Trois âges d’une migration française au coeur du continent : de la Haute Louisiane espagnole des années 1790 au Missouri de 1860

Abstract

French migration to the former Illinois Country didn’t not stop with the end of the French regime. In what was the Spanish Upper Louisiana before becoming the American state of Missouri, between the 1790s and 1860, this article defines three ages of this migration. It is first a small forgotten part the history of the Atlantic revolutions since it is mainly constituted of exiles of the French Revolution. In the first decades of the American sovereignty, the flow is impossible to quantify but concerns missionaries, merchants, and without doubt other ones difficult to discern. It is clearer from the 1840s : the French constitute a thin stream in the process of European migration’s massification.