France's Lost Empires brings together ten essays that collectively investigate the historical, cultural, and political legacies of French colonialism and, specifically, the endings of the French empire(s). Combining analyses of three "lost" territories (Canada, India, and Saint Dominigue) of the "first" French colonial empire, that of the Ancien Regime, with investigations of the decolonization of the "new" colonies of the "second" French overseas empire (specifically in North Africa), the essays presented here investigate the ways in whicih colonial loss has been absorbed and narrativized within French culture and society, and how nostalgia for that past has played a fundamental role in shaping French colonial discourses and memories. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution and its historicization during the 1820s and ending with an examination of the "postcolonial" republic at the end of the twentieth century, the chronological structure of the volume serves to reveal the extent to which the memories of territorial loss have been sustained throughout French colonial history and remain evident in current metropolitan representations and memories of empire. In analyzing the longevity of these tropes of loss and nostalgia, and their importance in shaping France's identity as a colonial power both during and after periods of colonization, France's Lost Empires reveals a basic premise: it is not simply successful conquest which creates a self-validating colonial discourse; failure can do so too. Indeed, the pervasive and tenacious nostalgia for past colonial glories, variously identified by the contributors to this volume, suggests that, for some, the emotional attachment to France's colonies has not waned and remians today as it was in nineteenth-century France.

The Indian uprisings (1857-58) against British rule in India represent an iconic period within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Numerous works have considered these historical events from British and Indian perspectives, but none have yet questioned how they were viewed by Britain's foremost colonial rival in India, the French. The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony at the hands its own colonial "subjects" allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance. The uprisings offered the attractive possibility that France could undergo a colonial revival in the wake of British defeat, thereby reversing the devastating losses inflicted upon France's former empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Notable among these losses was Britain's decision (in the Treaty of 1814) to permanently reduce France's presence in India to five small trading posts scattered around the periphery of British territory. The extent to which to the French colonial imagination of the nineteenth century was shaped by the memories of such defeats forms a primary concern of this monograph. This investigation into French responses to the Indian uprisings reveals that French colonial discourse was determined as much by its visions of the colonized "other," as by the dominance of their British rivals. Drawing from journalistic, historical, political, and fictional texts written during Louis Napoleon's Second Empire (1852-70) and in the early years of the Third Republic (1870-1944), The French Colonial Imagination shows how the uprisings gave French writers the opportunity to speak out against the rapacity of British colonialism and its treatment of colonized Indians, while simultaneously constructing a competing colonial discourse that would justify further expansion in North Africa and South East Asia. Standing at a crossroads between the "loss" of Ancien Regime's empire and the Third Republic's ideological investment in overseas expansion, this understudied period of colonial history reveals the centrality of loss, fracture, and political emasculation as core preoccupations haunting the French colonial discourse in its quest to regain cultural and ideological ascendancy over its greatest political enemy.

This volume pays tribute to the work of Professor Kate Marsh (1974-2019), an outstanding scholar whose research covered an extraordinarily wide range of interests and approaches, encompassing the history of empire, literature, politics and cultural production across the Francophone world from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Each of the chapters within engages with a different aspect of Marsh’s interest in French colonialism and the entanglements of its complex afterlives — whether it be her interest in the longevity of imperial rivalries; loss and colonial nostalgia; exoticism and the female body; decolonization and the ends of empire; the French colonial imagination; the policing of racialized bodies; or anti-colonial activism and resistance. As well as reflecting the geographical and intellectual breadth of Marsh’s research, the volume demonstrates how her work continues to resonate with emerging scholarship around decoloniality, transcolonial mobilities and anti-colonial resistance in the Francophone world. From French India to Algeria and from the Caribbean to contemporary France, this collection demonstrates the persistent relevance of Marsh’s scholarship to the histories and legacies of empire, while opening up conversations about its implications for decolonial approaches to imperial histories and the future of Francophone Postcolonial Studies.