[3] Finding the colony in dire financial straits, he increased taxes on imported cloth from other countries, which went some way to placating the large French commercial houses while alienating local interests in Saint-Louis and Dakar.

[4] In April 1873 Brière de l'Isle, had sent Paul Soleillet to Ségou (now central Mali) to open negotiations with the ruler Ahmadu Tall, beginning French expansion into the Middle Niger River valley.

Brière de l'Isle was quickly won over, and found an ally in the new Minister of the Navy (to whom colonial officials reported), Admiral Jean Bernard Jauréguiberry, appointed February 1879.

This enabled Brière de l'Isle's government to go ahead with what had been Faidherbe's grand project: the construction of the Dakar-Saint-Louis railway through the rich groundnut cultivating regions of central Senegal.

[9] In October 1877 Brière de l'Isle's began a campaign east and south along the Senegal River aimed at Abdul Bubakar's state in the northern Fouta Djallon highlands.

To the south (in what is today Guinea), he began a series of offensives in Rivières du Sud occupying positions near Benty in 1879 and seizing the islands of Kakoutlaye and Matakong.

Again blocked by the colonial minister in Paris, he argued that they were a threat to the Senegalese kingdom of Futa Tooro (then a French client state) with which the British were poised to interfere.

While the Siege of Medina Fort in 1857 had helped persuade the empire's founder El Hadj Umar Tall to turn his attentions east of the Senegal River valley, the French had had little contact with the conquest state since then.

Admiral Georges Charles Cloué was named Minister of the Navy in 1881, and the Governor was warned that expansion of the rail line to the Niger River was a low priority, to be pressed by civilian (business) interests only, removing the Marine involvement in its construction.

Within weeks Brière de l'Isle ordered his military protege Lieutenant Colonel Gustave Borgnis-Desbordes to launch a punitive expedition to the Niger and seize the small town at Bamako.

This created the institutional conditions, just as Brière de l'Isle's flouting of government restrictions stoked the martial culture, for independent action and imperial expansion by officers in the field.

[12]Giving its military commanders sufficient cover to act unilaterally (if unlawfully), this territory was quickly expanded through conquest to the east, and renamed French Sudan in 1890.

Brière de l'Isle's flank march at Hưng Hóa enabled the French to occupy the most heavily fortified Black Flag stronghold in Tonkin without losing a man.

The retreat, which threw away the gains of the February Lạng Sơn Campaign, was ordered by Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Gustave Herbinger, the acting commander of the 2nd Brigade, and came less than a week after General de Négrier's defeat at the Battle of Bang Bo (24 March 1885).

Without waiting to sift the misleading information contained in Herbinger's alarmist cables from Lạng Sơn, Brière de l'Isle fired off a pessimistic telegram on the evening of 28 March to the French government, warning that the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps faced disaster unless it was immediately reinforced.

Although he was to obtain further professional advancement before his retirement, he knew that he would in future be remembered not as the French commander who had captured Lạng Sơn and relieved Tuyên Quang but as the man who had lost his head and sent the notorious telegram that had brought down Ferry's administration.