3
EXPANSION AND CONSOLIDATION
The cod fishery in Newfoundland in the eighteenth century, with French drying racks on the shore.
Between 1663 and 1713 the balance of power in North America shifted. In the 1660s the European colonies along the eastern seaboard clung to the shoreline, dependent on the neighbouring Indian nations for their security and prosperity. Their survival was no longer in question, but their future development was tenuous and uncertain.
Events in the 1660s changed the shape and the future of the European settlements in North America, transforming them from poor but permanent dependencies, caught between the next Indian attack and the arrival of the next supply ship, to provincial emanations of the great Western European powers, France and England. Because events in Western Europe in the late seventeenth century determined what happened next in North America, we shall turn to consider circumstances that were entirely outside the control of the settlements in America but that would prove crucial for their development.
EUROPE IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA
War and the absence of war shaped what the colonies became. By the 1660s Europe had been in an almost constant state of turmoil for 150 years, with wars inspired by religion and ambition devastating the centre of the continent. In France a king was assassinated—Henri IV in 1610— and in England a king, Charles I, was beheaded in 1649 and a republic established. Civil disturbances preoccupied France and the British Isles throughout the 1640s and 1650s.
Under the circumstances, then, governments had other things to do than worry about colonies. Yet as the wars continued governments learned that it was possible to organize themselves better so as to make war more efficiently. And later, the more or less simultaneous abatement of domestic disturbances in France and England after 1660 afforded an opportunity for governments to strengthen themselves for any further wars. Also simultaneously, governments began to imagine a use for their colonies.
Stability at home came first. England’s republican government, having reached its wits’ end in 1659–60, negotiated the return of the monarchy as represented by the son of the executed Charles I. Charles II left his French exile, and the court of his cousin, Louis XIV, and arrived back in London in May 1660. He had no desire, as he put it, to go on his travels again, and governed England as prudently as difficult circumstances allowed. For though the fires of religious controversy were banked, they were not out: rivalry between Protestants and Catholics, and among various sects of Protestants, dominated English politics throughout Charles’s lifetime and beyond.
Charles wasn’t merely king of England, but king of Scotland and Ireland too. (He also claimed the French throne, though it had been centuries since an English monarch had allowed that to interfere with normal and generally peaceful relations with France.) The Scots were mostly Protestant, but with an active Catholic minority, and the Irish were mostly Catholic, but with a recently settled Protestant minority. In all three kingdoms Catholicism was officially suppressed, with Catholics suffering various degrees of persecution or disability at the hands of the state. The state was represented by Protestant parliaments that required— demanded—appeasement by their anxious monarch. Charles governed, but he did not, absolutely, rule. It was an uneasy compromise, even illogical, but it was what the situation demanded.
Many families were mixed in religion, and that included the Stuarts, Charles II’s family. His grandmother and mother had been Catholic and his brother, the Duke of York, was too. Charles had leanings toward Catholicism but wisely kept them to himself; he was, he knew, a Protestant monarch at the head of a fiercely Protestant people. To act otherwise would be to risk his throne, if not his head.
Louis XIV viewed Charles’s religious-political predicament with sympathy but also a certain amount of disdain. He too had seen civil disorder as a child and was determined not to repeat it. Louis set out to become an absolute monarch, and did. There would be no nonsense of parliaments, or elections, or subjects standing against their king. The Estates-General, the assembly of the orders of the realm, last met under Louis’s father, in 1614. It would not meet again until 1789.
Louis cast a jaundiced eye on French Protestantism too. His grandfather had once been a Protestant, or Huguenot, and had granted a protected status to the sect. The grandson, however, believed in “One king, one law and one faith” (roi, loi, and foi) and revoked the protection in 1685, driving hundreds of thousands of Huguenots into exile in friendlier Protestant countries, including the English colonies in America. The number of Huguenot exiles, in any case, far outnumbered the thin stream of faithful Catholics induced to settle in the king’s overseas colonies, especially New France.
Louis’s system of government precluded a chief minister; the king had suffered too many overmighty advisers in his youth and was determined not to repeat the experience. But he wasn’t averse to employing talented ministers, especially in the area of finance. Finance fed war, and war was the staple of the king’s policy. Industry produced the implements of battle, as well as taxes. French economic policy was rearranged to encourage domestic industry while discouraging purchases abroad. And what couldn’t be made in France might, perhaps, be found in the colonies— furs in the case of New France, sugar in the case of the French islands in the West Indies.
