This essay develops a detailed reading of Jean-Christophe Rufin's Rouge Brésil, an historical novel recounting the failed sixteenth-century French colonial project in South America. This tale of religious war, of cultural difference, of voyage and attempted (but failed) colonization gives an ironic, critical account of French colonialism. On the blurry borderline between Western culture and the New World, a number of Rufin's characters create hybrid identities that reveal the complexity of initial encounters between the colonizers and the colonized, questioning this very dichotomy in the process. The essay's analysis of Rouge Brésil focuses first on irony and satire as instruments of critical reflection on colonialism, then on the representation of women and gender in the colonialist enterprise, and thirdly on the role of nature and ecology in the story. While it profoundly affected the indigenous population of Brazil, the French colonial mission as recounted by Rufin also had a devastating impact on the non-human environment. The conclusion situates Rufin's postcolonial revision of early modern history in the context of twenty-first-century environmental issues and cultural conflicts.

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