Paul Le Jeune

Paul Le Jeune (1591–1664) was a French Jesuit missionary in New France.

Le Jeune was born to a Huguenot family in Vitry-le-François in the region of Champagne, France in 1591, and converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of sixteen. Le Jeune received a thorough preparation for the Jesuit priesthood; he was a novice for two years between 1613 and 1615, and he was deeply influenced by his mentor Father Massé, whom he met at the collège Henri IV de La Flèche. During his studies, Le Jeune developed a keen interest in missions and became convinced that education was a key element in any successful attempt to spread Christianity. After finishing his philosophical studies Father Le Jeune was a teacher at the colleges in Rennes (1618–19) and Bourges (1619–22).

In 1624, Le Jeune was ordained, and in 1632 he was named superior of the Jesuit mission in Canada. He had not requested the posting to New France, but accepted without complaint and embarked from Le Havre with two companions on 18 April 1632. It was a difficult voyage and the forty year old Le Jeune was terribly seasick. They arrived a Tadoussac on June 18, 1632.

Le Jeune's first year was spent in the French settlements. Perhaps best known for his work with the Native American population, Le Jeune displayed an eagerness for learning various Native American languages. His assignment was to translate the Scriptures. Sometimes he caught them "teaching him obscene words in place of the right ones." Among his most well-documented experiences are his travels during the winter of 1633-1634 among the Montagnais. During the trip he had to contend with the teasing and occasional hostility of the shaman, Carigonan. While his work during those six months did not result in mass conversions as he had hoped, his ethnographic account of the Montagnais and his personal anecdotes about the cold, hunger, and conflicts he encountered are recorded in Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France of 1634. E.F.K. Koemer suggests that Le Jeune's identification of a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns eventually assisted John Eliot in his gammar of the Natick language.

In 1635 a Jesuit college was established in Quebec to educate French and Amerindian boys. That December he preached the sermon Samuel de Champlain's funeral. Le Jeune decided that in order to effectively carry out his apostolate, he needed to establish mission settlements, on the model of Jesuit work in Paraguay, a hospital to care for the aged and the ill, and schools for educating the young. He wrote:

...
Wikipedia