The French Sudan was a nation state that primarily existed on maps in the Foreign Office in Paris. It existed at two separate time periods, from 1890-1899 and 1920-1960. During the first period French Sudan met Voltaire’s famous bon mot for the Holy Roman Empire (that it wasn’t holy, wasn’t Roman, and it wasn’t an empire). French Sudan wasn’t Sudan and was only nominally French as it was hundreds of miles geographically removed from British Sudan and at least during it’s first incarnation it operated as little more than an administrative district. Sections were cleved off from time to time to create other French Colonies or to add to the territory of existing French African states. French Sudanese stamps are largely common mint but very rare postally used and on cover and most never seemed to be for sale anywhere in Africa but only at the postal agency in Paris. Years ago I was judging the Rompex stamp exhibition in Denver and there was a wonderful collection of French Colony postal history and covers. The collector had a census of early French Colony covers that he had seen for sale over the fifty years that he had collected this material. By far the scarcest country to find covers of in the classic period was French Sudan.
