French Colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean Sea
Overview
Initial French Expeditions across the Atlantic Ocean
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the differences in how Europeans established different colonial models in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds.
- Compare and contrast the Spanish, French, Dutch, English, and Portuguese colonial systems.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Christopher Columbus - Genoese explorer credited with the discovery of the Americas
New France: first French colony in North America, established along the St. Lawrence River
Mercantilism: economic ideology embraced by European imperial powers, based on the concept that colonies were founded to benefit the countries that founded them
During the Age of Exploration/Discovery, the French—along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch—established settlements and colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean Sea. These settlements and colonies were part of the unification of humanity across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, along with the mercantilist economic development of these European powers. This mercantilist development went hand-in-hand with the imperial competition and struggle among these powers. While the British, the Portuguese, and the Spanish colonial empires eclipsed the French colonial empire in the Americas and the Caribbean, the French colonial presence still left a mark on and legacies for the Americas and the Caribbean islands that are still evidence in present times.
French mariners, among other European mariners, did not initially come to the Americas to establish colonial settlements. They sought a northwest passage across the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans to Asia. Finding lands, natural resources, and rivers, among other geographic features, was serendipity. During the first half of the sixteenth century the French government sponsored expeditions led by two explorers across the Atlantic Ocean. Florentine mariner Giovanni da Verrazano, sailed across the Atlantic in 1524. Verrazano was one of a number of explorers during this period, including Christopher Columbus, who worked for other countries other than their own. French King Francis I asked Verrazano to make the trip in search of new trade routes. Verrazano traveled up the Atlantic coast from present-day South Carolina to the coast of Nova Scotia, without finding a passage to Asia. The second French-sponsored explorer, Jacques Cartier led three expeditions across the Atlantic between 1534 and 1542. During the first two he explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River. His third expedition, in 1541 – 42, was an unsuccessful effort to establish a French settlement on the St. Lawrence River. Cartier’s expeditions laid the foundation for New France. During the second half of the sixteenth century France suffered through religious discord and warfare growing out of the Reformation; this discord distracted French efforts in exploring and/or settling along the Atlantic coast until the early seventeenth century.
French North America
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the differences in how Europeans established different colonial models in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds.
- Compare and contrast the Spanish, French, Dutch, English, and Portuguese colonial systems.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
New France: first French colony in North America, established along the St. Lawrence River
Louisiana: second French colony in North America, established along the Mississippi River
Huguenots - members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries; inspired by the writings of John Calvin
Mercantilism: economic ideology embraced by European imperial powers, based on the concept that colonies were founded to benefit the countries that founded them
1763 Treaty of Paris: treaty that ended the 1754-61 “Great War for Empire, providing for French loss of its North American colonies and paving the way for disputes that led to the American Revolution
In North America the French established two huge colonies, each along a major North American river. The first of the two was New France founded along the St. Lawrence River. The second was Louisiana with the Mississippi River as its axis. The French, like the English, established their first lasting settlements in the early seventeenth century. In contrast the Spanish had established their first settlements in North America during the sixteenth century. Division over the Reformation in the sixteenth century hindered both English and French efforts to explore and settle North America. During the last third of the sixteenth century religious divisions between Catholics and Huguenots, embodied in a succession of religious wars, nearly tore apart France; this prevented the government from committing resources to the construction of a colonial empire in the Americas. With the conclusion of religious hostilities in France in 1598, the French government under Henry IV could devote more resources to the establishment of a permanent, if small, French presence in present-day eastern Canada.
During that period, the latter half of the sixteenth century, fishermen dominated the French presence in the St Lawrence River valley and coast of eastern Canada. The growth of French fishing in the northwestern Atlantic led to the establishment of winter settlements, the development of a fur trade, and more contacts with indigenous peoples, all activities not requiring an extensive colonial presence.
New France
The single most important individual in the early development of New France was Samuel de Champlain, a partially enigmatic figure who dedicated his energies to seeing that New France thrived as a colony and not just a collection of outposts. Founded in 1608, Quebec was the first settlement of New France, and it has lasted to the present day. Over the next forty years French colonists founded Trois Rivieres in 1634 and Montreal in 1642. Those two settlements, along with Quebec, would become the three small urban centers of a slowly growing New France. The original focus of New France and Louisiana was the fur trade. The French government also made modest efforts to encourage migrants to settle for the purpose of farming, in order to establish self-sufficiency.
