In 1905, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza exposed the horrific underpinnings of the French colonial system in the Congo: bloody requisitions, hostage camps, institutionalized violence. His report, too disturbing, was buried for a century. Nofi explores the anatomy of a state silence and how the Republic concealed its crimes in the name of “civilization.”
French colonial history is riddled with strategic silences. Some were improvised in urgency, others meticulously crafted by elites to ensure facts never became political truths. The case of the Brazza Report falls squarely into the latter. Long obscured, this explosive document written in 1905 by explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was not merely administrative. It was an act of indictment. A mirror held up to the Republic, reflecting an organized brutality in the African territories of French Congo, at a time when European powers claimed to bring light, law, and civilization.
But what exactly did the report say? And why was it buried for over a century? Behind the façade of humanitarian duty, the French colonial empire—especially in Equatorial Africa—practiced economic plunder, physical subjugation, and cultural humiliation, often via private companies backed by the administration. The Toqué-Gaud affair, often downplayed as an “isolated scandal,” was in fact the symptom of a well-oiled system where symbolic and actual violence served as governance.
The Brazza Report, drafted in response to this affair, was one of the rare documents from inside the colonial structure that precisely documented these mechanisms of violence. But it was never meant to enlighten. It was locked away, reduced to a sanitized version, and its author discredited and marginalized until his death shortly after completing the mission.
This article revisits the Brazza Report without varnish or filter. Not to exhume a frozen historical fact, but to understand how a state can erase its own crimes, how an administration can engineer forgetting; and how Africa, as a subject—not merely a stage—can reclaim the narrative of its mutilated memory.
Genesis of a suppressed colonial scandal
the barbaric execution of Pakpa
The year 1903 marks a grim turning point in the history of French Congo. At Fort-Crampel, an administrative post in today’s Central African Republic, an act of cold, calculated cruelty would lay bare the structural brutality of the French colonial system. This wasn’t an isolated incident—it was a ritualized sacrifice orchestrated by representatives of the Republic.
On July 14 (a deeply symbolic date), colonial administrator Georges Toqué and Indigenous Affairs clerk Fernand Gaud decided to “set an example.” Their target: Pakpa, a former African guide accused of insubordination and independent thinking. Their method? A ritualized murder disguised as psychological warfare. They tied dynamite around Pakpa’s neck and blew him up. Not in a moment of madness, but with deliberate, premeditated calculation—later admitted in court. “It seems stupid,” Gaud would say at trial, “but it’ll dazzle the natives. If they don’t behave after that…”
That sentence says it all. It summarizes the deep logic of colonization as practiced in the African interior at the time: terrorize to dominate, dehumanize to govern. Pakpa was not executed for what he did, but for who he was: a free man who refused colonial rule.
Toqué and Gaud’s objective was clear: to shock and awe. To sow fear to consolidate a fragile grip on power. Their action was part of a broader strategy of intimidation: the administrators knew they lacked both the logistical means and moral legitimacy to control the local populations. Violence—raw, spectacular—was all they had left to crush any seed of resistance.
This murder did not stay buried at the empire’s periphery. Thanks to a few shocked witnesses (including French soldiers), news reached Paris. The press took notice, tentatively at first, then with mounting indignation. Le Journal des Débats and later Le Temps reported the affair. Catholic, republican, and even socialist press joined in. Emotions reached Parliament. A scandal had begun.
But caution: it wasn’t Pakpa’s fate that alarmed the political class—it was the diplomatic risk. The “red rubber” of the Belgian Congo, exposed by British figures like Roger Casement, had already sparked a European outcry. The Republic feared similar accusations. It had to react—without revealing too much. Thus was born the idea of a commission of inquiry. A prestigious name was chosen, known for integrity: Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. A respected but weakened man. The investigation began. The stage was set. But the will to uncover the truth? That remained to be seen.
Media and parliamentary indignation
Pakpa’s barbaric execution on July 14, 1903, could have faded into the ocean of colonial brutality met with bureaucratic indifference. But this time, a few lines were crossed. European witnesses, outraged or worried about their reputations, passed the news along. The Parisian press, always eager to condemn abuses—especially abroad—pounced.
