The Croissant and the Corbin sounds like the name of an Islington pub. In fact, Croissant and Corbin were the first two trading vessels dispatched from France to the East Indies. The year was 1601. The shoals of the subcontinent proved trickier than the crew imagined, and it was as captives of the Chittagong ruler that the first Frenchmen washed up on Indian shores. The French imperial enterprise in India was off to an unpromising start.

Small wonder it took over half a century to establish the Compagnie des Indes. By the time it came into existence in 1664, the French were playing catch-up with the Dutch and the British. To its official François Martin, it made sense to call for cooperation, not competition, between trading companies. The Brits, however, had no truck with the idea of a union of Europeans. So it was that trade with India turned into a winner-takes-all contest.

Britain’s victory was not a foregone conclusion, Robert Ivermee tells us in this pacy, perceptive history of France’s cackhanded foray into India. Indeed, in the anni mirabiles of 1750–52, the French were the dominant foreign power on the subcontinent, controlling a tidy chunk of the southern peninsula. For a brief moment, they believed that the Brits had nothing on them. The Compagnie’s chief courtier, for one, was completely complacent: ‘Just as even a worm will raise its head and dance when it sees the cobra dancing, so the English, their hearts burning with jealousy of the French, have themselves attempted to conquer their enemies and get possession of territory. But who can get what he wants by the mere force of desire?’

As it was, the East India Company had a lot more going for it than just desire. The following ten years would prove crucial, and Ivermee devotes a good third of his book to autopsying the French decisions that enabled the East India Company to steal a march on the Compagnie des Indes. By the early 1760s, the French empire in India was almost in ruins. It would survive in five tiny enclaves – Pondicherry among them – until the Indians finally did for it in 1956, nine years after the Raj had gone.

The presiding spirit of these pages is Joseph François Dupleix, the Napoleon-­like governor-general of French India responsible for both the imperial successes and the subsequent reversals. Ivermee takes a dim view of him, depicting a cantankerous, psychopathic villain with comical reserves of megalomania. Dupleix had a Tamil village named Dupleixpettai and issued fines to the hapless natives who used the old name (he’d doubtless be thrilled to find a station on the Paris Métro bearing his name today).

Dupleix’s fatal flaw was his ambition, the upshot of which was imperial overstretch. Involved in both the Deccan and the Carnatic, his troops were stretched thin across the south. He was able to paper over the problems by propping up friendly regimes, but not for long. It all began to unravel in 1752, when the Brits chummed up with the Marathas to defeat the French at Srirangam. Dupleix lost his Carnatic ally to a beheading. Meanwhile, his Deccan crony became preoccupied with troubles of his own.

Thanks to all the bloodletting Dupleix had unleashed, the Compagnie’s trading had ground to a halt. Rent was supposed to be the answer to its woes. This, too, proved illusory on account of Dupleix’s heavy-handedness. By the time he was recalled to Paris in 1754, the Compagnie had ceased to be a thriving concern. On his return, he discovered that he had become a foil for the philosophes, including Voltaire.

It was left to those franchouillards Diderot and the Abbé Raynal to posthumously rehabilitate him as an enlightened reconciler of East and West – a selfless Samaritan who had tried but failed to save Indians from the extractive yoke of British imperialism. It’s a theme later French imperialists spiritedly took up by adopting a new buzzword. Their sole objective on the subcontinent, they insisted, was the liberation of India.

At all events, the French Revolution gave the lie to such self-serving grandiloquence. Plus français que les français, some Tamil bureaucrats in Pondicherry demanded the vote following the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the French National Assembly. They found a few supporters among the French in India. The Marquis de Culan, for instance, argued that the Tamils in the colony were ‘citizens like us’. For their thousand or so compatriots, however, such reasoning was nothing short of heresy. The radicals were duly deported to France.

The official party line was that the hidebound and caste-bound Indians were at least for the time being fundamentally incapable of comprehending the thought world of European Homo aequalis. In the end, only 214 of Pondicherry’s thirty thousand residents were recognised as citizens. Women, natives and unpropertied whites remained subjects. It appears that French Pondicherry imbibed only the sartorial trappings – tricolour cockades and flags – of the revolution.

A final stab at expansion was made when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. Egypt was supposed to be a stepping stone to the conquest of India. An alliance was forged with Mysore to expel the British from the subcontinent, generating an awkward fudge: the French in India were expected to swear their ‘hatred of all kings, except Tipu Sultan’. Calling the Mysore ruler ‘Citizen Tipu’ helped iron out the inconsistency. Not that it mattered. A year later, Tipu was killed by the British at the Siege of Seringapatam. So ended the Anglo-French contest in India. Perfide Albion had won.

Ivermee, a historian of colonial India at the Catholic University of Paris, has elected to end his narrative here, which is a shame because the remnants of the French empire in India lasted another 150 years. These are dispensed with in a few brisk pages. Closing this book, I was reminded of the counterfactual that Ivermee sets up at the outset: had French imperialism not been a ‘glorious failure’ but a roaring success, India may well have made a rendez-vous avec le destin in 1947 rather than a ‘tryst with destiny’, to quote the speech Jawaharlal Nehru made on the eve of Indian independence.

Would things be any different if India had once been ruled by the French rather than the British? Seen from our age, France’s no-nonsense laïcité may have been exactly what the subcontinent needed. Then again, things may just as well have gone the other way. In hock to Frenchified elites, postcolonial India may have had the same fate as the Sahel, lurching from one military dictatorship to the next with a dreary sense of déjà coup.