Virtual Museum of New
France
Internet sites that address the history of New France are
abundant. Lovers of history and professional historians, teachers and students
alike, will find numerous avenues of further exploration and research. For
example, the Canadian
Museum of History list of useful links is lengthy but not exhaustive, and
it is periodically enriched and updated.
The Canadian Museum of History provides an online Virtual
Museum of New France. In the Heritage
Section of the Site, it explains that New France disappeared in 1763, but
its legacy persists to this day. The transfer to Great Britain and Spain of the
territory occupied and claimed by France brought about a major political
transition. The transatlantic networks which until them had animated the French
colonies were reconfigured in fundamental ways. The French colonial population
nevertheless remained firmly rooted. It did not overnight lose its religion,
its customs, or its language. Colonial institutions were restructured, but many
of them retained for many years to come the character they had acquired under
the French Regime.
The heritage of New France is omnipresent today. The
populations born of seventeenth and eighteenth century migrants continue to
blossom, not only in Quebec, but through Canada and certain regions of the United
States. With a little genealogical research, the gap between that era and our
own is easily narrowed. The heritage of New France also shows through the
particularities of the French language as it is still spoken in North America. French
and Aboriginal place names, fixed by explorers and pioneers, etch traces of
this founding epoch across the continent.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, New France has
also been commemorated in more explicit ways. From the tercentennial of the
foundation of the city of Quebec, in 1908, to the two hundredth and fiftieth
anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, in 2010, solemn ceremonies
and historical re-enactments have abounded. Monuments to founding figures and
events have proliferated. Many historical sites have been reconstructed and
animated through the efforts of governments and devoted lovers of history. New
France, as it turns out, has not entirely disappeared.
Portal of New France
A second source of historical information from 1534 to 1763 is
the Wikipedia Portal
of New France. It explains that New France is the name that France gave to
its colonies in North America. The history of New France began with the first
attempts at French colonization following the first trip of Jacques Cartier in
1534. From 1604 to 1760, the Kingdom of France gradually expanded its authority
over lands inhabited and sometimes settled by Native American populations.
Samuel de Champlain founded the town of Quebec on July 3, 1608. It is one of
the first permanent European settlements in North American soil and it was the capital
of New France for over a century and a half.
This vast territory spanned three distinct regions: Acadia,
in what is now Atlantic Canada and part of North Eastern United States, Canada,
then comprising only St. Lawrence valley, and Louisiana, which included the
Illinois Country, comprising the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys down to the
Gulf of Mexico. New France had a low population growth compared to the British
American colonies adjacent to its eastern borders. Around 1730, the gap was
considerable: the British colonies had about 250,000 people of European origin
while there were only 30,000 people in New France. This, in addition to its
geographical position preventing the expansion of the British colonies,
triggered confrontations. Those became more frequent until the fall of Quebec
on September 13, 1759. A year after its capital was captured, New France fell
and was dismantled. Parts were ceded to Great Britain while the rest went to
Spain.
New France ceased to exist in 1763 when France ceded Canada
and its dependencies to Great Britain by signing the Treaty of Paris. Then in
1800, Napoleon Bonaparte returned the vast Louisiana region to France from
Spain under the Treaty of San Ildefonso. However, the treaty was kept secret,
and Louisiana remained under Spanish control until a transfer of power to
France on November 30, 1803, just three weeks before the cession to the United
States under the Louisiana Purchase. Today, all that remains to France of this
once vast wilderness empire are the little islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon,
located off Newfoundland, Canada.
