Civilian administration replaced military rule to actually implement the civilizing mission

Evidence

Roume’s emphasis on having a higher ambition than maintaining order and allowing commerce-that of opening the colonies to civilization-confirms that the new governor general came to Dakar convinced that modern colonization should benefit France’s colonial subjects as well as the metropole. … As military conquerors, they nevertheless had even fewer resources at their disposal to effect these progressive ideals than their civilian successors. Whatever ambitions these leaders might have harbored for uplifting Africans, the day-to-day realities of maintaining control inhibited intervention in African customs, or the formulation of grandiose plans for transforming the physical and social landscape. The Government General under Roume, now organized into an autonomous organ of administration, did not feel similarly constrained. The very point of civilian rule, Roume’s speeches suggested, was to ensure that the civilization that military rulers might well have dreamed of-and to which their own actions had contributed by securing peace and order in the interior-would now take place. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 180

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to how conquest pacification (securing order) was a precondition that civilian administrators then built upon — parallels with military-to-civil transitions elsewhere.