The History of French Colonial Policy, 1870-1925

Stephen H. Roberts

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429614392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Published in 1963: The author gives a clear and accurate account of the immense development of France as a colonial power which, in an incredibly short space of time, was to control one third of Africa. He drew his material not only from the scanty formal literature then available, but also by carefully evaluating and selecting from large mass of controversial material to be found in deliberate propaganda, parliamentary debates, and the often suspect offical documentation.

PART I

FRENCH COLONIAL POLICY IN THEORY

CHAPTER I

GENERAL COLONIAL POLICY

WHEN the question of colonization arose in the nineteenth century, France had a tradition and a legacy with which to face it. The tradition was that of the first overseas Empire and of the long combat with England for primacy in the New World. Colbert, Frontenac, La Salle, d’Iberville, Martin, Dupleix—the names unrolled themselves in a mist of adventurous memory, and few thought of Law, or the hide-bound Intendants, or the way in which the French at home had deliberately dissipated the colonial gains. The tradition was rather a rose-coloured view of the grandiose schemes of the past,—of Dupleix’s essentially Latin diplomacy, of the line of forts to hem in the English settlements to the Atlantic seaboard, of Jolliet and Marquette pushing down the great Mississippi water, of the huge Louisiana scheme which would have written “Closed” on the English chapter in America, of the empire of the Antilles that was as rich as the Dutch spice-islands, and of the grip of the barques and caravels of Dieppe on the lucrative African trade. These were the very stuff of romance,—tales of “the days when the world was wide,” and when the French adventurer was a mixture of Franfois Villon and a Jesuit father, a compound of adventurous bonhomie and mystic faith. Shrinking from the parochialism of the restored Bourbons and the Monarchy of July, France dreamed of the past.

This was especially the case when the peace of 1816 finally wrested most of the Empire from French hands. The Empire which had been at its zenith under Louis XIV had gone bit by bit. France had died of a virtual suicide in India, of inanition in Canada, and, in the rest of North America, from blindly refusing to face the facts of Colbert’s riparian policy in Louisiana. The Seven Years’ War had been the turning-point: it definitely ended the French dreams of a new Empire beyond Europe; and, from then until the conquest of Algeria, the country spoke of departed glories. History under these conditions was at once a grievance and an outlet for repressed romantic instincts. The Frenchman liked to dream, and liked to intensify his dreams by the sense of injustice under which he laboured. Hence the strength of the tradition; hence the curiously poignant way in which this colonial question was regarded. It was on a plane of emotional intensity unknown in the England of that time; it was a living passion, because nowhere is a tradition created as quickly as in France, and nowhere does national self-delusion on any desired theory reach such an intensity.

The tradition left over from the First Empire was thus partly a vision, partly a crystallization of the nation’s wrongs. But the actual legacy was of a different kind. Here the French were on firm foundations. In the first place, they received from the First Empire certain principles and methods of colonization that were deemed to be ingrained in the French spirit and that formed part and parcel of every colonial scheme in which France has dabbled. It was never doubted, for instance, that colonization, in some vaguely metaphysical way, was an especial attribute of the French nation. “Our race is expansive,” cried Louis Madelin,¹ and this was unhesitatingly accepted as a principle of 1789, even by those who, for economic or political reasons, would have limited colonization in practice. Expansiveness was a natural Gallican attribute: so too was the manner of that expansion,—and here we get to the root of the influence of the First Empire. This Empire bequeathed to nineteenth-century France its colonial creed,—a creed summed up in the twin dogmas of assimilation and the Pacte Colonial. In the same unquestioning kind of way in which they accepted the Gallican capability of colonization, the French accepted the method. Expansion was to be the expansion of France, of French civilization, of French ideas, for how could it be otherwise? Was not colonization national proselytism? What better fate for the Indians of Canada than to be administered under the Paris code and the details of French law? Were not French institutions and the sacred principles of 1789 a goal greatly to be desired for races that had not progressed so far? And was it not as logical as it was desirable that the tiniest embellishment of French civilization should be transferred to the newest settlement? The French flag meant France; France meant the apex of civilization; and the duty of a civilizing nation was to proselytize. For what otherwise would be the significance of the phrase with which France described her colonies, “La France outremer”? Assimilation à outrance was thus the most striking legacy which the first colonial Empire left to the second. Preaching abstract logic and the universalism of the minutiœ of French life, it cast all French colonialism into a preordained mould, thus making development synonymous with artificial growth along certain prescribed lines. Assimilation in politics and law, the subordination of the Pacte Colonial in economics—that was the well-defined theory of the First Empire; and it was as clearly the theory on which the new Empire was raised, at least until 1910. Indeed, theory to the contrary, these ideas permeate many parts, if not the whole, of French colonial life even to-day.

