"On 15 Messidor year V of the Revolutionary Calendar (3 July 1797), Citizen Talleyrand, known in his pre-revolutionary days as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, addressed the Institut National des Sciences et Arts in Paris on the 'advantages to be gained from new colonies in the current circumstances'. To his listeners in the Institute, the intellectual powerhouse of the French Republic, 'current circumstances' was a recognisable shorthand for the cascade of events that had brought the Ancien Regime colonial empire to its knees"--