France was once a remarkable colonial power. From the 16th century onward, the French managed to seize territories in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. A handful of these happened to be in South America.
Some of the earliest French colonies in South America began in Brazil, where the French found themselves in direct competition with the Portuguese. Initially, French traders and explorers had simply hoped to establish a small settlement due to their frequent trade expeditions in the area. In 1531, on the island of Santo Aleixo, the French had built a small fort and trading post, but by the start of the next year, this settlement had already been abandoned in response to Portuguese aggression.
But by 1555, the French were ready to try again. And a man by the name of Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon was sent at the helm of a fleet of three ships carrying 600 men in total. This expedition was aimed for the Bay of Guanabara, and a colony was immediately started upon arrival.
The next year, another fleet with nearly 200 additional colonists arrived, but it wouldn't take long for many to actually leave. This was because Villeguignon was still in charge of the project, and he was seen as a bit of a despot. As a result, the colony started to collapse almost as quickly as it had formed.
In 1559, Villeguignon decided to return to France and leave the colony in the hands of his nephew, but the Portuguese shortly put an end to it entirely after two days of intense armed conflict. Yet, the French refused to give up altogether. In 1590, Adolphe Montbil led another expedition into Brazil, this time settling in Ibiapaba.
Montbil's colony held up fairly well for a solid 14 years, but in a predictable fashion, the Portuguese arrived in 1604 to stamp it out. This led to one more effort by the French to maintain some kind of foothold in Brazil, beginning again in 1612. Focused mostly around Maranhão, this colony only lasted for a couple of years before the French would yet again succumb to Portuguese pressure and surrender entirely. Nevertheless, the French were far from done trying. France was a colonial power, Possessing overseas territories was just part of what they did. So, when the early South American colonies failed, the French looked to the Guianas, just across the border from Brazil.
After exploration by other European nations that led to nothing permanent, the land of what is now French Guiana was open for anyone's taking. In 1624, the French subsequently tried to set up another colony. But just as over the border in Brazil, the Portuguese became much too aggressive for the French to handle. Still, the French persisted, and by 1643, they had not only returned, but managed to establish a colony in Cayenne. Until this time, attacks from the indigenous population forced the French to abandon the project.
Over the following decades, French and Dutch colonists would clash over who the region belonged to. But eventually, France would get it back after the Treaty of Breda in 1667 and a short Dutch occupation in 1676. For now, the French had managed to at least hold on to one colony in South America, which proved to be crucial only a century later. When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, France lost nearly all of its American colonies. French Guiana was nearly all that it had left, and so the French crown decided to send a few thousand colonists over to the remaining settlement in hopes of further securing what they already had.
But French Guiana was not necessarily a nice place to be, nor had it been well established. Due to disease and regular clashes with the indigenous population, only a few hundred of these settlers would survive. and just about all of them would leave after only a couple of years.
Somehow, though, the colony survived, and in 1776, Pierre Victor Malouet was in charge and employed a Swiss man by the name of Jean-Samuel Guizon to help him rebuild and begin to establish reliable agriculture. This prompted a relatively peaceful period for French Guiana, but when the French Revolution broke out, the direction of the colony's future took a hit after A prison for dissidents was opened in Sainte-Marie in 1792. Between this and the horror stories that have been brought back by the early surviving settlers, French Guiana was not looking like a desirable place to live. By 1792, the city was under the control of the French.
In 1997, a handful of journalists and deputies had been sent to the colony as punishment, and before them, 193 of the executed Maximilien Robespierre supporters had additionally been deported to French Guiana. Less than a year later, the colony was taken to the French Guiana, where it was later taken to the French Guiana. The colony was then taken to the French Guiana, where it was later taken to the than half of these early exiles had survived, likely due to the same diseases that had killed so many Frenchmen before.
Nevertheless, the work on agriculture did provide some level of success in producing popular exports, such as the cayenne pepper. But by the early 1800s, the colony faced yet another obstacle, this time in the form of the Portuguese. Just like old times, Portugal stripped the French of their remaining South American colony in 1809 after an invasion and was able to hold onto French Guiana until 1814. After another Treaty of Paris signing, though, the territory was given back to France. The abolition of slavery that came not too long after would be a significant blow to the success of French plantations and the colony, and it seems that the luck of the French in South America was still fairly non-existent.
Nonetheless, The French crown continuously failed to either care or understand the difficulties of the colony, and only increased the number of convicts that were to be sent over as settlers, and just as before, many would shortly die due to disease or malnutrition from the struggling agriculture. For the next century, life didn't get much better in the territory either. Though gold would soon be discovered in the later 1800s and add some kind of incentive for colonists to stay or more to come, it still was not a great place to be. By the mid-20th century, the colony had gone through some governmental changes and challenges and officially became an overseas department of France in 1946. Over the next decade, French Guiana continued to fall apart as the prisons were eventually phased out of use, and still, no one was really seeking out a life in this troubled settlement.
Instead, by 1970, Kourou, French Guinea became a launch site for rockets alongside the newly built Guinea Space Center. The 70s, in turn, saw an improvement in efforts to make French Guinea more likable. and an influx of refugees from Laos further helped increase the population.
But as the settlement finally grew, so did a push for autonomy. By now, France's other South American colonies, if they could even be called that, were long gone. Mostly lost to the Portuguese, none of the prior settlements had held up for long enough to even beg the question of whether independence was an option or not.
But for French Guiana, though the road had been long and rough, It was long enough for the settlers who had remained and survived to begin contemplating a break from France. Protests in favor of this movement would occur throughout the late 1990s and the start of the 21st century, but the demonstrations were stamped out and the general population was not in strong enough favor for independence. In the end, a 2010 referendum put a stop to the movement with a vote against autonomy.