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French colonization

William Cohen
Rulers of Empire: the French Colonial Service in Africa

Hoover Institution Press. Stanford University. 1971. 279 p.

II. — The Years of Experimentation

Close observers of the French colonial administration were acutely aware of its shortcomings. In 1874 the famous French colonial theorist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu blamed the deficiencies in the French overseas administration on the poor recruitment of personnel and on the lack of a specific colonial service.
France more than any other country [he wrote] has committed grave errors in the recruitment of its colonial personnel; it has had no other law than chance and favoritism. … It is time for France to imitate England and Holland and to create I a corps of colonial administrators, especially selected and trained....
The essential prerequisite for establishing such a corps, in his judgment, was the establishment of a strong and relatively autonomous colonial office in Paris, for only such an office could effectively direct and shape the colonial services. Unlike the British, the Dutch, and-to Leroy-Beaulieu's consternation-even the Spanish, the French had not set up a colonial ministry 2.
The colonies were not considered important enough for a single ministry to occupy itself exclusively with them; rather, until 1894, they remained the collateral responsibilities of ministries and services whose chief tasks lay elsewhere. Under Richelieu the colonies were administered by the surintendance of navigation and commerce; in 1669 Colbert assigned them to the ministry of the navy. Within that ministry the areas of responsibility were unclear, and not until 1710 was a special bureau of colonies created with a civil servant at its head 3.
As a rule the ministry of the navy had little but strategic interest in the colonies. But in 1858, during the Second Empire, Napoleon III briefly established a ministry of Algeria and colonies as a sinecure for his cousin Prince Napoleon; after two years, however, Algeria was returned to the ministry of war, and the colonies to the ministry of the navy. In the 1870s, in the first years of the Third Republic, colonial affairs continued to be the responsibility of a civil servant with the title of director, who headed an office called the directorate of the colonies.

