¹ Stern, Jacques, The French Colonies: Past and Future (New York, 1944), pp. 25–26.Google Scholar

² Quoted in Luethy, Herbert, France Against Herself (New York, 1955), p. 218.Google Scholar

³ ibid., p. 220.

⁴ An exceptional example of this confusion is provided in Roberts, S. H., History of French Colonial Policy (1870–1925) (London, 1929).Google ScholarKnight, M. M. has observed that “Roberts leaves the tangle of meanings attached to ‘subjection’, ‘assimilation’, and ‘association’ more muddled than it is in the better French surveys”. “French Colonial Policy: The Decline of ‘Association’”, The Journal of Modern History, V (1933), 208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The indiscriminate use of the same term for varying phenomena also characterizes Priestley, H. I., France Overseas: A Study of Modern Imperialism (New York, 1938), and various studies of specific areas in the French Empire.Google Scholar

⁵ Recueil des Délibérations du Congrès Colonial National, Paris, 1889–90 (Paris, 1890), I, 24;Google ScholarCongrès International de Sociologie Coloniale…1900 (Paris, 1901), I, 183. Frequent reference will be made to these congresses and to another which preceded them, the Congrès Colonial International de Paris of 1889, whose report was published at Paris in that same year. It is important to distinguish between the international congress of 1889 and the national congress of 1889–90, although Roberts, op. cit., and other works frequently fail to do so. For the sake of clarity as well as brevity, the reports of the several congresses will hereafter be cited as CCI 1889, CCN 1889–90, and CISC 1900 respectively.Google Scholar

⁶ Girault, Arthur, Principes de Colonisation et de Législation Coloniale (Paris, 1st ed., 1895; 2nd ed., 1903; 3rd ed., 1907; 4th ed., 1921; 5th ed., 1927). A 6th edition, considerably revised and condensed, was published under German occupation in Paris in 1943. The summary of Girault's views which follows is drawn from pp. 54–75 of the first edition.Google Scholar

⁷ ibid., p. 68.

⁸ CISO 1900, p. 181.

⁹ Girault, , op. cit. (3rd ed., 1907), p. 51.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Advocates of assimilation, seeking to find the broadest possible basis of support for their views, sought at times to claim the legacy of the Old Regime as well as that of revolutionary France. Thus, Alexandre Isaac recalled that “the edicts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV declared that all Frenchmen who had left the home country to settle in a colony continued to be considered…as if they were ‘residing in this kingdom’;—and that even the ‘savages converted to the Christian faith on making profession would be supposed and deemed to be naturels francais, eligible to all offices, honors, inheritances and donations’”. CCI 1889, p. 139. Less graciously, another supporter of assimilation noted that under the Old Regime the colonies shared with the mother country “the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, feudal rights, the communal oven and mill, lettres de cachet, and that whole body of iniquitous and superannuated institutions which had become so odious to 18th century Frenchmen’. Girault, , op. cit., 1st ed. (1895), p. 67.Google Scholar

¹¹ Lavergne, Bernard, Une Révolution dans la Politique Coloniale de la France (Paris, 1948), p. 53.Google Scholar

¹² Girault, , op. cit., p. 178.Google Scholar

¹³ Bentham, Jeremy, Works (Edinburgh, 1843), IV, 407.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Girault, , op. cit., pp. 186–191.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Lavergne, , op. cit., p. 71.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Deschamps, Hubert, Les Méthodes et les Doctrines Coloniales de la France (Paris. 1953), p. 107.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Tersen, Emile, Histoire de la Colonisation Francaise (Paris, 1950), p. 49.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Priestley, , op. cit., pp. 82, 85.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, De la Colonisation chez les Peuples Modernes, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1882), pp. 352–353.Google Scholar He also thought it would be “a farsighted policy” to extend suffrage to the natives in some form. ibid., p. 378. It is interesting to note Leroy-Beaulieu's use of the word “fusion” for what might otherwise be called “native assimilation’. When elsewhere (p. 380) he did use the term “assimilation’, what he had in mind was making Algeria an integral part of France from a political and administrative standpoint.

²⁰ See footnote 5, supra.

²¹ Isaac's background is interesting in view of his prominence as an advocate of assimilation. He was born in Guadeloupe in 1845, but was educated in France and then entered the educational administration. In 1879 he was named Director of the Interior at Guadeloupe, where he introduced numerous reforms in the system of public instruction in the colony. On his election in 1885 as Guadeloupe's senator, he returned to France, where he played an active role in the discussion of colonial issues. After reelection to the senate in 1894, he was one of the founders of the Democratic Left group in that body. He was vice-president both of the Society for Colonial and Maritime Studies and of the Committee for the Protection of Natives at Paris. Curinier, C. E. (ed.), Dictionnaire National des Contemporains (Paris, n.d.), I, 329–330.Google Scholar

²² CCI 1889, pp. 50–51.

²⁹ ibid., pp. 59–60.

²⁴ ibid., pp. 53–54, 58.

²⁵ ibid., pp. 84–85.

²⁶ ibid., p. 85.

²⁷ ibid., p. 91.

²⁸ ibid., p. 81–83.

²⁹ ibid., pp. 90–91. Not all French officials in Africa agreed with Admiral Vallon, as was apparent from the remarks of M. Ballay, lieutenant governor of Gabon, during the discussion of a report on education in Indo-China. After recounting the efforts in his African colony “to spread education in and the use of the national language’, Ballay expressed his belief that while these efforts should be encouraged, “it would be dangerous to give the natives anything more than an elementary culture. Experience demonstrates that the black who has received too developed an education acquires a distaste for labor. Those who simply know how to read already disdain manual occupations and refuse to cultivate the land. To multiply the number of so-called educated subjects would be to create in Gabon a hotbed of idlers and déclassés.” ibid., p. 24.

