French Colonial Acquisitions

When the Napoleonic Wars ended, France was left with the rump of the great colonial empire in America and India lost in the Seven Years' War. France's holdings in the Americas were limited to St. Pierre et Miquelon and fishery rights in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica in the Caribbean, and the small portion of the Guianese coast around Cayenne. Her holdings in the Indian Ocean were far smaller, limited solely to the islands of Mauritius and Réunion. Even in Africa, the French presence in Africa was limited to some slaving stations on the Sénégalais and Guinéen coasts.

The French empire saw little expansion under the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X. In 1830, though, what began as a simple punitive expedition against the Bey of Algiers turned into a war of conquest. Though the Algerian war was not enough to avoid the 1830 Revolution that deposed Charles X, under Louis-Philippe I Algeria was developed into a colony of settlement. By 1848, almost a quarter-million settlers had been settled in the fertile lands along the Algerian coast, divided into three départements centered around the main cities of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine. Algeria increasingly became a major force in French domestic politics, with representation in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris.

The First Orleanist Kingdom engaged in limited colonial expansion elsewhere in the world. Though the Chamber of Deputies did authorize the purchase of the Dutch stations in the Gold Coast in 1839, the most significant advances made under the First Orleanist Kingdom were in the Pacific and South America. A combination of favourable treaties and gun boat diplomacy led to the annexation of Nouvelle-Calédonie (in 1838), Nouveau-Dauphiné (in 1840) and Tahiti (in 1842). The last two acquisitions caused no small measure of problems for Anglo-French relations, but by the time of the 1848 Revolution France's acquisitions in the Pacific were firmly established.

The same could not be said for French Guiana. In 1835, the Brazilian Amazon erupted in revolt as Native American and Afro-Brazilian rebels turned against the white and mulatto élites of Belém and Manaus. A French merchant ship sent to deliver arms to the Belém garrison before the revolt erupted was seized, and her crew killed. Through a series of blunders on the part of the Brazilian government, France warred with Brazil. by 1843 France had completely occupied the lower Amazon basin. The 1839 Franco-Brazilian treaty led to the cession of the vast Amazonian territory to France, despite British disapproval. As late as 1869, though, large stretches of Amazonia remained outside the control of the French military authorities.

The 1848 Revolution seemed initially to promise a complete transformation of the metropolitan-colonial relationship. Although the older colonies gained the status of département d'outre-mer (overseas department) or territoire d'outre-mer (overseas territory), and slavery was abolished throughout French holdings, the French holdings in the Pacific, Africa, and South America remained under military rule.

To Napoléon III, a man deeply imbued by Saint-Simonian philosophy, France's colonies were a vital resource for the metropole, capable of providing the metropole with much-needed resources and giving the colonies a vital chance for self-improvement. In his 1858 essay Sur l'importance des colonies, Napoléon III distinguished between three types of colonies:

* colonies de peuplement, colonies of settlement. Napoléon III described these colonies as "lands, like long-lost Canada, where the native races are rapidly diminishing in numbers, leaving their lands for more advanced races." Algeria, Nouvelle-Calédonie, and Nouveau-Dauphiné were all described as colonies de peuplement.

* colonies d'exploitation, colonies of exploitation. "These colonies, in Africa and elsewhere, peopled by barbaric races sturdy in temperament, are lands that are not suited for the presence of the European, but which do contain resources and materials usable by modern industry. These should be organized to provide the most possible benefit to the metropole, and also to the native."

* colonies de modernisation, colonies of modernization. These were lands "capable of modern civilization, but requiring the aid of France to reach their full potential." Guiana was cited as a prime example of this phenomenon.

The Second Empire spent the 1850's in a torpor, choosing to consolidate France's existing holdings. In the 1860's, though, France's overseas holdings expanded tremendously. The first major expansion occurred in the course of the French intervention in the United States Civil War, and led to the establishment of a protectorate over the Yucatán peninsula in central America. Later in the decade, the Second Empire began to fully subjugate the native populations in French colonies of settlement, performing a vast razzia against the Algerian Arabs and Berbers that drew the condemnation of humanitarians throughout Europe, and purchasing lands from the scattered Maori and Kanak tribes of Nouveau-Dauphiné and Nouvelle-Calédonie for French settlers and convict deportees. The Samoan chiefdoms and Tongan kingdom were also contacted and converted into protectorates, despite lingering British resentment over the French acquisition of the choicest territories in the South Pacific. In west Africa, French explorers and military forces solidified France's control over the west African coast, while various campaigns were made in Indochina.

Thus, by the time of the Franco-Prussian War, the French colonial empire had become the second-largest in the entire world after that of Britain.