First French colonial empire

The distinction between a "first" and a "second" French empire is a historian's convenience, not a French idea. What actually ended in 1763 was Canada; the Caribbean islands and the Indian comptoirs survived, and the second empire — Algeria from 1830, Indochina, West Africa — grew out of them.

At a glance

What was the first French colonial empire?

A claim to most of eastern North America, a handful of Caribbean islands that produced more wealth than all of Canada, and a string of trading posts from the Senegal river to the Bay of Bengal. The North American empire was vast on paper and thin on the ground: about 70,000 people in the St Lawrence valley in 1760, against some 1.5 million in the British colonies to the south. The Caribbean islands, by contrast, were densely settled, brutally profitable and almost entirely worked by enslaved Africans.

That imbalance is the key to everything that follows. France did not lose Canada because Canadians were outnumbered in Canada; it lost Canada because Canada was worth less to it than Guadeloupe, and because the war that decided the question was fought at sea. It is also why the English colonies to the south, with twenty times the population, could absorb a continent while New France could not.

How did it begin?

With fishermen, then fur traders, then a soldier. Breton and Norman fishermen were on the Grand Banks and the Gulf of St Lawrence in the early sixteenth century, and Cartier's three voyages — 1534, 1535–36 and 1541–43 — gave France a claim and a failed colony at Charlesbourg-Royal. The fur trade, not settlement, made the colony viable: Tadoussac at the mouth of the Saguenay was a seasonal trading fair by 1600, and in 1603 Champlain made an alliance with the Innu and their allies at Tadoussac that shaped French policy for a century.

The first permanent settlements followed: Sainte-Croix in 1604, moved to Port-Royal in 1605; Quebec in 1608; Trois-Rivières in 1634; Montreal in 1642 as a missionary colony. Each was tiny, each depended on Indigenous goodwill, and each was a foothold in a continent controlled by nations the French could not conquer and had to court.

Who governed it?

Companies, then the Crown. The Company of New France — the Cent-Associés, founded in 1627 by Richelieu — was given a monopoly of the fur trade in return for bringing out 4,000 settlers by 1653, a target it never came close to meeting; it charged its hundred associates 3,000 livres each. In 1645 the company surrendered its trading rights to the Compagnie des Habitants, made up of the colony's own merchants, and in 1663 Louis XIV took the colony over as a royal province, with a governor, an intendant and a sovereign council.

Under the Crown the colony was run on the French model: the Coutume de Paris as its civil law, the seigneurial system as its land tenure, the Catholic parish as its local government. A seigneur held a long strip of land with frontage on the river — typically one league by three — and granted it out to censitaires in return for a cens, a rente, the banalités (the seigneur's mill and oven) and a few days' corvée. There were some 220 seigneuries by the end of the regime, covering about 36,500 square kilometres. It was a feudal system transplanted to a forest, and it survived the conquest.

Who went there?

About 10,000 migrants in total between 1535 and 1763, of whom some 2,000 were women. That is the striking figure: Canada was built by natural increase, not by immigration. The population reached 3,216 in 1666, about 10,000 by 1680 and about 70,000 by 1760 — a growth rate no other European colony in North America matched, achieved by large families and low mortality rather than by a continued flow of settlers.

The Crown tried to accelerate it. The filles du roi — about 800, some sources say 850, young women sent between 1663 and 1673 with a dowry and a passage — had an average age of 24, received 100 livres, and about 41 per cent were given an additional 50-livre dowry. Engagés signed thirty-six-month contracts and worked them off; more than 13,000 soldiers were sent out over the period, and many stayed. By 1760 the colony had about 100 parishes, 84 priests, 30 Sulpicians, 25 Jesuits, 24 Récollets and more than 200 nuns.

How did the fur trade actually work?

