I thought it was Franklin's assistant who founded the Gazette.
It may have been, but it's certainly part of my city's mythic identity to attribute it to Franklin. (In the same way as the Marquis de Sade starting the French Revolution by sticking his head out the window of his cell in the Bastille and shouting "help, they're killing everyone in here" because he thought it was amusing, if it's not true it should be.)
And I have a friend who toyed with precisely that event but never buckled down to write it.
It's a long way from being a period I know well enough to write, but it seems to me that a French victory there and a solid New France leads pretty directly to no Proclamation of 1763, no Quebec Act of 1774, quite possibly a shorter Seven Years' War so less of the economic tightness that leads to the tax issues that are the proximate cause of the American Revolution, and a strong New France maybe making the idea of breaking free from the British Empire seem less appealing anyway; so if the history of the rest of the Empire goes more or less as it does in our timeline, the next interesting flashpoint is the Empire-wide ban on slavery on the 1830s as a possible point for the slaveholding territories to revolt. And likely not get very far with it if the rest of British North America gets the full weight of Empire behind it. (This all presuming nothing drastically weird happens during the Napoleonic Wars, but well, the War of 1812 ? Kind of a sideshow in world terms.)
You know, on reflection, I may have tighter standards for "not a period I know well" than many people.
