Des nouvelles France aux colonies – Une approche comparée de l’histoire impériale de la France de l’époque moderne

Imperial history today enjoys great momentum all over the world especially concerning the early modern period. As anticipated by historians such as Trevor Burnard, John Elliot, or Cécile Vidal, the imperial framework appears as a key for understanding the dynamics of European colonization especially in their relations with the political and social transformations experienced in Europe by the early modern states. French history has had some difficulty in following this movement because of an enduring (even if shrinking) gap between the specialists of the colonies and the specialists of the French kingdom, and because of a deficiency of questioning about the very processes of expansion, of colonisation and of empire as envisioned by contemporaries. This paper sums up the principal issues about the meanings of key words such as “empire” and “colonies” in the French political thought of the 17th and 18th centuries in comparison with the English and Spanish vocabularies. It reflects on the relations between the French crown and its territories in Europe as well as in the Americas and it stresses that the colonial dimension of the French ultramarines territories was far from being settled from the beginning. The imposition of coloniality rather was a long and painful process made through the legislation on taxes and on persons. This process progressively stripped the thought and the practices of the French ultramarine expansion of all references to the building all over the world of a set of new Frances, in the very meaning of the term, for concentrating on the exploitation of a few colonial territories, disconnected from the métropoles. And it opened the way to “modern” colonisation