France distinguished its empire by its duty to defend individual rights.

Evidence

Abolishing slavery, like eradicating indigenous languages and customs, pestilence, poverty, and ignorance, was central to the French understanding of their mandate in West Africa. Roume’s antislavery rhetoric nevertheless reveals an additional point about the French view of their mission civilisatrice, which Dakar’s emphasis upon economic development, education, and justice did not necessarily bring out. This was the extent to which the French believed that their republican heritage imposed upon them not only a special obligation to uplift the oppressed of the earth materially, in whatever way they could, but also a specific duty to defend the individual rights of man wherever they were threatened. It was this specific commitment to the principles of freedom, the above statements imply, that set France’s mission civilisatrice apart from other nations’ “civilizing missions,” along with France’s greater commitment to carrying out its humanitarian agenda. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what made France’s ‘mission civilisatrice’ distinctive in French eyes — a self-conception central to the reader’s topic.
• XREF: connects to: French was cast as protecting individual dignity against collective identity excesses — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 583