Le Journal des Débats raised the alarm, soon followed by Le Temps and L’Humanité, each deploying its own moral rhetoric. Pakpa’s execution shocked, yes—but more so, it embarrassed. In a colonial rivalry with Belgium’s Leopold II, France could not afford to be equated with the very practices it publicly condemned. Talk of “red rubber” and bloody exploitation was gaining traction in Europe. The myth of the civilizing mission was wavering.
In the salons of the Republic, it wasn’t violence itself that was troubling, but the potential loss in the battle for moral superiority. In the National Assembly, some republican deputies worried: silence would only confirm the accusations. An international commission—seen as a threat to French sovereignty—might be imposed. The state had to act fast. Hence the savvy move: appoint an “internal,” national commission to contain the crisis.
At this point, the name Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza re-emerged. A former respected explorer, still popular with the public, he embodied a “humane” brand of colonialism—opposed to private interests and blind repression. The Ministry of Colonies, led by Étienne Clémentel, saw Brazza as the perfect scapegoat. He was appointed not to expose the truth, but to reassure. Clémentel was clear: the report must show that violence is “isolated” and that France “systematically punishes abuses”—unlike other powers.
Thus a commission was born with an official goal of transparency, but under tightly controlled conditions. A generous budget (268,000 francs—unusually high for such a mission) was allocated, but the timeframe was just six months, including travel. Everything had to go quickly. The goal wasn’t accountability, but damage control. What the press had unleashed, the government was preparing to contain.
Pakpa’s case thus became a diplomatic issue, a political calculation—not a moral alarm. Media indignation was real but uneven; parliamentary momentum existed but was limited by state interests. For African colonies, it was a bitter lesson: even their martyrs would only be acknowledged if their deaths threatened French interests. In this theater of appearances, Brazza departed for the Congo with one certainty: what he would discover could not be silenced.
Official intentions vs. real expectations
When Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza accepted the mission to lead the inquiry in French Congo, he entered an arena where the rules were already set. Officially, the goal was to “shed light” on the events at Fort-Crampel and the living conditions of the indigenous people. Unofficially, the goal was to produce a diplomatically harmless report—reassuring to parliamentarians, flattering to the Republic’s image, and vague enough to avoid any political fallout or structural reform.
The instructions given to Brazza by Colonial Minister Étienne Clémentel were telling. He was explicitly tasked with demonstrating that France, unlike its colonial competitors, punished abuses “when brought to its attention,” that acts of violence were “individual” and that there was no “organized system.” The narrative framework was already defined. Brazza could observe, but not accuse; report, but not denounce. In essence, he was expected to confirm that the Empire remained within the bounds of republican decency. Any divergence would be seen as political betrayal.
But the French administration underestimated Brazza. The man had changed. Once a humanist conqueror, he had become a critical observer. He knew what he would find—and what was expected of him. But unlike the Parisian bureaucrats, he had nothing left to prove. Sick, fatigued, and marginalized, he decided to fulfill his mission fully—even if it meant displeasing the authorities. For him, this mission was a final attempt at truth—a kind of moral testament.
The inquiry he conducted with his companions—notably the philosopher Félicien Challaye—far exceeded initial expectations. While Paris wanted moderated reports, Brazza collected overwhelming evidence: African testimonies, logbooks, visual inspections. He investigated in Bangui, Fort-Crampel, and the most remote requisition areas. He overcame intimidation, bypassed administrative limits, and wrote over 1,200 pages of notes. As he progressed, he realized that what had been presented as “isolated abuses” was, in fact, an entrenched, systemic mechanism embedded in colonial administration.
Yet French authorities remained fixed on their strategy. In Paris, they were already preparing to “reformulate” the report—summarize and shelve it. The follow-up commission (famously led by Lannessan) included none of the original investigators. Nor did it intend to publish the full document. What Brazza had produced was not an administrative report—it was a political detonation.
The disconnect between the ministry’s initial intentions and Brazza’s radical findings raises a critical question: can one investigate truthfully within a framework defined by those being investigated? Brazza’s experience suggests not. As soon as a “truth mission” is controlled by the very actors it is meant to scrutinize, it becomes an operation of public relations, not of justice.
The full version of the Brazza Report was never meant to exist. Yet it does. But in 1905, its revelations were deemed too dangerous. Too real. Too African, even—in the way it gave equal, if not greater, weight to indigenous voices than to those of administrators. That alone sealed its fate to oblivion.
