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A Mission to Civilize - The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Paperback, 1 New Ed)
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A Mission to Civilize - The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Paperback, 1 New Ed)
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This book addresses a central but often ignored question in the
history of modern France and modern colonialism: How did the Third
Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values,
allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal
of a "civilizing" ideology with distinct racist overtones? By
focusing on a particular group of colonial officials in a specific
setting--the governors general of French West Africa from 1895 to
1930--the author argues that the ideal of a special civilizing
mission had a decisive impact on colonial policymaking and on the
evolution of modern French republicanism generally.
French ideas of civilization--simultaneously republican, racist,
and modern--encouraged the governors general in the 1890's to
attack such "feudal" African institutions as aristocratic rule and
slavery in ways that referred back to France's own experience of
revolutionary change. Ironically, local administrators in the
1920's also invoked these same ideas to justify such reactionary
policies as the reintroduction of forced labor, arguing that
coercion, which inculcated a work ethic in the "lazy" African,
legitimized his loss of freedom. By constantly invoking the ideas
of "civilization," colonial policy makers in Dakar and Paris
managed to obscure the fundamental contradictions between "the
rights of man" guaranteed in a republican democracy and the
forcible acquisition of an empire that violates those rights.
In probing the "republican" dimension of French colonization in
West Africa, this book also sheds new light on the evolution of the
Third Republic between 1895 and 1930. One of the author's principal
arguments is that the idea of a civilized mission underwent
dramatic changes, due to ideological, political, and economic
transformations occurring simultaneously in France and its
colonies. For example, revolts in West Africa as well as a more
conservative climate in the metropole after World War I produced in
the governors general a new respect for "feudal" chiefs, whom the
French once despised but now reinstated as a means of control. This
discovery of an African "tradition" in turn reinforced a
reassertion of traditional values in France as the Third Republic
struggled to recapture the world it had "lost" at Verdun.
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