Charles Keith: Thanks.
As Professor Merriman said,
I'm going to talk today about
the French Empire from 1871,
the year that the course
begins, to 1914,
which is the beginning of World
War I,
of course;
which is something that you'll
talk about, if I'm not mistaken,
in the lecture right after this
one.
So, I'm going to start the
lecture with a passage from a
French novel called Le
Maître de la Mer,
The Master of the Sea.
It was written by Vicomte
Melchior de Vogüé
published in 1900;
so, right in the middle of the
period we're talking about.
The novel is about an Army
officer who is so upset by the
defeat at the hands of Prussia
and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine
that he leaves France to go
serve in a regiment in the
Sudan,
in the heart of West Africa.
At one point during the novel
the young officer returns to
France and he meets an older
general from his father's
generation.
So, during their conversation
the older general expresses some
anger that the young officer
seemed to be more concerned with
adventuring,
in his words,
than with recovering the lands
where his father's generation
had fallen.
The young officer replied to
him, this is a quote,
"are we to blame if the world
around us has changed and grown
all out of recognition?
Diplomacy used to be concerned
with the Mediterranean and the
Bosphorus;
now it has to do with China and
the Congo.
The great states of Europe are
dividing up the other continents
of Africa and Asia in the way
they used to divide up countries
like Italy and Poland.
What used to be a European
balance of power is now a world
balance of power,
and any country which does not
wish to become less important
must obtain as much new
territory as our rivals are
doing.
It is through colonies,"
concluded the young officer,
"that we shall one day achieve
your life's ambition"--the
ambition of the older general.
"I give you my word of honor,"
he said, "that you are mistaken
in thinking that this ambition
has died in our hearts."
During the period I'm talking
about today the French Empire
quite literally exploded.
An empire that in 1871 had been
little more than parts of
Algeria and a military presence
in parts of North Africa,
Southeast Asia,
and a few small spits of land
in the Pacific and the Caribbean
exploded to include large swaths
of North Africa and West Africa,
most of mainland Southeast
Asia, parts of the Middle East,
and territories in the Pacific
and the Caribbean as well.
By the end of World War I the
French Empire spanned eleven
million kilometers and one
hundred million inhabitants.
So, just to put it in the
context of France,
that's twice as many people as
lived in metropolitan France at
that time, roughly.
So, I chose the passage from
the novel to begin this lecture
because it captures what I think
are the two central themes in
this period in French colonial
history.
Both the young officer and the
older general in the novel are
serving in the French army
because they are obsessed with
recovering the national strength
and prestige that France had
lost in the devastating defeat
to Prussia.
Now, the older general thinks
about this in terms of
recovering Alsace-Lorraine,
in terms of continental
rivalries, but the young officer
sees France's road to greatness
in very different terms;
he sees it overseas,
outside of Europe.
So, my first point is that in
these decades after 1871 French
nationalism became increasingly
inseparable from the idea of a
large and strong colonial
empire.
France had had colonies for a
long time, but the fusion of a
more modern and mass form of
nationalism with colonialism was
new in French history,
to this period,
and it was something that drove
the explosion of the French
Empire,
that I just described,
to its heights in the years
just after World War I.
The second point that I want to
make about the novel is simply
that it was a novel.
It was one of many novels
written about empire during this
period.
And novels were just one of the
many forms of popular culture
that began to reflect France's
growing presence overseas.
Indeed, during the late
nineteenth century empire became
something that more and more
French people experienced
directly,
whether through popular culture
or sometimes in much more active
ways, serving in the army,
or in the navy,
or in colonial administrations,
or even settling lands that had
not been part of France when
those people were born.
So, what I would like you to
take away from this lecture is
that during the Third Republic
empire became a central part of
French national identity.
Empire was something that all
political platforms in France
discussed and took positions on.
It was part of the idea of
French national greatness that
citizens were beginning to learn
in the schools of the Republic.
It was in the national
newspapers that more and more
people were reading,
and it even for some became a
career and a way of life.
So, in its many forms empire
during this period became a
common experience for French
people,
whether they were from
Brittany, or from Burgundy,
or from Provence or the
Ardèche.
In short, empire was a central
part of making people French.
Although it was in the decades
after 1871 that France's
colonial empire truly became a
part of national identity,
empire had a long past in
French history.
During the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries France had
territories in the Caribbean
and, of course,
in North America.