French Congo as Seen by Brazza
The machinery of economic terror
At the heart of the colonial system laid bare by the Brazza Report is an unrelenting economic model: requisition through fear. It was not a blunder, nor a brutal improvisation. It was a calculated, rational, immoral strategy. The colonial economy of French Congo relied on absolute coercion: extracting as much rubber and ivory as possible at the lowest cost—without salaries, without infrastructure, without negotiation. Natives were not workers—they were hunted, coerced, and punished for failure. The economic order was maintained through terror.
In the Oubangui-Chari region, Brazza discovered a systematic method. To ensure men went into the forest to collect rubber, their wives, children, and elders were taken hostage. These hostages were confined in compounds, huts, or trading posts. Their release depended directly on how much rubber was delivered. This was not taxation—it was existential blackmail.
In Bangui, Brazza inspected one such place: a long hut, six meters wide, where 66 women were crammed. No windows. A single door. Within two weeks, 25 of them died. Their corpses were thrown into the river. At Fort-Crampel, a hostage camp was identified—open-air, with children screaming, women wasting away, and soldiers guarding.
The most chilling part? The total lack of concealment. Local officials did not deny these practices. They justified them. They spoke of “efficiency,” “necessity,” and “native discipline.” This is where economic logic met colonial violence: administrators no longer saw Africans as subjects—or even human beings—but as productivity variables.
The pressure came from Paris and the concessionary companies. In 1899, there were 40 such companies. By 1905, 33 remained, barely half deemed “viable.” Their profits depended on local productivity, which depended on coercion. These companies were not independent private actors—they operated under state contracts, with the colonial army as enforcement. This predatory system was fully integrated into the imperial command chain.
Brazza also identified a more insidious mechanism: tax in kind. Instead of monetary tax, colonial authorities required rubber as payment. As a result, local populations were forced to deliver their resources to private companies as a tax obligation. The colonial economy became a form of generalized servitude—no contracts, no time limits, no way out.
Beyond numbers and stories, a logic of domination emerged. The French administration did not govern by integration, but by organized devastation. The colonial order relied on the systematic destruction of local social balances: men were forced to abandon villages, women were taken hostage, children grew up in fear. The goal was not to structure a territory—but to drain it of resistance.
Through this economic machinery of terror, an entire worldview was expressed: Africa had no autonomy, no economy, no rationality—only a function: to supply. To produce. To deliver. Or to die.
The role of concessionary companies
One of the most revealing aspects of the Brazza Report lies in its unflinching demonstration of a fact the colonial administration desperately tried to conceal: in French Congo, republican authority did not oversee the economy—it delegated it to private companies with quasi-sovereign powers and virtually no oversight. This is the paradox of French colonial rhetoric: a Republic that boasts of moral virtue while outsourcing violence to agents of economic predation.
At the end of the 19th century, the French colonial administration granted massive territorial concessions to private companies, giving them exclusive rights to exploit natural resources (notably rubber and ivory) across tens of thousands of square kilometers. In return, these companies were supposed to provide minimal “development” and pay symbolic royalties to the state. In reality, this “development” was nothing more than brutal extraction, carried out for immediate profit.
Brazza observed that these companies operated with near-total autonomy. They levied taxes, conscripted indigenous labor, organized punitive expeditions, and maintained their own coercive networks—sometimes with logistical support from the colonial army. They did not act in the shadows—they acted under the watchful, complicit gaze of a state that looked away so long as colonial revenues kept flowing.
The example of the “rubber tax” illustrates this collusion. Far from being an anomaly, it became standard practice. Instead of collecting taxes in money or local harvests, state agents demanded raw rubber, harvested by forest communities. This rubber was then sold directly to concessionary companies. A tax that appeared public became a systematized transfer of wealth to private interests. The Republic served as a luxury middleman in a legalized looting operation.
This hybrid system, blending state authority with market logic, did not bring modernization—it triggered the collapse of traditional structures. Subsistence farming was abandoned. Communities crumbled under the weight of rubber quotas. Territories became human-hunting zones, where company agents tracked “delinquents,” “rebels,” or simply exhausted villages.
Brazza didn’t just describe the effects—he revealed the causes: the Republic was no bystander. It was the architect. Concessions were granted knowingly. Interim reports, local alerts, missionaries’ protests—all reached Paris. Yet nothing changed. Worse: colonial officers who resisted gratuitous violence or challenged the companies’ authority were transferred, marginalized, or discredited.
