New France

At a glance

What was New France?

Three different things under one name. Canada was the St Lawrence valley — Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Montreal — the only part with a real settler population. Acadia was the Bay of Fundy, a separate colony of dyked marshes and fishing ports, ceded to Britain in 1713 and emptied of most of its French population in 1755. The pays d'en haut was the interior: the Great Lakes, the Ohio valley, the Illinois country, a network of forts and missions with almost no settlers, existing to trade furs. And Louisiana, from 1699, was a separate colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, which became a plantation society and should never be folded into a description of Canada.

The population tells the story. In 1666, after a generation of settlement, Canada had about 3,200 people, one-third of them women. By 1760 it had about 70,000. That growth was almost entirely natural — the colony had one of the highest birth rates in the Western world — rather than the product of mass immigration.

Did Cartier found it?

No — he failed twice. Jacques Cartier reached the Gulf of St Lawrence in 1534, planted a cross at Gaspé, and took two of Donnacona's sons back to France as evidence. He returned in 1535 with three ships and went upriver to Stadacona (Quebec) and Hochelaga (Montreal), reaching the latter on 2 October. The winter nearly killed them: 25 of his 110 men died of scurvy before the St Lawrence Iroquoians taught them to drink a decoction of white cedar, the annedda.

His third voyage, in 1541, was a colonisation attempt at Charlesbourg-Royal, and it failed too — the winter was brutal, the local people hostile, and the settlement was abandoned. Roberval, sent out to take command, arrived to find it already breaking up. France's first colony in America lasted two winters and left no trace except the word Canada, taken from the Iroquoian name for a village.

The fishery mattered more than the colony for the next sixty years. Basque, Breton and Norman boats had been working the Grand Banks and the Gulf of St Lawrence since the early sixteenth century, drying cod on shore and trading for furs at Tadoussac, and that trade — not agriculture — was the commercial reason anyone returned to the river.

Why did Champlain's Quebec survive?

Because it was a trading post first and a colony second, and because Champlain made one alliance that lasted. He founded Quebec on 3 July 1608 with a handful of men, and in the summer of 1609 he joined a Montagnais–Algonquin–Huron war party and fought the Mohawk at what is now Ticonderoga. His own account is precise about the shot that began two centuries of enmity: he aimed at one of three chiefs and "with the same shot, two fell to the ground; and one of their men was so wounded that he died some time after. I had loaded my musket with four balls."

That alliance — French with the Algonquins, Montagnais and Huron against the Haudenosaunee — was the foundation of the colony's diplomacy and its fur supply. It also put France permanently on the wrong side of the Iroquois, whose friendship the English at Albany cultivated.

The colony grew slowly. The Company of One Hundred Associates was granted the monopoly in 1627 and the obligation to settle 4,000 colonists; it never came close. The Kirke brothers took Quebec in 1629, held it for three years, and returned it by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1632. The Compagnie des Habitants took over in 1645. In 1663 the company surrendered its rights altogether, and the colony became a royal province.

Who governed it?

After 1663, three men and a council. The governor commanded the troops and conducted diplomacy with First Nations. The intendant ran justice, finance and the economy — the budget, prices, the king's stores, settlement, roads. The bishop controlled the church, education and welfare. The Sovereign Council, created in 1663, was a court of appeal with the governor, the intendant and the bishop among its members, never more than twelve councillors; it was renamed the Superior Council in 1702–03 and, after the right of remonstrance was withdrawn, became little more than a registry. It was never a colonial parliament, and the schoolbook picture of one should be resisted.

Jean Talon, intendant from 1665, was the ablest of them. He settled almost 2,000 immigrants and retired soldiers on the land, organised the filles du roi, ran the first census, and tried to diversify the economy into brewing, shipbuilding, hemp and flax — nearly all of which had failed by the time he left in 1672. His most durable act was to set the tithe at one twenty-sixth of the grain harvest in 1667, after the settlers had refused the canonical one-thirteenth.

How did the seigneurial system work?

By giving every farm a river frontage. A seigneurie was normally one league by three (about 5 by 15 km), divided into rangs — long rectangular strips running back from the water, a survey pattern brought from Normandy. A typical habitant holding was about 3 arpents wide by 30 deep: roughly 175 metres of frontage and 1.75 km of depth. The geometry was social as well as agricultural: every family had access to the river, the only road, and to its neighbours.

