The Crisis of French Colonialism

by HERBERT LUETHY

To speak today of the French Colonial Empire is, of course, to speak of something belonging to the past. Juridically speaking, the Empire replaced it by the vague and never clearly defined concept of the French Union, which in theory at least excludes all idea of domination. For years the politicians of France acted as though they could change the name from Empire to Union without having to alter anything else, but that illusion has since been cruelly shattered. While the French possessions in Asia — the most peripheral of the Empire — have had to be abandoned, the African mass of the old Empire so far remains intact. But it is already clear that if any of it is to be saved, it will have to be through far-reaching changes in France’s relations with her overseas territories.

To understand what it is that is now in the process of changing, we must first have some idea of what the Empire once was. To find the living incarnation of the French imperial idea you have to go down to Negro Africa and meet the dark-skinned voter of Senegal who proclaims his French citizenship with exactly the same pride that Saint Paul took in calling himself a civis romanus — with the consciousness that this is the supreme dignity that man can aspire to. Indeed, in certain of its fundamental aspects this French Empire has no other parallel in history than the Roman — above all in its conception of universal civilization in the proper and primitive sense of the word: that in which to “civilize” means to “ make citizens.” And yet the France of the Third Republic which built this Empire bore little resemblance, either in power or in will power, to Rome, mistress of the ancient world. The French Empire, indeed, has been one of the most paradoxical and misunderstood realizations in European history; and like many other historic achievements, we may only be able to do it full justice in retrospect, when we can compare what follows with what went before.

Even in France, people began taking notice of this immense imperial domain only when the emancipated countries of Asia and the Middle East started attacking it from all sides. The truth is that the colonies and metropolitan France have not shared the same past, and it is probably since the Liberation of 1944 that they have definitely ceased to understand each other. It was with deep instinctive distrust that the “internal” resistance saw troops and leaders from the colonies arrive in France in the days of liberation. It was the meeting of two forces which were strangers and slightly suspicious of each other. Liberated France hastened — on paper at any rate — to abolish its Colonial Empire. As usual, it was only the name that was being abolished. But this embarrassed haste was characteristic. To talk of the Colonial Empire in the Third Republic had always been to talk of something scandalous. It was something which existed and which Frenchmen could take pride in, but basically it was contrary to republican principles.

Hundreds of French history books have been written in which colonial politics are mentioned merely in passing, as a sort of curiosity, a series of more or less successful adventures. In these histories only the most dubious episodes of French colonialism are mentioned: the speculations of John Law and the Mississippi Scandal; the casual abandonment, of those “few acres of snow,’as Voltaire called Canada, and of the “fairy-tale’ Empire of India which cost Dupleix so much effort and ingenuity to build for Louis XV; Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Saint Vitus’s dance of the rights of man in Santo Domingo; Napoleon’s dreams of world domination in the shadow of ihe pyramids; the famous “flick of the fly-whisk” (administered by the Dey of Algiers to the French Consul in 1827) which precipitated the conquest of Algeria, a maneuver intended to save the crumbling monarchy by diverting public attention abroad; Napoleon III’s adventures in Cochin China, Syria, and Mexico; the multiple intrigues of the Moroccan crisis, In short, an uninterrupted repetition of mishaps culminating in the 1890s in the Panama Scandal and Fashoda Incident.

Such was approximately the conception of the French Empire in the popular historical writings of the Third Republic. It was all the product of an obscure agitation carried on in the wings of the French political stage. The “people” had nothing to do with these machinations, plotted behind their backs by the tycoons of big business and banking, by the clergy and the military, all busy trying to rebuild overseas the Bastilles which the “people” had torn down at home.

No one went out of his way to thank the Comte de Polignac after the capture of Algiers in 1830 for having rid the Mediterranean of a nest of pirates that had infested it for centuries, and for laying the foundation of a Colonial Empire destined to replace the one which the French Revolution had liquidated. The whole Algerian expedition was treated as nothing more than a wretched electoral maneuver and a pretext for regaining diplomatic prestige which aroused general mirth in Paris. Each new budget debate provoked uproars against the cost of this “ mad undertaking.” It was only grudgingly that the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe finally bowed before the fait accompli of a colonial implantation which the French generals were systematically extending into the interior of Algeria. Deputy Passy summed up these debates in a remark which deserves to remain famous: “As far as I am concerned, I would give up Algiers any day for a shack on the Rhine.”

