I have not read Belloc. I am honestly quite poorly read in the traditional sense, because I eschew reading other people's opinions of what happened, much preferring to read actual legal documents, annals and looking at treaties. My basic assumption is a fundamentally Catholic and Christian one: that human beings are everywhere the same, with similar motives, and always have been since the dawn of man. So, culture and leadership inflect the expression of human desires, but only to a degree. The human desires are the same, and medieval Japanese or the Chippewa hunting parties are not really any more difficult to understand than modern Americans. Given the extremely multiracial nature of my family, I have had nothing but resounding confirmation of this intellectual prejudice of mine. Although it's not true, technically-speaking, that there is nothing new under the sun, it is true in terms of the human heart and human motivations.
You mention the difference between Catholic and Protestant colonization, and it is so, yet between the three Catholic colonial powers: Spain, Portugal and France there were nevertheless key differences that made the outcomes quite different. Of note, although Brazil speaks Portuguese, and the rest of Latin America speaks Spanish, the ties with Spain are distant and vague, nothing like the close heart-ties between England and America, and certain nothing like the universal sense of "La Francophonie", with French troops to back it up!, that still persists in most of the former French Empire. Consider that there are over a million French citizens in the Americas, and that the EU literally touches Canada (the islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon are integral parts of France), and the EU is literally in the Caribbean (the departments of Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana are not colonies, but integral parts of France, with seats in Parliament and direct votes for the President - like Hawaii vis-a-vis the USA); there is a strong difference between French colonial history and everyone else's.
We needn't parse it too hard. When the French spoke of "la mission civilizatrice", they were completely seriously. When they spoke of "black Frenchmen", they MEANT it, and blacks and whites were on a plane of complete juridical equality in France, not a sham equality, since the 19th Century.
It is true that the King himself is gone, and has been gone since 1870, but the centralizing power, the centripetal force of the French state, remains. The French State is at the apex of all things in France, and the French, left right and center, cannot envision how it could be otherwise and run effectively. On the margins there is SOME appetite (mostly in the UDF) to try and disengage the day-to-day management of all affairs by the state, but even among the UDF there is no belief that the State doesn't have the POWER and RIGHT to regulate everything. It is, rather, the sense that the State doesn't do some things well, and so should ALLOW private actors greater freedom of action, always, however, subject to supervision.
Une foi, une loi, un Dieu, un Roi! is still the principle of France, really, though the "King" is now "la Republique">
"liberte egalite fraternite" all sound great on paper. Unfortunately, in practice, it is nowhere near true. After living in France for more than 12 years, I have found the French to be anything but. They are racist,anti-semitic,anti-American.I realize this is a large generalization with exceptions, but on the whole, it is asrounding to see people give lip service to those values, and live exactly opposite.
The leftist elites are the most guilty on the anti-semitic and anti-American counts, although I was shocked to find it on all levels of French society.