Frontier Soldiers of New France

René Chartrand was born in Montreal and educated in Canada, the United States and the Bahamas. A senior curator with Canada’s National Historic Sites of Parks Canada for nearly three decades and he was also attached to Canada’s Department of National Defence as an historian. He went on as a free lance writer and historical consultant for media productions and historical restorations of military sites in North America and the West Indies. As a curator, he initially specialized in military material culture and later researched organization, tactics, policy and geo-strategy. He has authored some 50 books and hundreds of articles and research notes published in England, France, the United States and Canada. He lives in Gatineau (Quebec).

Born in Montréal, Québec, in 1971, Kevin Gélinas studied at the Université de Montréal, where he graduated in 1995. This was followed by a Bachelor of Education from the University of Ottawa in 1996. Author of The French Trade Gun in North America 1662-1759. A museum consultant specializing in the military material culture of New France, Kevin has also published numerous articles on French-era colonial trade goods and shoulder weapons. He has also contributed to publications such as La Belle: The Archaeology of a Seventeenth-Century Vessel of New World Colonization and has been a guest speaker at numerous events. Kevin currently lives in Trois-Rivières, Québec, where he teaches and is actively continuing his extensive archival research into the history of New France’s material culture, voyageurs and the Trois-Rivières region.

Born in Nantes in 1944, Michel Pétard studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he began a thesis on eighteenth-century Nantes gunsmiths, which led him to meet the historian of arms Christian Ariès for whom he illustrated his famous work Les armes blanches règlementaires francaises between 1966 and 1990. Jean Boudriot, another renowned author on the subject of French weapons and naval history and an amateur designer for his treatise Le vaisseau de 74 canons, hired him for a long collaboration until the publication in 2003 of Marine royale where Boudriot entrusted him with the research, analysis and illustration of uniforms of the marine troops under the ancien regime. In the meantime, Michel Pétard was asked by René Chartrand of Parc Canada to illustrate the uniforms of the French troops in New France; this fruitful association thus continued with the present and innovative work initiated and directed by Kevin Gélinas. During these many years, Michel Pétard has published extensively on French military uniforms and its material culture as an author and editor (Équipements militaires, Des sabres et des épées), then as an author in several magazines with a variety of articles devoted to weapons and uniforms.