CANADA: Hero Debunked

As every Canadian schoolboy knows, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac was a celebrated hero of Canada’s colonial era. Schoolbooks honor him as one of New France’s greatest governors, a valorous Indian fighter and a strong-willed defender of Quebec against the marauding British colonists from the south. Counties in Ontario and Quebec, a street in Montreal and even towns in far-off Minnesota, Kansas and Missouri bear his name. Frontenac’s memory was also perpetuated in Quebec’s famed Château Frontenac, by a statue in Quebec City and, until a recent brewery merger, as the brand name of a potent Canadian beer.

In Winnipeg last week, William John Eccles, a University of Manitoba history lecturer, said flatly that history has been giving Frontenac far more than his due. Eccles spent most of the past three years poring over musty records in the Ottawa archives and in Paris. Eccles’ research, presented in a paper to the Canadian Historical Association, portrays Frontenac as a wastrel, a bungler and a timid commander whose 19-year governorship almost ruined the Quebec colony.

About the only heroic thing that Eccles found on Frontenac’s record was the size of the count’s debts. At 44, Frontenac owed $440,000. He had tried to ease the burden by marrying the daughter of a wealthy advocate, but that scheme failed when the daughter was disinherited. Finally, to escape his creditors and unloved wife, he wangled a royal appointment as governor of New France in 1672.

A hotheaded, overbearing man, Frontenac quarreled constantly with other colonial officials, not only over administrative affairs but also to get more than his share of the graft from the rich fur trade. He was far less pugnacious with the Indians. Eccles claims that in the critical year of 1681 Frontenac was afraid to meet the Iroquois ; he sat in his Quebec château and let the colony’s outer defenses run down. “[Because of] his weakness and irresoluteness in the face of danger,” Eccles says, “no river was safe any more, every portage was a potential ambush.”

Will school history books now be rewritten to conform with Eccles’ research? Probably not. Said Historian J. W. Chafe, author of the Manitoba high-school text: “It’s going to be tough to write textbooks if every character in history is going to be debunked.”