- France Antarctique
"France Antarctique" was the name of the failed French
colony south of theEquator , inRio de Janeiro ,Brazil , which existed between1555 and1567 , and had control over the coast from Rio de Janeiro toCabo Frio .Brazil had been discovered in April
1500 by a fleet commanded byPedro Álvares Cabral on behalf of the Portuguese crown, which arrived in present-dayPorto Seguro ,Bahia , but except for Salvador (first Brazilian capital city) the rest of the new territory still remained largely unexplored half a century later.On
November 1 ,1555 , aHuguenot French vice-admiral namedNicolas Durand de Villegaignon (1510-1575), commanding a small fleet of two ships and 600 soldiers and Huguenot colonists, took possession of the small island of Serigipe in theGuanabara Bay , in front of present-dayRio de Janeiro , where they built a fort namedFort Coligny (in honor ofGaspard de Coligny , a Huguenot admiral who supported the expedition in order to protect his co-religionists). To the still largely undeveloped mainland village, Villegaignon gave the name of Henriville, in honour of Henri II, the King of France, who also knew of and approved the expedition, and had provided the fleet for the trip. However, the French crown failed to make good use of Villegaignon's exploits to expand the reach of the French kingdom into theNew World , as was being done at the time with the claims ofJacques Cartier in the present-day province ofQuébec ,Canada . All of these settlements were in violation of the Papal bull of 1493, which divided the New World between Spain and Portugal. This division was later defined more exactly by theTreaty of Tordesillas .Unchallenged by the Portuguese, who initially took little notice of his landing, Villegaignon expanded the colony by bringing more colonists in
1556 , this time largely made ofSwiss Calvinists fromGeneva , in three ships under the command of his nephew,Bois le Comte . Villegaignon secured his position by making an alliance with the Tamoio andTupinambá Indians of the region, who were fighting the Portuguese. However, in1560 Mem de Sá , the new Governor-General of Brazil, received from the Portuguese government the command to expel the French. With a fleet of 26 warships and 2,000 soldiers, he attacked and destroyed Fort Coligny within three days, but was unable to drive off their inhabitants and defenders, because they escaped to the mainland with the help of the Indians, where they continued to live and to work. Admiral Villegaignon had returned to France in1558 , disgusted with the religious tension that existed between French Protestants and Catholics, who had come also with the second group (seeFrench Wars of Religion ).Urged by two influential Jesuit priests who had come to Brazil with Mem de Sá, named
José de Anchieta andManuel da Nóbrega , and who had played a big role in pacifying the Tamoios, Mem de Sá ordered his nephew,Estácio de Sá to assemble a new attack force. Estácio de Sá founded the city of Rio de Janeiro onMarch 1 ,1565 and fought the Frenchmen for two more years. Helped by a military reinforcement sent by his uncle, inJanuary 20 1567 , he imposed final defeat on the French forces and decisively expelled them from Brazil, but died a month later from wounds inflicted in the battle. Coligny's and Villegaignon's dream had lasted a mere 12 years.Largely in response to the two attempts of France to conquer territory in Brazil (the other one was named
France Équinoxiale and occupied present-day São Luís, state ofMaranhão ), between1612 and1615 , the Portuguese crown decided to expand its colonization efforts in Brazil.ee also
*
France Équinoxiale
*History of Brazil
*History of Portugal
*History of France
*French colonization of the Americas
*French colonial empires References
* "Pioneers of France in the New World". By Francis Parkman; University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
External links
* [http://www.colonialvoyage.com/frenchbrazil.html French in Brazil: Saint-Alexis, France Antarctique (Rio de Janeiro) and Sao Luis de Maranhao]
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