In a course on Canadian history, we were taught that one of the many causes of the ultimate historical failure of French colonies in America was that unlike people from the British Isles, French people strongly disliked the idea of living elsewhere than in France. As a result, French colonial populations in Canada and elsewhere were much smaller and slower-growing than those of English colonies.

Part I - I found the answer easily via the university library in the book EUROPEANS ON THE MOVE: STUDIES ON EUROPEAN MIGRATION 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny, 1994 (New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press). Chapter 3 (start p. 237) about France is by Peter Moogk, who writes: "The Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731) inspired two operas of that name. When Abbé Antoine-François Prévost wrote this story of a courtesan, Manon, who was exiled to Louisiana and followed by her noble lover, he expressed a widespread French view of overseas emigration. The view was that permanent resettlement in the colonies was an option that no free person would willingly accept, no matter what adversity he or she faced at home. The story was a tragedy because des Grieux's passion for Manon drove him into colonial exile. Since the American colonies were a place of cruel exile, it followed that individuals who settled there must have done so under compulsion. It was always assumed that French colonials were the offspring of exiled criminals and prostitutes and other social outcasts ( . . . ) English speakers shared this prejudice ( . . . ) "Although there was some truth to the belief that France's colonies were peopled by exiled criminals, that conviction overshadowed the fact that a greater number of respectable people had settled there ( . . . ) Criminals were not dispatched to New France in the seventeenth century, yet people assumed that they must have been sent there. The persistent assumption that social outcasts had populated France's American possessions was one of the barriers to large-scale French colonization abroad. Overseas migration was a last, desperate option to be considered only by those who could no longer make a living in their place of birth. The myth that the French colonies were entirely populated by criminals sustained that repugnance for transatlantic emigration."

Part 2 - These other excerpts from the same source may also interest you: "Exceptional mass emigrations have been studied. The most infamous one was the result of religious intolerance. In the seventeenth century, and especially after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, from 130,000 to 250,000 French Protestants fled to adjacent England, Switzerland, Rhineland-Palatinate, and the Dutch Republic. Secondary migrations carried these Huguenots to South Africa, Ireland, and British North America. Marcel Trudel observed that during the seventeenth century there were more French speakers in New York Province than in nearby New France. Louis XIV was not disposed to accept Protestants as settlers in the French colonies, and the Huguenots, for their part, had no love for the monarch who had outlawed their faith. Thus French Calvinists played only a small role in the settlement of French America. The other exceptional migration that has received scholarly attention is the exodus of over 60,000 royalist émigrés from France in the 1790s. A few of these people appeared in Louisiana and Canada, even though these colonies were no longer French possessions, but most remained poised in England and other European countries, awaiting restoration of the French monarchy. ( . . . ) Despite being inland, Paris supplied a tenth of all emigrants to ‘Canada’, as the St Lawrence valley-Great Lakes colony was called. That was because the metropolis itself was the destination of many newcomers. Its role was also inflated by the fact that most of the 850 filles du roi sent as potential brides to New France in 1663–73 were drawn from a Paris hospice for orphans."