Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution

REVOLUTION

Introduction

The Creation of a Colonial Culture in France, from the Colonial Era to the Memory Wars

Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire,

Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas

The present collection is the fruit of an inquiry that began in the early 1990s and that sought to better elucidate certain aspects of France’s contemporary history. The weight of colonial imaginary, discernible in the production of a colonial iconicity, in colonial cinema, and in the intertextual articulations of images/ discourse, called for improved contextualization, as did those mechanisms associated with the construction of different paradigms with respect to the Other in the context of a burgeoning imperialism.1 Initial research was conducted on the subject of human zoos, and then shortly thereafter we began evaluating the importance of colonial expositions and world fairs that were held in France and abroad.2 We also sought to better understand the relationship between immigration to the metropole from the global South and the colonial phenomenon itself over a longer historical period that included both the colonial and postcolonial periods. In turn, we found ourselves compelled to investigate even more complex, yet related, processes, such as French Republican identity.

This research is the result of an empirical deconstruction of a number of initially scattered cultural, juridical, and political systems, which over time came to constitute a historical system that could be defined in large part by imperialism and its postcolonial repercussions.3 We have found the expression colonial culture helpful in describing this system. The present work thus represents a concerted attempt to elucidate and interpret the gradual development, dissemination, and mutation of colonial culture in the French metropole over more than two centuries. The book therefore begins at the dawn of colonial culture, when slavery was first abolished, and ends in the postcolonial period with an examination into the long-term effects of the imperial system. Of course, research conducted in Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere over the past two decades has greatly contributed to the construction of this field, particularly those works that have evaluated the colonial and postcolonial impact of imperialism in the former colonial metropoles.

The Origins of Colonial Culture

In the nineteenth century, following the utopian dream of a new society, and in keeping with Republican universalist ideals inherited from the Revolution, France strove toward progress, namely in the form of the colonial act. The dynamics of colonialism were rooted in a postrevolutionary continuum, which began with the French campaign in Egypt and in the abolition movements of 1848, with the conquest of Algeria in 1830, and the conquests of the Second Empire (1852–1870). Colonialism was seen as a mark of civilization, of national grandeur, of science and progress. The nation, which emerged out of the French Revolution, brought liberty and not oppression, development and not exploitation, to the peoples it was liberating.

The first two waves of conquest in the nineteenth century were unrelated to an emergent colonial ideology—which was not fully established until the Third Republic (1870–1940)—and were instead primarily the result of internal politics. The conquest of Algeria in 1830, which became the central pillar of the pre-Republican Empire, was the regime’s way of leaping into unknown overseas lands. However, this Restoration-era project proved a failure in the realm of internal politics. The Second Empire’s overseas enterprise was part of Napoleon III’s geo-strategic vision of the world (see Chapter 2). From the conquests in Indochina to the failure of the French Mexican Expedition, from the myth of the Arab Kingdom to engagements in Syria or in China, Napoleon III worked to construct an overseas destiny for France in line with that of the mythical period prior to 1763 (the Treaty of Paris) or the Ancien Regime’s first colonial Empire. The new wave of conquests initiated by the Third Republic in 18794 (in Indochina, sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar, and the Maghreb) resulted, until 1885 (when the first official partitioning of Africa between the major Western powers began following the Berlin Congress), in the voluntary construction of a new regime for opportunistic republicans (although there were numerous debates between republicans with respect to the kinds of opportunities such a policy would yield).5 The driving principle was international dominance, and the development of national cohesion through the subversion of internal social and political rivalries.

The republican wave of conquest was similar in scope to those that came earlier, though with an additional twist. Whether following the conquests that led to the annexation of Morocco, or later, after the participation of a number of indigenous troops in the First World War, the actual legitimacy of colonization was only rarely questioned. The Rif War (around the mid-1920s) was thus as much a reflection of the desire to underscore France’s power as it was an effort on the part of the Cartel des Gauches to affirm its national fiber by opposing itself to communist activism; meanwhile, the strategy in the Levant was primarily a reaction to secular opposition to the British Empire in the Middle East.

France’s colonial enterprise and the Third Republic were born in the same moment. This was the era during which the multifaceted foundations of a colonial culture were laid. This culture was at once a burgeoning ideology and a collection of cultural markers. Initially an elitist and minority position, colonial ideology progressively became a coherent political doctrine strongly linked to a universalist discourse, and was partially reliant upon new bodies of knowledge impacting all domains of thought and experience. It was molded by the pragmatic necessities of the hour, namely those of inter-European competition and internal political demands. Multiple cultural markers helped form and shape colonial culture: travel literature and adventure novels (with the press reporting the feats of explorers and the discovery of the world), critical institutions (such as the first colonial associations), geographical societies, and commerce-related organizations with new ambitions and aspirations, alongside the dramatic rise in research and interest on the Other and the Elsewhere (such as in colonial ethnography and physical anthropology). Together, these elements formed a complete discourse animated by social practices, which, popular throughout the nineteenth century and well into the first half of the twentieth century, serve to reveal the conditions of the cultural possibility of imperial expansion.

During this process, France went from an exclusively hexagonal society (with the exception of a few colonial territories inherited from the Ancien Regime) to an imperial culture.6 This colonial culture reached its apogee at the moment of the centennial of the conquest of Algeria and the International Colonial Exposition of 1931. This multiform culture was widely disseminated throughout French society, becoming a mainstay over the following three decades up until independence and the Algerian War (1954–1962), and then subsequently being transformed during the postcolonial era.

The present collaborative work thus aims to better determine the powerful means through which this culture was disseminated (literature, song, cabaret, propaganda, theater, the press, expositions, postcards and posters, school textbooks, books, fixed images, cinema), the primary social spaces in which it was advocated (schools, museums, the military world, economic milieus, propaganda agencies, the scholarly world, the realm of politics), and the key moments of its promotion (colonial and universal expositions, the Great War, commemorations, national union, colonial conquests). We have thus organized the book into five relatively equal parts in order to illustrate the chronological process of this phenomenon: The Creation of a Colonial Culture (from the first abolition of slavery until the defeat at Sedan); Conquering Public Opinion (from the beginnings of the Third Republic to the International Colonial Exposition of 1931); The Apogee of Imperialism (from the interwar period until independence); Toward the Postcolony (postcolonial repercussions on French society); and The Time of Inheritance (on memory, influences, and outcomes in the present day).