Architects of the Empire

Fifty years later French public opinion reacted in the same way to the punitive expedition dispatched to crush the “Kroumir plunderers,” which led to the establishment of a French protectorate over Tunisia. “ What idiot,” cried Henri Rochefort, the most brilliant polemicist of the Third Republic, “no matter how big his goitre, is going to be made to believe by the government that we are going to spend hundreds of millions and immobilize forty thousand men in Tunisia, solely to punish three Kroumirs, who, from time to time, rob our colonials of a cow worth ninety francs? We are sure that the Ferry government would offer thirty thousand francs to whoever would get it a Kroumir, if only to display it to the army as a sample. Unfortunately, there are just no Kroumirs on the market.”

Before a Paris jury the polemicist was acquitted with considerable éclat of the libel charge brought against him by the government. Ferry, the Prime Minister, fell after an exceptionally tumultuous session of the Chamber of Deputies. But the enraged Parliament, after formally condemning the Tunisian expedition, was forced to ratify the Treaty of Bardo, establishing the protectorate. The French were there; therefore, they would stay.

Jules Ferry, the “architect of the French Empire,” is a symbol. Four years later he had to appear before a furious Chamber to justify his having undertaken the campaign of Tongking in northern Indochina. This time it was not just a question of a parliamentary vote of defiance. In front of the Palais-Bourbon a furious crowd argued as to whether Jules Ferry — the “Tunisian,” the “Tonkinois” — should be strung up on a lamppost or tossed into the Seine. He had to escape by a side door. But the French stayed on in Indochina.

Today the work of French colonization enjoys less popular esteem than ever at home. To judge by the Paris press, the war in Indochina was one uninterrupted series of sordid deals, odious traffickings, and peculations, from the “Emperor of the Night Clubs,” Bao Dai, to the constantly halfsmothered and rekindled scandals involving piasters, peddlers of political influence, and lucrative acts of treason. Recent events in North Africa have likewise brought out the sullen hostility existing between the parliamentary republic at home and the overseas French — settlers, high administrative officials, and officers of the Army of Africa

— who have consistently refused to respect the decisions of the “government in Paris.” The Moroccan coup d’état of August, 1953, which removed Sultan Ben Youssef from his throne, was a local plot, in the purest Franco style engineered by Marshal Juin and the Pasha of Marrakesh against the vacillating will of the French government.

Yet it would be equally possible to write another history of overseas France in which the quarrels and scandals in Europe appear only as stupid and sometimes destructive interruptions of the vast, audacious, patient, century-long work of those pioneers and Empire-builders whose achievements ignorant politicians and demagogues at home have never ceased to dissipate on the Rhine and in Flanders, if not in budgetary debates and corridor intrigues. For France has certainly the greatest and oldest colonial tradition of all the nations of Europe. Prior to the English, the French between 1650 and 1750 established a protectorate over a large part of India, the last five trading posts of which were surrendered to New Delhi a year and a half ago. They were the first to bring European colonization to the interior of North America. France is the only country which, having lost almost all of one vast Colonial Empire, set out again to build another

— one that is still the second largest in the world.

The Empire of Richelieu and Colbert, however,

was not the first; the history of French colonialism really starts at the beginning of our millennium with the Norman expeditions and reaches its apogee in the Crusades and the Franco-Latin Empire of the East. Barely one hundred years after their debarkation on the soil of France, those Scandinavian pirates, the Normans, took off again as French conquerors, sowing French culture and language in every direction, from England to Sicily and Jerusalem. Here for the first time we encounter that astonishing power of assimilation of a people which

— right up to yesterday — had no doubt of its ability to weld all peoples and races together in the melting pot of France, and to turn them into Frenchmen whether they were Kabyles, Tuaregs, Madagascans, Annamites, or Indians.

