History of the French Empire

Ah, France. Home to such stories as Caesar's conquest of the Gauls and the Avignon anti-Pope fights. Good times. But sometimes one France just isn't enough. Then they want new France, East France, Hot France. What happens when France wants an entire empire? Well, definitions for French empire range from a period of about 15 years at the turn of the 1800s to a full four centuries, and depending on when, it covered anywhere from 2 to 10% of the world's land area. It's honestly kind of ridiculous, and researching this video reminded me vividly of how I nearly flopped AP European history way back in high school. I'm not going to editorialize about the moral implications of colonial imperialism and the painful legacy of European oppression, but I will, however, complain bitterly about how freaking annoying it was for me to read through all of this garbage, as well as make the 50-plus maps for this video. There are way too many plot threads happening all at once. That's just bad narrative composition. Tidy that up. Get an editor. With colonialism, everybody loses. including France. To see why, let's do some history. Now, colonialism is technically the action, whereas imperialism is the underlying mindset, but I'll be using the terms interchangeably because I honestly just don't care. I'm gonna take the long perspective here and just talk about all of French colonization. So our story begins very slowly in the 1500s when half of Europe spent a century trying and failing to bandwagon off of Spain's conquest of the New World. In 1608, France settled the colony of Quebec along the Saint Lawrence River and quickly spread west to the Great Lakes to form New France. But the French were unsurprisingly not the first people to live in North America, so they started trading furs with the local native populations like the Iroquois Confederacy, whose word Canada, meaning village or settlement, became, well, Canada. Plot twist, I know. New France spread down the Mississippi River at the end of the century, creating a second main entry port at New Orleans, as well as forming a big old wall against the developing English colonies on the coast. But this had the added benefit of connecting New France to their holdings in the Caribbean. What started with two islands in the Lesser Antilles grew to include Saint-Domingue in 1664, and then all of modern Haiti by the end of the century. Unlike the shiny France away from France that was blooming up north, the Caribbean was all sweltering sugar factories with extractable value that the colonists had simply earned by right of conquest. The rules of imperialism were harsh but simple. If a flag isn't waving, it's ripe for enslaving! Ha ha! Ha! Now this is obviously horrible, but it was a genuine mentality of the European colonists. If it didn't belong to the Spanish, English, or Dutch, it was free real estate. And speaking of enslaving, it's still a couple centuries before France glomps onto Africa en masse, but there were still plenty of coastal African outposts to facilitate the notorious Triangle Trade across the Atlantic. The French Empire reached its first peak at the turn of the 1700s, as New France was a strong and self-sufficient colony that rivaled Spain's massive dominion of Central and South America. France next took a page out of Portugal's colonial playbook and went east to get rich, establishing a series of small outposts down and up the African coast, on Senegal, Mauritius, and the Seychelles, and over towards India. Of the European powers that went to India, France was by far the slowest to arrive, but they made up for two centuries of tardiness by carving a full chunk out of the southeast coast in 1740. So now that France has this vast and wealthy empire across both hemispheres and four continents, time to collapse. Because much like a small child complaining that their friend has cooler toys, France's empire earned the jealousy of England, and that meant war. About seven of them, to be precise. While all of these wars started for a smattering of different reasons and involve lots of tangential players, the core underlying conflict was always France v. England for the biggest and shiniest empire. Some historians call this the long 18th century, since this arc starts in the late 1600s and ends in the early 1800s, but I also enjoy the more descriptive moniker of the Second Hundred Years'War. Given most of Canada and the United States speak English, I won't dally over the details because you kinda know how this one ends. Now, back to historical terminology for a minute, because I can and will do everything in my power to not talk about French Imperial history. This era is usually described as the Early Modern Period, but that name is dumb, unspecific, and also not informative in any way. So, I came up with a better name to describe that nebulous new world discovery to World War II span of about 400 years. The Age of Vanity. It's topical here on account of the sheer national narcissism inherent in colonialism, but it also encompasses the greater focus on the self after the Reformation and the development of capitalism, as well as recognizing the larger-than-life personalities of most European kings and queens between the 15th and 1900s. Three types of vanity in one! The first act of this era is the discovery of the New World and the ensuing Age of Colonialism. The second act is that Hundred Years War I mentioned earlier, along with the Enlightenment going on at the same time. Act three is the Industrial Revolution and the Scramble for Africa. And the fourth act de Noumont is Decolonis- Each act displays different characteristics of state-driven personal and royal vanity. So that's my pitch for naming this nebulous period. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Let me know what you think or if you have a suggestion drop it in the comments. Anyway, the first three of these wars in the second Hundred Years War involve various coalitions to either beat back France or fight over who inherited the crowns of Austria and Spain. Two of which were directly caused by the incestuous literal clusterf**k that is the Habsburg family, so I hate it on principle. But the big one was The Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763, which started as a skirmish between French and English colonies in America and picked up in Europe when alliances spiraled out into a full-on continental war. Haha! Good thing that never happens again! England's main strategy was to open up fronts on every single French colony and stretch them out as far as possible. So America, India, and the Caribbean all turned into battlefields. If you want to see more on this, our friend Griffin the Armchair Historian has a full animated documentary about the Seven Years War. Definitely worth a watch. Bottom line for France was that they lost, and with it, they lost nearly all of their overseas colonies. A couple decades later, they supported America in their independence from Britain, but even this would only prove a dent in the blooming British Empire. So, in the late 1700s, France was very much on the down-and-out. The state was broke, the people were poor and hungry, the intellectuals were fed up, all while the nobles and clergy were living large and