Who speaks—can she? Is there a force or an instance that authorizes us to speak, or to write? Social language usage certainly privileges some actors and orators over others. However, speech cannot be given unless someone in fact takes it. In other words, it is only the right to proffer that may be conferred; to withhold a word, that is another story: here, it is ours. These opening sentences doubtless bring us to the nagging question of my own legitimacy, and of all legitimacy, for the interpretation of the colonial adventure. For the present, I am much more concerned with slaves and indigenes who ventured far beyond the stated limits, and who spoke. To the predetermined restrictions placed on access to discourse, one must add an entire set of pronounced impossibilities when speaking of the colonial context. If an idiom is always acquired, removed from all naturalness, then a so-called français de souche, a “French-Frenchman,” has no more of a predisposition toward his language than someone recently annexed to the empire. However, in many of the texts we will read, we will find the formulation of a linguistic inaptitude among the colonized. As a result, the francophone indigene, for example, will pass for a puppet—or a prodigy. In the latter case, as a divine miracle or living proof of the supernatural action of national education, the new speaker will still have to face a certain history of the language, which sought to arm itself against all illegitimacy, and which wanted to impose a silence at the very heart of words themselves. This procedure of interdiction, residing in the words of a language devoted precisely to replacing the other idioms of the conquered, constitutes a colonial specificity (more extreme than the republican hostility toward dialects and patois). The gift and censure of French sought to safeguard an instrumental francophonie against all (desire for) speech. I will examine these detailed mechanisms I have just named. We will see once again that differences (historical, geographical), even the theoretical contradictions, do not prevent comprehension of the meanings of the colonial phenomenon. In short, we will linger over the repeated event of words that break with this system of silencing, in the Americas, and in Algerian and metropolitan France. I will also certainly continue to examine the colony from different sides; this will allow us to specify how you and I can speak of it.