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