Although many of these were
lost during the era of the
French Revolution,
one of the Revolution's most
powerful legacies was the idea
of a moral imperative to
continue the revolution beyond
France's borders;
in other words,
France had not only a right but
a duty to bring French
civilization to the rest of the
world.
Even as the revolution raged in
France at the close of the
eighteenth century,
the Republic's armies had
poured outward into Europe to
bring the rights of men to the
monarchies of the continent.
This continued,
of course, with Napoleon who
extended the reach of the nation
completely across Europe before
its hands froze in the cold
Russian plains.
Napoleon also believed,
and this is important,
that France was destined to
quote/unquote,
"civilize those who were not
only not French,
but not European."
Napoleon attempted to colonize
Egypt just at the turn of the
nineteenth century,
and his attempt combined a
messianic belief in science and
progress, an absence of any real
knowledge about non-Western
world,
and a predisposition for the
idea that non-white races were
inferior to whites,
to Europeans.
And this was a potent
combination of nationalism with
ideas about race and
civilization that would drive
French colonialism until its
bitter end.
This combination came to be
known in French as the
mission civilisatrice,
the civilizing mission,
the idea that a Greco-Roman
heritage, Christianity,
the legacy of the
Enlightenment,
modern science,
capitalism, that all these
things made France inherently
superior and gave it a moral
responsibility to export these
legacies of its civilization to
the less fortunate.
So, although France had a long
history of empire,
at the birth of the Third
Republic in 1871 the upheavals
of many revolutions and the
Paris Commune meant that the
overseas empire had been fairly
small for a long time,
and that it was at that point
pretty marginal in national
politics and culture.
In the years before the French
defeat by Prussia the French
government's control over
territorial expansion was
actually pretty limited.
The main urge to expand came
not from French politicians but
often from soldiers and sailors
in far off places who were often
prompted by missionaries who
urged intervention to save
souls,
or by businessmen who urged
intervention to make a quick
franc.
Even the bulk of French
expansion in Algeria after 1830
(Algeria was really France's
major colony in the years--for
most of the nineteenth century)
even this was largely the work
of generals who waved the flag
and shot their rifles,
often in direct opposition to
the wishes of national
governments in Paris.
So, at times it really seemed
like the French Empire was
little more than a giant system
of relief for the armed
services.
As one former colonial governor
wrote, "what drove us to expand
in far away places was above all
the need to find something to
occupy the army and the navy."
But this began to change in
important ways after 1871.
In French politics after the
end of the disastrous war with
Prussia the overriding question
for many was how France could
regain its place as a national
power,
as a great power among Europe.
The war with Prussia had shown
that Germany was a nation on the
move, and England's dominance in
world affairs,
especially its empire,
was unquestioned.
As you all know by now,
politics in France during the
1870s and the 1880s were
tumultuous, to say the least.
As France hobbled from one
affaire to the next
critics attacked the Republic as
a cesspool of intrigue and
scandal.
Periodic industrial downturns
brought political challenges
from left and right,
as Boulangism and socialism
both threatened to overthrow the
Republic.
France also suffered from the
lowest birthrate among Western
European nations.
So, emasculated militarily,
slumping economically,
shrinking demographically,
France appeared to many people
to be in a state of inevitable
decline.
Staring at this specter of
national stagnation and fading
international relevance,
many luminaries of the young
Third Republic believed that the
key to recovering France's
greatness lay in the expansion
of its colonial empire.
Perhaps the most famous of
these advocates of colonial
expansion among the political
elite was Jules Ferry,
who was of course the famous
advocate of the école
républicaine and the
battles over that in the 1870s
and 1880s.
Ferry's arguments for imperial
expansion in many ways
encapsulate French colonial
ideology in the late nineteenth
century.
Ferry believed,
in his words,
quote, "that colonial policy
was the daughter of industrial
policy;
enriched states where capital
abounds and accumulates,
where the manufacturing system
is undergoing continual growth,
export is an essential factor
in public prosperity."
In other words,
colonies were essential to a
strong national economy.
And the rise of Germany and
even the rise of the United
States and Russia meant that
France needed exclusive access
to new markets and sources for
raw materials that in the eyes
of many people only colonies
could provide.
Closely tied to these economic
imperatives of empire were
strategic ones.
Rivalries between nations in
Europe, as they often had in the
past, spilled out into the rest
of the world,
and a nation that wished to
survive had to compete.
