Like the English colonies in North America, the French also have a markedly religious origin, due to the fierce clashes between the Huguenots and Catholics in France during the second half of the 16th century.
The massacre of the night of Saint Bartholomew in Paris ended the lives of a good part of the Huguenots. These, persecuted for decades until the promulgation of the edict of Nantes by Enrique IV in 1598, had no other path than exile.
The French had founded Fort Caroline (in what is now the Carolinas) in 1564 in order to intercept the Spanish fleets laden with gold coming from Havana, but the Spanish Pedro Menéndez de Avilés attacked and destroyed the fort.
Foundationoffirstfrenchcities
At the beginning of the 17th century, Samuel de Champlain explored the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River and the coasts of Acadia until he founded, in 1608, the first French city baptized with the name of Quebec, with this he began the French colonization in America. Since the time of Jaeques Cartier, New France was called the entire region that extends from Lake Ontario to the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, and the economic base of these Gallic settlements was the exploitation of rich furs, which were abundant there among the varied fauna of the cold zone.
ExplorationsandpopulationofCanada
The French fur collectors were soon followed by religious missions such as that of the Jesuits, which in 1625 began the peopling of Canada, France's great colony in North America. The French, through their commercial companies and to break the Spanish-Portuguese monopoly, also began to occupy some islands of the Lesser Antilles (Martinique, Guadalupe, Tortuga, San Bartolomé, María Galante and Santa Lucía) during the first half of the 20th century. XVII.
In 1673, Count Louis de Fronténac, governor of New France, founded Fort Fronténac on Lake Ontario, where Franco-British interests soon collided.
René-Robert Cavalier de la Salle explored from the north the territories of Lake Michigan and the region that is now Illinois until, in 1682, he reached the mouth of the Mississippi and took possession in 1683 of the enormous valley that this river gave rise to, in name of Louis XIV. He baptized it in honor of the monarch, with the name of Louisiana, founding the city of Saint-Louis on it. At the beginning of the 18th century, Antoine de Cadillac founded the city of Detroit (1701). In 1718, New Orleans emerged in the Mississippi delta, an important cultural and commercial center for fur and cotton.