Faith in Empire

Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940

Elizabeth A. Foster

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804786225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Faith in Empire is an innovative exploration of French colonial rule in West Africa, conducted through the prism of religion and religious policy. Elizabeth Foster examines the relationships among French Catholic missionaries, colonial administrators, and Muslim, animist, and Christian Africans in colonial Senegal between 1880 and 1940. In doing so she illuminates the nature of the relationship between the French Third Republic and its colonies, reveals competing French visions of how to approach Africans, and demonstrates how disparate groups of French and African actors, many of whom were unconnected with the colonial state, shaped French colonial rule. Among other topics, the book provides historical perspective on current French controversies over the place of Islam in the Fifth Republic by exploring how Third Republic officials wrestled with whether to apply the legal separation of church and state to West African Muslims.

1

To Mock a Nun

RELIGION AND POLITICS IN SENEGAL’S COASTAL COMMUNES, 1882–1890

On 30 May 1886, the Réveil du Sénégal, then the only private newspaper in colonial Senegal, published a short blurb at the bottom of the last column of its second-to-last page: “A correspondent informs us that two nuns stationed on Gorée recently left for France, and one of them was in a ‘position forte intéressante.’¹ It seems the administration refused to pay for her passage. We will not forgive her for wearing her bustle in front, and not in the back, as our elegant ladies do.” Despite its cryptic nature, the paper’s readers understood the meaning of this report. The “correspondent” was suggesting that the nun was pregnant, because she had a bulge on the front of her person. Furthermore, the anonymous tipster intimated that the sister’s condition had gotten her in trouble with the colonial administration, which paid nuns to serve as teachers and nurses in Senegal’s urban schools and hospitals.

Though it was brief and buried in a corner of the paper, this burlesque innuendo touched off a political uproar in the colony. Senegal’s coastal communes had never seen anything like it in print.² The Réveil had first appeared only the year before. Prior to that, the sole local paper was the administrative Moniteur du Sénégal et dépendances. The Réveil had been overtly political and stridently anticlerical from its inception, an orientation that irritated and angered the colony’s Catholic missionaries and Catholic members of the urban public, particularly a powerful and devout faction of its métis population. Yet the Réveil’s ribald evocation of a nun’s sexual escapades went a step further than its usual invective, provoking widespread shock and outrage. The snippet prompted the nun in question, Sister Saint-Pierre of the Sisters of Saint-Joseph de Cluny, to pursue the paper’s editor, Auguste Forêt, for defamation. Found liable after a flurry of appeals, he served three days in prison and paid two thousand francs in damages.³ The fallout from the pregnancy accusation, combined with the consequences of other provocative pieces, led the Réveil to fold in 1887, but not before it had deeply shaken Senegal’s Catholic mission and the Catholic métis political establishment in the coastal communes.⁴

The Réveil’s tactics and the public reaction to them reveal the central importance of religion in communal politics in Senegal in the 1880s and early 1890s. The Réveil’s unrelenting criticism of the church in Senegal underscored the importance of Catholicism in the coastal towns even as the paper tried to challenge its influence. Yet Catholicism was not the only religion in play. In fact, the majority of Senegal’s voters were African Muslims, though in the nineteenth century most were bought or controlled by French or métis political leaders. Not until 1914 did African voters unite to elect the first black African deputy to represent the colony in the French legislature, Blaise Diagne. Even though Muslims did not vote as a religious bloc, both clerical and anticlerical factions sought to appeal to them. Anticlericals suggested that Catholics did not respect Islam and wished to convert Muslims, while Catholics argued that anticlericals were hostile to all religions, Islam included. Religion was therefore a key idiom of political debate and shaped the frequent municipal and regional elections.

At first glance, the Réveil’s strident anticlericalism seemed to mimic the tactics and vocabulary employed by ardent republican journalists in France, suggesting that the political battles of the metropole were simply spilling over into the colonies. The 1880s were a decade of republican triumph and consolidation in France, marked by, among other legislation, the Ferry laws curtailing the role of the Catholic Church in public education. Reading the Réveil as a mere echo of metropolitan politics would be misguided, however. Certainly, Forêt borrowed elements of his tone and presentation from anticlerical discourse in France, but the paper’s causes and raison d’être were entirely local.

