The Colonial Legacy in France

Fracture, Rupture, and Apartheid

Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Dominic Thomas, Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, DOMINIC R THOMAS, Alexis Pernsteiner

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253026514
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Colonialisme et post-colonialisme

Debates about the legacy of colonialism in France are not new, but they have taken on new urgency in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. Responding to acts of religious and racial violence in 2005, 2010, and 2015 and beyond, the essays in this volume pit French ideals against government-sponsored revisionist decrees that have exacerbated tensions, complicated the process of establishing and recording national memory, and triggered divisive debates on what it means to identify as French. As they document the checkered legacy of French colonialism, the contributors raise questions about France and the contemporary role of Islam, the banlieues, immigration, race, history, pedagogy, and the future of the Republic. This innovative volume reconsiders the cultural, economic, political, and social realities facing global French citizens today and includes contributions by Achille Mbembe, Benjamin Stora, Françoise Vergès, Alec Hargreaves, Elsa Dorlin, and Alain Mabanckou, among others.

PART I

COLONIAL FRACTURE / 2005

1.1. THE EMERGENCE OF THE COLONIAL

1

THE REPUBLICAN ORIGINS OF THE COLONIAL FRACTURE

Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard

THE LINKS BETWEEN colonization and the Republic remain of utmost importance and relevance to contemporary debates in French society. Might colonization, in fact, represent the inevitable reverse side of what stands as a universal utopia, one that invariably becomes less and less “pure” as one moves away from the center (the metropole), and as the color of the people who are theoretically placed under its “protection” becomes darker? Such complex questions are no doubt impossible to answer definitively. However, they do have the merit of clearly setting out an issue that has, until now, often been avoided or, at times, even distorted.

In order to better understand these issues in all of their complexities, we will begin by examining an article we published in a special report devoted to the question in 2005,¹ a report in which editors Patrick Simon and Sylvia Zappi undertook a broad reflection on republican politics and identity. A diverse and balanced array of contributions served to highlight the urgency of the discussion, despite what some might call its “paradoxical” nature. In their introduction, the editors explained how

the Republic prides itself on its emphasis on the universal citizen and its disinterest in identities, which belong to the private sphere and therefore do not concern the state or the public sphere. The very idea of identity politics is thought to be an invention of multicultural societies, which are believed to foster group membership, allegiances, labels, and emblems. For the Republic, these represent a hypertrophic expression of identity that serves to hide the issue of inequality behind a show of respect for beliefs and practices. In contrast to such displays of identity and community, the Republic asserts its credo of undifferentiated and neutralized public and political spaces. The universal citizen acts on a neutral playing field, but it has chosen the rules of the game to its own advantage. For although the universal promotes neutrality, it is embodied, as we all know, by historic figures that represent the dominant group. If one were to describe the ideal universal citizen in France of the 2000s, basing oneself on a sociology of its main representatives (politicians, the media, the economic elite, intellectuals, and community associations), the neutral figure would be that of a white middle- or upper-class man.²

And the editors go on to posit that, “On further examination, republican indifference toward identity is more than dubious. It bears a striking resemblance with an identity politics that cannot understand itself as such, precisely because it serves the interests of the ideal citizen. On the surface, the lack of differentiation acts as a guarantee of fair treatment, but in fact, through contrast, it ends up making minority identities visible.”³ We shall therefore position ourselves in a similar perspective with respect to the issue of the Republic’s relationship to the “other,” in this case colonized peoples. Our aim is to analyze the “first moments” of this relationship in the nascent Third Republic.

We shall first concern ourselves with the genealogy of the link between republic and colony. In this perspective, the status of the “other”—descendants of slaves, subjects, or natives⁴—is inconceivable without a broader reflection on French identity and a consideration of its evolution throughout the nineteenth century. Over the course of its slow construction, from the reincorporation of Languedoc to the annexation of Savoy, and including the progressive integration of Brittany, Moselle, and Corsica, as well as the successive back and forth over Alsace-Lorraine, the French territory was in a state of perpetual movement and transformation. In that process, the nation was an ongoing conquest, situated between two utopian references: national insularism and universal expansion.

