WI France won the French and Indian War?

Year 0

Banned
Please forgive me if this subject has been brought up before. The Search function wasn't working for me.

What would have happened if France, rather than Great Britain, had won the French and Indian War? Would the American Revolution never happen? Would France gain control of British Colonies in North America? Or is this entire scenario implausible and would have never happened?

I think that France would probably gain control of the Thirtein Colonies, similar to how Great Britain gained control of most of the Louisiana in OTL. Thoughts, anyone?
 

Thande

Donor
The subject has indeed come up before, one timeline dealing with the subject is "God is a Frenchman" by Anaxagoras.

Do bear in mind that the French and Indian War was just one front of a world war, the Seven Years' War, and it's important to specify whether you're asking of a scenario where the French win only in the American front and still lose the European and Indian fronts (and naval battles) or whether you're asking about a wholesale victory. Or indeed if the French had won elsewhere, they might lose in America but still get their possessions traded back to them at the peace treaty, as had already happened with Louisbourg twice before.
 

Year 0

Banned
Well, in this case, I'm reffering only to the American Front, though it can be speculated as to what would have happened if the French had won on other fronts as well.
 

Thande

Donor
All right, my brief take on it would be this:

France gets back all of New France, ie "Canada" (modern southern Quebec and Ontario), Louisiana and the Mississippi watershed. Now what happens next depends on just how convincingly the French won. IMO it would be really difficult for Montcalm and Vaudreuil to do more than beat back the British and colonial forces, considering how badly they were outnumbered. They held out for quite remarkably long even in OTL. So if the French only win on the American front as you suggest, it's basically status quo ante bellum, or as we call it nowadays, The Big Reset Button For The Next War.

However, if the French also manage to win elsewhere, say a big naval battle or they capture British forts in India, then the British government might be forced to make more concessions in America. In its most extreme form (the one in Anaxagoras' TL) the French would get the Ohio Country and everything else west of the Applachians, except maybe the Hudson's Bay Company's lands in what's now Canada. The British colonies would be hemmed in behind the Appalachians, at least until the next war.

This would avert the American Revolutionary War as we know it, because the French are still a credible threat and the colonists still need Britain to protect them. However, we will still see a dawning national identity here, which had already begun a couple of decades earlier during the War of Jenkins' Ear/Austrian Succession. Instead however I think we'll see a lot of resentment by the commoners in the colonies against the established governors and assembly members, with the flames fanned by protofederalists like Ben Franklin. In the Seven Years' War a lot of British commanders expressed frustration that the colonial governors were unwilling to commit many militiamen to the campaigns against the French, and this will be used as the excuse for why the war was lost.

When the next war rolls around - perhaps over the Nootka Sound Dispute, or maybe even earlier than that - I see the British colonies having had some sort of centralised authority created there at least for military matters, and many more regular Army regiments drawn up to take colonials (in OTL there were only a few, and most were disbanded after the Seven Years' War, with the notable exception of the 60th Royal American Rifles). Then expect the colonials to go full-out in an attempt to win back their transappalachian territories. In the long run, if they put their minds to it, the French really can't win - in terms of population to draw upon, the French colonials in New France are outnumbered 20 to 1 by the British colonials in the Thirteen Colonies.

When the French have finally been cleared out of North America, one or two wars later, that's when we might see the gathering of pro-independence ideas in British America...but by that point France's mounting debts might already have triggered the French Revolution - or maybe not if they still have their Indian trade. Bit hard to predict beyond there in the abstract.
 
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