Quote, this is Ferry again,
"in today's Europe,
in this competition of the many
rivals whose power we see
growing around us,
a policy of abstention is very
simply the road to decadence.
In the times in which we live
nations are only great in
accordance with the activities
which they develop.
Exerting ourselves without
action, regarding all expansion
in Africa and the Orient as a
trap or an adventure,
to live in this way,
believe me, is to abdicate our
position and to tumble from the
first to the third or the fourth
rank of nations."
Ferry also believed in what he
called the humanitarian and
civilizing side of the question.
In his words,
quote, "superior races have a
right vis-à-vis inferior
races," he wrote.
"But they also have a duty,"
and this is echoing the language
of the French revolution,
almost directly,
"they also have a duty to bring
civilization,
Western government,
education, medicine and morals
to other peoples."
So, for men like Jules Ferry it
was the greatness of the nation,
of the French nation,
that made the expansion of the
French Empire not only necessary
but legitimate.
It was the colonial empire that
would save France from losing
ground to its rivals,
and that would help elevate the
cultures and the civilizations
of the peoples that France
colonized.
So, in the 1880s politicians
like Ferry brought France's
colonial ambitions into national
politics in ways never seen
before.
Indeed, just a few years after
national political power swung
decisively to the Republicans,
in 1879, Ferry's government
launched a campaign to try to
jump-start France's stagnating
presence in southeast Asia by
taking over the northern half of
what is now Vietnam;
it was then called Tonkin,
and the French had tried to
take this on several occasions
but had failed.
On the pretext of defending
persecuted Vietnamese Catholics
and attacking pirates,
the French sent several
companies of soldiers north to
attack the capital of Hanoi.
The campaign was just a little
too ambitious,
and a French captain,
a man named Rivière,
ended up with his head on a
pikestaff in the middle of the
city.
Yes, this happens places other
than France, heads getting cut
off.
Ferry's aggressive colonial
expansion was really very
unpopular at first.
Georges Clemenceau accused him
of high treason and crowds
outside shouted for Ferry's head
on a pikestaff next to
Rivière's.
Nevertheless,
Ferry's insertion of colonial
affairs onto the national stage
was a sign of the prominence
that empire would come to play
in national politics in the
years to come.
Just after Ferry's demise in
national politics,
French colonial activity began
to expand at a rapid rate as the
Third Republic raced to compete
with the British,
and the Germans, and the Dutch.
By the 1890s debates over
colonial policy had become a
standard part of discussions in
the Chamber of Deputies,
and every government after
Jules Ferry's presided over a
steadily expanding colonial
empire.
This new prominence of colonial
issues in French national
politics was in many ways due to
the activities of a growing and
very influential colonial lobby
in French society.
So, in many ways it was this
colonial lobby that was most
responsible for imagining and
spreading the idea that national
greatness was closely tied to
colonial expansion.
What was this colonial lobby?
I want to emphasize that it was
not a single organization or
formal movement,
it really was more a large and
very diverse group of
individuals and associations who
put forward the case for
colonial expansion in many
different ways.
The colonial lobby was not
organized by an executive
committee;
it had no organized sections
and no clearly defined program
or electoral platform.
It was far beyond the vocal
colonial advocates in the
Chamber of Deputies.
It included men like the
informal group of explorers and
geographers who met every week
in Paris at the Petite Vache
brasserie to share their
fascination with exotic places,
and to talk about how the
government might be able to
better promote and support these
voyages of exploration.
The colonial lobby included
shipbuilders,
and railway magnates,
and factory owners,
people who believed that the
colonies were the way to--were
the path to untold material
wealth.
It included missionaries who
saw in the, quote/unquote,
"heathen races" of Africa and
Asia a potential source for
converts to replace the French
who were starting to skip
church,
and starting to use birth
control in even greater numbers.
It included writers and
journalists for whom the
colonies were little more than
good copy.
So, those who made up the
colonial lobby weren't united at
all by the same interests,
but it was precisely this
diversity of their interests
that shows how compelling empire
was becoming for so many
different parts of French
society.
So, indeed during the 1880s and
1890s the assumption
increasingly became that the
French colonies served the
nation,
they served the nation as a
whole, in ways that went further
and further beyond economic and
geo-strategic necessities.
Many parts of French society
increasingly came to see empire
as a solution to national
problems.
