French Empire

   During the Age of Imperialism France had, after Britain, the second largest and most diverse colonial empire, with a wide mix of settler colonies, penal settlements, plantations, trading bases, and protectorates that literally spanned the globe. The bulk of French colonial possessions date from the nineteenth century, but the origins of the empire actually go back 300 years earlier when men like Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain were sent by the monarchy to explore and colonize parts of the New World. Although the French subsequently expanded their possessions in Canada and the Caribbean to include slaving bases in West Africa, several Indian Ocean island colonies, and five trading bases in India, nearly all were lost in a series of eighteenthcentury wars against Britain and Spain. In the early nineteenth century, during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose conquests came mostly at the expense of other great powers in Europe itself, France lost still more overseas colonies. The Haitian Revolution, led by Toussaint l ’ Ouverture, not only cost France her most prosperous plantation colony, it also led to the sale of recently restored French holdings in the Mississippi basin to the United States in what has become known as the Louisiana Purchase (1803). Consequently, at the start of the nineteenth century, the French overseas empire was limited to a handful of trading bases in India and Senegal, Caribbean plantation colonies in Guadeloupe and Martinique, the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Canada, and Guiana on the South American mainland. Subsequent French colonial expansion overseas was haphazard and devoid of any grand master plan. Instead, colonies were taken either to satisfy the vagaries of domestic French politics or in response to the activities of individual colonial officials and special interest groups. The result was continuous, if somewhat chaotic, expansion that reached a fever pitch in the 1880s as part of the Scramble for Africa.

   Colonial Expansion

   The first bout of French colonial expansion in the nineteenth century came in Algeria, which at the time was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire ruled by a local viceroy. After the final restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty in 1815, Franco-Algerian relations suffered a sharp decline when the French objected to the high interest rates charged for grain borrowed by Napoleon’s armies and refused to take responsibility for debts incurred by the Revolutionary government. The situation came to a head in April 1827, when an argument over unpaid debts escalated and led the Algerian viceroy to destroy French trading posts and expel the French consul after swatting him with a ceremonial whisk. Charles X, the increasingly unpopular king, later seized on this incident as justification for launching a March 1830 invasion in a vain effort to divert the attention of the French masses from his attempts to restore autocratic royal power. Despite the success of the French invasion, Charles was toppled from power and replaced by the July Monarchy of his distant cousin Louis Philippe. The new king opted to keep Algeria in the hopes of placating competing economic pressure groups by granting contracts and concessions in Algeria. Shortly thereafter the eruption of a long and bloody revolt by the Algerian masses led the French to expand their initial holdings by pushing deeply and permanently into the Algerian interior.

   The July Monarchy also oversaw the expansion of French interests in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Polynesia. In an effort to compete with the British for trade along the Guinea coast of West Africa during the late 1830s and 1840s, French merchants and naval officers began signing a series of treaties granting French protection to coastal tribes in Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and the river estuary of Gabon, thereby turning an old string of trading posts dating to the seventeenth century into a larger informal sphere of influence. This sphere later served as the nucleus for additional French incursions into West and Equatorial Africa during the “new imperialism” of the 1880s. In the Indian Ocean, the desire for sugar plantations and the need for resupply bases for naval vessels led the French governor of Reunion to annex the islands of Nosy Bé in1840 and Mayotte in 1841, giving France a toehold in the Comoros Islands and a base from which to intervene in the affairs of neighboring Madagascar. Similarly, longstanding demands from missionaries and colonial enthusiasts for annexation of various Polynesian islands in the hopes that they would yield plantations and resupply bases for the French navy finally bore fruit in the early 1840s when Admiral Abel Aubert Dupetit-Thouars acted on his own authority by annexing the Marquesas and declaring a protectorate over Tahiti. Additional expansion in Africa, the Pacific, and Indochina in Southeast Asia took place during the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III), who opted to pursue an active and aggressive foreign policy to live up to his namesake, increase popularity at home, and divert attention from his failed foreign policy ventures in Italy and Mexico. During his time in power (1852–1870), Napoleon III continued the conquest and pacification of the Algerian interior and dispatched French troops to Guinea and Dahomey on the pretext of protecting French merchants and securing access to the increasingly important peanut and palm oil trade. A combination of military power, diplomacy, and bribery was then used to get local chiefs to accept protectorates over additional West African coastal regions. In the South Pacific, the existence of good pasture land, a strategic location near Australia, and the need for a healthier penal settlement than Guiana led France to annex New Caledonia in 1853. Over the next several decades, New Caledonia was turned into a small settlement colony composed of a handful of free settlers and thousands of convicts and political prisoners exiled from metropolitan France. In nearby China and Indochina, France was goaded into action by the persecution of missionaries and their converts, culminating in French participation in the Second Opium War in 1860. Similarly, the French government intervened in nearby Indochina by sending in the navy in 1847 and again in 1858 to bombard the port of Da Nang in an effort to force Tu-Duc, the emperor of Annam, to grant freedom of worship to Christians. Tu-Duc was eventually forced to sign a treaty in 1862 that granted religious toleration throughout his realm and ceded the southern province of Cochin-China, including Saigon, to France.