The dues were modest and fixed. The cens was 2 to 6 sols a year; the rente was set at 20 sols per arpent of frontage; lods et ventes, payable when a holding was sold, were one-twelfth of the price; the banalité required grinding at the seigneur's mill, which took the fourteenth minot of every 200; and the corvée was one to four days' work a year, in sowing, haying or harvest. Everything fell due on St Martin's Day, at the manor house.

Land was cheap and seigneurs were weak. A dissatisfied habitant could move, and a seigneur who demanded too much attracted no settlers. Most lay seigneuries did not become profitable until the late eighteenth century. Louise Dechêne's verdict, in her 1971 study of Montreal, is the one to keep: the Canadian seigneury was legally the same institution as the French one, it strengthened rather than decayed in its first century, and yet it was marginal — "it neither directs nor reflects the life of the colony". The system that actually governed rural Canada was not the seigneurie but the parish: the militia captain, appointed by the intendant, became from about 1715 the state's principal intermediary in the countryside, distributing corvée, billeting soldiers and collecting wheat.

What did the towns look like?

Small. Quebec, founded in 1608, was the capital and the only real town: a lower town of warehouses and wharves under the cliff, an upper town of the governor's residence, the seminary, the cathedral and the Ursuline convent, and a population of a few thousand. Montreal, founded in 1642 by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve as a mission settlement, became the fur-trade city — the place where voyageurs were hired and canoes left for the interior. Trois-Rivières, founded in 1634, was the third small town, a trading post and administrative centre between the two.

The seigneurial countryside held almost everyone: about 220 to 250 seigneuries were granted in the French regime, covering some 36,500 km², and 75 to 80 per cent of the population lived on seigneurial land until the mid-nineteenth century. The colony was a river with farms along it, punctuated by three towns and a few forts.

Who came?

Far fewer people than the empire suggests, and mostly men. The old figure of 10,000 immigrants is a founding population, not a migration count. Mario Boleda's revision puts "observed immigration" at about 33,500 people, and net migration at about 20,000 — the difference being soldiers, sailors and indentured workers who went home. Over 13,000 soldiers left for Canada during the French regime.

The most famous migrants were the filles du roi, about 800 young women sent between 1663 and 1673 with a royal allowance of a hundred livres each, most of them urban, many orphans, average age 24. Forty-one per cent received a dowry of 50 livres. They arrived in a colony with one woman for every six men, and most married within months.

The engagés were the labour force: three-year contracts, hence the nickname trente-six mois, young single men from western France, about a fifth of all Frenchmen who spent a winter in Canada before 1760. About half went home at the end of their term. In 1666 servants were slightly less than 15 per cent of the population; by 1681, little more than 5 per cent — about one servant for every twenty inhabitants.

What did they live on?

Wheat, and the fur trade. A typical habitant farm had two to four dairy cows, one or two teams of oxen, a breeding boar, a dozen hens, a few sheep and perhaps a horse. Wheat was the staple and the export to Louisbourg and the Caribbean; peas, oats, maize and vegetables filled out the year; pigs and cattle supplied meat, and the river supplied fish. The seigneurial dues were paid in grain and poultry as often as in coin.

The fur trade was the colony's real business, and it worked through two very different figures. The coureur des bois was an illegal independent trader who went into the interior without a licence; the voyageur was a licensed, contracted canoe man who moved goods and pelts between Montreal and the posts. Beaver was the currency: felt hats required the underfur, and the trade's monopoly system — granted, revoked, regranted — was the colony's permanent political quarrel. After the 1680s the French pushed west and north into the pays d'en haut, and the Hudson's Bay Company, chartered in 1670, took the northern trade from the other side.

How did the fur trade actually work?

Through a monopoly that was perpetually being granted, broken and regranted. The Company of One Hundred Associates held it from 1627; the Communauté des Habitants from 1645; the Crown took it over in 1663 and farmed it out to a succession of financiers, then to the Compagnie de la Colonie in 1700, then back to the Crown. Each monopoly was supposed to fund settlement and each was evaded by independent traders, which is why the state kept legislating against them.

