FRANCE'S TEN overseas departments and territories are the remains of more than four centuries of imperial expansion and contraction which, at various times, gave France sovereignty over large areas of North America, Africa and Asia, as well as, more briefly, much of the European continent and the East Indies. Since at least the time of the Crusades, French voyagers have moved outwards to explore, trade, proselytise, settle and sometimes to conquer. In the 1500s and 1600s France put together its first empire, centred in the Antilles but including parts of eastern Canada and the Mississippi basin and outposts in Africa and India. Most of this empire was lost to England in the 1700s. Then, from the early 1800s, after the defeat of Napoleon's ambitions for a Levantine or a Continental empire, France created a second overseas empire embracing islands in the Pacific and vast domains in Africa and Asia. At its height in the 1930s, this French empire counted some 12 million square kilometres of territory and almost 68 million subjects alongside 1.5 million French settlers. Later in the twentieth century, France relinquished almost all its vast second empire through decolonisation, sometimes easily, sometimes very painfully.

The ten DOM-TOMs are the legacy that history has left to France far beyond its European shores.