Les grandes Indes

In a mémoire dated December 1776, written during the journey from Agra to Hyderabad, Louis Laurent de Féderbe, comte de Modave, with remarkable prescience, foretold British dominance of the geographical area the French then called les grandes Indes:

His observation that the French had ‘become nothing’ in India was something of an exaggeration, calculated to support his contention that France should once more intervene in Indian affairs in order to prevent the expansionism of the British East India Company. But the stark opposition which he established between British power and that of the French contained an element of truth. Following the Treaty of Paris of 1763, the French presence in India had been reduced to a rump of five comptoirs or trading posts, Pondichéry, Karikal, Mahé, Yanaon and Chandernagor, scattered around the edges of the subcontinent. In accordance with the treaty, Louis XV agreed to renounce any further expansionist activities and to maintain the comptoirs without fortifications or a standing army.2 After 1763, France had become a peripheral power in India, standing, as Modave's theatrical metaphor might have put it, in the wings while the British occupied centre stage.

If French personnel in India believed that they had been marginalized, then the history of the French encounter with India has been similarly consigned to the peripheries in recent historiography of both the French and the British empires.