French Expansion in North America Cornelius J. Jaenen University of Ottawa FRreNcH INTEREST BEGAN with the Breton fishermen who are recorded as having reached North America in 1504, but Normans and Bretons probably frequented the Grand Banks to harvest cod and visited the mainland to hunt walrus decades earlier. In 1508, Thomas Aubert, a navigator from Dieppe in the service of the prominent shipowner Jean Ango, reconnoitered the northern American coastline and brought back the first Amerindians seen in France. Their costumes, arms and canoes caused great excitement in Rouen, where they were baptized with great pomp. It marked the beginniong of French missionary interest in the New World. The Crown became interested in economic possibilities, employ- ing areligious civilizing mission as justification, after 1524 when Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine navigator in the service of Francis I, recon- noitred and mapped the coasts from Florida to Cape Breton. Jacques Cartier was then sent to claim land for the crown and raised the French flag on the Gaspé Peninsula at the mouth of the St.Lawrence river in 1534. In two subsequent years he explored the St. Lawrence valley as far as the present Montreal, a site which he named. Settlement was first attempted at Quebec in 1541 by La Rocque de Roberval, a Protestant nobleman named lieutenant-general in charge of colonization, evangelization and mining exploration for Jacques Cartier’ s third expedition. Famine, disease and the hostility aroused among the St. The History Teacher Volume 34 Number 2 February 2001 © Society for History Education156 Comelius J. Jaenen Lawrence Iroquois brought the small colony to a rapid conclusion after a particularly harsh winter. Admiral Coligny sponsored two further Hugue- not colonies—Charlesfort (in South Carolina) in 1560 under Jean Ribaut and Fort Caroline (in Florida) in 1564 by René de Laudonniére. These were too near to the homeward route of the Spanish treasure fleets to ignore and consequently the settlers were massacred. Thus these Hugue- nots, or Protestants, had the first opportunity at overseas colonization, but religious wars at home and opposition abroad thwarted these early projects. It was not until 1604-05 in Acadia and 1608 at Quebec, under the leadership of Samuel de Champlain in the employ of the merchant association of Gua de Monts, that permanent settlements were estab- lished from which continental expansion followed. Unlike the English who established agricultural seaboard colonies, the French in the seventeenth century established commercial comptoirs administered by chartered companies and merchant associations at Port Royal, Placentia, Tadoussac and Quebec. Cod, whalebone and walrus ivory and oil were the first commodities sought, soon followed by furs and hides, especially beaver pelts. As long as Native American traders would bring the peltries to these beachheads there was little incentive for expansion into the heartland. Iroquois hostility, depletion of game in proximate regions and competition necessitated penetration up the St. Lawrence to establish posts at Trois Riviéres and Ville-Marie (Montreal). Settlement grew slowly after the institution of royal government to replace company rule in 1663. Consequently, an agricultural support base and rural parishes began to take on importance. Montreal became a key military base and staging center for hinterland trade and exploration. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, during the wars of Louis XIV that pitted English and French colonies against each other, Canada took on strategic importance far outweighing its commercial value. For geo-political imperatives, permission was granted by Versailles to found acolony at Detroit in 1701. Canadian settlers moved westwards into the upper Mississippi basin in what became known as the Illinois Country. At the mouth of the Mississippi the colony of Louisiana was settled directly from France. After 1713 Governor Vaudreuil had a band of forts built in the interior to serve as bases for trade and negotiation with Native American peoples and military officers replaced the missionaries in the role of diplomatic agents. In addition to this line of forts that kept the English colonists east of the Appalachian watershed, French traders in competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company for hinterland furs moved beyond the Great Lakes onto the western plains, as far as the Missouri Coteau and Athabasca region, establishing their headquarters at Kaministiquia (Thunder Bay, Ontario) in 1717. To the south they rangedFrench Expansion in North America 157 over the area drained by the Missouri, Arkansas and Red rivers. In other words, New France had become a continental colony by the early eigh- teenth century. Having outlined the French colonial effort, the first point I should like to make is that no single model of colonial expansion, no single paradigm of government, and no single framework of societal evolution can ad- equately characterize or explain New