“Cultural imperialism”

Underlying this “ absurd dream ” is the naïve and unlimited confidence in its own human and spiritual indestructibility of a nation which has always wished to possess not an ethnic or racial but a cultural unity, open to everything that is human. Since the Middle Ages there has existed what we might call a French “ cultural imperialism ” which, alongside of other more down-to-earth motives, has been one of the driving forces of French colonial, and even foreign, policy. This cultural imperialism of France has always implied a degree of receptivity to, and a readiness to appropriate, what is foreign.

These were the qualities exhibited by those French pioneers who played so great a role in the history of overseas France, the Cailliés and the Foucaulds, who became natives, Indian or Negro tribal chieftains, sheikhs, ulemas, Marabouts, fellahs, or mendicant pilgrims on the road to Mecca — men who penetrated different civilizations without ceasing to be French; men who conquered new realms of the human spirit for France.

Throughout this colonial history, the French back home had no understanding of what was going on or of what was at stake overseas. They had to be confronted with faits accomplis, convinced by appeals to patriotic pride, seduced by glittering promises of gold mines, before they would consent to contribute the minimum aid needed to complete the work begun. The Empire was built, almost in spite of them, by those who labored and risked everything on the spot — the settlers, legionnaires, missionaries of the Catholic faith or of French culture, entrepreneurs and adventurers, whom this ostensibly stay-at-home people has produced in such extraordinary profusion. It was maintained by any means at hand against the slogan-mongers of metropolitan France who bickered over every budgetary penny and were ever ready to “ give up Algiers for a shack on the Rhine.”

The paradoxical feature of this Empire has been its idealism. The Empire of France has always been a luxury, a question of prestige, of international rank, of cultural glory, far more than something necessary or useful. Tending to be selfsufficient, metropolitan France has never felt the desire or the need to exploit the work of her Empirebuilders. Thus, never even in the most limited sense has she developed an imperial economy. Before the First World War, when she was the banker of the world, France invested 45 billion francs abroad, but of this immense sum barely one tenth went to her colonies. From the Tsar of Russia and other European monarchs the Third Republic bought bonds which were eventually eaten up during the war, but it made no real “investment ” of its funds overseas. The military conquest and pacification of the colonies cost it 10 billion francs, but it could not even spare half that amount for their economic development. In the last budget for the colonies before the Second World War — that of 1938 — the French State devoted 2½ per cent of its allocations to its overseas possessions, four fifths of which went to the army.

The colonies compete with home

Behind the tariff walls shielding the colonies, French trading companies have lived comfortably off the sale of commercial products manufactured for the natives and off the import of colonial products sold on the home market. From the start it was extensive colonization of the mercantile and almost feudal type, with trading stations and large landed estates rather than small settlements and industrial plants. The colonies have thus become simple extensions rather than partners of the metropolitan French economy.

The economy of Algeria after one century of French domination offers the most dramatic illustration of this tendency carried to extremes. With fierce exclusiveness the French settlers of Algeria grow wheat, the overproduction of which in France has already entailed a cutback in sown areas; and they produce wine, which, since the drinking of alcohol is forbidden to faithful Moslems by the Koran, can only find a market in France, a. wine-producing country par excellence. The result is that metropolitan France must now protect herself with a tariff barrier against this very Algeria which is integrated into the political, administrative, and fiscal system of the “one and indivisible” Republic.

This, of course, is an extreme case. Yet it is a fact that up until the First World War nine tenths of what France — herself an agricultural country — imported from her colonies consisted of foodstuffs. The progress made by the banana-growers of French West Africa has caused panic among French fruitgrowers at home; coconut-palm and ground-nut oils have seriously threatened French olive oil; rum from Martinique has competed with French cognac and eau de vie. As a result, hardly a single colonial product has been spared by the French customs. Prohibited too has been all industrial development in the colonies, even of the humblest local industries for the processing of native foodstuffs or minerals.

The sanctity of metropolitan France’s monopoly position was always the first principle of French colonialism.

Two territories, before the war, stood out as exceptions in this scheme of things: the two youngest and most modern of France’s colonies, Morocco and Indochina. A more up-to-date brand of colonization was able to assert itself here — thanks, in the case of Indochina, to its very distance from France, which in a way protected it; and, in the case of Morocco, to the grandiose views of Marshal Lyautey, who “ launched ” the protectorate much as one launches a business. In the latter case, this has been furthered by the fact that the Treaty of Algeciras of 1906 recognized the commercial “open door” and thus prevented Morocco’s incorporation into the French colonial system. Here the spirit of French enterprise has shown that when faced with foreign competition it can meet the test, and that all it has lacked elsewhere has been the invigorating experience of being obliged to stand up to its rivals.

