First French colonial empire: A Visual History

France's first overseas empire began with Cartier's voyages of the 1530s and Champlain's founding of Quebec in 1608. It grew to include New France along the St Lawrence and Mississippi, the enormously profitable sugar colonies of Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe, posts in Senegal and India, and Louisiana. Defeat in the Seven Years' War (1763) cost France Canada and India; the Haitian Revolution destroyed Saint-Domingue; and Napoleon sold Louisiana in 1803. By 1814 only scattered islands and posts remained.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is First French colonial empire. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

French colonial claims

Claims in North America far exceeded settled or controlled land.

Timeline of the First French colonial empire

1. 1534
   Cartier claims Canada
2. 1608
   Quebec founded
3. 1682
   La Salle claims Louisiana
4. 1697
   Saint-Domingue ceded by Spain
5. 1713
   Treaty of UtrechtAcadia and Newfoundland lost.
6. 1759
   Fall of Quebec
7. 1763
   Treaty of ParisCanada and Louisiana lost.
8. 1791
   Haitian Revolution begins
9. 1803
   Louisiana sold
10. 1804
    Haiti independent

New France

Champlain founded Quebec in 1608 and French explorers, missionaries and fur traders pushed along the Great Lakes to the Mississippi; La Salle claimed Louisiana in 1682. New France was vast but thinly settled, with only about 70,000 colonists by 1760 against over a million in British America. Its strength lay in alliances with Native nations and the fur trade.

Sugar and slaves

The Caribbean islands were the real prize. Saint-Domingue (Haiti), taken from Spain in 1697, became the most profitable colony in the world, worked by half a million enslaved Africans; France's slave trade shipped over a million people. Trading posts at Pondicherry and Chandernagore competed with the British in India, and Dupleix briefly made France the leading European power in the south.

Loss

The Seven Years' War was a catastrophe: Quebec fell in 1759, and the 1763 Treaty of Paris gave Canada and everything east of the Mississippi to Britain and Louisiana to Spain, leaving France with the sugar islands and five Indian towns. Revenge in the American war brought little territory. The French Revolution triggered the slave uprising of 1791 in Saint-Domingue, which became independent Haiti in 1804 after defeating Napoleon's expedition. Napoleon, having briefly recovered Louisiana, sold it to the United States in 1803.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Second French colonial empire (1830 to 1980)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• Spanish Empire (1492 to 1976)
• Napoleonic (First French) Empire (1804 to 1815)
• Oyo Empire (1300 to 1836)
• Danish colonial empire (1536 to 1953)

Wars of the same era and region

• Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763)
• War of the Spanish Succession (1701 to 1714)
• American Revolution (1775 to 1783)
• French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792 to 1815)
• Nine Years' War (1688 to 1697)
• Deccan wars (1680 to 1707)

8 surprising things about the First French colonial empire

1. At the 1763 peace Voltaire dismissed Canada as 'a few acres of snow' and thought France was well rid of it.
2. In 1763 France chose to keep the sugar island of Guadeloupe rather than Canada; sugar was worth more than fur.
3. Saint-Domingue produced more wealth than all thirteen British American colonies combined.
4. France's Indian empire is remembered in Pondicherry, which remained French until 1954.
5. The Louisiana Purchase sold about 2.1 million km2 for 15 million dollars, roughly 3 cents an acre.
6. France ruled Senegal's Saint-Louis and Goree from the seventeenth century, the seed of its second African empire.
7. The Acadians expelled by the British in 1755 became the Cajuns of Louisiana.
8. France's fur-trading alliances gave it influence over a territory it could never have garrisoned.

Sources

• French colonial empire Wikipedia
• New France Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Treaty of Paris 1763 US Office of the Historian
• Philip Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700 (2008) Johns Hopkins University Press

Back to all empires and wars