Kourou and the Struggle for a French America

M. Godfroy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137363473
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia francesa

Kourou was to be a wonderful revenge, a French colony in America after the Seven Years War in 1763. However, the fantastic ideal became a grand failure and political disaster, marking the end of the French attempts for an American colony.

1

Farewell Quebec

It is not usual in our current season for winds to be this stubborn; everything is for the English.

Fouteux, Journal du siège de Québec du 10 mai au 18 septembre 1759, p. 16

England had Pitt; France had the duke de Choiseul. Each had radically different strategies. William Pitt focused on immobilizing French forces in Prussia and continuing attacks in the Antilles. Choiseul preferred to counter the Caribbean assaults and gain ground in Prussia. Who exactly was this Choiseul?

Étienne François de Choiseul became secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1759, then secretary of state of the navy and the colonies in 1761. The often acerbic pen of Talleyrand recognized in him:

one of the [...] most forward-thinking men, who has already predicted the separation of America and England, and who warned us of the partition of Poland, [a man] who had already started preparing, through negotiations, the cession of Egypt to France, in order to be ready to replace the American colonies with the same production and increased trade, the day they would escape us.¹

With the end of the war and the generalized haste and confusion that followed, this visionary minister was so utterly convinced of the importance of certain developing stakes that he attempted a final breakthrough of the enemy’s line of defense.

Choiseul bluntly announced that a single error summed up France’s position during the Seven Years War. This error had played out in 1757 when France had turned its back on its former allies. The Franco-Prussian alliance against Great Britain and Austria in 1756 had recast France in alliance with Austria against Great Britain and Prussia. According to Choiseul, “[t]his new alliance neglected the sea war and America, which was the real war.”² This was a presumptuous statement coming from one of the architects of the alliance.

Indeed, at the start of the conflict, Great Britain and Prussia stood in opposition to France, Austria, and Russia. Austria’s possession of Silesia, and the North American rivalry between France and Great Britain, clearly established two battlefields. During the early months, Frederick II of Prussia seemed victorious in Europe, just as did France across the Atlantic. However, starting in 1759, the two allies experienced major setbacks. In Europe, so in America: the Battle of Kunerdorf and the fall of Montreal marked the premises of the future defeat. Prussia’s position seemed so vulnerable that der alte Fritz, “Old Fred,” was rumored to be on the brink of suicide.

France was still hoping for a few more glorious victories. She attempted to invade Great Britain, amassing an army at the mouth of the Loire, with fleets from Brest and Toulon to ensure mastery of the seas. The British fleet, however, defeated the French at the Battle of Lagos on August 19, 1759, and then at the Battle of Quiberon Bay three months later, on November 20, 1759. The only saving grace was the duke d’Aiguillon’s victory at St Cast.

Choiseul did not give up; in 1762, he sent Admiral d’Estaing to invade Brazil. Before reaching the Portuguese coast, however, d’Estaing was informed that his mission had been terminated and that preliminary negotiations were progressing at Fontainebleau. The duke de Choiseul therefore failed to benefit from this daring advance. Worse, the court’s insidious atmosphere and the endless reshuffling of ministers encouraged caution.³ Choiseul however, managed a double “tour de force,” not only remaining in office, but doing so while signing the peace. Better still, he anticipated the shape of American politics for the coming years and prepared a response.

The flames of war

The ten years between the war by proxy in North America and the Seven Years War need to be understood from France’s point of view.

These were dark years for the king, for the government, and for France’s domestic affairs. In January 1757, the news of Robert François Damiens’ assassination attempt spread through the land. Louis XV had already lost his sobriquet of “Beloved,” and the blade of this deranged individual, once a valet at the Jesuit College of Paris, Louis-le-Grand, plunged the sovereign into silence. This mutism extended to the king’s chambers, where he drew the curtains, temporarily dismissing his favorite, Madame de Pompadour. It lingered as the sovereign’s depression led some to wonder whether he would ever govern again. The moment was ripe for conspiracies and for speculation about the Dauphin, Louis-Ferdinand de France – a leader of the religious party – who abhorred the royal mistress. This same mistress was beloved by artists such as Quentin de La Tour and Francois Boucher. Machault d’Arnouville, secretary of the navy and garde des sceaux, advised the king to send her away, but she ultimately prevailed, forcing the departure of one of the court’s ablest ministers at a time when affairs demanded a man of his caliber.

