France: explorations and colonization(for individual work)
France: explorations and colonization
During the 1500s, other European nations began to explore and colonize, one of the most important being France. From the start, Spain and Portugal attempted to lock these "northern wave” countries out of Atlantic exploration. At stake were immense wealth, military power, and Catholic-Protestant rivalry.
France’s king Francis I (1515–47) and his supporters rejected that the Portuguese possessed Brazil and Spain had Americas under the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).
The principal tool used by the French to finance exploration and colonization was the joint-stock company (participants joined their shares to make adventure).
Initially, the only places open to new exploration were those farther to the north, which the Spanish and Portuguese cared little about. Hoping that a Northeast Passage (along Russia's northern coast) or a Northwest Passage (through Canada's northern waters) might provide an alternative route to Asia, French mariners turned to Arctic and North Atlantic voyaging. They came no closer to Asia as a result of these expeditions, but they did discover rich fishing and whaling grounds, and they developed an interest in the northern coast of North America.
In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian navigator sponsored by the King of France, sailed from what is now North Carolina to Cape Breton and southern Newfoundland.
Moreover, by the late 1500s, the French had grown strong enough and sufficiently skilled at seafaring to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese for control over Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific sea routes—and even over ports and colonies.
Upon returning from his third voyage to the so-called New World in 1498, Columbus already feared French attackers near Madeira and took precautions to avoid an encounter.
The French were first active in the Atlantic Triangle in the period of Columbus’s famous voyages, but it was not until Cortés’s conquest of Mexico (1519–21) that large amounts of American treasure began to flow back to Spain.
A prelude to pirate acts to come occurred in 1523, when a Norman corsair (from the contemporary Spanish term, corsario, a pirate) named Jean Florin (or Fleury) captured several Spanish ships off Cape St. Vincent (southwest Portugal). The ships, which were carrying a portion of the treasure stolen from the Aztec, or Mexica, ruler Moctezuma, had encountered other French corsairs near the Azores and had lost some valuables. Florin, however, ended up with the lion’s share of the booty; by some accounts his opportune attack yielded 62,000 ducats in gold, 600 marks (c. 140 kg) of pearls, and several tons of sugar.
French corsairs raided the Spanish Caribbean between 1500 and 1559. Official war between Spain and France was halted by the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, but not all of France’s subjects were of one mind.
French Huguenots (Protestants) tried to colonize Florida in Northern America and Brazil.
In Brazil the French sought to trade with coastal indigenous groups for dyewood, or brazil-wood, from which the modern nation takes its name, but the Portuguese, though far more interested in their African and East Indian ventures, did not tolerate the encroachment. In spite of increasing Portuguese hostility, the French continued attempts to plant an “Antarctic France” in Brazil into the 1560s, when the last colonists, most of them Protestant refugees, or Huguenots, were finally driven from the region.
Iberian removal of the Huguenot bases of Florida and Brazil did not cause French corsairs to disappear from the West Indies. Instead, the French turned to strong-armed contraband trading, breaking into Spain’s (and to a lesser extent Portugal’s) tightly held colonial markets at every opportunity.
The French colonial presence in North America began in Canada, in the 1530s, when Jacques Cartier charted the St Lawrence River. It was during the early 1600s that France established its first cities in Canada—among them Quebec, founded by Samuel Champlain in 1608—and it created the Company of New France in the 1620s. Later in the 1600s, the French moved southward, claiming the vast Louisiana territory, which included the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin. Their highest priority in these areas was the fur trade.
French hunters and trappers were more adept than other Europeans at cooperating with Native Americans (especially the Hurons and Algonquins), adapting themselves to local customs and environments.
In the south and along the Gulf of Mexico, the French challenged the Spanish, and they seized Caribbean islands such as Martinique and Saint Domingue (today Haiti) with nearby isle of Tortuga, the seventeenth century buccaneers’ base.
In the Caribbean the French grew sugarcane using slave labour. Slaves were transported from Africa. The French were active slave traders.
Also in the 1600s, the French, like the other northern nations, elbowed their way into the Indian Ocean, competing with the Portuguese for trade. The 1700s were less kind to France's colonial efforts. Its principal enemy by this time was England, which took Canada from France as a result of the French and Indian Wars (1754-1763), which were related to the Seven Years' War in Europe. Although the province of Quebec retained its French heritage, French-speaking Acadians were driven out of eastern Canada and forced to resettle in Louisiana—where their descendants are still known as Cajuns. Also during the Seven Years’ War, English troops defeated Mughal states allied to the French, ensuring that England, not France, would go on to gain colonial mastery over India.
Expert questions
1. What were the stimuli of the French explorations and colonial expansion?
2. What strategies and tools did the French use in their colonial expansions and capital accumulation?
3. What role did the joint-stock companies (name the most important) play in the French colonization? Why, you think, were the joint-stock companies involved?
4. What were the main achievements of the French expansion? Were there any falls in this expansion during the considered period?
5. Compared with other nations (Spain, Portugal, England and Holland) what were the distinct features of France? (before giving answer read other nations in the theme 8 section)