In 1787 , there were 30,000 white colonists on France 's colony of Saint-Domingue . In 1804 Dessalines , the first ruler of an independent Haiti ( St. Domingue ) , ordered the massacre of whites remaining on the island . Out of the 40,000 inhabitants on Guadeloupe , at the end of the 17th century , there were more than 26,000 blacks and 9,000 whites . Bill Marshall wrote , " The first French effort to colonize Guiana , in 1763 , failed utterly when tropical diseases and climate killed all but 2,000 of the initial 12,000 settlers . " French law made it easy for thousands of '' colons '' , ethnic or national French from former colonies of North and West Africa , India and Indochina to live in mainland France . It is estimated that 20,000 '' colons '' were living in Saigon in 1945 . 1.6 million European '' pieds noirs '' migrated from Algeria , Tunisia and Morocco . In just a few months in 1962 , 900,000 French Algerians left Algeria in the largest relocation of population in Europe since World War II . In the 1970s , over 30,000 French '' colons '' left Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime as the Pol Pot government confiscated their farms and land properties . In November 2004 , several thousand of the estimated 14,000 French nationals in Ivory Coast left the country after days of anti-white violence
massacre of whites
1804 Haiti massacre
French colonial empire