On February 1, 1757, the comte d’Argenson, secretary of state for war, accompanied the minister in his disgrace. Historian Andrew Zysberg has categorized the event as the departure of two of Louis XV’s most energetic and competent servants from his administration. Worse was to come. In a few short years, these dismissals led to the replacement of the leaders, but also to the replacement of their advisers, even down to their clerks. Thus, Peyrenc de Moras, comptroller general of finance, replaced Machault at the ministry of the navy, before resigning from the former position in August 1757 and then from the latter in May 1758. He was briefly succeeded by the marquis de Massiac – the only minister in Louis XV’s administration to have risen through the ranks of naval officers – before Nicolas Berryer took over the ministry, displaying a chaotic form of leadership. At the War ministry, the marquis d’Argenson resigned in 1758 after a short period during which his incapacity was made public. The department was then entrusted to Marshal de Belle-Isle, who remained in post until his death in 1761.

Collapse was imminent. In 1759, Guadeloupe fell into enemy hands before a single shot was fired. Indeed, the British fleet, instead of a battle, simply proposed an arrangement. They would preserve the habitations – the French designation for plantations – in exchange for docility. Worse, the British bought slaves, and financed the construction of a port at Pointe-à-Pitre. Patriotism had seen better days. This was the starting point for the English conquest of the Caribbean.

This new adventure pitted the English directly against France and Spain, recently allied. The Royal Navy nevertheless launched a spectacular offensive against the island of Dominica and was intent on pursuing its goals of conquest. British battleships sailed up through the Caribbean arc, precipitating the fall of Martinique. The offensive’s climax was the siege of Havana, which began on June 6, 1762 and ended in a bloody capitulation on August 10, with the death of 8,000 British soldiers and sailors due to yellow fever, then known as Siam disease. In America, France tried to regain control of several possessions, but failed dramatically. After defeating the French one last time in Newfoundland (at Signal Hill, on September 15, 1762), the British enjoyed clear dominance both on land and at sea.

Had the French government planned for such a disaster? How could such a general rout of French forces be explained? What was the balance of power between the two Americas? A map by the British cartographer, Emanuel Bowen, printed in 1755 and entitled An Accurate Map of North America Describing and Distinguishing the British, Spanish and French Dominions on this Great Continent, illustrates the contrast between the two empires. French America, depicted in green, is vast, restricting the growth of the Thirteen Colonies, marked in red and yellow. The French presence continued into the Caribbean Sea, into the Antilles; the French partially controlled the Gulf of Mexico. While New France and Louis XIV’s Louisiana were over 4,000 kilometers long and 600 to 2,000 kilometers wide, the British colonies were confined to a strip of land barely 300 to 500 kilometers wide and 2,000 kilometers long, enclosed by mountain ranges. The Antilles islands were added to Britain’s continental colonies.

France dominated the map, from the mouth of the St Lawrence to the delta of the Mississippi River, by way of the Ohio Valley; French North America covered over three-quarters of the continent. It was clearly both a geographical and political obstacle to the inland development of the Thirteen Colonies.

Paradoxically, France did not humanly nor physically occupy its territory. In 1714, New France boasted 19,315 inhabitants, a mere drop compared to the 250,000 British fenced in along the east coast in the Thirteen Colonies. In 1750, George II’s North American subjects numbered over a million, as compared to fewer than 100,000 French. New York in 1760 had nearly 60,000 inhabitants, while Montreal counted only 5,000 souls. The sizable difference was further punctuated by British ambitions: Britain’s goal was to settle and develop a local elite, whereas the French confined themselves to trade.

The first two years of conflict witnessed the victories of Montcalm, responsible for defending the St Lawrence and Mississippi basins, at the Battle of Oswego in 1756, and then in 1757, at Fort William Henry. These successes led certain observers to believe that the war would win itself in America and that attention was better paid to the European continent. Nevertheless, the beginnings of the conflict, during the “proxy war” led others to fear for France’s forces. There was Villiers de Jumonville’s assassination by Lt. Col. George Washington’s militia in 1754. The French officer was conducting a reconnaissance mission; judged to be a spy, he was executed by a firing squad. The French defined the event as murder, spreading the story widely, notably in patriotic writings.⁴ While the British Chancellor Horace Walpole placidly summarized the event, Voltaire, outraged, accused the English of being sea pirates who murdered French officers. Misfortune, however, had its roots elsewhere.

