At the center of The Colonial Dream are two overlapping storylines. One concerns France’s repeated attempts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to create a durable colonial presence in Madagascar – an agenda beset by frustration and failure. The other centers on the ideology that developed alongside these efforts, a contradiction-laden »colonial dream« oriented around the civilizing and assimilation of the island’s indigenous, Malagasy population. In exploring the interplay between these two narratives, Tricoire deftly weaves together text and context, colonial politics and philosophy. The upshot is not only a reappraisal of Madagascar’s colonial history, but also an innovative rethinking of how the early modern French understood, discussed, and crafted policy within their overseas empire.

Tricoire devotes several chapters to France’s colonial ambitions in Madagascar. From the 1640s to the early nineteenth century, the French attempted to implant several settlements on the island. Their locations varied, from the Anosy region in southeast Madagascar to the Bay of Antongil in the north, and from the eastern shores of the Great Island to Nosy Boraha, an islet off its coast. The intensity of this activity varied as well, with energetic colonization efforts followed by extended periods of disinterest. But the results were always the same. France’s would-be colonizers consistently underestimated the obstacles they would encounter – a harsh climate, tropical diseases – while overestimating their appeal to the Malagasy, who encouraged trading relationships but balked at French efforts to exert military power or encroach on their culture and institutions.

Far from learning from their mistakes, Tricoire notes, French officials developed two, self-serving lines of reasoning to explain their failures: either they were not given enough support from their superiors, or they were stymied by the tyrannical pretensions of overreaching peers or subordinates, who poisoned French relations with the Malagasy. In either case, the logic behind France’s colonial strategy was assumed to be sound, with failure coming from poor execution rather than poor planning. Historians have recycled this storyline, turning the exculpatory narratives spun by French administrators into established facts.

This historiographical tendency, Tricoire argues, not only obscures the faulty assumptions that led to the failure of French colonization efforts in Madagascar. It also conceals a deeper epistemic problem. By the late eighteenth century, the island and its inhabitants had become subjects of outlandish reporting. French officials described the Malagasy – a diverse and divided population – as a homogeneous mass, awaiting the gift of European civilization. They cast themselves, meanwhile, as progenitors of a »soft«, assimilationist colonial strategy. In their reports back to France, such administrators played down the harsh realities of settlement in Madagascar, while leaning on recognizable Enlightenment tropes to lend authority to their reports. Exaggeration gave way to pure fantasy. Epitomizing this trend of unreliable colonial narration was Louis Laurent Fayd’herbe, comte de Maudave, who oversaw a failed settlement in Madagascar in the 1760s and 1770s. His tenure was followed by that of another suspect administrator, Moritz August Beňovský, a Hungarian imposter who lied his way into the French service and, during his tenure in Madagascar, convinced superiors back in France that he had been crowned Ampansakabe, or »king of kings«, by the Malagasy – an utter fabrication. Together these officials laid the foundations for a persistent – and persistently false – colonial dream, which cast France’s colonization efforts in Madagascar as a benevolent undertaking.

Thus did fraudsters and failed colonizers reframe France’s early modern colonial project. Their penchant for fabrication was facilitated by the philosophical discourse of the Enlightenment, especially the growing emphasis by philosophes on the concept of »universal history«. Based on the idea that humans shared a common evolutionary trajectory – with some cultures farther along the timeline of development than others – universal history provided powerful scaffolding for Maudave and Beňovský’s assimilationist claims, as they promised to nurture the Malagasy into the next stage of civilizational progress.

The dynamics of knowledge production under the absolutist monarchy likewise stirred the fevered dreams of France’s colonial imagination. A patrimonial state with bureaucratic ambitions, the Old Regime lacked a standardized, disinterested, and timely system for verifying the accounts of overseas officials. Administrators like Maudave and Beňovský effectively gatekept the information flowing out of Madagascar, silencing contradictory accounts, while leaning on influential patrons to legitimize their reports. Back in France, petitioners lobbying for overseas posts then recycled the fanciful claims made by these officials, creating a self-reproducing cycle of misinformation. The Colonial Dream is not simply the story of a failed colonial project; it is of the flawed epistemic setting that made such a dream possible in the first place.

Here is Tricoire’s major achievement. The Colonial Dream occasionally delves a little too far into the speculative when describing the tropes and genres deployed by figures like Maudave and Beňovský. Maudave, for instance, is suggested to have flavored his writing with »Voltairean irony« although the degree to which he read or adopted the style of the Sage of Fernay is covered only in passing (120). But Tricoire shines in showing how information was processed, legitimized, and repurposed to create a widely accepted understanding of the colonial project in Madagascar – and in revealing how missteps and false assumptions shaped the ethos of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The result is a compelling revision of French colonial historiography. By rooting a civilizing mission associated almost exclusively with France’s second, nineteenth-century empire within its first, early modern one, Tricoire lays bare the critical importance that Madagascar, and colonial failure more generally, played in structuring the imperial imagination.