French colonial expansion, a prominent colonial publicist concluded in November 1883, ‘has always been the product of isolated enterprises, of individual initiatives occasionally supported by public opinion but rarely understood by governments which, in the long run, caused them all to fail through lack of foresight, blindness, unwarranted timidity or misplaced temerity’.1 The defects which Gabriel Charmes blamed for the loss of the first French colonial empire were just as evident in the construction of the second. Nineteenth-century French governments rarely pursued any consistent imperial design. Except for occasional bursts of enthusiasm, the French public, too, seemed either indifferent or actively hostile to empire. For most of the nineteenth century, empire-building proceeded by fits and starts, more often than not through the initiative of military agents on the imperial frontiers over whom metropolitan governments exercised little or no control. Similarly, those who finally gave French expansion some sense of direction after 1890 were for the most part members of the small but powerful French ‘colonial party’. The incomprehension of governments, the indifference of public opinion and the influence of small groups on the periphery or at the centre were the dominant features of French expansion after 1815, and their interaction helps to explain how the second-largest colonial empire in the world came to be built.