French India

French India was the French colonial possession on the Indian subcontinent, a scatter of five enclaves that survived more than two centuries after France lost the contest for India. The settlements began as trading factories of the French East India Company, chief among them Pondichéry on the Coromandel Coast, with Karikal and Yanaon nearby, Mahé on the Malabar Coast and Chandernagor in Bengal. In the 1740s Governor Dupleix dreamed of a French empire in India and very nearly built one, seizing Madras and dictating to princes, until recall, bankruptcy and British sea power under Clive undid his work. After 1816 the French kept only the five towns, tiny dots amounting to some five hundred square kilometres, administered from Pondichéry with their own governor, schools and French law. They endured as imperial souvenirs long after the British left: Chandernagor voted to join India in 1950, and the remaining four followed by de facto transfer in 1954, closing almost three hundred years of French presence that had begun with a company warehouse in 1668.