In fact, the Réveil’s anticlerical stance was part of a broader assault on the powers that rivaled its sponsors, the Devès family, in the communes’ political arena and the colony as a whole. The Devès were a métis branch of a Bordeaux clan that had built up a vast commercial network extending well into the African interior. In the mid-nineteenth century, patriarch Gaspard Devès had made a fantastic fortune that may have equaled that of some of the great Bordeaux houses by cobbling together a veritable empire of African clients and allies throughout the Senegalese interior.⁵ The Devès cared most about preserving their business interests from outside interference, and they opposed a constellation of entities that they saw as potential threats, including the colonial administration, which had signaled its desire to expand French rule inland and also to supplant independent powers in the colony; the devout métis political faction, which had ties to rival Bordeaux houses and the colonial administration; and the Catholic mission. Yet the Devèses’ anticlericalism was largely opportunistic: they were more than willing to abandon it when it made sense to ally with Catholics. Moreover, the results of the Réveil scandal also point to divergence from contemporary metropolitan trends: the paper’s aggressive anticlericalism backfired, demonstrating the strength of the church and the depth of public support for the nuns, though Catholics were in the minority in the communes. This outcome points to the importance of local agency and conditions in a colonial setting.

The church did not emerge unscathed from the political controversies of the 1880s, however. Although the Réveil closed down in disgrace, the missionary clergy also suffered in the treacherous arena of communal politics. The paper’s virulent anticlericalism helped tarnish a particular Catholic culture that had developed in the communes in the preceding decades with the support of the colony’s former military administration. In combination with other factors, including missionary policy in the interior, political attacks on Catholicism helped drive a wedge between the Catholic mission and the new civilian colonial administration, which took over from the military in 1882. In addition, the Réveil scandal exposed fissures within the colony’s Catholic establishment itself. While the Sisters of Saint-Joseph de Cluny initially hesitated to magnify their embarrassment with a lawsuit, the priests who ran the mission and male Catholic métis politicians saw the nuns’ misfortune as an opportunity to attack their political rivals. The slander incident demonstrated that the nuns had successfully cultivated an identity as selfless servants of the colony’s urban communities and that they were popular among groups beyond devout Catholics. Yet it also showed that, in order to maintain their status and image in the colony, they had to negotiate the colony’s two Catholic male centers of power: the missionary priests and the métis politicians. The sisters alternately cooperated with and resisted male Catholic authorities and did not hesitate to try to manipulate them to protect their own particular interests.

This chapter explores the volatile relationship between religion and politics in the Four Communes during a time of formative transitions in colonial Senegal. In the 1880s, the French both extended their reach inland and established a new, civilian administrative hierarchy in Senegal. These two developments had far-reaching impacts both on the political scene and the Catholic mission in the colony. A detailed exposition of the complex political and religious landscape in the communes introduces the key actors and their relationships with one another. The chapter then delves into the political acrimony of the 1880s, focusing on the use of religion in politics and its effects on the Catholic establishment, while ultimately circling back to the slander of Sister Saint-Pierre.

A Complex Political and Religious Landscape

In the 1880s, Senegal’s coastal communes featured a racially and religiously diverse population. The French, including administrators, officers, missionaries, traders, and merchants, were likely the smallest group, though they controlled administrative and military power. Until late in the nineteenth century, the majority of French inhabitants were men, with the notable exception of nuns, and most were at least nominally Catholic, though observance varied greatly. The Société des missions évangéliques ran a tiny Protestant mission in Saint-Louis, but it had relatively little impact.⁶ There was also a French Freemason presence; although masons had first founded a lodge in Saint-Louis in 1781, their roots in the communes were quite shallow before 1900.⁷ In Saint-Louis and Gorée in particular, a large métis community, the fruit of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century alliances between French men and African women, wielded a great deal of commercial and political clout. Most of the prominent métis families were devout Catholics and close to the Catholic mission, though the Devès and their allies were an important exception. The majority of the urban population was African, and its most powerful elements, particularly the prosperous traders of Saint-Louis, tended to be Muslim and Wolof, though the Muslim Lebu were in the majority in Dakar and Rufisque.⁸ There were also small communities of African Christians who had been converted by the missions, and some animists, particularly among new arrivals from the interior.