France. Imperialistic impressions of absolute monarchy, theocratic rule, mercantilist restrictions and met- ropolitan direction have led to a misunderstanding of French colonialism more by reaction to these deterministic characteristics than by application of these qualifications. How absolute was the monarchy, how dominant the church, how mercantilist the local economy, and even how control- ling was the intruding European society over indigenous peoples in terms of language, laws, customs, values, economy, warfare? Even a nationalist Quebec historian like Guy Frégault, under whom I studied, acknowl- edged that while government was absolutist in theory, it was paternalistic in practice. William Eccles has gone so far as to evoke an embryonic colonial welfare state. Social historians in Canada were for a time ob- sessed with the model of dominants/dominés. This came to be seen as a distortion of the catch-all lower class. It was a case in which what appeared to be simple was only what had been simplified. It is important that the French colonial experience must be seen as a very complex and diversified historical phenomenon. This point made, I would next observe that much colonial history had been founded on myths of founders, martyrs, explorers, warriors and governors. But the great man—and occasionally great woman—approach later gave way to a period of debunking of heroes. I think of W. J. Eccles’ doctoral thesis debunking Governor Frontenac, in spite of the fact he was the only colonial governor ever to be given a second mandate on popular demand; or of Guy Frégault debunking Intendant Bigot as a rapacious Frenchman defrauding a poor Canadian colony; or of Guy Lafléche questioning Jesuit martyrdom; and more recently still, Patrice Groulx destroying the legend of young Adam Dollard and his fellow youths as saviours of Ville-Marie from Iroquois fury. Of course, we also have the rehabilitators, such as Jean-Claude Dubé’s vision of pious crusading Knight Montmagny, first colonial governor of New France, and André Cété’s revision of Michel Cadet, once the reviled commissiary respon- sible for Canada’s enormous debt in 1759-1760. It is evident that we must look beyond and deeper than the careers of nation-builders in our under- standing of colonial history. Next it is important to understand that the spatial, temporal and inter- actional diversities within a national colonial experience need to be borne158 Cornelius J. Jaenen in mind. I quickly learned at least two things in my initial study of New France. First of all, that French colonists were a minority in this vast continent, and also a minority within the territory they claimed as New France. Little by little, I turned my attention to that dynamic majority, the Amerindian societies. In the second place, I became aware that French behavior and policies in the several regions of New France had much less to do with national character and religious allegiance than hitherto as- sumed. It became evident to me that French behavior towards Native American peoples, for example, while very different from the English approach along the Atlantic seaboard, also differed greatly in Louisiana and the Antilles from relations in Acadia and Canada. Most Native American communities in the northern region were regarded as military allies while in Louisiana the Native American peoples were very often treated as enemies. Slavery illustrates the point as well. Slavery, gov- ered in varying degrees by the Code Noir (1685), existed in all the colonial regions. In Louisiana it involved largely Black slaves working on plantations, while in the northern regions it was urban domestic slavery involving Amerindians as well as Blacks, owned by government officials, religious communities, military officers and merchant families. Consequently, the French commercial port of Nantes did not have much commercial interest in Quebec or Louisbourg compared to New Orleans. Generalizations on national, cultural, or religious criteria could be mis- leading. These three approaches help us to understand the nature of New France and its continental expansion in the framework of European colonialism. New France consisted of a number of distict gouvernements:—three in Canada, which at one time included the IIli- nois country and for fourteen years the Hudson Bay region—Acadia, Plaisance or French Newfoundland, Louisiana, and Isle Royale consist- ing the islands of Cape Breton and Isle St-Jean (Prince Edward Island) with its capital at Louisbourg, and finally the far western Mer de I’ Ouest stretching from the Great Lakes to the Rockies. All this immense terri- tory—from the Atlantic coast to Santa Fe in the south-west and to the Athabasca country in the north-west, from the height of land of the Arctic drainage basin to the mouth of the Mississippi—constitutionally at least, came under the civil jurisdiction of the Governor-General as the King’s representative, and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishop of Que- bec. These various components of New France grew out of