not paying taxes. This exploded into a bloody guillotine. a teeny mess in the French Revolution, also known as Exhibit A of France collapsing under the weight of its own failed empire. National Assembly, Kill the King, Reign of Terror, yadda yadda yadda, and Britain thought this was a perfect opportunity to go double or nothing and kick France while it was down. And it probably would have worked if not for a clever general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, who returned from yoinking northern Italy to seize power in 1799 as Consul of France and eventually Emperor of France in 1802, and then conquered across mainland Europe like he was a cat laying down across a keyboard. My favorite part about this last France vs. Britain conflict is the pure visual comedy between the heads of state. King George of England has a powdered wig and all this royal fans, but pretty boy Bonaparte was the most powerful dude in Europe and he looked like the missing Jonas Brother! Why is the Emperor of France a Shonen protagonist? At his height, all of continental Europe was either Napoleon's ally or vassal, and he issued a full trade embargo against Britain. When little Portugal dared to break it, Napoleon tore through Iberia and forcibly annexed Portugal, and also Spain since it was- was just on the way. This dude did not let up. Several coalitions tried and failed to topple Napoleon's Grand Armée, but in the end, only Napoleon could defeat Napoleon. The big oops came when Emperor Bonaparte pushed his army deep into Russia without managing to secure their surrender, so Napoleon had to march back with a fraction of his troops and he got soundly defeated by the Sixth Coalition the next year. Paris was captured, Napoleon was exiled, then he came back but was defeated again at Waterloo, and then he was exiled for good. And that's the end of the whole Napoleonic story. Hereafter, Continental France France was confined to France and they remained firmly shut out of the Western Atlantic. So they started a new wave of colonization in Africa. Step 1 was a protracted invasion of Ottoman Algeria in 1830 that took 17 years and killed a quarter of the native population. No sweat. Step 2 was Napoleon's nephew installing himself as emperor after a brief revolution in 1848, and one Napoleon was already too many, so I am distinctly not a fan of this. His big thing was to boost the navy and colonize more of West Africa and also Vietnam. The means of acquisition for all these are highly dubious. In Asia, the Vietnamese tried in 1864 to clamp down on the growing French presence, so the army rolled in and just conquered the place outright in 1883, and they spread inland to Laos and Cambodia through the early 1900s. From there, the colonists exported tea, rice, coffee, pepper, and rubber back to France. They didn't plan to make this a serious settlement colony, but simply extracted wealth through the land's natural resources, because goods meant value in an industrialized world. This was a far cry from the old model of opening up a small trading post on some coastal sliver of land from far away and calling it a day. Even with the slave trade nominally abolished in 1848, France had strong reasons to get his paws on Africa. as it provided more resources, a convenient place to dump an overflowing population, and perhaps the biggest factor, if they had it, then England didn't. From their main bases in Algeria, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, France glomped nearly the entirety of West Africa. Pro tip, easy way to conquer half a continent, have guns! Really streamlines that whole process. And France didn't take slaves, no no no, they simply deprived natives of French citizenship rights and forced them into low-wage grunt work, the civilized way. You know, kinda undercuts the grand narrative of we're bringing glorious civilization to these ignorant savages when you go out of your way to deprive them of the right to actually participate in that civilization. Hubris, dear viewers, is much like a bear trap placed gingerly on the seat of a chair. It likes to bite people on the ass. Hard. So, let's watch this all go wrong. The beginning of the end came in World War II, when Germany captured Paris and annexed French West Africa, while the Japanese Empire conquered Vietnam. During the war, France's leader in exile and future president Charles de Gaulle decreed that the post-war empire would remain firm, with no chance of colonial self-government autonomy. Spoiler alert, this will backfire spectacularly. After the war, Africa tepidly returned to French control, but the communist Viet Minh declared full-on independence from France in 1945 after the Japanese withdrawal. France was determined to keep their empire and and deployed the army to quash the insurgent Vietnamese. And here to talk about that war is friend of the channel, Griffin Johnson, the armchair historian. Hey Blue, thanks for having me here. What began as a guerrilla resistance became far more complex when communist China supplied weapons and instruction to the Vietnamese army. Late in the war, France attempted to lure Vietnamese forces into battle on their terms, at a fort they constructed in the remote village of Dien Bien Phu. Believing their technological and organizational advantages would grant them a decisive victory. What the French didn't expect... was thousands of Viet Minh soldiers and civilians hauling mass amounts of artillery and anti-aircraft guns through the jungle and atop the surrounding hills. The French position that seemed unassailable swiftly became a death sentence as Vietnamese troops with superior artillery support ferociously pushed their way to the center of the French positions forcing a humiliating surrender. The catastrophic defeat marked the end of French presence in Vietnam and War of Independence. The situation was so dire that the French Fourth Republic outright disintegrated under the weight of the crisis, this being colonial collapse Exhibit B, after which the rest of French Africa noped right the hell out of there. The new Fifth Republic under de Gaulle was determined to hold on to Algeria but eventually gave in and granted independence in 1962. Though France maintained a handful of territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, the decolonization of Algeria marked the clear end to the French Empire. And that's the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall of Imperial France! Though the motives and means changed significantly from one century to another, the core mindset of imperialism was among the strongest guiding principles for France throughout the Age of Vanity. Moral of the story here, don't do colonialism! Everybody l- loses, and there is a two-thirds chance that it'll break your government too. Thanks so much for watching, and a huge thank you to Griffin the Armchair Historian for stopping by. I tell you, the more I learn about Napoleon, the more and less I grow to respect him. It is truly an enigma that I just can't crack, though honestly the monarchical politics of the Age of Vanity are so convoluted in general that I kind of don't care to try. So stay tuned to my next video for something infinitely more familiar and comfortable for me to discuss. I'll see you then.

