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The men entering the Corps of Colonial Administrators in the interwar period were
generally speaking men of high ability, possessing personal integrity and a sense
of dedication. Many of them were worthy of the praise given a graduate of the Ecole
Coloniale in the 1920s: he is “impassioned by his vocation, to which he brings
the enthusiasm and real faith of an apostle 1.” The governors claimed that
only superlatives could be used to describe some of the administrators 2. It could
be said of many more administrators than before the war that they were “good
and gentle with the natives 3.”
The quality of the Corps was to a large measure shaped by the increased selectivity
in recruitment, by the fact that all the administrators were required to receive
their training at the Ecole Coloniale, and by the improvements in curriculum which
the school itself had undergone. The young men entering the colonial service in
the interwar period were then a new breed of men.
In spite of this renovation of the Corps, the colonial service nevertheless was
rigid, and in fact crystallized the status quo in the interwar period. Hubert Deschamps,
one of the keenest observers of the French colonial scene and himself a member
of the Corps of Colonial Administrators between the two world wars, observed that
French colonial rule, characterized at times in the early period by the innovative
spirit of men like Faidherbe, Galliéni, and Lyautey, seemed to deteriorate
into rigidity after World War I. Deschamps described the years 1919-1939 as decisive,
but “lost years.” Of this period, he wrote: “We fell asleep somewhat
from a political point of view .... when it would have been wise slowly and resolutely
to lead an evolution.” It was because the French failed to take any initiative
during the interwar years, Deschamps declared, that “from then on we could
do nothing more than follow developments without being able to guide them 5.”
Galliéni had advocated the establishment of a supple administration, sensitive
to the ever-changing needs of the colonial societies.
The administrative procedure which is excellent today should be rejected a few months from now if events modify the situation. . . . There is nothing that needs to be more supple, more elastic, than the organization of a [colony]. To all political and economic evolution must correspond an administrative evolution 6.
The colonial administration in the interwar period, Deschamps wrote, betrayed Galliéni's thought by preserving unchanged the administrative system that he had established, while admitting no innovation 7.
In the aftermath of World War I there was some interest in establishing a reform
of the colonial system—an interest triggered by the wartime sacrifices of
the colonial populations to French victory. During the war 818,000 men were recruited
overseas for military service; 636,000 were sent to France, of whom 187,000 served
in the French labor force and 449,000 as combatants. The losses of the colonial
troops were heavy, amounting to almost 70,000 men. The material contribution of
the colonies was also impressive: 2.5 million tons of produce were shipped to the
mother country. The French clung to the image of the loyal colonial subjects, ignoring
a series of rebellions which had broken out in the colonies because of excessive
French efforts to force local production and to recruit men for the army. The noble “Senegalese,” as
all black troops were called, became part of popular legend. The wartime contribution
of the colonies apparently demonstrated the dependence of the French on their colonies;
the welfare and prosperity of Frenchmen, it seemed were intimately connected with
the welfare and prosperity of the colonial populations 8.
Albert Sarraut, who was minister of colonies for four years (1920-1924), became
the official spokesman for this doctrine. He was a Radical Socialist politician
who had served as governor-general of Indochina before World War I. In 1921, he
proposed that the French Parliament establish a program of economic aid to the
French possessions, amounting to 3.5 billion francs, to be invested over a ten-year
period 9. Sarraut argued that until World War I the French had to concentrate on
consolidating their empire and establishing a administration over it. Since the
period of territorial aggrandizement was now ended, Sarraut claimed, the time had
come for considering an overall plan for the mise en valeur, for the utilization
of the colonial resources through economic development 10.
In a world in which the French would presumably be facing stiff international economic
competition and in which there might again be a serious need to bolster up their
defense forces, Sarraut said, the French would become increasingly dependent upon
their colonies. It was essential therefore to have easy access to raw materials,
and to ensure that the indigenous populations of the empire were healthy and well
educated 11.” Conversely, he also stressed the moral debt that the French
owed the colonies as a result of their aid and loyalty during the war. His arguments
were generally utilitarian, however, stressing the advantages to France of the
program of economic aid to the colonies. This line of argument was probably not
merely a tactic to convince a reluctant Parliament; it also represented Sarraut's
personal convictions. Outside the Palais Bourbon, Sarraut, mapping colonial policy
in the more intimate surroundings of the offices of Rue Oudinot, again advocated
that “all our efforts must be employed so that the colonies render the maximum
... [in] the interest of the metropole 12.”
Whatever the motives of the Sarraut proposal, it did have the merit of attempting
planned economic development of the colonies. In spite of the accomplishments of
individual administrators in developing their districts, there was little overall
effect in changing the economic and social conditions of the overseas populations.
Georges Barthelemy, who had served as a colonial official in 1908-1909, went overseas
in 1922 in his role as deputy and parliamentary reporter on the colonial budget.
On his return to France he declared that in his twelve years' absence from the
colonies, “little has been accomplished over there 13.” Henri Cosnier,
another parliamentarian on an inspection trip, blamed the economic backwardness
of French West Africa on the lack of economic planning. Only railroads had been
built as part of a coherent economic plan 14.
The French Parliament, however, was unwilling to make a major sacrifice for the
colonies. Even Sarraut had hoped that the aid would be financed in part by the
massive German reparation payments, which most French politicians expected the
defeated enemy to pay. The significant reduction in the amount that the Germans
finally did pay, and the financial difficulties that the French encountered after
the war, put a serious strain on the budget. In 1922 Sarraut himself felt that
it was impossible to realize his plan of the previous year 15, and as for Parliament,
it never acted on his proposal.
The French did not give grants-in-aid as Sarraut had proposed, but in the early
1930s Parliament permitted the colonies to float loans. They borrowed over 5 billion
francs, but the interest on the loans used up an excessive proportion of their
budgets; in 1937, it was 29.7 percent of the year's budget of AOF, 40.6 percent
for AEF, and 17.1 percent for Madagascar 16.
The colonial treasuries continued to pay the major share of their budgets for administrative
costs. In the Congo in 1930, for example, 70 percent of the budget was spent on
such expenses 17. In addition, the colonies shared the expenses of certain services
they shared in common
with France—such as the French national defense costs. In 1927 the AOF treasury
contributed the not insignificant sum of 19.4 million francs to the French budget.
In a speech to the colonial council, Governor-General Carde noted that this was
indeed an important part of the French West African budget, but he added that the
charges were little in comparison with the charges weighing on the mother country. “Well
then, messieurs, our duty is plain; France calls, we respond 18.”
The lack of funds meant that the colonies could contribute only a very meagre portion
of their budgets to the improvement of the lives of the African population. In
1930 the Middle Congo, the wealthiest colony in French Equatorial Africa, spent
only 2 percent of the budget on public works; medical care and hygiene for the
areas outside the two urban regions of Pointe Noire and Brazzaville accounted for
only 1.5 percent of the budget. A medical post serving 80,000 people in the area
of Stanley Pool had a yearly budget of 200 francs 19. When André Gide traveled
in the Congo in 1927 he was told that “when the medical service is asked
for medicines it generally sends, after an immense delay, nothing but iodine, sulphate
of soda, and—boric acid!” He himself saw that “everywhere people
suffer from the lamentable penury by which diseases that might easily be checked
are allowed to hold their own and even to gain ground 20.”
Sarraut's doctrine of the necessity of concentrating on economic development was
adopted, although the necessary correlate, serious investment by France, was rejected.
This meant that most of the cost of economic development devolved upon the colonies
themselves. The first effect of this policy was to impose heavier tax burdens on
the colonial population than were levied before the war. In 1926 in the Sudan the
taxes increased 618 percent over those of a decade earlier; in 1926 alone the increase
was 65 percent over the previous year. In the Ivory Coast taxes were raised from
11 million francs in 1925 to 14.7 million francs in 1926 21.
The entire administrative machinery tended to concentrate its efforts on developing
local production. The administrators spent an ever increasing amount of their time
in spurring the production of crops; in Senegal it was peanuts, in the Ivory Coast
cocoa and coffee, and in AEF cotton and rubber. The growing concern with economic
development can be seen in the changed emphasis of the administrative reports being
sent from the administrators to the governors. Before 1914 their reports were largely
concerned with problems connected with establishing or maintaining French rule;
in the 1920s, however, the reports stressed developments in local crop production,
and informed the governors at the same time of local improvements such as the building
of roads or the erection of bridges. The stress on production became so strong
in the administration that governors were accustomed to saying in praise of a subordinate, “He
is a man of quantity 22.”