In the words of the historian
Gwendolyn Wright,
the colonies were
quote/unquote,
"a laboratory of modernity;"
they were places to further and
protect the destiny of the
nation, literally,
quite literally through
experiments in nation building.
Before the Third Republic
colonies had been seen--really,
the social value of colonies
was little more than seen as
getting rid of people that the
State considered to be
undesirable.
The French penal colony in New
Caledonia was a good example of
this, where over 4,000 of the
communards had been sent
in 1871.
But toward the end of the
century this began to change.
Social reformers began to see
the colonies as a potential home
for landless peasants,
for the unemployed,
or even for orphans who had no
home in France.
In other words,
colonies were places that could
serve to solve the nation's
problems and not merely lock
them up and throw away the key.
French engineers and social
planners came to see the Empire
as really a vast worksite where
new forms of architecture and
urban planning could be carried
out,
places where experiments could
be carried out to help benefit
France.
Hubert Lyautey was a famous
French military officer and
future administrator in the
colony of Morocco.
He insisted that North Africa
was for France,
quote, "what the far west is
for America,
an excellent testing ground for
creating new energy,
rejuvenation,
and fecundity."
The French military likewise
saw colonies as a training
ground where the army and the
navy could protect and expand
France's overseas interests,
and in doing so could learn to
better defend the nation at
home.
So, as empire became a more
important part of French
national debates it also started
to become an increasingly
central part of popular culture
and life in France.
School children began reading
about colonies in textbooks.
One directive from the Ministry
of Education read that,
quote, "it must not be
forgotten that France is a world
power which possesses colonies
in all parts of the earth.
Let us not have any scruples
about retaining for two years,
just two years,
the attention of French youth
on France.
Let us give them as rich an
image as possible for their
country, of the mother country
and her distant daughters."
French citizens,
already out of school,
began to learn about the empire
in different ways.
For example,
the urban middle classes who
visited the Museum of Man or the
Museum of Natural History in
Paris began to see collections
of art,
of clothing,
and household objects,
and other things collected in
the French Empire by scientific
societies that were brought back
to Paris to be put on display.
The colonies were put on
display in even more spectacular
fashion at international
expositions which were held in
Paris in 1878,1889,
and 1900.
The exposition of 1900,
which quite literally took over
the city of Paris,
in that exposition colonies
were for the first time given
their own separate exposition
grounds in the gardens behind
the Trocadero Palace,
across the Seine from the
Eiffel Tower,
and were, quote,
"set apart enough by the river
to permit the creation of an
atmosphere different from the
rest of the fair."
Entire colonial buildings were
transported to Paris and
rebuilt.
Colonial workmen were brought
to France to execute the detail
and decorative work on the
buildings,
and they remained there
throughout the exhibition,
posing as residents and
merchants in the reconstructed
villages and bazaars,
from far away.
Mosques, temples,
archeological discoveries,
dancers, music and food,
all were brought to create a
self-contained world that
attempted to represent France's
growing empire to the average
French person.
The empire was more than a
periodic occasion for spectacle.
Colonies slowly but surely
crept into the most mundane
forms of everyday life.
Readers of French newspapers,
for example,
like the Petit Journal,
read more and more about the
French empire every day as it
grew.
For the most part,
articles focused on military
encounters and on the French who
fought in them.
African or Asian opponents
merely filled the need in these
stories for an evil or a savage
enemy.
They were a backdrop for main
characters in a drama that
unfolded every day,
a story that more and more
Frenchmen loved to follow.
Other readers read novels that
evoked the exotically
different--the strange customs
of natives,
the bright colors and the
pungent odors of overseas,
and the lure of the desert or
of the jungle.
Pierre Loti,
who was one of the most famous
of these writers,
wrote panoramas of colonial
life that were packed with
adventure,
with danger,
with sex and with local color,
quote/unquote,
"in which hardy Frenchmen lived
the rough life,
the sensual pleasures,
and the fighting spirit of the
Empire."
Artists like Paul Gauguin and
Henri Matisse began painting
Levantine harems and
souks,
African villages and jungles,
temples in Indochina and native
life throughout the Empire.
Colonies were a rich source of
subjects for the growing medium
of photography.
Photographers liked
photographing the rice paddies
in the Mekong River,
Buddhist monks in saffron
robes,
mysterious Muslim women behind
veils, and cannibals with
spears.