Ah, France. Home to such stories as Caesar's conquest of the Gauls and the Avignon anti-Pope fights. Good times.

But sometimes one France just isn't enough. Then they want new France, East France, Hot France. What happens when France wants an entire empire? Well, definitions for French empire range from a period of about 15 years at the turn of the 1800s to a full four centuries, and depending on when, it covered anywhere from 2 to 10% of the world's land area.

It's honestly kind of ridiculous, and researching this video reminded me vividly of how I nearly flopped AP European history way back in high school. I'm not going to editorialize about the moral implications of colonial imperialism and the painful legacy of European oppression, but I will, however, complain bitterly about how freaking annoying it was for me to read through all of this garbage, as well as make the 50-plus maps for this video. There are way too many plot threads happening all at once. That's just bad narrative composition. Tidy that up.

Get an editor. With colonialism, everybody loses. including France. To see why, let's do some history.

Now, colonialism is technically the action, whereas imperialism is the underlying mindset, but I'll be using the terms interchangeably because I honestly just don't care. I'm gonna take the long perspective here and just talk about all of French colonization. So our story begins very slowly in the 1500s when half of Europe spent a century trying and failing to bandwagon off of Spain's conquest of the New World.

In 1608, France settled the colony of Quebec along the Saint Lawrence River and quickly spread west to the Great Lakes to form New France. But the French were unsurprisingly not the first people to live in North America, so they started trading furs with the local native populations like the Iroquois Confederacy, whose word Canada, meaning village or settlement, became, well, Canada. Plot twist, I know.

New France spread down the Mississippi River at the end of the century, creating a second main entry port at New Orleans, as well as forming a big old wall against the developing English colonies on the coast. But this had the added benefit of connecting New France to their holdings in the Caribbean. What started with two islands in the Lesser Antilles grew to include Saint-Domingue in 1664, and then all of modern Haiti by the end of the century.

Unlike the shiny France away from France that was blooming up north, the Caribbean was all sweltering sugar factories with extractable value that the colonists had simply earned by right of conquest. The rules of imperialism were harsh but simple. If a flag isn't waving, it's ripe for enslaving! Ha ha!

