The Popular Front briefly revived egalitarian colonial rhetoric on forced labor

Evidence

Finally, it seems appropriate to ask at the end of this study what the subsequent history of the mission civilisatrice in France and West Africa will be. I have argued that by the war years, the more universalistic elements of France’s early overseas mission had mostly exhausted themselves, leaving a heightened sense of difference and a conservative rhetoric of civilization. Would the republican idea of empire in France and West Africa subsequently recover any of its earlier egalitarianism? Here, the intertwined histories of republicanism in France and the growth of nationalist protest in Africa remain instructive. When the Popular Front came to power, there was a brief shift in Paris’s and Dakar’s rhetoric and policies regarding forced labor. Marius Moutet, Leon Blum’s new Socialist minister of colonies, hoped to remedy the notorious abuses attached to forced labor in Ivory Coast and to authorize substantial new social investments in the federation. And Governor General de Coppet did succeed in making the application of the prestations more equitable throughout the West African colonies. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 888