In spurring production a number of administrators forced their population beyond
its capacity. In the Ivory Coast, for example, an administrator in the 1930s imposed
on the people he ruled impossible quotas of production of cotton. To avoid punishment
for failure to comply with the administrator's orders, the Africans went across
the border to the Gold Coast where they bought the cotton at excessively high prices.
The administrator also dictated the prices at which the inhabitants were forced
to sell the cotton to French dealers; the prices were lower than those the people
themselves had paid for the same cotton in the British colony. The administrator
also exacted honey from the people in his cercle. Since there was none in the region,
the local young men had to make a three-week journey by foot to the Sudan to collect
it. There was so much suffering that, according to the report of a French inspector,
the people wished for the times of Samory, the African empire builder whose methods
of conquest in the 1890s had laid waste vast regions of West Africa 23.
And this example was not untypical. Marcel Olivier, who had served as governor-general,
wrote in 1931 that the administrators too often ordered the people in their districts
to grow certain quantities of produce without discovering whether such demands
were realistic. Olivier claimed that the administrators, trained in the general
skills of administration, were ignorant of the technical aspects of agriculture.
There were few technicians overseas to direct or even to advise on colonial agricultural
policy 24; the first expert on cotton production, for example, was sent to AOF
only in 1924 25. The development of agriculture, the very foundation of the colonial
economies, “lacked method, logic, and efficacy” because of lack of
expertise 26. This lack was one reason for the gap between the administrators'
economic expectations and the true potential of their regions, but the authoritarianism
of the system and the lack of participation of the population in decision-making
also contributed to the situation. The French, like the other colonial powers,
placed primary emphasis on coercion as a means of bringing about technological
change 27.
Some French officials, however, were openly opposed to the system; in the Ivory
Coast a commandant declared that the administration had no legal right to coerce
the population into crop production. He also refused to aid the white settlers
in the recruitment of local labor, because the local French plantation owners were
not paying their laborers enough. The colonial administration seemed at times closely
connected to the white plantation owners and traders, but in this particular instance
the administrator's independent stand does not seem to have hurt him; he received
a rapid promotion, reaching the top rank of the Corps within a short time 28.
In numerous writings administrators and former colonial officials attacked the
emphasis on production. Delavignette, for one, was a spokesman for the younger
men in the service when he emphasized that the policy of mise en valeur must be
aimed not at increasing export production, but rather at increasing the standard
of living of the local populations. “I worry when people speak of the land
without taking account of the men living on the land,” he wrote in the liberal
Catholic review Esprit 29.
Labouret, a member of the generation that had served overseas before World War I, also complained that there was far too much talk in the metropole about economic exploitation of the colonies, and too little concern for their human resources, the colonial populations 30. Many administrators identified profoundly with their cercles. Nearly all the administrators, Deschamps wrote, had “a passion for their profession and pride in the progress that their command achieved.” This attitude had its ridiculous side, Deschamps added, for many administrators
had the feeling that the country was their possession, their work, and this feeling gave to some of them an extraordinarily possessive language; we all used to say “my cercle,” “my roads” “my buildings.” Some even said “my natives,” “my river,” “my rain.” 31
Nevertheless, the possessiveness of the administrators meant that a very large
proportion of them were genuinely concerned for the welfare of “their people.” Many
administrators were deeply embittered by the governmental failure to provide sufficient
funds to enable them to help those they administered. A fairly large number of
the administrators complained of the metropolitan financial neglect of the colonies.
The British also emphasized economic development of the colonies, but the British
Parliament showed a greater willingness than did the French to make financial contributions
to its overseas empire; in addition to guaranteeing loans it voted in 1929 to establish
the Colonial Development Fund, which made available a modest but annual aid of
one million pounds.
World War I led to a quickened pace in the evolution of the colonized peoples.
For the French colonies the war had meant that half a million of their populations
had participated in a white man's war. The experience of seeing white men killed
and even defeated in battle probably destroyed any image there might have been
of the white man's invincibility. The French army practiced segregation of its
fighting forces, but many of the colonial troops, because of their wartime experience,
began to assimilate European mannerisms and even values. A report of the governor
of Dahomey in 1919 revealed changes undergone by some Africans who had participated
in the war, and the kinds of problems that the colonial authorities had to face
as a result. The governor reported that the commandant of one of the Dahomean cercles
remains preoccupied ... by the attitudes of former tirailleurs having returned to their homes, whose state of spirit is far from satisfactory. Several times he had to intervene to reestablish order ... upset by some troublemakers presuming to have the right to interfere in the life of the cercle, to pursue the witch doctors, and to free themselves from the authority of their native chiefs 32.
In fact, administrative reports for AOF from 1920 to 1930 are filled with complaints
about tirailleurs giving villagers examples of insubordination against the traditional
chief 33.
Contact with European values was undermining the allegiance of segments of the
colonial populations to traditionalism. The limited yet rising tempo in establishing
communications within the colonies and bringing them increasingly into a money
economy led to the partial disintegration of the old social fabric within the colonial
societies. Faced with the possibility of the disintegration of entire indigenous
societies, Van Vollenhoven had addressed himself to that problem even during the
war. Van Vollenhoven saw the populations of AOF as comprising “a mass of
natives” and an elite group. The masses, he wrote in 1917, needed to evolve
within their own environment. In order to assure them of security “in their
families, their villages and their traditions,” the indigenous society had
to be consolidated. “A collapse” of the traditional society had to
be prevented 34. Van Vollenhoven saw the elite as a small group of individuals
who stood apart from the masses because of their greater aptitudes and ambition:
This elite was ostracized from the native society because it no longer lived in the native manner and would not return to it. Proud of their effort, presumptuous and sometimes unbearable in their vanity, this category represents the young, the avant garde, the example.
While the masses were to develop within their own traditions, the elites, Van
Vollenhoven stated, “must evolve more and more in our environment 35.”
After the war many officials deplored the degree to which the chief-system had
been destroyed. In a written report to the minister of colonies in 1921, the governor-general
of AOF regretted the “inevitable errors which accompanied the beginnings
of European occupation.” The first generation of administrators had misunderstood
the nature of the indigenous societies. Experience, the governor-general stated,
had shown the value of respecting the traditional cohesion of these societies 36.
Henri Labouret warned that the destruction of tribal organizations was producing
a crisis of authority. He called for a more careful study of the evolution of the
colonies in order to stem the crisis 37.
Concern was also expressed in the highest official circles. The minister of colonies,
André Maginot, in a circular of 1929 to the governors-general, expressed
his misgivings about the disappearing authority of the indigenous chiefs. The administrators
alone, Maginot warned, would be unable to keep order; the chiefs were an important
element in making it possible for the administration to maintain its authority
over the masses 38.
Governor-General Jules Brévié of AOF, who had served as governor
of Niger and had experience in dealing with the great Hausa emirs of that colony,
stressed the need to preserve and strengthen the chiefs. In the past, Brévié indicated,
French officials had been too impatient with the chiefs. They had been unrealistic:
To want to transform from one day to the next the amenokal of Ouillimède into a perfect collaborator of our administration would be equivalent to trying instantaneously to change the Sire de Coucy into a Prefect of the Third Republic 39.
Brévié advised his subordinates to make a special effort to choose
as chiefs men who by tradition were entitled to their positions. He specifically
warned the commandants against the habit that had been relatively widespread before
World War I of appointing former NCOs or other close collaborators of the French
as chiefs. Brévié, like the British, wanted to modernize and strengthen
the chief-system. Men having a traditional right to succeed as chiefs should be
appointed, Brévié wrote, but they would be required to go through
at least a four-year French education. In 1931 Brévié predicted that
within a few years every chief would have an education equivalent to that of a
primary school graduate 40.
Brévié—like the British—wanted the advantage of traditional
chiefs without the bureaucratic inefficiency that accompanied reliance on generally
illiterate men. Ironically, Brévié's modernization of chiefs would
not, as he imagined, strengthen traditional society, but rather would undermine
it; after several years of French schooling, the chiefs no longer wholly belonged
to the traditional world.
In the interwar period the French generally found the British policy of indirect
rule attractive. Lord Lugard, the great organizer of Nigeria, had made the clearest
and most systematic presentation of the British doctrine of indirect rule, and
was now admired and read by French officials. “Lugardisme” became popular.
Before World War I, French administrators had thought that they would eventually
use educated Africans as intermediaries between themselves and the large mass of
the population. But the Africans who gained an education were by no means unconditionally
enthusiastic about French rule. A number of young Africans as early as the 1920s
smuggled, dispersed, and read publications from Paris that were critical of French
rule. The governor-general of AOF noted in 1927 that “subversive ideas propagated
by certain newspapers” could be found among “town dwellers, artisans,
government employees, [and] tirailleurs 41.”