With this went the second legacy, which can only be explained by that partial logicality which makes the Frenchman, while pledging his troth unreservedly to logic, so utterly illogical. This was a spirit of opposition to all colonization. The philosophers set the tone, and others followed without thinking, so that anti-colonialism became almost a cult in France, and one so deeply implanted that, despite utterly changed conditions, it has not yet been eradicated and is still one of the gravest menaces to the effective development of the French Empire. Voltaire commenced the attack, a line in his Candide containing the catchword that French Canada was only “a few acres of snow,”² not worth troubling about. Then Rousseau’s humanitarianism was invoked to identify colonization with exploitation, and France was intrigued with the idyllic state of native bliss described or invented by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Literature and philosophy were practically unanimous: and the economists, confined to the localist land-emphasis of the Physiocrats, supported them, with the exception of Quesnay and his school. There was thus a solid phalanx of anti-colonial influences in eighteenth-century France. Nor did the Revolutionary philosophers change this trend: rather did they intensify it, crying aloud with Robespierre³ for the death of the colonies on the slightest pretext. Stray voices like that of Barrere urging the dependence of commerce on colonization went unheeded, and, on the whole, the attitude of Voltaire, strengthened as it was by the test of 1789, became stereotyped as the only logical and therefore orthodox opinion. Anti-colonialism came thus to be deemed not only logical and philosophical, but so obvious that the very questioning of its veracity was almost tantamount to treason to the principles of the Republic. A cause that had commenced by being logical was now based on emotion, and deemed to be so palpably clear as to admit of no cavil.

Unfortunately, Napoleon did little to clear this situation: he was too busy to devote adequate attention to the colonial problem, and his chief evolutionary importance in this regard was to crush the administrative and commercial liberty conferred on the colonies by the Revolution.⁴ Then, after him, the restored Bourbons were not merely apathetic, but clearly opposed to colonial ventures, and, from 1815 to 1830, France was virtually without colonies.

Nor did the occupation of a few coastal-posts in Algeria in 1830 lead to a changed outlook, for the dissensions caused by the annexation, and the failures of the first few decades, intensified the feeling of opposition to the colonies per se. France went to Algeria partly to provide some other scope than political agitation for the nation’s energies, partly to restore French credit abroad, and partly to annoy England.⁵ And she stayed there primarily because she could not evacuate and save her face, but largely because of a kind of inevitable but unwanted fatalism. For years, no decision was taken between the ideas of evacuation or limited conquest or complete occupation: France simply stood still, colonial unpopularity increasing the while. The only partisans of the colonial cause were the Midi deputies who wanted commercial expansion, the strategists who dreamed of the Mediterranean as “a French lake,” and the patriots who prated of “la gloire.” But these were in a decided minority, and, up to 1840, Parliament followed the “Agrarians,” the successors of the Physiocrats, in systematically opposing colonial development. Not one economist declared in favour of colonization, except Sismondi, and his protests were unheard during the triumph of J. B. Say.⁶ And a flippant mot completed the victory of the non-expansionists—that “Algeria is a rock without water, a place where only air is found, and even that is bad!”

It was little wonder, then, that there was an almost completely sterile period in the history of French colonization up to 1870; and the attitude towards Algeria (which was limited to the coastal-fringe north of Kabylie), merely proved the case. The “old colonies,” dismembered fragments of the first colonial Empire, were stagnant and crushed under Napoleon’s régime of excessive centralization, and were under naval martinets appointed by the Ministry of the Marine. The three privileged islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe and Reunion), it is true, were under “the régime of law,” but, even in their case, the colonial assemblies had practically no power, and all administrative and financial matters were administered by and from Paris. All alike were under the Pacte Colonial, the analogue to the Navigation Acts of England, which had been reestablished in 1802. These restrictions were supposed to go with the triumph of free-trade in France in 1861, but really, “she abolished all that was unfavourable to herself, all that favoured the colonies.” Even the reform of 1866, giving the colonial councils-general the right to impose tariffs, was conceded only to Algeria and the three privileged sugar-islands, and was at once regretted. On the whole, the governing principle was still the subordination of the colonies to the mother country.⁷

