I read somewhere that the French were much more fair to their colonies than other nations. Is there any truth to this?

This is a difficult question to answer because the metric of "fairness" is difficult to pen down in a comparative sense. Especially when referring to an era of colonialism that was hundreds of years long.

What can be said definitively is that the French were not fair to their colonies in any human sense of the word. Colonialism is marked by the application of brutal violence to native populations and France was not better in this regard than anyone else. Early French expansion into Algeria was marked by land appropriations and massacres.

The facts of occupation were remarked upon separately by Alexis de Tocqueville and a Parliamentary Committee dispatched on a fact finding mission. De Tocqueville wrote that "As far as I am concerned, I came back from Africa with the pathetic notion that at present in our way of waging war we are far more barbaric than the Arabs themselves. These days, they represent civilization, we do not. This way of waging war seems to me as stupid as it is cruel. It can only be found in the head of a coarse and brutal soldier. Indeed, it was pointless to replace the Turks only to reproduce what the world rightly found so hateful in them." Though this betrays a certain bias on his part, and though he was still generally supportive of the French colonial mission, it demonstrates that there was some worry in French society about the brutality of their administration.

The report by the Parliamentary inquiry was far more explicit. Written in 1833 it states bluntly that: "“We have sent to their deaths on simple suspicion and without trial people whose guilt was always doubtful and then despoiled their heirs. We massacred people carrying safe conducts, slaughtered on suspicion entire populations subsequently found to be innocent … &etc.”

The violence in Algeria only escalated over time. The war fought between Algerian rebels and the French authorities from 1954 to 1962 was one of terror. Algerians bombed French civilians and assassinated police officers and bureaucrats. The French retaliated with massacres, detentions, and endemic torture.

The savage war that ended France's colonial empire was marked by disgusting violence. Henri Alleg in La Question details his detention and torture. He was regularly subjected to water-boarding and electrical shocks to his testicles. His experience was not extraordinary. Very controversially, the former general Paul Aussaresses wrote a tell-all memoir exposing and defending his use of torture to defeat the Algerian insurgency. To quote his obituary in the New York Times: "He coolly recalled rounding up 1,500 unarmed prisoners — almost all of them Muslims — then selecting “the die-hards” and having them shot. He had the bodies taken to a Muslim cemetery and laid side by side facing Mecca in a 100-meter ditch that a backhoe had dug. Lime was shoveled onto the bodies to hasten decomposition. "

Men like Aussaresses and Bigeaurd were known for acts so infamous that left-wing magazines were wont to refer to "our Gestapo in Algeria" in criticism of the colonial policy. Jean-Paul Sartre in his absolutely stirring introduction to La Question wrote: "In 1942, in the Rue Lauriston (the Gestapo headquarters in Paris), Frenchmen were screaming in agony and pain: all France could hear them. In those days the outcome of the war was uncertain and the future unthinkable, but one thing seemed impossible in any circumstances: that one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name."

Colonialism has always been, is and will always be a brutal business. By its very nature it is the violent imposition of rule upon a people unwilling or uninterested in being ruled. It is the naked exercise of violence for material gain. The mission civilitrice is but a convenient white wash of reality. The French were no better than anyone else, and no colonial power was good.