In November 1881 when Léon Gambetta, leader of the moderate republican forces, became prime minister, he wished to emphasize the peaceful rather than the martial aspects of French colonization. Accordingly he transferred the directorate of colonies from the ministry of the navy to the newly baptized ministry of commerce and the colonies 4, but only three months later, when he fell from power, the directorate went back to the naval ministry. The colonies apparently assumed a higher status in 1882, when the Freycinet government appointed an undersecretary of state for colonies to head the office in the naval ministry dealing with colonial affairs. Adding to the power of the undersecretary was the fact that rather than being a civil servant, he was a political figure 5.
Three outstanding figures served as undersecretary of colonies between 1881 and 1894 and helped to make the system increasingly independent of ministerial control. At the same time they strengthened the government's control over the colonies.
The first of these notable undersecretaries was Mix Faure, appointed in 1883. Faure was a businessman from Le Havre and had been one of Gambetta's early disciples. An able member of the Chamber of Deputies, Faure had political and administrative skills which distinguished him in his earliest years in politics: finally in 1895 he rose to the presidency of the republic. While undersecretary of colonies, Faure maintained friendly relations with the minister of the navy and won a large measure of initiative in the colonial field. After he left office the authority of the undersecretariat continued to grow; from 1886, for example, the undersecretary for the first time was authorized to sign payment orders for colonial expenses, and a Bulletin offciel was published for the undersecretariat of colonies separate from that of the naval ministry.
Eugéne Etienne was the second undersecretary who contributed to the formation of an independent ministry and strengthened its authority over the empire. Like Faure, Etienne was a businessman and a disciple of Gambetta. In Parliament he represented the district of Oran in Algeria. Garnbetta's influence, Etienne's own business interests, and his life as an Algerian settler had made him a dedicated empire builder. He became undersecretary of colonies for a few months in 1887 and again during three eventful years from 1889 to 1892. Later he occupied several key cabinet posts and in the Chamber of Deputies led a large group of parliamentarians known as the Groupe colonial, which was dedicated to the cause of imperial expansion. While undersecretary of colonies, Etienne played a crucial part in expanding the French empire in Africa. He ,alously sent explorers to the black continent and thus gave « the world ie impression that from the bulge of the Niger to the Mediterranean, erything was reserved for France 6. His authority and prestige grew hen he gained admission to the regular meetings of the cabinet. By 1892 te work of Faure and Etienne had been so successful that a deputy —scribed the undersecretariat of colonies as a ministry in every aspect accept that of name 7.
Théophile Delcassé, the third of the outstanding undersecretaries, destroyed the last vestiges of the undersecretariat's dependence on another ministry. When he assumed the office in 1893, Delcassé demanded that his administration be transferred to a separate building. At that time the offices of the undersecretariat occupied a few poorly aired and dimly lit rooms in the ministry of the navy which in Napoleonic times had served as a guardhouse 8. By having the offices moved to the Pavillon de Flore, a wing of the Tuileries, Delcassé gave it added prestige 9. Physically separated from the ministry of the navy, the undersecretariat was less subject than before to ministerial control. This was especially true while Delcassé was undersecretary, for he was not one to take ministerial orders readily. Indeed, his personality reminded Faure of Julius Caesar 10.
Increasingly independent in its administration, the undersecretariat had become a ministry in nearly all aspects but name. Already a century before, in the 1780s and 1790s, colonial publicists and officials had suggested the establishment of a separate ministry of colonies 11. In the 1880s an increasing number of persons advocated such a ministry 12. Overseas officials added their voices: Gallieni, campaigning in the Sudan, wrote Etienne of the necessity for a ministry of colonies which would give the empire a coherent policy and a colonial tradition separate from that of the naval ministry 13.
Legally, the cabinet had the power by simple decree to elevate the undersecretariat to a ministry, but it hesitated to do so in the 1890s because the Chamber of Deputies was basically hostile to such a change. Many deputies opposed the action, because they feared it would mean increased expenses for colonial administration, others because they assumed a separate ministry would more effectively be able to sponsor what they considered an undesirable stress on overseas expansion. Feeling that a ministry was desirable but not wanting to risk the hostility of the Chamber, the relatively weak government of Charles Dupuy decided to forego its decree powers and submit the question to the legislators. The first reading of the bill occurred on May 15, 1893, but action was delayed on it until the following year. The undersecretary of state for colonies, Maurice Lebon, gave the bill new urgency when he resigned in March 1894, claiming that it was impossible to administer the empire with the existing administrative structure 14. Delcassé spoke for a ministry of colonies, and his persuasive oratory seems to have finally ensured the passage of the bill by a vote of 260 to 239 in May 1894 15.
Faure and Etienne, in addition to strengthening the undersecretariat, had instituted reforms which consolidated the undersecretary's control over colonial personnel. In 1883 Faure had established a standard uniform for civilian officials serving in the colonies 16; this was an important step, symbolizing as it did, the subservience of the colonial administrations to the central administration in Paris. In 1887 Eugène Etienne took the crucial step: by decree he gathered territorial administrators under his authority into one body, the Corps of Colonial Administrators. The only administrators excepted were those of Indochina, who were assigned to a separate corps 17.
By the decree of 1887 the chefs de service in the French possessions in India, the commandants particuliers in Porto Novo, the residents of Grand Popo, Ogoué, Louango, the commandants de cercles in Senegal, and the commandants d'arrondissements in New Caledonia—all of whom represented French authority in the colonies—were now united into one corps. The roles of the colonial administrators continued to vary, as before 1887. In Grand Popo, for example (later part of the French colony of Dahomey), the résident was more of a diplomatic representative than a territorial administrator, while in New Caledonia the commandant exercised effective control over the local population. Nevertheless, as the French began to consolidate their positions and extend their conquests, the functions of the administrators grew somewhat more uniform, while recruitment, promotion, and salaries of the administrators were standardized after 1887.
During the quarter of a century between 1887 and 1912, the central administration in Paris employed various methods of recruitment, all aimed at improving the quality of the administrators being sent overseas. The decree of 1887 had been drawn up for that purpose, but its only requirement, so far as candidates were concerned, was that they must be government employees with an annual salary of 2,000 francs or more 18. The stipulations of the decree did not in themselves necessarily ensure a better Corps; nevertheless the undersecretary, in establishing centralized authority over the colonial administrators, could now exert more rigorous control over their appointment. Within a year after the decree, some candidates for the lowest rank of administrators were required to take examinations for entrance into the Corps 19.
In the early 1890s, as the areas under French control expanded and a bureaucracy developed, the administration in each colony began to hire officials for specialized functions. While the governor had administrators to rule over the local regions, in the colonial capital he acquired his own staff, the secretariat, which was separate from the newly founded Corps of Colonial Administrators. And to aid the administrators in the bush, either in performing clerical tasks in the administrative center of the cercle or in administering a subdivision of the cercle under the administrator, the governor appointed men with the title of agents. In French West Africa they were called agents des affaires indigenes, and in the other regions agents des affaires civiles. (After 1920 the latter designation was also used for those officials in French West Africa.) These agents filled subordinate positions for which the British were accustomed to use indigenous personnel. (Hereafter these functionaries will be referred to as “agents.”)
The colonial administrators were civil servants of the French state, responsible to the local governor but hired and fired by the central administration in Paris. The agents, however, were civil servants of the colony who could be appointed or dismissed at the will of the governor. They formed a separate corps in each colony, but after the founding in 1904 of the French West African federation (Afrique Occidentale Frangaise, AOF) and the erection of a similar federation for French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Frangaise, AEF) in 1910, they constituted a corps within each federation, subject to appointment and dismissal by the governor-general.
Methods of recruitment, promotion, and salaries of agents varied from one colonial group to the next. French citizenship was the only requirement for appointment. As an impassioned critic of the colonial administration wrote:

A hairdresser, a chestnut vendor, a ditch digger, depending on his contacts (the eoncierge of an administrator on leave, the bath attendant, the friend etc.), can be appointed commis des affaires indigènes without anybody caring about his capacities, his intelligence, his disposition, or his aptitudes 20

The agents usually secured their appointments through political patronage or other forms of favoritism. A young man who had only an elementary education and whose previous professional experience consisted in raising horses in the army was appointed as an agent in 1904 because he could claim important connections. The personnel bureau in Dakar which processed his application noted:

Seems very little educated. See his application. Recommended by M. Emile Chautemps [deputy] at the request of M. Le Gall, former secretary-general to the presidency, and by M. de Heriss6, former director of the bank of R6union. Proposal: [Appointment as] Commis fourth class 21.

In France the baccalauréat was absolutely necessary for any kind of administrative career, and persons without a secondary school education were doomed to occupy low positions from which they could never rise. Because appointment as an agent before 1912 did not require any specific educational background, many young men without education but with aspirations toward joining the Corps of Colonial Administrators chose the post of agent. Only men in the most desperate circumstances, such as those who had failed in business overseas or who had extremely lowly positions in France, saw the post of agent as an end in itself.

The poor quality of the men entering the territorial administrations in the colonies before 1887 was plainly evident, but since it was impossible to find immediate replacements, Etienne had little choice but to integrate into the Corps the forty men who had belonged to those administrations. Thus his solution to the pressing manpower problem was mere makeshift.

The colonial vocation was generally not popular in France. A small minority of men were interested in an overseas career-men from the seacoast areas of France, the Bordeaux region, and the area around Marseilles, who could identify with the naval tradition of their regions. Nevertheless, and especially before 1900, the colonial administration was not considered attractive. In particular, health conditions were appalling. Nearly all the administrators suffered from frequent malaria attacks; a few unfortunate ones serving in Equatorial Africa contracted sleeping sickness. Most of those returning to France every two years on leave required prolonged hospitalization or rest cures. Tropical diseases took a heavy toll of the Corps; between 1887 and 1912, 135 out of 984 appointees (16 percent) died in the colonies 22. If they did not die there, the administrators' lives were nevertheless dramatically shortened. Retired colonial officials died seventeen years earlier than their contemporaries who had occupied metropolitan posts. Even though sanitation and preventive medicine had improved by the 1920s, nearly a third of the 16,000 Europeans living in AOF in 1929 were hospitalized an average of fourteen days 23. Because of the deplorable health conditions the administrators could not bring their families with them and few men were willing to accept a career involving nearly lifetime separation from their families. This state of affairs lasted until health risks had been reduced with the building of hospitals and roads, making it easier to transport the sick or to secure medical aid. These improvements came at an uneven pace—in Senegal in the 1890s, but in areas that were penetrated at a relatively later date (such as Niger and parts of the Ivory Coast) only in the 1920s.
To be sure, the salaries of the administrators were twice as high as those that civil servants in comparable positions might have earned in the méetropole. This inducement, however, did not offset the high cost of living in the colonies and, for married men, the expense of keeping up two households, one in France and the other in the colonies. Although there were a few individuals who seem to have entered the Corps because of the relatively higher salaries, this was usually not a significant factor in the choice.
In general the prestige of overseas service was low, largely because some of the early administrators who were not socially accepted at home proved overseas to be brutal and dishonest. The passage of time did not immediately erase this negative image of the colonial service. A French settler described the colonies in 1894 as “the refugium peccatorum for all our misfits, the depository of the excrement of our political and social organism.” 24. In 1909, Lucien Hubert, a senator friendly to the colonial administration, found it necessary in the face of adverse criticism, to deny “the odious legend which represents the colonial administrator holding in one hand the bottle and in the other the whip.” 25.
As late as 1929 Georges Hardy, the director of the Ecole Coloniale, which had been founded in 1885 by Faure, then undersecretary of the colonies, complained that when a young man leaves for the colonies, his friends ask themselves, “What crime must he have committed? From what corpse is he fleeing?” 26. Even in the next decade, in spite of the significant improvements made in the recruitment of the Corps, the negative image of the colonial vocation seemed to remain, A,newspaper article in 1931 claimed:

To leave the metropole and to go to the African or Indochinese jungle meant that one had a guilty conscience. Nobody can understand why an intelligent and active boy would be so imprudent as to disregard the good, quiet, and safe position of a bureaucrat at 3,500 francs a year with pension, in order to go and live in the tropics, get some dangerous fever and fool around [s'accoquiner] with colored people.… 27.

Hubert Deschamps, who had then already served several years in the colonial service, claimed in 1931 that the colonial administrator was still considered “a little bit the bad boy of the past, the gentleman of adventure, and his name evokes ... the specter of the pirate ... the sadistic bureaucrat, the professional liar, and the drunkard.” 28. Admittedly the members of the colonial service, or people connected with the French overseas venture, were prone to exaggerate the lack of appreciation they received from the homeland; nevertheless, it is clear that the French colonial service never enjoyed the high prestige that the British colonial service seems to have enjoyed in Britain 29.
French civil servants in the pre-1914 era were highly motivated by the social prestige of their position, and by such dignities as elevation to the Léegion d'honneur. Very few colonial administrators, however, received that decoration; indeed, the Corps was probably the least decorated branch of the higher governmental bureaucracy. This neglect stemmed from the fact that the minister of colonies was a junior member of the cabinet with few nominations allotted to him, most of which he usually awarded to his collaborators in Paris. Of thirty available to the colonial ministry, only an average of four a year went to the actual administrators 30. Even though the Corps grew twentyfold between 1887 and 1910, its members received no more decorations in the latter year than in the former.
There were, then, a number of psychological and material reasons that discouraged many young Frenchmen from considering a colonial career. Until 1914, therefore, the undersecretariat or the ministry of colonies had only a limited number of applicants from whom to choose the colonial administrators. Although Etienne's decree of 1887 was an important first step toward improving the quality of the Corps, almost twenty-five years were to elapse before the ministry could cease heterogeneous recruitment and establish a uniform training program for all the administrators.
During his tenure in office, in 1889, Etienne had created an administrative section of the Ecole Coloniale 31 in which future administrators would receive special training in colonial affairs. All the administrators were supposed to be recruited from among graduates of the school. Such recruitment, by ensuring common training for all administrators, would have done much to improve the quality and morale of the Corps, but unfortunately the school was not equipped to train more than a few students each year — only a fraction of those needed in an ever expanding empire. Also, the school faced widespread opposition in France. Several chambers of commerce had considered beginning their own colonial training program in the hope that the government would appoint their students to the.Corps. When the government chose to train its own civil servants rather than accept those specially trained to serve the interests of the Bordeaux merchants or the Marseilles shippers, the chambers of commerce angrily denounced the school 32. Another self-interested critic was Emile Boutmy, the eminent director of the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, who had instituted a training program in colonial affairs at his school. When his students were not appointed to the colonial administration, he devoted an entire book to assailing the EcoleColoniale 33. Colonial officials attending the Colonial Congress of 1889 induced it to adopt a resolution attacking the practice of sending overseas young men whose comprehension of colonial affairs was limited to bookish learning 34. Because of the opposition, by 1892 graduates of the Ecole had lost their monopoly of recruitment into the Corps, but the school was not abolished, as some of the more vocal critics had advocated.
After these experiences, the undersecretariat, in trying to fill the Corps and at the same time heeding its critics, returned essentially to the methods of recruitment employed in 1887. Although the Ecole Coloniale students provided some recruits, others continued to come from the ranks of the metropolitan civil servants or of those who had seen some form of government service in the colonies. The ministry's experience with the men coming from these different sources gradually shaped its recruitment policies, so that the period up to World War I was basically one of experimentation. It was on the eve of the war, in 1912, that the colonial ministry established methods of recruitment and training of colonial personnel which were to remain basically unchanged until 1945.
One important source of manpower during the early years was the armed forces. Colonial military officers had played a predominant role in building the French empire in Africa, and this role and their experience in colonial affairs made them likely recruits. But military men were a mixed blessing to the Corps. A number of them who were appointed as administrators often had, to be sure, an intimate knowledge of the people in their district—some of whom they had helped to subjugate. Often, however, they could, not shake off unfortunate habits acquired during their military careers. One administrator who had formerly been a naval officer was described by his governor as “an old sea dog” who “finds it difficult to understand that one cannot run a cercle as if it were a ship.” 35. Many former officers who became administrators established martial discipline in their territories and were often brutal or excessively harsh in their treatment of the local populations. Many within the Corps who came to oppose the continued recruitment of military officers—and with good reason — were the civilians 36; for until 1905 officers with a captain's rank or higher were appointed to the upper ranks of the Corps, thus impeding the promotion of other administrators.
Between 1887 and 1900, 15 to 20 percent of the Corps consisted of former officers. Thereafter the colonial ministry became increasingly wary of appointing officers to the Corps, both because of their record of brutality and the civilian opposition to them. After 1905 the ministry abolished the provision that required one-sixth of the Corps to be appointed from among officers, and from that time only an occasional officer was admitted. In 1907 the Corps had only thirty-four military officers (twenty-seven former colonial military officers and seven naval officers) out of a total of 465 men, 37, or 7 percent of the Corps. As the older ex-officers retired, the proportion decreased still further.
