French, Dutch, and Belgian Colonial Territories

France assembled its empire through both direct incorporation and federated colonial administration. Algeria, conquered beginning with the capture of Algiers in 1830, was legally treated not as an ordinary colony but as an integral extension of France, organized into departments from 1848 and home by the mid-twentieth century to over a million European settlers, the pieds-noirs. In West Africa, Paris grouped its territories in 1895 into the federation of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française, AOF), headquartered at Dakar and eventually comprising Senegal, French Sudan (Mali), French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Dahomey (Benin), Niger, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), and Mauritania, while a parallel federation, French Equatorial Africa (AEF), was formed in 1910 around Gabon, Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari (Central African Republic), and Chad, with its capital at Brazzaville.