There are two good reasons for singling out the Gaigneur family. The first is that they and their many relatives sent more ships, more goods, and more people out to Canada than any other trading firm in their time, which stretched from 1628 almost to the end of the century. This reason will be universally understood, but the second reason may puzzle the business historian who has not studied the reign of Louis XIII: the Gaigneur family and their relatives were all Roman Catholics established at or near La Rochelle, where so much business was still in the hands of Huguenot families. This is an anomaly that invites us to set aside the normal assumption on which trade is studied without reference to the religion of the traders. Close study of the Gaigneur clan shows that their trans-Atlantic trade can best be explained with reference to the religious and political events of their time. Those events count for a great deal because the Gaigneur clan's motives and purposes can only be inferred from what they did: they left no explicit statements, no letters or memoranda, that might tell us what they thought they were doing. The same may be said of most merchants engaged in shipping or trading with New France during the seventeenth century. Few indeed left any reflections on their lives; we can only try to deduce why the merchants in the Gaigneur clan traded with Canada and Acadia.

The year 1628 was a strange time to begin sending ships over to those colonies. The armies of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu had been besieging La Rochelle, a Calvinist stronghold, since the spring of 1627; it surrendered on 28 October 1628; soldiers, royal officials and Roman Catholic missionaries immediately invaded and began to catholicize the town. The public in France and throughout Europe followed these events with passionate interest. Only people unfamiliar with French history in those times could imagine that shipping to Canada was driven entirely by business motives and that religious purposes were secondary in it. This being so, the problem for the historian is evidently to determine, or to disentangle, the parts played by business and religion in the Canada trade.