World War I drove French West Africa toward a more conservative civilizing mission

Evidence

The upheaval of World War I altered this progressive interpreta- tion of the mission civilisatrice. In the course of recruiting soldiers and intensifying production for the war effort, Dakar began to re- assess what it meant to civilize Africans. The wartime and postwar generation of governors general felt their predecessors had made mistakes. African chiefs were not tyrants, but genuine representa- tives of democratically organized collectivities. The new educated elite was not turning out as Dakar had expected. The policy of mise en valeur, predicated upon the construction of railroads, had ne- glected the most important factor in West Africa’s agricultural pro- ductivity: the human element. A more conservative vision of the mission civilisatrice thus emerged, in which the prewar preoccupa- tion with transforming African society yielded to a greater respect for the precolonial aristocracy-who were now to become associated in the civilizing process-and an emphasis upon power sharing gen- erally. And a greater concern for inculcating in Africans “the law of labor” and new strategies of race preservation-what the French re- ferred to as faire du noir-replaced the tenet of civilizing through railroads and modern sanitation. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 875

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The shift from transforming African society to governing with the precolonial aristocracy connects to the later association discourse described in the postwar period.

Related

• World War I drove Dakar from transforming Africans toward respecting precolonial aristocracies. (similarity 0.93)
• Failed prewar policies forced France into a conservative civilizing mission. (similarity 0.91)
• World War I weakened republican ideology and shifted colonial policy toward conservatism (similarity 0.89)
• World War I and right-wing politics drove French racism into colonial policy (similarity 0.89)
• West African revolts forced Dakar to reverse its assimilationist policies (similarity 0.86)
• World War I triggered the first large-scale revolts against French colonial rule (similarity 0.85)
• Postwar French colonial doctrine shifted in response to African resistance. (similarity 0.85)
• African conscription in WWI triggered a more racialized French colonial policy (similarity 0.85)
• African colonial demands shaped metropolitan France’s racist turn, not just French domestic trends (similarity 0.85)
• Colonized peoples’ revolts in Africa intensified France’s interwar racial conservatism (similarity 0.84)
• French failures in West Africa revived racism and redefined their civilizing mission (similarity 0.84)
• WWI conscription discredited French emancipationist policies and revealed defiant African elites (similarity 0.84)
• The mission civilisatrice was largely a lie according to West African critics (similarity 0.84)
• Forced African conscription discredited France’s civilizing mission in West Africa (similarity 0.83)
• The early mission civilisatrice carried an egalitarian current that interwar association policy abandoned. (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• France’s civilizing mission lost its universalism and turned conservative by World War I #corroborates (0.95) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 888
• Colonized peoples’ revolts in Africa intensified France’s interwar racial conservatism #expands (0.60) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 883
• World War I supplied colonial troops on a massive scale while contradicting empire’s rationale #expands (0.55) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1184
• France’s civilizing mission was not chiefly about cultural assimilation #qualifies (0.50)