Say that instead of Spain and Portugal like IOTL, France discovers modern-day Latin America and subsequently colonizes it. Is it plausible and how would those regions be different today?
Even if France encounters the New World first, I don’t see them having at all the same success as the Spanish do.
Why not?
How are the Spanish less brutal than the french? Tolerance of borderline pagan "saints" was common for most catholic powers when dealing with a recently converted population. Their problem was with religions similar to their own thats to say jews, muslims and worst of all... christian of the wrong denomination. Also Spain had in it's record the recents expultions of most of their muslim and jewish population and the forced convertion of the rest of them with a lot a suspition, paranoia and proto-racism towards conversos and their descendants. France OTOH had the brutal expultion and forced convertion of a protestant population that Spain never had to deal with. But considering the history of the Catholic Church in Spain and the relation of the monarchy with the papacy protestants in Spain would fare the same as in France in fact they would be repressed far sooner as the Spanish monarchy would never get out of their way to piss of the pope the manner that the french one did allowing protestantism to spread in the first place.French conquest of Mexico would probably be slower.
Their record of brutal religious persecution vs the Spanish relative tolerance means they might commit greater atrocities than the Spanish did
Is easy to not kill protestants when you don't have any. Meanwhile tolerating expagans is easy an done by both france and spain in the new world and even by the teutonic order in prussia! The brutality of France in its religious wars isnt too different from the spanish one at the end of the reconquista, remember that in places like Valencia moors made up 1/6 of the population. I am not an advocate of the black legend, on the contrary, I am pointing out that when confronted by a similar situation (a population of a different abrahamic sect, that was seen as unloyal to the state and prone to revolt or to assist possible foreing invasions) both monarchies did the exact same thing: expultion and forced convertion.the spanish toleration of neo pagan traditions and saints was harldly for recently converted populations, it was widespread in the spanish countryside. No Witches were burned in spain at all and the rural areas were mostly untouched by the inquisition.
compare this to the hundreds of thousands killed in the french wars of religion.
Believe it or not the spanish monarchy was a more tolerant place for non catholics than france was at this time.
Québec was pretty much a backwater, all of the French attention went towards those sweet, sweet sugar plantations in the Caribbean.Considering the brutality of french rule in Haiti, and that Martinique was similar, i doubt french tropical plantation colonies on the continent would be signficiantly better than spanish ones...
Now those more south may be different, maybe a french southern brazil or argentina would end up more like quebec, maybe not, and we also don't know how quebec would have turned out without british influence....
Thirdly, it’s naval tradition is horribly lower than that of Spain and vastly lower to that of Portugal.
That is in OTL though. French kings made the decision to concentrate on the land army. Also they failed to reform the country’s finances forever and as a consequence had less revenue per capita than the Dutch and English did. Those decisions do not have to be true in any TL.
France had 20 % of the population of Europe in the early modern period. Its history can go in a lot of directions.