3 - The Mission Civilisatrice to 1914

Summary

The “civilizing mission” gave the French their most coherent explanation of empire since mercantilism. The Third Republic would return France to the front rank of Great Powers through an expanding empire rooted in republican values and capitalist economic development. Evolving race theory provided new means of legitimizing hierarchical difference. Settler republicanism deepened its roots in Algeria, even as European immigration began to decline. The republican imperial agenda dovetailed conveniently with geopolitics in the “scramble for Africa,” leading to the formation of two colonial federations, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, each much larger than the Hexagon itself. The agents of republican empire were largely the same as previous incarnations—colonial officials, military officers, missionaries, and capitalists. The “civilizing mission” produced varied results, not least because of the parsimony of the bourgeois regime. Republican schools trained both collaborators and future anti-colonial and postcolonial elites. Railroads built at a horrendous cost in blood and indigenous treasure unified parts of the empire. In the Indochinese Union, the French sought to construct a gateway to influence in Asia that would rival that of British India. Through a state-driven regime of extraction, the Indochinese Union became financially self-sustaining.