Ha! Now this is obviously horrible, but it was a genuine mentality of the European colonists. If it didn't belong to the Spanish, English, or Dutch, it was free real estate. And speaking of enslaving, it's still a couple centuries before France glomps onto Africa en masse, but there were still plenty of coastal African outposts to facilitate the notorious Triangle Trade across the Atlantic. The French Empire reached its first peak at the turn of the 1700s, as New France was a strong and self-sufficient colony that rivaled Spain's massive dominion of Central and South America.

France next took a page out of Portugal's colonial playbook and went east to get rich, establishing a series of small outposts down and up the African coast, on Senegal, Mauritius, and the Seychelles, and over towards India. Of the European powers that went to India, France was by far the slowest to arrive, but they made up for two centuries of tardiness by carving a full chunk out of the southeast coast in 1740. So now that France has this vast and wealthy empire across both hemispheres and four continents, time to collapse. Because much like a small child complaining that their friend has cooler toys, France's empire earned the jealousy of England, and that meant war. About seven of them, to be precise.

While all of these wars started for a smattering of different reasons and involve lots of tangential players, the core underlying conflict was always France v. England for the biggest and shiniest empire. Some historians call this the long 18th century, since this arc starts in the late 1600s and ends in the early 1800s, but I also enjoy the more descriptive moniker of the Second Hundred Years'War. Given most of Canada and the United States speak English, I won't dally over the details because you kinda know how this one ends.

Now, back to historical terminology for a minute, because I can and will do everything in my power to not talk about French Imperial history. This era is usually described as the Early Modern Period, but that name is dumb, unspecific, and also not informative in any way. So, I came up with a better name to describe that nebulous new world discovery to World War II span of about 400 years. The Age of Vanity.

It's topical here on account of the sheer national narcissism inherent in colonialism, but it also encompasses the greater focus on the self after the Reformation and the development of capitalism, as well as recognizing the larger-than-life personalities of most European kings and queens between the 15th and 1900s. Three types of vanity in one! The first act of this era is the discovery of the New World and the ensuing Age of Colonialism.

The second act is that Hundred Years War I mentioned earlier, along with the Enlightenment going on at the same time. Act three is the Industrial Revolution and the Scramble for Africa. And the fourth act de Noumont is Decolonis- Each act displays different characteristics of state-driven personal and royal vanity.

So that's my pitch for naming this nebulous period. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Let me know what you think or if you have a suggestion drop it in the comments. Anyway, the first three of these wars in the second Hundred Years War involve various coalitions to either beat back France or fight over who inherited the crowns of Austria and Spain.

Two of which were directly caused by the incestuous literal clusterf**k that is the Habsburg family, so I hate it on principle. But the big one was The Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763, which started as a skirmish between French and English colonies in America and picked up in Europe when alliances spiraled out into a full-on continental war. Haha! Good thing that never happens again! England's main strategy was to open up fronts on every single French colony and stretch them out as far as possible.

So America, India, and the Caribbean all turned into battlefields. If you want to see more on this, our friend Griffin the Armchair Historian has a full animated documentary about the Seven Years War. Definitely worth a watch. Bottom line for France was that they lost, and with it, they lost nearly all of their overseas colonies.

A couple decades later, they supported America in their independence from Britain, but even this would only prove a dent in the blooming British Empire. So, in the late 1700s, France was very much on the down-and-out. The state was broke, the people were poor and hungry, the intellectuals were fed up, all while the nobles and clergy were living large and not paying taxes. This exploded into a bloody guillotine. a teeny mess in the French Revolution, also known as Exhibit A of France collapsing under the weight of its own failed empire.

National Assembly, Kill the King, Reign of Terror, yadda yadda yadda, and Britain thought this was a perfect opportunity to go double or nothing and kick France while it was down. And it probably would have worked if not for a clever general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, who returned from yoinking northern Italy to seize power in 1799 as Consul of France and eventually Emperor of France in 1802, and then conquered across mainland Europe like he was a cat laying down across a keyboard. My favorite part about this last France vs. Britain conflict is the pure visual comedy between the heads of state.

King George of England has a powdered wig and all this royal fans, but pretty boy Bonaparte was the most powerful dude in Europe and he looked like the missing Jonas Brother! Why is the Emperor of France a Shonen protagonist? At his height, all of continental Europe was either Napoleon's ally or vassal, and he issued a full trade embargo against Britain.

When little Portugal dared to break it, Napoleon tore through Iberia and forcibly annexed Portugal, and also Spain since it was- was just on the way. This dude did not let up. Several coalitions tried and failed to topple Napoleon's Grand Armée, but in the end, only Napoleon could defeat Napoleon.

