During the summer and fall of 1882, no French man or woman was more visible than the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. At a time when France confronted armed resistance to its imperial efforts in North Africa and Indochina, Brazza's “pacific conquest” of extensive lands along the Congo River made him a national hero. Parisian journalists crowned Brazza a “conquérant pacifique” and lauded him for winning the Congo “without spilling a drop of blood.” Brazza's stature was enhanced all the more by a widely publicized rivalry with the famous Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, whose current employer, King Leopold II of Belgium, had sent him to seize the same lands. Brazza's view was that the Congo should belong to France, and almost without a dissenting voice, the Parisian press cheered him on.

The French fascination with Brazza and with the remote part of Africa he explored and ultimately “gave” to his adopted homeland (he was Italian by birth) are crucial to our understanding of the early Third Republic. Journalists sympathetic to the Republic used Brazza's image to rally a long-divided nation around a fledgling regime in need of great men and great deeds. And even those hostile to the new political system unwittingly added to its strength with their adulatory coverage of the explorer's exploits. The press turned Brazza into a hero-celebrity in the 1880s, helping him personify a new French standing in Africa and the world at large and encouraging leaders of the Third Republic, long averse to territorial annexation, to plant the French flag in equatorial Africa. In doing so, they helped transform the image—or at least the selfimage—of the new regime.

No longer would the fledgling Third Republic be the beaten, humiliated nation of 1871; it would now be a great colonial power, a player on the world stage whose territorial holdings rivaled those of Great Britain and vastly surpassed those of its enemy to the east. But the new colonial France, its republican advocates maintained, would not mirror the British Empire in being largely a business enterprise. As Alice Conklin has shown, leaders of France's new democratic Third Republic, heir to the liberal and liberating aspirations of the French Revolution, would construe the new imperialism as a humanitarian and civilizing mission.