René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, born 1643 in Rouen, France, God rest his weary bones, wherever they are, may have found solace in the words of his countryman and near contemporary Michel Eyquem de Montaigne: “There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.” This comes from Montaigne’s Of Cannibals, a subject on which La Salle could have written his own firsthand treatise had he not been so preoccupied with vainly tramping across the New World and been unfortunately murdered in the process.

Toronto Star literary critic Philip Marchand is not lying when he writes that La Salle is “the greatest of French explorers,” though the praise seems a tad backhanded. Other than Cartier and Champlain, after all, who are the other ones? But forget that. More pertinent is La Salle’s fate as the greatest explorer few people have ever heard of. The man claimed almost the whole of North America for France – so where is he now? But that’s history, I suppose. To the winner go the spoils; to the loser, anonymity.

Rather than present a straightforward, bone-dry history (which, for all its good intentions, would keep poor La Salle in obscurity), Ghost Empire does a nice dance with genre, combining history, travelogue, memoir, and even investigative journalism (Marchand infiltrates a historical re-enactment, among other things) into a cohesive book that feels on the short side, even at 440 pages.

Marchand follows La Salle’s route across the continent, through Montreal, Kingston, Toronto, Detroit, Green Bay, and eventually Memphis and New Orleans, overland of course. He makes clear how much the myth of La Salle – remembered in a plaque here and statuette there (in one place as “a martyr to the advancement of Texas,” which won’t make much sense any way you read it) – is now almost wholly forgotten. Which is fascinating because, victory or no, La Salle’s are impressive accomplishments to forget.

In the 17th century, the continent rife with warring native tribes and horrible weather, La Salle travelled the St. Lawrence, along the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, and eventually a little ways into Texas, claiming all of it for France in 1682. He died at the hands of his own men, his legacy erased a brief 80 years later when the Treaty of Paris gave everything to the English.

Those are some sad facts. But facts aren’t the point (when are they, really?). One of the several worthwhile points of Ghost Empire is its comparison of histories: academic histories, official histories, amateur histories, counter-histories, imagined histories. What if Louis XIV had made good on La Salle’s claim? What if the French had won? Marchand writes: “A few different turnings of history and you, reader, would be reading this book in French and speaking to your children in French. The United States would not exist.” Say what you will, it’s a nice thought.

The reality is somewhat more messy. The coureurs de bois, natives, Jesuits, and their coteries did not always get along so famously. Many of them, like La Salle, met difficult ends. There are some thoroughly gruesome tortures, maimings, burnings, hangings, and, yes, eatings delightfully nestled into the narrative.

A Jesuit priest, courtesy of his Iroquois captors, gets his eyes gouged out and replaced with hot coals, for instance, before being killed with a hatchet. True story. It seems that brutal torture before an unceremonious death was a genuine hazard for the French of the period. For the natives, Marchand deadpans, such torture “was a very interesting experiment.”

Readers will come to expect that kind of statement – wry, verging on the morbid – in Ghost Empire. Marchand handles the gore quite well, the lags in La Salle’s plot even better, with a clear, frank voice and expert use of understatement, so refreshing in such an earnest discipline as history. And then there are the quips, those digestible, irresistible turns of phrase that show a writer and thinker at play: “The real secret history of humanity, accounting for everything from Columbus’s voyages to the first production of Hamlet, is the history of fundraising.” Or: “The road to frivolity is paved with tasty gumbos.”

Far from frivolous, Ghost Empire is a chronicle of the French legacy sprawled across this continent, imaginary or real, a chronicle of exploration and loss. Did La Salle succeed in anything? In the New World the French, like the natives, are often seen as historical dead ends, Marchand says, “but as dead ends they are not all that dead.” They survive as ghosts in the land, and in our own pasts, like a whole world that exists next to this one, the way things could have turned out, if only.

Perhaps all of this is no consolation to poor old La Salle, but it should be. Never mind the historians – his defeats are
triumphant.