On September 13, 1759, a British army of about 4,400 men under Major General James Wolfe formed up on the high ground west of Quebec and defeated a French force of about 4,500 under the Marquis de Montcalm in a battle that lasted less than half an hour. Both commanders were mortally wounded. Wolfe died on the field, Montcalm the next morning. Quebec surrendered on September 18.
The battle happened where it did because of what came the night before. Wolfe had spent two months bombarding the city from across the river and from the Ile d'Orleans and finding that a fortress on a cliff cannot be taken from below, and he had been ill and had been turned back at Montmorency. In August he began raiding upriver to destroy the settlements that supplied Quebec. Then on the night of September 12 he put his men into boats, floated them down with the tide to a cove at Anse au Foulon, and had them climb a path up a 50-metre cliff in the dark. The French picket at the top was small and was taken.
Montcalm's mistake was to fight at once rather than wait. He had more men than Wolfe if he waited for the garrison at Beauport to come up, and the British had no guns and had landed on ground they could not retreat from. He came out in the morning, and the French advance was ragged: the militia on the flanks fired too early and too far and disordered the regulars in the centre.
They held their fire. At around 40 paces they fired. The French line broke. Wolfe was hit in the wrist and then in the chest and died knowing the battle was won. Montcalm was hit in the lower body on the retreat and died at five the next morning. He had written to Wolfe the previous day asking whether Quebec could be saved.
The city was handed over on September 18. France and Britain both sent reinforcements, and the fighting in North America went on another year, but the Treaty of Paris in 1763 gave Canada to Britain outright, and New France, which had run from the Gulf of St Lawrence to the Rockies in theory and along the St Lawrence and the Mississippi in fact, ceased to exist.