Abstract: In order to shed light on the rhetorical choices made by Mirbeau and other writers to denounce the colonialist ideology, this study describes the literary field in which, before the 1914 war, supporters of the colonial conquest, who disseminated their propaganda in attractive and cheap adventure novels, and their opponents, who were reduced, in order to defend their position, to resorting to the scholarly practice of irony in short texts for confidential distribution.
