Louisiana (colony)
Louisiana was a French colony in the central area of North America from the 16th century to the 19th century. The capital was La Nouvelle-Orléans .
In 1535 the French navigator Jacques Cartier circumnavigated Newfoundland , founded a settlement on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and took a large part of Canada for France into possession. He sailed as far as the Indian village of Stadacona , but it was not until 83 years later that the first permanent French colony of Québec ( New France ) was founded by the navigator Samuel de Champlain . Later other such villages were founded, which became the basis of important cities such as Montreal or Trois-Rivières . In the following time the French advanced from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River west to the Canadian chain of lakes.
When the English took possession of Hudson Bay in the north in 1668 , New France saw its interests violated. The French, in the form of Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet , oriented themselves to the southwest and reached the Mississippi River in 1673 .
In 1682 Robert Cavelier de La Salle followed the Mississippi to its confluence with the Gulf of Mexico and took possession of all the lands on the river for France. These lands were combined to form an area that was named Louisiana in honor of the French King Louis XIV . With these territorial claims, France had drawn a locking bar in the south and in the middle of the continent for the further expansion of the English territory to the west. Only in the north could the English advance to the Pacific Ocean.
In 1718 the city of La Nouvelle-Orléans , now New Orleans , was founded on the Mississippi . This enabled trade flows to be established from the areas west of the Appalachian Mountains via the Mississippi and its tributaries to Europe, and with the rapidly growing city France also gained the practical opportunity to enforce territorial claims on the river in the event of a conflict. French efforts to expand the colony in 1685 by building a settlement in Matagorda Bay into what is now Texas , which is claimed by Spain , ended in disaster.
In North America, not only the trading companies but also the French and English settler peoples fought against each other, so that the future of North America depended on their different growth. Around 1750 the number of French settlers in Canada was 26,000 and in Louisiana just 5,200, of which 2,000 were black / slaves ; the English, on the other hand, had almost 400,000 settlers.
In the French and Indian War (1754–1763), which was also fought for supremacy in North America and India , the French initially recorded military successes, but by mobilizing all their forces, the English were able to turn the tide: in 1758 the French became from the Ohio Valley, Quebec was taken in September. In 1760 the entire French armed forces in Canada surrendered. Since France feared losing all of its American colonies to England, it ceded Louisiana west of the Mississippi and the Isle of New Orleans to Spain in the preliminary peace of Fontainebleau November 3, 1762 . This agreement was confirmed in the Peace of Paris on February 10, 1763. The eastern territories of Louisiana fell to England, as did the colonies in India and Canada. For France, this peace treaty was a great colonial defeat and the end of the dream of a French North America .
The English Louisiana went to the Revolutionary War to the United States . Spain was forced by Napoleon to cede its stake in Louisiana to France ( secret treaty of San Ildefonso , October 1, 1800). When President Jefferson heard of this assignment, he offered France to buy the Isle of Orleans . To their surprise, the American diplomats who had come to France to make the purchase were offered all of Louisiana. After the French troops were driven out of Saint Domingue ( Haiti ) by Toussaint Louverture , Napoleon had to fear that Louisiana would no longer be defensible in a renewed war with England and would fall to England. The diplomats agreed to the purchase without first consulting Jefferson, who was in the United States, and the deal known as the Louisiana Purchase was made with Louisiana going to the United States for 80 million francs ($ 15 million).
In 1804 the Isle of Orleans was split off from the Louisiana Territory under the name Orleans Territory. In 1812, the Orleans Territory was named Louisiana as the 18th US state. The Louisiana Territory was renamed the Missouri Territory .
See also
literature
- Charles J. Balesi: The Time of the French in the Heart of North America, 1673-1818. Alliance française de Chicago, Chicago 1996 ISBN 1-88137-000-3 (1st edition 1992)
- Michaël Garnier: Bonaparte et la Louisiane. Kronos / SPM, Paris 1992 ISBN 2-901952-04-6
- Réginald Hamel: La Louisiane créole politique, littéraire et sociale (1762–1900). coll. Francophonie vivante, Leméac, Ottawa 1984 ISBN 2-7609-3914-6
- Gilles Havard, Cécile Vidal: Histoire de l'Amérique française. coll. "Champs", Flammarion, Paris 2006 ISBN 2-08-080121-X (1st edition 2003)
- Gilles-Antoine Langlois: Des villes pour la Louisiane française: Théorie et pratique de l'urbanistique coloniale au XVIII: e siècle. coll. "Villes et entreprises", L'Harmattan, Paris 2003 ISBN 2-7475-4726-4
- Bernard Lugan: Histoire de la Louisiane française 1682-1804. Perrin, Paris 1994 ISBN 2-7028-2462-5 , ISBN 2-262-00094-8
- Jean Meyer , Jean Tarrade, Jacques Thobie, Annie Rey-Goldsteiger: Histoire de la France coloniale , vol. 1. Des origines à 1914. Coll. "Histoires Colin", Armand Colin, Paris 1991 ISBN 2-20037218-3 ; again ibid. 2016 ISBN 9782200617042
- Louise Pothier, Bertrand Guillet: France, Nouvelle - France: Naissance d'un peuple français en Amérique. Exhibition catalog. Somogy, Paris 2005 ISBN 2850569070 , esp. Chapter Expansions: 1700- 1750, by Gilles Havard, Cécile Vidal, pp. 73-99 (with numerous illustrations, references - Canadian edition: Musée d'Archéologie, Pointe-à-Callière ISBN 2921718413 )
- Cecile Vidal (Ed.): Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2013, ISBN 978-0-8122-4551-6 .