The French faith in assimilation was somewhat blunted by the experience of seeing
men, dressed in European clothes and speaking French, denouncing the very country
that had brought them the supposed benefits of civilization. The group most affected
by French rule, contrary to expectations, could not, it seemed, be counted on as
reliable intermediaries. There was a turning away from the elites and instead a
concentration on the more simple rural population; the local elites were not used,
the chiefs being retained instead.
Accompanying this development was an increasing understanding and tolerance for
the traditional aspects of the colonial societies. Delavignette, writing of a French
official, observed:
Often he would go so far as to admit that his own civilization was not universal, that it was not the only one, that he was dealing with different civilizations which it was his job to understand and protect 42.
Robert Arnaud, a superb administrator and one of the finest writers of colonial fiction in the interwar period, described in his semi-autobiographical novel Les Meneurs d'hommes how an administrator attempted to bridge French values with those of local tradition in the colony. Faced with traditional law requiring the death sentence of an adulteress, he wrote:
I admit with the assessors of a native court that the adulteress must die. I thus proclaim the force of tradition. Then by subtle arguments ... I reduce the punishment to short imprisonment. I thus establish a suave compromise between the unchanged tradition of the ancestors and the doctrine of modern philosophy based on love 43.
Increasingly, responsibility and duties were transferred to the chiefs. Yet in
the final analysis, there still could be no doubt that all authority remained in
French hands. Brévié quoted Van Vollenhoven's phrase, “Only
the commandant de cercle commands; the native chief is only his instrument,” and
added, “This principle remains 44.” To allow the colonial populations
to rule themselves without external control would imply, Brévié stated,
the “existence of a well-policed society, a wen-organized social structure,
a native elite interested in public affairs. . . . Now, that is not the case in
Black Africa 45.”
If the aim of French policy had really been to strengthen the chiefs, then, as
a former French administrator asks, “Why were they not given the power to
levy taxes and to have their own budgets?” The real reason for the granting
of greater authority to the chiefs, Pierre Hugot suggests, was the desire “to
simplify the administration.” The administrators, unable to handle the severely
increased work load, turned to the chiefs, whom they transformed into something “like
a police chief 46.” French administrators intervened less zealously than
they had before 1914 when the chiefs were guilty of malfeasance. A chief whom an
administrator had described as a “sinister rogue ... [a] former trader living
from monstrous exactions, [who] carries on a real reign of terror in his canton,” was
retained because he was useful to the administration 47. As the governor of Guinea
remarked in 1956, “We have for several years out of administrative convenience
closed our eyes on the behavior of chiefs ... who were useful to us. Let us recognize
the hypocrisy of our lack of interest in the means used by the chiefs, as long
as they followed our orders 48.”
In spite of the strengthening of the chiefs that went on in the interwar years,
the French never surrendered the goal of eventual assimilation of the colonies.
Association practiced in the interwar years, with its respect for local institutions,
was mostly thought of as a tactic to achieve more conveniently and thoroughly the
same end-assimilation. Governor-General Olivier declared in 1931 that “a
good native policy is one which, without upsetting anything, permits the sane and
normal evolution of native societies toward a civilization that will be as close
to Western civilization as possible. 49” The reason Olivier favored the values
of Western civilization was that they had “best succeeded in conciliating
respect for individual liberties with the needs of society and progress 50.” Thus
the new emphasis on local institutions was motivated either by the need for administrative
efficacy or by the persistent desire to achieve eventual assimilation. It did not
connote any fundamental belief in the inherent virtues of traditional structures,
such as that displayed by the most enthusiastic British proponents of indirect
rule.
The French leaned so heavily on the chiefs that they transformed them into mere
tools of the administration. As the governor of Senegal observed in 1931:
The chiefs are auxiliaries of our authority.... Increasingly they have the tendency, under heavy pressure of daily obligations, to reserve all their activity for the execution of orders emanating from the local authority, [thus] abandoning gradually their role as born protectors in the traditional framework of the populations that under our administration, our tutelage, they command 51.
In two ways the chiefs ceased to be genuine spokesmen of their populations. First,
they remained too traditional for the parts of the population that had come into
contact with modernizing influences, such as, for example, the war veterans. Over
these men the chiefs could no longer pretend to rule. Second, because the administration
had reduced the chiefs to auxiliaries of the regular administration, the chiefs
also ceased to be full members of the traditional society. The chiefs were forced
to do the bidding of the local French commandant; they had ceased to be the “protectors,” as
the governor of Senegal put it, of their own societies.
French rule had emptied the traditional structures of their meaning, but it did
not replace them. The French had destroyed the old structures in the name of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, but once the societies were in the process of disintegration,
they hesitated to transform their ideals into reality. The colonial system was
in dire need of change, for it no longer corresponded to the needs of the African
societies. These had undergone profound change, but the colonial system was virtually
the same as it had been at its inception in the 1880s. Yet no basic reforms were
introduced in the interwar period.
The only reforms were palliatives, making colonial rule somewhat less harsh than
it had been before World War I. For example, although forced labor was to exist
in the French colonies until 1945, its use was increasingly controlled. In AOF
all labor service was limited in 1930 to a maximum of ten days per year, and a
decree provided that no labor could be proscripted during the harvest season. Also,
in the 1930s provisions for exemption from labor service were made for all those
paying the equivalent of the price of labor from which they were being exempted.
In 1937 the Popular Front governor-general of AOF, Marcel de Coppet, ordered his
governors to abolish forced labor in the developed regions of their colonies and
to institute instead an additional tax which would finance the public works. Four
colonies adopted this suggestion: Senegal, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and Dahomey.
Forced labor was thus abolished in twenty-five out of 109 cercles in AOF. In the
regions where it was kept, it was somewhat milder in form; in the Ivory Coast in
the nonexempt areas, the maximum age of those required to perform labor was reduced
from sixty to fifty years 52.
The indigénat, which had been a major hallmark of the colonial system, continued
in force, although in the interwar period its use was limited in application. The
first limitation on the exercise of repressive justice was established in 1917
in AOF when chefs de canton were exempted from the indigénat; further immunities
were granted in 1918 to veterans and their families. In 1924 a decree promulgated
for all the colonies suspended the indigénat for government employees, members
of local assemblies, assessors in indigenous courts, recipients of French medals,
owners of elementary school diplomas or their equivalents, and merchants with trade
patents.
Individuals could also be exempted “because of their participation either
in the commercial or agricultural development of the country or in general work
of public interest, or in service to the French cause 53.” In 1925 in AOF
the total number of acts punishable by the indigénat code was reduced from
forty-six to twenty-five; in Madagascar the categories of acts punishable were
reduced in 1937 from seventeen to five. Women were exempted from the indigénat
in AOF after 1934. The maximum fine was still 100 francs, but because of inflation
it no longer represented as severe a penalty as it had before the war.
The governors-general and the governors reminded the administrators to employ the
indigénat sparingly, and its use was gradually reduced in the 1930s. The
following table for the Sudan demonstrates the general decrease in the number of
disciplinary punishments 54.
The colonial system had become more humane, but it underwent no basic transformation.
Most administrators continued to believe in the necessity of the authoritarian
system with which the indigénat was associated. In 1934 the governor of
Senegal reported that all the administrators in his colony agreed with him in his
estimation:
The indigénat, in spite of the generally good spirit of the populations, remains an indispensable institution. We must for a long time to come maintain the disciplinary punishment that will allow us to punish in a quick and striking manner acts incompatible with the public order and acts that do not justify referral to a court 55.
The authoritarian system remained intact, basically unchanged. The commandants
were still the “real chiefs of the empire.” Men who served in the colonies
in the interwar period, even authoritarian ones, were to express later on a feeling
of surprise that they had been entrusted with so much power. And one of them was
to quote and concur with Lord Acton's dictum that all power tends to corrupt, and
absolute power corrupts absolutely 56.
The totality of powers that the administrators had arrogated to themselves meant
that any change in the colonial system could occur only through their activities.
The Corps in the interwar period, however, maintained a form of stability overseas
that easily led to stagnation, as Deschamps observed 57.
This stagnation was due in part to the influence of the older administrators, recruited
before World War I, who had reached the upper ranks of the Corps in the 1920s.
Accustomed to old routines, they were not aware of the changes that had occurred
in the colonies. Since promotion was to a large extent by seniority, many mediocre
administrators had reached the top echelons of the administration. A commission
of the ministry of colonies suggested in 1928 that one way of improving the top
ranks of the Corps would be to require officials to take examinations and to write
monographs before being appointed as chief administrators. Governor-General Carde
was opposed to these strictly literary prerequisites, suggesting that some administrators
who were brilliant essayists made poor administrators, and vice versa 58. Promotion
would have to be granted men possessing administrative rather than literary abilities.
