French Colonial Empire

The French colonial Empire was the set of territories that were under French rule primarily from the 17th century to the late 1960s. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the colonial empire of France was the second-largest in the world behind the British Empire. The French colonial empire extended over 12,347,000 km² (4,767,000 sq. miles) of land at its height in the 1920s and 1930s. Including metropolitan France, the total amount of land under French sovereignty reached 13,018,575 km² (4,980,000 sq. miles) at the time, almost 1/10 of the Earth's total land area. Its influence made French a widely-spoken colonial European language, along with English, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

France, in rivalry with Britain for supremacy, began to establish colonies in North America, the Caribbean and India, following Spanish and Portuguese successes during the Age of Discovery. A series of wars with Britain during the 18th century and early to mid-19th century, which France lost, ended its colonial ambitions in these places, and with it what some historians term the "first" French colonial empire.

In the 19th century, France established a new empire in Africa and Southeast Asia. In this period France's conquest of Empire in Africa was dressed up as a moral crusade. In 1886 Jules Ferry declared; "The higher races have a right over the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior races." Full citizenship rights - assimilation - was offered, though in reality "assimilation was always receding the colonial populations treated like subjects not citizens."

Following World War I and especially World War II, anti-colonial movements began to challenge French authority. France unsuccessfully fought bitter wars in Vietnam and Algeria to keep its empire intact. By the end of the 1960s, many of France's colonies had gained independence, although some territories – especially islands and archipelagos – were integrated into France as overseas departments and territories. These total altogether 123,150 km² (47,548 sq. miles), which amounts to only 1% of the pre-1939 French colonial empire's area, with 2,685,705 people living in them in 2011. All of them enjoy full political representation at the national level, as well as varying degrees of legislative autonomy. (See Administrative divisions of France.)

Read more about French Colonial Empire:  Second French Colonial Empire (1830-1960), Civilising Mission, Decolonisation (20th Century)

Famous quotes containing the words french, colonial and/or empire:

    In most other modern societies working mothers are not put under these special and exaggerated pressures. For example, French and English mothers often prefer to breast-feed their babies, but they do not feel that their womanhood is at stake if they fail to do so. Nor does anyone else.
    Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)

    In colonial America, the father was the primary parent. . . . Over the past two hundred years, each generation of fathers has had less authority than the last. . . . Masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic involvement, skills at fathering and husbanding, but began to be defined in terms of making money. Men had to leave home to work. They stopped doing all the things they used to do.
    Frank Pittman (20th century)

    I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.
    Gore Vidal (b. 1925)