French colonialists justified empire as a slow gradual uplift rather than rapid assimilation

Evidence

We have been told that by appearing thus as the great liberating power, we would prodigiously enhance our moral prestige as well as our economic prosperity, and that the curiosity of these peoples, awakened, would turn toward us in order to draw upon our reasoning, our methods and our tastes, and thus steeped in our genius without dreaming of an impossible assimilation, they would continue magnificently France overseas … [Our] program is to bring them not in twenty-four hours, but perhaps in a century if necessary, gradually and smoothly, to that level of civilization that aging Europe through so many catastrophes and even regressions has taken thousands of centuries to reach. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 484

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the distinction between the gradual ‘civilizing’ mission and ‘impossible assimilation’ — core vocabulary for the reader’s project.
• XREF: connects to: Liberalism historically frames empire as benevolent uplift; the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”