The communes, however, were not demographically identical, and their populations were in flux in the late nineteenth century. Saint-Louis and Gorée, the two oldest settlements, featured a particularly strong métis presence, which dominated politically in the nineteenth century. In the early 1880s, Rufisque and Dakar were tiny by comparison—in 1878, Saint-Louis boasted a population of 15,980; Gorée, an island, had 3,243 inhabitants; Rufisque had 1,173; and Dakar, 1,566.⁹ In 1880, a French administrator observed, “[Dakar] will certainly become more important with the introduction of the railway, but for now it is quite bleak and lacks resources.”¹⁰ Rufisque was elevated to commune status in 1880, but Dakar did not become independent of Gorée until 1887. Saint-Louis remained the largest commune until Dakar overtook it around the turn of the century, aided by its newly developed port and its designation as the capital of the entire French West African federation in 1902. French traders, businesspeople, and bureaucrats, as well as Africans from throughout West Africa, came to Dakar in large numbers after 1900, changing Senegal’s urban demographic balance and weakening the political importance of Saint-Louis and its métis population.

By 1880, the unique colonial society in Senegal’s coastal communes enjoyed extensive, institutionalized political rights. Between 1870 and 1879, metropolitan officials endowed the communes with legislative institutions, overriding strong opposition from the colony’s military governors.¹¹ In the course of the decade, French, métis, and African male inhabitants of the communes obtained the right to vote for a deputy to represent them in the French legislature, as well as for municipal councils and a General Council that controlled a portion of the colony’s budget and participated in the allocation of resources to the communes and a swath of the rural interior that surrounded them.¹² These concessions were the fruit of aggressive lobbying by Bordelais commercial houses, as well as the métis and African traders themselves.¹³ All of these parties wanted commercial interests to have a say in the colony’s governance, in order to protect trade and check the power of the colonial administration. Muslim African voters enjoyed a particularly advantageous and unique position that allowed them to vote as French citizens yet retain their personal status as Muslims. This gave them the right to be judged by Muslim courts in accordance with Muslim law, according them a degree of privilege largely unparalleled among indigenous, or indeed French, populations elsewhere in the empire. The colonial state went even further than merely granting these privileges: it installed and remunerated a bureaucracy to guarantee them. The colonial administration in Senegal paid a salary to Muslim qadis (judges), their clerks, and the tamsir in Saint-Louis.¹⁴

Though it may be tempting to interpret the extension of the vote to Africans in the coastal communes as a grand republican gesture—a testament to republican universalism and assimilative tendencies—the reality was much more complicated. An assimilative reading is countered by the institutionalization of Muslim African voters’ special status, which allowed them to preserve a distinct public, legal identity that reflected their privately held beliefs. Moreover, republican ideologues were not yet firmly in power in France until 1880, after the electoral institutions were already in place, and the new elected offices all had precedents—de facto or de jure—in earlier eras, in some cases well before any republican stirrings in France. Gorée had métis and/or African mayors in the 1760s, and Saint-Louis, by the 1770s, if not earlier.¹⁵ In 1789, Saint-Louis’s métis mayor, Charles Cormier, presided over a local committee that sent a cahier de doléance to Paris—it sought to end the commercial monopoly of the Senegal Company.¹⁶ In a separate petition of 14 March 1791, a French resident of Saint-Louis, Dominique Lamiral, asked the National Assembly to recognize the town as a proper municipality, with paid officials elected by French, métis, and African property owners. Though the assembly’s colonial committee examined the proposals and produced a draft of a decree that instituted most of them in Saint-Louis and Gorée, it appears that the revolutionary government never followed through.¹⁷ Nonetheless, it seems that mayors and some form of municipal councils, either elected or appointed, remained in effect in Senegal into the nineteenth century. There were also precedents for the Genera...