These images were reproduced in
books, newspapers,
postcards and other places.
The French encountered empire
in many other ways in their
daily lives.
Colonial influences began to be
heard in music,
for example.
Café and dancehall goers
heard songs like Ma belle
tonkinoise,
about a Frenchman's Vietnamese
concubine.
I can't resist,
I'm going to read it:
"N'entends tu pas a ta
fenêtre celui qui t'aime,
ton quartier-maître?
Je reviens de Tonkin où
j'ai fini, hereux de te revoir,
ma jolie.
J'ai quitté
ma belle tonkinoise.
C'est pour toi,
ma charmante
Françoise.
Tu étais la plus
belle de l'îsle,
loin de toi je n'étais
pas tranquil."
"Don't you hear at your window,
he who loves you,
your quartermaster?
I'm back from Tonkin where I've
finished, happy to see you,
my darling.
I've left my beautiful
Tonkinoise for you my charming
Francois.
For you are the most beautiful
of the isle.
Far from you I was not at
peace."
More bourgeois music lovers
heard orchestral works by
composers like Ravel and
Debussy, who were fascinated by
the sounds of the Orient.
The colonies also came to
suggest new fashions.
Oriental silks and Levantine
frocks, popular in women's
clothing in the early twentieth
century, owed much to this
fascination with the exotic.
Even the goods that people
bought increasingly evoked the
colonies, often through
advertising.
One of the most famous French
advertisements ever,
for example,
is the publicity for Banania,
a sweet powdered beverage made
from bananas that when mixed
with milk makes a breakfast
food.
The yellow Banania box featured
a derogatory caricature of a
smiling African uttering the
pigeon phrase in French,
"y'a bon Banania," "good
stuff Banania."
Things like this brought the
empire all the way to the
breakfast tables of many French
families.
French people even began to
encounter the empire in church.
The last third of the
nineteenth century was a time of
intense Catholic missionary
activity outside of France,
usually in the French colonies,
and churchgoers in France
listened to the appeals of their
priests to donate money to help
a French missionary from their
département away
in far- off Indochina or Senegal
replace a little bamboo or straw
chapel with a proper brick
church.
Of course, there was no better
way to experience,
or more intense way,
I would say,
to experience empire than to
actually go there,
and in the late nineteenth
century more and more French
people did exactly that.
Until the 1880s and the 1890s
there were relatively few French
people in territories that the
French controlled as colonies,
with the exception again of
Algeria, which had about 300,000
French settlers in 1871.
This really was an exception.
Even by the 1880s or 1890s
places like Indochina only had
probably between 20,000 and
30,000, at the most,
maybe even less.
So, at first many of these
French colonies had little more
than administrators,
garrisons of troops,
and some explorers and
missionaries beating the bush
for riches or for souls.
Gradually, however,
more and more French citizens
came to overseas territories,
not for adventure but just to
make a living.
The part of French society most
immediately affected,
of course, was the military,
which went to the colonies in
increasingly greater numbers as
the empire, and resistance to
it,
spread.
Soldiers in the empire risked
long sea journeys,
and tropical diseases,
and miserable pay for the risk
and the adventure that they
thought that they might find
over there.
Missionaries too,
as I mentioned,
went overseas more and more
toward the end of the century to
try to find converts that they
weren't finding in France.
Apart from soldiers,
and traders,
and missionaries were settlers
who increasingly went to the
colonies not for a tour of duty,
but they went there to stay.
Settlers were often committed
to the colonies for life.
They gave up the resources they
possessed at home,
they took to the colonies
whatever capital and whatever
possessions they could get and
could carry with them.
The colonies were not
hospitable places,
needless to say.
Remoteness from France and
relatives, tropical diseases,
and a very understandable
hostility of indigenous
populations were a major
deterrent for many people.
However, a number of French men
and women did dare a new life in
the Maghreb, in Indochina or in
West Africa.
Many were drawn by the
inducements of people who owned
large tracts of land and who
needed people to work and
cultivate this land to help them
turn a profit.
When there weren't enough
Frenchmen, landowners didn't
hesitate to populate their lands
with non-French Europeans like
Italian and Spanish,
some of whom were also in the
colonies as members of the
famous international military
force,
the Légion
Étrangère,
the Foreign Legion.
As the French Empire grew,
life in the empire became,
slowly, more regularized.