The first conquest was that of a Carolingian Europe, which was reconstituted under the Empire (and organized into one hundred and twenty “European” departments). This Europe was federative, revolutionary, and imperial, and it began to take possession of other (non-European) worlds with the campaign in Egypt after having “sacrificed” or “lost” overseas territories such as Haiti and Louisiana. Slavery was also reinstated in 1802.⁵ The second was evidenced in many regimes as early as 1830, but it became crystallized under Napoleon III—through the myth of the Arab Kingdom, policies established in Algeria, the conquest of French Cochinchina, and the disastrous Mexican experience as well as the expeditions to China—after the nation’s continental borders were pragmatically “established.” The Third Republic would choose to combine these two aspects, with one particularity: an integration of land and a segregation of men. From this point of view, it would show itself to be even more restrictive than the Ancien Régime, going back on “liberalities” granting citizenship prior to 1870.⁶

The Promotion of a “French Model”

The colonial epic spanning the five continents unfolded in the name of universalist values and human rights. In mainland France, it reaffirmed the republican regime—and thus the power of the state—as well as republican values, which helped bolster a national sentiment. The dynamics of “Greater France” became republican and postrevolutionary, drawing on—and deliberately constructing—a national imaginary that told a story of France’s conquering destiny, beginning with the Crusades.⁷ This quest for a universal destiny capable of promoting the “French model”—by definition, unique, universal, superior—was one of the era’s leitmotivs. France’s vocal support of equality gave it, above others, the right to colonize the world. Beginning in 1871, a wave of colonial conquests asserted a system of values, which the Republic would make its own. That system rooted itself in epics: from Clovis to Charlemagne, from Saint Louis to Joan of Arc, from Robespierre to Napoleon, from the Restoration to Napoleon III’s Arab Kingdom. It formed what would be the substratum of a national identity. The successive conquests—it is often forgotten that France was in a state of almost perpetual war from 1856 to 1961—made France what it was in the twentieth century and legitimized its overseas expansionist projects in the early 1880s; they established the Third Republic as a conquering power.

It would therefore be wrong to assume that the colonial commitment of opportunistic republicans was a kind of accident or betrayal of universalist values. Neither was it—at least not exclusively—a liberty taken by colonial business circles, which were still only emerging and not yet very influential. Nor was it simply a concession to an army seeking to regild its tarnished ego after the defeat in Sedan.⁸ The interest of republicans in colonial expansion, therefore, had other, more structural motives, even if satisfying the army or a fraction of the economic sphere did play a role in the dynamics of colonialism. And one should not be too quick to dissociate republican political ideology from a colonial ideology shaped by republicans themselves in the nascent Third Republic.

On the contrary, all indications suggest that the colonial project fitted perfectly with republicanism’s emerging ideological system. First, because colonization was, from its inception, conceived as a collective project capable of uniting social groups and political parties—even if, in the early 1880s, it was not yet a mobilizing force and remained an important topic of debate in Parliament, notably with respect to the issue of funding these conquests (1884–1886). Second, because the colonial project was associated with essential republican values: progress—Comtian positivism was the philosophy favored by most in the republican camp—equality, and the greatness of the nation.⁹

To that end, it is important to remember the difficult context surrounding such politics. In the early 1880s, the great imperial drive came from opportunistic republicans, but this was by no means a foregone conclusion, and they had to fight for it, since a fraction of republicans and a majority of conservatives and monarchists opposed them. The first of these opponents sought to align foreign policy with the revolutionary principles that formed the foundation of the First Republic—namely, equality and liberty. The second argued against dissipating a national energy that they thought should be focused instead on reconquering Alsace and Lorraine. The parliamentary debates of December 22–25, 1885,¹⁰ were therefore decisive, since they led to a fusion of republican and colonial visions, perpetuated over the long term with the progressive creation of a colonial consensus (1890–1910).

