colony · North America and Oceania

French Louisiana

1682 CE – 1762 CE · capital New Orleans

France's colony in the Mississippi basin, founded around the Gulf coast and New Orleans, whose Creole culture still marks the state of Louisiana.

Origins

In 1682 René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle travelled down the Mississippi and claimed its basin for Louis XIV, naming it Louisiana. Settlement began when Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville built Fort Maurepas at Biloxi in 1699. Mobile followed in 1702, and in 1718 his brother Bienville founded New Orleans, the capital from 1722.

John Law's Company of the Indies ran the colony from 1717 to 1731, promoting settlement in a speculative boom that collapsed in 1720. Thousands of enslaved Africans were brought, mostly from Senegambia, and the Code Noir of 1724 governed slavery. Louisiana stretched in claim to the Illinois Country and depended on Native alliances, though wars with the Natchez chiefdom and the Chickasaw Nation were costly. It became a crown colony in 1731.

Facing defeat in the Seven Years War, France secretly ceded New Orleans and the land west of the Mississippi to Spain in 1762, creating Spanish Louisiana, while the eastern lands went to Britain in 1763.

Cite this page

APA: The Epoch Institute. (2026). French Louisiana. In The Epoch Institute States Register. https://the-epoch-institute.org/state/french-louisiana
MLA: “French Louisiana.” The Epoch Institute States Register, The Epoch Institute, 2026, https://the-epoch-institute.org/state/french-louisiana. Accessed .
Chicago: The Epoch Institute. “French Louisiana.” The Epoch Institute States Register. 2026. https://the-epoch-institute.org/state/french-louisiana.
Harvard: The Epoch Institute (2026) ‘French Louisiana’, The Epoch Institute States Register. Available at: https://the-epoch-institute.org/state/french-louisiana (Accessed: ).

Last reviewed October 2026Random state ↻