A continuous republican idea of empire drove French policy from 1895 to 1930

Evidence

The preceding chapters have examined this sense of mission in detail. What larger conclusions can now be drawn about the mission civilisatrice in West Africa, the nature of modern French republicanism, and the relationship between colony and metropole? The study of the mission civilisatrice in Dakar reveals, first, that there was a continuous republican idea of empire in French West Africa between 1895 and 1930. This idea can be attributed to the continuity of the democratic tradition in France under the Third Republic. As heirs to the universalizing impulses of 1789, French republican policy-makers never questioned that Africans had to learn to feel French, though they insisted that their subjects evolve within their own cultures. The conviction that democratic France had a special obligation to improve the lives of all Africans, and not just those of an indigenous elite, was also widely held. Moral improvement would occur through a selective extension of the rights of man to Africans: the abolition of slavery, “feudal” tyranny, and barbaric custom first, and then the gradual initiation into representative govern- ment. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 872

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the earlier articles’ theme of ideology as coercion—here republicanism itself as a civilizing force imposed on West Africa.