The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  Even among liberal economists there was some movement. Clément Juglar (one of the first theorists of the business cycle) and Joseph Garnier, editor of the liberal Journal des économistes, toned down their initial opposition. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, author of De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (1874), which inspired Jules Ferry, was far more outspoken.104 A liberal admirer of British colonialism (he called the British ‘le peuple colonisateur par excellence’), he maintained that the French had failed to maintain their old possessions in the Americas because too few of them became settlers.105 Settlers would maintain the customs and culture of the mother country, and hence a trading relationship, for a long time, even when the link with the old country was broken.106

  There were actually few French settlers in the colonies. An exception was Algeria, which was regarded as an integral part of French territory in the Constitution of 1848. But even in Algeria there were few ‘true’ French settlers. In 1866, out of almost 218,000 settlers in Algeria only half had been previously resident in France, the others were non-Muslims who had settled in Algeria.107 By 1870, thanks to the initiative of Adolphe Crémieux, a leader of the Jewish community in France, the Jews of Algeria were granted French nationality (the so-called Crémieux Decree), much to the alarm of the Muslim population. The majority of the Algerian population did not have the rights of French citizens. A proposed law in 1846 even declared that it was impossible to turn Muslims into French citizens, for cultural reasons.108 In 1889 the right to French citizenship was conferred on all those born in Algeria, including foreign settlers, such as the Italians, Spaniards, and Maltese, but Muslims remained relegated to the status of indigène and hence excluded.109 By the 1920s there were 850,000 ‘Europeans’ in Algeria, 14 per cent of the total population.110

  During the parliamentary debates of 1885 on colonialism, Jules Ferry on 28 July explained that colonization was important because France needed, more than ever, an outlet for her exports, now that Germany had embraced protectionism.111 And of all the markets the most appetizing was that of China, opened thanks to the Opium Wars. Ferry rejoiced to have entered this market, a market of 400 million consumers who are not ‘poor blacks’ leading rudimentary lives but made up of ‘one of the richest and more advanced peoples in the world’.112 This was challenged by Jules Delafosse, an anti-colonialist conservative, who wondered why, if commercial outlets were so important, the French were trailing so far behind the British, the Germans, and the Americans in China – a market open to all.113 Charles Freycinet, the pro-colonial Foreign Minister, declared that when it came to the conquest of Madagascar the ‘real issue’ was not the cost but the defence of ‘our citizens in danger’ (i.e. the French settlers) threatened by a government à moitié barbare (semi-barbaric). Since this was a matter of honour and national pride, it would be unbecoming to haggle about the cost.114 He was obviously aware that the costs were in fact very high, the gains almost nil, and in any case very few French had settled in Madagascar.

  Anti-colonialists argued that empires were too expensive. Georges Clemenceau, who was then against colonies in principle (he changed his mind as he progressed up the political ladder towards becoming Prime Minister), in his parliamentary intervention of 30 July 1885 questioned the lack of coherence in French colonial policies: why were some territories taken over and others not? Why did France spend as much on colonial policy as Britain, whose empire was much larger?115

  René Lavollée, in an article in March 1877 in the liberal Journal des économistes, warned: ‘Never in France has a regime spent so much for colonies and for so little profit … The time has come to react against such follies.’116 Frédéric Passy, a liberal reformer, and eventually the first Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1901 (with Henri Dunant, a founder of the Red Cross), knowing full well that the ethical arguments would not convert the unconverted, declared in the parliamentary debate that 200 million francs was far too much to spend on expeditions in far-away countries.117 Charles Gide, in ‘À quoi servent les colonies’ in Revue de géographie (15 October 1885), thought colonies were useless and emigration was not a valid reason since France needed to import labour, and its products, which tended to be high-quality luxury goods, would find no market in the colonies; besides, he added, French capitalists were risk averse, not audacious like the British.118

  Some on the right were just as scornful of colonial aspiration, including right-wing supporters of Général Boulanger (a possible dictator until the decline of his popularity in January 1889); monarchists and anti-Semites, such as the Duc Albert de Broglie and Édouard Drumont, author of the best-selling and ferociously anti-Semitic La France juive; and revanchists such as Paul Déroulède, who lambasted Ferry’s colonial policy, aimed at compensating for the defeat by Prussia in 1870 and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine with the sarcastic remark: ‘J’ai perdu deux soeurs et vous m’offrez vingt domestiques’ (‘I have lost two sisters and you offer me twenty servants’).119

  Socialists often opposed the unpalatable consequences of colonialism (such as its cost) rather than colonization per se. In the Revue socialiste (1897) Paul Louis, a socialist and later a communist, declared that colonialism was a waste of money, helped big capital, and was unjust towards black people.120 Paul Henri d’Estournelles, another winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1909), noted that French public opinion was increasingly demanding hard-headed business reasons to acquire colonies. ‘France seems to be tired of being generous without any gain; our young writers no longer worry about the negroes of San Domingo or about the fate of Chinese children,’ he wrote, ‘they are no longer content with colonies that bring honour but demand that they should make us rich.’121