Even before the declaration of war, an act of maritime piracy undertaken by the English sailor, Edward Boscawen⁵ in November 1755 had led to the capture of nearly 155 ships from Bordeaux. Six thousand men were lost. In the meantime Britain made its fiscal superiority count. In 1758, George Anson prevented any reinforcements from crossing the Atlantic by installing a powerful squadron facing Ouessant to block Brest. In 1760, Bertin, the French Controleur Général, had thirty million livres, while the navy’s budget amounted to one hundred and fifty million. The French government seemed to have chosen its sites and goals early on. When Marshal Belle-Isle, the secretary of state for War, wrote on February 19, 1759 that the reinforcements requested by Montcalm would only “encourage the London Ministry to make even more efforts to maintain the superiority earned in this part of continent,” he sealed the fate of all Canadians.⁶

In America, these political considerations were dispersed by cannon fire. In Canada’s parish registers, priests did not note the year “1759.” The figure MDCCLIX yielded to the term “Year of the English” (l’année des anglais). This odd euphemism clearly illustrates the distance between French promises (enemy scalps would fly on Quebec’s fortified walls) and the notice nailed by Brigadier General Robert Monkton on the doors of the Church of Beaumont on Orleans Island in the St Lawrence on June 30 of that same year:

The formidable armament for land and sea that the Canadian people now see in their country is destined by the king, my master, to punish France’s insolence, to avenge the insults offered to the English colonies, and to completely take the best institutions in North America away from the French. It is to this end that the formidable army under my command has been raised.⁷

The message could not have been clearer. The program posted by Monkton for the greater glory of George III had been in place for quite some time.

Some in France had foreseen these events. In 1749, the Duc de Noailles, former secretary of state for foreign affairs, whose protégé was none other than count Stainville, soon to be duke de Choiseul, sent this memorandum to Louis XV:

Finally, everything leads us to feel and believe that England is merely biding for a favorable moment, she might even create one under the slightest pretext, to go to war with us in America, to seize all our possessions, to utterly destroy our trade, and by doing so, render us incapable of ever having a navy befitting a state as powerful as France, one such as it had had for much of the reign of the late king, and such as the one we see in our histories that previous kings had possessed at a time when England was weaker in terms of maritime forces.⁸

This prediction was ignored amidst an unthinking Anglophobia and within a Manichean conception of the war. “Arrogant, ambitious, usurpers”: in 1755, the marquis d’Argenson could not find words strong enough to lambast Britain, that perfidious Albion. He considered the French prosecution of war to be just, whereas the British war effort was the result of “tyranny.”⁹ Thus, d’Argenson’s conception of France’s war combined a series of different considerations. The first addressed the issue of keeping or abandoning Canada, the second combined patriotism and the reality of conflict, and the third was a moral vision of hostilities. Finally, self-delusion and neglect combined to accelerate France’s defeat. In 1761, in an attempt to rebuild new forces, the Government resorted to the “don gratuit”; in other words, it was up to the chambers of commerce, the provincial estates, and the cities to finance naval construction from that point on.

“The king is determined to wage war with the English”

It was in this troubled context that the duke de Choiseul appeared on the scene. The count of Stainville was born in Nancy on June 28, 1719 and would become duke in 1758. A native of Lorraine, he began his military career during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). The conflict – the result of the Pragmatic Sanction, Charles VI’s effort to enable his daughter Maria Theresa to succeed him after the end of the direct male line of the House of Habsburg – placed Prussia and its allies (France, Spain, and Bavaria) in opposition to Austria (supported by Great Britain and the United Provinces). Choiseul served under the Prince de Conti, and took part in the Battle of Coni, on September 30, 1744, during which the Prince’s bravery earned him a Te Deum at Notre Dame, which was offered by Louis XV.

A small man with a turned-up nose, Choiseul loved women and liberties. In 1750, he married Louise Honorine Crozat de Châtel, fourteen years his junior. Along with a pretty face, this daughter of Louis Crozat, a reputable financier, offered another advantage: she brought with her a fortune totaling 120,000 livres a year. This, howe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword by Patrice Higonnet
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Farewell Quebec
• 2 The Realm of the Golden King
• 3 The Americas
• 4 White Colony
• 5 Forces Present
• 6 Mirages
• 7 From the Rhine to the Atlantic
• 8 Disaster Ahead
• 9 Kourou
• 10 The Trap is Sprung
• 11 Turgot’s Disgrace
• Conclusion
• Chronology of events
• Glossary
• Biographies
• Notes
• Index