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- France borders eight countries.
Well, actually, no, it doesn't,
it borders way more than eight countries.
And in fact, its longest border
isn't even this one with Belgium or this one with Spain,
it's this one way over here with Brazil.
What is going on here?
I learned this on Reddit,
and it quickly flung me down a giant rabbit hole
of some very strange information.
I then put a call out on Instagram,
and asked all of you to tell me what is going on with France
and its giant overseas empire looking thing.
I got a bunch of responses.
So then I did what I always do,
which is spent the entire day mapping this,
every single island, every single administrative boundary,
every single ocean border.
I made an entire behind the scenes,
by the way, for my patrons.
Thank you, patrons, you guys rock.
Yeah, it was a lot.
But now I'm on the other side of it
and I have some stuff to share with you.
(upbeat instrumental music)
By the way, this video is sponsored by Storyblocks,
where I get a lot of amazing footage.
More on that later.
(upbeat instrumental music continues)
Okay, so this is France,
but really this is only one version of France.
They call this version of France,
L'Hexagone, or the hexagon.
It's also called La France Metropole,
or the Metropolitan France.
It's the mainland, it's the motherland of France.
It's the France you probably think of
when you think of France here in Europe.
But there's another France,
it's called France d'outre-mer, or the Overseas France.
And that one looks like this.
This France accounts for almost 20% of all of France's land,
and a whopping 97% of its ocean territory,
nearly 3 million French citizens live here.
This France is peculiar.
It includes far-flung tropical islands,
remote archipelagos with penguins,
and weird looking, uninhabited atolls all around the world.
There's lobster fishing, and scientific research,
and nuclear weapons testing, and military exercises.
And the mind blowing fact here
is that because France actually looks like this,
that means that the European Union actually looks like this.
I wanna show you France's weirdest borders
and pieces of land to try to understand why this country,
that should have decolonized six centuries ago,
has territory all around the world.
(upbeat instrumental music)
All right, so let's go over to the Netherlands.
No, no, no, not that Netherlands.
Let's go this way over to the Caribbean.
This is a little island that is split in half
between the Netherlands and France.
It's the only place where these two countries
share a border.
The population here, they're French citizens.
A few years back, they did vote
to become semi-independent from France,
but even still they're French citizens, this is France.
Zoom out and you'll see that France isn't alone.
This whole neighborhood
is full of European colonial holdovers.
France has three other island groups in this chain.
Two of which are basically the exact same as mainland France
in their administrative status.
And then you get down here to France's longest border,
which is in French Guiana,
which is a proper part of France,
and the European Union, and the eurozone.
They use the euro here.
But remember where we are, we're in South America.
This place was used as a prison colony
for France most of the time.
A lot of people were sent here
for grueling prison sentences, many died.
That's a whole other history, we're not going into it.
Okay, so this is French Guiana in the Caribbean,
key part of France.
Honestly, people just like to vacation here,
because they speak French
and it looks like this.
(mellow instrumental music)
Anyway, let's zoom up North to a teeny, tiny island
that is a holdover from the old days
when France was colonizing North America.
This little piece of France is 4,000 kilometers
from France Metropole,
but it is a few kilometers off the coast of Canada.
And it's right smack dab
in the middle of Canadian economic waters.
France wanted to hold on to this
and have it as their own little enclave away from France.
And so a few years ago,
they fought with Canada in the international courts
to try to carve out a little bit of economic waters
for themselves that looked like this.
It turns out they ended up only getting
this little key-shaped slice of economic waters,
so that they could have a little passage way
into their country from international waters
to their little France enclave.
And that's what it looks like today.
It's a super weird situation.
Here on this island,
they use the euro and they speak French.
Like France French, not Quebec French.
It is a very French place,
even though it is right smack dab
in the middle of Canadian waters.
Okay, so the Caribbean
and this weird set of islands off of Canada.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Now let's get to the wild ones.
The ones that were actually the hardest for me
to get my head around as I was mapping them.
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If you zoom all the way down here, close to Antarctica,
all of these islands are owned by France.
There are people who live on these islands
who are French citizens.
We'll get to those in a second.
But first look at this weird looking block.
I know it's a little bit awkward.
Thanks Mercator.
Let's look at it a little bit differently here
from like an actual bottom up view.
This slice of land is claimed by France.
The Frenchmen arrived here in the 1800s
and claimed it for France,
and they've had people there ever since.
That's a literal ice wall.
Even in the 1800s, they knew that there was an ice wall.
The world is flat.
Okay, so France claims this little bit of Antarctica.
Zoom up just a little bit,
and you'll get to all these French islands
that have a ton of inhabitants,
but they're just not humans.
(mellow instrumental music)
There are more king penguins on these islands
than anywhere else in the world.
And honestly, looking at photos of these islands
makes me feel like this is the part of France
I want to visit more than any part of France.
I mean, look at this place.
And the crest for this group of islands,
the official crest, is like really cool looking.
I mean, it's got lobsters,
and seals that are like yelling,
and king penguins.
I mean, this place is just a wild, freaking dreamland.
The only actual people who live on these islands
are French military and science personnel.
So why did France hold on to these remote islands
near Antarctica and these ones here in the Indian Ocean?
Well, other than the fact that France is,
as our friend CGP Grey notes.
- [CGP Grey] The queen of not letting go.
- These islands provide France
with a major presence in the Indian Ocean.
Military presence, where they can put bases,
they can run patrols,
they can just have a presence
in this important geopolitical part of the world.
