The French gained and lost a vast empire in the New World from the sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. Mercantilism, a set of economic and political practices based on the assumption of limited wealth, underpinned that empire. French explorers founded colonies in North America based on trade in furs and fish. Few French ever to wanted move to the empire throughout its history. The French lost almost all their North American empire by 1763, mostly to Britain. But its colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean exploited slave mercantilism as effectively as any in the world. Terror made possible rule by a small white population. The edifice supporting that rule cracked with the French Revolution, beginning in 1789. By 1791, the enslaved population risen, overthrown the slave system, and begun a bloody war of independence that produced the first anticolonial hero, Toussaint Loverture. In the end, the enslaved would win their war, and establish independent Haiti in 1804. Napoleon would find his schemes for a rejuvenated empire based in the Caribbean and the Louisiana territories thwarted. As the nineteenth century dawned, the French empire would need not just new lands, but new ideological foundations.

The French empire both expired and morphed into something else after World War II. A postwar “French Union” uneasily blended republicanism and federalism. Two wars of decolonization mirrored each other. The war in Indochina (1945–54) had relatively little to do with French identity but had a great deal to do with the Cold War in Asia. A communist insurgency gradually became a North Vietnamese state aligned with communist China and the Soviet Union. France would bequeath its war of decolonization to the United States after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The war of Algerian independence (1945–62) had little to do with the Cold War but a great deal to do with French identity. The irresistible force of anti-colonial resistance met the immovable object of settler intransigence. The Fourth Republic crumbled in the wake of the conflict, leaving the Fifth Republic to negotiate the independence of a settler colony that had been national territory since 1848. The constitution of 1958 created a more consensual “French Community,” which applied mostly to the French domains in Africa. “Decolonization,” particularly in West Africa, came to mean political independence and international recognition coupled with continued economic and political links to France.

We can read Jean de Brunhoff’s 1931 children’s story The Story of Babar as a fable illustrating the contours of French imperial rule at a particular time in its history. Political scientists define empire simply—a polity based on asymmetrical contracting that preserves politically significant difference. If this definition provides a constant, the explanations behind it constitute the variables. The French had many explanations of just why they had an empire. This book recounts the history of those explanations, and of the contours of imperial rule that resulted from them. Resistance profoundly shaped imperial rule.

In French colonial history, we can read the world wars as a single conflict. The Great War and World War II broke the French empire as it existed in the previous century. The empire contributed substantially in blood and treasure to victory in 1918, though mobilization for that war deepened existing colonial tensions and created new ones. Shifting dynamics pointed to a renegotiation of basic colonial bargains. An ostensibly new colonial doctrine, the mise en valeur, sought to make the empire a more cohesive economic and political unit. Anti-colonial movements became stronger and more articulate throughout the interwar period, though repression and military force had little trouble preserving imperial authority, for the time being. The defeat of 1940 upended imperial relationships. How could the Vichy regime rule an empire when it had very limited authority even in the Hexagon? Yet Free France promised only continued, if reformed, imperial rule. This situation made questions of collaboration and resistance at least as complicated in the empire as in Europe. By 1945, it became clear to the attentive that the French empire would either have to expire or become something else.

The “civilizing mission” gave the French their most coherent explanation of empire since mercantilism. The Third Republic would return France to the front rank of Great Powers through an expanding empire rooted in republican values and capitalist economic development. Evolving race theory provided new means of legitimizing hierarchical difference. Settler republicanism deepened its roots in Algeria, even as European immigration began to decline. The republican imperial agenda dovetailed conveniently with geopolitics in the “scramble for Africa,” leading to the formation of two colonial federations, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, each much larger than the Hexagon itself. The agents of republican empire were largely the same as previous incarnations—colonial officials, military officers, missionaries, and capitalists. The “civilizing mission” produced varied results, not least because of the parsimony of the bourgeois regime. Republican schools trained both collaborators and future anti-colonial and postcolonial elites. Railroads built at a horrendous cost in blood and indigenous treasure unified parts of the empire. In the Indochinese Union, the French sought to construct a gateway to influence in Asia that would rival that of British India. Through a state-driven regime of extraction, the Indochinese Union became financially self-sustaining.

Through four regimes between 1815 and 1870, the French would regularly invent new rationales and purposes for empire. A domestic crisis of legitimization led to the invasion of Algeria in 1830. So began a French settler colony in which barely half the settlers even came from France. The revolutionaries of 1848 annexed the colonies, making them national territory. While chattel slavery was legally abolished throughout the empire, annexation meant different things in different places. Colonial incoherence continued. Missionaries fostered and legitimized imperial expansion, though the imperial state never found them completely reliable. Military entrepreneurs in Senegal and Indochina had their own agendas, and did Emperor Napoleon III, who envisaged an “Arab Kingdom” in Algeria. He also sought to expand the empire indirectly, through a disastrous scheme to place a Habsburg on a Mexican throne. The prison colony provided another brutal avenue of colonial expansion. French imperial capitalism generally prospered, though the French were so outmaneuvered by the British after building the Suez Canal that they overshadowed the French role altogether. By 1870, the whole of the French empire still somehow seemed less than the sum of its parts.

France and its empire have continued to shape each other’s trajectories, longer after formal “decolonization.” Millions of people from the colonies migrated to France during the postwar economic boom. They and their descendants have helped turn France into a multicultural society. Some domains never decolonized at all and remain French national territory as Départements et Territoires d’Outre Mer (DOM-TOM). The republic has proved surprisingly tolerant of local political cultures, though most DOM-TOM remain far more economically dependent on the French state as national territories than they ever were as colonies. Yet none of the DOM-TOM appear to want full independence. In postcolonial Africa, policies known collectively as Françafrique have involved interference at the highest levels of postcolonial governance, substantial development aid, and an array of dubious business dealings. Françafrique made France a partner in genocide in Rwanda, and later required it to deal with some brutal postcolonial regimes fighting militant Islam in the Sahel. Independent Algeria essentially inherited and refined the colonial state, most violently in the civil war of the 1990s. The history of the French empire, to date, does not really have an end, as former colonizer and formerly colonized continue to contest its memory.

The outcome of the Great War shook to its foundations the idea of the Westphalian state, which existed primarily for itself and its own security. This chapter explores three alternatives to the Westphalian state, at the intersection of political and intellectual history. A ’Wilsonian imperium’ posited a world governed by a transnational community of liberal citizens that would regulate state behaviour. The state would remain an institutionalised locus of sovereignty, but all states would be guided by a common moral compass. At first, a ’Bolshevik imperium’ envisaged world revolution, which eventually would be able to dispense with the Westphalian state altogether. However, in the process of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks began to turn the former imperial Russia into a unique species of imperial state, which never wholly renounced the ideological goals of the Bolshevik imperium. The successor state appeared to resemble the Westphalian state, in its fixation of borders and security. However, it rested on new and unstable foundations – the imperative to maximise and naturalse both ethnic and historical boundaries. In complementary ways, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt opened up a space in the theory of successor state sovereignty that could be occupied by the race, or Volk. No reimagining of state sovereignty after the Great War did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system.