France assimilated only small old colonies with long intermarriage history

Evidence

A policy of both cultural and political assimilation was applied to a select group of French colonies after 1789: the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Reunion, French Guyana, and the French cities of India and of coastal Senegal. They all had two points in common, which explain why France was willing to assimilate their populations. Each was fairly small, and each had been founded under the ancien regime, which meant that by the nineteenth century there had been at least a hundred years of contact and intermarriage between the French and other local inhabitants. In contrast, none of the new colonies in the nineteenth century offered comparable conditions for acculturation-a reality the French were already beginning to come to terms with in Algeria. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1054

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines which colonies qualified for assimilation and why, grounded in size and prior intermarriage history.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1054