New France

views updated

New France

The name New France was first applied to the northeastern portion of North America in a map prepared by the explorer Giovanni da Verrazano (1485–1530). It reflected the overseas ambitions of Verrazano's master, King François I (1494–1547), as well as the presence of Breton and Norman fishermen in the coastal waters of the region. The French navigator Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) staked a claim to the Saint Lawrence River in 1534, and later in the sixteenth century French and Basque fur traders established regular relations with the native peoples of the region. Only at the time of Samuel de Champlain (ca. 1570–1635), however, were year-round French settlements established, first in Acadia (present-day Nova Scotia) in 1604 and then in "Canada" (now Quebec) in 1608.

Through the first half of the seventeenth century, New France consisted of a few small posts owned by the Company of New France and allied to indigenous nations from whom the settlers purchased beaver and other furs. In 1663 King Louis XIV (1638–1715) dissolved the company and took over direct rule of New France, reorganizing colonial administration along the lines of a French province. France then provided Canada with a substantial injection of soldiers, settlers, and capital, with the result that the colony soon developed a European aspect, with the towns of Quebec and Montreal bracketing agricultural settlements along the banks of the Saint Lawrence.

The flow of immigration was numerically modest and almost exclusively French and Catholic; immigrants, drawn from across the western half of France, were mostly poor, predominantly male, and disproportionately urban in origin. A census in 1681 numbered the French-Canadian population at 9,742; by the end of French rule in 1760, it had risen to approximately 76,000.

Through the seventeenth century the French fully occupied only a small territory along the Saint Lawrence and around Port Royal in Acadia, but French influence extended over a vast and growing portion of the continent. Fur traders and missionaries traveled inland along canoe routes that led through the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi watershed. Cavalier de la Salle (1643–1687) reached the Gulf of Mexico from Canada in 1683, establishing a French claim that would later be followed up with the founding of Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico in 1699.

New France's inland empire, enveloping the British colonies by the early eighteenth century, was French only in a very special and limited sense, for this was really Indian territory, largely beyond the control of French sovereignty, law, and culture. A few hundred French maintained a degree of influence thanks, in part, to their commercial role making European goods available to avid native customers. Equally important—and inseparable from the economic connection—was the central role they played in the alliance system that emerged in the interior as tribes sought to maintain a common front, first against the Iroquois and later against the British.

By the early eighteenth century, it was becoming evident that, on purely mercantilist principles, the North American colonies were far less valuable to France than its booming sugar plantation possessions in the West Indies. After a disastrous attempt to finance colonial development through private investment, Louisiana became synonymous with speculation and waste. Canada, where settlers were free of direct taxation, generally cost the crown more than it produced by way of revenue from the fur trade. And Acadia, on the exposed Atlantic shore, proved impossible to defend in the long run.

The imperial logic shaping policy toward New France was of a different order in the eighteenth century—strategic rather than economic—and it had everything to do with the growing Anglo-French rivalry. The great arc of French territorial claims, from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, through the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, was designed at least in part to keep the much more populous and economically viable British colonies hemmed in along the seaboard. Taking the form of a great alliance system connecting hundreds of native nations to the French crown, this larger New France represented a valuable military resource in times of war.

Throughout its history, New France was intermittently at war, first with the Iroquois League between 1609 and 1701. In later struggles, against the Fox of the Great Lakes and the Natchez and Chickasaws of Louisiana, the French seemed determined to exterminate entire enemy nations, effectively giving the lie to any notion that France's approach to empire was entirely benign.

After 1689, the intensifying rivalry between Britain and France embroiled the North American colonies increasingly in Europe's dynastic struggles. Though the Anglo-American side enjoyed an immense superiority in numbers and economic power, the French-Canadians were more thoroughly militarized and, in the case of the fur-trade veterans, skilled in wilderness travel; furthermore, they could usually count on support from their network of native alliances. Accordingly, New France specialized in the techniques of "la petite guerre" (small guerrilla war) with parties of Indians and Canadian militia raiding vulnerable outposts on the frontiers of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Ruthlessly targeting civilian settlers, this strategy succeeded for a time in keeping the enemy off-balance, but it contributed to a growing determination on the part of the British to defeat and utterly destroy New France.

After a series of French victories early in the Seven Years' War (1754–1763 in America, where it was known as the French and Indian War), Britain was persuaded by her American colonies to mount a major assault aimed at conquering Canada. With the Europeanizing of the struggle, Canada's native alliances and frontier raiding traditions became a marginal factor. While the navy sealed off approaches to the Saint Lawrence, a huge (by colonial standards) British and American army launched a three-pronged attack. While one force headed west to capture inland posts before doubling back toward Montreal, a second army made its way straight north along the heavily fortified Lake Champlain corridor. Meanwhile, a third, amphibious, army sailed in from the east to lay siege to Quebec in 1759. The famous battle on the Plains of Abraham brought a dramatic conclusion to the eastern campaign, but New France's fate was sealed, not so much by a single clash of arms, but by the relentless and convergent advance of three over-whelming forces. The British attackers met at Montreal, and there the governor of New France surrendered on September 8, 1760.

With the end of New France confirmed by the peace settlement at Paris in 1763, the French Canadians found themselves uneasy subjects of a Protestant monarch. The transition was more difficult for the native nations of the western interior, who lost much of the leverage they had maintained in a context of contending empires; without the support of the French alliance, they had reason to dread the onslaught of British settlers.