The French government began to
replace soldiers and sailors
with administrators who
exercised the will of the State.
These administrators held
responsibility for collecting
taxes, for overseeing spending,
and for keeping law and order,
which often mean authorizing
violence against those who
resisted the spread of the
French Empire.
Increasingly these
administrators came not from the
ranks of the military but from
new schools founded in France to
train people for service in the
Empire.
One of the most famous of these
was the École Coloniale,
founded in 1887,
which taught future
administrators a little bit
about the language and the
culture of the place that they
were being sent,
as well as the basics of the
position that they were going to
fill when they were over there.
The French government also did
its best to draw professionals
to newly acquired territories;
lawyers, doctors,
engineers, surveyors,
all of these were much needed
in the empire,
and Paris offered subsidiaries
to get qualified candidates to
take a post overseas.
As the empire continued to
grow, more and more women came
to live in these places that had
for a long time been perceived
as much too dangerous for them.
In many ways the domesticity
that the arrival of women
brought to French life in the
colonies was the clearest sign
of the idea of domesticating and
even taming French colonies and
integrating them into the sphere
of greater France.
Places that had once been
considered too dangerous for
women became places where women
eager to marry went to find a
husband.
A book called La Femme aux
colonies,
The Women in the Colonies,
published in 1900,
assured interested women that
the empire could provide a
hospitable home,
quote,
"a woman who arrives in Tonkin,
for example,
is sure of success.
There are no women in Tonkin
who fail to marry."
There were, of course,
women who did not go to the
colonies simply for marriage,
and even those who did found
themselves pushed out of normal
social expectations by the
necessities of colonial life.
Many women in the colonies,
for example,
were drawn into humanitarian
work at hospitals or in distance
areas or orphanages;
which is ironic in light of the
positions that many of their
husbands held in the colonial
administration,
doing work that couldn't
exactly be described as
humanitarian,
of course.
So, just to put the expansion
of the French population in the
colonies in the context of one
place,
let me just mention the
Algerian town of Annaba during
this period.
Before the French conquest,
Annaba had a population of
about 4,000 Arabs and Berbers,
some Turks and a fairly large
Jewish population.
The French captured Annaba
fairly early,
in 1832;
but, for many years the
European population of the city
was really little more than the
soldiers who kept control of the
city.
By the mid-1840s,
however, there were 5,000
Europeans.
As time went by mines and
forests in that area became an
attractive source of employment
for people.
A railway line was built,
and the city and infrastructure
slowly grew.
In fact, the city was also at
that time renamed Bône.
A transient population of
Europeans, mostly French,
evolved into a rooted and
stable one.
By the 1890s,
Europeans born in Bône
outnumbered migrants from
overseas and French citizens
formed the majority of the
residents of the city.
Algeria is by far,
of course, the French colony
with the largest French
population,
but the others grew and grew
during this time,
and by World War I there would
be almost a half a million
French citizens scattered
throughout the French Empire.
So, what was life like for
these people?
Few men and women in the Empire
had lives that were as exciting
or as romantic as the newspapers
and popular songs made the
colonial experience out to be.
Despite being drawn to the
empire by the promise of
adventure and prosperity,
few people who went over there
found either.
Disease took a large toll on
French people in the colonies,
many of whom fell victim to
malaria or yellow fever,
dengue fever or leprosy,
before they had spent much time
in the colony at all.
Attack was often--always a
concern, in fact,
as were accidents in deserts or
jungles.
Medical care in the colonies
was often pretty inadequate.
Working conditions were harsh.
Most settlers,
for example,
had to build and maintain their
own houses, clear forests or
brush, and set up their own
shops.
Colonial goods were often
susceptible to rapidly changing
market conditions and many
colonists ended up in debt.
Many benefits offered by the
French State to its citizens
didn't extend to the empire,
and subsidies that people had
received to move to Algeria or
to Morocco were quickly
exhausted.
Social life in the colonies was
pretty limited.
Bigger cities had theaters,
and some had art galleries and
concert halls,
but in most places French
citizens might spend months
without the sight of another
European.
Most of the French who lived in
colonies never abandoned the
stereotypical attitudes that
they had about their own
superiority,
and these attitudes,
of course, were often
reinforced by French laws and
institutions that gave whites
more privileges than indigenous
populations.
For the most part,
life was really quite separate
between whites and others.
