Before I begin, I would like to give a shout-out to @Gabingston for partially inspiring this TL with English Canada/French Carolina: A Timeline. The premises, while similar, are not exactly the same. The Age of Exploration and Colonization is also one of my favorite periods in history to explore.
La Floride: A French Huguenot Colony in North America
- Thread starter PGSBHurricane
- Start date
Prologue: An Age of Discovery
Prologue: An Age of Discovery
The initial voyage of Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo) from Palos de la Frontera in August 1492 would change the world forever. The idea of a navigable overseas trade route to the East Indies dated back to 1453 when the land route, also known as the Silk Road, prohibited Christian traders under the Ottoman Empire following the fall of Constantinople. In the 1480s, he had developed a plan by sailing directly across the Atlantic Ocean, which was the only ocean believed to exist then, with no landmasses in between other than the mythical island of Antillia. Of course, for various reasons, it was difficult for his plan to gain support. It was only in early 1492 when his plan was picked up by a monarchy, who was Queen Isabella of Spain. By then, Portugal had found an eastern route and was no longer interested in dealing with Christopher. In April 1492, in the "Capitulations of Santa Fe" between Columbus and Isabella, the former was promised the title of, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" and the appointment of the titles of viceroy and governor of any successfully claimed colonies for the Spanish Crown. For his westward voyage in his quest to find a shorter route to the Indies, Columbus and his crew took three medium-sized ships: The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The ships departed into the Atlantic Ocean from Spain on August 3, 1492.
On October 12, Columbus and his crew had finally sighted land, which was a small island that he had named San Salvador. The indigenous Lucayan peoples had called it Guanahani. Columbus called them, along with the nearby Taínos and Arawaks, Indios (which was the Spanish term for "Indians” as he had believed he was in Asia), and believed they would be easy to convert to Christianity. He took note of their gold earrings and took some Arawaks prisoner so they could guide him to the source of gold. Later that month, he explored the northeastern coast of Cuba. By the end of the year, he had researched the northwest coast of Hispaniola, where the Santa Maria ran aground and was abandoned. There, he left 39 men behind, including his interpreter Luis de Torres, and founded the settlement of La Navidad. In January 1493, he completed his journey along the northeast coast of Hispaniola where he encountered the Ciguayos and found the inlet where he met them, the Bay of Arrows. As he returned to Europe, most people initially accepted that he had reached the East Indies. On May 4, 1493, the Pope decreed that the non-European world would be divided between Spain and Portugal along a north to south meridian 100 leagues west of either the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, granting Spain everything that was discovered by Columbus. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas moved the line an additional 270 leagues west. Columbus would take three more voyages into the West Indies before his death in 1506.
It was not until Amerigo Vespucci came along that the new landmass was disputed not to be part of Asia. In 1501, King Manuel I of Portugal commissioned an expedition to investigate a landmass far in the western Atlantic Ocean (which would eventually be renamed Brazil). Vespucci claimed much of the landmass that laid east of the line created by the Treaty of Tordesillas. In August 1501, he described the region as something that could only, “properly be called a New World,” and that it was not an island but rather a continent by itself. The Age of Exploration was now underway. In 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Panamanian Isthmus and reached the Pacific Ocean. Exploration of both the Eastern and Western hemispheres was bridged in 1522 when Ferdinand Magellan completed the first circumnavigation of the world, passing through the Straits of Magellan near the tip of South America and what was later named the Philippine Archipelago off the Pacific Coast of China. Of course, Spain and Portugal were not the only European countries involved in discovering new lands. The expedition of John Cabot of England to the North in 1497 came right on the heels of Columbus and his southward expeditions. The Dutch soon followed suit with their own explorations and discoveries. But this tale focuses on yet another player in this game: France.
One of the first major expeditions under the French flag was by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who was motivated by indignation over the division of the world between Spain and Portugal. In 1524, he explored the Atlantic Coast of North America from Florida to Newfoundland. From 1534 to 1536, French explorer Jacques Cartier traveled into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and then into the St. Lawrence River. He named the land, “The Country of Canadas,” and claimed it for France. Europeans outside the Iberian Peninsula recognized neither the Treaty of Tordesillas nor Pope Alexander VI's donation to Spanish finds in the New World. Two of these new competitors were Protestant, England and the Netherlands, which did not recognize the Pope anyway and the other was France despite itself being Catholic. It did, though, have a significant Protestant minority in the form of Huguenots, who were French Calvinists and adopted the Huguenot name in 1560. Concentrated in western and southern France, they were initially tolerated. When the Edict of St. Germaine was issued in 1562, which granted them religious freedom with limitations, France had two million Huguenots within its borders. On March 1, the ultra-Catholic Francis, Duke of Guise, massacred dozens (if not hundreds of Huguenots) and injured up to 200 in the town of Vassy, beginning the French Wars of Religion. Desperate for escape, some Huguenots sought refuge across the Atlantic Ocean.
