The antislavery campaign justified French intervention as deliberately directing Africa’s evolution.

Evidence

Indeed, if republican France did not really have a civilizing mission to accomplish in West Africa, such intervention “would not be justified. There would be nothing to do but allow slavery to die out of its own consequences … and the evolution of African society to take place of its own accord.” Instead, the administration was deliberately introducing into societies which were “following their normal course, the extraordinary factor of an external social will to precipitate and direct their evolution.” 72 An essential part of this evolution, in Roume’s words, was “the substitution of relations based upon contract in place of the previous order of things based upon conquest and coercion” and the inculcation of “the notion of reciprocal commitments that obligate both parties equally … and which are independent of the traditional status of those contracting.” — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 340

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The admission that Africa was ‘following its normal course’ and France imposed an ‘extraordinary factor of external social will’ encapsulates the entire logic — and paradox — of the forced civilizing mission, key to the reader’s stated goal.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s question about how republicanism was forcibly imposed on West Africa.