Défrichement

Défrichement, the clearing of forest for settlement and use, is both a physical practice and a governing idea in the novel. It begins with René Sel cutting trees under Monsieur Trépagny’s command and grows into a transgenerational program of farms, timber commerce, and overseas extraction. The promise that the forest can be endlessly remade repeatedly collides with evidence of ecological loss and colonial dispossession.

The work of clearing

René’s introduction to the work is immediate and practical. Before daylight, Monsieur Trépagny takes him and Charles Duquet from the storehouse to a cramped clearing, gives them blunt short-handled axes, and orders them to cut logs for quarters that will enlarge his household’s domus. René’s axe has a large chip in its edge; when he tries to sharpen it with a river cobble, Trépagny throws the stone away and demonstrates the use of sandstone. The scene establishes both the bodily labor of clearing and its hierarchy: René is expected to work, while the master controls the tools and teaches only what the task requires.

When Trépagny later supplies sharp iron axes and whetstones, René marks his handle with an R. The improved tool makes the work more effective, but its force carries a cost beyond the fallen tree. As René cuts, he imagines the web connecting human life, animals, trees, flesh, and grass shivering and breaking. Clearing is thus rendered as a material gain and a severing of relations at once.

The labor extends well beyond felling. René and the others limb and bark trees, drag logs with oxen, cut and fit them into walls, and fill the gaps with river mud. They stack further trees to dry and burn older piles. Smoke becomes a constant feature of the settlement; oxen gouge the ground, tree shadows give way to harsh light, and the mosses and ferns beneath the canopy wither. The clearing does not end when a tree falls: it reorganizes the ground, the vegetation, and the daily life built upon them.

Improvement as colonial doctrine

René questions why they cut forest when open meadows seem easier places to build. Trépagny answers that their purpose is to clear and subdue the wilderness. He defends the New France system of long strips running from river to forest: each settler, he says, receives fertile soil, high ground above floods, and access to timber, fuel, and mushrooms. His account joins a practical land-allocation system to an ideological claim that people must change the land in order to live in it.

Trépagny’s imagined future makes that claim explicit. Pointing into the forest, he pictures cabbage fields and vineyards where trees now stand and declares, “To be a man is to clear the forest.” In this vision, the forest is not a community of living beings but unrealized farmland awaiting human purpose. The slogan presents clearing as both work and proof of masculinity, and turns a particular colonial project into an apparently universal rule.

His rhetoric sits alongside a broader dispute about resources and their use. Trépagny complains that France favors Baltic timber and neglects the valuable resources of New France, while René’s labor continues to reshape the land in the name of settlement. Later, Mi’kmaq voices challenge the assumptions behind such claims. Sosep reminds his listeners that the French king has given their land to the British, and Theotiste answers that it was not the king’s land to give. Sosep describes settlers’ animals destroying food, boats and nets taking fish, and introduced plants displacing local ones. His account of a rising outside force contrasts with Trépagny’s language of wilderness and improvement: what the colonizer calls land to be opened is already a homeland with established relationships and uses.

A forest that exceeds its users

The forest does not simply disappear as René cuts it. Over years, settlers arrive and crown labor gangs widen a trail into a road; maize is planted between stumps. Deer and moose retreat, followed northward by wolves, while woodpeckers leave as the chopping sounds multiply. Yet sprouts rise from stumps and living roots, and trees remain on the horizon. René feels both compelled to keep working and powerless before the forest’s immense extent. The apparent inexhaustibility of the landscape is therefore not proof that clearing has no consequence; it is a contrast between the scale of the forest and the accumulating changes made within it.

The work also shapes René’s identity and body. The narrative names him a défricheur and bûcheron, a woodsman and feller of trees, then enumerates the practices that define his occupation: topping, stripping, splitting, stacking, and using the axe. His life is marked by toil, smoke, insects, and the repeated lifting and handling of timber. At forty, he is found dead on his knees in the forest, his hands still clenched around the axe handle, with the axe embedded in a cedar. The tool that organized his working life is present at its end; his sons and grandsons follow him into the same vocation.

From local labor to global commodity

The novel sets René’s labor against Charles Duquet’s later calculation that forest products could support lasting wealth. Having seen fur profits rise and fall with scarcity, surplus, disease, and changing markets, Duquet rejects animals and other uncertain resources as a basis for a permanent fortune. He decides that forest is a commodity Europe lacks and imagines timber supplying ships, houses, and fuel. His confidence that it can provide profits indefinitely turns the forest into an investment proposition, while overlooking the damage visible in René’s work and the instability of supposedly limitless resources.

Duquet’s commercial thinking extends beyond a single market. During a trading voyage, he observes Captain Verdwijnen exchanging goods in India for produce, spices, and opium destined for trade elsewhere, and considers whether a three-cornered route could serve a lumber merchant. Later, the business sends its first cargo of selected pine to Sydney, Australia; an Australian buyer proposes a decade-long supply contract and expresses interest in kauri from New Zealand. Forest clearing has become an international chain connecting trees at the source to distant buyers, transport, and commercial agreements.

In New Zealand, that chain takes the form of scattered logging camps and trading stations dealing in flax, spars, and lumber. The camps move on after taking the most valuable timber, leaving burned stumps and deep accumulations of waste. Kahikatea and then kauri are cut; fallen timber carpets some areas before being burned with brush, vines, birds, insects, fruit, bats, epiphytes, ferns, and forest litter. The description makes clear that the commodity is not only the harvested tree: clearing destroys or removes the surrounding forms of life as well. The newcomers’ claim that “The forest was there for them” condenses the entitlement that licenses this extraction.

The cost of the promise

The same assumption of inexhaustible timber is challenged within the business’s own deliberations. Dieter argues that timber will become scarce and more valuable, and points to older lands planted decades earlier as evidence that continued forest cover can sustain later wealth. His argument introduces a longer timescale than immediate harvesting: retaining or renewing forests may protect future supply. Yet the terms remain commercial, with future forest framed as security for lumber and paper rather than solely as an ecological community.

Across these episodes, Défrichement connects a settler’s daily labor to a wider transformation of land and economy. The axe, the road, the planted maize, the distant timber shipment, and the burned logging camp belong to the same process, but they do not carry the same meaning for everyone. Trépagny sees a future of fields; Duquet sees a durable fortune; Sosep remembers land and a shared Mi’kmaq world under pressure. The novel’s changing scales expose the central contradiction of clearing: it promises permanence through the conversion of a living forest, while leaving disrupted ecologies and dispossessed communities in the wake of that promise.