French Maritime Empire

3 Key excerpts on "French Maritime Empire"

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  Agency and Archaeology of the French Maritime Empire

  • Marijo Gauthier-Bérubé, Annaliese Dempsey, Marijo Gauthier-Bérubé, Annaliese Dempsey(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  Introduction

  Marijo Gauthier-Bérubé and Annaliese Dempsey

  Agency and Archaeology of the French Maritime Empire was born following the Society for Historical Archaeology 2020 Conference in Boston, as most of the authors of this book contributed to a session focused on the lower classes of the French Maritime Empire in the Americas from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. While this panel did not pretend to encompass the entirety of the research involved in this topic, the resulting session framed French sailors, settlers, enslaved populations, and shipwrights as an extremely dynamic group that constantly negotiated their identities with both the center of power and their complex regional realities. This session was not about the story of kings, military leaders, and politicians but rather an exploration of the perspective of those who provided the fuel, both willingly and unwillingly, for the French Maritime Empire.

  The chapters in this volume expand on efforts to archaeologically document and reflect on these populations throughout various regions that were once under the influence of France. This introduction will briefly review some of the core aspects of this work and explore the extent of the French Maritime Empire to provide a common ground for understanding agency within the archaeological record.

  REVIEWING THE French Maritime Empire

  The use of the term empire for French territories in the context of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries might surprise the reader who is familiar with the political regimes of France. Indeed, the concept of empire in France’s history typically refers to the Napoleonic era of 1804 to 1815, when Napoleon Bonaparte ruled the country, followed forty years later by the Second French Empire under Napoleon III, from 1852 to 1871. For the goals of this volume, we wish to transcend national political definitions to encompass a broader definition of the concept of empire. Such concepts have received much attention in modern scholarship, from formal to informal. Formal definitions often require a certain number of typical features, including military conquest, exploitation, and an elite imperial class (Pomper 2005: 2). A formal definition of empire also implies a sovereign state with a strong hierarchy whose power elites shape the grand strategies of high-stakes social projects such as economic development, military strategies, colonial endeavors, etc. While the populations included in this volume did largely exist within the boundaries of a formal French political structure, focusing solely on a political definition of empire risks centering the agency of elite strategists and overlooking the agency of those removed from these central offices of political power (Pomper 2005: 11). In an alternative definition, Hardt and Negri, in their work Empire

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  Age of Empires

  • Robert Aldrich(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Thames and Hudson Ltd

    (Publisher)

  FRANCE

  Empire and the Mère-Patrie

  JACQUES FRÉMEAUX

  From the end of the sixteenth century onwards, French statesmen such as Cardinal Richelieu (Louis XIII’s chief minister, 1624–42) and Colbert (Louis XIV’s chief minister, 1665–83), started to give their support for colonial ventures to the merchants and ship-owners in the great ports – Nantes, Bordeaux and Marseille – in an effort to safeguard French markets and interests overseas. As a result, the French empire began to expand in various directions. In North America, the French first colonized New France (in present-day Canada), starting from the St Lawrence Valley, where Quebec was founded in 1608 and Montreal in 1642, and stretching south to Louisiana, which at the time covered the entire Mississippi basin and where New Orleans was founded in 1718. In the Caribbean, they settled in Martinique, Guadeloupe, the eastern side of Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue, later to become Haiti), and then Grenada, St Lucia, Dominica and Tobago. More settlements were created in Guyana on the South American continent, where Cayenne was founded in 1635. The French were also interested in India and, after the formation of the French East India Company in 1664, they established bases in Pondicherry in 1674 and Chandernagore in 1684; the French took over islands in the Indian Ocean as well – the Île Bourbon (now Réunion) and Île de France (now Mauritius) in the Mascarene archipelago, which became important stopping places on voyages to Asia.

  The royal empire

  This expansion of the French empire became a source of grave concern to the rulers of Britain. They were not prepared to see French possessions in North America thwarting the westward expansion of their own thirteen colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, while the ambitions of the French East India Company, under Dupleix, caused much alarm among the directors of its British counterpart. The threat was such that at the beginning of 1755 the British government declared war on France. The Seven Years’ War that broke out in Europe the following year forced France to cut back on her overseas commitments, and then, thanks to their superior naval power, the British were able to conquer French Canada and to occupy France’s possessions in the Caribbean and India. In alliance with Prussia, Britain duly won the war, and under the terms of the peace treaty of 1763, France had to give up New France and all her territory on the east bank of the Mississippi; Louisiana was ceded to Spain as compensation for Florida, which went to the British. The treaty left France with just a few colonies: Martinique, Guadeloupe, half of Saint-Domingue, the Île Bourbon and the Île de France, as well as the tiny islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland. As for India, the French were allowed to keep the five ports they already held but had to renounce any further expansion.

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  The Routledge Companion To Postcolonial Studies

  • John McLeod(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These successive periods of colonial expansion were far from discrete. Some of the oldest colonial territories have, for instance, had an almost unbroken connection with France since their acquisition in the seventeenth century. The nineteenth century, through the abolition of slavery, witnessed major changes in the plantation colonies of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean which had, during the previous century, been a source of great wealth. French expansion into sub-Saharan Africa radiated primarily from trading posts which had been instrumental in the earlier Atlantic trade in goods and enslaved people. To this chronological and geographical complexity, marked by clear continuities and discontinuities, is to be added a comparative dimension, for the French empire is but one (if admittedly significant) part of a globalized imperial project in which most of the major European powers were involved. Although, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Spanish predominated in the transatlantic exploration of the New World, by the 1600s the principal rivalry over the acquisition of new territory was between England and France. This situation continued for several centuries, as is evident not least in the diplomatic and military manoeuvring during the 1775–83 American War of Independence (when the French supported the rebel colonists), as well as in the scramble to colonize Africa in the later nineteenth century. Any account of the French empire is, therefore, to be read in the light of other imperial histories, although it is important to recognize the distinctiveness of these differing national traditions. The French empire, in its nineteenth-century Republican manifestation, was, for instance, associated with a ‘civilizing mission’, underpinned by a belief in the superiority of French civilization. France’s long-term impact was, however, more limited than that of Britain, Spain and Portugal, all of whom have been overtaken by their former colonies in terms of size and population.

  THE ‘OLD COLONIES’: THE

  ANCIEN RÉGIME

  EMPIRE

  During the reign of François I (1515–47), the French undertook their first significant overseas explorations. Jacques Cartier’s three voyages to Canada between 1534 and 1542, during which he sailed up the St Lawrence to indigenous settlements at present-day Quebec City and Montreal, initiated the processes of settlement of ‘New France’. The colony developed from the early 1600s, predominantly on the East coast of the country and around Hudson Bay, after Samuel de Champlain had founded Quebec in 1608. The first colonists led dangerous and uncertain existences, dependent for their livelihoods on trapping and the trade in furs, often developing alliances with indigenous peoples to ensure their survival. With the promotion of settlement, the population increased, and the French gradually expanded their sphere of influence into the Great Lakes area and further southwards, down the Mississippi, to New Orleans. The French territories in North America remained precarious: at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, Acadia (present-day Nova Scotia and its surrounding regions) was surrendered to Britain, resulting in the forced emigration half a century later of many settlers to Louisiana (see Chapter 7

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