NEW FRANCE IS A TERRITORY that once spread from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico. As a French colony it included at least three main regions: Acadia, Canada, and Louisiana (not counting Brazil and Florida). In the context of Canadian history, the term refers to a period corresponding to that of the Ancien Régime in France, dating conventionally from 1534 (the first voyage of Jacques Cartier) to 1763 (the Treaty of Paris, which sanctioned the military conquest by Britain in 1760). New France was in fact the result of six major historical developments: first, the voyages of discovery, beginning officially in 1524 with Verrazzano, followed by Cartier's first voyage; second, the establishment of trading monopolies, starting with De Monts in 1604 (followed by the founding of Quebec City in 1608) and the establishment of the state enterprise Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France in 1627 (succeeded by the Communauté des Habitants in 1645); third, the Sovereign Council in 1663, when France imposed peace on the Indians and the territory of the colony expanded considerably; fourth, the onset of the Indian wars in 1684, further complicated by war with the British colonies; fifth, the “thirty-years peace” (1713–1744), which for the span of one generation allowed social and economic growth in the colony; and sixth, the resumption of war, which ended with the British conquest of 1760. Yet New France was much more than a territory, a period of history, or a colonial society. It was American France, a “France d'Amérique.”

DESPITE THE VAST BODY OF LITERATURE about New France produced by French writers, it must be noted that before 1760 there was no literary scene in New France that could have rivaled that of France — neither in quality nor by extent. The French colony, conquered by military force in 1760 and ceded to Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, was a colony in the strict sense — that is, a society still far from capable of taking charge of its own destiny. On the other hand, if Quebec today is a nation with a culture of its own, it is because by 1760 New France had already developed a French culture distinct from that of France, a culture that managed to resist the powerful temptations to assimilate with the dominant culture of Britain and English Canada. Yet in 1760 New France did not have a literature of its own, and this fact describes the situation for both the works from France that it incorporated and the literary works it produced — or can be assumed to have produced from today's perspective (the majority of texts were not preserved, since they were largely written for special occasions and were not accorded any greater importance).

The matter of a colonial literature in New France arises somewhat more plausibly with the establishment of the first trading settlements in Acadia in the early seventeenth century.

THE WRITINGS ON NEW FRANCE constitute a great marginal literature spanning three centuries. The term “literature” has to be understood in a broader sense here, since literary texts, or works possessing an aesthetic value, were rare exceptions in this period. Such texts as did exist seldom concerned themselves with the French colony. Their subject was rather North America and the Native Americans — in other words, the anthropology, human geography, or, as it was called at the time, the natural history of the New World. After the discoveries, explorations, and voyages came the long and difficult missionary endeavors, conducted mostly by the Jesuits. As a result, the literature on New France, throughout the seventeenth century, drew a portrait of the Native American and of North America's tribes and confederations on a two-dimensional cultural graph, with the one axis running from friends and allies (including the Mi'kmaq, Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron peoples) to enemies (the Iroquois Confederation, the Abenaki), that is, from savages to barbarians, and the other axis running from Christians to infidels. Native Americans were the main characters in these writings, not the explorers or missionaries — and still less the governors, administrators, and military leaders of the colony. For New France — unlike the Europeanization of the Dutch, British, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies — was indeed an attempt to make America and the Native Americans French, which also produced the opposite result, namely the Americanization of the French in America.