To run the economy and produce taxes, Louis employed Jean-Baptiste Colbert as controller general of finance (1662–83). Colbert managed well, repaying the national debt, reorganizing taxes, and encouraging industry— especially those industries that would support the country’s expansion. He especially encouraged shipbuilding, for overseas trade and for the navy, to protect the shipping and to enhance national strength.
France had a natural advantage in terms of the European balance of power. It had the largest population of any state in Western or Central Europe, coherent and largely defensible frontiers, and, thanks to Louis’s firm government, domestic peace. The population sustained a large army, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the largest in Western Europe since the Roman Empire. Abundant finance—and as time went on, abundant taxation—meant that the king could pay, feed, and clothe his troops in uniforms, with consequent beneficial effects on obedience and discipline.
The frontiers of France expanded quickly, and French influence more quickly still. There was even a minor war with cousin Charles II of England, admittedly a half-hearted affair in support of Louis’s ally of the day, the Netherlands, in 1665–67. Louis, fortunately, was in no position to attack the British Isles: his ambitions lay elsewhere, and his increasingly effective and professional armies marched where ambition and glory dictated. As far as the colonies were concerned, the war was half over before the colonial authorities, English or French, even learned it was on.
That war therefore produced no serious hostilities between France and England in America, but it did rearrange the political geography of coastal North America, and not to the benefit of New France. An English expedition sailed into the harbour of New Amsterdam, forced its surrender, and appropriated the Dutch colony to the English crown. Renamed New York, the city and its surrounding colony became an English province, linking New England to New Jersey (another acquisition). Nor was New York the last expansion of England into America: under Charles II new colonies were established in Pennsylvania and North and South Carolina—named, of course, after the king.
The Carolinas and Virginia were distant names, but New York was close by and geographically significant because the Hudson River brought ships and supplies near the frontier of New France. And along that frontier lived the Iroquois, who kept the colony in a constant state of fear.
INDIAN DIPLOMACY
Louis and his minister Colbert had a three-pronged strategy for New France. The first item was to make it a regular part of the French state. So in 1663 New France became a royal province, similar to the provinces of European France, and a royal governor was dispatched to represent the king. But true to Louis’s conception of absolutism, the authority even of very important officials was strictly limited. This was especially the case with provincial governors, who were chosen from the nobility, men of dignity and honour, to be sure, but not to be trusted with unlimited power. The real power rested with a second royal official, the intendant, who managed finance, economic policy, and civil affairs generally, including justice and the courts. Finally, and rivalling the governor, there was the spiritual power, the bishop, with authority over such things as morals and education. Officials who offended the bishop risked excommunication from the Church, a state that under the pious Louis XIV wasn’t likely to lead to promotion and might easily lead to something much worse. The bishop was also a link in government: because the basic unit of organization in New France was the parish, the parish priest accordingly took on a certain importance as a link to the bishop and the capital by acting as a source of information or a conduit for communication.
At its best, the administration of New France might be described as being in a state of creative tension. At its worst, the bifurcated powers of the colony produced stalemate and dissonance. From the point of view of the French monarchy, however, even an ineffective government was to be preferred to an autonomous province. An ineffective government, after all, was a dependent government, relying on France, months away by sea, to solve its problems.
The governor, the intendant, and the bishop were periodically reunited in a Sovereign Council. Part court, part cabinet, the Council acted by consensus and, where that was lacking, deferred to its presiding officer, the intendant.1 The Council decided the more important legal issues (smaller ones were left to the intendant alone), but the Council’s judgments could be and frequently were appealed to France, at least at first. The volume of appeals eventually became so great that in 1677 Colbert sent them all back. After that the Council was effectively New France’s court of last resort.2
The Sovereign Council sat in Quebec. For purposes of local administration, lesser courts sat in Trois-Rivières and Montreal (where there were also local governors and sub-intendants); their decisions could be appealed to the Council in Quebec.
That didn’t mean, however, that government was fixed in the capital. The governor’s duties varied with the seasons, and summer was the season for trade and diplomacy with New France’s trading partners in the interior, the Indian nations of the Great Lakes and the north. They came to Montreal every summer, the Iroquois permitting, and engaged in a round of feasting and, often enough, drinking. (Threats by the bishop to excommunicate anyone engaged in selling liquor to the Indians were ineffective.) There were ceremonies and exchanges of gifts, and for proper solemnity, the presence of the governor was frequently desirable. And so the governor moved to Montreal every summer, either to stay and feast or as a base for expeditions into the interior, for most of the governors of New France also led their troops in the field, as circumstances dictated.3 (One governor, the comte de Frontenac, was well into his seventies when he led an expedition against the Iroquois—in his case the last of many.)
