New France

The History of New France spans more than two hundred years and includes most of the Eastern half of North America plus the Caribbean.

Two of the most important early explorers were Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain.

In general the story of the French colonial experiment is that, unlike the Spanish Empire, the French found no existing indigenous empires to plunder or major deposits of minerals to exploit, and unlike the English colonies nearby, very few French men and women came to the Western Hemisphere to settle.

The French colonies were primarily concerned with the lucrative fur trade in the north and with plantation slavery in the south. French relations with indigenous peoples were generally good, or at least better than the Spanish and English, with the notable exception of a bitter enmity with the Iroquois Confederacy.

The French controlled two of North America's greatest rivers, the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi and had numerous indigenous allies, yet were ultimately ejected from North America by the British. What brought the French Empire down was the population mismatch with the growing English settlements and Britain's superior ability to move its military forces by sea. Several times major French strongholds like Quebec and Louisbourg were captured by the British only to be returned following the result of negotiations were North America was an afterthought compared to European developments. The final blow came in 1759 with the capture of Quebec and Montreal, and in 1763 France relinquished all claims north of the Caribbean except for tiny Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

From this point on, the history of continental North America is the history of the British Empire and its transformation into the present-day countries of the United States and Canada as well as the transformation of the Spanish Empire into Mexico and the interaction of Mexico and remaining Spanish claims with the emerging Anglo-American nations.

The French briefly had the opportunity to revive their continental North American empire when Napoleon I got much of the Louisiana region back form Spain, but he almost immediately sold it to the United States, ushering in the era of American westward expansion. Napoleon tried a little harder to hold onto Haiti - at the time an incredibly lucrative slavery based plantation economy - but eventually had to give up on that as well in the face of a slave uprising that gave rise to the modern nation of Haiti. This failure by the French (and success by the Haitians) concluded the French chapter of North American history (excepting a brief foray into Mexico in the 1870s and a few small islands).

After being re-organized in 1717, the provinces of New France were:

• Acadia (l'Acadie): today Maine, Atlantic Canada and Saint Pierre and Miquelon
• Canada (le Canada):, basically the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence River, today Quebec, Southern Ontario and Upstate New York, plus:
  • the Pays d'en haut or "up country": today Northern Ontario, the upper Midwest, and parts of Manitoba, where France did not control the territory but did have influence with the local indigenous peoples
• Louisiana (la Louisiane): basically the drainage basin of the Mississippi River, including all of the Southern States west of the Appalachian Mountains, and the lower Midwest (the "Illinois Country"). Theoretically, it also included the Great Plains and Mountain West states, but France never had a permanent presence there.