settlers in the borderlands of Maine and Nova Scotia. Although, at the time, in the pages of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, the eighteenth-century successor to the Relations (which was however more focused on missionary heroics in China and SE Asia), Pierre La Chasse, the Jesuit superior at Quebec, cast Râle's violent end very much in religious terms: he died ‘at the foot of a large cross that he had erected in the midst of the village’. Here La Chasse was able to draw on the well-established idea of crusade and holy war, which Le Jeune had refurbished for the benefit of the young Louis xiv in his Relation of 1662, in which the Jesuit addresssed the king directly:

Thanks to McShea we can now decode such rhetoric and view it as part of a carefully curated representation of a missionary endeavour which was, in actual fact, as much about empire as salvation. This leads her to claim in her conclusion that: ‘modern, post-revolutionary French imperialism, with its self-justificatory mission civilisatrice, has deep roots in post-Tridentine missionary Catholicism’ (p. 256). Given the scrupulously detailed attention paid by the author throughout her text in chronicling the role played by the Jesuits in facilitating and brokering alliances of the French colonists with indigenous tribes, it is disappointing that amongst the few black and white illustrations there is not a single modern map to assist the reader. I was also surprised to find no reference to Catherine Ballériaux's important comparative history of French, Spanish and English missions to native peoples of the Americas: Missionary strategies in the New World, 1610–90: an intellectual history (London 2016). Finally, the author's exclusive French focus can mean that when she ventures further afield, her grasp is not so sure. Louis xiv's clash with Pope Alexander vii in 1662 was caused not by the latter's ‘ordering the Swiss Guard to fire upon Louis's Corsican guardsmen’ (p. 196). Rather, it had been provoked by perceived insults being made against one of the pope's Corsican mercenaries by a member of the French ambassador's 200-strong armed guard. In response, the Corsican's comrades from their barracks nearby not only surrounded the French embassy and opened fire on its occupants, but also attacked the carriage of the ambassador's wife, the duchesse de Créqui, who was returning from church, killing one of her pages. All this would have been easily audible from the Jesuit mother church of il Gesù which was but 500 yards from the Palazzo Farnese, location of the French embassy. Violence and bloodshed remained an endemic problem not only in the woodlands of New France.