European neighborhoods again
had a town hall,
theaters, shops lining shaded
streets and cafés.
Very often indigenous peoples
were separated from the French
by social barriers and by
physical barriers,
sometimes.
Markets and shops,
mosques and pagodas,
were often apart from French
colonial life.
So, taking us now to World War
I.
When the guns of August began
to roar in August 1914,
the colonial empire was very
near its height.
Paris controlled the second
largest empire in the world,
second only to Britain's.
During the forty years before
the First World War,
the empire spanned these vast
swaths of north and west Africa,
and southeast Asia;
enormous islands like
Madagascar, famous cities like
Timbuktu;
and it even contained parts of
India, the crown jewel of the
empire of their fiercest
national rival.
Colonial promoters lauded the
benefits of an empire that they
said provided international
prestige,
a secure place for investments,
a market for French products,
a source for raw materials,
and a reserve army of soldiers.
Empire had become a popular
part of popular culture,
of daily life,
and even a career for many
French men and women.
In short, empire had become a
fundamental part of the national
identity and in some ways the
national hubris then sweeping
through France,
not only France but the rest of
Europe as well.
Just as many in France cheered
at the declaration of war on
Germany in 1914,
with no idea of what was to
come, few French people in 1914
could see any reason to think
that anything might threaten
this eternal marriage between
France and its outposts
overseas,
between the brave,
beneficent purveyors of French
civilization and the "graceful
natives" under French rule.
For many people France had
recovered completely from its
devastating defeat in 1871,
and from the loss of
Alsace-Lorraine,
to once again become a powerful
nation.
Empire, again,
empire had been a central part
of this national revival.
As one member of the colonial
lobby said in 1912,
quote, "it may be said that it
was colonial expansion which,
coming as it did just after the
events of 1871,
brought the renewal of France.
It was on the day that France
became a colonial power again
that she became once more
conscious of her vitality and
her strength,
and was able to resume her role
in the concert of Europe and on
the world stage.
Today when that role is
becoming so important again in
the concert of Europe,
when France finds herself in
all parts of the world on a
footing with the greatest
European powers,
we may indeed be proud;
we may indeed be proud of the
colonial work which France has
performed."
What was there to be proud of?
Again, this idea of national
expansion and national
greatness, intimately tied to
the perceived positive benefits
of bringing French civilization
abroad.
A member of the Chamber of
Deputies in fact answered this
question, what was there to be
proud of?
Quote: "What nobler or more
inspiring work could one find?
Colonizing means coming in
touch with new races and
civilizations,
and it means achieving the
noblest type of fellowship,
for any form of colonization
which did not successfully seek
to increase the dignity,
the moral standards,
and the wellbeing of the
colonized people would be
uncivilized and unworthy of a
great nation,"
end quote.
Of course, not all was well in
the empire.
I've focused in this lecture so
far on the place of the empire
in domestic politics and
culture.
So, I haven't spoken all that
much about the effect that
French colonization had on the
lives of those in the colonies.
Needless to say,
the realities of empire did not
often coincide with Jules
Ferry's promises to spread the
best of French civilization,
nor did it coincide with the
caricature of the smiling,
graceful African in the popular
press or on the front of the
Banania box on the breakfast
table.
Empire, of course,
was much more complicated than
that.
Few people accepted the rise of
French power without a struggle,
but few could match the
technological advantages then
enjoyed by the French military
and the navy.
As the French Empire spread,
soldiers and sailors put down
one resistance movement after
another,
usually with uncompromising
brutality and often with very
high death tolls.
As French colonial
administrations,
legal systems,
police forces,
replaced the army and the navy,
military repression,
what had been military
repression, took more the
character of an occupation,
dressed up as integration,
the integration of the colonies
into the French nation.
French structures of authority
enforced inequality between
French and other races,
and justified the exploitation
of resources and the political
repression that really were the
realities of everyday life,
for most of the French colonial
subjects.
Cracks--by 1914,
however, cracks began to appear
in this edifice.
Not everybody had been swept up
by France's colonial dreams,
and as the realities of empire
became more and more apparent a
small anti-colonial lobby in
France began to grow.
Like their counterparts in the
colonial lobby,
anti-colonialists opposed
French expansion for a number of
reasons.
For some people,
French colonial adventures
seemed a dangerous
over-extension of French power.