  Jean Jaurès, future leader of the Socialist Party, was a ‘humanitarian’ colonialist. In the columns of the pro-colonialist La Petite République (17 May 1896), he denounced colonialism as a waste of resources while accepting its inevitability.122 He thought it was necessary to ‘reconstruct’ (refaire) the Arab race, under France’s ‘noble tutelage’.123 And, anyway, if Algeria had problems, he continued, it was the fault of the local Jews who monopolized the best jobs. In France, he went on, Jewish power was based on money and on their influence in the press and in finance, but in Algeria they also had strength in numbers.124 (Yet when, a few years later, the Dreyfus Affair exploded, Jaurès, along with the novelist Émile Zola, took a clear stand against the detractors of the unjustly accused captain.)

  In a speech in Parliament (1903), Jaurès explained that France had every right to remain in Morocco since the ‘civilization she represents is certainly superior to that of the present regime in Morocco’.125 The expansion of French markets, he claimed, would enable the French proletariat to obtain higher wages. The task of socialists was not to oppose colonialism per se but to ensure that indigenous people were treated humanely and that colonialism did not lead to war among colonial powers. Jaurès favoured international (i.e. Western) agreements to resolve extra-European ‘problems’. He did not think the colonized should have a voice in this. So it is not surprising that, at the Seventh Congress of the Second International held in Stuttgart in August 1907, he voted against the anti-colonialist motion.126 He was not the only one. Socialist delegates from colonialist countries, an outraged Lenin reported, voted in favour of ‘civilized colonialism’ or, rather, of a colonial policy ‘which, under a socialist regime, may have a civilizing effect’. The anti-colonialist motion narrowly won (127 votes to 108).127

  Few on the left argued against colonialism on the basis of human rights. The most favoured argument was that it was a waste of money, or that it enhanced the unhealthy relationship between government and particular business circles, or that the supporters of colonial policy had forgotten that the sacred duty of France was to recover the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from Germany.128 Thus the poet Charles Péguy, now well into his conservative phase, wrote, in 1913, that though he did not regret the support given to various oppressed people throughout the world: ‘Why are we urged to be moved by
the plight of oppressed people everywhere except for one, which happens to be the French people?’129 Of course, for many, this is precisely what colonies were for: a compensation for the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.130

  Yet the parti colonial continued to grow in strength. In 1892 in the Chamber of Deputies there were ninety-one members of the vociferously pro-colonial Groupe Colonial. Ten years later there were almost 200 members. Thus, when, in 1912, France established a protectorate over Morocco, one of the last independent countries in Africa, there was virtually no opposition. The same noble motivations were trotted out: philanthropic humanitarianism, the sense of mission and destiny, the need to prevent Germany from taking over Morocco (thus threatening Algeria and Tunisia). French trade with Morocco was insignificant but the investments required to build up the country required loans from eager banks. The principal beneficiary was the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (Paribas), a bank that grew mainly through government loan issues connected to colonialism.131

  Whether indeed colonies profited France as a whole was doubtful. Between 1873 and 1913 well over half of French trade came from and or went to Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, Russia, the Balkans, and Latin America.132 French trade with its colonies was small: between 12 and 14 per cent. Much French investment abroad went to central and eastern Europe and the Middle East, especially to Russia, where, by 1914, 25 per cent of total French investment was directed, against only 9 per cent to the empire.133 Capital exports to the colonies did increase, but they increased far more to the Americas: 5 per cent in 1882, 26.3 per cent in 1913.134 In other words the formal French colonial empire played a small part in France’s foreign trade and foreign investment.135

  In the 1880s it was still not quite taken for granted that France should become a fully fledged colonial power. The French parliamentary debates of 1885 centred on the acquisition of Madagascar and Tonkin (North Vietnam) but were really about whether France should follow the British. Economic lobbies such as the Comité de l’Afrique Française, supported by powerful economic interests (opium traders, the Banque d’Indochine, the Société des mines du Tonkin), wanted colonies. It is doubtful, however, that the initial impetus for the acquisition of Indochina in the 1880s was the pressure of economic interests.136 The will to acquire the colonies existed among politicians, who then used economics as one of their many arguments. In 1885, however, it had become awkward to use naked economic interest, let alone the opium trade, as a good reason for acquiring Indochina.137 It was felt preferable to invoke France’s mission civilisatrice dressed up with the required humanitarian rhetoric. The opposition leader Albert de Mun, a monarchist and staunch Catholic who had originally voted against the war in Indochina, thus siding with the anti-colonialists, suggested in March 1884, during a debate on Madagascar, that colonialism might be desirable if the objectives were not lucrative, but civilizing: ‘this would be the most noble and best justification for one’s conquest’.138 He detailed all the possible reasons for French intervention in the island.139 In the first place, the mission civilisatrice was a French responsibility, since there are no duties and rights without responsibilities. It was not just a matter of money, it was a question of conscience. We have the duty to civilize these barbarians, we cannot treat them as equals because we are a superior race. Then there was the humanitarian angle: the inhabitants of Madagascar needed to be rescued from their perfidious local oppressors, who continued the work of the terrible Queen Ranavalona, responsible, according to de Mun, for the torture and death of some 200,000 of her own people thirty years previously. In fact, Queen Ranavalona (1788–1861) had been a remarkably modernizing sovereign who had the fault or merit of opposing the imposition of Christianity.140 A clinching argument, for a good Catholic like Albert de Mun, was that colonization, be it in Madagascar or Indochina, provided great opportunities for the further expansion of Catholic missions.

