It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
Feel free to submit!
French issued gold Pagoda for Southern India trade cast in Pondicherry 1705 1780
@credits
Pagoda was a unit of currency, a coin made of gold or half gold minted by Indian dynasties as well as the British, the French and the Dutch.
Fete des travailleurs indiens /Hiindu festival at the Réunion
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, French immigration to the Réunion, supplemented by influxes of Africans, Chinese, Malays, and Indians gave the island its ethnic mix.
Punjab, India, 1947
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908–2004)
Gelatin silver print8 15/16 x 13 9/16 in. (22.7 x 34.5 cm)
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.168)
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
This photograph depicts a group of refugees at the Kurukshetra camp performing simple exercises to drive away lethargy and despair. Framed against a blank wall, as if in an ancient frieze, the wildly dancing figures appear eternally suspended between desperation and ecstasy.
Vue des magasins de la Compagnie des Indes à Pondichéry, de l’amirauté et de la maison du gouverneur, gravure, XVIIIe siècle (Lorient, Musée de la Compagnie des Indes)
View on the warehouses of the Compagnie des Indes in Pondichery, of the Amiralty, and of the governor’s house.
The French East India Company set up a trading centre at Pondicherry in 1674. This outpost eventually became the chief French settlement in India.
Wars raged between European countries and spilled over into the Indian subcontinent. The Dutch captured Pondicherry in 1693 but returned it to France by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1699.The French acquired Mahe in the 1720s, Yanam in 1731, and Karaikal in 1738. During the Anglo-French wars (1742–1763), Pondicherry changed hands frequently. On January 16, 1761, the British captured Pondicherry from the French, but the Treaty of Paris (1763) returned the city to the French.
The British took it again in 1793 amid the Wars of the French Revolution, and then once again returned to France in 1814. In the 1850s, the British allowed the French to retain their settlements in the country. Pondicherry, Mahe, Yanam, Karaikal and Chandernagar remained a part of French India until 1954.
The independence of India in 1947 gave impetus to the union of France’s Indian possessions with former British India. An agreement between France and India in 1948 agreed that the inhabitants of France’s Indian possessions would choose their political future. The de jure union of French India with the Indian Union did not take place until 1962, although de facto, the bureaucracy had been united with India’s on 1 November 1954. It was organized as a Union Territory in 1963.
Pondicherry is now a part of India.
Coton indien imprimé / © Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Ville de Lorient
This piece of textile was bought by the French East India Company, and sold, when in France, to the upper classes of the country. The profit could then paid the sharholders of the company.
Portrait de Pierre-André de Suffren, réalisé probablement lors du voyage du bailli en Italie. “Suffren en grand uniforme d’officier général de la Marine” (environ 1785)
Admiral comte Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez, bailli de Suffren, French admiral, was the third son of the marquis de Saint Tropez, head of a family of nobles of Provence which claimed to have emigrated from Lucca in the 14th century. He was born in the Château de Saint-Cannat, near Aix-en-Provence. He was most famous for his campaign in the Indian Ocean, in which he inconclusively contended for supremacy against the established British power there.
