Antarctic France Timeline: a French Southern Cone in America.

Gabingston

Kicked
A few thoughts:
First, on the border between France Antarctique and Portuguese Brazil, may I suggest the Paranapanema River as a natural geographic boundary between the two? Maybe even the Tiete River if the French get really lucky, but I think the former is more likely. Overall, I think the border between Brazil and France Antarctique would be approximately the border between OTL's Brazilian states of Sao Paulo and Parana.
Second, with so many of France Antarctique's inhabitants being resentful of the French crown, I think France Antarctique could be the prime candidate to revolt against their mother country, especially if many of TTL's French Enlightenment figures go to France Antarctique. A Protestant, Republican Antarctique and a Catholic, Monarchist France would be an interesting outcome for TTL.
And last, will France Antarctique eventually reach all the way down to Tierra Del Fuego? I think it would be likely, considering that the French population would be far larger than OTL's Southern Cone, and thus they'd want to expand as much as possible, even to the very bottom of the continent.
 

JosephWorld

Banned
A few thoughts:
First, on the border between France Antarctique and Portuguese Brazil, may I suggest the Paranapanema River as a natural geographic boundary between the two? Maybe even the Tiete River if the French get really lucky, but I think the former is more likely. Overall, I think the border between Brazil and France Antarctique would be approximately the border between OTL's Brazilian states of Sao Paulo and Parana.
Second, with so many of France Antarctique's inhabitants being resentful of the French crown, I think France Antarctique could be the prime candidate to revolt against their mother country, especially if many of TTL's French Enlightenment figures go to France Antarctique. A Protestant, Republican Antarctique and a Catholic, Monarchist France would be an interesting outcome for TTL.
And last, will France Antarctique eventually reach all the way down to Tierra Del Fuego? I think it would be likely, considering that the French population would be far larger than OTL's Southern Cone, and thus they'd want to expand as much as possible, even to the very bottom of the continent.
I think that the border between Antarctic France and Brazil would indeed be at the level of the Paranapanema river, which is almost the exact border between the OTL states of Parana and Sao Paulo (as a result, Antarctic France would also own the southern part of OTL Mato Grosso Do Sul). And Antarctic France will effectively extend as far south as possible until it can reach... Antarctica!
 
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Gabingston

Kicked
It was mentioned that Henriville was built at the mouth of the Lagune des Canards, which would be OTL's city of Rio Grande, so that's where I'm assuming Henriville is. Can you confirm this?
BTW, I think you should add threadmarks for each of the updates. It makes reading the TL a lot easier.
 
It's definitely possible as the Spanish wouldn't have that good of a navy by the 19th century, and I think there may be a possibility where the English + French help the Antarcticans (it's the French Antarctique, so that's the name in running with). There's a great possibility that a rebellion occurs in Chile that allows for the full invasion of Chile as the people there are cooperative.
 

JosephWorld

Banned
Part XIV: The expulsion of the Jesuits and the suppression of Amerindian reductions.

From the beginning of the 16th century, evangelists from different religious orders arrived in America to convert the Amerindians to Catholicism. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Jesuit order (a very rigorous order devoted to the pope, created in 1540) began, especially in the Southern Cone, to gather many Amerindians in villages in order to accustom them to a sedentary European way of life based on the practice of Catholicism. These Amerindian villages run by the Jesuits were called "reductions". To escape slavery and other abuses by French settlers, tens of thousands of Guarani Indians quickly abandoned their tribal way of life in the wilderness to live in these reductions.

In the early 18th century, most of the Guarani reductions were located along the Parana River and in the slave colonies of St. Catherine and Parana. As French settlers moved inland to clear new agricultural lands, the territories of the Jesuit reductions were threatened with encroachment. Some planters financed criminal gangs to loot and burn Guarani villages and drive the Jesuits further afield. Likewise, the colonial administration of Antarctic France was very hostile towards the Jesuits: it looked unfavourably on the quasi-independence of these economically prosperous reductions, which were led by a religious order that was answerable only to the Pope and which, above all, had committed the heresy of evangelizing the Amerindians in their vernacular language (the Guarani) rather than in French and Latin. So Antarctic France wanted to drive out the Jesuits and take control of these reductions.

