Postwar French colonial policy shifted toward racial separation and away from assimilation

Evidence

Confronted, then, with multiple signs of discontent, the Government General sought first to contain those deemed a danger to its own authority, which policy the Ministry of Colonies fully sanctioned. Such repression provides telling proof of a heightened vulnerability among the colonizers, but it was not the only way the French attempted to reassert their hegemony in West Africa in the postwar decade. Equally striking was a new emphasis in the rhetoric of French officials on how different Africans were from French, and how important it was now to keep the two races separate. These expressions took on a variety of forms. Most revealing, perhaps, was a reconsideration of French naturalization policy toward the colonized and in a more racialized direction; colonial officials now began to wonder whether anyone not born on metropolitan soil could become French. Greater consciousness of race, however, emerged in other ways as well. Sexual relations between French and Africans, which the administration had once encouraged, were now increasingly condemned in favor of white wives and families. And the French worried more about miscegenation and its consequences for French rule. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 566

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to reader’s goal: policy shift reverses the earlier civilizing/assimilationist doctrine noted in earlier chapters; contrast with the moral panics over dress/beards in ADDENDUM article 2 — same dynamic of policing identity boundaries.