Merlin argued Africa needed French-imposed discipline to avoid relapsing into barbarism

Evidence

But this new disposition, in favoring the intellectual development and the material progress of the natives, also renders them more vulnerable to the self-interested calls and fallacious promises of professional agitators. It thus behooves us to confront these unhealthy stimuli with the notions of order and social discipline, which should direct the evolution of the black races and preserve Africa from upheavals, whose certain effect would be to annihilate the work of civilization that has begun and return the continent to its ancient barbarism. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 668

Categorization

• XREF: Merlin prescribes order and discipline against ‘professional agitators’ — parallel to the logic of republican paternalism discussed throughout the reader’s study of French republican empire.