French legal rights that applied in the metropole were suspended in West Africa

Evidence

Freedom of the press did not emerge unscathed. Before the war, citizens in West Africa had legally enjoyed the same freedom of press established in France by the law of 1881. In the 1920’s, Dakar repeatedly and successfully petitioned Paris for permission to curb this freedom. Decrees in 1921 and 1928 prohibited the circulation of seditious material, gave Dakar the right to censor all drawings, cartoons, paintings, and emblems considered prejudicial to French authority, and allowed it to suppress the sale, circulation, or publication of any newspaper in any language in West Africa that it considered defamatory. Although the Government General could not go so far as to forbid individual Africans from receiving seditious French newspapers published in the metropole, it confidentially instructed the lieutenant governors to censor all incoming mail. The French Penal Code guaranteed the inviolability of correspondence, but considerations of public safety in West Africa, Dakar explained, allowed this principle to be ignored in practice. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 565

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s goal of understanding how French republicanism was forced onto West Africa — republicanism legally included press freedom, yet colonial practice overrode it; connects to Chapter themes about the limits of the civilizing mission.