If one considers this sequence of events, it is possible, step-by-step, to delimit an initial period that covers 1763 to 1870, and that saw the emergence of a precolonial culture in metropolitan France. Still in its infancy, this culture slowly began to appear in the different stages of French intervention overseas: from the loss of the Ancien Regime’s colonial possessions to the French Revolution with the first abolition of slavery, from the expedition in Egypt to Napoleon’s punitive expeditions in the Caribbean, from the restoration of slavery to the conquest of Algeria, from the second abolition of slavery in 1848 to the conquests in Indochina, from installation in New Caledonia to the failure in Mexico, each colonial moment incited a reaction in the metropole, reactions that slowly gave way to a collective understanding according to which France was engaged in a lively colonial enterprise overseas. However, this understanding remained for the most part limited to elite and economic circles, and did not really reach the general public until the Third Republic. Over time, thanks to travel literature, geographical societies, colonial committees, and especially the success of the first major universal expositions, held in 1855 and 1867, the colonial idea began to spread.

The following period, from 1871 to 1931, marks the juncture at which colonial culture became ingrained in public opinion and society, a process that can be divided into three moments: the time of impregnation (the defeat at Sedan and the pacification of Morocco), the time of affirmation (the Great War and the Rif War), and the time of apogee (from the Exposition of Decorative Arts to the International Colonial Exposition of 1931). In this process, the Great War represents a pivotal moment in which the colonial reality deeply penetrated [ … ] French society (Chapter 8). Because it ushered into the metropole a massive wave of conscripted infantrymen and workers from the Maghreb, Indochina, and Africa it put an end to [previous] ways of presenting colonized peoples and of discovering the Other (Chapter 3).7 An array of cultural materials, debates, and issues are thus explored in this book, and a broad multi-disciplinary framework allows us to better access and evaluate colonial culture. The transversality of this approach highlights the complexity and entangled nature of the cultural processes being investigated. In many ways, the French became colonial in spite of themselves through the gradual but nevertheless effective impregnation of the primary axes of colonial ideology into a variety of discursive messages that transformed the colonial phenomenon into a proliferation of images depicting foreign lands and new peoples, bolstered through recourse to a diverse array of ordinary social practices (such as the exposition, the human zoo, and ethnographic exhibitions), which altogether yielded a clear understanding as to the place of each population in the world, while simultaneously establishing the supremacy of the West and outlining its mission.8 Not so much colonials in the sense of agents of colonization (these only constituted an extremely small minority) nor in the sense of conscious partisans of colonialism; but rather colonials by dint of the often unconscious incorporation of imperial discourse, norms, attitudes, indeed of a habitus into the collective mentality and psyche. Without this dimension, the historic colonial system would not have lasted long, nor even have been able to exist.

How then, did this colonial culture establish itself? Although this question must be considered in light of certain evolutions in French overseas policy, this culture cannot merely be defined as a consequence of them. Colonial culture emerged according to its own rhythm, which is of course fairly logical if we take the time to consider the variety of domains therein that are either directly or tangentially related to it. Neither causality nor simple logic can be ascribed to it. A teleonomy cannot be traced. However, it is nevertheless possible to discern a moment in history in which a dynamic proper to ethnography crosses into the passion for adventure novels, the development of scouting, the obsession with colonial expositions and negro villages, the interest for conferences put on by geographical societies, the first colonial films. Though each of these domains maintained a dynamic proper to them, they also shared something in common, something that signaled the emergence of a new vision of the world. This new vision could jointly be described as a desire for the elsewhere and the seductive force of annexation, of the certainty of Western civilization’s superiority and the corollary superiority of its race, as evidenced through the inferiority of the Other (this feeling was also often mixed with a kind of fascination). In reality, people were convinced that spreading these values to lesser societies was a legitimate task.

Our aim is not to give a unique and totalizing definition of colonial culture, a task that in any case would be impossible.9 Ours is rather to offer a number of empirical studies that might begin to sketch the contours of such a phenomenon. The definition of what colonial culture might correspond to—following Edward Saïd’s lead in the book Culture and Imperialism and as an extension of Raoul Girardet’s foundational work L’Idée coloniale en France—could in itself be the topic of a book. Having said this, defining limits is, in a way, already to provide a definition.10

Colonial culture is thus what makes sense in recent national history or quite simply in the history of France when we investigate the colonial influence: the evolution of citizenship beginning in 1830, the fusion between the national and the colonial under Napoleon III, the Republic’s involvement in the overseas enterprise, the popular success of the International Colonial Exposition of 1931, the specific impact of the economic crisis, the demographic stakes, the evolution of the Ministry of the Colonies beginning in 1858, changes in the army, regional specificities of migration from the south, debates on the nation, immigration policies, the anticommunist struggle, and so on. Colonial culture was the ubiquity of France’s colonial domain in French society, a domain that over time became Greater France, then the Empire, then France Overseas, the French Union, and finally the French Community… prior to being transformed into French Overseas Departments and Territories known today as the DOM-TOM. The place of the colonial in our institutions, our political culture, and our imaginary was not simply a product of state propaganda, but also the result of an array of influences, intermediaries, and interactions of which we are only beginning to understand the importance. They are in fact made up of multiple layers. The dates of the universal expositions serve as structuring points, especially that of 1889, which incontestably marks the first high point of France’s colonial culture because it commemorated the centennial of the French Revolution and marked the beginning of modernity (as exemplified by such important symbols as the Eiffel Tower), as well as the recent victory of the Republic.

