Marquis de Vaudreuil
The Marquis de Vaudreuil was the only Canadian-born governor of New France and the one who had to surrender it. He was born in Quebec, the son of a previous governor, and had governed Louisiana for a decade before returning in 1755 to a colony of about seventy thousand French settlers facing British colonies with more than a million. His war was fought with that arithmetic. New France's advantages were interior lines, the fur-trade alliances with Indigenous nations that his family had spent generations maintaining, and irregular warfare in country the British could not move through easily. Vaudreuil favoured exactly that - raids, ambushes, and the Canadian militia - and he quarrelled continuously with Montcalm, the metropolitan general sent to command the regulars, who wanted a conventional European defence of a few fortified points and thought the colonials undisciplined. Those alliances were the colony's real depth. New France had spent a century trading, intermarrying and negotiating with the nations of the Great Lakes and the Ohio, and could raise war parties the British colonies could not match - which is what destroyed Braddock's column in 1755. Montcalm's regulars neither understood the arrangement nor respected it, and the massacre of surrendered prisoners at Fort William Henry damaged it badly. Montcalm got his way at Quebec in 1759 and lost the city in twenty minutes on the Plains of Abraham, dying in the action. Vaudreuil withdrew the army to Montreal, held out through the winter, and surrendered in September 1760 when three British armies converged on it. He negotiated terms that mattered more than the battle: the articles of capitulation protected the Catholic religion, the civil law and the property of the inhabitants, and those protections were substantially carried into the Quebec Act of 1774. He was arrested in France, tried for the colony's loss, and acquitted.
- Lived: 1698 CE – 1778 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
