Quai d'Orsay's photographic treasures brought to light

For a century they slept inside their red-and-brown leather covers embossed in gold with the words "Ministry of Foreign Affairs".

It took a visit by Michele Vedrine, the wife of the present Foreign Minister, to the ministry's archives in an old army barracks in Nantes, to bring the Quai d'Orsay's photographic treasures to light. Most of the estimated 400,000 photos have not even been catalogued.

"They arrived at the Quai d'Orsay from the four corners of the earth, usually glued to diplomatic telegrams," Pierre Fournie, the ministry's chief archivist explained. "Then they were assembled in bound volumes." Long before the word processor, the accompanying texts were copied in exquisite calligraphy.

France was the cradle of photography, and from about 1860 French diplomats used pictures to document their reports to Paris. Some, like Charles Bonin - who in 1893 set up a French administration in a part of Laos conquered from Siam - took their own photos. Others, like Charles Wiener, a French consul in Brazil, commissioned photographic essays from professionals. In 1876 Wiener paid the Franco-Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez to photograph the Amazon. Ferrez's haunting portrait of an Indian child in the Mato Grosso wearing a feather head-dress is the poster for an exhibition of 140 images taken between 1860 and 1914, at Les Invalides until November 10th.

The diplomats' record is sociological, ethnological, historical, architectural, poetic. In 1905 the staring mullahs of Tabriz were dressed like their present-day successors. You cannot help feeling sorry for those whom the colonialists tried to transform into imitation Frenchmen - Chinese soldiers standing to attention behind a French officer in Canton in 1864; the Africans of Madagascar sweltering in high-collared European dresses, cut-away jackets and top hats in 1887.

Much of the exhibition is a tribute to the prowess of French engineers who built parts of Shanghai and Saigon, the port of Beirut, the Beirut-Damascus railway and the Suez Canal. During 1862-68, the French restored the dome of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The spotless telegraph room of the Post and Telegraph office in Tunis, photographed in 1890, is another reminder that the France of the Third Republic believed its civilisation was synonymous with modernity.

Even as they fought at home for separation of church and state, secular governments at the turn of the last century used religion to project power abroad, especially in the Middle East, where France became the protector of Christian communities. Brother Raphael, a Capuchin friar, photographed peasants and missionaries in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. In 1909, the French consul in Mersin sent pictures of the aftermath of the Turkish massacre of 30,000 Armenians back to Paris. Six years later, 1.5 million Armenians would be killed by the Turks in the first holocaust of the 20th century.

In Morocco, Gabriel Veyre, an eccentric Frenchman and failed pharmacist turned photographer, ingratiated himself with Sultan Moulay Abd el-Aziz and became the main intermediary between Paris and the sultan's court. Known to all as "Docteur Veyre", his colour images, taken in 1907, show the French community of Casablanca in carnival costume and that backbone of the colonisation of North Africa - French army officers.

Roger Therond, a founder and longtime director of Paris Match magazine, helped select the photos for the exhibition. "The civil servants of diplomatic France and the photographers they employed were the forerunners of today's press agencies," he remarks. "Looking at these images, I felt as if I were leafing through the great magazine of French diplomacy." Some diplomats even had a journalistic flair for the exclusive. "For the first time, the Dalai Lama has consented to be photographed with his entourage!" Ernest Ronssin, France's consul general in India reported in 1910.

The exhibition contains two chilling before and after photos of the execution of Chinese pirates in Canton in 1900. The executioner raises a blurred sword in the first; in the second, four severed heads lie in pools of blood while the sword swoops upon its last victim. But the public are unlikely to see more of the foreign ministry's gruesome collection of torture and atrocity pictures. At the Quai d'Orsay, propriety and discretion often triumph over truth: 16 frames of a Chinese undergoing the "torture of 100 pieces" in 1906 are not on show.