WI New France had the same population as the 13 colonies.

The thing is, the French government didn't really want to sponsor a massive settler colony. It feared ( irrationally) that France would be "depopulated" if large numbers of settlers were sent, and (more rationally) that this would alienate the local Indian tribes and damage the fur trade, which provided the only real export commodity.

So to have a more populous New France you need the French government to change its whole mentality. The low population wasn't just because not many wanted to go to Canada, but also because the government was basically OK with that. It wanted to have just enough people there for the colony to be able to defend itself, and that was it.

Could you engineer some sort of population boom, leading to metropolitan France becoming over-populated and the government encouraging overseas settlement as a way of alleviating this?
 
Could you engineer some sort of population boom, leading to metropolitan France becoming over-populated and the government encouraging overseas settlement as a way of alleviating this?

Well keep in mind, France in the era of Louis XIV was far more populous than all of its neighbors - it had over 20% of Europe's population by itself. So the concerns of the country being depopulated were pretty silly. Especially considering that conditions in Canada were healthier and families had more children than in France. It needed more settlers but this wouldn't have affected France's own demography much.
 
To over-populate Metropolitan France you need a decade or so of good harvests followed by a few lean harvests. Then food shortages will encourage the more ambitious citizens to emigrate.
OTL See the Irish Potatoe Famine of 1848 ....

OTL Québécois were definitely healthier because of lower population density (slower spread of disease) and better fed because of all the farmland available in the Saint Lawrence River Valley.
Well-fed people live longer.
For example, the average Québécois woman got pregnant a dozen times in her lifetime. This number of pregnancies was similar to fertility rates in back in France. The difference was that most Quebec-born babies survived into adult-hood.
Talk about revenge of the cradle!
Despite limited immigration (from France) after 1755 and many waves of immigrants from the UK, 1/3 of modern Canadians still claim French as their mother-tongue.

As for France discouraging immigration because it might interfere with the fur trade ...... that is a valid fear, but demand for beaver fur hats dropped dramatically after the French Revolution.
 
Could you engineer some sort of population boom, leading to metropolitan France becoming over-populated and the government encouraging overseas settlement as a way of alleviating this?

France was already quite populous. I think we were really approaching its population limit assuming no more major agricultural advances.
 
The heart of the issue was that Louis XIV saw more glory in European conquest than overseas expansion. He was willing to sponsor colonies, but he saw them mainly as a way of making some money, a cash cow to fund his military adventures. France had the largest population in Europe, but every time it went to war it ended up facing a coalition of nations ranged against it. So he figured that France couldn't afford to lose too many people, or else it would lose its military advantage.

Of course, France didn't have to lose that many people, due to the huge population growth rate of the Canadiens. IOTL the population of Canada grew by a factor of 20 between 1660 and 1750 (from 3,000 to 60,000) and that was mainly through natural increase. If Louis had sent 10,000 more people in the 1660s/70s than he did OTL (should not be impossible - France at this time has 20 million people) then you could be talking about 200,000 more people a century later. But it just wasn't that high a priority to him. Canada's main export was furs, and having more settlers wouldn't produce any more of those.
 
Well France adopted the potato quite late, at the end of the 18th century. Have them adopt the potato earlier, say around 1600 like northern Italy, and you would have one hell of a population boom. With such a crowded country, you could expect mass emigrations to France's colony. It would be less dependant of royal decisions since the French themselves would be will to move, unlike OTL.
 
Top