"Over more than four centuries, the French empire explained itself in many different ways through many different colonial regimes. This narrative history recounts the unique origins and purposes of the French empire, through to the numberless traces that remain both in the former colonies and in today's French Republic"--

Leonard V. Smith is the Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College, Ohio. He has written four previous books, most recently Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (2018).

Introduction: why did France have an empire?; 1. The rise and fall of the Mercantilist Empire; 2. Reinventions of the empire in the 19th century; 3. The Mission Civilsatrice to 1914; 4. Empire and the world wars: 1914¿1945; 5. Decolonization: 1945¿1962; 6. The empire after the empire: 1962¿present.