The two figures of the trade are distinct. The coureur des bois was an unlicensed trader who went into the interior on his own account — illegal, numerous, and essential, because the official system could not reach the distant nations. The voyageur was a contracted canoe man, hired at Montreal for a season or a wintering, who paddled and portaged the goods out and the pelts back. A wintering voyageur earned 200 to 500 livres, and trade goods were advanced on credit at about 30 per cent.

The economics favoured the colony less than the myth suggests. Importers in Quebec City made 20 to 30 per cent in peacetime and over 100 per cent in war, but the trade's profits flowed to a small group of merchants, officers and nobles who held the posts. The habitants supplied the food, the canoes and the men, and got a wage. After 1670 the Hudson's Bay Company took the northern trade from the other side of the bay, and after 1701 the English at Albany sold cheaper goods to the same Native nations. The fur trade made New France strategically important and never made it rich.

What was the Church's role?

Enormous, and not only spiritual. The Jesuits held a near-monopoly on missions until the 1660s, and their Relations, published annually in Paris, were the colony's publicity and its ethnography. Their Huron mission ended in catastrophe: in 1649 the Iroquois destroyed the Wendat villages, and the priests at Sainte-Marie-au-pays-des-Hurons burned their own mission and withdrew. Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were killed, and the accounts of their deaths, published in the Relations, became founding texts of Canadian Catholicism.

The church ran schools, hospitals and welfare. The Ursulines and the Hospitalières arrived in 1639; the seminary of Quebec, founded by Bishop Laval, trained priests and ran an agricultural and crafts school at Saint-Joachim where local boys learned to read, write and count. The parish was the unit of both religious and civil life: the tithe — one twenty-sixth of the grain harvest, from the 1667 settlement — was delivered to the presbytery, and the church wardens and the militia captain ran the community between visits from authority.

What was daily life like?

Cold, rural, and short. A habitant house was low, of fieldstone or timber with a steep shingled roof, one or two rooms, a clay oven and a single hearth; the family slept near the fire in winter. In the towns, stone houses with steep roofs and small windows lined narrow streets. Furniture was a table, benches, a chest and beds; pewter and earthenware rather than porcelain.

The year had a hard rhythm. Spring was sugar-making and the sowing; summer hay and the harvest; autumn the killing of pigs, the salting of meat, and the payment of dues at the manor on St Martin's Day; winter the hauling of wood, the repair of tools, and — for the men — the fur trade, either on the river or in the interior. Travel was by canoe in summer and by snowshoe and toboggan in winter; the roads were the river and the winter track.

Life expectancy was low even by the standards of the day: infant mortality in Canada between 1608 and 1760 was about 225 per 1,000, meaning nearly one baby in four died before its first birthday, and life expectancy after childhood rarely exceeded 40. Smallpox killed 1,000 to 1,200 people in 1702–03 — about 8 per cent of the population — and returned in 1733, 1755 and 1757. Contemporaries thought they lived in the healthiest country in the world; Pierre Boucher wrote that "the air is extremely healthy at all times, but mostly in winter", a reminder that people misread their own mortality.

Did New France have slaves?

Yes, and mostly Indigenous ones. The first enslaved African came in 1629 with the Kirke brothers — a boy from Madagascar or Guinea, sold for 50 écus, baptised in 1633 as Olivier Le Jeune, and buried in 1654 as a domestique, whether freed or not is unclear. But the majority of slaves in Canada were Indigenous: captives taken by France's Native allies and given or sold as panis — strictly the Pawnee, but the name became generic for any Indigenous slave. Captives came from the Fox, Sioux, Inuit, Chickasaw, Apache and many other nations, and after the Yamasee War of 1715 cut the southern supply, the colony took them through the western fur trade. No slave ship ever reached the St Lawrence; the Africans who arrived came overland from the English colonies or from the French Caribbean.

The legal chronology matters, and it is usually got wrong. The Code Noir of 1685 governed the French Antilles and was never adopted in Canada, though its rule that a child of an enslaved mother inherited slavery was applied. On 1 May 1689 Louis XIV authorised the importation of enslaved Africans; the war that broke out two weeks later stopped the trade, and only thirteen arrived through private sales. The first actual legislation was the Raudot ordinance of 13 April 1709, which declared that "all Panis and Negroes who have been purchased and who will be purchased, shall be the property of those who have purchased them and will be their slaves".

