Pondicherry within the French Empire

Four centuries brought France from the absolute monarchy of its Ancien Régime to republican citizenship of early twentieth-century modernity. In 1789, the country experienced a wholesale social and political revolution, followed by 23 years of the First Republic (1792–1804) and First Empire (1804–1815), the latter under Napoleon Bonaparte. After a period of post-empire monarchy from 1815 to 1848, the nation then progressed from the Second Republic (1848–1853) to the Second Empire (1852–1870). The Third Republic, which lasted from 1870 to 1940, was founded in September 1870 following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. During the Third Republic, France was politically unstable due to rivalries among Bonapartists who hoped to revive the empire, monarchists, and republicans, as well as various political scandals. Despite this turmoil, the Third Republic also opened the path to the strengthening of institutions based on universal male suffrage.

During these four centuries of internal transformation, France also fought over and maintained possessions abroad, including the small territory of Pondicherry in southern India, as part of what is termed the first French colonial empire. By the eighteenth century, the French colonial territories remained small in terms of area, but were spread all over the world: in North America, the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon and Terre Neuve; in the Antilles, Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Sainte-Lucie, Tobago, and Guiana; Saint-Louis, the island of Gorée, the îles Soeurs (Nuns’ Islands), île de France (present-day Mauritius) and île de Bourbon (present-day Réunion) in Africa; and finally, five comptoirs (trading posts) in India.