French colonial policy in West Africa was republican, not assimilationist or associationist

Evidence

These measures confirm that schools, while constituting one element of France’s civilizing mission, in the eyes of Dakar were neither the sole nor the preferred instrument for transforming African society. An assessment of these measures also, however, undermines a second assumption commonly made about French imperial ideology: that it was assimilationist-that is to say, it consciously espoused the belief that all Africans should eventually be assimilated into French culture and society. Although a precedent for such assimilation existed in the oldest French colony of the federation, the Four Communes of Senegal, the judicial, educational, and emancipationist policies enacted by Dakar make clear that the new Government General rejected the notion that part of its civilizing mission was to make Africans into Frenchmen. Instead, these policies show, the French felt they were duty-bound to respect “traditional” West African customs and to encourage the peoples of the federation to evolve within their own African cultures, with one exception. This exception was if the custom in question was deemed to conflict with the principles of civilization as defined by the Third Republic. In those cases, the Government General insisted on its obligation and its right to excise the morally reprehensible attributes and replace them with superior French mores and institutions. … At first glance, it is tempting to attribute these civilizing ideas to the emergence in the r 89o’s of the colonial doctrine known as association. Association ostensibly superseded the older concept of assimilation; reflecting the trend toward social evolutionary thinking in the social sciences, it emphasized that France respect the diversity of the colonized and their institutions. Yet the term “association” was not used in Dakar at all before World War I. Instead, much of the Government General’s view of moral progress apparently derived from an older and richer French tradition still: republicanism, and, more particularly, the universal principles of 1789. The aspects of African society that the French found so objectionable, including its failure to respect the individual’s right to dispose of his labor and to live free from tyranny and superstition, all reveal the impact of the ideology of the French Revolution upon the doctrine of the Government General, even after the old ideal of assimilation had been rejected; the decision to found schools for the masses was also entirely in keeping with the social agenda of the republicans now in power in Paris. In short, the Third Republic’s official mission civilisatrice in the early 19oo’s was neither preeminently assimilationist nor associationist. Rather, it was profoundly republican, at a time when traditional republican values were still ascendent at home. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 253

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the distinction between assimilation, association, and republican civilizing ideology in French colonial doctrine.
• XREF: This republican-civilizing framework directly serves the reader’s stated goal of understanding how republican ideals from France were imposed on West Africa and their consequences.