  Then a strategic factor was invoked: it was imperative to stop England from occupying Madagascar. England, warned de Mun, was already mistress of Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus, and was now ensconced on the banks of the Nile. France was a maritime nation but one could not be a maritime nation without being also a colonial power. Very similar arguments were produced by republicans opposing de Mun. François de Maby (future Minister of Colonies in 1887–8) supported the occupation of Madagascar on the grounds that it was an island easy to defend, very large, with good harbours, good fisheries, and plenty of coal, iron, and wood. Its ‘few inhabitants’ (there were actually 3 million of them), deeply divided by tribal rivalries, need not be exterminated, he magnanimously reassured his audience, only forced to join ‘the ranks of civilization’ by their deliverance from tyranny and superstition. Besides, and this was, as always, the clinching argument, if France did not take over Madagascar, ‘others’ would. From all sides they nodded; the ‘others’ were the British.141 This was not an argument that required complex strategic calculation. The acquisition of colonies might not be necessary but they might become important because someone else might take them over.

  A year later (28 July 1885) Jules Ferry, no longer Prime Minister but still powerful, took up the pseudo-humanitarian theme in a more robust language: ‘Gentlemen … We must openly say that the superior races have a right with respect to the inferior races … because they have a duty, the duty to civilize the inferior races.’142 Almost identical words were used by the socialist leader Léon Blum forty years later, in 1925, including the reference to the duty of ‘superior races’ towards those races still behind in culture and civilization – just like the monarchist de Mun.143 One can, of course, list all the ‘benefits’ that colonization brought about: better transport, better roads, better infrastructures, public health. When Paul Doumer became Governor-General of French Vietnam between 1897 and 1902 (he eventually became President of the Republic in 1931 and was killed by a Russian émigré in 1932), he proceeded to restore Hanoi, the old imperial capital, to its ‘ancient glory’, turning it into the capital of French Vietnam (the capital had been moved to the more central city of Huê´ by the Nguyn Emperor, Gia Long, in 1802). In reality, Doumer rebuilt Hanoi according to the prevailing ideology of the colonizers. It became ‘French’ in the sense that the natives were systematically regarded as inferior beings fit only to be servants and excluded from the beneficial aspects of colonial urban development. Being ‘white’ and a ‘Westerner’ was more central than being French since Russians, Italians, Germans, and the English enjoyed the same privileges as the French. In the words of a historian of Hanoi, ‘imperial France created a white city of the Red River’.144

  By 1906 the civilizing mission had become the most common defence of colonialism. Arthur Girault’s Principes de colonisation et de législation coloniale, published in 1895, inspired by Herbert Spencer’s ‘pop’ evolutionism, helped to train a generation of public functionaries.145 The overwhelming assumption was similar to that expressed previously by Engels and de Tocqueville: colonization might hurt the indigenous people, but it is temporary and in the long run they will be better off. The white races were like severe yet kindly parents. Georges Leygues, Minister for Colonies, declared at the Colonial Congress (1906) that a colonization which did not intend to elevate the dignity, the morality, and the welfare of the colonized would be ‘une oeuvre grossière et brutale, indigne d’une grande nation’ (‘a vulgar and brutal endeavour, which did not become a great nation’).146

  One could have a racist view of history and still be against colonialism. Gustave Le Bon, the theorist of the psychology of the crowd (who also believed that the larger the skull the greater the intelligence), thought it was absurd to try to impose Western customs and ideas such as human rights on others. The French, he wrote in the 1880s in an overt attack on the liberal colonialist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, have to use an army of 60,000 to control 6 million Muslims in Algeria, the same number required by the British to rule the whole of India. This is costly, childish, and useless, he exclaimed, urging the
French to respect Islam and strengthen the authority of the mullahs without trying to transform Muslims into Frenchmen.147 In other words the French should do as the British and eschew what today would be called cultural imperialism.