French colonial policy aimed to assimilate colonial peoples into French identity

Evidence

Ernest Barker, Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1941, p. 4. See also the very good introductory remarks on the foundations of the French Empire in The French Colonial Empire (in Information Department Papers No. 25, published by The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1941), pp. 9 ff. “The aim is to assimilate colonial peoples to the French people, or, where this is not possible in more primitive communities, to ‘associate’ them, so that more and more the difference between la France métropole and la France d’outremer shall be a geographical difference and not a fundamental one,” [back] *** 13 See Gabriel Hanotaux, “Le Général Mangin” in Revue des Deux Mondes (1925), Tome 27. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2195

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the assimilation-vs-association distinction as the defining feature of French empire — a conceptual tool carried into postcolonial theory.
• XREF: Links to the reader’s existing work on how assimilation doctrines produced ambivalent colonial subjects, echoing themes in the Islamophobia field. — connects to: Colonial education imposed spurious French ancestry that buried real lineage in nonhistory — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 46; Only French among European colonial languages in the Caribbean yielded compromise Creoles — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 611; Creole emerged because French had not yet achieved normative unity at conquest — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 508 (+1 more)