France built two empires and had lost most of the first by 1814
The French colonial empire gathered overseas colonies, protectorates and mandates from the sixteenth century onward. Historians separate a first empire, largely lost or sold by 1814, from a second that began with the conquest of Algiers in 1830 and by 1914 was the world's second largest after Britain's.
The first empire reached into the Americas, the Caribbean and India from the 1500s, but defeat in the Seven Years' War stripped away most of it, with North American lands passing to Britain and Spain. Spain handed Louisiana back in 1800, and France sold it to the United States three years later. Rebuilding came mainly after 1850, focused on Africa, Indochina and the South Pacific. The new colonies were expected to ship raw materials home and buy French manufactures, and after the crushing Franco-Prussian War, which left Germany dominant in Europe, overseas expansion was also a way to recover national prestige. In both world wars the colonies supplied soldiers and workers.
The empire's official justification was the mission civilisatrice, the idea that France had a duty to spread its language, laws and values. Jules Ferry spoke of an obligation to civilise. Not everyone agreed: Georges Leygues argued that forcing assimilation on Muslim, Hindu and Vietnamese peoples with long and brilliant histories would be both absurd and disastrous. In practice the universal rhetoric sat alongside unequal legal regimes, and full citizenship was rarely granted. Some routes to citizenship and schooling were wider than in rival empires, yet schemes such as naturalising Algerian Muslims mostly failed amid French division and local refusal.
Few French people emigrated to the colonies, Algeria being the big exception, where a European minority held political and economic power. Many future independence leaders studied in France and turned its republican ideals against colonial rule. During the Second World War Charles de Gaulle's Free French used the colonies as a springboard to liberate France, and afterwards Paris, humiliated by occupation, clung to its possessions to restore its standing.
That proved costly. Wars in Indochina and Algeria ended with both lost, while most other territories became independent fairly peacefully after 1960. The 1946 constitution created a French Union that lasted until 1958. What remains are overseas departments and territories covering about 119,394 square kilometres with 2.8 million inhabitants in 2021, and ties persist through the Francophonie, the shared CFA currency, and military missions run together, Operation Serval among them.
Source: French colonial empire
