By 1664 France controlled 14 islands in the Caribbean. The principal possessions were St-Domingue (now Haiti), Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica. The economies were based largely on sugar. The labor system was African slavery. The island societies had a rigid class structure headed by white officials and planters (gros blancs) who governed the merchants, buccaneers, small farmers, white laborers (engagés), and slaves.
On the northeast coast of South America, the colony of French Guiana was founded about 1637. One hundred years later it was still a struggling, commercially unsuccessful colony, with a population of only about 600 whites. Not until the 19th century did the colony achieve any real prosperity. French Guiana was infamous for Devil’s Island, a French penal colony off the coast that operated until the 1950s.
The largest French colony in the New World was New France. This region comprised most of what are now eastern Canada and the portion of the United States from the Appalachians in the east to the Missouri River in the west and from the Great Lakes in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. To the north of New France was the large territory controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company, an English trading association.
Starting about 1540, French fishers annually fished off the Newfoundland coast and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The first colonization efforts were led by Samuel de Champlain, the “Father of New France.” He helped to found the colony that became Port-Royal (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia). This fur-trading post and fishing village was the first organized settlement in Acadia (the French possessions on the Atlantic seaboard) as well as the first permanent European colony in North America north of Florida. Champlain founded Quebec in 1608 and explored as far west as Lake Huron by 1615.
For all the vast area the French laid claim to in North America, New France was never effectively colonized. Many permanent communities were founded, but the main interest of the mother country was commercial exploitation. The fur trade, far more lucrative than farming or fishing, became the basis of the economy. This led the French to explore widely in the region, to forge strong alliances with the local Indigenous people, and to set up forts and trading posts. But the population of New France never grew to the same extent as that of the English colonies. By 1754, on the eve of the French and Indian War, the population of New France was only about 55,000.
Within this vast midsection of North America, many permanent settlements were founded, including Detroit, St. Louis, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. Under French rule all these settlements remained frontier outposts. Only after 1800, when citizens of the United States began trekking westward in search of plentiful, inexpensive land, did they really grow.
By 1760 the British had conquered all of Canada and the French settlements on the Great Lakes. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the conflict, ceded all of New France east of the Mississippi River, except for New Orleans, to England. New France ceased to exist in 1803 when the United States purchased the territories west of the Mississippi from France, in what is known as the Louisiana Purchase.
https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/colonization-of-the-Americas/272832
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