The European competition for the lucrative trade routes to India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was played out amongst rival trading companies, of which the French were relative latecomers. It is somewhat of an historical misnomer to speak of the French East India Company as a single entity because it evolved from a variety of disparate predecessors rather than from a singular corporate entity. Hence, the history of the French East India Company is not the history of a continuous, unitary corporate body. Unlike the English and Dutch companies, moreover, the later French variants were more closely aligned to the state and more prone to the fiscal pressures and internal dynamics of official government policy. While the French saw themselves as rivals to the English East India Company, however, they preferred to emulate the federated structure of the Dutch East India Company.
In fact, historians are able to trace six different companies that were formed at various times. Although Henry IV issued the first patent in 1604 to grant the Compagnie des mers Orientates exclusive rights to trade in Asia and to establish colonies, this venture was largely a failure due to lack of funds and the opposition of the Dutch. Louis XIII granted a new patent in 1615 to form a company called La Compagnie des Moluques, which sent two ships to India, of which only one returned.
However, it is not until the influence of Cardinal Richelieu under Louis XIV that maritime endeavors received the attention of the French state. The formation of La Compagnie d’Orient in 1642 was the first company of colonization in the Indian Ocean area, founding the trading post of Fort Dauphin on the island of Madagascar as the strategic midway point between France, Africa, and the lucrative Asian trade. The establishment of La Compagnie des Indes Orientates in 1664 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the emerging importance of colonies such as the Ile de France (Mauritius) and the Ile de Bourbon (Reunion) saw a new era of direct competition with the Dutch and the English for the South Asian trade. Whereas La Compagnie des Indes Occidentales had a trading monopoly in North America and on the west coast of Africa, the former was given the French patent to trade from the Cape of Good Hope and throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans and, hence, covered a vast area that included the southern and eastern coasts of Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and stretching as far as New Caledonia and Tahiti. In 1719 the company was amalgamated into the broader American and African operations under the umbrella organization La Compagnie des Indes.
The difficulty of establishing a base on Madagascar saw the French Company look further afield to India, which was the main object of European colonial ambition. First settling in Surat in 1666 and then founding the important center of Pondicherry in 1673, the French was the last European power to compete with the Indian trade on the subcontinent and were in direct competition with the English and the Dutch who were already established there. Under Benoit Dumas and Jean Francois Dupleix in the 1730s to 1750s, the French Company developed a largely successful policy of forming subsidiary alliances with local rulers to gain commercial advantages and sought corporate control of Indian territory. This was a strategy that was later emulated by the British to their greater advantage.
The defeat of the French at the Battle of Wandiwash in 1760 and the intermittent capture of Pondicherry and other French settlements during the Anglo-French Wars meant that the company’s operations in India were precarious. The French East India Company was liquidated in 1770 with the transfer of all assets and trading stations to the French government who took direct control of colonial affairs under the Marine Ministry. There were some attempts to revive purely commercial operations in 1785 when a new company was formed by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, but these were thwarted by the events of the French Revolution and the emergence of the English East India Company as the paramount territorial sovereign power on the Indian subcontinent.
