Jean Talon Changes the Seigneurial Landscape

The Compagnie des Cent-Associés (Company of One Hundred Associates) ceased operations on the twenty-fourth of February, 1663. Louis XIV's idea was then to run New France by direct rule through a Conseil Souverain (Sovereign Council.) The following year, however, he went back to the previous kind of arrangement and handed over colonization of the territory to the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (Company of the West Indies.) This company was founded on the twenty-eighth of May, 1664, and was to continue operations until December, 1674. It acquired "full seigneurial, ownership and judicial rights" to the following territories:

... the said islands, the island of Cayenne and all the mainland of America from the River of the Amazons to the Orinoco; Canada, Acadia, the island of Newfoundland and other islands and mainland from the North of the said country of Canada as far as Virginia and Florida, together with all the coast of Africa from Cape Verde to the Cape of Good Hope, since that the said countries do belong to us by virtue of their having been hitherto inhabited by Frenchmen...

Four seigneuries were set up during the Sovereign Council's interregnum, and two others by the royal administrator Charles de Lauzon-Charny. Then a major change took place when, on the eighteenth of August, 1666, Claude Le Barroys, the representative of the Company of the West Indies, proposed that land grants should henceforth be made by the intendant (royal superintendent.) Thereafter the successive royal administrators of the colony performed this function themselves until 1760.