The Americas and France Antarctique

Beyond its already familiar founding in 1555, Villegagnon’s colony endured five tumultuous years, torn by religious rivalries, before succumbing to the Portuguese assault — leaving behind two travel accounts that stand among the founding texts of modern ethnography.

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⛵ A Difficult Enterprise from the Outset

The project did not start on virgin ground: half a century after the discovery of Brazil by Cabral in 1500, Guanabara Bay had already been surveyed by the navigator and cartographer Guillaume Le Testu, and merchants from Le Havre had even established, near present-day Cabo Frio, a trading post meant to supply Rouen’s cloth industry with dyewood. But the expedition of Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, vice admiral of Brittany tasked by Henry II with establishing a lasting colony there, ran at once into serious recruitment difficulties, then into defections along the way — many colonists rejecting the moral rigour of their leader, fiercely opposed to relations between Frenchmen and Tupinambá women.

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✝️ The Protestant Reinforcements and the Religious Fracture

Faced with his colony’s isolation, Villegagnon sent Le Testu back to France to request reinforcements; Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, already committed to the Reformed cause, saw in this an opportunity to found a Protestant colony in the New World. Three ships left Honfleur on 19 November 1556, carrying a group of Reformed settlers, among them the pastor Jean de Léry. But the arrival of these reinforcements, far from calming the colony, only worsened its tensions: in the account he was to publish much later, Léry describes continual dissension, crystallised in particular around the conflict that set him against André Thevet, a Franciscan friar, geographer and chaplain of the original expedition — the community gradually dividing between Catholics and Protestants, under Villegagnon’s ever more rigid authority.

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💀 The Fall and the Literary Legacy

These internal divisions ultimately worked to the Portuguese’s advantage: in 1560, an expedition led by Mem de Sá, governor general of Brazil, seized Fort Coligny and destroyed it, putting an end, after barely five years, to the first French attempt at settlement in South America. The episode nonetheless left a lasting legacy, less territorial than literary and scientific: back in France, André Thevet published as early as 1557 his Singularitez de la France antarctique, while Jean de Léry brought out, much later, in 1578, his Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil — two accounts that still count, today, among the very first European ethnographic texts on the Amerindian peoples, and which were to feed, a century and a half later, even Montaigne’s reflection on the “cannibals.”

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🧠 Key Takeaways

• Founding of France Antarctique in 1555 (Villegagnon, Fort Coligny), already familiar from the main narrative
• Early recruitment difficulties and defections, linked to Villegagnon’s moral rigour
• 19 November 1556: departure from Honfleur of Protestant reinforcements led by Jean de Léry, at Coligny’s request
• Growing fracture between Catholics and Protestants within the colony, crystallised in the Léry-Thevet conflict
• 1560: destruction of Fort Coligny by Mem de Sá’s Portuguese forces, end of the colony
• Major literary legacy: Thevet’s Singularitez de la France antarctique (1557) and Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage (1578)

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Next zoom: The Death of Henry II and the End of the Reign.