Through Montreal. Each spring the fur fleet left Quebec for France, and each summer Indigenous traders brought pelts down the Ottawa river to Montreal, where the trade was licensed and the goods were exchanged: cloth, iron tools, guns, brandy, tobacco. The beaver was wanted for felt, and the felt trade was regulated as a monopoly from France. When the beaver market collapsed in the 1690s the Crown ordered thousands of pelts burned to hold the price.

Beyond Montreal lay the pays d'en haut, the upper country, reached through the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. The men who went there — coureurs des bois, then licensed voyageurs — spent years in the interior, married into Indigenous families, and produced a Métis society that neither France nor Britain knew quite what to do with. The congé system of 1681 tried to limit the trade to a fixed number of licensed canoes a year and never succeeded, because the interior was beyond the reach of any intendant.

What did it trade?

Beaver, above all. The fur trade was the reason for the colony and the source of its wealth: beaver felt for European hats, gathered by Indigenous hunters and traded at Montreal and the posts of the pays d'en haut — the upper country beyond the Great Lakes. The coureurs des bois who went into the interior without licences were outlawed and indispensable at the same time; the congé system of 1681 tried to regulate them by licensing a fixed number each year, and failed.

The Caribbean produced the real money. Saint-Domingue became the richest colony in the world: sugar, coffee and indigo worked by enslaved Africans, its population rising from under 50,000 around 1710 to more than 500,000 by 1790, about 90 per cent of them enslaved. From 1715 three-quarters of French slave voyages went to Saint-Domingue, and 40,000 captives were landed there in 1790 alone. Guadeloupe and Martinique were smaller but equally specialised, and the French cod fishery off Newfoundland fed the islands' enslaved populations as well as Europe.

What was the Caribbean like?

A factory in the open air. Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and Martinique were organised as plantation colonies from the start: land in large estates, labour in enslaved Africans, capital in sugar mills and boiling houses, and output for export to France under the exclusive trade system. The French islands were the most profitable colonies in the world in the eighteenth century, and their products — sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton — were re-exported across Europe.

The demography was grotesque. In Saint-Domingue the enslaved outnumbered the free by nine to one by 1790, and the free population was itself divided between whites and gens de couleur libres, who made up 5.9 per cent of the population in Martinique, 5.2 per cent in Saint-Domingue and 2.8 per cent in Guadeloupe in 1789. The terminology itself — "free people of colour" — only became common after 1763, which tells you how recently the category had become socially important.

The islands were also the empire's military weakness. They were defended by a navy that could not always reach them, and they changed hands repeatedly: the British took Guadeloupe and Martinique in the 1750s and 1760s, and France kept them in 1763 only because Choiseul judged sugar more valuable than Canada.

Who governed the islands?

A governor, an intendant and a sovereign council, on the Canadian model, with one crucial difference: the islands' councils were dominated by the planter families, and the planters' interests — the exclusive trade, the supply of captives, the defence of slavery — shaped policy more than any minister's instruction. The exclusif required the colonies to trade only with France, which kept French merchants rich, the islands supplied, and the colonists permanently resentful.

The French state also governed through the Church and the militia. Parish boundaries, the curé's records and the militia rolls were how a planter society with a small white population was administered, and the free coloured militia became, by the end of the regime, a substantial military force that the whites did not trust and could not do without.

What was slavery's place?

Central, and more central the further south one looks. The Code Noir of 1685 — sixty articles, registered at Petit-Goâve on 6 May 1687, and not called the "Code Noir" until the 1718 Saugrain edition — was the empire's slave law. It required Catholic baptism, banned interracial marriage, and declared slaves meubles, movable property, in article 44. It made slave status matrilineal in articles 12 and 13. It prescribed ear-cropping and hamstringing for runaways in article 38. And it did set limits: articles 26, 42 and 43 forbade separating husbands and wives, selling children under fourteen apart from their mothers, and torturing slaves.

