In 1925-26, the centre-left government of the Cartel des Gauches found itself managing two major crises in the French colonies: the so-called ‘Druze revolt’ in Syria (in fact a widespread uprising with nationalist characteristics) and the Rif uprising led by ‘Abd al-Karim in Morocco. The two were linked, both in reality—the emerging insurrection in Syria had benefited from the redeployment of troops from the Levant to Morocco—and in the minds of French deputies. Although the government tried to avoid a parliamentary debate on the issue, it found itself attacked from both sides in the Parliament: by the Communist left, which both rejected the colonial project and invoked raw memories of the Great War to criticize the expenditure of French lives; and by right-wing deputies (by no means all of them from the extreme end of the political spectrum) who accepted France’s colonial mission but used these crises to attack the Cartel’s management of it—and, implicitly or explicitly, of France’s political destiny. The Cartel was forced to recall the left-wing general Maurice Sarrail, its own high-profile appointment as High Commissioner in Beirut. This paper focuses on the Syrian uprising and the ‘affaire Sarrail’, though it also refers—as the parliamentary debates did—to the simultaneous conflict in Morocco. Drawing on parliamentary records and the contemporary French and Syrian press, as well as archival material on the uprising, it seeks to demonstrate that the debate about colonial affairs was only indirectly concerned with the colonies themselves. The stances that deputies across the chamber took on colonial affairs were shaped more by metropolitan political struggles than by any profound knowledge of or engagement with events in the colonies, however bloody. Yet the decisions taken in the metropole did have a direct effect on the colonies, notably as credits voted to augment the military budget funded the repression of these anti-colonial uprisings. The colonized populations, meanwhile, were not represented in the metropolitan parliament; it was only through such crises that they could impinge on its debates. The paper thus intervenes in the long-running debate over the place of imperialism in metropolitan society and politics, to show that metropolitan politicians (and metropolitan society) could be profoundly committed to the colonial project on the basis of a very superficial understanding of the realities of French colonial government—and the colonized population’s reactions to it.