The Bourbon Empire

Of all the Atlantic states of early modern Europe, France seemed to possess the best assets to build a global empire. It was the most populous, with 15-25 mil­lion inhabitants, while Spain and Britain counted less than 10 million each, and Portugal and the United Provinces approximately one million.

In addition to political contingency, two long-term constraints help to explain the mediocre results of French efforts at empire-building before 1750. First comes the weakness of France's northeastern border, devoid of natural protections and the focus of French geopolitical anxieties after the rise of the Habsburgs, often at the expense of overseas expansion: France only sporadically—in the 1660s, 1760s, and 1850s—made the financial effort required to compete with other global maritime powers. The second constraint was the low level of metropolitan emigration to the colonies: less than 100,000 individuals between 1500 and 1760, against approxi­mately 750,000 British, 700,000 Spanish, and 500,000 Portuguese emigrants over the same period.^[2222] French emigration overseas remained minimal in the nineteenth century, and historians sometimes attributed these low numbers to a lack of co­lonial entrepreneurship inherent in the French national character.

When such constraints are taken into consideration, French imperial achieve­ments under the Bourbons appear more impressive. Early attempts to found settle­ments in Brazil and Florida, in the mid-sixteenth century, foundered as a result of infighting between Protestants and Catholics and of the Spanish and Portuguese determination to preserve their duopoly in the New World. The end of the reli­gious civil wars in 1598 and the decline of the Habsburg threat consecutive to the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) made a more sustained effort possible. Building on the seasonal presence of French fishermen, permanent settlements were founded in Canada near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River (Quebec, 1608) and in Acadia (Port Royal, 1610). An agricultural colony slowly grew in the St. Lawrence Valley, while the development of the fur trade helped to give credence to the proclamation of French sovereignty over the entire Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the river's mouth (upper and lower Louisiana), in 1682. As part of their efforts to disrupt communications between Spain and its American colonies, the French also founded permanent settlements in Guadeloupe (1635), Martinique (1639), sev­eral smaller windward Caribbean islands, and, after several unsuccessful attempts, Cayenne (Guyane) on the South American continent in the 1660s.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the main minister of Louis XIV from 1661 to 1683, sought to rationalize the administration of these diverse colonies and encourage their com­mercial development along mercantilist lines. The concentration of civilian and mil­itary powers in the hands of, respectively, intendants and gouverneurs mirrored the absolutist royalisation of metropolitan administration, while stringent regulations of colonial trade, reorganized as the Exclusif legislation in 1717 and 1727, reserved imports and exports for metropolitan France. Perhaps the most spectacular affirm­ation of centralizing aspirations was the adoption of the Coutume de Paris, the legal system prevailing in Northern France, in all French colonies. Having contributed to more than half of its original capital, the state also exercised tighter control over the East India Company than in the United Provinces or Britain. But recent re­search has called into question the actual impact of Versailles' writ on the develop­ment of French colonies. Most French colonial ventures were the product of private initiatives and retained privileged relations with specific seaports: La Rochelle for Canada, Nantes and Bordeaux for the Caribbean, Saint-Malo and Lorient for East Indian possessions.

Moreover, a tension persisted between the vast underpopulated colonies of the temperate North American continent—less than 100,000 French settlers over 5,000,000 square kilometers by the mid-eighteenth century—and the smaller but thriving tropical islands of the Caribbean. Colbert's encouragement of intermar­riage with indigenous North Americans to remedy the lack of European women and the automatic granting of French nationality to all indigenous converts to Catholicism did not yield the hoped-for results. Children of mostly illegitimate mixed unions often opted to join Indian rather than French colonial society and conversions, despite the sustained efforts of Jesuit missionaries, often proved su­perficial. One area of success, despite several difficult wars against the Iroquois Confederacy, was the forging of solid alliances with the majority of Indian tribes against a common enemy: the much more numerous, land-grabbing British settlers along the Atlantic seaboard. Holding in check British expansion soon became the main purpose of New France.^[2224] By contrast, the introduction of sugar-cane culti­vation in the 1650s and the rapid growth of slave plantations turned Guadeloupe, Martinique, and later Saint-Domingue into extremely valuable commercial assets. East of the Cape of Good Hope, French commercial activities also grew faster than British or Dutch trade, while the military alliances forged by the Marquis Dupleix, governor-general of French establishments in India from 1742 to 1754, with Indian principalities seemed to pose an existential threat to British settlements.^[2225]

Although alliances with indigenous powers partly made up for the small num­bers of colonizers on land, naval inferiority rendered the Bourbon empire extremely vulnerable to British ambitions.