³⁰ ibid., p. 96.

³¹ ibid., p. 143.

³² ibid., pp. 137–139.

³³ ibid., pp. 134–135.

³⁴ ibid., pp. 149–151.

³⁵ CCI 1889, pp. 147–148; CCN 1889–90, I, 1–4.

³⁶ His report is given in CCN 1889–90, II, 3–59.

³⁷ ibid., I, 15, 18–19, 25; II, 13.

³⁸ ibid., III, 329.

³⁹ ibid., I, 18–21; III, 5.

⁴⁰ ibid., III, 307, 329.

⁴¹ ibid., III, 329–331.

⁴² The quoted phrase is from the discussion of the 1889–90 congress in Roberts, , op. cit., I, 103, a discussion which is almost a parody, bearing no recognizable relationship to the assimilationists' views as revealed in the proceedings of the congress. Roberts drew heavily on anti-assimilationist French writers who made the same misrepresentation for their own purposes.Google Scholar

⁴³ CCN 1889–90, III, 350, 352–353, 362.

⁴⁴ ibid., III, 338–340.

⁴⁵ ibid., III, 286, 346, 353, 359, 364.

⁴⁶ Rolland, Louis and Lampué, Pierre, Précis de Législation Coloniale, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1936), pp. 146, 160.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ deSaussure, Léopold, Psychologie de la Colonisation Francaise, dans ses Rapports avec les Sociétés Indigènes (Paris, 1899), pp. 10, 12, 51, 187, 261, 294.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Chailly-Bert, Joseph, Dix Années de Politique Coloniale (Paris, 1902), pp. 45, 56–57, 117.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Masson, Paul, “La Colonisation Francaise au Début du XX^e Siécle’, Exposition Coloniale de Marseille 1906, II (Marseille, 1906), 15.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Harmand, Jules, Domination et Colonisation (Paris, 1910), pp. 160, 163.Google Scholar

⁵¹ ibid., p. 12.

⁵² ibid., pp. 152–153, 155–156, 170.

⁵³ ibid., pp. 339, 342–343, 350.

⁵⁴ ibid., pp. 345, 351.

⁵⁵ ibid., pp. 159, 170.

⁵⁶ There is a stimulating discussion of the influence of this assumption in Ragatz, Lowell, “Must We Rewrite the History of Imperialism?’, a paper read at the American Historical Association meeting in 1950, and published in Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, VI (11 1953), 90–98.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Roberts, , op. cit., I, 103.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Quoted in Vignon, Louis, Un Programme de Politique Coloniale—Les Questions Indigènes (Paris, 1919), p. 202.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Some perceptive comments on this tactic appear in Buell, R. L., The Native Problem in Africa (New York, 1928), II, 77–85.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Girault, , op. cit., footnote to discussion of assimilation from 2nd ed., 1903, quoted in 3rd ed., 1907, p. 91.Google Scholar

⁶¹ The degree to which natives could participate in elections varied considerably from colony to colony. Only in the ‘old colonies” and the “four communes” of Sénégal was there a blanket naturalization of non-Europeans, but varying provisions existed elsewhere by which a limited number of natives could attain French citizenship through special procedures. The prevailing situation in the mid-1920s was summed up—and sharply criticized as dangerously liberal—in Runner, Jean, Les Droits Politiques des Indigènes des Colonies (Paris, 1927).Google Scholar Runner considered “association” to be “only a disguised policy of assimilation’, and he had no use for either. ibid., p. 10.

⁶² Serious scholars have accepted such statements at their face value. It would be unkind to cite specific instances, but they are easily found.

⁶³ Doucet, Robert, Commentaires sur la Colonisation (Paris, 1926), p. 48.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Deschamps, Hubert and Chauvet, Paul (eds.), Gallieni Pacificateur: Écrits Coloniaux de Gallieni (Paris, 1949), pp. 218, 314.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Knight, M. M., “French Colonial Policy: The Decline of ‘Association’”, The Journal of Modern History, V (1933), 209.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ It is interesting to compare the French debate over assimilation to the turn-of-thecentury controversy in the United States as to whether “the Constitution followed the flag” in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. As in the French case, the problem arose from the apparent contradiction of a democratic republic becoming an imperial power. As in the French case, too, the opposition was based in large part on the belief that the principles of Western democratic government were not suitable for “backward” non-white peoples.

⁶⁷ CCN 1889–90, I, 50; III, 16.

⁶⁸ In the African territories of “overseas France” prior to World War II, ‘only a few schools on the French model were provided in some of the colonial cities for the children of French expatriates and officials or for the few indigenous peoples who were able to pass entrance exams. The French never excluded colonials, for racial reasons, from French culture and education, but they made little effort to make it available until about a decade ago…By 1950 when the problem of colonial education had become acute, French colonial areas had illiteracy rates ranging from 95 to 99 per cent.” Quigley, Carroll, “Education in Overseas France’, Current History, XXXV (1958), 102.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Doucet, , op. cit., p. 67.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Hammer, Ellen, “The French Empire Today’, ed. Earle, E. M., Modern France: Problems of the Third and Fourth Republics (Princeton, 1951), p. 453n.Google Scholar