   Not all colonial activities during the reign of Napoleon III were orchestrated or even officially sanctioned by his government. In eastern Africa, a French merchant and occasional diplomat, Henri Lambert, visited the Somali coast in 1855 and convinced the local chief to cede the port of Obock to him on behalf of France. Although the ministry of foreign affairs convinced Napoleon III to turn down the cession owing to suspicions about Lambert’s motives, the French negotiated a new treaty in 1862 after Lambert’s death purchasing Obock outright so as to counter the British presence in Aden and guarantee access to the Red Sea. French expansion in Senegal was similarly driven by a single individual who forced the government’s hand. Starting in the mid 1850s, Louis Faidherbe, the newly appointed governor of Senegal, embarked on an unofficial and unsanctioned program of colonial expansion by invading the interior after provoking border disputes with neighboring Muslim communities in an effort to gain land for plantations.

   In 1870, the Second Empire’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War swept Napoleon III from power, triggered the Paris Commune uprising, and ushered in the Third Republic. Given its bloody beginnings and the French public’s loss of confidence in the new regime over a series of scandals, including the Boulanger Affair, the Panama scandal, the Dreyfus Affair, and the turn of the century anticlerical campaign, the new regime was forced to compensate with an aggressive foreign policy in the hopes of preserving France’s geopolitical position and, above all, reinvigorating French patriotism via the acquisition of allies and new colonies overseas. In the process, the Third Republic hoped to use the new territories, their resources, and peoples to restore French military and economic power on a global scale. Indeed, by the turn of the century, French politicians were openly talking about using their empire as a base for creating a nation of 100 million Frenchmen that would ensure France’s status as major world power.

   The renewed French interest in colonies was not just motivated by geopolitics. As in other European powers, by the 1870s, national attitudes toward empire were also changing because of industrialization, persistent action by special interest groups, and belief in the twin ideologies of social Darwinism and the white man ’ s burden. Industrialization caused domestic misery and unrest in metropolitan France as the masses adjusted to urbanization and factory-based means of production. Like Charles X before them, Third Republic politicians often saw the acquisition of colonies as a means of diverting public attention from domestic crises. Given the intensified competition among industrial powers, colonies were also seen as a major arena of investment and an attractive safety net providing guaranteed markets and raw materials; interest groups, which now included leading industrialists, continued to push European governments to acquire colonies. France was no exception. In addition to bankers and overseas investors, French merchants and missionaries also made strident demands for annexation to protect their activities. The military and their suppliers soon joined in, reasoning that the pursuit of empire would both demonstrate French power and legitimate their own claims on national fiscal resources. Lastly, the belief in social Darwinism convinced the French that they were in a struggle for survival in which the strong were entitled to seize resources from weak. In the process, they incurred a moral obligation to elevate and “civilize” their racial inferiors by providing peace, stability, education, good government, and exposure to capitalism.