One hundred million sons of France

What metropolitan France has always expected of “greater France” is the “ making of Frenchmen ” — French citizens, of course, but first and foremost French soldiers. For the native elites the narrow gate providing access to French citizenship has always been the French high school diploma; but the great highway open to all has been the chance of serving under French colors in time of war.

All the French “laws of assimilation” and the mass grants of citizenship date from war years: 1870-71, 1914-18, 1943-45. It seems to have been General Mangin, that hero of the First World War, who first spoke of France as a country numbering not forty but one hundred million Frenchmen. It is on the battlefield that the great dream of making men of all races into sons of France has found its basic and concrete expression. In her colonies France has found no dearth of soldiers. Here, where it has kept the spirit of the ancien régime alive more successfully than at home, the army has been the great crucible of assimilation. Out of Arabs and Berbers, out of Senegalese and Madagascans, it has created French patriots; whereas only too often French schools have produced intellectuals who, in the sacred name of republican principles, have revolted against French colonial rule. Nothing could better illustrate the efficacy of the military crucible than that corps which groups under its banners men who are neither French subjects nor the sons of primitive peoples — the Foreign Legion.

Here again the Second World War dealt a mortal blow to the old French imperial structure, not so much by the defeats that France suffered in the course of it in Europe and Asia as by the chaotic events of its aftermath. For the old French colonial army, with all its glamour and glory, is now no more than a memory of yesterday. At the end of the war the Army of Africa was simply liquidated for having been an “instrument of Vichy.”

Within this image of a greater France of one hundred million sons all the ideologies and traditions of France clash together and are blended: rhetorical enthusiasm and harsh realism, humanitarian sentiments and the brutal necessities of military recruiting, the egalitarian idealism of the Jacobin revolutionary and the Christian missionary spirit of the ancien régime. All of them fuse to form that notion of mankind on the march, moving forward to join a. frontierless France, a. France which is the “nation of man ” par excellence. La patrie de l’homme is a phrase which a facile rhetoric has almost completely discredited, but to see in it nothing but empty words and grandiloquence is to fail to grasp the true grandeur and crisis of the French imperial idea.

It is true, of course, that of these one hundred million Frenchmen, sixty million remain far from the appointed goal and only too often very distant indeed from what may be called human dignity. But in this myth they are on the march, and the elect, who have already reached the goal, beckon them on. In the symbolic figure of the Negro governor of the Tchad, Eboué, the first Frenchman in Africa to rally to General de Gaulle in 1940, this myth received its first great embodiment.

From Empire to Union

The first imperial conference, held by the Free French in January of 1944 under de Gaulle’s chairmanship, reaffirmed the principles and aims of French colonialism more categorically than ever. “We read from time to time,” declared the Commissioner for the Colonies, René Pleven, “that, this war must end by what is called the emancipation of colonial peoples. But in the great Colonial France there are neither peoples to be freed nor racial discriminations to be abolished. . . . There are populations that we intend to lead step by step to higher stages of individual expression, and in the highest stages to full political franchise, but which have no wish to experience any form of independence other than the French.”

The preamble to the declaration summing up the decisions of the Brazzaville Conference was even more emphatic: “ The aims of the civilizing work accomplished by France in the colonies exclude any idea of autonomy, any possibility of evolution outside of the framework of the French Empire. The establishment in the colonies of self-government, even as a distant prospect, is to be discarded.” The very term “self-government ” figures in English in the text like some foreign body, utterly indigestible and alien to French language and thinking.

When the time came in 1945 to transform the French Empire into the French Union, the idea of granting the Arabs of North Africa, the Madagascans, or the peoples of the ancient civilization of Indochina the vital minimum of autonomy which the British Commonwealth, if only for reasons of administrative efficiency, grants to the humblest Negro kingdom proved even more inadmissible for the French colonial reformer of the Left than for the most impenitent colonialist of the Right.

