Canada (New France)

Canada was the heart of French North America, the most developed colony of New France, held from 1534 to 1763. Jacques Cartier claimed the Saint Lawrence valley for Francis I in 1534, but the first official settlement waited for Samuel de Champlain's Québec in 1608. From three districts, Québec, Trois-Rivières and Montreal, each with its own governor, the colony spread seigneuries along the river, baptised Huron allies, and fought the Iroquois and then the English for a century and a half. Fewer than a hundred thousand French lived there at its height, facing a million British colonists to the south, yet the colony held until the Seven Years' War broke it: Montcalm lost Québec to Wolfe in 1759, Montreal fell in 1760, and the Treaty of Paris in 1763 made Canada the British Province of Quebec. The French stayed on as a people if not as a flag, and their language, law and church survive in Quebec to this day.