different overseas operations: Acadia and Placentia out of the fishery; Canada and its hinterland extensions from commercial counters; Louisiana and Isle Royale (Louisbourg) begun for strategic reasons in a context of interna- tional rivalries, the former developing into a plantation colony with someFrench Expansion in North America 159 resemblance to the Antillian colonies, and the latter as an international commercial entrepot, naval base and fishing centre. Of all the regions of New France, Canada came closest to meeting the objectives of the Crown as a more culturally homogeneous and thoroughly Catholic society than France itself, with uniformity in civil law, weights and measures, and political power concentrated after 1663 in a central royal administration. In 1950, Marcel Giraud postulated that Louisiana’s distinctiveness, when compared to Canada, was traceable to eighteenth century metro- politan conditions such as an impoverished Crown and a less zealous Church. Both Louisiana and Isle Royale (Louisbourg) were founded in the early eighteenth century, whereas Acadia and Canada were founded in the early seventeenth century, when France itself was a patchwork kingdom of different regions, administrative units, legal codes, tax sys- tems, currencies, etc. symbolically united by monarchy and Gallican church. My question is: was it the changed metropolitan situation that accounts for differences in colonial character and policy, or the particular temporal, spatial and interactional situation in each colony? Did not the situation in each colony also evolve over time, and not remain static, frozen into some metropolitan master plan? Conditions were as subject to change in the colonies as they were in the metropole, and both functioned in a changing international milieu. Acadia and Illinois colonists had more experience with self-rule than Canadians because of their geographic isolation from centers of control. French colonial expansion exhibited some significant changes over time and space. Canada developed from commercial beachheads at Tadoussac, Quebec and Montreal based on resource exploitation—furs and eventually wheat and lumber—into a northern agricultural enclave with its population becoming less urban with each census. By the mid- eighteenth century, four-fifths of the colonists were engaged in agricul- ture, although most of the immigrants from France had come with manual trades from urban centers. Social rank dictated economic behav- ior. The elites were often indebted because of aristocratic pretensions and investment in seigneuries, an unwise practice since land was plentiful and labor expensive. Socially and politically, Canada was known for its strong military ethos, seigneurial land-holding, Catholic exclusivity flow- ing from a strong seventeenth century dévot influence, benevolent pater- nalistic administration, and dependancy on Amerindian allies for its security and survival in the face of increasing Anglo-American hostility. The riverine colony of Canada stretching from the narrows at Quebec to the island of Montreal upstream was surveyed into narrow parallelo- grams fronting the river transportation route. In this narrow strip of colonial occupation no Native Americans needed to be displaced, a fact160 Comelius J. Jaenen of capital importance, because intertribal wars in the sixteenth century had wiped out the original occupants Cartier, Roberval and the fishing fleets had known. As these St. Lawrence lowlands became populated and cultivated, Native Americans were attracted into the area of colonization, settling on réductions (now reserves) for a variety of personal, economic and political reasons. These missionary-administered Native American seigneuries were strung out along the southern border from Quebec to Oswegatchie (Ogdensburg NY) to act as buffers between the French and English colonies. Official policy was to restrict settlement to a compact Laurentian riverine colony with scattered mission stations, trading posts and forts in the vast upper country inhabited by friendly aboriginal peoples. It was a policy of colonisation sans peuplement in the hinterland, based on the need to ensure a strong Laurentian core while avoiding displacement of Native Americans in the periphery. There were only a few relatively small European enclaves in this upper country, at Detroit and in the pays des Illinois. Those who did come from the Montreal rural region to settle in the upper Mississippi valley replicated the longlot survey but also reverted to ancient metropolitan-style compact villages surrounded by communal pasturelands and scattered individual lots in large open fields. Although St. Louis was founded as a fur-trading post, it soon resembled other Illinois country communities in pattern of settlement and land use. However, one cannot generalize about hinterland expansion because the francophone Métis would later implant the Laurentian river lot pattern on the banks of the Red River in Manitoba, just as it had already been established at Detroit, Michilimackinac, Green