The original political, religious, and social structures of New France were taken from those of early modern and medieval France, partly rooted in that nation’s feudal institutions, practices, and structures. The original seigneural system for land distribution was taken from the feudal system of land tenure in France. As part of this system seigneurs held title to landed estates. The lands of these estates were distributed to settlers, known as habitants, for the purpose of farming. Remnants of this system survived into the nineteenth century.
The fur trade required the French colonists to interact with indigenous peoples of the region, both through diplomacy and warfare. The fur traders, settlers, missionaries, and government officials of New France developed a complex set of relationships with these people that were shaped by assorted and antagonistic interests. Their first interactions were with the Huron and the Iroquois. By the mid-seventeenth century the withdrawal of the Huron and Iroquois from the St. Lawrence River valley opened new opportunities for French immigrants in the fur trade and farming. Regardless, the colonial population continued to grow slowly because of the distance of the colony from France, the climate, and the perception of limited economic opportunities.
During the 1660s New France experienced a significant improvement in fortunes when Louis XIV made this colony a priority in his pursuit of an expanding French global empire. Louis XIV and his chief, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, saw French colonies in terms of how they could benefit France, as part of the ideology of mercantilism. Louis and Colbert made the organization of an effective colonial government in New France a priority. New France now received more of the attention and resources it needed to grow and develop, including its placement under the authority of the Department of the Marine. However, even with this new attention to its development, New France continued to grow slowly during the rest of the seventeenth century and into the first half of the eighteenth century.
Maturation of New France
During the first half of the eighteenth century, specifically between the Wars of the Spanish and the Austrian Succession, 1713 – 1744, New France matured as a colonial society. A number of Canadian historians have characterized it as a golden age. During this period the economy of New France expanded unevenly, largely as a result of the relative peace between the British and French North American colonies, as well as between Britain and France around the world.
French economic expansion and relative prosperity during the first half of the eighteenth century was grounded in mercantilism. The French government valued New France, among the other French colonies, for its natural resources and as markets for manufactured goods, above and largely to the exclusion of all else. In the mercantilist economies of the eighteenth-century European empires, raw materials and markets were all that mattered, notwithstanding any lip service paid to the Christian missionary impulse.
During this period the culture of New France did not so much mature as blossom, fed by population growth and the new wealth generated, which led to economic growth and prosperity. This maturation of New France, from the early eighteenth century, was marked by the continuity of economic, political, religious, and social institutions and practices from early modern and medieval France; the militarization of New France as a necessary response to the threat of English conquest and Iroquois hostility; and the economic opportunities afforded by the resources of New France.
Louisiana
The French government established the second French North American colony, Louisiana, in 1682. The axis of this colony was the Mississippi River, explored extensively by Robert de La Salle as part of the events leading to the establishment. In a number of ways, Louisiana was an extension of New France to the north. As with New France the fur trade was the initial economic engine of Louisiana. Coureurs des bois—French traders—drove the development of this trade.
Louisiana grew even more slowly than New France, being more difficult to reach for potential French colonists and possessing fewer visible economic incentives. Fewer than ten thousand European immigrants settled in French Louisiana during the eighteenth century. Most of these lived in New Orleans, the colony’s most populous city, or other settlements along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. French colonial society in French Louisiana did not mature beyond these scattered and mostly small settlements that punctuated these river valleys. Consequently, this French Louisiana colonial society was mostly what the French settlers had brought with them from France. This French colonial culture did not have much time to interact and merge with indigenous and African cultural elements before French Louisiana was divided by the Spanish and the British as part of the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the 1754-61 war between them, also known as the French and Indian War.
The End of New France and Louisiana
One of the key factors in France’s loss of its North American colonies was the small population of each colony, most of whom lived along the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Rivers, and their tributaries. While the French government claimed hundreds of thousands of square kilometers on both sides of each river, the population of both, at the time that France lost them in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, was less than 100,000; on the other hand, the population of the British colonies along the Atlantic coast was over a million. French settlers in these two colonies were spread out in a number of small settlements, punctuated by a few larger settlements—such as Montreal, New Orleans, and Quebec—which would evolve into large cities beginning in the nineteenth century.