The commission recommendations were dropped.
Eventually the older administrators who had clogged the top ranks of the Corps
were there no longer; by the end of the 1920s nearly a fifth were either pensioned
or retired; sixty were pensioned because of infirmities acquired in service and
156 were retired because of age. The Doumergue government's economy laws of 1934,
which required the premature retirement of the top ranks of the various French
bureaucratic organizations, led to the withdrawal of 120 additional administrators,
or 10 percent of the Corps 59.
As a result of the Doumergue decrees, a growing proportion of the older generation,
that is, men who had entered the service before World War I, left the Corps. This
process continued so rapidly that by 1939:
Thus on the eve
of World War II the French colonial administration consisted overwhelmingly of
young men. These young men were cadets of the Ecole Coloniale or agents who had
had a one-year training program at the school. That training, as has been shown
in Chapter V, emphasized the need for careful observation of the colonial societies
and the need for flexibility in administration. But in their methods of administration,
the colonial functionaries seem to have been relatively unaffected by the Ecole
Coloniale.
In the field, the young, newly arrived administrators were most influenced by senior
officials in the field, and turned instinctively for inspiration and guidance to
their elders. This was as it should be, for the older administrators were superb
masters in teaching their young colleagues the complexities of local administration.
The system of apprenticeship prepared the colonial officials well for the day-to-day
practical problems of ruling a cercle. It had its disadvantages, however, in that
it permitted the older generation of officials to pass on many of their attitudes
to the younger men. The writings of both Van Vollenhoven and Lyautey, which a number
of former administrators claimed as having inspired them in their administration,
again tended to reinforce traditional attitudes.
The authoritarian system in the colonies provided an ideal opportunity for effective
and conscientious administrators to form a new and better society. Delavignette
described the situation thus: “The colony becomes a sort of totalitarian
party and the colonials compulsory members, working overtime to draw towards themselves
the territory's whole native life 60.”
The system, Delavignette wrote, is “the only humane form of government in
Africa, Europe, or anywhere else, because it is the only one where those who govern
see those who are governed as living men.” The dangers inherent in the system,
he recognized, would emerge if the officials lost this contact with those they
administered 61. As the quality of the men going overseas improved, the system
became more bureaucratic. The administrators were men with higher education and
character; they were reliable officials. But these very qualities made them prone
to routinization: content with the establishment of an administration which seemed
a near-perfect form of benevolent paternalism, most administrators failed to bring
any real change to the system. One of the main reasons for the failure, as Delavignette
had warned, was precisely the fact that the administrators lost contact with the
populations under their rule. In a 1931 letter to the minister of colonies, the
governor-general of AOF wrote:
We have lost contact with the native. We are poorly informed of his sentiments, of his complaints, of his aspirations, of his eventual reactions; and we may one day have a cruel surprise 62.
The administrators serving in the bush before the war seem to have lived closer
to the local populations than had their successors. A large number of administrators
in the early period of colonization had arrived at their posts without their wives.
As a result, they generally traveled widely within their cercles. The local girls,
with whom the administrators often lived, tended to serve as useful guides to the
language and other mysteries of the local societies. But as living conditions improved,
administrators began to bring their European wives with them. This development
meant that the administrators were less inclined to leave their residences and
to go on tours of their cercles, a situation which led to a somewhat less effective
administration. Even before the war, Governor-General William Ponty observed that
the administrators who brought families with them lost approximately 50 percent
of their efficiency; the comfort of the hearth, he had said, was detrimental to
good colonial administration 63. In 1932, Brévié remarked that administrators
on tours often took their families with them, and were more preoccupied with assuring
the comfort of their wives and children than with observing the realities around
them 64.
The arrival of white women in the colonies after World War I put an end to the
relatively unrestrained social intermingling that had been prevalent in earlier
years. And the introduction of the automobile further tended to make it more difficult
for the administrators to keep in close contact with the local populations. A governor
of the Sudan correctly warned his subordinates that “the seat of a car can
become nothing more than a bureaucrat's chair (rond de cuir).” 65 The car
allowed the administrators to travel faster and farther in their cercles, but it
also meant that they could only go where there were roads; villages off the beaten
track became relatively less accessible.
But probably the main factor preventing the administrators from maintaining close
contact with their people was the chronic shortage of personnel. During the interwar
period the duties of the administrators had significantly increased. They were
required to spend an ever larger proportion of their time in interminable office
work, filling out reports and sending statistics to the colonial capitals. The
governor of Dahomey estimated in 1933 that since the time of the French occupation
in the 1890s the workload of the administrators had quadrupled. But although the
duties increased, the personnel did not, largely because the administrations, pinched
for funds, had to limit their main expenditure —personnel costs. Thus, there
were scarcely more administrators than there had been before the war. In 1912 AOF
had had 341 administrators; in 1937 there were 385. In AEF there were even fewer
administrators in the 1920s than there had been before the war; in 1913 there had
been 398 administrators; in 1928 there were only 366 (of whom only 250 were actually
in AEF exercising their functions).
After the war an increasing number of administrators was used for bureaucratic
tasks in the colonial capitals, and as a result there were fewer men available
for work in the bush than there had been before and a number of administrative
posts had to be closed. Many cercles, because of their size and importance, required
assistant administrators in addition to the commandants de cercles, but fifty-one
such cercles lacked assistants. The governor-general of AOF pointed out in 1931
that his administration would require 200 more administrators to perform adequately
68. Yet eight years later only thirty-three additional administrators had been
added to the administration of AOF. Because of the shortage in personnel, men known
to be unfit were entrusted with important posts; by the governor-general's admission,
nineteen out of 118 cercles in AOF in 1930 had been given to administrators who
were mainfestly incompetent, and of the 130 subdivisions twelve were in the hands
of unsatisfactory administrators 69.
Another factor that prevented colonial officials from establishing contact with
the people was their constant turnover. Governors remained in many cases less than
a year: between 1928 and 1933 Dahomey had six governors; between 1929 and 1933
the Ivory Coast had five and Guinea four. The impermanence also of the administrators
was well known. In one cercle in Chad, a former administrator noted that there
were thirty-three different administrators between 1910 and 1952. Only seven of
them remained for two years or longer, and some as briefly as four to six months
70. In an extreme case in Senegal in 1937, there were four different commandants
of one cercle within five months. The displacement of administrators was so frequent
that Cosnier declared that the instability of personnel was “the most obvious
characteristic of our colonial administration 71.”
Of course some administrators served many years in the same region; Félix
Eboué served for twenty-one years in Oubangui-Chari, René Isambert
for fourteen years in the same colony 72. But these were notable exceptions; in
Senegal, for example, the average period of service between 1887 and 1940 was about
six years 73. Some writers on French rule, such as Suret-Canale, claim that after
World War I administrators were rotated more often than before the war, but the
statistics reveal that the practice of short assignments and frequent rotation
existed from the outset. (See Appendix III.)
British administrators, on the other hand, often stayed in the same colony for
their entire career, since they were in the employ of a specific colony's service.
Even if they transferred from one colony to another, their stay was usually a long
one. But within districts there are examples in the British colonies of rapid turnover;
in one district in Southeast Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) twenty-six men served
between 1919 and 1962, and in another district there were twenty-eight men during
the same forty-three year period 74.
The French tended to rotate their governors, and even more their administrators,
for fear that they might become too independent of superior authority or too partial
to any one party in their administrative regions. (Because of the intense complexity
of administering nomads, the French administration usually made an exception to
this practice and permitted administrators in nomadic regions to remain in the
same area for several consecutive assignments.) The furlough system also made it
difficult for administrators to serve consecutively in the same cercle. After serving
two years in the colonies, they were sent to France for a six months' leave. In
the meantime their places were taken by other administrators and upon their return
they were assigned to other regions. One administrator bemoaned the bewildering
variety of regions to which the administrators successively had to adjust. He wrote:
When we got to know the forest, they sent us to make our apprenticeship in the jungle, and then to the borders of the desert. We pass successively from fetishist people to Islamic tribes, from disorganized tribes to hierarchical kingdoms 75.
After twenty-three administrators in five years had passed through the cercle of Tougah, the governor of Sudan remarked, “The cercle resembles a building to which everyone has contributed a brick, without having considered the shape of the building 76.” In the same vein, an administrator remarked shortly after World War II:
As a result of frequent changes there is a lamentable lack of continuity, a number of praiseworthy initiatives without a future, and as a result after twenty years the country has not progressed more than in two, the efforts of some having reversed those of others, or at least not having continued them 77.
