The civilizing mission ideology constrained what French colonial governors could actually do.

Evidence

This book demonstrates just how powerful an idea the mission civilisatrice was under the Third Republic by examining how a particular group of colonial officials in a specific context-the governors general of French West Africa from 1895 to 193o-understood this mission. Scholars have too often dismissed the mission civilisatrice as window dressing. Or they have been content to label the French as racist, without bothering to explain the insidious and persistent appeal of colonial ideology, or to consider its relationship to policy making. I begin from a different set of premises. I argue that republican France invested the notion of a civilizing mission with a fairly specific set of meanings that set limits on what the government could and could not do in the colonies. By officially acting within these limits, the French managed to obscure the fundamental contradiction between democracy and the forcible acquisition of an empire. … A second theme of this book is that the content of the republican mission civilisatrice between 1895 and 1930 was not in any sense static; rather, it evolved as the colonial situation and conditions in the metropole changed. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 28

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s core concept: mission civilisatrice as a specific, policy-bearing ideology, not window dressing.