Previous universal expositions held in Paris in 1855, 1867, and 1878 had afforded an increasingly important space to the colonies, as had the World’s Fairs held outside of France in Amsterdam (1883), Anvers (1885), Barcelona (1888), and Brussels (1888), but it was the Universal Exposition of 1889 that offered a new kind of visibility with respect to the colonies. North Africa and Indochina were the exposition’s main attractions, alongside the human zoos from sub-Saharan Africa and the four hundred individuals on exhibit, including two dozen Tahitians and Kanaks. A colonial conference was organized for the occasion that reaffirmed the major tenets of the Republic’s colonial ideology: the assimilation of indigenous peoples, the supremacy of French civilization, economic liberalism for the benefit of all, political largesse, the uniformization of the Republic’s laws, and so on. None of these principles would be instituted in the colonies. As an extension of the exposition and the conference, the structural pillars of the colonial lobby were put into place, a lobby that fought for the impregnation of the colonial idea into the metropole and the formation of elites. The first was the very powerful Comité de l’Afrique Française (French Africa Committee), founded in 1890; then the colonial group was formed in the House two years later, and finally the Union Coloniale in 1893. Together, these groups constituted the visible surface of the colonial party.

All political tendencies and economic or administrative powers were involved, from the prince of Arenberg to Leroy-Beaulieu, from Charles-Roux to Siegfried, from Archinard to Binger, and so on. Meanwhile, increasingly specialized committees began to form: committees on Egypt, French Asia, Morocco, and French Oceania. Simultaneously, the colonial group in the House continued to grow, counting more than two hundred representatives in 1902 and accounting for 75 percent of France’s ministers from the colonies between 1894 and 1900. The Union Coloniale was by far the most active instrument of propaganda, relying upon a number of intermediary groups11, with its publications like La Quinzaine coloniale, as well as the ones it financed, including La Politique coloniale and La Dépêche coloniale. The number of conferences, dinner-debates, and talks was impressive and contributed to the formation of a colonial consciousness among the elites. The final pillar was put in place in 1889, namely the creation of a Colonial School, with the specific objective of training high-level administrators that would be deployed overseas. Enrollment in the Colonial School was fairly modest though, and on the eve of the war, less than one-fifth of administrators in overseas posts were graduates of this establishment.

In fact, although a good many strategic efforts and structures were put in place, none would ultimately have a large-scale impact, which would explain why the French colonial magazine, the Bulletin de la Ligue Coloniale, asserted in 1914 that the colonial education of the French remains to be done. At this historical juncture, the budget for the colonies was still relatively modest, representing only some 2 percent of the state budget, in other words three times less than that allocated to public instruction, albeit more than that of the marines and double that of agriculture. Yet, thanks to the multitude of committees and organizations, various conferences and talks, the forty colonial periodicals and reports at the time, the space devoted to the colonies in the major press, and the multiple local and national expositions, public opinion was bombarded by the colonial enterprise. However, the French remained far from convinced colonials—at the time, German colonial leagues counted three to four times more militants—though they were deeply affected by colonial culture.

The metamorphosis of anticolonialists in 1914 confirms this point: claims were no longer made for an end to colonialism, and few were those who demanded instead that it be humanized. A residual but related movement in favor of an abolition of colonial domination remained alive in the Communist Party, and was voiced at a number of Comintern meetings held during the interwar period. But this period also introduced an important rupture as the state became increasingly aware of its propagandist mission and of the necessity to reorganize a number of existing committees and associations. In Chapter 10, Sandrine Lemaire paints the picture of a state that between 1920 and 1931 federated, organized, and attempted to dispense colonial knowledge throughout France, a dimension underscored by then minister of the colonies Albert Sarraut when he claimed on February 27, 1920, in the French Senate:

It is absolutely essential that a methodic, serious, persistent propaganda, through speech and through image, in newspapers, conferences, films, expositions, impact adults and children throughout our country. [ … ] The history lessons offered in our primary, middle, and high schools and the part therein of our colonial domain are inadequate. We must improve and expand this component of teaching and make it more lively, more expressive, more practical, and the images, movies, and projections used need to be more informative and entertaining for French youth that are ill-informed when it comes to our colonies.

Government and Colonial Culture

Following the Great War, the state became more closely involved in the promotion of the colonial idea in France, notably through the French Bureau of Propaganda and official expositions. For this, it relied on the scholarly world, some economic sectors, and even the entertainment world, dimensions developed here in the chapters contributed by Gilles Boëtsch, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Sylvie Chalaye, and Alain Ruscio, who points out that before the boom in state propaganda, literature played a central role in the promotion of the colonial enterprise: Partisans of colonialism had countless ways and countless occasions to express themselves, while its adversaries and critics were marginalized (Chapter 5).

Exotic literature, in the same way as colonial songs and scholarly publications, was an essential means of disseminating this culture. The Republican school also played a major role in anchoring into the collective consciousness the certainty of the French colonial system’s superiority. Moreover, it helped to democratize this culture. Soon, cinema and fixed images would contribute to the campaign, through the dissemination of thousands of pieces of audio/visual material. A whole populace, from rural to urban areas, was thus immersed in a veritable colonial bath. Each image participated in the elaboration of a social imaginary, through which the national community, appropriating a common patrimony, constructed itself.

Public opinion appears to have been increasingly convinced by the colonial idea, thanks in part to the Empire’s indispensable support during the Great War and to the notion of a robust autarchic market—the object of endless promotion— and finally to the supposed strategic importance of the overseas possessions. This almost unanimous consensus in the late 1920s with respect to the issue of the colonies was a source of national unity that crossed party lines, from the socialist left to the nationalist right, and was echoed by the press. Indeed, this consensus was perhaps most obvious during the International Colonial Exposition held at Vincennes in 1931. A new colonial era was beginning in France, and everyone seems to have shared the same feeling: France needs its Empire, France is a colonial power, and to be anticolonial was tantamount to being anti-French.

As the imperial idea was making political inroads, a colonial imaginary began to emerge in diverse cultural forms, ranging from school textbooks to the most illustrious of Parisian theater houses. The wide-scale dissemination of this imaginary was made possible by the advent of mass culture,12 and, as Nicolas Bancel has argued, On the one hand, because the ideological principles behind it (a hierarchy of the world and its peoples, a glorification of European and Enlightenment culture), no matter the cultural iteration (colonial expositions, postcards, etc.), mutually reinforced one another, without ever really changing. On the other hand, because these forms were primarily apolitical (Chapter 14).