A Cameroonese clerk who served the French administration during the interwar period and, after his country achieved independence, served as its ambassador to the United States, wrote a fascinating portrayal of the variety of successive administrators in the cercle in which he was employed:
The first [French administrator] was in 1916, a military officer.... [He was] impetuous, authoritarian, rowdy, and severe, but not spiteful. [He was] more of a passing horseman than a stationary administrator.... He did not remain a long time. He celebrated the event of November 1918, danced with the villagers on the public place, and left....
M. le Commandant B. [was] silent, timorous, afraid of everything, intimidated by everything, exaggerated everything. Of a wisp of hay, he would make a haystack....
Then there was Commandant C., a small old twisted man who rarely came to the office, or came rather when the clerk was gone, searched in the latter's writing pad and read the scraps of paper in the wastepaper basket....
The writer still remembers Commandant E., a very conscientious, humane, honest, just, understanding, and Christian man. When he returned to France, he wrote the clerk a friendly postcard....
The clerk also got to know M. le Commandant F. Alas, this one was mad.... The very day of his arrival he had asked the clerk what the “going rate” was for the local wenches. When the clerk answered him.... he pulled out his wallet and exclaimed, “I only have enough for six sessions.” His whole stay was marked by this weakness. He had a deficit in his treasury.... He also left and was subject to public ridicule....
The clerk had known M. le Commandant H., a hard worker and a married man. His wife had small get-togethers with the wives of the functionaries in the region. Both learned the local language. The population was very happy, they had a child during their stay to whom they gave a name from the country. They were well liked in the region … 78
From this sketch it should be apparent that no clear and persistent policy could
be carried out, for given the authoritarian framework during the interwar period,
the style of administration in each cercle changed each time the region had a new
administrator. The administrators would have had to be retained for longer periods
of time within each cercle to allow the development of any really constructive
policies.
A number of sporadic efforts were made to keep the administrators for longer periods
within the same cercle. Sarraut in 1921 and one of his many successors in 1932
proposed the adoption of measures that would have remedied the situation. Both,
however, failed in their efforts. In 1938 Mandel finally issued a decree requiring
administrators to remain for five consecutive years in the same region 79. But
this decree was hardly put into effect when it was abrogated by the Vichy regime.
The frequent change in assignments generally meant that there was little incentive
for the administrators to learn the local languages and very few bothered to learn
them; no sooner might they have mastered the language than they were assigned to
another region where they had no use for it. There was really no language that
could serve as a lingua franca in either AOF or AEF. In the Ivory Coast alone,
for example, there were over eighty different languages.
From 1887 until 1939 only a little over 12 percent of the administrators spoke
an African language, which meant, of course, that relatively few were able to converse
with the people living in their regions. In 1933, fewer than one out of every ten
administrators spoke the local language 80. Further, since the officials were so
frequently moved about, their language abilities were of minimal use. Administrators
knowing Wolof, which is spoken in Senegal, could find no use for this language
in Niger or Guinea, nor for that matter could they use it in the southern part
of Senegal itself
In general, the colonial administration did little to encourage the study of the
local languages. Galliéni founded a school of interpreters and encouraged
his subordinates to learn the local languages in Madagascar, yet he thought of
this as an interim solution. He impatiently awaited the time when the Malgache
population would have learned French, thus easing the administrative burdens of
the French officials 81. A colonial official in 1934 expressed the concern of many
of his contemporaries when he wrote that it was admirable for some administrators
to learn the local languages in the colonies, but
under the guise of advancing the natives within their traditions will we go through
their school? ... are we going to renounce the essential — and fundamental
principle of the access of the natives to the French language 82?
The administrators were largely dependent on their interpreters. Traveling through AOF in the early 1930s, a young Englishman, Geoffrey Gorer, observed of the administrators that he had “never met one who was independent of an interpreter 83.” This situation often led to abuse. The complaint voiced by a Dahomean in 1909 certainly does not describe a unique situation; he declared that the interpreter in his cercle has established a court in which he regulates all matters before submitting them to the administrator; this is not done for nothing, chicken, sheep, money . . . have to be paid.... [He] has said that the white man will believe anything he says 84.
As Delavignette showed in his Les Paysans noirs, the indigenous interpreters
continued, in the interwar period, to be a barrier between the administrators and
the local populations; often through bribes they misled and misinformed inexperienced
young administrators. The undesirability of having interpreters was recognized
by the colonial administration, but they were generally considered a necessary
evil. As Governor-General Brévié wrote in 1935, “It would be
desirable to suppress all the native interpreters, but it is impossible 85.”
The administrators, as Delavignette noted in a critical article in 1931, had lost
contact with the indigenous populations and had failed to carry on research about
the societies in which they were working. Delavignette remarked that missionaries
and occasional travelers were contributing far more to an understanding of the
local societies while “the administrators live on the fruits of old works
86.”
In general, the colonial administration did little to encourage the administrators
to study the societies in which they were serving. An official who served in the
interwar period was carrying on ethnological research when his superior called
him in and told him:
I have observed that you are not very serious; you carry on completely superfluous ethnographic studies, and during your tours in the bush you take many photographs.
Only in secret was he able to continue his research. This obstructive attitude
toward ethnological research, Delavignette suggested, was quite common 88. Ethnological
reports were “considered taboo and buried away among the administrative files
89.”
In 1938 Mandel issued a decree that encouraged the learning of African languages
in the colonies; all administrators having a knowledge of the language spoken in
their region were to be paid an additional annual allowance of 5,000 francs. This
provision meant for the intermediate ranks of the administration approximately
a 10 percent raise in their salaries. Again, however, this provision was introduced
too late to have any effect in the interwar period 90.
In the end the administrators themselves—rather than the administrative system—must
be blamed for the general lack of research on the colonial societies, for they
had remarkably little interest in the indigenous societies. Gorer, during his tour
of West Africa in the 1930s, found that I was practically never able to get any
information about the habits or customs of the Negroes they were ruling; they were
almost all convinced that there was nothing of interest to be found 91.
A former British administrator who had frequent contacts with his French counterparts wrote in 1947:
French administration has slight interest in and gives little time to native customs and ideas and languages. The ignorance of French officials is in fact astounding 92.
It is something of a mystery how a Corps that after 1930 consisted of such a large proportion of graduates from the Ecole Coloniale (many of whom had also studied at the Institut des langues orientales) could be so little concerned with the study of the customs and languages of the colonial societies. Of course, the administrators were heavily burdened with administrative tasks which left them very little time for research. But Governor-General de Coppet was undoubtedly right when he accused the administrators, especially the younger ones, of having fallen into “a certain inertia” which prevented them from studying the colonial societies 93. Because the administrators had become seriously estranged from the local surroundings, they were unable to appreciate fully the evolution going on around them and therefore had few, if any, proposals for a change in the colonial system. As Delavignette observed in his article of 1931, as a result of the failure of the administrators to keep in close touch with the developments of the colonial societies,
It follows that the natives are evolving faster than the administrators or the administration. It follows that the natives are very far beyond the goals we have assigned for them from the official observatories in which the administrators are confined 94.
The establishment of representative institutions would, to a great degree, have helped keep the French abreast of the developments of the colonial societies. Furthermore, such institutions, by giving the African populations a greater role in the process of governing their own societies, would have taken into account the new demands that were being raised by the local elites within the colonies. One of the striking aspects of the French empire, as Cosnier noted, was that “the governed people are not represented by anybody 95.”
Toward the end of World War I Governor-General Angoulvant noted that new political
institutions would have to be adopted in view of the effect that the war was having
on the colonial populations. “The indigenous populations must inevitably
develop toward a more advanced political and social situation.... The war unquestionably
accelerated the speed [of change] and has set aside all our previous plans....
There is no doubt but that one could have wished a less speedy evolution 96.”
In 1920 Sarraut proposed the establishment of representative assemblies in the
colonies. Their existence would have constituted a French recognition of the extent
to which the colonies had evolved and would also have helped lead the social and
political evolution overseas. The representative bodies should first have a restricted
electorate, Sarraut argued, and it should be gradually enlarged to become finally
fully representative of the colonial populations 97. The prerogatives of these
assemblies were left somewhat vague, but Sarraut evidently envisaged that they
would play an important role in voting the local budgets and in controlling the
administration of each colony. In spite of the modesty of his proposal, Sarraut
found it necessary to deny in advance, before any objections might be raised against
it, that his plan, which would give the colonial populations experience in local
rule, would lead to a demand for independence 98. Rather than weaken the bonds
of empire, this system would strengthen them, Sarraut claimed. Besides, he assured
his readers, the colonial populations did not desire independence; too many of
them were presumably aware of their own incapacity to rule themselves and recognized
the blessings of French rule 99.
