French republican ideology was more egalitarian before 1914 than after.

Evidence

Although continuously “republican,” the French idea of empire contained more universalizing and egalitarian tenets before World War I than after. Between 1895 and 1914, a powerful rhetoric of emancipation and social and cultural transformation emerged among policy makers in Dakar. French administrators called for the eradication of slavery and the aristocracy, in the name of the individual’s right to freedom; they proclaimed the need for mass education and the spread of the French language, and they built railways and improved public health in the name of France’s republican traditions. This liberalism had its well-defined limits. Only a few Africans were ever expected to become French citizens, and Africans were to love France and Africa simultaneously. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 874

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s key periodization claim — the shift from liberal/egalitarian to repressive after World War I parallels patterns seen in other colonial and republican histories.