Here, the full meaning of the concept of colonial culture emerges: it is not simply an item of propaganda or a public vulgate, but rather a culture in the sense of a host of discursive materials, images, and practices, which, beginning in the 1920s, no longer had much to do with colonization properly speaking. France had changed, it had been transformed; the colony, like the army and schools, was now part of ordinary everyday life; it was now part of the fabric of Republican gesture. France’s roads, towns13, geography, museums and monuments14, universal and national and colonial expositions, object lessons (see Chapter 3), history, economy, publicity, art, music, literature, cinema, statesmen and its officers, and more—all of these elements were imbued with the colonial. The Great War ushered in a new era of propaganda, which affected all age groups. At this time, as Éric Deroo has shown, hundreds of postcards (in the form of photographs or illustrations), commercial vignettes or posters, news headlines, manufactured objects, novels, and films depicted the bravado of the faithful ‘Y’a bon’ character (a slogan that would later be used by a brand of cocoa powder, with great success), of the fierce Turk, of the intrepid Spahi, or of the clever Tonkinese (Chapter 8). All that pertained to the colonial was now fashionable and permeated every facet of society. Every advertisement or publication, it seemed, featured something colonial. For the French, the overseas territories had become an intimate, banal, natural thing.

Three generations of politicians grew up in this context, one from which women were de facto excluded. Some were influenced by the colonial space, others educated in it, and still others came from it. The fate of a large portion of the nation’s political elites was in some ways determined by the colonies: from Doriot to Lyautey, Gambetta to Ferry, Faure to Poincaré, Doumergue to Lebrun, La Rocque to Pétain, Sarraut to Viollette, and Clemenceau to Mitterrand. We often forget that, from the defeat at Sedan until the early 1930s, France was in a constant colonial war. This explains why the Empire constituted a kind of school—and a way for military men to quickly advance their careers—for elites. The overseas territories became a field of experimentation where new men could establish themselves. The ubiquity of the colonial—in the press, in comics, in children’s literature, in novels, at the theater or the movies—resulted in a peculiar relationship to the world: a constant conquest in the name of universalist ideals, which placed the Republic in a continuity with the French Revolution and the preceding regimes that made France. The colonizers were naturally superior and legitimized in their activities, because they were involved in a civilizing mission: colonization was considered a humanitarian ideal. The right to colonize and the duty to educate went hand in hand. Jules Ferry expressed this idea succinctly in a speech he made to the Chamber of Deputies on July 28, 1885: The superior races have a right with respect to the inferior races… because they also have a duty toward them. They have a duty to civilize the inferior races.

Republican Ideology Extends to the Colonies

Colonial culture was bound to the ideals and the ideology of the Third Republic. Opportunistic Republicans thus integrated colonization into an internal ideological campaign, which was fully inscribed within colonial culture. Republicans, facing the constant threat of a possible return of the monarchy and a revivified nationalism, were politically fragile. They therefore introduced and promoted reforms that aimed at creating national unity among the populace, a unity that promised to assure their social and political power. Here, we are of course referring to the 1882 law on compulsory education and generalized conscription. This was the Republican response to the issue of how to form a national community, a community that was still in its early phases, threatened by political divisions, regional fractures, linguistic heterogeneity, and institutions that were either openly or potentially hostile, such as the Church and the army (even though, as we know, the majority of officers were legitimists). Republican power was, in this sense, a power obsessed with its own fragility. Its entire ideological strategy was thus to invigorate the idea of the nation, of national unity, and to create transcendent political ideals capable of mobilizing the largest swath of the population. The civilizing ideal for the colonies was seen as a potentially mobilizing discourse, and the project of colonization was, in a sense, that of nationalization.

The state’s colonial discourse—in which the colonial was described both as an extension of the national and as a condition of the nation’s power—maintained an Enlightenment notion, that of spreading civilization to peoples considered biologically and culturally inferior, up until the era of independence. The certainty of superiority was, for the most part, validated by science (though scientists were not always terribly favorable of the colonial enterprise), and as Gilles Boëtsch reveals in Chapter 4:

In the end, scientific knowledge was placed at the service of a colonial order that relied upon an understanding of the other (the mores, customs, and environment) for its own construction. In close proximity to the burgeoning colonial system, indeed a participating element in its construction, this scientific discourse was omnipresent. Hierarchizing humanity, it worked to legitimize the colonial order. Scientists therefore contributed to the creation of a culture of difference, a culture that quickly became indispensable to the colonial order.

Many were influenced by the thinking of Ernest Renan on the community of living beings in a same territory. For them, France would not be France until it had achieved uniformity among its citizens and throughout its territory (for example, in the case of Algeria, which became a French department, or before that, of Corsica). However, by the end of the nineteenth century, notions of race had infiltrated a rather significant fringe of the intelligentsia. For those affected, the national community necessarily excluded African Blacks, barbarian and fanatic peoples, inferior races, and other unassimilable populations—in other words, almost all of the nonwhite peoples in the Empire. The definition of the word nègre in the Grand Dictionnaire Larousse universel du XIXe siècle (1865), which preceded the wave of Republican conquests, is revealing with respect to the propagation of racism (especially, here, in terms of a discourse of physical anthropology):

In vain, a handful of philanthropists tried to prove that the negro race was as intelligent as the white race. A few rare examples among them is, however, not sufficient evidence to prove the existence of great faculties of intelligence in this group. One incontestable fact to stand out from all the others is that they have smaller, lighter, and less voluminous brains than that of the white race. And, as in all of the animal kingdom, intelligence is directly related to the size of the brain and the number and profundity of its circumvolutions. This alone is enough to prove the superiority of the white race over the black race.15

France involved itself in a series of regional and colonial conquests, which over time evolved into a notion of empire (with all the Roman power therein implied) or of Greater France. It revolutionized classical matrices of national identity through the concept of assimilation, and the colonial territories and outlier regions became inscribed into a common process of absorption into the nation, which sought to make the conquered spaces French. The colonization of overseas territories did not thus constitute a rupture with the past. Rather it was symbolically inscribed in a consubstantial continuum with the construction of the French nation, and later, through a kind of inheritance, with that of the Republic. For, as Françoise Vergès explains, The Republic thus gave its adherents a mission to accomplish: that of propagating the good word. The civilizing mission was multifaceted in nature: it was thought to be humanitarian, it had an ideology of assimilation, it justified colonial intervention. Colonial conquest was undertaken in the very name of republican principles (Chapter 17).