The numbers: Marcel Trudel's catalogue, revised by later scholars, counts about 4,200 people enslaved in Canada between 1671 and 1834 — roughly 2,683 Indigenous, 1,443 African or of African descent, and 59 of unknown origin. That is a cumulative total over two centuries, not a contemporary population; at any one time the number was in the hundreds to low thousands, in a colony of 70,000. Ownership was elite and urban: governors, intendants, clergy, religious communities and officers, and in two-thirds of cases a master owned a single slave. There was no plantation economy, so intergenerational slavery was limited and many slaves died young.

Slavery was formal enough to require a clause in a treaty of capitulation. Article XLVII of the Montreal articles, 1760, provided that "the Negroes and panis of both sexes shall remain, in their quality of slaves, in the possession of the French and Canadians to whom they belong".

How did the colony treat its Indigenous allies?

As the foundation of the whole enterprise, and with a mixture of dependence and contempt. The fur trade could not function without Native hunters, canoe men, guides and middlemen, and the colony's diplomacy was built on gifts — gifts, calumets, and the ceremonial language of alliance rather than the English language of treaty. The French were also far more willing than the English to marry into Native communities: the métis populations of the Great Lakes and the Red River are the result, and French officers and traders often lived for years in Native villages.

The missions were the other face. Jesuits, Recollets, Sulpicians and Ursulines ran missions among the Huron, Montagnais, Abenaki and Iroquois, and the mission villages were places where Christianity, French law and Native society were deliberately mixed. The church's aim was conversion; the state's was pacification; and the two did not always agree.

The alliances were not sentimental. In 1747 the colony proposed exchanging two Indigenous slaves for one African slave, as Louisiana was doing; France refused, because New France depended on Indigenous alliances and could not afford to be seen selling allies. That single decision explains the demography of slavery in Canada better than any moral argument.

Who fought the Iroquois?

Everyone, for a century. The wars that began in the 1640s were about fur and captives, and they nearly destroyed the colony. In 1649 the Iroquois broke the Wendat confederacy, France's principal trading partner; the Neutral were destroyed in 1651, the Erie absorbed in 1657. Raids reached the outskirts of Montreal, and in 1660 Adam Dollard des Ormeaux and a handful of men died at the Long Sault in a stand that became a French-Canadian legend.

Louis XIV sent the Carignan-Salières Regiment in 1665: about 1,100 men into a colony of 3,215. They built forts along the Richelieu, burned Mohawk villages, and in the January 1666 march lost 60 men to the cold. The peace of 1667 held for two decades; 400 soldiers stayed to colonise.

It broke in 1689 with the Lachine massacre, and the 1690s were a cycle of raid and counter-raid — Schenectady, Salmon Falls, Fort Loyal, Frontenac's campaign against the Onondaga. The Iroquois, exhausted and halved in strength by war and disease, made peace at Montreal in 1701, and the colony's southern flank was quiet for a generation.

What happened to the Acadians?

Acadia was the oldest French colony in North America after Quebec, founded at Port-Royal in 1605, and by the 1750s it held about 14,000 people who had built a prosperous economy on dyked salt marshes — the aboiteaux, wooden sluices that drained the tidal flats — and who had spent forty years trying to be neutral between Britain and France.

Neutrality was no longer acceptable in 1755. The British governor, Charles Lawrence, demanded an unconditional oath; the Acadian delegates refused; and in August the deportation began. About 6,000 people were shipped out that year, and the total reached some 10,000 by 1763. Families were separated, many died of disease and shipwreck, and the survivors scattered to Louisiana — where they became the Cajuns — to France, and to the Atlantic colonies. Some returned to Nova Scotia after 1763 and settled on marginal land.

The deportation is the clearest case in North American history of a civilian population being removed for strategic reasons, and it happened before the war had formally been declared. It also removed Britain's most productive farmers from the Bay of Fundy and required New England planters to be brought in to replace them.

How did it fall?

Through the Ohio valley. The Seven Years' War in North America began in 1754 over competing claims to the Ohio country, and France's advantage in the first years — Braddock's defeat in 1755, the capture of Fort Oswego and Fort William Henry — evaporated when the British committed their navy and their purse.

