Conclusion

Abstract

This concluding chapter explains that the French swings from the informal to the territorial and back again conformed to a global pattern. The crucial role played by global factors helps in understanding why an empire tends to resemble another at any given time, but it does not imply that all empires are the same. The main singularity of successive French imperial formations since 1789 was probably their assertiveness, relative to other European countries' imperial ambitions and France's actual resources. This is well established in the cases of the Napoleonic and republican colonial empires, and the chapter states that the book shows that between 1815 and 1880 France continued to pursue empire, albeit by informal means. France was not a nation-state that experienced aberrant imperial moments, but it was almost always a nation-state and an empire. The conclusion illustrates the principal analytical benefit of the concept of informal empire.