Instead of smothering French imperial ambitions, the humiliation of the Seven Years' War increased awareness of the political and economic significance of over­seas expansion. Three decades of intense debates and original initiatives to restore France's status as a global power ensued. Convinced that British hegemony posed an existential threat to the European balance of power, the Duc de Choiseul, the main minister of Louis XV from 1758 to 1770, eschewed ambitious territorial projects but placed a new emphasis on economic exploitation and mobilized unprecedented resources to reassert French power overseas.

The reformist policies adopted after the Seven Years' War grew out of the increas­ingly symbiotic relationship between Enlightenment science and French ambitions overseas. Parisian scientific institutions such as the Jardin du Roi, whose curator was the Comte de Buffon, the author of a monumental and global Histoire naturelle (1749—1788), became central hubs of what some historians have dubbed the “co­lonial machine” of French science. They dominated European scientific debates and facilitated the circulation of botanical and other types of scientific knowledge between French colonies. Between 1766 and 1769, the sailor Louis-Antoine de Bougainville completed the first avowedly scientific circumnavigation of the globe, with several naturalists and geographers aboard. Advocates of the new economic science of Physiocracy, anticipating Adam Smith, criticized the alleged advantages of slave labor and mercantilist regulations and recommended the adoption of a more liberal approach to the economic management of colonies.^[2227] All these ideas prefigured the shift from predatory to developmental imperialism in the nineteenth century. They were popularized by the Histoire des deux Indes, a collective work ed­ited by the Abbe Raynal, which offered the first comprehensive and critical account of European efforts at empire-building overseas since the fifteenth century. Its five volumes became one of the age's political best-sellers, with no less than 30 editions between 1772 and 1787.

In tune with these aspirations to enlightened reform, restrictions on colonial trade were relaxed, with the Exclusifmitige of1767, confirmed in 1784, for trade with formal colonies, and the abolition of the Compagnie des Indes Orientals’ monopoly on trade east of the Cape of Good Hope in 1769. These reforms contributed to an unprecedented boom in French colonial trade, especially with the West Indies: de­spite the loss of Canada and Louisiana, imports from French colonies in America more than trebled between 1755 and 1790, helping France to supersede Britain as the main re-exporter of tropical goods to the rest of Europe.^[2228] The principal source of this exponential growth was the progress of cultivation in Saint-Domingue, the “Pearl of the Antilles.” By 1790, the colony yielded two-fifths of the sugar and over half of the coffee produced in the New World. Le Cap Fran^ais, the colony's main city, was larger than Philadelphia or New York, and enjoyed a vibrant cultural and scientific life. The less enlightened side of this prosperity was the equally rapid growth of French slavery. Yearly imports of African slaves in the French Caribbean rose from about 15,000 around 1750 to nearly 50,000 around 1790.^[2229] After the breakup of the British Empire following American independence in 1783, France became, with 800,000 slaves, the largest slave-owning colonial power.^[2230]

Several initiatives sought to mitigate the loss of North America. These included an ambitious but ultimately disastrous attempt to transform Guyana into a colony of predominantly European settlement. Nearly 15,000 settlers, the majority from Alsace and the Rhineland, and more than the total of French emigrants to Canada in a century and a half, embarked for the South American colony in 1763-1764. But natural conditions made Guyana particularly ill-suited to such a large influx. Two- thirds of the would-be settlers perished in just a few months, and most survivors returned to Europe.^[2231] The French monarchy also sought to revive the family com­pact with the Spanish Bourbons in the hope of obtaining preferential access for French goods in Spain's vast American empire, but with limited results. A consid­erable financial effort to increase the size and efficiency of the French navy proved more successful. After France joined the side of the insurgents during the War of American Independence in 1778, its strengthened navy played a decisive role in the

Franco-American victory over the British Empire. The confirmation of American independence at the 1783 treaty of Versailles erased the affront of the Seven Years' War and seemed to avert the threat of British global hegemony. But the outbreak of the French Revolution brought about the downfall of the resurrected Bourbon Empire as well as the monarchy.