- [Narrator] Here are the French military activities
in the region between 2016 and 2019.
You can see how these islands give France
immense military presence in the region.
- Okay, wait, I'm just trying to do
like a fun geography explainer.
I don't need to get into like the military stuff.
Can we just chill out for just one video?
Can I just not explain the geopolitics?
- [Narrator] Sure, but don't forget that these islands
are also used to harvest over 16 million euros
worth of fish and lobster.
- Okay, stop, I get it.
Military dominance, resource extraction,
science stuff, I get it.
- [Narrator] But wait, while we're here,
I also wanna mention that during the '60s and '70s,
France literally stole hundreds of children
from this island, one of their territories,
to bring back to France
to help boost the declining rural population.
- Okay, that's actually pretty effed up, yeah.
Okay, so zoom to another really remote part of the ocean,
this time the Pacific Ocean,
so the most remote ocean in the world,
and you will see a bunch
of teeny tiny islands that are France.
They're 14,000 kilometers from France Metropole,
which is like a half a planet away.
Like they are so remote.
And to understand why France
wants to hold on to these islands,
just look at the water boundaries.
The water boundaries of these 118 islands
of French Polynesia are 5 million square kilometers.
For context, the entire European Union,
like the landmass, the area of the whole EU,
is 4.4 million square kilometers.
So the water boundaries around French Polynesia are huge.
It is a lot of water that belongs to France.
This place is home to Bora Bora and Tahiti,
and just a bunch of really beautiful islands.
So maybe I take back my previous statement,
this is the part of France I want to visit the most.
- [Narrator] But wait, aren't you forgetting something?
- Yes, I'm sure I'm forgetting something.
- [Narrator] French Polynesia is where France
tested its nuclear weapons,
almost 200 of them between the 1960s and 1990s,
damaging local populations and natural environments,
and violating international law.
- Yes, of course.
Nukes in the Pacific Ocean,
damaging irreparably populations and natural resources.
I get it, yes, I should've known.
I should've known, sorry.
I'm just trying to do a geography explainer, that's all.
All right, let's look at one last piece of Overseas France,
which is right next to French Polynesia,
but let's zoom to the other side of the map
so we can see it better.
This is New Caledonia.
And they were actually on their way
out of being a part of France.
They were on a 20 year plan to transfer power
completely to the people of New Caledonia.
But just last month,
just like literally a few weeks ago, they voted on this.
The people voted and 53% of them
said they wanted to stay with France,
while 47% wanted independence.
- [Reporter] Voters on the Pacific islands of New Caledonia
have, once again, rejected independence from France.
- France secretly loved this decision,
because New Caledonia is full of nickel,
something that they could mine.
- The result was welcomed
by France's President Emmanuel Macron.
- There you go with your natural resources again.
And honestly, this vote of New Caledonia
wanting to stay with France
gets to the heart of the tension
in all of these colonial holdovers.
All of these islands are the product of French colonialism,
brutal, greedy, racist colonialism.
The people in these countries were conquered and ruled
by this ruthless power,
who forced them to adopt their language,
their government, and their economic structures.
And yet here we are centuries later in a globalized economy,
where the world governmental order and system
was invented by these big colonizing powers,
the Frances, the Britains of the world.
France holds on to all of these islands,
because of what we just talked about,
military interests, expanding their economic waters,
scientific research, exploiting natural resources.
And so now you have many locals
who live under France's rule and many want independence,
but others realize that there are benefits
to being attached to the people who invented the rules
and who still have the power.
That is not an easy tension to resolve.
For now, things likely won't change.
This is France and will probably be France for a long time.
They will keep their sprawling,
low key empire around the world.
And France's longest border will continue to be
not with Belgium or Spain, but with Brazil.
(midtempo instrumental music)
Telling stories like this is a visual puzzle,
because obviously the mapping and the technical part,
but also just being able to bring you to these places
and bring myself to these places I'm researching is hard.
I lean on a lot of different resources.
And one of the major resources I lean on is Storyblocks,
who is the sponsor of today's video.
Some of the footage that you saw in this piece,
like this clip, and this clip, and this clip,
those were all downloaded from Storyblocks.
I didn't pay any extra to get these clips.
I pay one subscription and I have unlimited access
to over a million assets,
a lot of that high-quality 4K, beautiful footage.
I can download as much of this as I want
every month that I'm a member.
I also get access to After Effects templates
and audio resources, like sound effects.
It is a tool in my toolkit
that I don't know what I would really do without.
I've been using Storyblocks for years,
well before they ever came to sponsor a video.
And I can't recommend them enough
if you are someone who is trying to tell stories,
or improve your skills as a video maker,
or someone who needs high quality assets
for professional video making.
Honestly, I use this for all of my projects
and I am very grateful to Storyblocks
for supporting this channel.
There is a link in my description,
clicking that link helps support this channel,
but it also gives you a way to find out more
on how you can get access to all of these amazing assets
for a very, very affordable price.
It's actually sort of blows my mind.
Like compared to all other stock footage,
which is usually very expensive for just one clip
and you pay by the second,
with Storyblocks you pay one price
and you get access to all of it, unlimited.
So I don't really know how it works,
but it does work and I use it all the time.
So thank you, Storyblocks.
Thank you all for being here.
Thank you, patrons, for supporting this channel as well.
I was able to do a behind the scenes
of my map workflow for patrons.
I'm also outputting a high-res version
of this France map that is on Patreon as well.
So go check that out.
Thank you all for being here,
and I hope you're having a great end of your 2020.
And I will see you in 2021, bye.
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