“The colonies will always be subjected to the same administrative forms as France. There can be only one good way of administering. If we have found it for the countries of Europe, why should those of America be deprived of it?” This classic formula of Boissy d’Anglas, the chairman of the Committee on Colonial Affairs in the Revolutionary Assembly that debated the Constitution of 1791, has remained one of the Ten Commandments of French politics. Federalism, autonomy, decentralization, the recognition of ethnic or religious differences, are things that have always seemed suspect to French politicians and jurists, particularly of the Left. Here federalism is synonymous with reaction, conjuring up echoes of the royalist uprising of the Vendée in 1793, the Action Française, provincial clericalism, and the Vichy regime.

When the first Constitutional Convention reassembled in Paris after the war, it solemnly condemned colonialism and treated the institutions of the French Union as a simple chapter of the Constitution of the Republic. “ The Colonial Empire is dead,” proclaimed Pierre Cot, the head of the Convention’s Committee on Colonial Problems. “In its place we are setting up the French Union. Enriched, ennobled, and enlarged, France tomorrow will number one hundred million citizens and free men.” Unanimously adopted by the Convention, this Lex Caracalla of May 7, 1945, has remained the charter of French colonial policy ever since: “From the 1st of June, 1946, all natives of overseas territories (Algeria included) are legally considered citizens, on the same footing with the nationals of metropolitan France.”

Thus the nation of one hundred million citizens became a political reality. It is difficult to go back on pledges, no matter how lightly made, once they have received the solemn consecration of law. To limit the damage, the second French Constitutional Convention, held in 1946, contented itsell with leaving every possible escape hatch open for future “interpretive decrees” and local statutes. Thus revised, the Constitution of the French Union was no more than a hodgepodge of contradictory articles and conflicting theses. At the very end a couple of laconic paragraphs were thrown in which allowed everything to tumble back into the old well-worn groove. The French Parliament remained the legislator for overseas France; the governor of each colony, named by the French government and responsible to it alone, remained the head of the local administration and the sole depository of executive power. Behind the smoke-screen promise of assimilation for all the peoples of the French Union there remained the stubborn realities of administrative centralization — the wordless fact of colonialism in practice.

The tragedy of Algeria

All this engendered an inevitable crisis for the new French Union. It was first felt over the problems raised by the concept of assimilation, and notably in the case of Algeria, an integral part of metropolitan France. When for the first time in 1946 thirteen Algerian Moslems, elected by a separate and less-privileged electoral college, took up their seats in the French Assembly, it came as a shock to the French to realize that these men felt themselves more Algerian and Arab than French. The result was a clash, at once tragic and grotesque, between the stirring old notion of human progress and this jarring new reality. “I am here to represent the interests of my country,” declared Ferhat Abbas, the leader of the autonomous movement that had issued the “Algerian Manifesto.” Whereupon he was assailed from all sides by indignant cries: “No, sir, your country is France!”

Officially there is no such thing in France as Algeria or Algerians, but simply five (formerly three) departments on the other side of the Mediterranean — departments which are exactly like any other and administered by prefects appointed by the Minister of the Interior in Paris. The Algerian representatives from these departments (whose re-election to office was suspended last winter) were supposed to symbolize that “greater France” which makes no distinction between races and colors. But whenever, as harbingers of an equality that is yet to come, they denounced the inequalities of the present, they were accused of ingratitude toward the mother country. Their misadventures, indeed, assumed all the aspects of a cruel farce. When they wanted to speak as Algerians, they were reminded that they were French deputies, and that they must act as such; but when they wanted to discuss some French domestic issue, they were indignantly shouted down with the cry, “What business is it of yours?”

What in the French Assembly has only too often been a lamentable comedy has become a full-scale tragedy in Algeria. For the sublime ideal of one hundred million French citizens, translated into a juridical fiction, has become a deadly trap from which there is no escape. Since legally there are no such things as Algerians (in the parliamentary jargon they are referred to simply as “French Moslems”), there can be no compromise. Their rights may be limited, they may have a standard of living that is ten times lower than the French, four fifths of them may never have gone to school and be unable to read or write a word of French, but according to the official myth they are French citizens. Any Algerian nationalist or autonomist is thus automatically regarded as a bad citizen, a rebel, a traitor, and a deserter, rather than as a partner with whom the ticklish problems of coexistence should be discussed.

