On 2 August 1754, when Dupleix handed command of the French territories in India to his successor, Charles Godeheu, French influence over Indian affairs was at its apogee. The chef-lieu, Pondichéry, had been expanded to form a settlement of several dozen kilometres in width; Karikal had been enlarged; in the province of Mazulipatam over one hundred and twenty kilometres of land had been obtained. This was what historians writing under the Third Republic would describe, in all earnestness, as ‘Dupleix's empire’ but whatever grandeur it had was to be short-lived. By 1761 all of the French territories had been invaded by British East India Company forces, and the five trading posts had capitulated. The total area of the five French établissements or comptoirs (establishments or trading posts) returned to France under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763) measured about 56,000 hectares in total and remained this size until France formally ceded control in 1962. Politically and geographically circumscribed, French influence in India was marginal in comparison with that of the British and lacked the territorial unity of the Portuguese enclave of Goa. Even before the settlement of 1763, India was a region of the world not considered vital to the French national destiny. Nevertheless, French interests on the subcontinent remained. Between 1754 and 1815, France's relationship with India was conditioned by three factors: trade links, ongoing control of the comptoirs and European colonial rivalry.

In common with its European competitors (the English, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes), France's encounter with India began through trade. La Compagnie des Indes was created under the auspices of Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1664, sixty-four years after the foundation of the English East India Company; Colbert expressed the desire ‘procurer au royaume l'utilité du commerce [d'Asie] et empêcher que les Anglais et les Hollandais n'en profitassent seuls comme ils avaient fait jusqu'alors’ (to procure for the kingdom the advantages of Asian commerce and to prevent the English and the Dutch alone from profiting from it as they have up to now).