French Colonial Empire (First)

The First French Colonial Empire was the earlier of France's two great overseas empires, built largely in the Americas and the Indian Ocean between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries before being dismantled in a series of wars with Britain.

Its conventional starting point is 1534, when the explorer Jacques Cartier claimed the lands around the Gulf of St. Lawrence for the French crown, beginning France's involvement in North America. Permanent settlement followed in the early seventeenth century, when Samuel de Champlain, often called the 'Father of New France,' founded Quebec in 1608 and established French presence along the St. Lawrence. Under ministers such as Cardinal Richelieu and later Jean-Baptiste Colbert during the reign of Louis XIV, France pursued mercantilist colonial expansion through chartered companies, building New France across Canada and down the Mississippi valley to Louisiana, acquiring lucrative sugar-producing Caribbean islands such as Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, and establishing trading posts in India and Senegal. The Caribbean colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, became extraordinarily profitable through plantation economies dependent on enslaved African labour, and at its height around 1710 the empire was the second largest of the era after Spain's. French colonial fortunes were undermined by repeated conflicts with Britain. The Seven Years' War proved disastrous: by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France ceded New France (Canada) and much of its Indian and North American holdings to Britain. The remaining territory of Louisiana was sold to the United States in 1803, and the immensely valuable colony of Saint-Domingue was lost when its enslaved population won independence as Haiti in 1804. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Treaty of Paris of 1814, the first colonial empire had effectively ceased to exist, setting the stage for the 'second' French colonial empire that began with the conquest of Algiers in 1830.

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