Bay, New Orleans and the Arkansas post. Rural farms required the labor of children to function as a family unit of production, whether salt-marsh cultivation in Acadia, mixed farming in Canada and the Illinois country, or commercial planta- tion practices in Louisiana. The only satisfactory explanation of resemblances and differences in settlement patterns and administration is a situational and contextual one. Louisbourg prospered as a center for the commercial fishery and port of trans-shipment defying protectionist and nationalistic restrictions. The absence of seigneurial tenure on Isle Royale, whose rocky terrain could support little agriculture in any case, and the virtual restriction of Catholi- cism to mission activity in the Atlantic region are remarkable. Louisbourg never had a parish church, just as throughout the French Atlantic sea- board settlements the church gave way to the family as the primary social unit of organization. Louisiana and Isle Royale resembled each other inasmuch as both had similar royal governments, an absence of seigneurial tenure, a relatively tolerant religious climate and cultural diversity. BothFrench Expansion in North America 161 New Orleans, especially after the hurricane of 1722, and Louisbourg were planned urban spaces, laid out on a rectilinear grid expressing the official values of order, symmetry, and hierarchy. Quebec, in Canada, of course, also had its upper administrative town and its lower town com- mercial section. By 1760, there were approximately 85,000 colonists in all of New France, a not unimpressive number if one remembers this population descended from a permanent immigrant base of only 12,000 souls. It included a number of ethnic backgrounds, including even English cap- tives and deserters, Basques and Germans. It is doubtful that any strong Canadian or Acadian nationalism developed in the colonial era, although there were certainly local colonial values and attitudes that differed from those in the metropole. Royal decrees and ministerial instructions from Versailles not infrequently had their origin in some colonial suggestion and request, contrary to the assumption of monarchical and bureaucratic absolutism. Louisiana’s French society cannot be accounted for merely as an extension of eighteenth century metropolitan France. Like Canada, which from 1608 to 1663 was under company rule, Louisiana was under com- pany rule from 1712 to 1731, and never enjoyed the generous royal expenditures lavished on Louisbourg. Canada did not become the object of enormous royal expenditures until after the Treaty of Aix-la Chapelle (1748), and by that time it was too late because the balance of power had already tipped in favor of the British. There is a French Canadian nation- alist myth, of course, that France never adequately supported her Cana- dian colony and that she finally abandoned it. This view fails to consider economic contingencies in an imperial framework in which Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue (Haiti) were far more rewarding over- seas colonies than Canada. This brings us to a brief consideration of French colonial economies. The wide range of economic directives commonly known as mercantil- ism was beneficial to Canada in several ways. It offered the colony protected markets within the empire for its limited exports, price controls on imported goods, controls over what could only have been ruinous enterprises such as hat-making in Montreal, and the imposition of the burdens of insurance and losses at sea on the metropolitan merchants and the Crown. On the other hand, Acadia up to it cession in 1713, and Louisbourg up to its capitulation in 1758, profited from trade with New England in spite of the numerous prohibitive decrees. Trade even then followed the price 's Often as the flag. Nor can it be assumed that monopolies have detrimental effects on local initiative. The merchants of Montreal and those of Albany engaged162 Comelius J. Jaenen in mutually profitable illicit inter-colony trade, thanks in good measure to Iroquoian intermediaries who were not subject to the commercial laws of either New France or New York. The fur monopoly of the Compagnie des Indes required it to accept all the furs arriving at its Quebec ware- house, but by 1696 the company was unable to dispose of all these furs accumulating on the wharves of cities like Rouen, the Parisian hatters refusing to buy beyond their requirements. Two safety valves emerged. One, at Montreal, where about one-third of the furs from the upper country were diverted to Albany, as already stated, to be sold in England by New York merchants, some of them presumably in competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company on the London market. A second escape route was through the Dutch connection in France by which furs ended up on the voracious Leipzig market of eastern Europe, and a few also on the London market. Some might argue this was a mere circumstantial occur- rence, nevertheless it saved the monopolists from further embarrassment and profited