French administrators blamed their own peace for dissolving African communal cohesion and elders’ authority

Evidence

The uprooted [deracines] . .. have not found everywhere an organization strong enough to contain [encadrer] them … Already before the war the paix franyaise encouraged little by little the dispersion of the natives and diminished the solid cohesion of the villages where the authority of the elders used to hold sway uncontested. A growing individualism slowly but surely began to destroy the powerful African collectivity … It is now necessary for us to reconstitute this cohesion … and to restore to village chiefs their authority. … In other circulars, Merlin’s fears with respect to the evolues were more evident: … The ideas of emancipation, which the backers of the anti-European movement are attempting to spread in Africa, are obviously destined to create illusions among the young educated blacks, agents of the administration or of commerce, desiring to equal the white man, and to incite them to dream of aspiring for themselves, to the exclusion of any foreign element, the role of educators and leaders of the indigenous societies. On the other hand, the masses have up until now stayed attached to the land and faithful to their ancient customs. The stories of the liberated soldiers, returning home from the metropole or the coastal cities, have perhaps awakened in them new feelings. … But this new disposition, in favoring the intellectual development and the material progress of the natives, also renders them more vulnerable to the self-interested calls and fallacious promises of professional agitators. It thus behooves us to confront these unhealthy stimuli with the notions of order and social discipline, which should direct the evolution of the black races and preserve Africa from upheavals, whose certain effect would be to annihilate the work of civilization that has begun and return the continent to its ancient barbarism. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 664

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces deracines (uprooted) and encadrer (contain/organize) as French colonial-administrative vocabulary.
• XREF: Merlin’s diagnosis of French rule dissolving African collectivism parallels later French republican discourse on individualism; connects to the reader’s general theme of republican ideas forced onto West Africa.