France

France, officially the French Republic, is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various overseas islands and territories located in other continents.

France had colonial possessions, in various forms, from the beginning of the 17th century until the 1960s. In the 19th and 20th centuries, its global colonial empire was the second largest in the world behind the British Empire. At its peak, between 1919 and 1939, the second French colonial empire extended over 12,347,000 km² of land. Including metropolitan France, the total area of land under French sovereignty reached 12,898,000 km² in the 1920s and 1930s, which is 8.6% of the world's land area.

Currently, the remnants of this large empire are hundreds of islands and archipelagos, as well as one mainland territory in South America, totaling altogether 123,150 km², which amounts to only 1% of the pre-1939 French colonial empire's area.

Overseas departments, is a designation given to the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana in the Caribbean and Réunion in the Indian Ocean under the 1946 Constitution of the Fourth Republic. Saint-Pierre and Miquelon became an overseas department in 1976, but its status changed to that of an Overseas collectivity in 1985.