The decisive campaign was against Quebec. In June 1759 James Wolfe landed on Île d'Orléans with more than 8,000 regulars, nearly 900 American rangers and 2,100 marines. Quebec's defenders were more than 18,000, but about 11,000 were untrained militia. Wolfe failed at Beauport in July, then spent August destroying the countryside; in late August his ships ran past the batteries, and on 13 September he landed at L'Anse-au-Foulon, where light infantry climbed the cliff and took the French picket. By 8 a.m. about 4,500 British were on the plateau.

Montcalm attacked without waiting for Bougainville. He had about 4,500 men — half what he could have put in the field — including untrained militia. The French fired ragged volleys at long range; many men dropped to reload; the British volleys broke them. Wolfe was hit three times and died on the field. Montcalm, mortally wounded, was carried into the city and died before dawn, buried in a shell crater under the floor of the Ursulines' chapel. The Canadian Encyclopedia's aggregate casualties are about 658 British and 650 French.

Quebec capitulated on 18 September, its garrison granted the honours of war and the inhabitants protected in their property and religion. The French won the rematch at Sainte-Foy in April 1760, but a British fleet arrived in May and Lévis withdrew to Montreal, where three British armies converged in September. Amherst refused the honours of war, and on 8 September 1760 Montreal, and with it Canada, surrendered. The articles guaranteed the free exercise of the Catholic religion, the property of the seigneurs and the Canadians, and the fur trade on equal terms.

The peace took three more years. The preliminaries were signed at Fontainebleau in November 1762 and the definitive Treaty of Paris on 10 February 1763. Article IV: France cedes "Canada, with all its dependencies, as well as the island of Cape Breton" and agrees that the inhabitants may profess the Catholic religion "as far as the laws of Great Britain permit". France kept Guadeloupe, Martinique and the fishing islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. The popular story that France "chose Guadeloupe over Canada" is a simplification: the sugar islands and the fishery were the priorities in a package that also included Cape Breton and India, and Canada was expensive to defend.

What happened to the Canadiens?

They stayed. About 70,000 people, mostly farmers, remained under a military government that governed through existing seigneurial and parish structures. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 created a huge Indian reserve west of the Appalachians and said nothing useful about French law; the Quebec Act of 1774 put it right, restoring French civil law, confirming seigneurial tenure, and removing the oath that had excluded Catholics from office. The Americans invaded in 1775–76 and were repulsed, partly because the clergy and seigneurs preferred British protection to American republicanism.

The Loyalist influx after 1783 changed the arithmetic: English-speaking Protestants in the western settlements wanted English law and their own assembly. The Constitutional Act of 1791 split the colony into Upper Canada (English law, freehold land) and Lower Canada (French law, seigneurial tenure), each with an elected assembly. That is where the map's New France ends, not because New France survived, but because its legal and social order was now entrenched inside a British colony — which is the arrangement that produced French Canada.

The Loyalists who arrived after 1783 changed the arithmetic: some 30,000 English-speaking Protestants settled in Nova Scotia and the western parts of Quebec, and they wanted English law, freehold land and their own assembly. The Constitutional Act of 1791 answered them by splitting the colony — Upper Canada with English law and township land, Lower Canada with French law and seigneurial tenure — each with an elected assembly. New France had become two British provinces with a French-speaking majority in one of them.

What is left?

The legal code, for a start. The Coutume de Paris governed property and inheritance in Quebec long after the conquest and, in family property, into the twentieth century. The seigneurial system was abolished in 1854, but seigneurial property was not: a 1928 inquiry found rentes still being collected in a hundred and ninety seigneuries from nearly 60,000 families, and the last municipal payments to the redemption syndicate were made in 1970.

The landscape preserves the geometry: the long river lots of the Île d'Orléans and the Côte de Beaupré are still farmed. The parish system became the backbone of French-Canadian society, and the church that ran it dominated education, health and politics until the 1960s. And the memory of the Conquest became a political argument in its own right — the plain of Abraham is a park, the battle a national myth on both sides, and the phrase la Conquête still carries the sense of a founding defeat.

Common myths about New France

Timeline of New France

What the map shows next

At 1650 on the map the colony is a ribbon of farms on the St Lawrence, the Haudenosaunee hold the interior, and the English colonies are already the larger population.

At 1782 on the map New France is gone: the British have held Canada for two decades, the United States has just won its independence, and the French-speaking population is about to be given its own colony by the Constitutional Act.