Henri Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière (1541–1608), historian and historiographer from eastern Poitou, France. He studied the classics in Paris and then [law?] at the University of Toulouse. He was a Protestant, and took part in the early Wars of Religion as a commander on the Huguenot side. He would be excommunicated by the National Synod of Reformed Churches for his publication of the Histoire de France.
His early scholarship included 'translations of works on the art of war and on geography'. In 1571, he published La vraye et entiere histoire de ces derniers troubles [Cologne]. Two other editions followed in 1572 [Basel] and 1573 [La Rochelle]. These served as the basis for his definitive Histoire de France [1581]. Other works include his radical general history Histoire des histoires and the theoretical works Idée de l'histoire accomplie and Dessein de l'histoire nouvelle des francois.
His year of birth has been in dispute and is now set as 1545. He would be excommunicated, in 1581, by the National Synod of Reformed Churches at La Rochelle for his publication of his Histoire de France.
In 1582, he published Les Trois Mondes, a work setting out the history of the discovery of the globe.
Les Trois Mondes
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” (Les Trois Mondes, p. 50). 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: There still remains the representation of the third world, of which you would have no knowledge other than that nothing is known about it except that it is a land extending towards the South, or Midi, from thirty degrees beyond the Equator, of much greater extent than the whole of America, only discovered by Magellan when he passed through the strait that is the passage between the Austral land and the southern quarter of America to go to the Moluccas... We know nothing of so fine, so great a country, which can have no less of wealth nor other properties than the Old and New Worlds. Regarding the situation and extent of this third world, it is impossible that there would not be marvelous things and delights, riches and other benefits of life there. Even if there be found there nothing worthy of record, the curiosity of the prince who visits it will always be praiseworthy. La Popelinière joined a number of his contemporaries in this conception: Guillaume Le Testu, Jean Alfonse, Guillaume Postel, André Thevet. According to him, if France discovered and colonized this third part of the world, the Terra Australis, an unknown and immense land, she would be able to efface the grave fault of not having set foot on the New World since the time of Christopher Columbus. Les Trois Mondes is an invitation to exploration, to adventure, and an appeal to those Frenchmen who would wish to go in the footsteps of Columbus, of Magellan, of Cortes and of Drake. La Popelinière said: “there remain more countries to know than we moderns have discovered”. He even set out the means in explaining that it would not require the finances of a monarch but those of a simple gentleman of means. In fact, La Popelinière had had before his eyes a memoir which developed the hypothesis of an Austral continent. Its author, André d’Albaigne (or D’Albagno), had continued the project of his brother Francesque and of a Portuguese pilot, Bartolomeu Velho, in 1571. The cosmographer André d’Albaigne claimed to possess: “the secrets, charts and necessary instruments for conquering and reducing to the obedience of His Majesty great extent of lands and realms abundant and rich in gold, silver, precious stones, drugs and spiceries”.