Postwar French neotraditionalism at home underpinned colonial respect for African chiefs

Evidence

France after the war’s devastation, and the willingness of legislators to enact pro-natalist and social hygiene measures designed to regenerate France’s racial stock. A by-product was an intensified emphasis on restoring traditional morality-both veterans and policy makers sought to make sense of the war by recreating the “world they had lost” at Verdun. Gender relations, in this context, were particularly affected. Women who had worked in the munitions factories were now exhorted to return to the home and reproduce for la patrie; female suffrage was firmly rejected, and the virtues of patriarchy reasserted. These same concerns with restoring domestic order reverberated overseas, as Dakar’s growing interest in respecting chiefs whose power was “traditional” and “familial” fully attests. In the interwar years, an intensification of racialized thinking and reassertion of neo-traditional values went hand in hand, at home and in the empire. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 609

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the moral-panic framing in the reader’s published article on immodesty panics — domestic anxiety exported to colonial policy.