French Colonization

7 Key excerpts on "French Colonization"

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  France and the New Imperialism

  Security Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

  • Bruno Charbonneau(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes in which he argued for the crucial importance of investing in French colonies. He revised the arguments of economists and geographers for a period of liberal economics while giving it a humanitarian flavour. For Leroy-Beaulieu, the “emigration of capital” was vital for the economic, social, intellectual, and moral progress of contemporary societies. It produced wealth through the creation of new markets, new businesses, increased production, and a general increase in profits and wages. But even better, this “development” would be in the end beneficial to all of humanity because it would expand the reaches of civilization.

  Colonization is a nation’s expansionist force, it is its power of reproduction, it is its expansion [dilatation ] and proliferation across space, it is the submission of the universe or a large part of it to its language, its morals, its ideas, and its laws. A nation that colonizes is one that lays the foundations of its future grandeur and supremacy … [Notwithstanding where one stands intellectually and philosophically] here is an indisputable truth: the nation that colonizes the most is the foremost nation; if it is not today, it will be tomorrow (quoted in: Girardet 1972, 27-8).

  Beyond the theory, French colonies became increasingly important economically for the metropole. Colonial expansion was to guarantee access to essential raw materials for French industry and to offer new commercial opportunities. Colonialism was also perceived as a necessity for all of Europe. It was widely regarded as an economic law inseparable from the evolution of civilization. Increasing investments and competition and expanding industrialization presumed new markets. After 20 years of economic growth, France and other European industrial nations experienced an economic slowdown starting in 1873-74. The French domestic market was restrictive and showing weak potential for growth. French colonial possessions therefore presented attractive economic opportunities for a capitalism in need of new markets. Marseille (1984) demonstrates how colonies rapidly became a privileged place of expansion for private investments and French capital because the colonial investment offered two major advantages: high profitability and the security provided by direct political domination.

  The colonial market offered and guaranteed important opportunities for most French industrialists and small and medium entrepreneurs. And the wider French empire played an essential role in the metropole’s economic expansion. It rapidly became France’s third commercial partner behind Britain and Germany while often stealing Germany’s second place between 1900 and 1914. Before 1914, the imperial market regularly absorbed 40 per cent of French exports of refined sugar, 56 per cent of its rails, 85 per cent of its cotton, 73 per cent of its locomotives, and 80 per cent of metallic goods. The empire also supplied France with a variety of foods and primary resources, including 70 per cent of its peanuts, 73 per cent of its cork, 60 per cent of its vegetables, almost 90 per cent of its wines, 79 per cent of its phosphates, 95 per cent of its rice, and 58 per cent of its lead ore (figures represent ordinary years, Marseille 1984, 154).

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  Out of Africa

  Post-Structuralism's Colonial Roots

  • Pal Ahluwalia(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It was the assimilation policy that was to determine the relations between the coloniser and colonised. In practise, however, as Michael Crowder points out, ‘the French when confronted with people they considered barbarians, believed it their mission to convert them into Frenchmen’ (cited in Khapoya 1998: 120). The implication of such a policy were that education had to be in French because it was seen to be the key to civilisation itself. Indeed, so rigidly was this rule applied that Arabic itself was banned for the Algerians. 1 Colonial Algeria: the consolidation of the settlers Algeria, however, remained largely outside the configurations that governed the bulk of the French colonies because it was seen as an extension of France, making it perhaps the most prized of all French colonial possessions. It rapidly became both constitutionally as well as legally an important part of France. In 1848, Algeria officially became a part of France in the form of three départements. As Benjamin Stora notes: An Algeria made up of three French departments would forever ‘Gallicize’ the territories of the central Maghreb. … Its aim was to ensure the absolute and complete subjugation of the population to the needs and interests of colonization. The colons enjoyed full rights, the colonized were ‘subjects’ not ‘citizens’, liable to special provisions: tallage, corvee, and detention without due process. (cited in Stora 2001: 6) From the beginning of colonisation, there was a concerted effort to expropriate land and encourage settlement. The settlers, the colons or pieds-noirs were mostly peasant farmers or had working-class origins. By the end of the nineteenth century, the colons had established farms and vineyards and with ‘French-style cities and European settlers, Algeria was well on its way to becoming Algérie française

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  Princeton Modern Knowledge

  French Sociology and the Overseas Empire

  • George Steinmetz(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  This stood in contrast to the emphatic celebration of the language of colonialism between the wars. Yet already in the late 1930s, the word “colonial” started to be replaced with “overseas” (outre-mer) in the names of institutions. Such euphemistic parlance became universal after 1945. The French empire itself was rechristened as the “French Union.” African subjects gained the right to participate in elections to colony-level assemblies and to a powerless empire-wide parliament—the Assembly of the French Union—that met in Versailles. Plans for a wholesale integration of the empire into France began to be discussed immediately after Liberation. Although French voters rejected the extension of full citizenship to France’s sixty million colonized subjects, the discussion kept alive the idea of an “empire of citizens” or a federation that would closely connect France and its overseas territories. 24 The enormous public investments in the colonies, territories, protectorates, and overseas departments after 1945 can only be understood in light of the belief among large segments of the ruling elite that the empire’s life could be prolonged for many more years, and perhaps indefinitely, in one form or another. The Permeation of Colonialism by Experts and Science During the twentieth century, science and academic expertise came to dominate an imperial cosmos that had first been permeated by explorers and adventurers, then by conquistadors, then by capitalists and settlers. The new colonial empires of the 1880s were forged at the same time as the so-called second scientific revolution. 25 Colonial governments, associations, and businesses already began investing in scientific research at the time. Overseas administrators were spurred to make the colonies economically self-sustaining and governable, eliminate tropical diseases, resolve demographic crises, and create the conditions for European settlement

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  Africa in World Affairs

  Politics of Imperialism, the Cold War and Globalisation

  • Rajen Harshé(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  Although this restricted view of neo-colonialism does exclude the United States of America (USA), as a part of the Western alliance the USA has expanded its role in Africa since the 1960s. Its expansive ventures are imperial rather than neo-colonial. For the USA had no colony in Africa. Its imperialism has been informal as well as impersonal. As a world power, it has run an empire without colonies in several parts of the world. In a strictly technical sense only the Philippines was an American colony and the US can and has played a neo-colonial role there. However, the US’s role in Africa is extensively discussed in the next chapter.

