Bonjour, mate?

One of the last expeditions of exploration financed by the French monarchy under the Ancien Regime, was that of opening up the South Pacific Ocean. Several Frenchmen were associated with this – namely de Bougainville, de Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, La Pérouse, Baudin etc. Their names are remembered in countless placenames in the South Pacific and Australia. So I have a few questions.

1. What would the results be of a French colonization of Australia/Oceania during the reign of Louis XVI or the Revolution?
2. Would it be possible?
3. Might Australia still serve as a penal colony (just under French rule rather than British)?
4. What would the results be for France having lost Quebec and their posts in India in the Seven Years’ War if they were to colonize Australia?
5. Would France be interested in colonizing Australia/Oceania?
 
I have never felt that France was keen on colonisation until after the Napoleonic Wars, they just seemed to go thru the motions (look at Arcadia for example).

During the revolution people were too busy avoiding loosing their heads to fund an exploration / colonisation trip to the southern seas.

I suspect that if a colony was set up in Australia then it would have been lost at the Treaty of Vienna as the British consolidated their empire.
 
I suspect that if a colony was set up in Australia then it would have been lost at the Treaty of Vienna as the British consolidated their empire.
I don´t know about that. Didn't Britain return most colonies after Vienna? Especially if this Australian colony was out of the way for Britain, like on the West Coast, instead of the East Coast where the British Australian colonies were.
 
The British kept all the Pacific / Indian Ocean territories it had taken, I would suspect that if the British had taken the Australian colony this would not be returned either.

If the British had not taken the colony then I guess that it would remain French and may remain so well into the 19th century given that Britain seemed to have concentrated on the East coast and the French landed in Shark Bay on the West coast (in Western Australia north of Perth).
 
The British returned Java to the Dutch

It would be interesting if the French had established something in the Swan River, Perth area that could have been part of its potential chain of bases in the Indian Ocean area

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
There is a small French settlement called Akaroa 40 or so minutes drive out of Christchurch, NZ, which was settled about the time the British clearly* asserted sovereignty over New Zealand (a matter of days or weeks) in 1840. Of course it has long since been anglicised in terms of culture and spoken language, but it retains a certain rustic charm all the same.

Anyway, I was reading about it the other day and somehow the British and French came to some sort of arrangement where the settlers got to do their own thing, under British law, with the support of the French Navy, for 5-10 years. I am planning to read more about that as it seems slightly odd to think that French sailors were tooling about rural NZ just a couple of hours drive from where I grew up.


*Clear to them and the other Great Powers, not so clear to the Maori signatories.
 
Could Australia might've ended up as a new America? British settlers on the one side, French settlers on the other? Much like in America with the Atlantic side of the Appalachians being British and the Mississippi side (at a stretch) being considered French as part of Louisiana?
 
It is possible, but they'd have to hurry because La Perouse arrived in Australia as an explorer as Phillip was about to land about 1000 free and convict colonists in early 1788. The French would have had to explore and decide to colonise by 1786 to win this race, or set up somewhere else entirely.
 
I remember of an old AH story where Bougainville arrived first in Australia and claimed it for France before Cook.
Now I doubt it would make a good POD : after all he claimed Malouines (Falkland) and set up the first settlement on the islands, and it didn't prevented the abandonment of the archipelago to Spain for cash.

France at this time wasn't much interested on big empty good-for-nothing lands (it's why they didn't resented too much the loss of Canada) but for quickly bankable colonial productions, as sugar. Financial fallout as Mississipi Compnay severely refrained the interest of population as well for great colonizing investments.
 

katchen

Banned
Australia COULD have been a source of quick profit for France. The French in the latter half of the 18th Century were short of places they could grow opium for the pipes of China, since they did not have access to India to the extent the British did. Granted, France will likely lose it's antipodean colonies by 1815, the French settlements in Australia will have at least given the British a jump on settling Australia and will probably mean an extra ten to twenty million people for Australia, New Zealand and the Melanesian island chain by the present. :) ITTL.
 
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