After the imposition of royal government there were troops to command. As a sign of the new order of things, troops were shipped from France with a new intendant, Jean Talon, who met Colbert’s demanding standards for the post; Talon’s first task was to ensure that the soldiers were fed, housed, and paid. The regiment of Carignan-Salières comprised about a thousand men, including no fewer than 117 officers, five of whom were over seventy and thirty over sixty years of age. The troops rioted when they learned where they were going, but willing or not they were shovelled aboard ship at La Rochelle, and arrived at Quebec in the summer of 1665.
Their mission was to overawe or if necessary defeat the Iroquois. Some of the Iroquois were willing enough to be overawed, and sent peaceful representations to Montreal. As for the most hostile, the Mohawks, the French tried a march into their territory in January 1666. Luckily the expedition avoided disaster, and the troops were able to reprovision themselves from the Dutch merchants at Albany. (The French learned, for the first time, that the English had conquered the Dutch colony; neither side knew that England and France were also at war.) A second, summer campaign followed, which achieved the desired effect: peace was made with the weakened Iroquois, who’d been undermined by renewed epidemics more than by the French.
The respite wasn’t permanent. There would be more expeditions, and more Iroquois raids on New France, most notably in the 1680s, but there was enough abatement to allow for immigration and settlement. This was part of Colbert’s plan.
THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW FRANCE
Over the 150 years of New France’s existence, approximately ten thousand immigrants came to the colony. Almost all were French, direct from France; and almost all were, as Louis XIV desired, Catholic. They were not, most of them, a hardy race of peasants of Norman stock. The largest group came from Poitou, the region east of La Rochelle, but few of the western provinces of France were unrepresented, from Aquitaine in the south to Picardy in the north. A substantial number came from Paris, and some from other cities. Some came by compulsion, via the army, or as punishment for some minor illegality at home. Soldiers could obtain early release by staying in New France, and many found the offer too attractive to refuse. Others were indentured servants, trading their labour for a passage to New France. As the geographers Cole Harris and John Warkentin observe, “most [immigrants] came to Canada because they were sent.”4
New France wasn’t exactly a tempting prospect. By the mid-seventeenth century two things were known about the colony: it was the haunt of marauding Indians, and it was bitterly cold. Cold it certainly was. Temperatures were much lower than in virtually any part of France. The growing season was shorter. French crops did not take easily to the Canadian climate, and some could not be grown at all. And before anything could be grown a forest had to be cut down, a hardship not faced by the French of France since Roman times. Finally, although the valley of the St. Lawrence was fertile, the lowlands did not extend very far either north or south of the river—eight kilometres at Quebec, forty-eight at Montreal. Beyond lay the Canadian Shield to the north and the Appalachians to the south. New France stretched in the middle, a ribbon following the St. Lawrence.
To organize the settlement, the government, like the Hundred Associates before it, relied on seigneurs, petty nobles to whom land was granted (seigneuries) in return for attracting farmers to till it. The farmers didn’t own the land, but rented it from the seigneur. In theory the seigneur was lord of the manor, like his European counterparts, but in New France reality and theory frequently clashed. Seigneurs seldom had the capital to develop their land, to build a proper manor house and a mill where their tenants would grind their wheat. Nor could they hope to make up the difference from rents, which were low, or calculated in terms of labour rather than cash. Frequently, to survive, seigneurs either worked in the fields like their purported inferiors or moved to town in search of government jobs that alone could keep them in the state to which they would have wished to be accustomed. Many of the gentry of New France found employment in the military, either in local levies or in the army or navy of old France. They would uphold the French state, but as its employees rather than as semi-feudal grandees. In theory, the seigneurial system provided for authority and stability. In fact, it did nothing of the kind.
The pattern of settlement depended on the river, which until the middle of the eighteenth century was the only reliable means of transportation. Seigneurs and farmers sought river frontage, effectively for road access, and the result was narrow farms stretching away from the water. As roads developed near the only three settlements of any size, farmers did move away from the St. Lawrence, but this was a late development.
