France’s civilian Colonial Ministry could not control West Africa for its first twenty years

Evidence

The Colonial Ministry was created in 1894. Before then, responsibility for the colonies had been divided between an undersecretary, who had no power in his own right, and the minister of the marine, who was in charge of the colonial army. The creation of a Colonial Ministry under civilian rather than military control, like the creation of the Government General, signaled a growing sensitivity in Paris to the importance of colonial consolidation and commercial development in place of further expansion. For the first twenty years of its existence, however, the new ministry lacked the prestige of other more established cabinet posts. During those years, the Colonial Ministry proved unable to assert any real control over colonial affairs because of the rapid turnover in its personnel and a lack of clear-cut organization. The officers of the colonial army in West Africa had powerful supporters of their own in Paris at least until the outbreak of the Dreyfus affair. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 948

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the civilian-military power struggle shaping French colonial consolidation, a theme paralleled in chapter discussions of the Government General’s creation.