French officials justified forced labor as protecting Africans against their own lazy nature.

Evidence

Sometimes the native, victim of his own carelessness, restricts his plantings to the point where they no longer suffice to feed him … It is therefore necessary to try and improve his food intake, and if, in so doing, we run up against his indolence, it behooves us to force him to create food reserves … Motivated by the strictly humanitarian goal of protecting the native against his own nature, such intervention is justified every time the African in question is capable of furnishing the additional effort necessary to procure the supplementary income to improve his present condition, and as long as this intervention is sufficiently explained, and does not exceed his capacity for understanding. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 802

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the ideological frame of ‘protecting the native against his own nature’ — the paternalistic logic that underlay the mission civilisatrice.