Ironically, although the government sponsored and maintained the gentry of New France, it also undermined their authority through another local institution, the militia. This was first organized in Montreal and then extended to the rest of the colony. Every able-bodied male between sixteen and sixty belonged to the militia, and the force was organized in each parish under a capitaine de milice—militia captain—who usually wasn’t the local seigneur. Nobles were, however, exempt from militia service. (The post of capitaine de milice survived the French regime, and endured even into the twentieth century in rural areas of Quebec.)5
Others besides nobles avoided militia service. Compulsory service depended on whether one was around to be compelled, and many, males in the prime of life engaged in the fur trade, were not. It was a cause for resentment, but until the very end of New France, that resentment did not extend to refusing the military service on which the defence of the colony notionally depended.
Jean Talon, when he agreed to go to New France as intendant, did so on condition that it be a limited-term appointment. He also went on condition that he could trade privately in furs, which he also did, using some of the privileges of his position.6 It is generally agreed that he was active and intelligent, and he instituted what may be called Canada’s first “industrial policy.” It was a mercantilist policy, founded on the theory that a successful state must maximize its own economic activity in competition with other, similar states. (And indeed other states, especially England, did have similar policies.) Manufacturing was encouraged by subsidies direct and indirect, and imports discouraged. Making New France self-supporting, encouraging it to earn its way, and directing it to contribute to the economy of France were logical objectives for Talon and Colbert.
Farming required manpower, however, and manpower was in short supply. In part this was because of underpopulation and in part it was because the fur trade lured young men in the prime of their working life. But over time the demands and profits of the fur trade levelled off, so that by the early eighteenth century farm labour was sufficient to provide not merely subsistence but a modest surplus in wheat, which was then sold in the French West Indies once domestic needs had been met.
Attempts to establish industry in New France were less successful. Gristmills were an aspect of seigneurial tenure, and grain had to be ground. Since high shipping costs inhibited competitive imports, effectively there was no competition—but the same high shipping costs made New French products uncompetitive back in France. Talon established a brewery and a tannery, and encouraged the production of iron and hemp. The results were almost uniformly disappointing, but even repeated disappointment didn’t discourage the French government from a policy of industrial creation.
The key to the economy of New France was twofold. On the one hand was the fur trade, which to the end of the French regime and beyond enriched its participants, Indian or white. On the other was land, and plenty of it. The availability of land for farming meant crops for feeding the towns as well as the farmers and their families. The inhabitants of New France married young—earlier than in Europe. Absent contraception or any overpowering reason for limiting their families, they produced a child every two years. The resultant birth rate was higher than in France, though comparable to that of colonial New England. At the same time the death rate was lower, or slower, than in Europe, perhaps because society, once the Iroquois wars were over, was more tranquil and dangers to life and limb fewer.7 The population therefore expanded, from three thousand in the 1660s to ten thousand in the 1680s, and eventually to seventy-five thousand.
The nature of French government, and French government policy, also produced an unusual distribution of population in the colony. We shall consider the policy below; for the time being we should note that the official establishment was large, certainly by comparison with the English colonies to the south. Troops and officials had to be supported, and the governor’s miniature court maintained. Committed to a model of society in which nobility was to be recognized and rewarded, the government obliged with jobs, pensions, and gifts.8
In some respects, and certainly in times of war, New France was more or less a large garrison. During the Iroquois wars of the 1660s the king’s professional soldiers numbered a quarter of the colony’s total population. But these soldiers weren’t replaced, though many chose to stay on in New France as settlers. In the 1680s the French government sent troupes de la marine under the authority of the minister of marine who was responsible for the colonies. These professional soldiers remained at the governor’s disposal until the collapse of New France. At first they were recruited and officered by natives of France, but after 1690 the inhabitants of New France—the noble inhabitants of New France, that is—were eligible for officers’ commissions in the service. By the 1750s the majority of the officers of the troupes de la marine had been born in Canada, but their soldiers, as before, were recruited in France.
At the end of the French regime, in 1760, there were only three settlements of any size, Quebec, Montreal, and Trois-Rivières. Quebec alone had eight thousand people, and Montreal five thousand. As Harris and Warkentin point out, this meant that a quarter of New France’s population was urban, a higher ratio than in any of the British colonies to the south.9 On the other hand, three-quarters of the population (estimated at around seventy to seventy-five thousand in 1760) lived in the countryside, and, for the most part, contentedly.
ACADIA
New France was more than the valley of the St. Lawrence. The fisheries had brought the French to North America, to the waters off Newfoundland and then up the St. Lawrence to harvest fur as well as fish. The first temporary French settlements had been along the Atlantic coast, in Acadia. These had been abandoned, but very slowly, and during the seventeenth century French settlers returned.
