AHC: Create an expansionist France in the late 19th centuary

[SPJ]

Make France more expansionistic in regards to its colonies during the later half of the 1800s so that by the dawn of the 1900s if have more numerous and larger colonies.

[carlton_bach]

There was a suggestion in anmother thread that settling diofferences with Austria over Italy in the 1850s or early 1860s could avoid a Franco-Prussian War. With Italy defused, Prussia contained and Alsace-Lorraine safely French, colonial expansion would likely be both more feasible and less controversial in the last third of the century. Of course, barring a carve-up of the Sinosphere I don't think there was much valuable territory still to be had, but I could easily see bigger pieces of Africa and the Pacific going French.

[Grey Wolf]

Er...? France by 1900 had annexed (one way or another) Vietnam and IndoChina, Madagascar and a big chunk of West Africa, plus Djibouti and Tunis... It all seems rather expansionist to me! They even had Kwangchowan, just to be in on the "get a bit of China" bandwagon.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

[carlton_bach]

Originally Posted by Grey Wolf

Er...? France by 1900 had annexed (one way or another) Vietnam and IndoChina, Madagascar and a big chunk of West Africa, plus Djibouti and Tunis... It all seems rather expansionist to me! They even had Kwanchowan, just to be in on the "get a bit of China" bandwagon.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

Well, I guess you can always be more expannsionist. How many people here want to make the British or Roman Empire bigger?

[Tocomocho]

Well, how many more places are there other than they did annex IOTL that they could have annexed? I guess Taiwan in the 1880s, and some way or the other leads to the British agreeing to move the Sudanese border some miles to the West and... that's about it. France did overcompensate the loss of A-L by building a big-ass colonial empire IOTL after all.

[SPJ]

Originally Posted by carlton_bach

Well, I guess you can always be more expannsionist. How many people here want to make the British or Roman Empire bigger?

Indead, more is the key word in my OP.

Originally Posted by Tocomocho

Well, how many more places are there other than they did annex IOTL that they could have annexed? I guess Taiwan in the 1880s, and some way or the other leads to the British agreeing to move the Sudanese border some miles to the West and... that's about it. France did overcompensate the loss of A-L by building a big-ass colonial empire IOTL after all.

A-L? What's that?

Also how could France gain larger colonies in eastern Africa and perhaps another in southern Africa?

[Velkas]

Originally Posted by SPJ

A-L? What's that?

Alsace-Lorraine.

[Gruekiller]

Originally Posted by carlton_bach

How many people here want to make the British or Roman Empire bigger?

Plenty.

a lot.