The Story of French (15 page)

What exactly was holding the French back? The first answer is that they weren’t that interested in colonizing. At best their overall interest in naval affairs was sporadic. It’s not that the French lacked vision; rather, geography forced them to focus on Europe. Unlike Spain and Britain, France’s borders were not guarded by natural obstacles. While Britain was aggressively building New World colonies, France was obsessed with fending off the Hapsburg Empire. Because France had its capital right along its longest open border, its foreign-policy priority was to keep its neighbours weak and disunited, by either diplomacy or war. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the conquest of Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comté allowed France to roll back its borders to natural barriers of mountains and rivers. Colbert and Richelieu knew that the solution to France’s poor colonial record was to build a strong navy. When Colbert came to power in 1661, there were twenty-six thousand merchant vessels in Europe: thirteen thousand Dutch, six thousand English, and only two thousand French. Colbert planted entire forests of oak, hoping that future generations of the French would build more ships, but he himself was sucked into European conflicts and diverted from New World issues.

France’s colonial model, which was based on charter companies, also discouraged settlement. The charter companies were supposed to bring in settlers, but to keep their costs down they brought as few people as possible and invested little in infrastructure to keep them there. The very nature of the fur trade also worked against settlement. Fur trading depends on unspoiled nature and good relations with the Natives, who act as the harvesters. The highest grade of beaver skin was dubbed
castor gras
(greasy beaver) because it had been worn by a Native for two years. Such an economy doesn’t encourage settlement—agriculture displaces wildlife. The companies preferred hiring single men for short contracts. By 1617, nine years after the foundation of Quebec, only one French family had settled in New France, that of Louis Hébert, an apothecary, who came to Quebec with his wife and three children. Hébert’s daughter gave birth to the first (French) native of New France in 1620, twelve years after Quebec was founded. Meanwhile, Virginians and Bostonians had arrived with families and started multiplying the minute they set foot in the New World. Until 1660 there were seven males for every female in New France. Colbert changed the ratio when he emptied the Parisian orphanages of nubile girls—the so-called
filles du roy
—and shipped them to Canada to marry the settlers, but the initiative was too little, too late to offset the demographic imbalance with the American colonies.

And, of course, the French themselves weren’t particularly drawn to the idea of moving to the colonies. The French have never migrated en masse to any colony, the only exception being Algeria. In Britain in the same period, the Enclosure provoked a rural exodus to the cities—and the New World was there to soak up surplus labour. The French, meanwhile, were obsessed with demography and terrified by the idea of letting too many people go—they were the first people to practise birth control in Europe, a phenomenon that had created a serious population slump by the 1800s. The colony of New France also had many built-in disincentives such as scurvy, mosquitoes and cold, not to mention the dangers of the trip over. The Iroquois wars that lasted from 1641 to 1660 also discouraged settlers, right at a time when the demographic imbalance could still have been corrected.

France also missed the boat with one group of potentially dynamic colonizers: the Huguenots (French Protestants). In 1598 Henri IV had passed the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed freedom of conscience and protection to Protestants. These rights were progressively eroded until Louis XIV completely revoked the Edict in 1685. Fleeing persecution, three hundred thousand French Protestants left France for neighbouring countries, and they turned out to be industrious settlers when they went overseas. Many Huguenots had been skilled tradesmen, merchants and artisans in France. In exile they tended to turn to professions such as journalism, publishing, editing and teaching French. London-born Peter Mark Roget, author of the famous thesaurus, was a descendant of Huguenots. Champlain himself was a converted Huguenot, as was his boss, Pierre Du Gua de Monts. Pieter Minuit, famous for buying the island of Manhattan for sixty guilders, founded a prosperous Dutch colony in which French Huguenots were prominent. Other famous Huguenots include Paul Revere (formerly Revoire) and Davy Crockett, whose ancestor, Monsieur de Croquetagne, had been a captain of Louis XIV’s Guard. In Canada, famous Huguenot descendants included John Kinder Labatt, founder of the brewing company, and Laura Secord, a Loyalist heroine whose name would be given to a chocolate empire.

Yet relatively few Huguenots travelled from France to New France. Richelieu forbade them to emigrate to the New World; he feared, with reason, that they would side with fellow Protestants when they got there and switch allegiance to the British Crown. Of the three hundred thousand Huguenots who left France, about a third went to the Netherlands, a quarter to Switzerland and some German states—in 1700, the Huguenots made up twenty percent of the population of Berlin—and only a third to England, Ireland and the Americas combined. In the end, it seems, the Huguenots were no keener on the cold, mosquitoes and scurvy than French Catholics were.

Other French values worked against colonialism. Like their fellow Europeans, the French were curious to hear stories of adventure from the New World, but an important segment of the elite was simply not interested in questions of industry, science, technology, money or markets—issues that were vital to the development of a trading empire. The French Academy, of course, completely ignored scientific and technical vocabulary (as well as new vocabulary from the colonies). Unlike the English Puritans, French settlers were not driven by the idea of building an ideal French society, except maybe as an afterthought. The French Crown instead created an absolutist society that did not encourage free enterprise or local initiative. In New France, colonists were forbidden to establish towns; only parishes were allowed, which is why so many towns in Quebec have saints’ names. Finally, France’s colonial adventure was a victim of France’s growing brilliance. When the very capable General Frontenac started showing some initiative in New France, Colbert reprimanded him: “Even if Canada may seem far from the Sun, nobody should undertake things without the King.” Indeed, who wanted to be so far from the Sun?