Inspired by Sarraut's proposals a group of parliamentarians presented a project
in 1922 which would have created assemblies in AOF, AEF, Madagascar, and Indochina
that would have permitted them to possess real financial powers, and deliberative
powers in administrative matters. At most a third of the assembly members were
to be indigenous; the remainder would be colonial officials, and the governors-general
would have veto powers over the councils 100.
This rather limited project for self-government was not accepted by the Parliament
nor by colonial officials. Even Delafosse, who had advocated that greater responsibilities
be given the Africans, found this plan too bold; he opposed the election of the
African council members, instead advising that they be appointed 101. A decade
later Marcel Olivier, a member of the colonial service who had been governor-general
of Madagascar, showed the same reluctance to allow the colonial people active participation
in public affairs. “There is not a single Frenchman concerned with the interests
of the Fatherland and its empire,” he wrote, “who could favor such
a proposal 102.”
In 1919-1920, strictly advisory councils were created at various administrative
levels of AOF and Madagascar. (AEF, considered more backward, was given such institutions
only in 1938.) During the interwar era, they remained advisory bodies and were
not permitted to develop into genuine legislative bodies. At the government-general
level an AOF council—an advisory body consisting of the top functionaries
within the federation—was instituted. When the council met in plenary session,
one appointed African chief from each colony was allowed to participate in the
deliberations. When the council was in working session, only one chief, appointed
by the governor-general, was permitted to participate. At the level of the governors'
councils in each colony, two chiefs, appointed by the administration, participated
in the deliberations. At the cercle level local notables formed a council, the
object of which was to advise the commandant on taxes, labor dues, and public works.
The powers of these councils remained strictly advisory. It is doubtful that the
councils of notables were genuinely expressive of popular feelings, for the members
were easily cowed by the administrators.
In a number of urban areas comnuines mixtes were established in which city councils
were set up, the members of which were elected by a limited suffrage; the office
of city mayor was occupied by the French administrator.
The failure to found further representative political bodies, especially one that
might have had some effective control over the administration, can be attributed
to the tendency of the administration to favor the preservation of a system that
would continue to be untroubled and unhindered. Concerned mainly with administrative
efficiency, the administrators could only regard with hostility the establishment
of bodies that might question their acts. As an administrator who served in the
interwar period noted:
It would really be unnatural for functionaries holding in their hands the totality of power to work for the establishment of local representative institutions which would have the effect of troubling the good harmony and the satisfactory serenity of their services 103.
Most officials were basically wedded to a policy that would preserve the status
quo. If any kind of criticism of the French was voiced in the advisory councils,
then the entire council system became suspect. In 1931, Governor-General Carde
noted that in the colonial councils the chiefs were appearing to be the representatives
of the colonial peoples, for they were defending their interests by arguing for
a tax cut. This situation, Carde wrote, showed that “one cannot be too prudent
in the granting of political liberties to the natives.” 104
When the more liberal Brévié, Carde's successor, suggested in 1934
a slight increase in the prerogatives of the colonial councils, he had to defend
himself against a vehement charge by the ministry of colonies that he was advocating
autonomy for the colonies and the liquidation of the French empire 105.
The resistance to representative institutions was not, however, peculiar to the
French. The British had established a system in India in which considerable power
was entrusted to representatives of the local populations, but British governors
by no means looked always with favor at the establishment of representative institutions.
Governor Cameron of Tanganyika in 1925 specifically cited India as a warning example
of setting up “European” institutions in the colonies 106.
To the administrators, popular participation in decision-making would have interfered
with the efficiency of the administrative process. It would also have given a disproportionate
voice to the small educated elite that was emerging. As events were to show after
World War II, the introduction of parliamentarism did mean a nearly complete capture
of political power by the elite group.
French colonization, by encouraging economic development, had created centers containing
sizable urban populations. The spread of education also contributed to the emergence
of a restricted but educated elite. The administrators, used to serving in the
bush, were ill equipped to handle these new developments. In the bush benevolent
paternalism was still applicable, but in the urban centers this method of rule
was becoming quickly outdated. Many administrators felt that the elites developing
in the cities were unrepresentative of the colonial societies in general; therefore
only a few officials recognized the need to give an outlet to the African elite
in political and administrative responsibilities within their own societies. Brévié,
in a circular to his subordinates in 1932, could only suggest that the administrators
in their dealings with the new elite be just, kind, and patient 107.
A few officials, like the liberal Governor de Coppet of Dahomey, sensed the occurrence
of these political changes. When the governor-general of AOF suggested some minor
reforms in 1934, de Coppet observed that they would not be sufficient to satisfy “the
aspirations of Dahomean public opinion.” The Dahomean, de Coppet wrote, “aspires
for neither more nor less than the status of a citizen and to enjoy the civic
rights given the natives of Senegal in the four communes.” 108
Jules Reste, the governor-general of AOF, quoted de Coppet in a report to the ministry
of colonies, and added:
The same tendencies are beginning to appear among the intellectuals in Sudan, Guinea, the Ivory Coast. They refuse to accept , that even the lowest-born of their fellow Africans of the communes de pleins exercices of Senegal, solely because of their place of birth, with no regard to their personal merit, can enjoy privileges from which they are excluded 109.
These comments were unusually perceptive, but in general the colonial administration repressed all demonstrations of protest and remained unaware of a developing nationalist sentiment in a number of colonies.
When a serious nationalist uprising, the famous Yen Bay revolt, broke out in Indochina in 1930, the ministry of colonies blamed the uprising on the lack of communication between the adn-dnistrators and the colonial populations. Rather than recognizing that the entire colonial system needed to be changed in order to give an outlet to the newly developed elites and to take into account, at least to some extent, the developing forces of nationalism, the minister of colonies recommended that the administrators both in Indochina and in Africa keep in more intimate contact with their populations, that they multiply their tours of the countryside, and that they take a more personal interest in those they administered 110.
In AOF Boisson was aware of the development overseas of an elite that was not necessarily sympathetic to the French. If contacts with the elites were not strengthened, Boisson feared that they would fall under anti-French influence. Boisson therefore expressed in a circular the wish for the development of a number of athletic and cultural associations, guided by us, receiving their means from us, dependent on us for their prosperity and expressing themselves in festivities attended by the European population 111.
Implicit in his statement was the notion that the elite could be guided by the
French, and that it would accept such tutelage. While perceptive in recognizing
the development of an elite hostile to the French administration, Boisson nevertheless
still shared the belief of most officials that the disaffection could be remedied
by increased social contacts between the administrators and the people in their
districts.
Some officials vaguely sensed a crisis, but few envisioned the emergence of a fully
developed nationalism, or the breakup of the empire into nation-states. Camille
Guy, a long-time member of the colonial service, who had been governor of Senegal
at the turn of the century, declared that independence was impossible since the
colonies were inhabited by backward people. The Africans, he declared, also recognized
their own inferiority. “It will take several generations before they catch
up with our civilization and are able to rule themselves.” 112
Hand in hand with administrative stagnation overseas went an immobility in colonial
doctrine in France. The paucity of new ideas and approaches in the interwar years
is reflected in school textbooks in this period. There was no change in the concepts
about the empire in the period from 1919 to 1939. In fact the school manuals insisted
even more on the twin themes that had already evolved before World War I: the French
need for empire and the blessings that French rule brought to the overseas populations
113.
One of the most persistent intellectual legacies of the pre-1914 era inherited by overseas officials in the 1920s and 1930s, was the notion that the only solution to the colonial problem lay in the application of either the doctrine of association or that of assimilation. Each doctrine was considered an indissoluble entity. The advocates of association who spoke of the uniqueness of colonial societies and their need to have different institutions from those in France found it difficult to argue at the same time that these institutions should be more democratic and less authoritarian. But when they did so, they were accused of favoring the autonomy of the colonies, which would lead to independence. Generally, French colonial theorists considered the maintenance of the empire as incompatible with the granting to the colonial populations of human and political rights similar to those enjoyed by French citizens. This point of view was reflected in the warning issued by the Superior Council of Colonies, an advisory board of colonial experts which met at infrequent intervals to advise the minister of colonies. In 1925, the council warned:
One must above all avoid the error the British made in India of recognizing the same rights for the natives as for the conquerors; to do so is clearly to prepare the eviction of the colonizing element 114.