many entrepreneurs, ranging from the Amerindian hunters and their womenfolk who initially prepared the hides and skins, to the chain of merchants from Montreal to the final markets in Western and Eastern Europe. Much of history is circumstantial occurrence! The Illinois settlements, to my mind, constituted an intermediate zone between a northern Canadian economy and way of life and a southern colonial style. French native policy was very different as well, shifting from a more confrontational approach in the south to accommodating alliances and appeasement in the boreal colony. The British came to believe the French held the secret of befriending the aboriginal peoples— although they were quite mistaken about the influence of métissage and missionary work in the hinterland. When they created a Department of Indian Affairs in 1755, to bring Native American affairs under direct Imperial control, as had been the case in New France, they were careful to set up separate Southern and Northern departments in order to pursue different regional policies. The French held to a largely fictional centralized policy for all North America. The British believed it to be a reality and a source of strength for the cohesive defense of a territorially over-extended and demographi- cally and economically weak colony, as well as for the prolonged mainte- nance of important Amerindian alliances. The weakness of the Anglo- American colonies was seen as precisely this lack of unity and cohesion, and lack of good working relationships with large numbers of the aborigi- nal populations. Perhaps the most relevant comparison of another colo- nial regime in America with France would be Russian expansion from Siberia to the Aleutians and down the Pacific coast to Bodega Bay in the eighteenth century. Here was an imperial expansion into the New WorldFrench Expansion in North America 163 more than a century later than French penetration but with similar institu- tions—the ostrogs or fur trading posts, the promyishiliniki as counter- parts of the coureurs de bois, military units and missionaries of the Orthodox faith with which Native Americans readily identified. New France collapsed in the face of overwhelming British naval and ground forces, reinforced by Anglo-American colonial contingents and a few Amerindians, most of whom would later live to regret their location south of an international border. All conquests have some traumatic incidents and consequences. Lawrence in Acadia, Wolfe and Amherst in Canada, unlike Murray and Carleton, do not rank among the military gentlemen remembered for their humanity and British fair-play. The Séguin-Brunet thesis of the traumatic results of the Conquest in the decapitation, undermining and perpetual subjugation of the Canadiens fails to take into account both historical continuity and survivalism. The effects of the conquest and cession of New France in 1760-63 must also be examined in the context of British conciliation of “His Majesty’s new subjects” through the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act of 1774, and in the context of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The cession of New France to Great Britain in 1763 assured a continuation of an ancien régime society, characterized by monarchy, state church, aristocratic values, military ethos, centralized paternalistic administration and a mercantilist economy. None of this would seem to have been possible under either continued French rule or American conquest. Let me conclude with the observation that fragments of New France live on today in Canada’s cultural landscape, its political philosophy, its institutions and its will to remain an alternative North American society. In the province of Quebec certain traits of the French régime survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One thinks especially of the compassionate authoritarianism of both state and church, the dogmatic idealism that pervades society and the family solidarity that was so characteristic of rural and small town life. In a North American continent where right-wing conservatism is rampant, Quebec politics—even radi- cal independentism—is marked by liberal social democracy rooted origi- nally in Christian humanity and social justice. As one historian observed recently, “The apple has not fallen far from the tree.”164 Comelius J. Jaenen Bibliography Choquette, Leslie. Frenchmen into Peasants, Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Dickason, Olive P. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984). Eccles, William J. France in America, rev. ed. (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1990). Ekberg, Carl. French Roots in the Illinois Country. The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Gibson, James, ed. European Settlement and Development in North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). Griffiths, Naomi. 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Société é nouvelle (Ottawa: Presses de I’ Université d’ Ottawa, 1994).Copyright © 2002 EBSCO Publishing