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This is half a century before Jamestown, I could see the Huguenots nabbing a good chunk of North America.
I don't have the Huguenots expanding north much past South Carolina, almost certainly not into Virginia.
Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia
My apologies, I will go back and fix that.Pretty much every person with any level of education knew the world was round, which had been established in antiquity.Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Watched.
I'm thinking of what would an independent and sovereign French-speaking Southern United States including the society and ethnic makeup will look like in the modern era. If France had colonized the Southeastern United States, then it would be different like @Gabinston's TL where French North America and British Virginia have switched or swapped places divergently.
Maybe, France's Southeastern colony will be majority Catholic but I dunno if the country might have significant sizeable Métis population, similar to Pardos in Brazil and in fact, the population density would make an independent French-speaking country larger in terms of population than both France and Québec itself. And if France have colonized the Southeast, the relations between the colonists and natives might be different including the Cherokees.
Because of that, I'm guessing the colony might take in African slaves like what the British do.
I'm thinking of what would an independent and sovereign French-speaking Southern United States including the society and ethnic makeup will look like in the modern era. If France had colonized the Southeastern United States, then it would be different like @Gabinston's TL where French North America and British Virginia have switched or swapped places divergently.
Maybe, France's Southeastern colony will be majority Catholic but I dunno if the country might have significant sizeable Métis population, similar to Pardos in Brazil and in fact, the population density would make an independent French-speaking country larger in terms of population than both France and Québec itself. And if France have colonized the Southeast, the relations between the colonists and natives might be different including the Cherokees.
Because of that, I'm guessing the colony might take in African slaves like what the British do.
It will be interesting, to say the least. Catholic French Colonies vs Protestant French Colonies.
We'll see when we get there. This is just in the early development stages.
For those curious about the possible timetable, I will be updating my other TL by this weekend, and then I will be getting back to this one.
This needs a lot of explaining! In fact I suspect an independent French Huguenot colony without the patronage of some other European power nor the protection of the French king is categorically impossible. It is quite possible and OTL for the Huguenots to seek the protection of Protestant powers and even to then be routed to a colony somewhere overseas.
They did of course try exactly this OTL, in both Brazil and Florida. In fact it seems that the reason the Spanish outpost of St Augustine came into existence was precisely to expell such an attempt, at a site today unknown precisely but somewhere near the modern OTL Jacksonville. But the "colony" numbered in the low hundreds and was on the edge of extinction even before the Spanish expedition sent to remove them largely massacred them.
Now I can imagine that if politically expedient (that is, the King of France was at war with Spain or didn't mind risking it for a purpose) that the King might decide to avenge the Spanish massacre of his Protestant subjects, and double down (rather, raise the stakes by orders of magnitude) with a project to first turn the tables on the Spanish by investing and expelling the Spanish fort a-building at St Augustine, take it over and pour in a major expeditionary-colony, and invite Huguenots to settle there. He would be foolish to trust entirely to their loyalty of course and I think a possible model for Huguenot Florida could be that while the majority of settlers are Huguenots who enjoy settlements entirely of their own numbers, they agree to support other settlements nearby of predominantly Catholic subjects who are dedicated to supporting Catholic army and navy forces to supplement the Huguenot militia, the two branches of force being unified in command and accustomed to joint operation. Thus it would be a mixed Huguenot/Catholic colony, though the King would be careful to pick Catholic leadership pledged to tolerate and work with the Huguenots without invidious prejudice.
The purpose of state of the King doing this would be two-fold; on one hand, it is a safety valve, to defuse surges of anti-Protestant terrorism (and contervailing Huguenot counterattacks which were quite as terrible) by pressuring Huguenots to emigrate; on the other hand, if he can manage to keep this colony loyal, he can use it to threaten and distract the Spanish giving cover to the Catholic-only New France colony far far away to the north. (This might help explain why the Huguenots don't expand as rapidly northward as one might expect, they are encouraged to direct their expansionism southward to try to get footholds on the Gulf of Mexico and ideally to take control of the whole Florida peninsula so as to secure passage of French ships into the Gulf.
