France violated its own legal principles when judging African subjects

Evidence

Allowing administrators to challenge lower-court decisions resulted in the anomaly that the presiding judge of the circle court, the French commandant, tried the very case he had appealed. This rule hardly conformed to the principles of French law, but was justified on the premise that a representative of French civilization, in this case the commandant de cercle, was always a better informed and more benign judge than the representative of an inferior culture, the village, canton, or province chief. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s goal on how republican ideals were force-fitted onto West Africa: the same state that championed judicial impartiality at home let a prosecutor judge his own appealed case in the colonies.