A second group joining the colonial service consisted of functionaries employed by the government administrations in France. Whereas the German colonial service was nearly entirely staffed by civil servants from the mother country, the French Corps contained only a few. In 1907, for example, only fifty adn-dnistrators out of 465 came from metropolitan administrations 38. The type of man who would choose a comfortable career in the metropolitan civil service was unlikely to expatriate himself to the colonies, and those who did rarely adjusted well to the active life in the bush. A former chief clerk serving in Senegal was described by his governor in the following manner: “Since he has had the command of the cercle of Louga [one year] he has found it unnecessary to go any farther than twelve kilometers from his residence. Ignored by the natives, he ignores them. He has obviously made an error in entering the corps of administrators.” 39. Ineffective as administrators, these officials were fit only to perform clerical tasks in the colonial capitals, and because of many unfortunate experiences with them, the ministry after 1905 virtually stopped recruiting metropolitan functionaries.
A third group from which the ministry selected administrators in the early years comprised the functionaries of the secretariats-general in the colonial capitals. After reaching a certain rank in the secretariat and serving a minimum of two years overseas, these functionaries were eligible for appointment to the Corps of Colonial Administrators. Unfortunately the experience they brought to the Corps was relatively worthless, for they had usually spent their time shuffling papers in the offices of a colonial capital just as if they had remained on the banks of the Seine. From this sterile regimen the members of the secretariats did not gain any particular insight into the fife of the local populations; like the metropolitan civil servants, they were too much bound up in bureaucratic routine to make good administrators. A former member of the secretariat who had entered the Corps was condescendingly described by his governor as “only made of the stuff of a copyist.” 40. The governor was probably correct. Increasingly, members of the secretariats were considered undesirable in the Corps, and indeed very few sought to enter. In 1907 the Corps contained only forty officials drawn from that source 41; thereafter the number continued to decline.
A fourth source of recruits was the agents. Prior to 1914 this group supplied a majority of the administrators, and indeed until World War II half of them continued to be recruited from this source. Until approximately 1905 the ministry of colonies did not exercise sufficient care in allowing them to become administrators, so that incompetent, even brutal men were sometimes appointed to the Corps. In 1898 an agent in the Ivory Coast who had been ordered to "inflict a harsh punishment" on the assassins of two French officers annihilated a whole village to which the assassins belonged. He informed the governor, “I have ordered the following measures: the complete destruction of this people by killing all adult males and the assimilation of the women and children by the neighboring peoples.” The governor reminded him that “if justice obliges us sometimes to shed blood, it never obliges us to bathe in it.” 42. After thus severely rebuking his subordinate, the governor promoted him the same year, and three years later he was allowed to enter the Corps of Colonial Administrators. Another agent had been dismissed from a private French company for insubordination and general worthlessness and had then become one of the local pimps in the town of Rufisque; eventually he was made an administrator 43.
A high proportion of agents, however, turned out to be effective functionaries. Their service as administrators' assistants gave them a sound practical knowledge of territorial administration and its intricacies. Even novices in the Corps might be men with long practical experience in overseas administration, since they served at least four years in a colony and sometimes as many as ten years before being appointed to the Corps.
As the agents were the only group of functionaries whose members all aspired to become administrators, they constituted a large human reservoir for recruitment. The main drawback, of course, was that they were generally uneducated; often they could neither keep proper accounts nor write a readable report. Their lack of general culture, according to some of the higher officials, brought with it a certain lack of restraint, of a sense of balance and moderation. To remedy these faults, beginning in 1904 the governors-general of AOF and Madagascar and the governors in the other colonies required aspiring agents to take examinations usually calling for both practical and theoretical knowledge. The examination given to prospective agents in French West Africa in 1913 consisted of copying a report, writing an essay on the consequences of the opening of the Panama Canal, and taking tests in dictation and arithmetic. In the beginning these examinations were not taken very seriously; one candidate was appointed as an agent in spite of having failed both the dictation and the arithmetic tests 44. In general, however, the new procedure discouraged many uneducated men from trying to become agents and thus had the effect of raising their educational level. Gradually the standards of appointment were raised, and the advancement of agents to the rank of administrator became more selective.
A growing number of ex-agents proved their ability as administrators after 1905, but graduates of the Ecole Coloniale had long since shown themselves to be the real elite of the Corps. They were conscientious, honest, and reliable, and treated the local populations in a gentler and more humane manner than did their colleagues. Governors unanimously praised them; for example, in 1904 Governor-General Gallieni of Madagascar wrote that “the best administrators are recruited from the Ecole Coloniale.” 46
Experience clearly showed that the most successful administrators were either ex-agents or graduates of the Ecole Coloniale. The success of administrators recruited from the various sources is summarized in Table 1, based on all available files representing slightly more than two-thirds of the total number entering the Corps from 1887 to 1914.

