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in force until 1632. The total number of French—secular or religious—in the colony was small as well. Canada was not a place that the French could take over and occupy. Instead, the French sought to establish alliances among local populations. The success of such alliances was evident as early as 1609, when Champlain joined with Algonquian-speaking allies to fend off attacking soldiers of the Iroquois confederation. The French relied on harmonious relationships to secure access to furs, which were central to the colony’s economic success. Individual trappers became deeply involved in Indian communities, for example. So the priests who journeyed to New France, while eager to convert souls and always ready for the martyrdom that might await, did not have the expectations that shaped the aspirations—and angry disappointments—of priests in Central and South America. And these different aspirations affected their demonology, as, indeed, did the different indigenous groups they encountered, who did not have the complex and hierarchical religious institutions that fascinated and dismayed European observers in New Spain.

The language Jesuits in New France used to describe Satan and his minions was mocking, derisive, contemptuous—not language conveying the specter of a terrifying enemy. François-Joseph Le Mercier (see document 2), for example, referred to a sorcerer’s “pranks.”97 Jesuits described indigenous demons as fraudulent and marginal, not powerful and central. Jesuits believed that there was little doubt that Indian shamans worked with the assistance of the Devil, but the Jesuits also thought that they would be able to control these shamans, and perhaps even find ways to expose shamans as frauds.98 Unlike other places and times (such as Salem in 1692 or Abiquiu in 1756), where ardent religious leaders played crucial roles in sparking witch outbreaks, the Jesuits in New France do not seem to have engendered such events.

Other factors played a role as well in preventing the expression of witch beliefs in trials in New France, at least as far as surviving evidence indicates. As any study of witchcraft trial records suggests, witch accusations often depended on familiarity. Testimonies suggest the intimacy of communal life: witnesses peered through windows, listened over hedges, barged in uninvited, slept in the next room, or shared a bed or a pallet on the floor. For the most part, victims knew their accusers personally, and those accusations lodged against strangers tended to be discounted by investigating officials. So witch beliefs and accusations were embedded in the particular fabric of a given society. The depositions in documents 8, 10, and 12 all hint at just such relationships. Accusers presented a litany of grievances, some stemming from disputes over twenty years in the past. People who lived in dispersed family units, not in clustered villages, tended to have fewer opportunities to develop these relationships.

In New France, the basic residential unit was the family farm, not the village, even though French officials endeavored to get people to settle in villages. Moreover, these New France settlements were, just like the colony, new, without the long-standing relationships, family conflicts, and webs of obligation that sustained witch accusations in Europe. New France also had fewer of the marginal, economically impoverished, elderly women who were perceived as burdensome and became targets of accusation in some regions of France. New France, like most newly settled colonies in the Americas, contained more men than women, and those women who survived to old age often had children to care for them.99 Finally, the inhabitants of New France came from all regions of France. The two most dominant were Normandy (14.5 percent of immigrants) and Ile-de-France (14.3 percent), with every other part of the kingdom represented. Beliefs about magic, sorcery, and witchcraft had pronounced regional peculiarities in France, and so the beliefs immigrants transferred represented this same heterogeneity. The dominance of migrants