Regardless of a colonial population of nearly 100,000 French subjects, the French government ultimately saw New France and Louisiana as little more than defensive and offensive bastions in the military struggle for North America and pawns or chips in the peacemaking process that concluded each war. By the late seventeenth century, the British, the French, and the Spanish vied for control of various parts of present-day Canada and the United States, outside of Alaska. The colonial struggle between Britain and France, also known as the Second Hundred Years War, was punctuated by four wars, concluding with the French and Indian War. With the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the French and Indian War, New France and Louisiana became part of the British and Spanish North American empires. By which ever name, the residents of this area have struggled to find their place ever since the British annexation.
With respect to the fate of French Louisiana the 1763 treaty divided this colony along the Mississippi River between the Spanish west of the river and the British east of the river. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this dividing line along the Mississippi River continued to be significant in international diplomacy with the 1783 Treaty of Paris that established the Mississippi as the western border of the new United States, as well as the 1803 Louisiana Purchase by which the U.S. acquired much of what France had claimed as Louisiana. As the French colonial presence along the Mississippi River was sparse in 1763, descendants of these French subjects adapted to and/or embraced the dominant U.S. culture with the advance of U.S. settlement during the nineteenth century.
French Colonies in the Caribbean Sea and South America
Along with colonies in North America, the French also established a number of colonies among the Winward Islands along the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea and one on the northern edge of South America. The French colonies in the Caribbean Sea were smaller geographically than other colonies, but proportionately more profitable because of staple crops, such as sugar and tobacco grown on these islands. Accordingly, these Caribbean and South American colonies also garnered more attention and resources from the French government.
The French began settling the Caribbean during the early seventeenth century. They were part of the same European imperial competition then occurring in the Americas. The French established settlements on a crescent-shaped chain of islands in the eastern Caribbean, running from the northern crown of South America to Puerto Rico. The French also settled the western half of the island of Hispaniola. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a small elite group of slaveholding plantation owners came to control these French possessions, emerging as major players in France’s developing global colonial empire.
France’s single colony in South America, Guyane, located on the northern crown of that continent, was also dominated by a sugar plantation economy, but it enjoyed only modest development and prosperity as measured by the mercantilist standards of the time.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the differences in how Europeans established different colonial models in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds.
- Compare and contrast the Spanish, French, Dutch, English, and Portuguese colonial systems.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
New France: first French colony in North America, established along the St. Lawrence River
Louisiana: second French colony in North America, established along the Mississippi River
Middle Passage - the voyage across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas, comprised the middle leg of the trans- Atlantic slave trade
Slavery in the French America and Caribbean Colonies
Geography, climate, and staple crops dictated where European colonists embraced slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean Sea. While it existed only marginally in New France and Louisiana, slavery thrived in the French Caribbean, and, to a lesser extent, in Guyane. French slavery in the western hemisphere was part of the slaveholding system of the Atlantic World. The majority of the slave labor was to make sugar. This is very intensive work, and the French began to important more and more slaves to meet this demand. As part of this system Europeans purchased slaves along the west coast of Africa, likely over twelve million between 1400 and 1800. These slaves then endured the horrific Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean islands, South America, and, to a lesser extent, North America. It is here that African and European cultures began to mix together as can be seen by language, religion, and food cultures. For example, the vudu is a combination of indigenous African religions and Catholicism This blending of African and European cultures is one that was very different than their original cultures. Slaves who ended up in the French Caribbean and Guyane helped to shape the cultures of the western hemisphere, a role largely unrecognized by European and European-American historians until the twentieth century. These slaves brought their own cultures with them, which combined with European and indigenous cultural influences and formed the new cultures of the western hemisphere. While European settlers and European-Americans controlled the underlying processes by which these cultures evolved and matured, they could not exclude the African and African-American cultural presence of the peoples they had enslaved. These African cultural influences are still present in the Caribbean islands settled French colonists.
Legacies of the French Colonial Presence in the Americas and the Caribbean
While the French had lost their North American colonies by the late eighteenth century, and their possessions in South America and the Caribbean had become imperially insignificant by the end of the nineteenth century, the French colonial presence left its mark on the western hemisphere. Most visible is the French-Canadian province of Quebec, an evolved culture of the original New France culture, influenced as it has been with the surrounding Anglo-Canadian culture. French linguistic culture is also present in the various Caribbean islands on which the French founded colonial settlements. This French presence in the western hemisphere, while overshadowed by the English and Spanish cultural presence, has added to the diversity in the Americas and the Caribbean.
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