New France or Nouvelle France refers to the vast territory which France laid claim to and partly colonized in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French began exploring North America during the sixteenth century and attempted to establish a colony in Florida, but it was not until the start of the seventeenth century that they established permanent colonies in eastern Canada. The region was soon being referred to as Nouvelle France. In the late seventeenth century they also began establishing colonies around Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. A strategy was developed in the eighteenth century of expanding westwards in Canada to the Great Lakes and northwards from Louisiana up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to join up with the Canadian colonies, all with the goal of hemming in Britain’s Thirteen Colonies on the east coast of North America. In the process, New France became a vast territory that covered much of modern-day Canada and the American Midwest. It was always very thinly populated by French settlers and a highly theoretical dominion. The French ceded the Canadian provinces to Britain in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War and after various diplomatic shifts ended up selling the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803.[1]
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
New France chronology of events
France was one of several European countries that became involved in trying to map new parts of the Americas in preparation for settling colonies there in the first half of the sixteenth century. Jacques Cartier undertook three voyages of exploration around Newfoundland and the mouth of the St Lawrence River in the 1530s and early 1540s.[2] Jean Ribault attempted to found a colony in Florida in the mid-1560s, though it was wiped out by a Spanish expedition in 1565. Thus, it was not until the first decade of the seventeenth century that the French established their first permanent colonies in Acadie (1604) and Quebec (1608). The latter was established under the direction of Samuel de Champlain, who was named as the first Governor of New France.[3]
The French colonies in what is now eastern Canada continued to grow over the decades that followed. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the French also decided to begin settling a colony on the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, a region which they called Louisiana after King Louis XIV of France. The town of New Orleans was founded there in 1718. By that time a strategy of containing British expansion in North America was evolving in the context of the Second Hundred Years’ War (1689–1815) between France and Britain. In order to hem the British into the east coast region of North America where they controlled the Thirteen Colonies, the French planned to expand westwards from Quebec to the Great Lakes and up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from Louisiana to the Great Lakes and the Great Plains. Thus, where New France had previously referred to what is now eastern Canada, it now began to include the Louisiana Territory, encompassing much of what is termed the American Midwest in modern parlance.[4]
Less than half a century later this policy of containment of British expansion was in ruins. In 1754 the French and Indian Wars commenced as the British and French clashed over control over several forts on the Ohio River and surrounding regions. This subsequently morphed into the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). When it ended in 1763, the French ceded control over the Canadian provinces to Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, while the Louisiana Territory was annexed by Spain, bringing New France to an end.[5] As something of a coda to the history of New France, during the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon Bonaparte reclaimed the Louisiana Territory from Spain in 1800, with vague hopes of rebuilding France’s North American empire, but three years later, after French efforts at restoring control over Haiti failed, he sold the vast Louisiana Territory to the government of the United States in the transaction known as the Louisiana Purchase.[6]
Extent of migration to New France
For all that the French government claimed to control vast swathes of territory in New France, ones approximating to about half of modern-day Canada and all of the American Midwest, there was never a great amount of migration from France to North America. In a good decade, a few thousand French people migrated across the Atlantic. Indeed, such was the reticence of French people to strike out across the ocean and form a new life in the Americas that King Louis XIV and his government began an active propaganda campaign to encourage migration by sending the King’s Daughters, 800 French women, to New France between 1663 and 1673. These efforts aside, there was still only an estimated 70,000 people living in New France by the time the French and Indian Wars broke out in 1754. Many of these lived in Quebec City or New Orleans. Vast stretches of New France had barely a Frenchman living in them and the colonial population was restricted in most of the Louisiana Territory to a few fur-trading stations and forts on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.[7] This contrasted sharply with the British Thirteen Colonies, the population of which had expanded to around one and a half million by 1750.[8]
Demographic impact of New France
Although the level of French settlement in New France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was very minor by comparison with, for instance, Spanish colonial settlement in the Caribbean and Central America and British settlement in the Thirteen Colonies that eventually became the United States, French colonization of Nouvelle France still had a major bearing on the demography of North America. Approximately five million Canadians claim French heritage today, approximately 12.5% of the country’s population. The figure is even larger when it comes to people who have been strongly influenced by French culture. Approximately one-in-five Canadians speak French. These demographic patterns are much more pronounced in the eastern provinces that the French colonized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.[9]
The demographic impact has been less pronounced in the American Midwest. Several hundred thousand people in Louisiana and some US states further to the north and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico claim French heritage, while Creole culture in the region shows the residual influence of French culture in terms of their food, language and other aspects of their culture. Thus, a quarter of a millennium after New France started to come to an end, its legacy far outweighs the scale of migration which occurred from France to North America during the early modern era.[10]
Research French Canadian Ancestors on MyHeritage
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
See also
Explore more about New France
- Canada, People of Quebec records collection on MyHeritage
- Canada Newspapers, 1752-2007 records collection on MyHeritage
- Canada Burials, 1800-2019 records collection on MyHeritage
- 1851 Canada Census records collection on MyHeritage
- Canada, Nova Scotia Parish Baptisms, 1748-1930 records collection on MyHeritage
- Louisiana, Orleans Parish Births records collection on MyHeritage
- Louisiana, Orleans Parish Estate Files, 1804-1846 records collection on MyHeritage
- Louisiana, Death Index, 1819-1969 records collection on MyHeritage
- How to Find Birth, Marriage and Death Registrations in Canada at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Hidden Quebec Records on FamilySearch at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Quebec Civil and Parish Registers at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Quebec Census Records at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/collection/new-france
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/jacques-cartier
- ↑ https://www.historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/the-explorers/samuel-de-champlain-1604-1616/
- ↑ Richard W. Van Alstyne, ‘The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American Diplomatic History, 1686–1890’, in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 36, No. 2 (September, 1949), pp. 215–238.
- ↑ https://history.state.gov/milestones/1750-1775/treaty-of-paris
- ↑ https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/louisiana-lewis-clark/the-louisiana-purchase/
- ↑ https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/peuplement-de-la-nouvelle-france
- ↑ https://web.viu.ca/davies/H320/population.colonies.htm
- ↑ https://minorityrights.org/communities/french-canadians/
- ↑ Nicholas R. Spitzer, ‘Monde Créole: The Cultural World of French Louisiana Creoles and the Creolization of World Cultures’, in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 116, No. 459 (Winter, 2003), pp. 57–72.