During the short period of the Regency of the Duke of Orleans (1715-1723), after the death of Louis XIV and before Louis XV reached the age of majority, the Scottish banker John Law became minister of finance of the kingdom of France and set up a particularly ingenious system named "Law's system": the economic activity of Antarctic France was divided into a whole bunch of shares that were to be bought by paper money (rather than by metal coins, which should have been suppressed in the long term). These shares eventually gave rise to financial speculation that was to enrich the state coffers. But Law's system was ultimately a disaster: the speculative bubble in the shares of Antarctic France burst in 1720, causing the first financial crisis in French history.

Even if metropolitan France was forced to declare itself bankrupt, Law's short-lived system still allowed colonial foreign trade to be boosted and Antarctic France emerged as the great winner of this system. In 1722, when the economy of Antarctic France was extremely prosperous and the power of the Regent (who had become physically impotent and was close to death) was declining, the administrators of the St. Catherine's colony and the colony of Parana decided to solve the Jesuit problem in a radical way so that this thorn in the side would not continue to hinder the economic boom of Antarctic France: the Jesuits were expelled to the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru, the Guarani in the reductions were dispersed and lands in these former reductions were redistributed to the colonists.

This expulsion of the Jesuits was one of the most tragic moments in the history of the Amerindians. Thousands of Amerindians were forced to take refuge in the wild lands of the Chacaud, not yet colonized by the French settlers. A new colony was also founded beyond the Parana River and up to the Payaguas River, deep in the lands of the Southern Cone and with Assomption as its capital (which was formerly the religious and administrative center for the evangelization and management of the Guarani), this colony was named "Philippiane" in honor of the Regent Philippe d'Orleans and was opened to the French settlers.
 
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JosephWorld

Banned
It was mentioned that Henriville was built at the mouth of the Lagune des Canards, which would be OTL's city of Rio Grande, so that's where I'm assuming Henriville is. Can you confirm this?
BTW, I think you should add threadmarks for each of the updates. It makes reading the TL a lot easier.
Yes, Henriville corresponds roughly to OTL's city of Rio Grande.
I try to put many hyperlinks on the names of ATL places (to refer them to their OTL places), but maybe that's not enough to make my timeline readable?
 

JosephWorld

Banned
I made a map from the game Hearts Of Iron 4: ATL South America should look something like this in the 20th century.

Capture.PNG
 
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Gabingston

Kicked
I know it's only been ten days, but I've got to ask if anything is coming for this TL. You were posting updates left and right for a good few days, and while I expected the pace to slow down, the fact that this thread has been completely dead since then is concerning.
 

JosephWorld

Banned
I know it's only been ten days, but I've got to ask if anything is coming for this TL. You were posting updates left and right for a good few days, and while I expected the pace to slow down, the fact that this thread has been completely dead since then is concerning.
My mind was elsewhere last week, but I'll come back and post a new part in 1-2 days. It's possible that I'll be away for a while sometimes, I work a lot by energy peak.
 
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JosephWorld

Banned
Part XV: The taking of Chile.

Since the Treaty of Utrecht, the Spanish monarchy had been intimately linked to the French monarchy under the Bourbon dynasty. Spain was now only a second-rate power, while France had become the first European power and was strengthening its colonial hold on the New World year after year...

At the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, the Captaincy General of Chile was a terribly marginalized territory in the Spanish Empire. Between the Atacama Desert in the north and the colony of Conception in the south (on the north bank of the Biobio River), several tens of thousands of Hispanic settlers and mestizo survived (solely through subsistence farming in a region with to little economic appeal) in particularly hostile conditions and in poverty.

The Spanish conquistadors had never succeeded in pacifying the Mapuche territories south of the Biobio River and in annexing their territories to the Spanish Empire, after having suffered very heavy military defeats against them at the end of the 16th century. The Mapuches thus made regular raids north of the Biobio river to ravage the Spanish colonies. To this Amerindian peril was added a climatic peril: Chile is just near the subduction zone between the Nazca plate and the South American plate, Chile was thus ravaged by numerous earthquakes from the XVI to the XVIII century. The earthquake of 1647 in Santiago, capital of the captaincy, was so devastating that the buildings of the colony almost all collapsed. Finally, smallpox epidemics, which were particularly prevalent in the captaincy, prevented any demographic development of the Hispanic settlements in Chile. So much so, that after the loss of the main maritime outlet in the Southern Cone (the Silver River Basin), Spain wondered if it should not abandon Chile and completely evacuate the Southern Cone for good...

