The Huguenot city of La Rochelle votes on August 8, 1625, to join Soubise.

The people of La Rochelle, two months into the siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, finally start open hostilities against the central government of France in September.

Richelieu orders the army to besiege the Huguenot stronghold; the Cardinal personally commands the besieging troops.

The second English relief fleet, finally dispatched under the Admiral of the Fleet, the Earl of Lindsey, in August 1628, remains blocked by the seawall in front of La Rochelle.

The residents of La Rochelle have resisted for fourteen months, under the leadership of the mayor Jean Guitton and with the gradually diminishing help from England.

During the siege, the population of La Rochelle has decreased from twenty-seven thousand to five thousand due to casualties, famine and disease.

Exhausted and without hope of outside support anymore, La Rochelle finally surrenders to French Royal forces on October 28, 1628.

England, following these defeats, will end its involvement with the Thirty Years War, by negotiating peace treaties, with France in 1629 and Spain in 1630, to the dismay of Protestant forces on the continent.

Aside from its religious aspect, the result of Siege of La Rochelle marks an important stage in the creation of a strong central government in France, in actual control of its entire territory and intolerant of any regional defiance of its rule.

In the immediate aftermath this is manifested in growth of absolute monarchy, but is to have long-term effects upon all later French regimes up to the present.

French nobleman Robert Cavalier de La Salle had launched an expedition down the Mississippi River from New France in 1681, at first believing he would find a path to the Pacific Ocean.

Instead, La Salle had found a route to the Gulf of Mexico.

Although Hernando De Soto had explored and claimed this area for Spain one hundred and forty years before, on April 9, 1682, La Salle had claimed the Mississippi River valley for French king Louis XIV, naming the territory Louisiana in his honor.

Without a French presence at the base of the Mississippi, Spain would have an opportunity to control the entire Gulf of Mexico and potentially pose a threat to New France's southern borders.

La Salle believes that the Mississippi River is near the eastern edge of New Spain, and on his return to France in 1683, he had proposed establishing a colony at the mouth of the river.

The colony could provide a base for promoting Christianity among the native peoples as well as a convenient location for attacking the Spanish province of Nueva Vizcaya and gaining control of its lucrative silver mines.

He had argued that a small number of Frenchmen could successfully invade New Spain by allying themselves with over fifteen thousand Native Americans who are angry over Spanish enslavement.

After Spain declared war on France in October 1683, Louis had agreed to support La Salle's plan; his official duties now include "confirming the Indians' allegiance to the crown, leading them to the true faith, and maintaining intertribal peace".

La Salle had originally planned to sail to New France, journey overland to the Illinois Country, and then traverse the Mississippi River to its mouth.

However, to spite Spain, Louis has insisted La Salle sail through the Gulf of Mexico, which Spain considers its exclusive property.

Although La Salle had requested only one ship, on July 24, 1684, he leaves La Rochelle, France with four: the thirty-six-gun man of war Le Joly, the three hundred-ton storeship L'Aimable, the barque La Belle, and the ketch St. François.

Although Louis XIV had provided both Le Joly and La Belle, La Salle had desired more cargo space and leased L'Aimable and St. François from French merchants.

Louis has also provided on hundred soldiers and full crews for the ships, as well as funds to hire skilled workers to join the expedition.

La Salle himself is forced to purchase goods to trade with the Native Americans.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir works this year in Paris and La Rochelle.

The works that he executes from 1883 to 1884 on are marked by a new discipline.

While Renoir's experiments with Impressionism have not been not wasted, because he has retained a luminous palette, in paintings from this period, such as The Umbrellas (c. 1883; The National Gallery, London, UK) and many depictions of bathers, he emphasizes volume, form, contours, and line rather than color and brushstroke. (Art historians have grouped these works under the title the “Ingres” period—to signify their vague similarity to the technique of J.-A.-D. Ingres—or the “harsh,” or “dry,” period.)

The 79-year-old Bouguereau, a dominant figure in his nation's academic painting during the second half of the 19th century, dies on August 19, 1905 at La Rochelle. (Modern critics tend to assess Bouguereau as a painter who sacrificed boldness of technique and originality of outlook for a highly polished but conventional treatment of the human form.)