The Hero and the Historians : Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier »

Alan Gordon is an attorney with the Legal Aid Society and the author of seven books featuring the jester, including The Moneylender of Toulouse. He lives in Queens, New York.

Historians have long engaged in passionate debate about collective memory and the building of national identities. Alan Gordon focuses on one national hero - Jacques Cartier - to explore how notions about the past have been created, passed on through the generations, and used to present particular ideas about the world in English- and French-speaking Canada. He reveals that the cult of celebrity surrounding Cartier by the mid-nineteenth century reflected a particular understanding of history, one which accompanied the arrival of modernity in North America. This new sensibility shaped the political and cultural currents of nation building in Canada. Cartier was a point of contact between English and French Canadian nationalism, but the nature of that contact had profound limitations.

1 The sixteenth-century world and Jacques Cartier 10

2 Forgetting and remembering 29

3 The invention of a hero 50

4 Cartiermania 72

5 Common sense 99

6 The many meanings of Jacques Cartier 128

7 Decline and dispersal 157

8 Failure and forgetting 180

Notes 190

Bibliography 216

Index 233