ABSTRACT
French descriptions of actual and projected colonial expeditions during the
sixteenth andseventeenth centuries frequently lamented France’s inadequate position in comparison with the colonial empires being constructed by its European neighbours, at a period in which national hostilities might have crystallized along the lines of religious differences. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the country was torn apart by a series of bloody religious wars, and tension between Protestants and Catholics would continue to ferment long after the 1598 Edict of Nantes. This chapter examines visions of future French colonization in the period of, or immediately subsequent to, the Wars of Religion, at a time when consciousness of the movement of human populations in a largely unexplored world seemed to promise vast further possibilities for those willing to embark on colonial expeditions. Direct references to the future of colonies in French primary sources are scarce at this time, although two failed settlements in Brazil-the Huguenot France Antarctique in the mid-1550s, and the Catholic colony in the island of Maranhão (Maragnan) in the second decade of the 1600s-gave rise to a body of texts revelatory of perspectives on the colonial future. This study analyzes these products of polemic or propaganda after an initial discussion of the relationship between perceptions of human mobility and the colonial future.
