French conquest itself drove displaced Africans into new slavery that abolition rhetoric masked.

Evidence

In this context, perhaps the proper reproach against the civilian administration is not that it paid lip service to the principle of abolition while in fact preserving a servile system deeply embedded in African social mores; rather, it is that the French failed to take any responsibility for exacerbating slavery in West Africa during the conquest. By constantly describing slavery as a barbaric African practice and France as a liberating power, Dakar effectively masked the Republic’s role in driving ever greater numbers of displaced Africans into involuntary servitude in the 188o’s and 189o’s. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 350

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Directly challenges the liberator narrative of the civilizing mission — France was a slave-driver, not only a slave-freer, in the colonial scramble.