Jules Ferry, who served on two occasions as Prime Minister (1880–1881 and 1883–1885), presented two arguments in favor of colonization during those debates that seem crucial today. The first was that the Republic, like all great nations, needed to assert a policy of colonial strength as a way of guaranteeing its stature with respect to its European rivals (notably, England). That idea later gave rise to Napoleon’s policy of expansion. The second argument was based on the belief that although the Republic’s universalist principles were cited as legitimate reasons for imperialism and the desire to “civilize” natives and progressively bring them into freedom’s light, the “inferior races” to be colonized could only benefit from such principles in time. There was therefore a kind of “epistemological rupture” that turned the act of conquest into a natural extension of the Republic—henceforth a colonizing Republic. It also made the distinction between “whites” and non-European populations into an essential principle of discrimination, conceived as an application of republican principles. This moment was absolutely fundamental, since it was then that racial inequality was first introduced into the heart of the republican colonial project.

Racial discourse would then go on to permeate the political body, through various channels: physical anthropology, Darwinism’s influence on life sciences, sociopolitical conversions of scientific work (for example, through social anthropology), and so forth. And this discourse, which gained rational currency with thinkers at the Paris School of Anthropology, was also massively disseminated throughout popular culture, thanks to a range of novel social apparatuses: “human zoos,” posters for shows, the press, and anthropological post cards.¹¹

Inscribing Itself in a Republican Movement

Republican motives to civilize “natives” quickly attached themselves to the revolutionary project, in the sense that conquest became legitimized by a future horizon—a goal that “natives” could attain over the long term. That was the original principle behind the “civilizing mission,” which would become the central dogma of republican colonial discourse until decolonization. As a concept, the “civilizing mission” was created out of a representation of French uniqueness and the belief in a special link between France and the world. That link was materialized both in its universal mission of “education” and in a pragmatic colonial reaction to the freedoms granted up until that point in the colonial “trading posts” (notably in the Indies and Senegal).

For republicans, the uniqueness of the nation and the special link, both of which gradually took shape in the late nineteenth century, were not simple illusions. The idea of uniqueness was first embodied in metropolitan France by a literacy and education campaign that led to the great republican law of 1880; it was then conceived as a principle to be extended to the conquered—or soon to be conquered—colonial space. Discourse on the civilizing mission also made use of positivist arguments on the role of science in progress, a pillar of republican thought—both separated from religion and enlightened—and a contrast to a mostly conservative and monarchist clergy. In the same way, the argument was relentlessly adapted for republican discourse on colonial spaces. In short, republican ideas of liberty and equality were applied to a vague future horizon, when the “savages” would at last be “civilized.” This is what set French colonialism apart from the kind practiced by England and Germany.

Republican political ideology was therefore adapted to the imperial project, and this from the very beginning. This genealogy is crucial, in the sense that republicans quickly abandoned themes of essentialized racial discrimination in their discourse to legitimize conquest. In fact, racial discrimination was no longer useful to republicans as an argument, although in the late twentieth century it was the accepted explanation for colonial action. But it did inform the exceptional system, which, to different degrees and according to varying local constraints, would be installed throughout the colonial territories. One particularity of the French colonial system was precisely the variety of legal situations it applied to the “natives” and their descendants; many such legal categories were formulated over time by the successive regimes that contributed to the colonial puzzle. That was also, no doubt, what concealed an apparent contradiction between a representation of the Republic, which heralded human rights, and its colonial practices, which flouted them. In the end, the civilizing mission was a logical extension of human rights, which were promised to the “natives” just as soon as circumstances allowed, which is to say, when cultural—racial—differences could be abolished.

Such thinking could be found among ideologues of the Third Republic—Ferry and Léon Gambetta in particular. The socialist Jean Jaurès also expressed such ideas when, in 1884, he spoke of a “utopian course” for the subsequent seventy-five years:

When we take possession of a country, we must bring the glory of France with us, and be sure to be hospitable, since France is as pure as it is great; it is imbued with justice and goodness. Without deceiving them, we can tell these people that we have never voluntarily harmed their brothers; that we were the first to extend White freedom to colored men and abolish slavery … That wherever France has established herself, she is loved; that wherever she has simply set foot, she is missed; that wherever her light gleams, she is beneficent; that wherever she no longer shines, eyes gaze at her long and beautiful sunset and hearts remain steadfast.¹²

Ideas developed by Jules Duval (Les colonies et la politique coloniale de la France, 1864), Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, 1874, taken from a work written in 1870), and Ernest Renan (La réform...