Montréal in Nouvelle France

I recently finished Robert Rumilly’s Histoire de Montréal, Tome I (of VI). Rumilly himself was a reactionary Catholic born in France who expatriated to Canada in the early 20^th century and, in his own words, “did not come to New France, but to another France that resembled France before 1899.” If you can imagine a Frenchman who didn’t think the Belle Époque was quite so belle, that would be Robert Rumilly.

Should We Fire the Police?

           If you lived in England in Middle Ages, you probably lived in one of two places: a shire or a bailey.  A shire is a small village or town, simple enough.

The Cicottes Invent Real Estate Investment

When the first Cicottes in New France were settling the frontier, the French Empire was trying unsuccessfully to build a feudal society there modeled after the one in the Old World.  The attempt failed for a number of reasons, but at least two have to do with land ownership: First, the colonization of America had an inflationary impact on the value of land, the primary asset of the wealthy and powerful in Europe.

The Tragedy of the Commons (Côte-des-Argoulets Part IV)

By 1680,[i][ii] fifteen years after seven colonists of Ville-Marie contracted with the crown and with each other to settle on the St. Peter River, Jean Chicot had died and bequeathed his land along the Côte-des-Argoulets to his widow Marguerite and their only son, Jean-Baptiste. Marguerite remarried a man much closer her age, Nicholas Boyer, with whom she would have several more children.  Others of the original inhabitants of Verdun had also died, leaving their descendants fertile land and a more peaceful island; Ville Marie had gone from a few dozen citizens to a few hundred, and was growing.  Some of the Argoulets were still around though, and one of them was Étienne Campeau.  He had taken the charge to develop his land very seriously, perhaps too seriously, eventually landing himself in a legal dispute with the other settler of Ville-Marie.

It's O.K. Cicottes, You're Still #7 in My Book (Côte-des-Argoulets Part III)

I've been lying about the Cicotte family for a while now,

The Pharisees Would have Loved the Bill of Rights...

...Or Why I don't Support the Ordain Women Movement.

I. Why Did the Pharisees Care More About Boiling an Egg on Sunday than Starving the Poor?

It Takes a Village to Lose a Child

Outside a typical suburban high school in Ohio sits a concrete bench with my name carved in it, alongside the names of my brother Matthias and sister Regan.  The school engraved our names in memorial of the countless hours we spent sitting on that cold seat, waiting for our parents to remember to pick us up from school.  You haven't experienced calculus until you've tried to integrate trigonometric functions by the dim glow of parking lot security lights.

As it turns out, forgetting one's children is a family tradition.