On the other hand, the groping experiments of the sixties, ill-defined and almost annulled as they were, had some results; and, by 1870, it was vaguely realized that some benefits might accrue to all from the development of the colonies. The new free-trade policy of France, especially after the 1860 treaties, powerfully aided this idea; and, however much the actual application of the reforms might be retarded, the very promulgation of the schemes of 1861 and 1866 anticipated the decline, the disappearance even, of the old Pacte Colonial. Up till then, colonists had been forbidden to buy foreign manufactured goods, or to sell their goods in foreign markets; but, in theory at least, these restrictions no longer held. It was for the new Republican government of 1871 either to make the facts conform to theory or to restore the old position.⁸

In 1871, the French colonies were weak and scattered units, and opinion regarding them frankly hostile, although to some extent leavened by the reform-spirit of the preceding decade.⁹ In all, the Empire included less than a million square kilometres and five million people, and most of these were in Algeria. Even there, the boundary was uncertain; effective occupation had only gone as far as the Mitidja plain; the whole land was threatened by a revolt of Islam; and exploitation had scarcely commenced. There were certain scattered territories in the Senegal basin, but, although Faidherbe had pacified the coastal regions, the Senegal River was not yet reached. The Ivory Coast was not thought of, and a. few trading-posts draggled along the steam-baked coast of Guinea and the Congo. Outside of Africa were the “old colonies,” a few sugar-islands which were the prey of a labour-shortage and the competition of beet-sugar. Then there were the fragments of St. Pierre et Miquelon, a group of islands off the coast of Newfoundland; an unexplored piece of Guiana which seemed only useful as an alternative to the guillotine in getting rid of undesirables; five towns in India; the undeveloped New Caledonia and Tahiti in the Pacific, Cytherean countries which were useful for exiling the most incompetent officials; and a small hold, of a vague extent and a still vaguer security, on Cochin-China and the Mekong valley. Not one unit in this disconnected congeries was prospering; the trade of Cochin-China, it is true, was developing, but in foreign hands: the other colonies were either, like the Pacific islands, in a trance of inertia, or, like the sugar-colonies, rapidly declining. Their total commerce amounted only to 600 million francs a year, and of this a third was in foreign hands. Yet for this privilege, France paid 30 million francs, Algeria alone receiving an annual subsidy of 22 millions! Colonization thus seemed a particularly onerous form of bounty on industry, and it was little wonder that the public viewed the colonies through the eyes of the recent Mexican catastrophe, and would readily have accepted the abandonment of all colonial ventures, had that been possible.

Under these conditions, the anti-colonial feeling in France could be easily explained. This positive revulsion has been the most important feature of French colonization; without it, the history of French expansion in the last fifty years is meaningless, for it was felt in every colony. It is the thread of unity running through the whole, and practically all events connected with colonization may be explained by it. Indeed, it is difficult nowadays to conceive the bitterness and the emotional intensity of this feeling, because colonies have never evoked in England, even in the thirties and at the time of Gladstone’s “Great Betrayal” of the Transvaal, such a concerted furore of opposition as they have in France since 1870. The feeling has been almost a passion, and moments have not been lacking when to advocate colonization almost branded one as a traitor. Nor was it, as in England, a party matter. Liberal parochialism can explain the English ban on forward policies in the seventies, but no similar explanation on a party basis would be applicable in the case of France. There, the opposition was national, and supported by the same intensity, the same excessive passion, which France brought to the question of the Rhine. Indeed, the two issues were closely connected: an expansionist was a traitor to France on the Rhine, and the patriots wishing to reserve every ounce of France’s power for Continental schemes, opposed all colonies. Practically Jules Ferry alone, and later, the military expansionists, stood aloof from the general condemnation; the consensus of opinion on the matter was literally amazing, and there was not a single colony but suffered from it.

Louis Philippe’s old fight for Algeria now became almost insignificant as compared with the struggles for Tunisia and Tonkin. France delayed from 1862 to 1885 in taking Tonkin, and Dupre and Gamier, the leaders, expected repudiation and disgrace even in the case of their success. They staked their lives against failure, and, it would seem, their careers against success. Tunisia was given to France by Ferry against the country’s wish, and he twice fell for the sake of the colonies. His forward policy in Tunisia led to the fall of his first ministry (November, 1881), while his Tonkin policy literally hurled his second from power (March, 1885). “The doctrine of effacement,” as it was called, was in the ascendant, and Clemenceau’s fervid oratory rode roughshod over the more reasonable but less vehement advocates of colonization. Egypt was abandoned to Eng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PART I.—FRENCH COLONIAL POLICY IN THEORY
• PART II.—FRENCH COLONIAL THEORY IN PRACTICE
• LIST OF CHIEF COLONIAL OFFICIALS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX