French Settlements in North America. Because official French interest in North America began with the desire to find the fabled Northwest Passage to the riches of Asia, the crown lost interest in North America for almost fifty years following the unsuccessful attempts by Giovanni da Verranzano and Jacques
Cartier in 1524 and 1534 to find a transcontinental waterway. French fishermen, however, who had been plying the North Atlantic since the first decade of the sixteenth century, along with their Portuguese and Spanish counterparts, established a French presence along the North American coast. First landing along the coast to process fish for market, they quickly developed a parallel trading economy with the region's Algonquian and Montaignais Indians, exchanging European manufactured goods for furs.
While fishermen built temporary camps, sixteenth‐century attempts to establish permanent French settlements along the St. Lawrence River and at both ends of North America's Atlantic coast failed. Cartier's short‐lived Charlesbourg Royal, established in 1541 on the St. Lawrence near the Iroquois village of Stadacona, succumbed to harsh winters, scurvy, and attacks by nearby Iroquois, whom he had alienated by, among other things, kidnapping several Iroquois boys. In northern Florida in the 1560s, French Huguenots were repeatedly driven off by native Floridians and Spaniards, while a 1598 settlement on Sable Island (east of Nova Scotia) collapsed from internal dissent after four years.
Finally, in 1608, Samuel de Champlain, operating on behalf of sieur de Monts, who had received a monopoly on fur trade in exchange for funding colonization efforts, reoccupied the now‐abandoned village of Stadacona, renamed it Quebec, and established the first permanent French settlement in North America. From Quebec, French settlement would eventually spread along the continent's waterways—up the St. Lawrence, along the Great Lakes, and down the
Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico—as well as along the Atlantic coast. By 1700, France would claim three‐quarters of the North American continent, forming an arc from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, surrounding Great Britain's Atlantic colonies. The French population of this vast region was sparse, however, reaching only 85,000 in the 1760s. Despite the limited number of
habitants (colonists), the sheer extent of French settlements (along with geography, especially the Appalachian Mountains) served to contain Anglo‐American colonists’ expansionist desires. French containment of the English colonies was also bolstered by those Native American nations, living between the lands claimed by the English and by the French, who parlayed their geographic location into positions of substantial power in their dealings with both until 1763 when, as a result of the so‐called French and Indian War (
Seven Years’ War), France lost its North American empire, leaving these Native Americans without a European ally in their opposition to English expansion and leaving the English colonists without a European enemy in the northern half of the continent.
French settlements in North America can be separated into five regions, each shaped by its particular political economy and population. Acadian settlements along the Atlantic coast continued to be dominated by fishermen, joined by immigrant soldiers,
engagés (hired men), and some families who supplemented their subsistence with farming. The towns along the St. Lawrence River, from Quebec to Montreal (established upon another abandoned Iroquois village in 1642), served as administrative centers for secular and religious governance and for trade. Between these towns, farmers who had been recruited by seigneurial landowners filled the fertile river valley lands. Although primarily of French ancestry, colonists in Acadia and along the St. Lawrence also hailed from Portugal, the Basque Provinces, and Germany and included missionized Indians and
New England captives. Farther inland, in the
pays d'en haut, outposts housed explorers, traders, missionaries, and soldiers but few
habitants. The extent of French‐claimed territories outstripped actual French control, and New France's dependence upon economic and political alliances with a variety of Native American groups required limiting the extent of French settlements. Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac established a civilian settlement at
Detroit in 1701, but even there the
habitants were more interested in trade than in farming. Moving down the Mississippi River into what was known as the Illinois Country, French and Canadian fur traders became farmers, growing wheat, primarily for colonists in Louisiana, and developing multiethnic communities with their Native American wives around Jesuit missions and fur‐trading posts, including Cahokia (1699), Kaskaskia (1703), and Sainte‐Geneviève (1735). Finally, in the lower Mississippi valley, forts at Mobile (1702),
New Orleans (1718), and Natchez (1716, originally Fort Rosalie) became centers of a staple‐crop plantation colony that emerged gradually during the eighteenth century, inhabited by Canadian transplants, voluntary and involuntary immigrants from France, German peasants, French and Swiss soldiers, and Indian and African slaves.
The lives of many French North American
habitants were disrupted by eighteenth‐century geopolitical changes, but none more than the Acadians. As British‐French tensions increased prior to the Seven Years’ War, officials in the part of Acadia that had become British Nova Scotia decided to exile all French‐speaking Acadians who refused to swear allegiance to the British Crown. Beginning in 1755, several thousand Acadians were forced to disperse, spreading out from New England south to the Caribbean and east to England and France. By the mid‐1760s, unhappy with their original destinations, many Acadians began relocating to Louisiana, where they were welcomed by the colony's new Spanish government, which was seeking to increase the colony's population and was happy to do so with Catholic farmers. Settling among the isolated bayous of southern Louisiana, Acadians would become Cajuns.
Besides the Cajuns’ significant contributions to the development of Louisiana and its culture (especially its music and cuisine), French habitants left reminders of their presence on the peoples, landscapes, and cultures throughout North America, including the future United States, from the Métìs peoples of the Great Lakes through midwestern place names (such as Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and Des Moines, Iowa) to the cultural heritages of Sainte‐Geneviève and New Orleans.
See also
Colonial Era;
Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European;
Fisheries;
Fur Trade;
Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800;
Iroquois Confederacy;
La Salle, René‐Robert Cavelier, Sieur de;
Roman Catholicism;
Spanish Settlements in North America.
Bibliography
Carl A. Brasseaux , The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803, 1987.
W.J. Eccles , France in America, rev. ed, 1990.
Daniel H. Usner Jr. , Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 1992.
Carl J. Ekberg , French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times, 1998.
Jennifer M. Spear