Meanwhile, parts of the economic world were becoming increasingly convinced by the colonial enterprise. In the early days of the Third Republic, the economic stakes of the overseas territories were relatively small, as economic exchange with the possessions represented a mere 5.5 percent of French trade (two-thirds of which was with Algeria). During the period of conquest, a large number of renowned economists criticized the colonial enterprise, and many of the Republic’s elected officials—as seen during a colonial debate in the House in December 188516—were seriously considering a withdrawal from Madagascar and Tonkin. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (Chapter 12) adds, moreover, that following the war of 1870, many French politicians and economists questioned whether the Empire had a future and whether the colonies were a good deal, and concerted efforts had to be made to convince the public of the importance of colonial business.

The place afforded to the colonial space at the Universal Exposition of Vienna (1873) was still small, amounting to less than 3 percent of exhibits—it is perhaps not even worth mentioning the overrepresentation of Algeria among this small number. Over time, tropical goods became indispensable raw material[s] for the industrialization of metropolitan France. Directly or indirectly, every national firm needed [them], for either oiling their machines or lighting their workshops. [ … ] The textile industry in the metropole also benefited from the African, Indochinese, and Madagascan markets. Firms were already—since the days of the slave trade—in the habit of passing off lower quality textiles onto the precolonial market (Chapter 12). In fact, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch continues: It would be wrong to assume that only a few specialized firms had privileged relationships with the colonies. [ … ] the sectors most in favor of colonial expansion were also the most fragile and backward of the French economy: namely, the steel and textile industries.17 The diffusion of the colonial into various economic sectors was thus a progressive process that lagged behind the rest of society.

Colonial Culture and Anticolonialism

Between 1890 and 1910, political opposition to colonization arose from both the conservative and royalist right and the socialist and dissenting left. Paul Déroulède’s famous retort leveled at Jules Ferry perfectly summarizes the nationalist right-wing position: I’ve lost two children, and you offer me twenty servants. As Juliette Adam writes, a faction of left-wing Republicans agreed with this perspective: Each spadeful of colonial land looks to me like a spadeful of Alsace-Lorraine in Prussia.18 This opposition had different but related motives: for the conservative right and a faction of the left,19 colonization diluted French power at a time when it needed to focus on reconquering Alsace and Lorraine; for the radical left and the socialists—these latter, who went from a dozen members in the House in 1885 to about fifty at the turn of the century, were very divided on this issue—anticolonialism was in line with their traditional struggles against the Church (missionaries), capital (companies), the state (the administration), and the army (the conquerors).

However, they all criticized the excesses of conquest (brutalized natives, massacres, forced labor, rape, the displacement of populations, torture, repression, etc.) and the predatory nature of capitalism. No one really questioned the dogma with respect to the superiority of the European civilization. The most ardent anticolonial critiques from the time can be found both among the unionist-anarchists, in their famous periodical L’Assiette au beurre, and among the most radical socialists, beginning in September 1895 with their declaration against France’s colonial policy, which they considered one of the worst forms of capitalist exploitation.

Paul Louis, writing for La Revue socialiste, voiced what he called the doleful cry of raped humanity. In fact, Paul Louis was one of the most ardent theorists of anticolonialism—his work Le Colonialisme, published in 1905, reflects this—along with Gustave Hervé, who denounced colonial violence in his newspaper La Guerre sociale. There were also Félicien Challaye, a fierce opponent of major companies, Vigné d’Octon, a virulent critique of the colonial administration, Léon Bloy, the primary whistleblower on colonial atrocities, and Francis de Pressensé, a voice against colonial capitalism. These figures were at the forefront of French anticolonialism at the turn of the century.

However, these forms of anticolonialism were soon waved aside, becoming all but inaudible after the First World War. They were choked by the dominant colonial culture and the development of a colonial consensus. Even the nationalist right—rallying behind the Action Française during the Vichy period—became the most active supporter of the colonial idea in the country. And the radical left began to marginalize anticolonial issues. This was no longer the time of Clemenceau’s famous rants delivered in the Chamber of Deputies. The times called for national unity in support of the colonies. The traditional conservative right had been completely won over, and found itself entirely invested in colonial grandeur.20 Meanwhile, the First World War had resulted in the realization of France’s old obsession of defeating Germany. For the radical and socialist left, colonization became a central theme. For the communists, hitherto active critics of the colonial enterprise under the leadership of Jacques Doriot—author of the booklet Communisme et Colonialisme and very active during the Rif and Indochina wars—the struggle for independence became secondary under the Popular Front.

In the decade between 1920 and 1930, French anticolonialism thus became entirely marginalized, except, perhaps, as notes Alain Ruscio (Chapter 5), for some members of the intellectual and artistic intelligentsia: "The shock of the First World War led the French to relativize previously established notions about the superiority of the ‘White race.’ The surrealists shot a thousand and one arrows at bourgeois ideals. [ … ] During the International Colonial Exposition of 1931, Louis Aragon wrote vengeful verse, ‘It rains on the Colonial Exposition’ (Mars à Vincennes), in the image of lines from Front rouge," saluting a nationalist insurrection in Vietnam. But, in the context of a society at once seduced by the idea of Empire—lulled by illusions of exoticism—but indifferent to its destiny, what good were such reactions?

Colonial Consensus and National Unity

A new political order arose out of the Great War, one that helped consolidate consensus with respect to the colonial. The majority of political elites were in agreement on this issue. It was supported by the Agence Générale des Colonies and its numerous spokespeople that included writers, journalists, celebrities, editors, artists, and scientists, all of whom benefited from the agency during the interwar years, and was also maintained by the Republican school system. The latter had considerable influence over the generation from the interwar years. Gilles Manceron (Chapter 7) emphasizes this point in his reading of the indications pédagogiques (pedagogical instructions) teachers were provided in a geography textbook dating from 1913: "Let us insist right now upon the importance of emphasizing our colonial empire in your lessons on elementary geography. The colonies already play an important role in the economic life of these countries; this shall only become more and more the case. It is thus essential that French youth be familiarized with the resources from the vast territory over which our flag waves." This topic was ubiquitous in child-oriented periodicals, comics (such as the famous Tintin in the Congo), and books that helped to anchor the two following notions in the mentalities of French youth for generations: a sense of patriotism and of the superiority of the French Empire over native peoples. There were indeed numerous ways in which very young children were exposed to colonial culture.

