Building new cultures - by Henrik Karlsson
In 1555, six hundred men, mainly French Huguenots and Swiss Calvinists fleeing their Catholic persecutors, set out to found a new society off the coast of Brazil.
Their leader was Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon. Villegaignon’s CV included fighting the Turks, the Scots, the Italians, the Arabs, and pirates; he’d been a scientist, an explorer, a mercenary, and, always, an entrepreneur 1. It was he who abducted Mary, Queen of the Scots, when Francis II wanted to marry her.
Villegaignon was a Catholic, but when he set out to recruit citizens for his new society, he found it easier to convince Protestants, since they were persecuted by the Catholics, so why not? He took anyone he could find: “rakes, wantons and runaway slaves”. By July 12th, 1555, he’d filled two boats.
The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss relates the story of their arrival in the new world in his Tristes Tropiques (1955):
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