Contrary to what most North Americans have come to believe, France’s loss of America was not inevitable. At the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, demographics definitely favoured the British, at a ratio of twenty to one. By 1750 the New World held 1.5 million British, compared to about fifty-five thousand Canadiens, thirteen thousand Acadians and no more than a few thousand settlers in Louisiana. Yet militarily the French were much stronger, to the extent that it was the thirteen British colonies that felt threatened. Until the middle of the Seven Years War (1756–63) France invested proportionately more in military resources in New France than the British did in the Thirteen Colonies, and the French controlled the main waterways. The very organization of New France was fundamentally military. Many of its first settlers were former soldiers. Houses and farms were organized in a way that favoured defence and the mustering of forces—a layout that is still obvious today. France’s strong militia, seasoned in wilderness tactics and guerrilla warfare, fought and moved like the Natives, allowing the French to accomplish much more with far fewer people over a territory twenty times larger than that controlled by the English.

To compensate for their numeric inferiority, the French became exceedingly skilled at building alliances with the Natives. In some years the small colony could spend as much as eight to ten percent of its budget buying the loyalty of Native chiefs with guns, alcohol and lavish meals. Rare was the chief who did not possess a medallion of the King of France, the French “father.” In 1701
La Grande paix
(Great Peace) of Montreal was signed by more than sixty First Nations. The thirteen British colonies, meanwhile, were suffering from infighting, lack of unity and poor military organization.

The wind might have continued to blow favourably for the French had it not been for the providential character of William Pitt the Elder (1708–78). Pitt became minister of war after the British suffered a series of military disasters in the early stages of the Seven Years War. Grandson of a former governor in India, he had colonialism in his blood. In Pitt’s view, Britain had spent too much energy on battles in Europe. He redirected England’s military objectives towards the seas, with the objective of destroying French trade and ousting the French from India and America. While France committed heavy resources to the battles in Europe—as many as a hundred thousand men—Pitt put all he had into America. He chose competent generals and admirals, and finally convinced the Thirteen Colonies to coordinate their efforts against Quebec.

For the first time, all of Britain’s advantages came together: huge American colonies, a massive navy, good naval policy and some good luck. The Royal Navy generally had better training, a better sense of the sea and more heavy ships of the line—although the differences were not as great as is generally assumed. In the summer of 1759 a quarter of the British fleet was anchored in front of Quebec City. The French lost the battle of the Plains of Abraham in September 1759, then actually won a lesser-known second battle of the Plains and retook Quebec City the following April. The exhausted French expected reinforcements that never came, and then had to abandon Quebec when more British sails appeared on the horizon.

Even then, however, America was not lost to France. An odd thing happened during the peace negotiations. In 1763 the British offered to let France keep either Canada or the Sugar Islands (Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe). The offer was surprising, given Britain’s victories in Canada and India. What did they have to gain from making concessions to France? In fact, their victory was fragile. Britain was exhausted from fighting the Seven Years War, and near bankruptcy. It could not really afford to destroy France’s overseas commerce, because in doing so it would have delivered a larger blow to the economy of Europe than Britain’s economy could withstand.

With what today seems like an absolutely stunning lack of foresight, the French chose the Sugar Islands over New France. They were able to hold on to their Caribbean islands and five trading posts in southeast India—in Pondicherry and Chandernagore, which they would keep until 1954—but abruptly ended their 160-year presence in America. France also kept the island of Gorée, off the coast of Senegal, which was still an essential slave-trading transfer point. We visited one of the former Sugar Islands, Guadeloupe, now a French overseas territory. Wandering past the tumbledown apartment blocks in its capital city, Pointe-à-Pitre, and gazing at the meagre remains of the island’s once-flourishing sugar and banana plantations, as Quebeckers we were stunned to think that the French had traded Canada for this place. Although it’s better off than many of its Caribbean neighbours, the island’s economy is largely dependent on mainland France.

The choice may now seem short-sighted, but at the time it was rational. The French Antilles represented twenty percent of France’s total external trade. The islands—in particular Saint-Domingue—were the richest colonies in the world. Canada, by comparison, was a money pit. The influential Encyclopedists of eighteenth-century France believed strongly that only trade, not conquest, could produce wealth. They were convinced France would be better off without America, and they convinced many others as well. In his philosophical tale
Candide,
Voltaire dismissed New France as “a few acres of snow,” not worth the money France had already spent on it.

Yet French didn’t disappear with France’s departure from America. It survived, largely thanks to the work of French colonial mastermind Étienne François, Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s naval minister (1761–66) and then war minister (1766–70). With his vision and sense of purpose, Choiseul was a match for Pitt. The French had begun settling in Greater Louisiana at the beginning of the eighteenth century, founding villages and building forts. Most of the settlers up the Mississippi were domesticated
coureurs des bois
who had turned to farming the rich land of the upper Illinois (now Missouri). At the time Louisiana encompassed what are now fifteen states west of the Mississippi, right up to the Canadian border. Choiseul knew the French were going to lose anyway, so in 1762 he secretly ceded Greater Louisiana to Spain, as payback for siding with France in the Seven Years War and as a way of keeping it out of British hands.

Spanish rule over Greater Louisiana turned out to be so mild that it hardly made a mark on the French culture there. French settlers moved over to the west bank of the Mississippi to avoid British rule. Over the next seventy-five years this group would be constantly reinforced by French Canadians from Quebec who joined in the fur trade—to the point that most of the early legends of the American frontier were French (more on this in chapter 10). Even in the state of Louisiana, French was sheltered. The Spanish regime was not anti-French and not interested in assimilating the different groups that lived under its rule. The Spanish even invited Catholic Acadian colonists to Louisiana to help them defend the west bank of the Mississippi against the British, and later against the Americans. French speakers were a resilient group in Louisiana; they were the assimilators, soaking up Spanish, German and Portuguese immigrants, whose cultures would be absorbed into the French-speaking Cajun culture, with its unique music, food and language.