Savagery was a common trait of this pedagogical exercise, resulting in a rather paradoxical image. For, as Sylvie Chalaye notes in Chapter 6, French activity in the colonies was justified through savage and animalistic images of the native; however, it was also important that this same figure not be feared. In addition to the shows portraying Africa as a terrifying continent, colonial ideology worked to attenuate fears generated by the idea of savagery by poking fun at it and highlighting the entertaining aspects of exoticism. The French saw of colonization only what was presented to them: an allegory that had little to do with the colonial reality.21 Colonial culture was effective in impacting the collective consciousness and affecting the minds of the people.

Through colonial culture, one began to understand difference in hierarchical terms. A figure of the Other emerged in this process—from the status of savage to that of native—which amounted to a denial of subjecthood for the colonized. Native-immigrants arriving in the metropole became stigmatized through the press:22 from L’Ami du peuple to Gringoire, from L’Action française to Le Figaro, from the conservative to the popular press, the message was the same. In the year of the International Colonial Exposition, the daily newspaper Le Peuple (January 17, 1931) conducted a survey on the colonization of Paris by exotics:

The Rue Harvey in Paris is a real piece of Africa: when the sugar factories close in the evenings and the workers spread out over the cobblestones, the street fills with a swarm of swarthy men and the cacophonous sounds of Arabic. In a moment, the small, double file flow carries this crowd away: under the rare streetlight, between smoky walls, North Africans gather. To the sound of a phonograph wailing a local tune, they line up their dominoes on wooden tables, they shuffle cards in their brown fingers: the ronda, the baya, the feverish dances begin, which slowly but surely eat up the paychecks, run down the savings, make these children lose their money and their reason … Meanwhile, a similar crowd can be found in La Villette, Javel, Boulogne, Saint-Ouen, Gennevilliers. They come out of work exhausted, these Kabyles from Algeria, Kroumirs from Tunisia, Soussi and Riffs from Morocco, the slacker Chleuh, peddlers who could be found up to recently pushing a small donkey carrying an equally small heap of junk all over North Africa. They all go home to their small rooms where, at the very heart of Western civilization—in which, alas, they only know hardship—they try, to varying degrees of success, to recreate life in the douars. How many live in the Paris-area: sixty, seventy, eighty-thousand? It is difficult to tell, so well have they kept their nomadic ancestral tendencies, their mistrust of others, and their wily character, even after crossing the sea. They change their names, swap papers, and avoid the services put in place to watch over them.

Discrepancies between two types of populations, the desirables and the undesirables on national soil—the assimilables (even if it might take time) and the others—began to emerge. In the context of the 1930s, these latter were the colonized, Jews, and—a widespread usage was evident of the very maurrassien term métèques, an offensive way of designating Mediterranean populations in France.23 Up until 1924, immigrant-natives had been able to circulate more or less freely between France and the colonies. However, in the years that would follow, every aspect of their lives was increasingly monitored, and some were even expelled from the mainland. Though the Front Populaire attenuated these restrictive measures in 1936, they progressively reappeared within the French administrative domain, especially during the Algerian War.

The invention of the native (see chapters 11 and 17) involved the transformation of the figure of the colonized-Other, which had become a central facet of the French collective imaginary since the days of the great push for colonial expansion (1880–1885 and then 1890–1910). This was a long process, which began with an image of the seventeenth-century slave and evolved, three centuries later, into that of the immigrant. During the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks in large part to a new visual economy founded on the spectacularization of difference and of race, concretely, this can be seen in the period’s human zoos, which had the advantage, as Gilles Boëtsch has shown, of offering scientists—and especially anthropologists—the chance to study human specimens, for the most part from countries colonized by the European powers, without having to travel far from their laboratories (Chapter 4), in negro villages, and at the colonial, national, and universal expositions; in the development of travel narratives and periodicals centered on exoticism and scientific vulgarization—which described extraordinary peoples; finally, in the classification methods found in certain disciplines, particularly in physical anthropology. This process gave life to a new vision of human diversity, in which a biological hierarchy, with all its nuances, reigned. As we have seen, even within this perspective, lively debate abounded. However, it is undeniable that race became a tool in political discourse, used by supporters of colonization to legitimize the expansion of colonial domination.

1931, or the Acme of Colonial Culture

The year 1931 was a turning point. More than simply the apotheosis of the colonial idea in France, it also signaled a real change in the evolution of colonial culture. This culture had now been established. It had become diffuse, ubiquitous, just at the moment when the Empire seemed to be moving toward another fate. The crowning moment was unquestionably the International Colonial Exposition of 1931, at which the French public elated before the splendors of the Empire.24 Beyond the colonial pomp, the event was also—and perhaps primarily—the century’s primary showcase of Republican power. Traces of a colonial education were evident everywhere one looked. First there were the schools, which prepared the French for a panegyric of the colonial with textbooks and the omnipresence of the Ligue Maritime et Coloniale, and micro-expositions within the curriculum. Indeed, from primary school until the university level, history courses taught an idealized vision of France’s duty to colonize. This blend of pedagogy, patriotism, and nationalism helped to cement the idea that colonialism was consubstantial to the Republic. To be for the colonial saga was to be a good French person. To be for the civilizing mission was to support France’s grandeur. To be for the Empire was to be patriotic. These beliefs hardened into dogma when they were taught in the classroom and were materialized at Vincennes.

Like Joan of Arc, Napoleon, and the French Revolution, the colonial crusade, along with the exposition, had become a constitutive element of the nation’s historic edifice. Beyond the classroom lessons, literature, cinema, the annual colonial weeks, the hundreds of local fairs and expositions, the incessant and effective activity of the Agence Générale des Colonies, this moment was a moment of triumph for colonial France. In a sense, the exposition was a metaphoric transposition of colonial culture and ideology, such as the primary advocates for the colonies in France imagined it. Foremost among those advocates was Marshal Lyautey. The Republic’s obsession with national unity undoubtedly found in this exposition, and in the colonial project generally, its completion.

