French court flees to Québec - possible?

I think you may be badly underestimating New Orleans both in actuality and potential. There were already large cotton plantations there and up the Mississippi, and the potential for development of trade and exploitation of the region from New Orleans was great, and recognized as such. The city didn't just trade with the USA, it also had Mexican trade. It's positioned so ideally as a trade entrepot it's hard to imagine it not becoming a great center.

I don't think it's arguable that the French were far better at commerical development and settlement by the late 18th c than the Spanish in every category. Besides, the Spanish had far lesser resources and way more pressing priorities.

Quebec can not only be blockaded, it can be fairly easily attacked overland. Not so New Orleans - or at least not in 1800.

The person doesn't matter, though I admit I thought Britain was being referred to. But anyone who can blockade French Canada most certainly can blockade French Louisiana. New Orleans isn't even a rich city by 1800, and little will change that.
Why? The money isn't really there. Louisiana is only commercially viable at the time because of American trade that goes through New Orleans, which is exactly what made it so strategically necessary to the US that they were willing to go to war for it.

If you want money, go to the Caribbean. If you want good farm lands, it's not in Louisiana. Louisiana is empty except for the Indians, and initial French settlers are going to be outweighed by settlers from the east coast soon enough.


No, it wasn't much more important by then. Not to anyone but the US, that is. New Orleans by 1800 is small, pitiful, and poor. Even if you trippled the population, the region would still be small, underpopulated, and poor. The only real trade it gets is from settlements from up the Mississippi and west of the Appalachians, where it was cheaper to float it down river and sail back up the east coast than it was to use wagons across the Appalachians at a time when roads are laughable.

But this trade is largely one-way, since shipping up stream was at a mile-per-hour pace, and almost all the settlers west of the Appalachians were from the US. This makes New Orleans by far disproportionately important to the US compared to every other power.

Royalist remanents might choose New Orleans, for some strange reason, but if they're already in the position of being driven off to New Orleans in the first place then they aren't going to be able to keep the city.

New Orleans was the target of concentrated and explicit American desire for decades. Britain knows this, because the US was on the edge of an Anglo-American alliance of OTL. France knew this, because the US told them so in trying to buy the city. New Orleans is the geopolitical linchpin in American westward expansion and security west of the Appalachians, and the US and everyone else knows it.
 
I'd like to throw French Guiana as a contender... sure, it too is a swamp with nasty bugs and hostile natives, an inconducive climate and encroached upon by another European power, but it's damn close to those Caribbean possessions (apparently a paramount need when deciding where to relocate an exiled court to) and at least its not subject to hurricanes. And there's an Isle Royale right off the coast, perfect for Roi Louis to set up shop on....

My point has not been to argue that Quebec City is the ideal spot or would have been chosen, but to raise it's viability in this thread, since it was seemingly dismissed out-of-hand early on. I really believe a strong argument can be made for it (thanks for your supporting comments Dean), just as an argument for N.Orleans can be made. So until someone states "I choose this one and therefore it will unfold like this" it should be considered.
 
Just an idea: assuming that everything goes as IOTL, New Orleans going to the Spanish, French Canada being lost to the British, the American independence happening on time, but the only divergence is a POD between 1788 and 1799 that allows the court to flee France. If the French royals had decided to go to a colony, where could they have gone in this situation?
 
I'd like to throw French Guiana as a contender... sure, it too is a swamp with nasty bugs and hostile natives, an inconducive climate and encroached upon by another European power, but it's damn close to those Caribbean possessions (apparently a paramount need when deciding where to relocate an exiled court to) and at least its not subject to hurricanes. And there's an Isle Royale right off the coast, perfect for Roi Louis to set up shop on....

My point has not been to argue that Quebec City is the ideal spot or would have been chosen, but to raise it's viability in this thread, since it was seemingly dismissed out-of-hand early on. I really believe a strong argument can be made for it (thanks for your supporting comments Dean), just as an argument for N.Orleans can be made. So until someone states "I choose this one and therefore it will unfold like this" it should be considered.

I think Quebec is the 2nd-place contender, far above any 3rd, but I think the position of Quebec doesn't work. It's only real trade is fur, and it's adjacent to American and British power, both land and sea.
 
Just an idea: assuming that everything goes as IOTL, New Orleans going to the Spanish, French Canada being lost to the British, the American independence happening on time, but the only divergence is a POD between 1788 and 1799 that allows the court to flee France. If the French royals had decided to go to a colony, where could they have gone in this situation?
Martinique/Guadaloupe, I'd say - the sugar profits would keep them in fine form for awhile.

Or Guiana, but it was REALLY marginal; it didn't even become a penal colony until after the Restoration.
 
I think Quebec is the 2nd-place contender, far above any 3rd, but I think the position of Quebec doesn't work. It's only real trade is fur, and it's adjacent to American and British power, both land and sea.
True enough, but N.Orleans trade is the potential for river-floated goods. And it's between the expansionist Americans and the Spanish, both land and sea. And there's almost no French population to support the Exiles in the area. That's why I put N. Orleans as 2nd place, at least in North America.

Truely I think Martinique would be the most likely candidate out of all colonies. Rich, well-established, isolated. In the end you could have a Monaco-like mini-state retaining the French Monarchy into modern times.
 
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