French East India Company

The French East India Company was a joint-stock trading company chartered on August 27, 1664 by King Louis XIV of France at the instigation of his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who modeled it on the rival Dutch and English East India companies and sought a fifty-year monopoly on French trade and navigation from the Cape of Good Hope eastward to the Strait of Magellan. Governed by a central board of twelve directors originally based in Paris, with regional chambers in Bordeaux, Lyon, Nantes and Rouen before operations relocated to Lorient in 1670, the company established outposts at Pondicherry in 1673 and Chandernagor in 1688. Chronically undercapitalized and dependent on royal loans, it became insolvent by the 1680s, was restructured in 1685, went bankrupt again in 1706, and in 1719 its remnants were absorbed into John Law's company, which became the French Indies Company in 1723.