Thus, in his radio speech for the inauguration of the International Colonial Exposition of 1931, Paul Reynaud, the minister of the colonies, announced a new imperial relationship: The main goal of the Exposition is to make the French aware of their Empire, to use the word of the men of the Convention. Each one of us must feel himself a citizen of Greater France, that of the five parts of the world… After Russia, metropolitan France has the largest territory in Europe. Yet that is but one twenty-third of the French Empire. The moment was solemn, the opening of the exposition was grandiose. The term Empire had been deliberately chosen: France, the Republic, the colonies were now one. The utopian dream of (certainly greater) French power regained was now realized. The reconstitutions in Vincennes were sources of wonder, and made Paris the capital of the world for six months. As the posters pasted all over Europe and the colonial Empire claimed, it was possible at Vincennes to tour the world in a day.

Spectacular, magical, surprising, striking: these were all terms used to describe the great enterprise of propaganda of the colonial period. From the head of state to members of parliament, from journalists to writers, from entrepreneurs to retailers, from laborers to adolescents, more than 8 million people went to see this imperial mise-en-scène. They came from all over France to immerse themselves in the exotic atmosphere that had been touted by ad campaigns. This was another France. Hearsay from exposition-goers spoke of this life-sized theater. There was talk of it on the radio too. Many visitors, having seen some of the hundreds of reports or cinematographic newsreels, or having read about the exposition in the newspapers, were influenced by the propaganda that had been specially created for the event.

How could one not be struck, Sandrine Lemaire asks (Chapter 10),

by the famous tour of the world in a day, this metaphoric journey from one country to another without ever having to leave the site of the International Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1931? Indeed, this enormous information machine appealed to all the senses, vulgarizing the official message, while making it a thing of dreams. Every day and every night, cleverly orchestrated spectacles plunged visitors into reconstitutions of the court of Behanzin, into the middle of Annam’s ritual processions, and into the festivities of the Nuits coloniales (Colonial Nights), the sounds and lights of which made the nocturnal expositions magical, enchanting, mysterious. Through propaganda, the state was taking part in the entertainment business, throwing what could be called a political party.

The International Colonial Exposition is essential for understanding the decade that was just beginning. For two years, the world had been embroiled in a world crisis. Even today, the year 1931 fascinates us: one need only read Didier Daeninckx’s 1998 novel Cannibale to understand this shift between two periods, two worlds, two imaginaries.

In the three-decade period that began with the International Colonial Exposition of 1931, France was awash in the height of imperial culture. A mainstay no matter the political regime—from the Front Populaire to Vichy, from the Union Nationale government of the postwar years to the successive coalitions of the Fourth Republic (1946–1958)—no matter the crisis—from the Yen Bay repression to the rejection of Blum-Viollette’s project, from the rallying of France Libre to the repressions of 1945–1947, from the Indochina conflict to the independence of Morocco and Tunisia, from sub-Saharan resistance to the Algerian War—no matter the changes, this culture was an integral part of French life. This was no longer the time of the colonial seeking to penetrate common sense. Rather, it had progressively become part of daily life. This generation had been thoroughly immersed in imperial ideas to the point that the latter began to fuse with that of the nation.

The Colonial Idea, a National Passion

No doubt, on the eve of the Second World War, a majority of French people did not believe—in the sense of a consciously held belief—in the imperial myth. Many were still indifferent to the overseas territories. However, for us, colonial culture did not really operate in this sense. As such, the International Colonial Exposition provides us with important clues to understanding how colonial culture for the most part worked. First, it offered a narrative and nondiscursive universe founded on fabulation, seduction, imagery, and affect, which was exactly the aim of the exposition of 1931. A journey through colonial worlds, discovering the splendors of Angkor, the Djenné Mosque, the different peoples from the Empire, watching movies, and looking at panoramic images: these ludic and dream-based social practices made the colonial idea come alive in the body, the psyche. They were thus far more effective than speeches made by the champions of colonization.

Colonization was able to ingrain itself into the quotidian, and over the course of the 1930s it was even able to affect the populace’s conception of the nation and of French identity. This explains why the colonial lobby—unaccustomed to this kind of public interest, and indeed euphoria, with respect to the French colonial domain—radically changed. Indeed, it was quite enthusiastic about the impact of the International Colonial Exposition on the public and its subsequent obsession with the colonial. An article entitled, Les dernières heures de l’Exposition coloniale (The final hours of the Colonial Exposition), published in L’Illustration, describes this moment in October 1931 thus: The Exposition fades out, the Exposition has died a beautiful death thanks to the crowd, its enthusiasm, its fervor, which makes the even immortal, durable, a thing to remember… Friday was a day of supreme elegance, and Sunday, a day for the people.25 The Empire was both a thing for the masses and something that transcended political affiliation. Henceforth, as attested by a Pétainist formulation, it was part of hexagonal patrimony: though the Third Republic had been wholly rejected, colonization had not depreciated in value.

The Other Face of the 1930s

A crisis provoked a twofold withdrawal into the imperial over the course of the 1930s. The withdrawal was first born in the early 1930s from a series of economic needs elicited by the new world order. This became materialized in a slogan of imperial autarky. The notion of autarky was to favor exchange between the metropole and the colonies, and for France to make a priority of importing raw materials, whether they were strategic or not. In the troubled context of the era, Greater France concretely became an important resource. The imperial succeeded in penetrating French daily life thanks to the firm support of the fields of literature, cinema, and the press. The second withdrawal, which took place in 1938 and 1939, once again put the Empire at the forefront of the political scene, on the one hand because of international interest and on the other because of what it represented for the defense of the metropole against the threat of conflict.

