A thorough investigation remains pending into the French colonialists who designated France as a “great Muslim power.” The attribution of the epithet of “a great Muslim power” to an ostensibly secular state invites a subtle irony followed by a grand provocation. The French Empire flattered itself by claiming this self-aggrandizing designation which became evident in the complex field of imperial governance that was devoted to the management of its Muslim subjects – 'la politique musulmane française'. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the secular Third Republic and its overseas Empire adopted the epithet quite overtly in their official documents to promote their imperial rule in North and West Africa. This paper traces the persistence of the idea of Islamic governance in the French imperial enterprise. I endeavor to show how the French imperial venture in the Maghreb was deeply intertwined with a particular misperception of political power in Islam as systematized and conceptualized by Montesquieu’s theory of the “Oriental Despot.” How did the French Empire administer its North African Muslim subjects on the basis of a certain idea of Islamic Governance? How did the fiction of the Oriental despot through its 'politique musulmane' haunt the imperial imaginary up to the denouement of the Empire? This paper seeks in the French scholarly and political orientalist production on the Maghreb a privileged stance to contemplate the psyches, desires, imaginaries that enervate imperialism. I argue that the fantasy of the Oriental despot delineates more about the colonial political project in the Orient than it does about the indigenous structure of governance supposedly typical of the Orient. I attempt to illustrate how the fiction of Montesquieu’s Oriental despotism was omnipresent in the writings of the Empire’s officials and scholars, who perceived it as the most suitable regime for their Muslim colonies in the Maghreb. During the colonial period, Oriental despotism evolved into the projection of the colonialists’ fantasies of subjugation, and the colonial sovereignty which they sought to accomplish without constraints in the mythic vastness of the Oriental lands. This paper explores how the illusion of the Oriental despot takes us to the deepest corridors of colonial sovereignty in North Africa.