Before African independence, France established a photographic fund to promote its presence in its colonies. At the beginning of the 1930s, photography became the mainstay of official discourse, at a time when France was experiencing the apogee of its colonial policy.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, the French colonial empire was the second largest colonial empire behind the British Empire.

For the first time, the French Documentation, the repository of photographs grouped within the French Economic Agency of France, presents to the public this extraordinary deposit of images.

These collections, rich in tens of thousands of documents on Africa, from Maghreb to Madagascar, restore the official discourse.

These photographs offer a multiple view that historians, ethnologists and sociologists have chosen to decipher: 35 years after independence, this book analyzes the look of France on it’s Empire. Directed by leading photographers, these photographs retain an obvious aesthetic strength because, as Albert Memmi points out in his preface, it is essential today to take a fresh look at these Images d'Empire and to understand this period of French history differently.