What If New France Had More Settlers and Colonists?

Philip

Donor
What about English Catholics? If the mid-late XVII Century goes even worse for Catholics in England, could they be a source of immigrants?

Perhaps a failed Restoration portrayed as a Catholic plot?
 
Generically, I think this boils down to: if there's a will, there's a way.

France never really had the will/motivation to put the effort into populating New France. There are plenty of reasons, including an almost constant state of warfare in the mother country sapping resources and shaping foreign policy, and that foreign policy itself. What will did exist ended up mostly squandered through misguided effort.

However, there's no basic reason the colony (s) couldn't have seen more population.

To answer the original question, though, more settlers means an altered relationship with the natives. France depended on massive support of the natives to hold back the English. It's going to take a lot of white population growth to make up for any diminished native support. Of course, this TTL where France has an altered foreign policy might also see an increased appreciation of a navy, and with a better navy, France can keep lines of communication open with New France. It was loss of communication, more than the population disparity of New France/Britsh NA, that spelled doom for the colony.
 
It is worth noting that, even with a larger number of French colonists in New France, the empire could still have fallen. Québec ultimately fell in 1759 not because it lacked for defenders but because the French navy was cut off from supplying Canada. We could well have a situation where there were more Canadiens and Acadiens but New France was still cut off from French support.

I do think that there was a possibility of more expansion. Granted that the rapids just upstream of Montréal acted as a good barrier to easy traffic, I do wonder if the shores of Lake Ontario might have been colonizable with a minimum of disruption. The Huron and other peoples once living in the area had been displaced permanently by the wars of the mid-17th century. Could the seigneurial system have been extended to Ontario? I wonder.
 
Is there any chance that if there was a significant French loss in war of Austrian succession or seven years war or something, where there was an amount of destruction that peasants began looking for a life away from major rival states or whatever and as part of the treaty at the end of that war the winning side forces the French to give up its transatlantic travel monopoly to gain the fees from peasants who do travel- is there any chance that by the mid 18th century, there could’ve been an influx of arrivals to New France that actually affected the long term strength of the colony?
 
It is worth noting that, even with a larger number of French colonists in New France, the empire could still have fallen. Québec ultimately fell in 1759 not because it lacked for defenders but because the French navy was cut off from supplying Canada. We could well have a situation where there were more Canadiens and Acadiens but New France was still cut off from French support.

I do think that there was a possibility of more expansion. Granted that the rapids just upstream of Montréal acted as a good barrier to easy traffic, I do wonder if the shores of Lake Ontario might have been colonizable with a minimum of disruption. The Huron and other peoples once living in the area had been displaced permanently by the wars of the mid-17th century. Could the seigneurial system have been extended to Ontario? I wonder.
Agree overall.

I've read that the seigneurial system was an impediment to inducing immigration.
 
To be clear, France did not intend for its colonies to be lands of settlement; the model of the Thirteen Colonies was far from the mind of French colonial planners. They intended their French empire in North America to be based on the export of high-value commodities like furs, something that does not require a large population of workers to extract.
 

SwampTiger

Banned
France should have followed the path of Spain in sending any Catholics, regardless of ethnicity or national origin to the colonies. It should have offered additional incentives to draw settlers. Spain sent Acadians, Germans, Frenchmen, Canary Islanders and Filipinos to Louisiana. During the Religious Wars, send drafts of refugees to the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Valleys.
 
France should have followed the path of Spain in sending any Catholics, regardless of ethnicity or national origin to the colonies. It should have offered additional incentives to draw settlers. Spain sent Acadians, Germans, Frenchmen, Canary Islanders and Filipinos to Louisiana.
They tried : incitative settlement? failed (see above). Military settlement. Failed. Turning Louisiana into a French Australia? Failed. Trying to get replacement settlers? Not as much attempted as which ones?

During the Religious Wars, send drafts of refugees to the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Valleys.
There was no French Canada (and even less French Louisiana) during Wars of Religion : it's a bit the whole point of the thing, giving the Wars of Religion kinda freeezed any serious colonial project, and the only ones planned at this point utterly failed due to the lack of resources.
 
It wouldn't be a prudent politic for the king [...] to depopulate his own kingdom as it should be required to populate Canada. [...] this land will populate itself slowly, and after some reasonable time, could become quite considerable, giving that depending of Her Majesty business within or outside the kingdom, She will give it help according Her possibilities.

And was that wrong?
 
And was that wrong?
It was exagerated. While definitely electing to focus on European and metropolitain matters would have been a valid choice, as @Oamlyya said it would have been really hard to desertify France out of her population with providing with more settlers and ressources.
Not that you had a lot of room getting more voluntary settlers (there's possibilities, and you don't need to recruit foreign settlers from all Europe, with regions of the kingdom that provided little such as Provence, Languedoc, Bourgogne, etc.), but this kind of timorous perspective was enough that several officials didn't really believed the effort was doable or even desirable.

A political perspective that would be both realist and determined could have found some more settlers. Not really in numbers close to 1000 or 2000 (the settlers in New France initially represented 500 once you remove people going back, people going native, people dying quickly) but as long Louis XIV and royal state in France isn't ready to make a wild bet by making compromise peace and giving up on European ambitions for a really not that interesting Canada...You won't have much more.
The best PoD IMO, is a French victory in the SWS by the late 1700's.
 
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