The centre of settlement was a tiny French fort at Port Royal on the east side of the Bay of Fundy. The settlers diked the marshlands for their farms, a practice still in use. Small it may have been, but insignificance did not protect it against English freebooters, and the settlement changed hands several times in the mid-seventeenth century. Nevertheless, when Acadia was finally returned to France in 1670, it had 350 French inhabitants, and by 1700, twelve hundred.
The return to French control seems to have been a signal for the colony to expand: new settlements were founded on the Isthmus of Chignecto, linking what is now Nova Scotia to New Brunswick, and along the Minas Basin. Interestingly, though England and France were frequently at war, the Acadians had no objection to trading with the enemy, actual or potential, and at times proved reluctant indeed to cooperate with the French authorities in turning away New English ships, even in time of war.
Acadia’s best protection was peaceful relations between England and France. The long coastline couldn’t be defended, and relative proximity to New England meant that English ships were a constant opportunity for trade but a constant threat in times of war.
EXPANSION AND THE FUR TRADE
The real advantage of New France’s position on the St. Lawrence became clear only after the temporary end of the Iroquois wars in the 1660s. The means to travel were at hand—light, portable birchbark canoes, easy to make and easy to replace, capable of navigating shallow waters, and easy to carry around rapids or from one river system to another. The coureurs de bois would drop into their canoes at Montreal and travel up the Ottawa River on their way to the pays d’en haut, the rich fur lands north of Lake Superior.
The fur traders’ enterprise did not always please the colonial authorities, and a clash between the rulers of the colony and two particularly adventurous traders, Pierre Radisson and Médard Chouart de Groseilliers, provoked the two to take their business, and their knowledge of the fur trade, to England and the court of King Charles II.
The result was the foundation of yet another trading syndicate, chartered by the king in May 1670—the Hudson’s Bay Company. Its purpose was to seek its shareholders’ fortune in the northern interior of North America, not via the St. Lawrence or the Hudson but through the discovery by the explorer Henry Hudson in 1610 of an interior sea, Hudson Bay. Hudson had perished, but his bay lingered on in the fringes of cartography. Was Hudson Bay, forbidding as it was, really the opening of the fabled Straits of Anian, leading to the Pacific, China, and wealth? And what of the fur trade? True, the Bay was blocked by ice from November until June every year, and had a shoreline of swamp, rock, and muskeg, but what was discouraging to humans was delightful to beavers. If Radisson and Groseilliers were to be believed, the Indians beyond the Bay would jump at the chance of trading with the English.
Charles II obligingly claimed for England the lands of the Hudson Bay watershed, an unknown quantity then, but a vast piece of real estate stretching as far as the Rockies in the west and covering most of what would become the Canadian prairies. He then assigned the territory to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which in turn dispatched ships loaded with trade goods to the Bay. The Company proposed to establish permanent trading posts along the shores of Hudson Bay and its southern extension, James Bay. (The reasoning was that only a fixed establishment could reliably attract Indians with furs on a regular basis.) It took several tries, since those who were unlucky enough to winter in the Bay, and lucky enough to survive it, did not wish to repeat the experience.10 Endless winters and the experience of scurvy were serious deterrents, but not so serious as to prevent, finally, the establishment of a series of English posts by the mid-1670s.
It didn’t take long for the authorities in New France to notice. Louis XIV had sent out a new governor, the comte de Frontenac. Frontenac quickly concluded that the only sure source of wealth in New France was the fur trade, and in order to secure it he was anxious to expand his colony into the interior and establish trading posts of his own. It was for the good of the colony, to be sure, but in an age when public and private interests were often one and the same, Frontenac hoped to reap personal gain as well. He attempted to lure Radisson and Groseilliers back into the French service, and sent emissaries to visit the English posts on Hudson Bay. He had good reason to do so: his agents reported that the Indians of the interior, members of the Cree nation, were diverting furs to the Bay that otherwise would have gone to the French.
Commercial rivalry between the English and French continued through the 1670s and into the 1680s. The competition couldn’t be taken to extremes, however, for England and France were at peace. Louis XIV and his Stuart cousins, Charles II and his brother and successor, James II, were on amiable terms. Louis was especially anxious to encourage James, a Catholic, in his attempts to promote Catholicism in a stubbornly Protestant country. James for his part was well aware that he needed French help, and was accordingly inclined not to offend his cousin. And so an unlikely link emerged between religious politics in Europe and the competitive international slaughter of the beaver in the lands beyond Hudson Bay.
