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[1] [2] During the 19th and 20th centuries, the French colonial empire was the second largest colonial empire in the world only behind the British Empire; it extended over 13,500,000 km 2 (5,200,000 sq mi) [3] [4] of land at its height in the 1920s and 1930s. In terms of population however, on the eve of World War II, France and her colonial ...
Empire size in this list is defined as the dry land area it controlled at the time, which may differ considerably from the area it claimed. For example: in the year 1800, European powers collectively claimed approximately 20% of the Earth's land surface that they did not effectively control. [ 8 ]
A distinction is generally made between the "First French colonial empire", that existed until 1814, by which time most of it had been lost or sold, and the "Second French colonial empire", which began with the conquest of Algiers in 1830.
In the 16th to the 17th centuries, the First French colonial empire stretched from a total area at its peak in 1680 to over 10,000,000 square kilometres (3,900,000 sq mi), the second-largest empire in the world at the time behind the Spanish Empire. Colonial conflicts with Great Britain led to the loss of much of its North American holdings by ...
The Second French Empire, [a] officially the French Empire, [b] was the government of France from 1852 to 1870. It was established on 2 December 1852 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte , president of France under the French Second Republic , who proclaimed himself Emperor of the French as Napoleon III.
The first French colonial empire stretched to over 10,000,000 km 2 (3,900,000 sq mi) at its peak in 1710, which was the second largest colonial empire in the world, after the Spanish Empire. [33] [34] In the French colonial regions, the focus of the economy was on sugar plantations in the French West Indies.
From 1580 to 1640 the Portuguese Empire and the Spanish Empire were conjoined in a personal union of its Habsburg monarchs during the period of the Iberian Union, but beneath the highest level of government, their separate administrations were maintained. Subsequent colonial empires included the French, English, Dutch and Japanese empires.
In the 16th to the 17th centuries, the First French colonial empire stretched from a total area at its peak in 1680 to over 10,000,000 square kilometres (3,900,000 sq mi), the second-largest empire in the world at the time behind the Spanish Empire. Colonial conflicts with Great Britain led to the loss of much of its North American holdings by ...