During the last quarter of the past century the companies around Lüttich (Liege) noted the strong competition with the big German and Austrian gun-factories. Due to this reason the company Fabrique Nationale d'Armes de Guerre (FN) (=national war-weapons factory) in Herstal near Liege was founded in 1889 by a syndicate of Belgish investors, with the direct aim of the licenced production of Mauser-rifles for the Belgish army.
Within the founding companies there were 13 Belgish companies like Francotte, Nagant, Pieper, Simonis, Ancion, but as well the German company Loewe as supplier for machines.
After some quarrels about patents between FN and Mauser the German company Loewe, who as well was the owner of the company Mauser at that time, in 1896 bought the majority of the shares of FN, thus putting an end to the quarrel.
In the 1890ies John Moses Browning had a controversy with Winchester, where he had been working for some years, and he travelled to Europe to find a manufacturer to make an automatic shotgun following his ideas. Fabrique National was interested, and beside the shotgun-construction Browning showed them some of his ideas about automatic pistols too. FN bought the rights for some of his patents and started to develope them by their own way.
Browning returned to the States and got the interest of Colt in his pistol-patents. As result of this Colt and FN agreed in 1901 to divide the market. Colt took the western hemispere and FN the eastern one. By some means Great Britain was not included in this deal, but this was regulated later on and the British Isles were neutral area, which was delivered by both of the companies.
The company FN endured both of the World Wars with changing occupants and owners and up to today is busy with development and production of high quality guns.
In total FN produced millions of Browning-pistols even in a way, that the word "Browning" is widely accepted as synonym for "automatic pistol" in many European languages.