Thus, in 1939, L’Illustration conducted a massive survey titled L’Empire français. Réalité vivante (The French Empire. A living reality), and began its series of articles thus:

It would be of little use to remind L’Illustration’s readers of the fatal reason for which colonial issues slowly gained public interest. [ … ] interest in the empire was first expressed in public opinion as a feeling that France had at its disposition a thing that it had been keeping in reserve and that, either through negligence or because we were too busy elsewhere, we had not yet made a concerted effort to use it to our advantage. Then, at the very moment when our country suddenly realized its power overseas, the Empire became threatened. In response, the nation immediately unified itself behind the cause of protecting this national good. Two things then happened, which President Daladier’s visit to North Africa have strikingly confirmed: two facts that would henceforth affect all external politics. The first was the living reality of the Empire, as it was proclaimed and renewed by a hundred different peoples whose only commonality was our flag. The second was the wild realization of the French that they possessed this far-away good. They would perhaps never see this overseas domain. But it was already enough for them to know that it and their distant cousins existed. [ … ] When some pretend to extend a hand toward these territories, others furrow their brows and grumble. When somebody tries to touch his field, Jacques Bonhomme picks up his pitchfork.26

The long process that, between 1851 and 1931, had transformed France from an exclusively hexagonal society into an imperial culture continued in the years that followed, and became ingrained in the collective psychology.

A multifaceted colonial culture rooted itself into French society in the years 1931–1961, in spite of political upheaval, the crisis of the 1930s, the major trauma that was the Second World War, and the violent process of decolonization. The impregnation of this culture into society during these three decades can be broken into several stages. However, it is important not to equate the progression of these stages with a regular and uniform process. They were more like successive waves that over time became part of common sense, invaded the collective consciousness, and formed mentalities.

Three stages are particularly distinguishable: the ubiquity and the apogee of the imperial in French society up until the Second World War; a utopian period of grandeur during the Second World War wherein the Empire became seen as crucial in efforts to save the nation and secure its future, and then later when the project of the Union demonstrated a will to unite hexagonal France with France overseas; finally, the period of crisis, with the conflicts between the process of de-colonization and persistent imperial notions, in spite of the changes that occurred during this time. Sandrine Lemaire writes (Chapter 18):

The word Empire entered the vocabulary in the early thirties. At the outset, the word carried no political connotations; it was used to designate peoples related to the mother country. Other popular terms were France Overseas, External France, France of the Five Parts of the World, the France of One Hundred Million Inhabitants, Greater France, Total France. These expressions all referred to the notion that the colonies were but an extension of the Hexagon.

The context placed the Empire at the center of national political conflict, and especially with respect to international issues and that of the French imaginary. In the late 1930s, the term could be found in most newspaper articles, and had become the expression used to connote regained greatness.

As Nicolas Bancel and Daniel Denis point out with reference to the ways in which the school system and textbooks worked to create the colonial (Chapter 20),

the colonies were used as a space on which to project what the metropole wanted for itself: economic progress, unification of social strata, abolition of racial divides around one shared project (modernity), enthusiasm for a Republican utopia, and the far-off notion of equality. In a sense, it can be argued that France’s civilizing mission goes back to the educational ideal itself, and that it takes its cues directly from the curriculum. For it insisted on the possibility of transforming the natives, who were typically portrayed as children who needed to grow up, through education.

Several aspects of culture were layered over one another in such a way as to become a multiform (but internally coherent) whole. More than a political configuration, this was a silent cultural impregnation of society: spectacular events were no longer needed, for, thanks to a variety of materials and vectors, the culture was already part of daily life.

In such a context, it becomes clear that the concept of empire-nation, which marked the passage from the colonial concept to the imperial concept, was central to the way in which citizenship was constructed in France. This concept crossed the political divide, and as David Murphy, Elizabeth Ezra, and Charles Forsdick have shown, the French Empire had unprecedented political support, with the right and the left united behind a vision of the nation’s greatness. Such was also the case in the cultural domain, for the idea of Empire fascinated many artists and intellectuals [ … ] and exerted enormous influence over their work (Chapter 19). Imperial culture is thus this omnipresence of the colonial domain within French society. In the 1920s and 1930s it had been Greater France, but by the late 1930s and under Vichy, it was progressively rebranded under the term Empire. Then it became, in the official vocabulary, France overseas, then the French Union, the Federation, the French Community… In the media and for the public, colonies and Empire remained the dominant terms used to describe this other France, in spite of the variety of other designations.

From Colonial Migration to the Imperial Revolution

At the same time, the context in France was paradoxical. A law was voted on August 10, 1932, which reinforced the restrictions previously put into place in 1924, established quotas for immigration in France (a progressive closing of the borders), and introduced measures favoring French workers. Nevertheless, this period was marked by a process of immigration that changed the very nature of imperial culture, making it more palpable, more real, more a part of daily life. Tens of thousands of natives were now living in France, notably in Paris, and Paris became the leading city of ‘exotic’ immigration in Europe. As a result, its cultural and political identities were profoundly altered. This period, during which the ‘three colors of the Empire’ migrated to France, was the beginning of a half-century of continuous migration, which would forever change the nature of French society. Today, along with the question of integration, immigration is one of the ‘particularities’ of French identity in Europe (Pascal Blanchard and Éric Deroo, Chapter 22). During the same period, Georges Mauco published his controversial book Les Étrangers en France (Foreigners in France, 1932), in which he integrated national prejudices to his methodology and wrote of the potential for assimilation of each immigrant population, whereby some foreigners were deemed desirable (and assimilable), and others not.

There was a patent rejection of exotic peoples, which underscored the disconnect between discourse targeting the overseas territories and concrete practices on metropolitan soil. This fracture began to emerge alongside an official discourse that referred to the burgeoning colonial edifice in terms of a fusion among different peoples in the medium-term. Though often overlooked by researchers of contemporary history, this was a founding moment for national identity, one which shaped France for generations to come. The concomitance of these arguments, which have formed the basis of immigration policy in both the Fourth and Fifth Republics, is demonstrative of the formal contradiction that arose in a nation searching for its identity.27 A palpable contradiction was to be found in the press, with its regular campaigns against these undesirables who were often considered a threat to the nation’s unity when in the metropole, whereas the colonies themselves were seen as essential in fortifying the nation’s power and its unity.

However, in spite of this rejection of migrants from the Empire, which was in any case opposed to