In Canada slavery was never legislated. Raudot's ordinance of 13 April 1709 gave legal cover to the practice, the Code Noir was never adopted, and the matrilineal rule was nonetheless followed. About 4,200 enslaved people lived in Canada between 1671 and 1834, two-thirds of them Indigenous — the Panis, captives taken in wars with the Pawnee and other nations — and in the Quebec region 4,185 are documented, 2,683 Indigenous and 1,443 Black, with an average age of fourteen, 57 per cent female and 60 per cent living in towns. Article XLVII of the Capitulation of 1760 protected slave property, which is a fair measure of how embedded the institution was.

What was the Church's role?

Enormous, and contested. Récollets arrived in 1615, Jesuits in June 1625; the Jesuits were expelled in 1629–32 and then held a mission monopoly from 1632 to 1658. Their Relations, published from 1632, were the colony's first literature and its first propaganda: accounts of conversion, martyrdom and the wonders of the interior, sold to pious donors in France.

The Church ran the parishes, the hospitals and the schools, and the tithe — one twenty-sixth of the grain harvest, only enforceable after the edict of 1679 — was a constant grievance. Quebec became a diocese in 1674, and by the end of the regime the Church was the colony's most durable institution. It was also the institution that did most to shape the French alliance with Indigenous nations, because the missionaries were often the only French people who lived among them.

What was the place of Indigenous nations?

Everything. France never conquered New France; it allied with the nations that controlled it. The Wendat (Huron) were the great trading partners of the early colony, the Innu and Algonquin controlled the northern routes, and the Haudenosaunee — the Iroquois — fought the French and their allies for decades. The Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 ended those wars: thirty-nine nations and about 1,300 delegates met in a town of about 1,200 people, which is to say that the delegates outnumbered the inhabitants.

The French system was built on alliance, marriage, gift-giving and mission rather than on settlement. That was its strength — it could hold a continent with 70,000 settlers — and its weakness, because alliances are not sovereignty and could not be converted into an army when the British came south.

What was daily life in Canada?

A seigneurial farm along the St Lawrence: a strip of land running back from the river, a timber house with a steep roof and a stone chimney, a barn, a well, and a few arpents of wheat and peas. The growing season was short, the soil decent, and the habitant was, by the standards of eighteenth-century Europe, unusually well fed — wheat bread, pork, game, fish and milk, with maple sugar instead of cane. Families were large and the population doubled roughly every twenty-five years.

Winter defined the year: snow from November, the river frozen from December, travel by sled and snowshoe, work in the woods, and the corvée for the seigneur's roads and the militia musters. The militia was universal for men between about sixteen and sixty and fought as light infantry, which is why French Canadian troops were so effective in the forest and so unreliable in a European line.

The parish was the social centre: Mass, the tithe, the curé's register of births and deaths, the feast days, the processions. It was a society with little money, a great deal of land, and a Church that ran the school, the hospital and the poor relief.

What did France get out of it?

Not what it hoped. Canada was a strategic asset and a commercial disappointment: the fur trade was profitable for the merchants who held the monopoly and the posts, but the colony cost the Crown more in garrisons, gifts and administration than it returned. The Caribbean, by contrast, was a machine for generating wealth. Sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton from the French islands were among the most valuable commodities in European trade, and the re-export trade through Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille made port cities rich.

The empire's economics were mercantilist in doctrine and ramshackle in practice. The exclusif was evaded constantly; the colonists traded with the Dutch, the British and the Americans whenever they could, and the metropole alternated between enforcing the monopoly and granting exceptions when the islands were starving. The navy existed to protect the trade, and when the navy lost, the trade and the colonies went with it.

How was it lost?

In four wars. King William's War (1689–97) opened with the Schenectady raid of 9 February 1690 and ended with Ryswick, which restored conquests. Queen Anne's War brought the capture of Port Royal in 1710 and the Treaty of Utrecht of 11 April 1713, which ceded Acadia, Newfoundland and the Hudson Bay country to Britain and left France Cape Breton, where it built Louisbourg from 1719.

