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1661-1683 - French Colonies of Colbert

When Mazarin's death in 1661 left the government of France in the hands of the young King Louis XIV, no other country seemed to be so happily situated. While France had triumphed over Europe, in France itself the monarchy had triumphed over all rival powers, classes and organisations. In 1661 Jean Baptiste Colbert was member of the Council of Finance and chargi. d'affaires for the navy, and was raised to the post of Controller-General of Finance in 1667. Colbert conceived the total volume of European commerce to be incapable of a material increase. What one nation gained, he concluded, another must lose. He desired to turn France into a busy hive of industry, to promote and direct those industries by the action of the State, to protect them from the rivalry of foreign countries by high protective tariffs; and then to open up trade in the commodities produced by improving the internal communication of France, by establishing trade with distant lands and defending the country by an increased and remodelled fleet.

Colbert became Secretary of State for the King's household and Secretary of State for the navy in 1669. At that period the Dutch and the English were far ahead of the French in foreign trade. The better to compete with these rivals Colbert substituted privileged associations for the isolated efforts of individuals. French traders had hitherto played a small part in exploiting the wealth of the Indies and the Americas. Holland and England employed the method of chartered companies for their distant over-sea traffic, and Colbert resolved to do the same. He established five great companies modelled on the English and Dutch societies; those of the Indes Orientates and the Indes Occidentals in 1664; the Compagnie du Nord and the Compagnie du Levant in 1666, and the Compagnie du Senegal in 1673, according them exclusive commercial monopolies and granting them considerable loans. Some of Colbert's Companies did worse; some rather better; none succeeded in rivalling the great Companies of England and Holland. The development and the failure of all these Companies followed similar lines. Their record was a record of corruption, failure, and bankruptcy.

Colbert, in his capacity of Minister of Marine, paid great attention to the navy, laboring at the augmentation of that force with the same unremitting energy which he displayed in every other department, and which in this matter was guided by an eminently clear-sighted judgement, and accompanied by undeniable success. When he received his appointment, all the arsenals of the kingdom could hardly have sent forth a single fleet. When he died he left behind him a force rivalling the French in numbers, and superior to that of any other nation. During the twenty years of Colbert's administration the French navy rose to a place among the first in Europe. He inherited his policy from Richelieu, but he amplified and extended it as that Minister probably never dreamed of doing.

And it was apparently as much with the idea that a mercantile marine was the best nursery for a warlike navy, as for the sake of commerce, that he also encouraged the settlement of French colonies in different parts of the world; in the West Indies, on the American coast, at Madagascar, and in India, and erected companies to trade with them, stimulating their enterprise by bounties, monopolies, and every variety of exclusive privilege. But it would seem that the genius of the French people, brilliant and diversified as it is, is not exactly that which is the most suited to make successful colonists. Every one of the schemes failed; and of all the colonies established by the favor, and fostered by the liberality of Colbert, the little penal settlement of Cayenne was the only one which preserved his memory.

The colonies of France were closely connected with the commercial companies; and their history during the administration of Colbert was much the same. France possessed excellent bases for colonisation in Canada, Louisiana, and the West Indian Islands, and made a promising beginning in Madagascar, Ceylon, and India. But, though Colbert realised to the full the possibilities of these colonial establishments, he interfered too much; and his interference was even more dangerous at so great a distance from France than it was in France itself. The spirit of religious intolerance, which was soon to strike a heavy blow against his enterprises at home, ruined those abroad. The only thing that could have served the French colonies was liberty; and of this Colbert with all his vast gifts and powers never knew the value.

Colbert wished to restore life to the colonial system, much neglected since the days of Richelieu. The French now possessed only Canada, with Acadia, Cayenne, the lie de Bourbon [lle de Reunion], and several establishments in Madagascar and the Indies. Colbert purchased, for less than a million, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Grenada, and the Grenadines, Marie Galante, St. Martin, St. Christopher, St. Bartholomew, Santa Cruz, and Tortuga (fie de la Tortue) in the West Indies. He placed under the protection of France the French filibusters of Santo Domingo who had seized the western portion of the island (1664). He planted new colonies in Cayenne (1677) and in Canada (1665). He took Newfoundland in order to control the entrance to the St. Lawrence, and began the occupation of the magnificent valley of the Mississippi, which had just been explored by that adventurous captain, Robert de la Salle (1680). In Africa he wrested Goree in Senegal from the Dutch in 1665 and took possession of the east coast of Madagascar. In Asia the Compagnie des Indes established itself at Surat and Chandarnagar and afterwards at Pondicherry. The king in 1683 was relieved of Colbert.

Nothing contributed so much to transform the aspect of the colonial world, as the great work of colonisation which the English and French had begun in the northern continent and the West Indian Islands. On the St Lawrence, the French after a hard struggle had overcome the initial difficulties of agricultural settlement. Their progress had at first been halting and slow, and, in 1660, the colony founded by Champlain at Quebec in 1608 still ran risks of starvation or of extinction at the hands of the Indians. But Louis XIV and Colbert, by systematic and unremitting attention, rescued the settlers from their precarious conditions, and to a few fur-trading posts and Jesuit mission stations added a small community of seigneurs and peasantry.

The greatest of the French explorers was Robert de la Salle, who had established a trading-post at the outlet of Lake Ontario. About 1669 he made an expedition in which he discovered the Ohio and Illinois Rivers. The first vessel ever seen on the Great Lakes was launched by him in 1679. In 1682 la Salle launched his canoes on the Mississippi, and floated down that great stream to its mouth. Here, on the 9th of April of that year, he planted the banner of France and took possession of the great stream and the surrounding country in the name of Louis XIV. He named the country Louisiana, after this monarch, and afterward sought to found a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi.

In 1650 the Spaniards still held the inner and greater islands, Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto Rico, and Jamaica; though in Hispaniola French buccaneers were laying the foundations of the prosperous French colony of St Domingo. English, French, and Dutch divided amongst themselves the group of islands afterwards known as the Leeward Islands. The French occupied Guadaloupe and Santa Cruz, claimed Dominica, and shared St Kitts with the English and St Martin with the Dutch. To the Windward Islands the French had already paid considerable attention. They possessed Martinique, claimed St Vincent, and had attempted to settle Grenada and St Lucia. Near by was Barbados, the most flourishing of the English colonies, but not, like St Kitts, the mother of many new settlements.

Closely connected with the West Indies through the slave-trade was the west coast of Africa. Here the French had occupied the mouth of the Senegal, the English the mouth of the Gambia, and both English and Dutch had planted themselves on the Guinea Coast. As the American plantations developed, the volume of the slave-trade increased. The French appreciated the connexion between the West Indies and West Africa. In 1664, Colbert handed over the African trade to the reconstituted West India Company; but, when, ten years later, this body was dissolved, various small companies engaged in the trade, while the islands passed under the control of the Crown. West Africa was one of the few spheres of their colonisation where the French developed no vast schemes, but persisted steadily in what they had undertaken. Leaving the Guinea Coast to the English and Dutch, they consolidated their influence on the Senegal. In 1678 Goree, which had been captured in the previous year, was ceded to them by the Dutch.