New France

New France was the French colonial domain on the North American mainland, stretching at its widest from Newfoundland and Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. It grew out of Jacques Cartier's claim of 1534 and Samuel de Champlain's founding of Quebec in 1608, rested on the fur trade and on alliances with Indigenous nations, and ended when France surrendered it to Britain and Spain in 1763.

Cartier raised a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula in 1534 and claimed the land for Francis I of France, but an attempted settlement near today's Quebec City in 1541 lasted only two years. French fishermen and fur traders kept coming, drawn above all by beaver pelts. Port Royal in Acadia was founded in 1605, and in 1608 Champlain established Quebec with 28 men. Growth was painfully slow: in 1630 the settlement had just 103 colonists. English privateers captured Quebec in 1629, and it was returned to France in 1632.

The colony depended on the peoples already living there, Algonquian-speaking hunters and Iroquoian farmers. Champlain allied with the Algonquin, Montagnais and Huron, and in 1609 helped them fight the Iroquois, beginning almost a century of intermittent war that ended with the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. Indigenous people supplied the furs, taught settlers to survive the winters and guided traders inland, while young Frenchmen known as coureurs des bois lived among them. Marriages between traders and Indigenous women helped give rise to the Métis. Contact also brought epidemics such as measles, and Jesuit missions in Huron country were nearly destroyed by Iroquois attacks by 1649.

In 1663 Louis XIV took the colony from the Company of One Hundred Associates and governed it directly through a governor general and an intendant. The first intendant, Jean Talon, organised a census in 1666 that counted 3,215 people, with men far outnumbering women. Some 800 young women, the Filles du Roi, were sent out between 1663 and 1673, and by 1672 the population had reached about 6,700. Land along the St Lawrence was granted under the seigneurial system, and only Catholics were officially allowed to settle.

Slavery was legal in the colony. The historian Marcel Trudel counted 1,685 Indigenous and 402 Black slaves in the records of the French period, most Indigenous captives obtained through western trading networks. In Louisiana, founded after La Salle claimed the Mississippi basin in 1682, enslaved Africans made up roughly 65 per cent of the 6,000 non-Indigenous inhabitants by the end of French rule. The settler population grew mainly through high birth rates: Canada had about 55,000 people by the census of 1754, against roughly 1.6 million in the British colonies by 1760.

Rivalry with Britain brought a series of colonial wars. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 France gave up mainland Acadia, Newfoundland and Hudson Bay, and built the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton. The struggle for the Ohio Valley opened the French and Indian War in 1754. From 1755 the British began deporting the Acadians. Louisbourg fell in 1758, Quebec in 1759 after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and Montreal surrendered in September 1760.

The Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1763 ended the Seven Years' War. Britain took Canada, which became the Province of Quebec, and the lands east of the Mississippi, while western Louisiana had already passed to Spain. Only Saint Pierre and Miquelon remained French. The colony's French-speaking descendants shaped modern Quebec and the bilingualism of Canada, and the Conquest remains a debated theme in Quebec's historical memory.

Our maps draw New France in 1650, 1700 and 1715. In those years its neighbours were the English colonies along the Atlantic to the south and, after 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company's Rupert's Land to the north.