Those arguing for a revision of the authoritarian colonial system found only
in the doctrine of assimilation a system which gave democratic rights to the colonial
populations while ensuring the maintenance of tight bonds forever connecting the
overseas possessions to the mother country. Few colonial officials were willing
to see assimilation carried out immediately, although many claimed that they favored
the eventual assimilation of the colonial populations at some unspecified time.
Hubert Deschamps, a young administrator, a Socialist who served as Uon Blum's chef
de cabinet, was one of the few calling for immediate assimilation. In an article
in 1930 he had fought against “Lugardisme,” arguing that its effect
would be only to perpetuate the rule of the most backward elements of the overseas
societies, the traditional chiefs, thereby preventing assimilation.
The ancient societies were disintegrating and the only solution was to Westernize
the elites and to assimilate the colonies to France. In 1938, Deschamps ended his
thesis on Madagascar with the plea, “Let us be good educators and let us
prepare good Europeans.” 115
To Labouret and Delavignette the solution lay beyond the two categories of assimilation
and association. Nearly alone these two men were able to break loose from those
traditional doctrines. They fused some of the better elements from both doctrines.
Labouret, while wishing to see the authoritarian colonial structure ended, opposed
assimilation. Assimilation, he predicted, would mean that France would share a
common parliament with her colonies; thus as a result of the demographic advantage
of the colonies, “the newly civilized” would take political control
over the mother country itself. Since such an eventuality was unacceptable to the
metropole, the solution, Labouret wrote, was gradually to give the colonial populations
full political and legal rights within their own countries. The colonies themselves
would be connected to the mother country in the form of a federation 116. In a
general way, Labouret indicated the direction that France was to take after 1945.
Delavignette in all his writings argued the necessity of freeing the colonial system
from all formulas, since formulas were divorced from reality. In essence, there
was to be no doctrine, only a system corresponding to the needs of the colonial
populations. In the interwar period, Delavignette saw those needs as consisting
of some form of internal autonomy, at the same time maintaining close ties with
France. After World War II, Delavignette became one of the most impassioned advocates
of a Franco-African community based on equality between France and its overseas
possessions.
Labouret and Delavignette were speaking only for themselves; although they were
influential publicists, they were not at the levers of power. What the colonies
really needed was an overall plan emanating from the central administration in
Paris. Yet the very organization of the ministry at Rue Oudinot prevented such
a development. It was seriously understaffed; in 1896 it had 133 employees, but
forty years later, in spite of the ministry's increased responsibilities, it had
only 129.
Because of parliamentary instability, no n-dnister headed Rue Oudinot long enough
to impose his views on the colonial administration. Formulation of policy remained
in the hands of the top officials, the directors-general. These men had risen through
the ranks within the ministry; by the time they arrived at the top of the hierarchy,
Deschamps observed, they “were formed by tradition and they worked to preserve
it. We arrive thus at a kind of fossilization and a nearly total lack of vision
for the future.” In addition, Deschamps suggested, the legal education of
these officials prevented them from conceiving of the need for dynamic change;
they lacke d what Deschamps calle d a “ historical sense.” 117
The ministry itself was not in close touch with developments overseas. There was
very little interchange of personnel between the offices of Rue Oudinot and the
administrations in the colonies. The work in the central adn-dnistration was considered
dull, and few able administrators chose to serve in its offices 118. Usually only
older and ailing administrators who could not return to the colonies served in
the central administration. There were so many of them that one official facetiously
suggested that the ministry, a stone's throw from the Invalides, the home for the
aged and wounded war veterans, was itself the “Invalides” of the French
colonial service 119.
A conference of governors-general meeting in Paris in 1936 proposed a regular interchange
of officials between the colonies and the central administration. Rather than assigning
the older and more inefficient members of the Corps to the ministry, the conference
advocated that the brightest of the younger men serving overseas be brought to
Rue Oudinot for short periods of time. These men would bring to the central administration
current practical knowledge acquired from recent active service overseas. From
their experience at Rue Oudinot, it was also hoped, the young men would acquire
a broad understanding of the French colonial system and would thus become capable
of assuming in their later years positions of high responsibility within the service
overseas 120.
Minister of Colonies Marius Moutet issued a decree in 1937 by which administrators
were limited to a three-year period in the central adrninistration. In the past,
some members of the Corps, once they had arrived at Rue Oudinot, remained there
for prolonged periods. When Mandel became minister in 1938, he declared that “because
of an unfortunate tolerance [by the ministry], which has slowly transformed itself
into a real tradition, certain functionaries have practically ceased residing in
the colonies.” 121. This habit, Mandel declared, meant that officials serving
in the ministry lost contact with the realities of the colonial societies. Strengthening
the Moutet decree, Mandel announced that administrators failing to return to the
colonies after serving a maximum of three years in the central administration would
automatically be considered to have resigned. If the Moutet and Mandel decrees
had been adopted earlier, they might have had an impact on the formulation of policy
in the central administration during the interwar period, but they were hardly
in effect before the war broke out.
Thus, during the interwar period, no satisfactory system was established which
brought the offices of Rue Oudinot in close touch with developments overseas. As
Delavignette suggested, “a time lag” developed “between the highest
level of the colonial administration and the fragmentary but valuable experience
of the men on the spot.” 122
The first real initiative for a reorganization of the colonial system occurred
during the Popular Front government, when Marius Moutet became the first Socialist
to head Rue Oudinot. As a deputy Moutet had been a vigorous critic of the French
colonial system, particularly of its repressive aspects. Moutet replaced the governors-general:
in AOF, de Coppet, a Socialist and a liberal governor of Dahomey, was promoted
to governor-general of the entire federation; in AEF and Madagascar equally liberal
officials were appointed. Men like de Coppet gave the administration a different
style; he was the first governor-general ever to invite African students to an
official luncheon at his palace. In spite of such signs of change, however, the
men below the level of governor-general in the administration nevertheless remained.
And they retained the paternalist-authoritarian spirit.
Moutet attempted to establish a comprehensive Popular Front plan for colonial reforms,
and in 1936 called a conference of the governors-general. A similar conference
had convened in 1935 to deal with imperial economic problems, but its results had
been disappointing. Except for announcing a hope for some plan “to coordinate
and develop the economies of all the colonies making up the empire,” the
conference had achieved nothing 123.
Moutet's conference was intended to help the minister of colonies draw up an all-inclusive
program of reform. But once it met, the governors-general limited their discussions
strictly to economic and administrative matters.
In the economic field the conference proposed the establishment of a capital investment
program in the colonies amounting to between 200 and 300 million francs annually.
A massive program of public works was also suggested. The conference went on record
as favoring the use of paid, rather than forced, labor for the program of modernization.
The governors-general attempted to improve the financial position of the colonies
by asking that all the costs of maintaining French sovereignty overseas, such as
the salaries of overseas officials and military officers, be paid by the mother
country. For the colonial populations, the conference favored a reduction in taxes.
The conference also made specific recommendations regarding the use of French overseas
personnel. The govemorsgeneral recommended' that the agents of civil affairs cease
being used as aides to the administrators and be retrained for technical positions
in agriculture and public works. As a result, the technical services would be significantly
increased in size (AOF and AEF each had approximately 400 agents) and would be
able to launch a massive program of economic development. The conference suggested
that the positions vacated by the agents be filled by qualified members of the
local elite. By using Africans as agents, the administration intended to make sizable
financial savings, for Africans serving as agents would be paid only about half
the amount French officials received 124. Another advantage of using Africans as
agents, the conference perceived, would be to make available more outlets for the
local elites.
The conference recommended that only cadets of the Ecole Coloniale be appointed
as administrators. This measure was intended to ensure that only highly trained
men be appointed to the Corps, but by making the Corps inaccessible to the agents,
the conference in fact was further limiting the possibility that Africans enter
the Corps 125.
The governors-general had concentrated on the need for administrative efficiency
and on economic matters. But they had made no effort to draw up a political program.
This failure mirrored the general attitude of the colonial service that gave priority
to economic and social change over political reform. Olivier, former governor-general
of Madagascar, demonstrated that attitude when he declared that the colonial populations
could be given political rights only when they had bridged the cultural gap between
the metropole and themselves. For this reason, he declared, he was more interested
in “politique sociale” than in “politique tout court” (social
policy rather than simply politics) 126. The latter he relegated to a very distant
future, since he thought it would “take several generations of patient effort
to transform a primitive people into a civilized one.” 127
The Popular Front government in 1937 presented a proposal for the establishment
of a Colonial Fund for Economic Development to Parliament; it was defeated. Since
all the other proposals were dependent upon increased expenditures for the colonies,
virtually all the recommendations, became unrealizable.
