The French colonial empire constituted the overseas colonies, protectorates and mandate territories that came under French rule from the 16th century onward. A distinction is generally made between the "first colonial empire", that existed until 1814, by which time most of it had been lost, and the "second colonial empire", which began with the conquest of Algiers in 1830.
In Senegal in West Africa, the French began to establish trading posts along the coast in 1624. In 1664, the French East India Company was established to compete for trade in the east.
A series of wars with Great Britain and other European major powers during the 18th century and early 19th century in France nearly all of its conquests.
Beginning in 1830, France focused on Africa, starting on the opposite coast of the Maghreb, and conquered the entire Sahara, most of western and central Africa. With the second Empire, French colonialism spread to Southeast Asia. Indochina was considered a gem of the colonial empire. In addition, there were smaller properties in India and China and dominance over most of the islands of the Indian Ocean and Oceania.
After the Second World War the anticolonialist movements began to challenge the French authority. France failed to avoid the disintegration of its empire in the fifties and sixties. At that time most of the French colonies became independent; in some cases, as in Indochina and Algeria, bloody wars had to be fought to continue the process of decolonization.
Currently, as the last remaining domains of the old colonial empire, France still has many islands in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, as well as French Guiana.
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