France is a distant homeland, colonial authority, and commercial market in the novel: a place that shapes the lives of René Sel, Mari, and Charles Duquet even when they are far from it. Its reach is consequentially unequal. Mari remembers being taken there against her will, while Duquet hopes to make a fortune by supplying European demand; Mi’kmaq characters, meanwhile, reject France’s claim to give away lands that were never the French king’s to grant.

Homeland and remembered loss

France enters Mari’s history through a childhood account of abduction. When French visitors announced that they were returning home, they seized seven Mi’kmaq people, including Mari, and carried them to a ship before the people on shore could intervene. She recalls the journey as prolonged sickness and describes arrival in Paris, where she and the others were transported in a wagon, wept, and slept in a box. Her brother and mother died in France; after Mari became ill, she was left with a baby as the surviving member of her family group.

The return voyage brought Mari and the baby back to Mi’kma’ki, where people ran to meet them. That reunion did not restore the community’s earlier security: nearly the entire tribe died in the following months, a loss attributed to illness brought by the newcomers. France thus remains part of a chain of separation, sickness, and bereavement, rather than a neutral destination in a travel story.

A remembered country of poverty

For Duquet, France is also the setting of a personal confrontation with his origins. In La Rochelle, its familiar signs of poverty bring back childhood hunger, chilblains, and his father’s beatings and curses. He recalls his father only as a pair of legs receding at the end. The city makes the deprivation he had left behind newly present, but memories of Kébec’s clear rivers and forest air help him regain his composure.

Duquet is embarrassed by how his clothes and manner mark him as a country bumpkin in French streets. His response is practical and aspirational: instead of the war hatchets he had used in New France, he buys an ambidextrous, flexible Walloon sword of the kind he sees on the streets. He silently resolves to acquire fine clothes and a rich wig. France represents the social world in which he wants to be recognized as a gentleman, as well as the poverty from which he hopes to rise.

Market and commercial horizon

France also figures in Duquet’s calculations as a market. Observing the fur trade, he sees that beaver pelts can arrive in quantities so great that French hatters and furriers can use no more, filling warehouses, while the resource and its market remain vulnerable to scarcity, overtrapping, or disease. He therefore rejects animals and other living resources as the basis for lasting wealth. He imagines the forest as an enduring commodity capable of supplying timber for ships, houses, and fuel, and plans to use profits from furs to prepare for a later move into timber.

His ambition is not simply to earn quickly: he wants wealth that can endure for generations, a fortune to pass to sons, and a family name changed from a curse into an honor. The French market is part of the commercial system that makes his fur-trading profits possible, while his plan to develop timber depends on his belief that European demand can turn the forests of New France into a permanent source of wealth. The novel’s longer view places that confidence beside later forest extraction, in which distant markets are supplied while severe waste and ecological damage remain at the site of cutting.

France, authority, and the question of land

The novel distinguishes commercial reach from political legitimacy. In a discussion of France’s colonial position, Père Crème objects that Mi’kmaq people love their country and children, and that French goods and forceful ways are helping to dispossess and alter their lives. He emphasizes that generations have lived on the land. His argument directly challenges the assumption that France’s strategic interests make the territory available for its use.

That challenge becomes explicit when Sosep tells the returning Mi’kmaq that the French king has given their lands to the British. Theotiste answers that the king cannot give what is not his: the land is theirs. The claim exposes the gap between European imperial agreements and Indigenous understandings of belonging and sovereignty. Sosep’s warning about growing settler encroachment likewise frames French and British rule as competing colonial powers whose decisions impose consequences on Mi’kmaq communities without making those communities’ consent the basis of authority.