Parliament blocked the possibility of reform in the colonies, but in an exercise
of good will, it recommended in January 1937 the appointment of a commission to
study colonial problems. The commission was charged with reporting back to Parliament
on the needs and aspirations of the colonial peoples. The task, as Moutet outlined
to the commission, was “to consider the application to the overseas countries
of the great principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” 128.
After this call for reform, Moutet added, in words which clearly demonstrated his
caution and his unwillingness to introduce fundamental transformations into the
colonial system, that he trusted the commission would “be solely concerned
with the general interest [of all parties in the colonies] and take care not to
create certain exaggerated hopes which might lead to painful disillusionment.” 129
A subcommittee of twelve was appointed to deal with Black Africa, five of whom
were members of Parliament and three former colonial administrators known for their
interest in reform (Delavignette, Deschamps, and Labouret); there were four other
public figures, of whom the best known were the famous ethnologist Lévy-Bruhl
and the writer André Gide. The administrators were assigned to study technical
questions such as econon-dc development, while Gide and Lévy-Bruhl, who
had little preparation for that kind of task, were asked to draw up a report on
the “aspirations” of the colonial peoples.
The commission was wholly ineffective. It held its first meeting six months after
Parliament called for its establishment. The subcommittee, rather than going on
its own fact-finding mission to Africa, drew up a questionnaire regarding the living
conditions of the colonial populations, and sent it to all administrators. This
took another six months. In the end, the commission never carried out its assignment.
Lévy-Bruhl was one of the few members of the commission to make a final
report-and his report was an investigation of the causes for continued cannibalism
in certain remote areas of the French possessions. Thinking back on the work of
the commission, thirty years later, Delavignette claimed that the commission never
made any specific recommendations. After the Blum government fell in July 1937,
the commission lost any real interest in proposing colonial reforms, for such reforms
had little chance of being adopted 130. In 1938 the Senate Finance Committee refused
to make the small appropriation necessary to allow the commission to continue its
work, and thus it was disbanded.
That the Popular Front government had achieved only limited results in the colonial
field was admitted even by Deschamps, one of its most active supporters 131. Thereafter,
in the face of mounting internal crisis and external threats from across the French
frontiers, successive French governments found it impossible to give any serious
thought to implementing colonial reforms.
World War II transformed the colonies to an even greater degree than had the
war of 1914. The colonial administration was poorly prepared to deal with the vast
transformation that the colonies were undergoing. A report written by an inspector
of colonies after his tour of AOF in 1940-1941 sheds some light on the extent to
which the colonial officials had lost contact with the local populations and with
the changes occurring. The administrators hardly ever used the archives of the
cercle, and as a result they ign6red the activities'of their predecessors. Because
of such practices there was no progress, and often even retrogression, in the administration
of a cercle, for the administrators often unknowingly canceled out the efforts
of their predecessors. For many administrators, the inspector observed, “statistics,
inquiries, monographs, classified archives seem ... to be superfluous and useless.” The
inspector found that in some areas a census had not been taken for several years,
although it was required annually. And the number of tours made by the administrators
had declined. The inspector did not consider these failings a reflection on the
personal value and character of the administrators; he blamed them rather on the
constantly increased tasks of the administrators. But the colonial officials themselves,
the inspector observed, had undergone a certain “sclerosis.” They were
not always able to keep up with the rapid evolution of the colonial societies,
and had therefore lost contact with the colonial realities 132.
The virtual immobility of the French administration disillusioned a number of educated
young Africans. In the late nineteenth century most of the French-educated Africans
had identified colonial rule as a harbinger of progress. That attitude essentially
remained in the interwar period, but a small minority became impatient with the
slowness of change. In the end the colonial powers did not transform the African
continent as dramatically as they had announced they would. Lack of funds, fear
of social and economic disruption, and the essentially conservative outlook of
the colonial administrators led to stagnation. The Race nègre, the organ
of a small impatient group of African intellectuals in Paris, argued, “it
is not that Negroes cannot modernize themselves within our own organizations, but
Europeans stand in the way.” 133
The caution of the administration led it in the interwar years to bolster the power
of the chiefs, at the cost of the rising elites. In Dahomey a newspaper denounced
French rule and the chiefs in Porto Novo, arguing
that “the reactionary politics of placing these imbeciles over educated men
is offensive to the native and the *native elites.” 134 Another Dahomean
newspaper, impatient with the slow and hesitant realization of the French commitment
to the spread of universal education, described the French presence as an impediment: “The
French came to civilize us, but they
prevent us from learning to read, to write, and to speak.... The government itself
betrays its principles of civilization.” 135.
The young wanted immediate assimilation; failing that, an end to French rule. The
Dahomean Kojo Tovalou-Houenou wrote that the choice was “L'assimilation intégrale
ou le home rule.” 136. At this point the local elites, with less ambiguity
than that evinced by the colonial administrators, embraced a program of modernization.
Ironically, the French administrators at the same time were cast in the role of
preservers of the traditional society, the very society they had originally set
out to destroy, or at least transform.
Too many administrators in the interwar years had become increasingly bureaucratized
and attached to routine, and they shunned innovation. Governor-General Boisson
complained in 1941 that the administrators had become engulfed in an “ever
increasing formalism” and at the same time their sense of personal responsibility
had diminished 137.
The shortcomings of the French colonial system were part of the larger failure
of the European powers to keep in step with the evolution of their empires. For
the British, there were peculiar doctrinal and administrative problems that prevented
them also from keeping up with changes among their overseas subjects. Prosser Gifford
has convincingly argued that the enshrinement of the policy of indirect rule was
largely responsible for focusing British attention on the traditional aspects of
African society, and blinding them in to the rise of the urban, educated elites
138. There was also a breakdown in administrative vitality, at least in some areas.
Writing of Tanganyika, Lord Hailey noted that “the progress of the Territory
as far as native affairs are concerned seems to have come to a standstill. Improvements
continue to be made in the machinery, but as a whole, the machine does not seem
to move forward.” 139
One wonders whether this loss of contact with the nature of the changing societies
might have been avoided if the colonial services of the imperial powers had functioned
differently, or held another ideology. By the very nature of the colonial situation,
the men who made the important decisions were born and formed in a culture different
from that of the colonies, and this made contact very difficult indeed. The very
reasons impelling men to join a colonial service prevented them from seeing the
evolution around them. It was the exoticism of the colonies and the apparent helplessness
of the colonial populations that first attracted the men overseas. The more the
local populations resembled Frenchmen at home the less interesting they became;
and indeed the very existence of the elite seemed to betray the young administratoes
original image of the African. The search for the lost world of his ancestors,
J. C. Froelich wrote, gave him his original interest in ethnology and the colonial
vocation 140.
It has been argued that the Western interest in exoticism stems from the attempt
to seek and recreate the perfect society, which our ancestors are presumed to have
enjoyed in primeval times 141. In nearly all cases, the interest in the exotic
was linked with an unhappiness with the metropole; the colonial vocation seemed
to offer an opportunity to leave the cramped atmosphere of the homeland. Paradoxically,
once abroad, the administrators were committed to spreading the very culture that
they had-at least partially-rejected. Nevertheless, many administrators could only
view with alarm the spread of institutions similar to those existing in France.
And thus, in spite of the French devotion to eventual assimilation, there was an
ambiguity toward modernization. Few were the men who with Delavignette could sing
the praises of the traditional African peasant and at the same time welcome the
emergence of the new elite represented by Léopold Senghor, the first African
agrégé 142.
Administrators encouraging modernization tended to follow a Saint-Simonian tradition;
although sympathetic to social and economic change, they were highly authoritarian.
P. O. Lapie, who had served several years in Africa, wrote of the thrill of overseas
service in the following terms:
There is no question here, as in civilized countries, of having to fight against opposing views, public opinion, the press, committees, or councils; you just grasp bodily the mass of sand, clay, and human beings and mould it into roads, towns, and men. … What regions in our cramped Euro ean countries offer such opportunities for modelling both soil and men 143?
The technocratic vision which Lapie and many of his colleagues held did not permit
the sharing of power with members of the colonial societies.
The men who entered and dominated the colonial service in the interwar period were
with some exceptions conscientious, hard-working men who ensured for the colonies
a humane and efficient administration. But the bureaucratization of the Corps–in
terms both of its structure and of the attitudes of its members—together
with the persistence of an authoritarian tradition, prevented the Corps from being
as innovative a force as it might have been, particularly in the political field.
Some might, with Deschamps, argue even more strongly that the interwar years constituted
an era of lost, opportunities, and that if the Corps had introduced reforms, it
would have made unnecessary, or even impossible, the kind of nationalism that swept
the French Black African colonies after World War II.
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