While the Ecole Coloniale graduates and the ex-agents made the best administrators, as a group they still had certain deficiencies that needed correction. Many seasoned colonial officials were skeptical of the ability of the young Ecole Coloniale graduates, complaining that after two years of study they thought they knew everything about the complex art of administering a cercle. To be sure, the legal studies of the school tended to make its graduates excessively rigid, and they seemed shallow pettifoggers to the old bush administrators who had made the ignoring of regulations virtually an article of faith. In 1902 Hubert Lyautey, who was then Gallieni's assistant in Madagascar and later gained fame as the founder of the French administration in Morocco, wrote of the graduates of the Ecole:

They ... seem to become increasingly bureaucratic; everything in their behavior takes on the form of a circular.... Regulations have become dogma for them, and those which they themselves created seem after a few months to have the authority of divine revelation. Finally and primarily they think abstractly ... and it is only through our mentality that they understand the native. Certainly ... they are better morally and professionally than the first group of colonial functionaries; they are irreproachable, but worse 47.

In spite of Gallieni's favorable remarks about the graduates of the Ecole Coloniale, he led a school of thought-in which Lyautey was the foremost disciple emphasizing the importance of appointing men who already had practical knowledge of colonial affairs. Advice from the men in the bush discouraged the ministry of colonies from attempting to expand the Ecole Coloniale and giving its graduates sole access to the Corps. Before World War 1, exstudents of the school constituted only a small proportion of the Corps-15 percent (seventy of 465) in 1907, 20 percent (170 of 861) in 1914 48.
Experience showed that some graduates of the Ecole Coloniale, despite their superior training, were incapable of adn-dnistering their districts when they first arrived overseas. A famous case which seemed to prove the inadequacy of purely intellectual training was the Toqué scandal of 1903. Emile Toqud was a graduate of the school; before leaving France he had demonstrated remarkable courage and presence of mind when he jumped into the Seine and saved a drowning person. He was sent to the Congo and put in charge of a large district. Baffled by the problems confronting him, Toqué resorted to terror and sadism. On the 14th of July 1903, he celebrated the national holiday by blowing up a prisoner with gunpowder. Shortly after the news of this act arrived in France, the brutal methods of exploitation used by the rubber companies in the Congo also came to light, and the administrators received some of the blame for not investigating or preventing the companies' actions 49. The Congo scandal seemed to demonstrate the need to improve the administration, and the Toqué affair showed that even well-educated students from the Ecole Coloniale needed a certain amount of practical experience in addition to their formal training.
In writing about the Toqué incident, Minister of Colonies Etienne C16mentel described it as “the affair which has so profoundly shaken public opinion in France.” It seemed to him that the maladministration that had been discovered in the Congo was perhaps owing to the fact that authority had been entrusted to “officials who are too young or of uncertain mental stability, [who are] isolated and far from their superiors, and at the same time possess nearly unlimited powers.” 50 To remedy in part the situation revealed by the Toqué incident, Clémentel issued a decree requiring that graduates of the Ecole Coloniale serve one or two years as probationers before being appointed to the Corps. During their probationary time they were not permitted to command a district but instead were assigned as assistants to older and more experienced members of the Corps. This expedient remedied some of the faults that Lyautey had found in the school's graduates and which the Toqué incident had presumably demonstrated. Many of the old bush administrators were tough authoritarians, and undoubtedly the new system of apprenticeship enabled them to transmit some undesirable methods to the younger generation of colonial officials. But many of them at least were excellent masters at showing the novices how to establish a tax roll, how to ride for days on horseback, and how to arbitrate a dangerous feud between two neighboring ethnic groups.
As the ministry attempted to improve the quality of the graduates of the Ecole Coloniale, it also tried to make better administrators of the colonial agents who were promoted to the Corps. What the latter needed, it contended, was some training in administrative law, accounting, ethnology, and other fields of knowledge in which the graduates of the Ecole Coloniale had received an effective preparation. Such training might help overcome the differences in educational background which had begun to divide the Corps. As the governor-general of Madagascar, Victor Augagneur, observed:

The administrators group themselves according to their origins: the graduates of the Ecole Coloniale form one Corps, those coming from the agents constitute another one. Rivalries ... if not jealousies are thus born 51.

An efficient bureaucracy seemed to require standardized training, and the logical way to obtain it was to educate the agents further. In 1905 the ministry decreed that henceforth all agents wishing to be considered for appointment as administrators would have to undergo a one-year training program at the Ecole Coloniale. For years this decree was ignored, but in 1912 its provisions were repeated in a new decree, which was enforced. Thus the Ecole henceforth had a monopoly over the training of all administrators; no one could enter the Corps without previous attendance at the school. To gain admission into the school the agents were required to pass entrance examinations, which stressed theoretical rather than practical knowledge. For example, the examinations in 1914 for agents in AEF consisted of questions on the physical, social, and economic geography of Equatorial Africa, on regulations concerning native administration, and on the financial, political, and administrative organization of the colonial system 52.
The decree of 1912 was suspended in 1914 for the duration of the war, and its real impact was felt only after 1920, when the agents were required to spend one year at the school, the cadets two years; nevertheless the two groups were brought closer together because of their similar training and the mutual contacts they had established in Paris.
In order to understand the relatively slow progress made in developing internal cohesiveness in the Corps and standard methods for training its members, one must keep in mind that the French empire was continuously in a process of flux. Although the French zones of influence had been relatively well delineated by 1900, they were still undergoing changes on the eve of the war. In general, the French empire in Africa was under control but not totally “pacified”; for example, in Niger, Mauritania, Chad, and the Ivory Coast, a struggle against the French continued into the 1920s.
The expansion of the empire brought with it a dramatic growth of the Corps of Colonial Administrators; within one generation it increased twentyfold.

The unbroken but highly uneven growth of the Corps must be kept in mind when one considers the difficulties the ministry had in attracting qualified officials. In 1899, twenty-two administrators were appointed; in 1900, sixty; but in 1901, only three. So long as the centrai administration in Paris could not anticipate the needs of the colonial service from one year to the next it could neither recruit systematically nor set up a proper training program. It was only when the French had completed their conquests and had established permanent administrative organizations in the colonies that the colonial office could estimate administrative needs and plan recruitment rationally. The problems of personnel planning and the lack of candidates for overseas service were not unique to the French; for similar factors forced the Germans in their East African empire to be content with the officials they could recruit. According to one writer, the German choice of officials lay-much as with the French “between irresponsible adventurers, aggressive militarists, and civil servants trained in the rigors of the domestic bureaucracy.” 53
Yet in spite of heterogeneous recruitment and irregular procedures, the colonial ministry did manage to improve the quality of its administrators. In judging their quality, one must rely largely on the quarterly reports submitted by the governors. Obviously governors could often disagree in rating a subordinate. Also, of course, today's standards might lead us to reject the criteria they used. Initially, those administrators who could maintain order in their cercles were considered satisfactory, while low ratings went to those whose excessive harshness toward the local populations caused uprisings, who systematically left their governors ignorant of events in their cercles, who kept poor accounts, or who were unable to explain deficits in their treasury. All administrators, including the very best, were highly authoritarian, even highly arbitrary, and many governors were very lenient in judging their personnel. It was only the worst exercise of discipline-for example, flogging followed by death-that the governors invariably recognized as brutality.
In view of the toleration with which most governors regarded their subordinates, the governors' reports are not very reliable gauges by which to measure the quality of the administrators serving in the period 1887-1914. Still, with the passage of time, as the governors developed both a greater sense of the administrators' human responsibilities toward the local populations and more effective ways of checking on them, their reports became increasingly credible. That the quality of the administrators also improved is confirmed in personnel files of officials who entered the Corps between 1887 and 1914. A steadily growing proportion received ratings of satisfactory from the governors who reviewed their work (see Table 3).