A new governor in New France, the marquis de Denonville, became convinced that the survival of his colony demanded action against the English, and not merely in Hudson Bay but in New York too. He could do little directly about New York, where the Iroquois were in the way and once again at war with the French. As for Hudson Bay, in 1686 Denonville sent a small expedition with ambiguous instructions. The French, led by a young officer, the chevalier de Troyes, and a young Montrealer, Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, seized Fort Albany, on James Bay, from the English.
The English of the Bay and “the French of Canada” were thus already at war when fate removed James II from the English throne in November 1688. The Protestant country rejected its Catholic monarch and placed another cousin, the Dutch William of Orange, on the English throne. James’s attempts to regain his crown were unavailing, and he lived out his life as a pensioner of Louis XIV. William of Orange became William III of England, and went to war with France.
The war between England and France was part of a larger conflict, formally called the War of the League of Augsburg, and in North America, more simply, King William’s War. It lasted until 1697. In its North American phase it merged with the existing French war against the Iroquois. That war in turn was part of an even larger confrontation between the Iroquois and the Algonquin peoples of the interior, and though the war is mostly remembered and recorded for such events as the bloody Iroquois raid on Lachine outside Montreal in 1689, it was really the Algonquins who fought the Iroquois to a standstill and finally defeated them. The French did their bit by organizing the various tribes into a single alliance with a common purpose and then supplying the allies. Frontenac, who enjoyed a second term as governor from 1690 to 1698, led his own expeditions into Iroquois territory. So while the French role was crucial, it was the allies who had the main task of, finally, rolling the Iroquois back into their heartland south of Lake Ontario.11
Frontenac also had the task of defending Quebec against a seaborne expedition from New England in 1690, and he faced down the English with his customary bravado. On the island of Newfoundland, where fishing berths were gradually developing into permanent settlements, the French led by d’Iberville did their best to drive the English off. But they were successful only in part, which meant, in effect, that they weren’t successful at all. War raged in the north as well, as French and English leapfrogged around Hudson Bay in pursuit of victory and profit. In Europe and in North America, however, neither side achieved a decisive advantage, and the war ended inconclusively with New York still in English hands, New France still French, and Hudson Bay and Newfoundland still divided between them.
The peace of 1697 was probably of less significance for New France than was another peace, concluded in Montreal in 1701 under Frontenac’s successor, Hector-Louis de Callière. This “great peace” put an end to the French and Algonquin war with the Iroquois. It was a peace the Iroquois had to have. Having it, they could continue as an important factor in the balance of power in North America between English and French, but in a larger sense the Iroquois were no longer decisive.
Nor were the French confined any longer to the St. Lawrence Valley. They had gone north, as we have seen, to Hudson Bay, and west to the head of Lake Superior. French posts were established at Fort Frontenac (now Kingston, Ontario) and Detroit. One of Frontenac’s protégés, René-Robert Cavelier de la Salle, found a route from the Great Lakes basin to the Mississippi River, and then descended the Mississippi, reaching the Gulf of Mexico in 1682. He claimed the Mississippi Valley, naturally, for his master, Louis XIV.
THE SCENT OF EMPIRE
With hindsight, we can see that Louis XIV and his empire were past their apogee in the 1690s. Louis had taken the French state and organized it for war. Until the 1690s his wars were generally successful, with French prestige growing along with his conquests. Even Louis’s distant Canadian colony was stabilized through a mixture of warlike policy and prudent economic development.
What should be done next? Caution dictated consolidation; France had an opportunity to recover from Louis’s wars. And New France finally had an opportunity to escape from the shadow of the Iroquois wars and to develop in peace. The fur trade had reached a balance apparently favourable to France and French interests, even if the English had never been chased completely from Hudson Bay.
Louis did not make these choices. Instead he pursued fortune, as he saw it, in the expansion of French influence and prestige. He placed his grandson on the throne of Spain in defiance of the powers of Europe. In North America he determined to create an empire out of his explorers’ discoveries. France wouldn’t attempt to invade or destroy the existing English colonies along the Atlantic coast; rather, it would surround them by dominating the Mississippi Valley—named Louisiana after its guiding spirit.
By these policies Louis sought to expand his power and perpetuate his strategic advantage—the advantage that his wars up to that point had gained for him. Instead, he set in motion a new cycle of wars that would end in the destruction of the French Empire in North America.