Given the subsequent colonial history of Great Britain, it's hard to say that Choiseul was RIGHT!
If Great Britain did not have Cousin Jonathan and the Dominions which speak the English tongue, Great Britain would have been swept away by either France or France and Great Britain would have been swept away by Germany 100 years later. It's the number of speakers of a language that begin to make a nation.
Where Greatest Britain failed to gel was integrating all of it's Anglophonic Christian colonies into one global Imperial kingdom. Or if not all, at least some...those colonies that had become Dominions or were small islands such as the West Indies and could be integrated with the Home British Isles, taking advantage of improvements in communications.
Which is something that France has done with what the remnants of it's colonial empire, from French Guiana to New Caledonia to Reunion to Mayotte and the Comoros. All of whom have substantial undersea resources in the seas surrounding them.
France could have done more though, by partitioning coastal Algeria instead of withdrawing from the entirety of Algeria and also keeping the Saharan portions of Algeria, Mali, Niger, Mauretania and Chad, all of whom have very low populations and the combination of which have under 2 million people, but which not only have significant mineral resources, but as it turns out, vast aquifers that can be used to cultivate vast portions of desert for hundreds of years. The United States has shown what can be done with desert in it's desert Southwest. And France could have and should have been gearing up to do this before World War II.
And then of course there is the Chinese contemporary example of Sinkiang, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria and Tibet. And Russia in Siberia. And Brazil in the Amazon and Mato Grosso. And Argentina and Chile in Patagonia.
No, properly handled, colonies are not a millstone around the colonizer's neck and saying that it is is a self serving" fox and the grapes" attitude.