PHOTO ARTICLE: Inside the French Empire

(and some other places along the way)

*Please note that as of tomorrow, I’ll be amending the days I send you articles. They’ll be coming out on a Tuesday and a Friday, entirely because of pick up rates and boring back end analytics stuff.

Over the past few days, I’ve been riddled with snot and laboriously going through material on a certain WW1 French General. I’ll be giving you something on the life of Charles Mangin, but as I was doing this it occurred to me that he had a talent that was nothing to do with making war…

At the time of the First World War, France’s Empire was only second in size in terms of African and Asian possessions to Britain, and Mangin had travelled it extensively, sometimes taking his massive family along with him. He was the leading exponent of the merits of African soldiers and what they could add to the French Army. The outstanding Bibliothèque nationale de France have made hundreds of pages of his photo albums public via their Gallica website. As a historian, this setup is gold. If there is another institution out there surpassing their efforts to make their collections accessible, I’d be amazed.

The talent I mentioned? Mangin’s pre and postwar albums are full of the kind of thing you’d expect. Lots of photos of soldiers, historic sites and family snaps, but he also had a knack of assembling images of everyday people in far off places, and so today, I thought I’d share some of the best of them with you…

One of the first albums available is from the Marchand Expedition which left Senegal in 1896. Ploughing inland, they planned to seize the non-entity of Fashoda to make it a French protectorate. Once there, however, Kitchener showed up. Mangin took this photograph of a group of local men in Fashoda, which was soon to be wiped off the map in a piece of diplomatic idiocy to keep the peace between Britain and France in Africa.