In 1921,

the colonial administration of the French Congo (later the People's Republic of the Congo)  engaged the Société de Construction des Batignolles to construct a railway through 500 kms of the hilly and ravine-riddled land between Brazzaville and the Atlantic coast, using forced labour recruited from what is now southern Chad and the Central African Republic. Like Spain and Portugal, France did not ratify the 29th article of the International Labour Organisation's Forced Labour Convention of 1930. Misery and anger among the native population towards this conscripted labour and other equally-outrageous forms of oppression led to the Kongo-Wara rebellion of 1928-1931. During the period of construction (which lasted until 1934) there was a continual heavy cost in human lives, with total deaths of slave labour conservatively estimated in excess of 17,000, from a combination of industrial accidents, cruelty, malnutrition and diseases including malaria. In 1946, France's new Third Republic finally condescended to ratify the ILO's article 29, because of indigenous indignation and revolt.

This was just one small part of the French Republican Empire which, like the equally murderous British one, was spread around the globe, from Indo-China to most of West and North-West Africa, to the Caribbean and on to French Polynesia.  Hundreds of thousands of colonists occupied Algeria from the 1830s on and, later (after an extended and bloody war of occupation), Morocco, dispossessing everyone who had productive land.  Slavery was not abolished in Morocco until 1926. 
Occupied Muslim Algeria's main export was low-grade vin de table for the poor of palate and income in 'metropolitan' France.  The Algerian war of independence throughout the 1950s was a particularly vicious struggle, and at its end, French colonials moved en masse to the southern coast of France and to Corsica. They were followed by Muslim Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian unskilled and very low-paid workers who were herded into urban ghettoes all over France, especially in Marseille and Paris.

The French Republican, like the British Monarchical, Empire killed millions of 'natives' all over the world, and brought misery, deracination and deculturation to millions more.
Now France declares three days of mourning for fewer than a hundred dead rich locals and tourists (including 10 children, who seem to be more valuable than grannies) in a bizarre little 'lorry-massacre'.  The death-toll of dogs and puppies has not been announced.