Metropolitan French population policy mainly targeted French women rather than colonized peoples

Evidence

As this brief listing suggests, most of these measures were not openly directed against people of color. If anything, they targeted French women more than Africans and Asians, who were now seen as so many wombs in the service of the nation. French deputies were more willing than in the prewar years to use state funds to improve and replenish France’s “depleted” racial stock, at the expense of individual rights if necessary; but they did not explicitly equate Frenchness with whiteness. Nevertheless, the intense focus on the biological renewal of France, and the passing of legislation consciously cast in the language of racial degeneration and regeneration, confirms that a heightened awareness of race characterized the metropole as well as the empire for much of the interwar era. This awareness also encouraged Frenchmen overseas to think in more racialized terms about themselves and their subjects-especially once Africans began asking for the same rights as Frenchmen. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 570

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that interwar racialized citizenship debates in the metropole fed overseas racial thinking complements the reader’s ongoing thread about republicanism being forced onto West Africa - the ‘race’ frame here directly shapes who could be a citizen.