French Empire Quotes

Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.

Of the hundred million of the population of Greater France, almost sixty are not of European origin. If they are to be kept in permanent French allegiance their loyalty must be secured. The French flatter themselves that they are peculiarly successful in winning the affections of those over whom they rule. So be it, though it is probable they entertain a good many illusions in this respect.

From Tangiers to Alexandria, the entire African coast of the Mediterranean, with the exception of the great Libyan desert, belongs either to France or to England. Italy, the Mediterranean nation par excellence, is virtually excluded from the control of the Mediterranean; she is imprisoned and besieged in her own ocean.

Your government means to be paternal—it is only weak…. Love France, love my glory—that is the only manner in which a King of Holland can do service.

The Netherlands were no more than the alluvium formed by the principle rivers of my empire.

If you drop a perpendicular from the frontier of Tunis, through Lake Chad to the Congo, you could say that the greatest part of the territories bounded by this line and the sea … are French, or destined to be included in France’s sphere of influence. We have a vast domain which it is for us to colonize and make fruitful …

I am asking the U.S.A and Great Britain if, just for once, they will kindly consider the problem of Cambodia from the viewpoint of the Khmers instead of that of the French... My people will tell you: 'We don't know what communist slavery means. But the slavery imposed by the French we know well, for we are now living under it.”

Nothing more can be done for your interests or well-being and that I myself am an obstacle to the restoration of good relations between my brother [Napoleon Bonaparte Bonaparte] and this land… I shall never forget so good and virtuous a people as yourselves. My last thought and last concern will be for your happiness…

Napoleon the Third was not much. He died in England, and was buried in a country church-yard much the same as Kiltartan. But Napoleon the First was a great man; it was given out of him there never would be so great a man again.

To the harsh doctrines justifying the dominion of France over inferior races there at first succeeded a naïve idealism, which saw in all the subjects of France men of equal value ready to be transformed into true Frenchmen. Experience and contact with the various populations of the French Empire have modified this exaggerated view and have taught France the complexity of her colonial problems. She knows now that her task is not to assimilate white, black, and yellow populations, each of them with its own traditions, but to help each, in its own interest as well as in the interest of all, to develop along the lines of its own individual civilization

The Demands of the Vietnamese People

Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

The fate of France is henceforth inseparably linked with that of Greater France. With a population which unfortunately remains stationary in the neighborhood of 40 millions. France would seem to be condemned to be but a great memory, a shadow of a glorious past. That instead she is a great reality, faced with a great future, is because of the 60 million subjects and protégés who inhabit the France beyond the seas. Among them there are not, it is true, more than one million of European origin and not more than 10 million of the white race. But it is French civilization which is stamping these diverse elements.

The history of France, a permanent miracle, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels.