Belief in French superiority shaped how colonial administrators governed.

Evidence

The ideology of the civilizing mission could not but strike a responsive chord in a nation now publicly committed to institutionalizing the universal principles of 1789. At the end of the nineteenth century, few French citizens doubted that the French were materially and morally superior to-and that they lived in greater freedom than-the rest of the earth’s inhabitants. Many may have scoffed at the idea that the Republic’s empire was actually bestowing these blessings upon those ostensibly still oppressed. But no one questioned the premise of French superiority upon which the empire rested, or even that the civilizing mission could in fact be accomplished. Such convictions were part of what it meant to be French and republican in this period, and had a profound impact upon the way in which the French ran their colonies. Administrators-vastly outnumbered, and equipped with little more than their prejudicesrelied upon the familiar categories of “civilization” and its inevitable opposite, “barbarism,” to justify and maintain their hegemony overseas. These categories served to structure how officials thought about themselves as rulers and the people whom they ruled, with complex and often contradictory consequences for French colonial policy-and French republican identity-in the twentieth century. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 27

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s question of how republican ideology was forced onto West Africa and its effects. — connects to: Colonial domination operated by casting Europeans as normative and Africans as other. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 35