French republicanism fused with racial evolutionism to justify suppressing African customs.

Evidence

Yet even in its embryonic form, Dakar’s approach to education under Roume is an important point of departure for understanding French civilizing ideology in West Africa. The tenets of adapted education confirm that, along with the practical reasons for education, Dakar felt an obligation to improve its subjects morally. Gradual evolutionism and republicanism were, moreover, essential themes of France’s mission in this moral realm. … In these cases, however, there emerged an apparently new facet of the tenet that Africans had to evolve within their own cultures. This was the added proviso that customs antithetical to French civilization had to be suppressed. Upon closer scrutiny, this begins to look familiar; as it turned out, what Dakar defined as antithetical to civilization was determined largely by the same French republican sentiments that had played such a dominant role in its concept of African education. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 294

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how ‘gradual evolutionism’ and ‘republicanism’ combine as the twin ideological pillars of the civilizing mission in its moral realm.
• XREF: Connects to the tension between liberal universalist ideals and their coercive colonial enforcement — resonant with broader critiques of how Enlightenment universalism justified empire.