In this sense, French Congo was not a “poorly managed” colony—it was managed to be exploited. And the concessionary companies, far from being rogue profiteers, were central cogs in the political economy of pillage. What Brazza cautiously called the “confusion of public and private interests” was in truth a foundational arrangement, allowing France to reap colonial benefits while avoiding the human, logistical, and moral costs of direct occupation.
This model—what one could today call “Françafrique before its time”—rested on a fiction: that of a humane, generous empire. But as the report showed, this fiction held only by suppressing facts, silencing African voices, and cynically outsourcing violence.
1,200 Pages of Documented Accusation
Far from the administrative report expected by his superiors, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza delivered—after six months of investigation in French Congo—a document of unprecedented depth. It wasn’t a handful of technical observations or a diplomatically balanced report. It was 1,200 pages of chilling rigor, where every testimony, every number, every visual inspection dismantled the colonial machinery implemented by France in Equatorial Africa. The result wasn’t a field study—it was an indictment.
From the first pages, Brazza was unequivocal: “I have found an impossible situation in Oubangui-Chari.” He spoke of “population annihilation,” “systematic requisitions,” and “methodical concealment of the truth.” What the Ministry of Colonies feared, he confirmed: a system of organized violence, protected by the hierarchy, and replicated from post to post with bureaucratic efficiency.
Every step of his journey—from Libreville to Fort-Crampel—was a descent into the underworld of imperial order. He visited trading posts where women were penned like livestock. He interviewed village chiefs, freed hostages, children branded with hot irons. Everywhere, the stories matched. Everywhere, the facts aligned. There was no talk of “lack of rigor” or “isolated flaws”—but of a designed, executed, and shielded system.
Brazza documented the obstacles thrown in his path. In Krébédjé, he noted how local authorities tried to mislead him, block access to sensitive sites, and hide hostages. To each obstacle, he responded with rare determination. He was no longer the romantic explorer of the late 19th century—he was a disillusioned man, driven by a final breath of truth.
What stands out in these 1,200 pages is the space given to African voices. The testimonies are not anecdotal add-ons—they form the backbone of the report. For a man of elite European background, this was a radical reversal. Brazza implicitly recognized that the only people who could truly describe colonial reality were those who lived through it.
Félicien Challaye, the young philosopher on the mission, would later recall the power of these stories. He published a few excerpts in Le Temps, but most remained unknown. They were stories from women recounting nighttime raids, children describing hostage camps, village chiefs explaining how their crops, weapons, and families were taken.
But beyond the content, the report’s structure made it explosive. Brazza spared no one. He directly accused field administrators, post chiefs, and district commanders. But he also blamed the higher-ups: Governor General Émile Gentil was explicitly named for obstructing the investigation, dismissing witnesses, and attempting to redirect the mission. Brazza no longer spoke of “errors”—but of obstruction, complicity, and state duplicity.
These 1,200 pages were more than a diagnosis—they were an unintentional manifesto. They proved that even within an official mission, one man could cross the line and say what must not be said. But Brazza was not naïve. He knew the report would not be received as he wished. He wrote it with the lucidity of a dying man, aware that his document would likely be manipulated, distorted, or buried.
And that’s exactly what happened.
The art of republican camouflage
The lannessan commission and state censorship
After Brazza’s death in Dakar in September 1905—under still-suspect circumstances, exacerbated by poor health and worsened by isolation—the Ministry of Colonies found itself holding an unmanageable report. Too detailed, too damning. A document that could not be refuted without discrediting the state, yet whose publication would cause political upheaval. It had to be neutralized. And so the Republic resorted to a tried-and-true strategy: creating a new, “neutral,” handpicked commission. Thus was born the Lannessan Commission.
Officially, the Lannessan Commission was tasked with synthesizing the documents gathered in the field. In reality, it was a filter. A political translation mechanism for the truth Brazza had shouted through 1,200 pages. At its head: Jean-Louis de Lannessan, a radical deputy, former governor of Indochina, and former Minister of the Navy. A man of the system, well aware of the balance needed between proclaimed morality and colonial reality. Above all, a man who knew the rules: you don’t bring down the colonial state without consequences.
The commission’s first act said it all. None of the original investigators were included. No inspector, no direct witness. Everything was rewritten from secondary notes, summarized, reorganized. Fieldwork was dismissed as a direct source. Only excerpts deemed “usable” within an administrative logic were retained.