I amused myself by imagining that the French having taken St Augustine (with substantial part of the force doing it Huguenot volunteers, though not the whole of it!) the Protestants choose to maintain and expand the Spanish site rather than return to their own razed one, and even keep the name, in French of course (Saint-Augustin) since St Augustine of Hippo is I gather a much revered authority in Calvinist doctrine; retaining the name chosen by the murderous Papists is a sobering memento mori to inspire the Huguenot settlers to answer the call to royal service in defense of their new homeland.
Looking at it long term:
1) it is pretty Utopian to suppose that the OTL decimation and exile of the Huguenots from France can be sidestepped by "peacefully" transferring them wholesale to Florida. Over time the rate of emigration across the Atlantic would increase of course, but we are talking about the mid to late 16th century here, and then the 17th century during which time the position of the Huguenots in France was worsening versus their high water mark of the Edict of Nantes. Early on, it is impossible to ship 2 million persons from France and dump them on the wild shores of North America anywhere with any expectation they survive. The shipping doesn't exist to carry them in the first place anyway. Any Floride colony must be built up gradually with more judicious injections of immigrants at a sustainable pace.
2) the general class structure of the Huguenot movement in France doesn't support them all freely agreeing to be settler colonists. Apparently conversion to this French form of Calvinism was a matter of nobles, gentry and persons higher up the social ladder generally. Few to none of them were peasants! Whereas a settler colony needs people who are going to get out there and till the soil, as well as stand by ready to take up arms against Native foes resentful of their seizure of land backed up by Spanish power. The Huguenots OTL had no problem creating quite effective armies, but pioneers they generally were not, by inclination. In fact a considerable number of them did wind up emigrating to varous pioneer situations, but these I believe were a minority and also driven by desperation. Whereas if the mass of Huguenots in France are driven by desperation indeed, by being crushed in civil war, they hardly have the opportunity to muster an orderly colonization effort!
I can foresee the possibility of the French Florida colony as a reserve outlet for Huguenots being kept under French Royal protection for a century or so without deviation from OTL, bringing us to the late 17th century, by which time the colony can be very populous and a major military force that Spain cannot hope to destroy. But under these circumstances, the Huguenots would be more powerful back in France than OTL--perhaps not so much so that Louis XIV would not change his mind and attempt to repress them as OTL.
If the Bourbons follow their OTL anti-Protestant course, then obviously there must be a breach in relations between La Floride and France--either the French come in with a really huge army, and massacre/scatter the colony as well as of course the remaining Huguenot population in France--which, news flash, is not likely to be a lot smaller than it was at this point OTL!
Or--considering the utility of the Florida colony, and that if a compromise going on a century or so can merely be continued, they continue to be of use to his policy, the King may instead resist taking a hard line against these Protestant subjects and keep stringing them along. Perhaps a combination of incremental discouragment in France and open opportunity in (southeastern) America (not in New France and perhaps not in Louisiana or Haiti either) has indeed caused the remaining Huguenot population in France to dwindle. Even so, it will not do for the King to take too hard a line even just rhetorically.
More likely, if a royally supported and protected Florida colony can be sustained, the Huguenots cannot be too disabled in France itself and therefore will not dwindle.
Assuming the French kings must bite the bullet sooner or later, "cleaning up" Florida is going to be a headache for whichever one pays the butcher's bill, and part of his reward will be to scatter greater numbers than OTL of sworn foes to shelter in the protection of all France's enemies.
To be fair, everything that could've gone wrong for the Huguenots did. One of the big sources of their failure was the lack of good leadership and Ribault not being available to resupply the colonies. At least that was the case in Florida (OTL South Carolina). This TL should explore what should happen if they had better luck. As an aside, what would you say is more realistic for the Huguenots other than attempted colonization? IOTL, they pretty much lost their identity after more or less being forced to emigrate to Prussia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom once the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. With this TL, the goal is to make sure the Huguenots don't lose their identity along with being more successful in their colonization efforts.
Would the French Florida colony be only Huguenots, or would the French, out of necessity due to the lack of peasants among the Huguenots, also send over Catholic colonists, thus leading to a mixed Huguenot-Catholic colony? Hopefully that wouldn't eat itself like the one in Brazil did IOTL, but rather come to some sort of agreement to live and let live for the sake of the colony.
Through 1685, I expect the colony to be overwhelmingly majority, if not completely, Huguenot. Beginning in 1685, though, expect it to be more mixed so that Huguenots could eventually be no longer the majority.
On a related note, will the French still colonize Canada? I still see them nabbing Louisiana as an extension of the Floridian colony, but I don't know if they'd found a separate colony separated from La Floride by the British colonies (although completely surrounding British North America would be a strategically brilliant move).