The melting pot of Empire

It would be a grave mistake to see nothing but hypocrisy in all this, even though there is no lack of administrative hypocrisy in practice. The idea of a “greater France,” of France as a melting pot of races and civilizations, has been one of the few genuine empire-building ideas of modern times. It is this myth which once gave the French Empire its cohesion, and it is still so deeply rooted in the French consciousness that the crisis affecting it reaches down to its very foundations. It is a crisis in the pretension to universality of a civilization which has always aspired to be that of all mankind.

In its heyday this pretension to universality implied a power of assimilation of the foreign and an openness toward the new and different which form two facets of the same phenomenon: that tranquil Self-assurance which allows a man to divest himself of all external signs of superiority without fear of losing his own personality. For centuries France possessed this certainty of herself which did not have to assert itself in extravagant gestures or dig itself into intransigent positions to make itself felt, and perhaps the greatest problem now facing France is this crisis in her own self-confidence.

Within the walls of a single monolithic state — “one and indivisible” — the French melting pot of races has ceased to bubble and has grown cold. The bureaucratic and juridical assimilation of the French colonies has become the very caricature of the true assimilative force which the idea of French civilization once possessed. The unilateral subjection of all citizens of the Empire to a uniform administrative yoke has, in fact, stunted all efforts at mutual comprehension and the exchange of views between Frenchmen and native populations.

The transformation of Algeria into a “100 per cent French land” is an extreme example of the tyranny of this legal fiction. For one thing today is certain: the Algerians are less likely than ever to become French now that they see Tunisia and Morocco on either side of them becoming independent Moslem states. For half a century the French administration of the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco was — in spite of obvious differences of status — copied from the administration of Algeria, and nothing can now insulate Algeria from a contagious influence working in the reverse direction.

Yet complete secession from the French Union would offer Algeria no future. After one hundred years of colonization and mutual exchanges of populations, the links between France and Algeria have grown so strong that they can no longer be cut without mortally injuring both countries. The hatred that has arisen between Algerians and Frenchmen has, in the last analysis, only become so bitter because it was born of a frustrated love, of disillusioned hopes. The Moslems of North Africa have heeded the voice of Cairo because for so long Paris stubbornly ignored their existence. In this way the three countries of French North Africa have slipped into violence and bloodshed.

The imprint of France

Yet all the French had to do, after years of vacillation and mounting terror, was to recognize the autonomy of Tunisia, and overnight the nationalist leaders there began throwing out the agitators from Cairo and proclaiming that they are closer to France and Europe than they are to Cairo and the Arab League. So too the Moslems of Algeria have no wish to change the color of their skins in order to become “assimilated Frenchmen”; but once they are no longer required to undergo this mystic and impossible transubstantiation, they will discover — to their own amazement — that they carry the imprint of France on their hearts and minds.

Thus the present agony of Algeria is basically only one aspect of the general crisis in France’s relations with the rest of the world. For ten years France has remained spellbound by the notion of her absolute and indivisible “sovereignty.” She has refused to seize her real opportunities, and has clung tenaciously to her empty titles to a glorious past. In reality, the awakened nationalisms of Asia and Africa have never demanded the severing of all links with France; they have required only home rule, which unfortunately is rejected wholesale by the French conception of sovereignty. In the same way, five European nations were at one time more than ready to unite under French leadership in a free federation, the very notion of which is incompatible with the juridical absolutism of French sovereignty — that, legacy of the ancien régime which modern France has still not been able to throw off, even though it is so far removed from the realities of the present.

With more confidence in herself, France could have taken the real — which is to say, the intellectual and human — leadership of these associations among equals. And the problem which thus poses itself for France today, not only in her relations to her colonies but also in her relations to Europe and the world, is this: Can she free herself from the armor of traditional ideologies, institutions, and legal notions which, instead of protecting her living energies, both spiritual and physical, has succeeded in stifling them? Is the French idea of universal civilization capable of being renovated and revitalized by that receptivity to the new and the different which is the indispensable companion of all cultural radiation, or is it doomed to be choked to death by that cultural chauvinism which in recent years has so often raised its head?