La Floride française

Florida was a central concern of French governments between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries in their repeated attempts to secure a French presence in the New World. From the expeditions of the Huguenot Jean Ribault and Rene de Laudonniere that led to the creation of Fort Caroline in 1565, somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Jacksonville, to bold plans at the time of the Louisiana sale, in 1803, to turn Eastern Florida into a French dominion that could somehow compensate for the loss of Canada and Saint-Domingue, these endeavors pitted France directly against rival colonial powers. First England and Spain, which successfully colonized territory North and West of the Florida peninsula, then the United States, which competed for control of territory in North Florida and along the Mississippi. France also carried on trade and traffic in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries between Florida and the neighboring French colonies in Louisiana and what is now Mobile, Alabama, as well as the Caribbean

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