  The Franco–African ensemble

  During the course of the first chapter of this study, the nature of French colonialism has already been discussed. Keeping the same discussion in the background, an attempt can be made to work out the necessary links between the colonial and the neo-colonial. For instance, minority adventurers, explorers, soldiers and sophisticated elites, in effect, constructed colonialism (Charbonneau, 2008: 38). Thus, when vast tracts of land in Africa were being brought under control, the so-called ‘orient’ was being discovered by the colonisers who presented their version to the people in the metropole with a somewhat jaundiced eye. The so-called construction of the ‘orient’, as Edward Said has rightly argued, had become an industry in the occident (Said, 2001 [1978]). Any construct that subsumes dominant–dependent ties is intrinsically skewed because the powerful country that is in the process of ruling such vast tracts of land through its imperial system tends to oversimplify complex realities. An attempt at self-glorification can be accompanied by the demonisation of the subjects or natives. Indeed, the process of colonisation, in general, involved a lot of violence, theft, looting and even genocide, which invited protests and resistance. But the history of such protests is often ignored in colonial accounts.

  Irrespective of this basic limitation, it could be safely argued that France not merely conceived its colonies as ‘France Outre-Mer’ (overseas France) but it made all-round efforts to integrate at least a section of African populations within the politics and society of metropolitan France. Since the late nineteenth century, the existence of African colonies was associated with the very identity of France which, in its turn, gave France the required prestige among competing European imperial powers.

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  Planning Power

  Town Planning and Social Control in Colonial Africa

  • Ambe Njoh(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • UCL Press

    (Publisher)

  Opponents of the idea included leaders of financial institutions and those with intimate connections to such institutions, who had preferred seeing France concentrate its limited resources on domestic investments. They contended that colonial expansion would result in the French state spreading scarce resources rather too thinly. Proponents of colonial expansion, including geographers (under the banner of the Geography Association or Société de Géographie), politicians, businesspeople, and the military, made a forceful case arguing that the acquisition of colonial territories would strengthen France intellectually, economically and militarily. In 1893 these proponents formed an association, the French Colonial Union (l’Union Coloniale Française). The main aim of the association was to convince the French populace that colonial expansion bore the potential of strengthening France especially economically and militarily. Accordingly, they set up a propaganda machinery designed to sway public opinion in their favour. An important element in this machinery was a newspaper, La Quinzaine coloniale, which preoccupied itself with selling the colonial ideology. A common thread that ran through the discourse on French colonialism was that it was designed to ‘civilize and modernize’ the primitive world. By the beginning of the twentieth century the French citizenry and politicians had been sold on the idea of French colonial expansion. Accordingly, the plan to penetrate, with the goal of acquiring colonial territories in Africa, was adopted in 1879 by the Ministry of the Colonies. The ministry devised a plan to establish a commercial link between Algeria and Senegal as a means of unifying the two colonies and facilitate further penetration into the African hinterland. This plan was later abandoned and in its stead a plan to construct a railway linking the two main rivers in the region, River Senegal and River Niger, was crafted

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  Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution

  • Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, Dominic Thomas, Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, Dominic Thomas, Alexis Pernsteiner(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  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,

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  The French and the Pacific World, 17th–19th Centuries

  Explorations, Migrations and Cultural Exchanges

  • Annick Foucrier(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  L'émigration aux colonies (Paris 1897). Colonisation as a solution for social problems found a lot of support in France at the end of the 19th century. On one hand, France participated in a small way in the large movement of European overseas emigration; the colonial lobbies were concerned about the expansion of Anglo-Saxon countries and considered French emigration a necessity to maintain the international status of France. On the other hand, the social effects of the industrial revolution induced pressure and the social question became the dominant one of the period.

  4 This programme was organised by Eugéne Etienne, one of the major personalities of the French colonial lobby; Member of the Department of Colonies in 1887, he became the leader of 'le groupe colonial de la Chambre des Députés', founded in 1892. A main issue of the programme was to compete with the growing influence of the South American agencies of emigration (especially the Argentina one) set up in France. The head of the Dept of Colonies wrote in 1889 to the Governor of New Caledonia: 'Divers états de l'Amerique du Sud ont constitué plusieurs régions de France, des agences chargées de recruter des travailleurs parmi les populations rurales. Grâce aux avantages faits aux cultivateurs français ceux-ci quittent en assei grand nombre la Mère-Patrie et vont porter dans des pays étrangers, une main d'ouvre qui pourrait être utilement employer à la mise en valeur des terrains cultivable® dans certaines de nos colonies d'outre-mer'. Circulaire ministèrielle, 6 juin 1889, in Bulletin Ojftciel de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. Indeed, the French social historian Louis Chevalier noted in an article published in 1647 that one of the main periods of French overseas emigration was 1888-90. A large proportion of the migrants settled in Argentina. L. Chevalier, 'L'émigration française au 19ème siècle', Etudes d'Histoire modeme et contemporizing

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