Conspiracy, cock-up and colonialism

I've spent a little time over the past few months chasing the peculiar story of Antarctic France. I admit the name appeals, conjuring up as it does an image of penguins in berets. But this was the shortlived (1555-60) French colony on the site of the modern city of Rio de Janeiro, whose name simply reflected the fact that it was south of the Equator.

This is apparently what the surviving fortifications looked like before they were destroyed during a naval revolt in 1898:



It first came to my attention because this was, as far as anyone can tell, the site of the first Protestant worship held, and the first Protestant sermons preached, in the New World. The colonists included a small group of French Calvinists, including two ministers sent from Calvin's Geneva. But it ended badly, with a spectacular falling-out between them and the colony's governor, the sieur de Villegagnon. Three of the Calvinists were executed (that is, thrown off cliffs into the sea with their hands tied behind their backs) and Villegagnon became a vigorous Catholic partisan during the French religious wars. In return, Protestant historiography has made his name mud, as a turncoat who had promised refuge to persecuted reformers and then betrayed them.

That story never made sense to me, and now I discover a much more satisfying account, in a nearly 20-year-old essay by Silvia Shannon.* She argues that Villegagnon knew some fashionable, moderate religious reformers of a bohemian and literary kind, and that he may also have met John Calvin when he was a young lawyer with as-yet-unformed religious views. And then he found himself in charge of this colony peopled mostly by convicts and fortune-hunters, who did not share his vision of a community of honest labour and chastity. So he invited Calvin's friends in Geneva to send him a couple of preachers, who could knock some virtue into the rest.

Trouble was, proper Calvinist ministers were neither moderate nor bohemian. They came intending to forge Antarctic France into a Geneva in the New World, and started winning converts. Villegagnon simply didn't realise what he was getting into. When they challenged his authority, he stopped them from preaching; when they responded by calling a strike, he threw them out; when some of them came back, he killed those who refused to recant.

So everyone felt hard done by. The Calvinists felt that Villegagnon had masqueraded as their friend and then turned on them. Villegagnon felt that the Calvinists had promised virtue and order, but delivered discord, sedition and blasphemy.

This rings very true to me: a classic case of religious opponents simply living in different worlds, and becoming so completely unable to hear one another that the only language left in which they could communicate was violence. When both sides accuse the other of conspiracy ... it's probably a cock-up instead.

*Silvia Shannon, ‘Villegagnon, Polyphemus, and Cain of America: Religion and Polemics in the French New World’ in Michael Wolfe (ed.), Changing Identities in Early Modern France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 325-344.