Then King George's War, in which New England took Louisbourg in 1745 — 11 May to 28 June — only for it to be returned in 1748 in exchange for Madras. And then the Seven Years' War, which began in the Ohio valley in 1754, brought the deportation of the Acadians from 1755, the second siege of Louisbourg in 1758, the battle on the Plains of Abraham on 13 September 1759, Lévis's victory at Sainte-Foy on 28 April 1760 and the surrender of Montreal on 8 September 1760.

The Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1763 gave Britain Canada, Acadia, Cape Breton, Grenada, St Vincent, Tobago and Senegal, and France kept Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Domingue, Gorée and its Indian comptoirs — the right to fish off Newfoundland, and the islands that mattered most economically. Louisiana had already gone to Spain by the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau of 3 November 1762.

Why did France lose?

Because Canada was worth less than the Caribbean, and because the war was decided at sea. The French navy could not match the Royal Navy in the Atlantic, and once the British controlled the approaches to the St Lawrence, Canada was doomed regardless of what happened on land. The colony's 70,000 people faced 1.5 million British colonists and a fleet.

Choiseul, the French foreign minister, ranked what had to be saved: the cod fishery, the sugar islands, Gorée and its slave trade, the five Indian comptoirs. Canada came last. His own phrase was that the islands were "a thousand times more interesting" than the colony of Canada, and he meant it literally as a calculation of value. The line about "a few acres of snow" belongs to Martin in chapter XXIII of Candide, not to Voltaire in his own voice, though it is always quoted as Voltaire's.

Why "first" and "second" empire?

Because French historians needed a way to distinguish two very different overseas projects. The first empire was Atlantic and commercial: Canada, the Caribbean, the slave trade, the Indian comptoirs, run by chartered companies and then the Crown. The second was imperial and territorial: Algeria from 1830, then Indochina, Tunisia, Morocco, West Africa and Madagascar, run by the army, the colonial administration and the mission civilisatrice.

The break is real but not clean. France kept Caribbean islands, Gorée and the Indian comptoirs after 1763, and those remnants were the bridge to the second empire: Senegal became the base for West African expansion, and the Antilles remained French départements into the twenty-first century. The "first" empire did not end so much as shrink to its most profitable parts.

What survived?

The Caribbean islands, which France kept and which remained the most profitable colonies in the world until the Haitian revolution destroyed Saint-Domingue in the 1790s. The Indian comptoirs — Pondichéry, Chandernagore, Karikal, Mahé, Yanaon — which France held, lost and regained, and finally gave up in 1954. Gorée and Saint-Louis in Senegal, which became the base of a second African empire. Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, the last fragment of the North American empire.

And Canada. The Quebec Act of 1774 preserved French civil law, the seigneurial system and the Catholic Church, which is why Quebec is a French-speaking province and not an anglophone state. The first empire's most durable legacy is the survival of the society it planted, in the country that conquered it.

About the map

This entry describes the empire of 1534–1763, but the border data behind the map card is not that empire. The dataset assigns this entry a small French colonial territory dated 1805–1813 — a remnant of the colonial empire during the Napoleonic wars, not the North American and Caribbean empire described here — because the source data conflates the colonial empire with Napoleon's First Empire under a single Wikidata identifier. The card is therefore drawn at 1810, the only year the data holds for this entry, and shows a fragment rather than the whole.

The mismatch is recorded rather than papered over. The history in this entry is the 1534–1763 empire; the map shows what the dataset has, and a later revision will need polygons covering the St Lawrence, Acadia, Louisiana and the Caribbean for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Until then the card is a pointer, not the empire's extent.

Common myths about the first French colonial empire

Timeline of the first French colonial empire

What the map shows next

The card is drawn at 1810 on the map, the only year the border data holds for this entry, and shows the last fragment of the empire described here — which is a fair symbol of how it ended: not with a ceremony, but with a rump.

For the empire at its height, read the entries on New France, which covers the St Lawrence colony in detail, and French Louisiana, which covers the Mississippi valley and the sale of 1803.