*It may be that the files examined give a somewhat excessively negative image of the quality of the administrators in the Corps in the early years. The reports, especially in the 1880s, were sometimes unfair, since they reflected the political and personal animosities of the governors. These reports became more reliable as the Corps became increasingly homogeneous and the governors were to a greater degree recruited from among former administrators. I have tried to take this problem into account by classifying an administrator as “incapable” only if he received a poor rating from more than one of his superiors.

*Representing slightly more than two-thirds of the total number appointed to the Corps during this period.

1. Ecole Coloniale graduates
2. Docteur en droit
3. Licence en droit
4. Bachelier en droit
5. Licence ès sciences
6. Licence ès lettres
7. Diplôme de l'Institut des langues orientales
8. Diplôme de l'Ecole libre des sciences politiques
9. Docteur en médecine
10. Diplôme de l'Ecole de pharmacie
11. Degrees from either Ecole navale or Saint-Cyr
12. Brevet de l'Ecole des hautes études commerciales
13. Baccalauréat
14. Primary education

Several factors contributed to improvement of the Corps. One of the most important was the improvement in the quality of the agents, from whose ranks so many Corps members were chosen. Another was the rising prestige of the Corps, as the ministry raised salaries, increased slightly the number of decorations, and made recruitment more selective. After the turn of the twentieth century the colonial service was able to attract an ever growing number of secondary school and university graduates. Among the administrators appointed prior to 1900, only half had formal education through the baccalauréat, but from 1900 to 1905, 70 percent held that degree, and from 1906 to 1914, 75 percent

Like the metropolitan bureaucracy, the colonial service increasingly attracted men with law degrees. Of the new recruits from 1900 to 1905, 23 percent had studied law; the proportion rose to 29 percent in 1906-1914. (These figures include the men who studied law as part of the curriculum of the Ecole Coloniale.) The study of law did not fully prepare men for colonial service, but it taught them to respect orders and follow regulations, both valuable assets for overseas service. Roman law, which stressed the universality of law and the basic equality of man, may have given some administrators a certain sense of obligation and duty toward the local populations. In general, it was the most educated administrator who was inclined to be humane, whether his training had been in law or in some other area of knowledge.
An investigation of the educational background of the administrators suggests that there was a direct correlation between the rising educational level of the men in the Corps and their achievement. Some governors may have been overimpressed with the educational qualifications of some of their subordinates and may have judged them less on their administrative capacities than on their educational qualifications 54, but this possibility does not obscure the correlation between the highly educated and highly capable officials.
Not surprisingly, the improvement in the administrators' educational level coincided with the French progress in “pacifying” the areas under their control. Obviously it was much easier for an administrator to be gentle and humane in a “pacified” area than in one in which French authority could be constantly challenged.
For all the complaints that the governors had made of their early subordinates, it might be argued that these rough buccaneer types were probably just the sort of men who were necessary to break local resistance and assert French authority. When the primary stage of colonizationor conquest-had been accomplished the time had come to begin the secondary stage: the establishment of a regular functioning administration. The buccaneer vanished and was replaced by the bureaucrat. In the face of this change, which occurred during the decade preceding World War I, it was logical for the ministry of colonies to insist on a high educational level for its administrators. Drawing on its former experiences the ministry arrived in 1905 at two irresistible conclusions: education was necessary to produce the most desirable overseas officials, and the best education available was to be had at the Ecole Coloniale. Accordingly the ministry decided to appoint to the Corps only graduate's of the school and the ex-agents trained there. With this decision to funnel all future administrators through the Ecole, the era of experimentation had come to an end.