"Reverse Huguenots"?

Okay. The Huguenots where French Protestants, Calvinists I think, who fled France for the Low Countries and Britain, and notably the Colonies in America due to religious persecution... a lost for France, it is argued.

But this is not what I talk of, actually. An hypothetic reversed, mirrored situation.

'Papists' had a load of persecutions and frank discrimination as well in Britain (and probably other Protestant nations..).

Is it possible to have British/English Catholic fleeing persecutions for France (and maybe even Spain or Portugal?), and french colonies? How to do this?

And how would they be called... Albiens?

(You can always go for another nation as German states, but... It's not the same.)
 
OTL many English Catholics ended up in Maryland. A longer lasting Protectorate ,under someone more capable than "tumbledown Dick" might have generated additional religous refugees.
 
OTL many English Catholics ended up in Maryland. A longer lasting Protectorate ,under someone more capable than "tumbledown Dick" might have generated additional religous refugees.

And would a growing hostility on both sides be enough to make them go french and New France, maybe?
 
They could settle on Sainte Domingue (Haiti), and become sugar planters, I suppose. Perhaps the extra dollop of pro-French colonists would be sufficient for France to gain control of more than OTL's Western third of the island.
 
Mostly because sugar cane was immensely profitable (for a few, anyway), and Hispaniola is less isolated and more densely populated than New France.
On some level though, I suspect that people intrepid/financially secure enough to emigrate more for religous than economic reasons would not settle for being farmers or trappers.
 
Perhaps "new christians"/conversos could flee across the Pyrenees to France and thence to the Americas?
IIRC they were technically banned from settling in most Spanish colonies,
but New France, etc. is still an option.
 
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