Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière

Who was Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière?

Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière, was a Gascon writer and historian. He was a Protestant, and took part in the Wars of Religion on the Huguenot side. In 1582, he published Les Trois Mondes, a work setting out the history of the discovery of the globe.

In writing Les Trois Mondes, La Popelinière pursued an explicit geopolitical design by utilizing the cosmographic conjectures, which were at the time quite credible, to theorize a colonial expansion by France into the austral territories. His country, eliminated from colonial competition in the New World after a series of notorious checks in the Americas, could only thenceforward orient her expansion toward this “third world”. He affirmed this explicitly, in declaring “to the ambition of the French is promised the Terre Australe, a territory which could not but be filled with all kinds of goods and things of excellence”. The purely commercial interest of certain French maritime expeditions in the eastern seas was overtaken by a colonial project that foresaw the settlement of a French population in the Antipodes and the creation of a true “France australe”. With regard to the austral lands, La Popelinière was inspired by the voyages of Drake, as well as by the accounts of a Portuguese pilot, Bartolomeu Velho, and by a cosmographer of Italian origin, Andrea D’Albagno. La Popelinière evoked in eloquent terms this unknown “third world” which would complete the Old World and the New World: