I recently discovered the history part of Reddit and so started to be more interested in other's views about history.

And, much to my surprise, I find out than quite often in my country(France), people think that, after all, colonialism is a bit bad of course, but our Empire was better than the others. The whole "we gave them schools, infrastructure, modern medecine thing".

I very much doubt that colonisation was an humanist endeavour. I've found quite a lot of thing about British empire building, as I was interested in it before this whole thing (The Empire Project for example is so good) but I have more trouble finding material comparing the european empires or focused on the French one, so do you have some good books/articles (I have access to JSTOR) talking about the French colonial empire, so I may give educated answer next time people try to argue than our colonies weren't that bad.