Scientific social planning legitimated French intervention in African societies

Evidence

One of the most pervasive French civilizing conceits was the idea that colonial administrators had the ability and the right to transform African social milieux in order to improve society. Recent research on the origins of the welfare state in France suggests that this conviction echoed a new, more modern way of looking at soci- ety than that of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism. New scientific knowledge, the argument goes, led to the belief in France that soci- ety was a delicately balanced organism with its own laws and inter- nal forces, which could be manipulated. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 43

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The ‘society as organism, scientifically manipulable’ premise is the intellectual foundation of forced modernizing policies in West Africa.

Related

• French colonial social engineering reflected a modern scientific view of society as manipulable organism (similarity 0.91)
• The antislavery campaign justified French intervention as deliberately directing Africa’s evolution. (similarity 0.86)
• French social-science thinking redirected blame for poverty onto environments and germs (similarity 0.84)
• French colonialism in West Africa operated through an internally coherent civilizing logic. (similarity 0.82)
• Civilian rule enabled far deeper intervention in African life than military conquest (similarity 0.82)
• Postwar French colonial doctrine shifted in response to African resistance. (similarity 0.82)
• Fin-de-siecle sociology shaped decisions to adapt education and justice in the colonies (similarity 0.82)
• Moral-civilizing doctrine mattered more than economic in French colonial policy. (similarity 0.82)
• Both racist anthropology and progressive sociology led France to abandon assimilationism. (similarity 0.82)
• French colonial ideology shifted in step with metropolitan political changes. (similarity 0.81)
• Focus on African agency made French colonial rule seem more monolithic than it was. (similarity 0.81)
• French colonial development policy fused fiscal self-interest with civilizing ideology. (similarity 0.81)
• A continuous republican idea of empire drove French policy from 1895 to 1930 (similarity 0.81)
• The mission civilisatrice was largely a lie according to West African critics (similarity 0.81)
• French republicanism fused with racial evolutionism to justify suppressing African customs. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• French ethnology was founded explicitly to serve colonial control objectives #corroborates (0.70) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 692