The big oops came when Emperor Bonaparte pushed his army deep into Russia without managing to secure their surrender, so Napoleon had to march back with a fraction of his troops and he got soundly defeated by the Sixth Coalition the next year. Paris was captured, Napoleon was exiled, then he came back but was defeated again at Waterloo, and then he was exiled for good. And that's the end of the whole Napoleonic story.

Hereafter, Continental France France was confined to France and they remained firmly shut out of the Western Atlantic. So they started a new wave of colonization in Africa. Step 1 was a protracted invasion of Ottoman Algeria in 1830 that took 17 years and killed a quarter of the native population.

No sweat. Step 2 was Napoleon's nephew installing himself as emperor after a brief revolution in 1848, and one Napoleon was already too many, so I am distinctly not a fan of this. His big thing was to boost the navy and colonize more of West Africa and also Vietnam.

The means of acquisition for all these are highly dubious. In Asia, the Vietnamese tried in 1864 to clamp down on the growing French presence, so the army rolled in and just conquered the place outright in 1883, and they spread inland to Laos and Cambodia through the early 1900s. From there, the colonists exported tea, rice, coffee, pepper, and rubber back to France. They didn't plan to make this a serious settlement colony, but simply extracted wealth through the land's natural resources, because goods meant value in an industrialized world.

This was a far cry from the old model of opening up a small trading post on some coastal sliver of land from far away and calling it a day. Even with the slave trade nominally abolished in 1848, France had strong reasons to get his paws on Africa. as it provided more resources, a convenient place to dump an overflowing population, and perhaps the biggest factor, if they had it, then England didn't. From their main bases in Algeria, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, France glomped nearly the entirety of West Africa. Pro tip, easy way to conquer half a continent, have guns!

Really streamlines that whole process. And France didn't take slaves, no no no, they simply deprived natives of French citizenship rights and forced them into low-wage grunt work, the civilized way. You know, kinda undercuts the grand narrative of we're bringing glorious civilization to these ignorant savages when you go out of your way to deprive them of the right to actually participate in that civilization. Hubris, dear viewers, is much like a bear trap placed gingerly on the seat of a chair.

It likes to bite people on the ass. Hard. So, let's watch this all go wrong. The beginning of the end came in World War II, when Germany captured Paris and annexed French West Africa, while the Japanese Empire conquered Vietnam. During the war, France's leader in exile and future president Charles de Gaulle decreed that the post-war empire would remain firm, with no chance of colonial self-government autonomy.

Spoiler alert, this will backfire spectacularly. After the war, Africa tepidly returned to French control, but the communist Viet Minh declared full-on independence from France in 1945 after the Japanese withdrawal. France was determined to keep their empire and and deployed the army to quash the insurgent Vietnamese. And here to talk about that war is friend of the channel, Griffin Johnson, the armchair historian. Hey Blue, thanks for having me here.

What began as a guerrilla resistance became far more complex when communist China supplied weapons and instruction to the Vietnamese army. Late in the war, France attempted to lure Vietnamese forces into battle on their terms, at a fort they constructed in the remote village of Dien Bien Phu. Believing their technological and organizational advantages would grant them a decisive victory.

What the French didn't expect... was thousands of Viet Minh soldiers and civilians hauling mass amounts of artillery and anti-aircraft guns through the jungle and atop the surrounding hills. The French position that seemed unassailable swiftly became a death sentence as Vietnamese troops with superior artillery support ferociously pushed their way to the center of the French positions forcing a humiliating surrender. The catastrophic defeat marked the end of French presence in Vietnam and War of Independence. The situation was so dire that the French Fourth Republic outright disintegrated under the weight of the crisis, this being colonial collapse Exhibit B, after which the rest of French Africa noped right the hell out of there.

The new Fifth Republic under de Gaulle was determined to hold on to Algeria but eventually gave in and granted independence in 1962. Though France maintained a handful of territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, the decolonization of Algeria marked the clear end to the French Empire. And that's the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall of Imperial France! Though the motives and means changed significantly from one century to another, the core mindset of imperialism was among the strongest guiding principles for France throughout the Age of Vanity.

Moral of the story here, don't do colonialism! Everybody l- loses, and there is a two-thirds chance that it'll break your government too. Thanks so much for watching, and a huge thank you to Griffin the Armchair Historian for stopping by.

I tell you, the more I learn about Napoleon, the more and less I grow to respect him. It is truly an enigma that I just can't crack, though honestly the monarchical politics of the Age of Vanity are so convoluted in general that I kind of don't care to try. So stay tuned to my next video for something infinitely more familiar and comfortable for me to discuss.

I'll see you then.

Transcript for:History of the French Empire

Transcript for:
History of the French Empire