At the beginning of the reign of Louis XV, the French monarchy was disappointed by the fact that two-thirds of the population of Antarctic France, in the colonies of the Atlantic coast, were Protestants. The royal court insultingly referred to Antarctic France as a "Huguenot rubbish dump". But France wanted to revitalize Catholicism in the Southern Cone by founding a new model Catholic colony, totally free of Protestant heresy. And the lands along the Pacific Ocean, west of the Andes, appeared to be an ideal location...

In 1728, while the French monarchy was at the same time fighting against other schismatic Catholic currents in the metropolis that threatened the stability of the Church (Jansenism and Richerism), a royal decree integrated the Mapuche territories (south of the Biobio River) into Antarctic France as an indigenous reserve. In 1729, at the Treaty of Seville (which ended a war between England and Spain), France took advantage of its authority as the first European power to demand that the English return Minorca and the Strait of Gibraltar (which had fallen into the hands of the Royal Navy during the War of the Spanish Succession) to its Spanish alliy. In exchange, Spain agreed to place the captaincy of Chile under a dual French-Spanish colonial administration.

As French missionaries and administrators arrived in the colonies of Chile, the colony of Castro (the only Hispanic colony present south of the Biobio River that managed to survive the Mapuche attacks), on the island of Chilowé, became in a few years a major religious pole near the Mapuche territories. The island of Chilowé had indeed a very mild oceanic climate, comparable to the climate of England or the West of France, the island was thus perfectly adapted to the human settlement. The island was thus quickly dotted with numerous monasteries, from where missionaries left to evangelize the hundreds of thousands of Mapuche. Several Mapuche reductions were also created, on the model of the former Guarani reductions. The Mapuche were quite hostile towards these missionaries and many missionaries went to Mapuche territory to a certain death, most of them went over there in the hope of ending up as martyrs and going to heaven. Nevertheless, in virtue of Catholicism and the good evangelization of the natives, France had forbidden the Huguenot planters of the slave colonies to invest the region, France also proclaimed to be the protector of the Mapuche populations so the Mapuche lands were sanctified and no settler could take them. The integrity of the Mapuche was thus fully respected in contrast to the Guarani and good relations between the French and the Mapuche were eventually established.

In 1750, Spain was forced to sign the Treaty of Madrid with Portugal and France, while Portugal had just established its total domination over the Amazon basin and the Guyanese region up to the Essequibo River (after driving the Dutch out of their colonial possessions in the jungle), while France had firm control over Chile (Spain had no more than a virtual control over its captaincy), and while the Spanish colonial empire was beginning to falter: Spain accepted the termination of the Treaty of Tordesillas and recognized the northern Brazilian possessions beyond 46° 37' west. Spain also agreed to terminate the General Captaincy of Chile and to transfer Chile entirely to France. In exchange, the boundaries of the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonial domains in South America were to remain frozen forever.

Finally, Chile became an important maritime crossroads in the mid-18th century. The colony of New Havre, founded in 1736 in the north of the island of Chilowé, became the port from which explorers left to discover the secrets of the immense ocean that separates the Indies from America, and from which most of the French long-distance ships (necessary to cross the immense distance between the Pacific and metropolitan France) were built. For the naval industry and to develop new agricultural lands for farmers, the forests of the island of Chilowé were therefore cleared. A small village, named Baie Profonde by the French colonial authorities, also became the port interface of Saint-Jacques-du-Chili in the 1750s. Baie Profonde, populated by several thousand inhabitants, quickly distinguished itself by a magnificent architecture perfectly adapted to the uneven relief of the city.
 
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There are already all the evangelized natives and the tens of thousands of Hispanics left in Chile, Chile is already overwhelmingly Catholic.
I meant catholic emigrants from France, since in story you stated a major reason for the purchase being the Huguenot majority of the colony nor being favored by the court.
 

JosephWorld

Banned
I meant catholic emigrants from France, since in story you stated a major reason for the purchase being the Huguenot majority of the colony nor being favored by the court.
Chile is still far away and difficult to live in, so the catholic emigrants who want to go there are quite few, they prefer the other colonies on the Atlantic coast.
 
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