This website is the logical continuation of a 25 year historical adventure which started in the California gold country in 1974 after I moved from my native Cannes to Marin County.
In the course of week-end trips to the Sierra foothills, I discovered French placenames everywhere my family and I traveled. We started to collect visuals and documents on this little-known, faraway French adventure in California, discovering as we went along how far back the French had been interested and involved in the Golden State and its history.
By 1991 I turned all this information into a dissertation presented at my Alma Mater, the University of Nice. This 800-page manuscript represented only a small segment of what I had learned, since it focused on the “French Adventure in Gold Rush San Francisco, 1848-1854”. It only mentioned in passing the important contributions of early French Explorers, the remarkable presence of French Canadians in the West, the French “Californios” who became founding fathers of some of California’s first settlements and cities, or the vibrant French character of major California cities in the late XIXth and early XXth centuries.
Most of all, it only contained a small appendix on the French Artists who painted or sketched California from 1786 to 1900, a treasury of scenes, views, and portraits of the state that I found particularly captivating. This has now been presented in a separate book, lavishly produced and published by the Book Club of California.
All along this route, as I slowly built a library of visuals and documents on the French in California, I have met interest from all sorts of different directions, Art collectors or dealers, historians and journalists, descendents of French-Californians, history buffs, French students of all levels and ages, as well as genealogists.
This site will hopefully answer many questions that were asked in the past. It offers information, documents and visuals that are part of my collection and which can therefore be made available without the need to obtain others’ permissions. I have attached a sort of “General Store” where items of a more lasting sort can be bought as keepsakes, beautiful reproductions of some prints, articles published on the subject, or new articles which I hope will at some point be turned into booklets or books.
I will be happy to make specific requests available through this site. Specific research can also be carried out. And most of all I would love to continue sharing and trading information on those who may be your descendents or the subject of your research or interest.
The internet is a magnificent tool for this sort of exchange, Bienvenue at FrenchGold!