Some people wondered how useful
these dense jungles and barren
deserts could possibly be to
France,
especially when it became clear
that a lot of the financial
returns on colonial expansion
that had been expected did not
come to match these initial
projections.
Some people began to criticize
colonial expansion for moral
reasons, protesting the growing
incidences of colonial
barbarity.
To give one example,
at one public protest in 1906
the famous intellectual and
novelist Anatole France
thundered,
quote, "whites do not
communicate with blacks or
yellow people except to enserf
or massacre them.
The people whom we call
barbarians know us only through
our own crimes.
It is our responsibility as
Frenchmen to denounce the crimes
being committed in our name,"
end quote.
Jean Jaurès,
the leader of the Socialist
party, went even further.
Refuting the myth of the
civilizing mission of the
mission civilisatrice,
in this case in Morocco,
Jaurès said,
quote, "there existed before
the French takeover a Moroccan
civilization capable of the
necessary transformation,
capable of evolution and
progress, a civilization both
ancient and modern.
And there was a seed for the
future, there was a hope.
And let me say that I cannot
pardon those who have crushed
this hope for pacific and human
progress,
African civilization,
by all sorts of ruses and by
the brutality of conquest,"
end quote.
During the 1920s and 1930s,
anti-colonialism would become a
more powerful force in French
politics,
grouping together some
socialists and communists,
some voices within the French
Catholic Church,
journalists and writers,
and a number of intellectuals
and avant-garde artists,
the latter of whom would
famously organize an
anti-colonial counter-
exposition during the famous
1931 Colonial Exposition in
Vincennes.
In 1900 in Paris there had been
no similar anti-colonial
exposition.
However, and I want to
underscore this,
it was not the French
themselves who would eventually
succeed in crumbling the
imperial edifice built over so
many generations.
When the French colonial empire
eventually expired in 1962,
when the French left Algeria,
it did so first and foremost
because of the many forms of
resistance organized and carried
out by those who lived under its
yoke.
That's another topic for
another lecture,
but what I want to say here
sort of in conclusion is that
the First World War was in many
ways the beginning of the end
for the French colonial empire.
It was a tipping point,
after which these myths
underpinning French rule were no
longer sustainable.
They'd been very powerful myths.
Before World War I,
many in the colonized world had
actually asked themselves
whether French civilization
might in fact be superior to
their own.
The French had arrived with
technological advantages that
many in the colonized world did
not have,
and they had achieved military
and political control with few
numbers.
For some people it did seem for
a time that what the French were
saying about the mission
civilisatrice,
the civilizing mission,
might actually in fact be true.
But for many of these people
World War I was a revelation.
During the war,
nearly half a million colonial
subjects were conscripted or
even volunteered,
and many of them did,
to don a blue uniform of
the poilu and to
fight for France.
Many others came to the
metropole to work in shipyards
or in factories.
Those who came saw poverty,
they saw deep rifts in French
society over the place of
religion,
over politics,
and most importantly they saw
their omnipotent colonial
masters in a war that was
literally ripping French
civilization apart.
Although those who came to
France to fight or to work were
a very small minority of
Colonial subjects,
the echoes of the guns of
August reverberated worldwide;
and for countless people
throughout the Empire the Great
War showed that France,
for all its power,
did not and could not
correspond to its own colonial
myths.
"In the minds of other races,"
would write the Governor General
of Indochina in 1931,
"in the minds of other races
the war dealt a terrible blow to
the moral standing of a
civilization which Europeans
claimed with pride to be
superior,
yet in whose name Europeans
spent more than four years
savagely killing each other.
Europe's prestige had been
greatly compromised.
It has long been commonplace to
contrast European greatness with
Asian or African decadence.
The contrast now seems to be
reversed."
Indeed empire would have a very
different relationship to
national identity in the years
after World War I.
For growing numbers of people
in France, empire slowly came to
seem too difficult to maintain,
too expensive,
especially during the lean
years of the Depression in the
1930s,
and perhaps,
for many, even immoral.
What had been a point of
unification in France slowly
turned into a source for
political and cultural tension.
But the opposite was true of
the places that France had
colonized.
Indeed, during the 1920s and
1930s national identities would
be formed outside France,
throughout the French empire,
in opposition to the French
colonial project,
as anti-colonial activists laid
the roots for liberation
movements that would ultimately
tear down the French colonial
empire in the years after the
Second World War;
and that's a subject for
another lecture.
Thanks very much.