The 1,200 pages were reduced to a 112-page report. A reduction of over 90%. But this was not just a summary—it was a purge. The most damning passages were deleted. African testimonies were minimized, if not entirely removed. Names of responsible parties were erased. Figures on deaths, hostages, and mutilations were either omitted or reinterpreted. This was no longer an investigative report—it was a political synthesis.
In this new version, the central administration was partially absolved. Governor General Émile Gentil, whom Brazza had specifically blamed for obstructing the inquiry, was shielded by a principle of “esprit de corps.” “Excesses” and “abuses” were acknowledged—but blamed on subordinates, “isolated initiatives,” and “occasional lapses.” The system itself was left untouched. The structure was saved.
The Lannessan Commission wasn’t a betrayal—it was a logical continuation. The French colonial system, unlike King Leopold’s regime in the Belgian Congo, claimed to be governed by republican law and administration. The façade had to be preserved. Brazza’s report had shattered that façade. The Lannessan report glued the pieces back together.
This bureaucratic sleight of hand was a masterstroke. It showed how a state could turn a bombshell into a memo. How a cry could be turned into an administrative whisper. How a people’s memory could be erased in the name of imperial stability.
And it showed that the French colonial state, at the start of the 20th century, was not acting in chaos. It knew exactly what it was doing—and how to react when the truth threatened to escape the frame.
The political management of scandal
Once the Lannessan Report was completed—trimmed, polished, stripped of its accusatory power—the state apparatus moved to contain what it feared most: public exposure. Because even if the content was neutralized, the form still posed a threat. A leak. A mobilization. A shift in public opinion. The Republic now acted not like an enlightened regime, but like an entity entrenched in its colonial interests. Silence became strategy.
Only ten copies of the Lannessan Report were printed. It was marked “confidential.” No parliamentary debate was organized. And when some deputies (including, ironically, Jean-Louis de Lannessan himself) formally requested the full report’s publication, they were flatly denied. Socialist deputy Gustave Rouanet, who demanded transparency during a session on February 19, 1906, was ignored. Colonial Minister Raphaël Milliès-Lacroix had the report buried. Literally.
But this wasn’t mere passive refusal. The colonial state made active efforts to stifle the affair’s memory. Journalists who continued discussing Fort-Crampel were sidelined. Academics advocating a critical view of colonialism were discredited. Inquisitive civil servants were transferred. And the few surviving African witnesses who had testified to Brazza were simply forgotten. Their names appeared nowhere in the final report.
Émile Gentil, the governor general directly implicated in Brazza’s notes, remained in office for three more years. In fact, he was effectively rewarded for his crisis management—proof that in the colonial system, loyalty to the structure outweighed accountability.
This reflex of systemic protection is no surprise. It’s standard in all imperial administrations—but here it was worsened by the nature of the scandal. The Brazza Report, as written, could have fueled a radical critique of French colonialism—not of its “excesses,” but of its very essence. That’s what made it so dangerous. It didn’t just speak of atrocities. It revealed a logic, a mode of rule based on fear, a network of public and private interests. It showed that this system wasn’t accidental—it was the rule.
How this truth was treated aligns perfectly with imperial practice: invisibilization, shifting the debate, reaffirming authority, and instrumentalizing moral discourse. This wasn’t a Republic that remained silent. It was a colonial Republic, fully aware of its crimes, that chose to cover them up.
This organized silence came at a price: a mutilated memory. It created a historical chasm between the lived reality of African populations and the sanitized version taught, celebrated, and diffused in the metropole. And it would take over a century for this truth to come back into the light.
The slow reawakening of a key document
For over a century, the Brazza Report remained locked away in the silences of the Republic. It was neither published nor referenced, nor even cited. It vanished entirely from the official historical record. The few mentions in administrative literature were vague, superficial, or deliberately incomplete. The most serious issue was not the absence of debate—but the organized forgetting, the methodical erasure of a document that could have changed how the French colonial empire was perceived as early as the 20th century.
For decades, the very existence of the report was doubted. Some researchers believed it had been destroyed. Others thought it was permanently embargoed. The rare historians interested in it—often from anti-colonial circles or African studies—could not access the archives. And in French schools, the Fort-Crampel affair became a footnote, stripped of context and political weight.
