Empire et diplomatie: la France à l’épreuve des mondes amérindiens

Abstract

Using New France as a case study, this article attempts to understand how an imperial formation was constructed in the 17th and 18th centuries. If New France was affected by an imperial dynamic in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was in the sense that the French enterprise of domination was carried out in a highly adaptive diplomatic framework, that of alliances with the Native Americans. New France was built through a cartography that valued Native ethnonyms, the existence of mobile diplomatic capitals, and the organization of military expeditions that relied on the implementation of several alliance networks over vast distances.

Keywords

• Native Americans
• empire
• diplomacy
• New France
• Louisiana