ABSTRACT
In late 1699, Louis XIV’s Secretary of State for the Navy and Colonies, Jérôme de Pontchartrain, authorized colonial official Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac to establish a new fort in the ‘interior’ of North America. Cadillac proposed a site in the south-east Great Lakes region, along a river on the straits, or le détroit, of Lakes Erie and Huron. Historians have characterized the subsequent period, in the early 1700s, as one of unprecedented colonial expansion, during which the French established a number of forts and settlements in the Great Lakes, Upper Mississippi Valley, the Illinois country and Louisiana. William Eccles and Dale Miquelon have argued that these initiatives in the last decades of Louis XIV’s reign under Louis and Jérôme de Pontchartrain, royal ministers for the colonies, marked a dramatic shift from royal policies in previous decades. Eccles argues that from the 1660s to the 1680s, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and his son the marquis de Seignelay adhered to a ‘compact colony’ policy that attempted to prevent colonists and traders from expanding French interests into the interior of the continent, based on the idea that such forays weakened the existing settlements of Québec, Trois-Rivières and Montréal. Détroit’s establishment in 1701, in Eccles and Miquelon’s assessment, therefore marked an important turning point when the Pontchartrains definitively abandoned Colbert’s ‘compact colony’ approach. Moreover, these scholars posit that French diplomatic and military objectives in Europe dictated the crown’s colonial policies. They argue that the Pontchartrains turned to colonial expansion in response to the Spanish succession crisis and that this major shift in policy ignited Anglo-French rivalries that culminated in the Seven Years’ War.1