Only in the 1960s did a rediscovery begin. Historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, a specialist in colonial Africa, found a forgotten copy of the report in the Ministry of Colonies’ archives in Aix-en-Provence. It wasn’t yet a public revelation—but it was a sign. The document existed. It had survived.
Then came militant publishers, independent researchers, and fringe historians who worked to restore its memory. Dominique Bellec uncovered annexes, internal notes, raw testimonies that had served as the report’s foundation. Gradually, the pieces were put back together. The machinery of forgetting began to crack.
Finally, in 2014—109 years after its writing—the Brazza Report was published in full by Le Passager clandestin. With a preface by Coquery-Vidrovitch, the work became accessible to the public. This wasn’t just a historical facsimile—it was a resurrection. For the first time, post-colonial France faced one of the most compromising archives of its imperial past.
Its return to the public sphere was anything but trivial. It came at a time when long-suppressed colonial memories were resurfacing in both African and French societies. The massacres, the plundering, the structural domination—once marginal topics—had become political, social, and educational issues. The Brazza Report, long kept out of the Republican canon, returned as key evidence in the moral trial of colonization.
But this awakening remains fragile. The report is not part of school curricula. It has inspired no official speeches. It is read, analyzed, but rarely embraced. Because its content allows no refuge in convenient formulas like “excesses,” “mistakes,” or “a different time.” It forces a simple question: What if French colonialism wasn’t just authoritarian, but criminal? If that is the case, then the Brazza Report is no longer a historical document—it is a piece of evidence.
Its rediscovery is not an end—it is a starting point. A call to re-examine what is still too often called “the great colonial adventure.”
A republic confronted with Its own violence
The Brazza Report is not just a rediscovered administrative archive. It is a mirror. And what it reflects is the image of a colonial Republic that engaged—not by accident, but by design—in a system of human plunder and organized repression. This document, muzzled from birth, demonstrates that French colonialism in Equatorial Africa was not a noble mission gone awry, but a cold machinery built on terror, economic spoliation, and the silencing of African voices.
What is shocking in the Brazza Report is not the existence of atrocities—but their systemic nature. Not the brutality of field administrators—but the protection they enjoyed. Not the inaction of top officials—but the sophisticated cover-up orchestrated to suppress the truth.
The story of the Brazza Report also teaches us this: in the colonial world, telling the truth is not enough. That truth must find political space to exist. Brazza spoke, wrote, and documented. And he died for it. His report was buried. The State won that round—imposing silence, shoving the archive into shadow.
But the facts, themselves, endured.
Today, as African societies demand reparations, recognition, and historical rewritings, this report becomes essential again—not as a museum artifact, but as a critical tool. A weapon of memory. It forces us to confront a question the Republic still avoids: What is a democracy worth, if it denies its founding principles as soon as it crosses its own borders?
Colonial memory cannot be optional. It is a debt. And within that debt, the Brazza Report is a rupture. It proves that even at the heart of the colonial system, some knew. Some spoke. And others chose to silence them.
The story of this censorship is now known.
What we choose to do with it—that is still up to us.
Notes and references
- Bailly, Vincent & Thil, Tristan, Le Rapport Brazza: Le premier secret d’État de la « Françafrique », Paris, Futuropolis, 2018, 143 p.
- Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine (pref.), Le Rapport Brazza. Mission d’enquête du Congo. Rapport et documents (1905–1907), Paris, Le Passager clandestin, 2014, 307 p.
- Martin, Jean, “Le rapport Brazza. Mission d’enquête du Congo. Rapports et documents. 1905–1907,” Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire, vol. 101, no. 382, 2014, pp. 295–297.
- Challaye, Félicien, Souvenirs d’un moraliste en mission au Congo, articles in Le Temps, 1905–1906.
Table of Contents
- Genesis of a Suppressed Colonial Scandal
- The Barbaric Execution of Pakpa
- Media and Parliamentary Indignation
- Official Intentions vs. Real Expectations
- French Congo as Seen by Brazza
- The Machinery of Economic Terror
- The Role of Concessionary Companies
- 1,200 Pages of Documented Accusation
- The Art of Republican Camouflage
- The Lannessan Commission and State Censorship
- The Political Management of Scandal
- The Slow Reawakening of a Key Document
- A Republic Confronted with Its Own Violence
- Notes and References
