WWI shook but did not end the French republican civilizing mission

Evidence

This letter, coupled with Van Vollenhoven’s actions, confirms that the events of the war years had shaken Dakar from its ideological moorings. Yet, if a new concern for French interests, along with repudiation of past methods for uplifting Africans, permeate this text as well as the other circulars cited above, another concern also emerges: that of a civilizing mission still unfulfilled, and a continuing commitment to somehow completing France’s original goals. Despite Van Vollenhoven’s insistence that France had acted precipitously in disrupting the old order, his words did not imply that the republican fight against this African ancien regime should be abandoned. Similarly, although Van Vollenhoven lamented “the disintegration (desorganisationJ caused by the implantation of those essentially moral principles that had led to colonization in the first place,” he also maintained that the Government General had not acted vigorously enough in providing schools, hospitals, and prosperity-in a word, the “civilization”-promised during the conquest. These references to civilizing Africans presaged an important transformation in the content of the mission civilisatrice. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 646

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay or article: how catastrophic events force imperial ideologies to be reformulated rather than abandoned, using WWI-era French West Africa as the case.
• XREF: Connects broadly to reader’s interest in republicanism being imposed on West Africa, showing the resilience of the civilizing rationale through crisis.