Industrial superiority convinced the French that they monopolized civilization

Evidence

The belief that France knew what was in the best interests of Africans was a by-product of industrialization in Europe. The overwhelming superiority of French technology to any in Africa convinced the French that they held a monopoly on civilization. The belief in African laziness also derived from the absence of industrial achievements in Africa comparable to those in the West. Confronted with their subjects’ “failure” to exploit the economic potential of the federation, French officials attributed this situation to moral depravity. Both the apparent failure of freed slaves in the West Indies to prosper after emancipation, in the 183o’s, and the “scientific” findings of French physical anthropology after 1850, encouraged the image of the lazy African; the wartime use of colonial labor combined with the growth of eugenic thinking and the flood of new immigrants in the metropole gave racist stereotypes another lease on life in the 192o’s. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 746

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapters on the mission civilisatrice and republican justifications for empire in this book.