French colonial policy racialized in the 1920s, retreating from assimilation toward racial separation.

Evidence

Most revealing, perhaps, was a reconsideration of French naturalization policy toward the colonized and in a more racialized direction; colonial officials now began to wonder whether anyone not born on metropolitan soil could become French. Greater consciousness of race, however, emerged in other ways as well. Sexual relations between French and Africans, which the administration had once encouraged, were now increasingly condemned in favor of white wives and families. And the French worried more about miscegenation and its consequences for French rule. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 566

Categorization

• XREF: Directly advances the book’s core thesis — the republican mission civilisatrice turning away from assimilation toward racialized separation.