France’s assimilationist premises overseas mirrored its domestic campaign to transform peasants into citizens.

Evidence

However committed the Government General appeared to be to a policy of African evolution within their own cultures, it had not broken with many of the universalistic premises upon which assimilation had been based-as the described curriculum also amply attests. These premises were, after all, ones that still resonated in France under the Third Republic in the prewar years. The belief in the inherent superiority of French civilization had not disappeared from official ideology in the metropole at the end of the century. To the contrary, it underlay the early Third Republic’s campaign to transform all patois-speaking peasants into French citizens. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 278

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s interest in how republican ideas transported externally mirror internal nation-building homogenization.