French civilizing doctrine granted colonized people culture but withheld equal political rights

Evidence

Leroy-Beaulieu, specifically addressing himself to the proper relationship between French and Algerians, still spoke of the need for a fusion of the two peoples. But his choice of words is deceptive; he used “fusion” interchangeably with “rapprochement,” and emphasized that what he meant was not a physical union of Europeans and Arabs, but a specific process of cultural change. Algerians were to become imbued with French civilization, but retain some of their own customs. They were to be placed under the same economic and social regime and follow the same general laws, although they were not to have the same political rights. The best way to accomplish this would be to grant them access to, and encourage them to use, such European institutions as schools, courts, and ministerial offices. At the same time, every effort would be made to transform living conditions and work habits and to increase agricultural productivity, through modern hygiene, road and railroad construction, and the introduction of private property. Finally, Algeria could not hope to be civilized unless France destroyed the Arab aristocracy, that “enemy of work … lover of luxury, of battles, of equestrian fantasias, and oppressor of the masses that it was supposed to protect,” and whose very existence prevented the progress of colonization and the rapprochement of the two races. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 82

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lay’s out Leroy-Beaulieu’s core ‘fusion/rapprochement’ doctrine, which defined the French model of acculturation without political equality, a model later exported to West Africa.
• SEED: Angle: the internal contradiction of the French civilizing mission — cultural ‘fusion’ explicitly coupled with political exclusion — as a template for understanding modern citizenship debates in Francophone Africa.
• XREF: connects to: The Napoleonic Code ended feudalism and established legal equality for citizens — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 146; the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”