Colonial chiefs’ collaboration reinforced rightward drift in France

Evidence

The new respect for the precolonial aristocracy that emerged in Dakar in the r 92o’s can also deepen our understanding of postwar developments in France. In addition to local unrest in the federation, metropolitan insecurities regarding France’s place in the world clearly contributed to a more benign French view of “traditional” chiefs. But it is also likely that the need for and acceptance of chiefs’ collaboration throughout the empire reinforced the Third Republic’s rightward drift at home. In this context, the timing of the founding of the new Institut d’Ethnologie at the University of Paris appears particularly relevant. Republican policy makers and academics discovered in “traditional” African institutions, which they were now officially studying, a bulwark against the assimilationist demands of the new colonial elite. But might they not have also discovered in “primitive” Africa an idealized premodern and patriarchal world reminiscent of the one they had ostensibly lost at Verdun, and now wished unconsciously to resurrect? Could not disillusionment with republicanization overseas have helped to create suspicion of democratic values in the metropole? — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 885

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how colonial governance experience in Africa fed reactionary and anti-democratic currents back into metropolitan French politics, a two-way flow rarely examined.
• XREF: Connects to the broad knowledge question about how republicanism imported into West Africa rebounded onto France’s own political trajectory.