   For all these reasons, the French entered the 1870s increasingly interested in taking on additional colonies. That interest peaked in the late 1870s and early 1880s as a result of events in Tunisia, Egypt, and the Congo River basin. Shortly after the turn of the century, the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, two outlying provinces of the declining Ottoman Empire, began modernization campaigns financed by European capital in an effort to strengthen their lands and secure their independence from the Ottoman Sultan. By mid-century, the size of these debts led to the creation of finance commissions that enabled the Europeans to supervise and reform Tunisian and Egyptian finances. France, as the largest creditor, naturally dominated these finance commissions and regarded both provinces as French spheres of influence. This position of French dominance was threatened at the end of the 1870s when a newly unified Italy indicated its intention to annex Tunisia as part of an effort to rally the masses at home behind the new nation. France responded by sending the Algerian army into Tunisia in 1881 in a bid to secure a treaty creating a formal French protectorate. The invasion, although intended to be temporary, provoked a nationalist revolt fueled by Islam that ultimately forced the French to stay permanently in Tunisia.

   As in Tunisia, the size of its loans and active involvement in the construction of the Suez Canal led the French to regard Egypt as a sphere of influence. They were therefore not pleased when Egypt’s debt burden forced the Khedive to sell his 43 percent stake in the Suez Canal to Britain in 1875. This move and the subsequent implementation of Anglo-French control over Egyptian finances proved to be deeply unpopular and helped trigger a nationalist uprising in 1881 that deposed the Khedive and threatened to nationalize the canal. Because Paris was preoccupied with domestic problems and the growing revolt in Tunisia, France refused Britain’s offer to send in a joint invasion force to restore order. Britain, after invading alone, subsequently declined to allow France to resume its old role in jointly administering Egyptian finances. Feeling cheated out of its sphere of influence, the French government became increasingly determined both to regain lost influence in Egypt and to contain British influence elsewhere on the continent.

   The chance to act on these sentiments was afforded by the actions of Leopold II of Belgium. Eager to overcome the limits of his status as a constitutional monarch, Leopold created a private trading company to explore and exploit the Congo River basin in central Africa. These efforts, which peaked in the late 1870s, put him in direct competition with French merchants operating out of Gabon. As French and Belgian company officials raced each other to sign treaties securing monopolies on trade with local African rulers, Leopold tried to preempt further French claims by declaring that he controlled the entire Congo region on the southern side of the river. Concerned that additional paper partitions could lead to conflict between European nations, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the French Prime Minister Jules Ferry convened the Berlin Conference in 1884 to set ground rules for future colonial annexations. Immediately thereafter, France joined other European powers in a race to acquire African territories that was subsequently dubbed the Scramble for Africa.

   During the scramble, France engaged in a combination of diplomatic ventures and military expeditions in an attempt to hem in British possessions and regain influence in Egypt by securing access to the upper Nile. Starting in 1884, French expeditions began pushing inland from all the existing African colonies in an effort to drive across the center of the continent in a French equivalent of Cecil Rhodes ’s Cape to Cairo dream. These efforts culminated in 1896 with an expedition led by Jean-Baptiste Marchand, which marched overland from Equatorial Africa to southern Sudan, claiming everything it encountered along the way for France. Although the Marchand expedition successfully reached the Nile River ahead of advancing British forces, the Fashoda Incident effectively put an end to the dream of regaining control over Egypt. Nevertheless, French gains in Africa were enormous, in part because the areas in question were often sparsely populated desert or were divided into large African states that periodically cooperated with French forces in actions against their neighbors. Consequently, by the turn of the twentieth century, French possessions covered more than one-third of the African continent and stretched from Algeria, Senegal, and Equatorial Africa to the Oubangui River. Further adjustments, including the acquisition of Morocco, continued right up until the outbreak of World War I and were the result of inter-European negotiations to resolve border disputes.

   The Third Republic’s colonial efforts were not limited to the African continent. The French also acquired additional Pacific island possessions, but their greatest area of expansion occurred in Indochina. Eager to protect existing holdings in the region, colonial lobbyists in France demanded active military intervention in Tonkin in 1884 in a bid to restore order and end endemic piracy. By the end of the decade, the success of these operations enabled France to establish protectorates over Annam, Tonkin, Cochin-China, and Cambodia and to turn the Vietnamese emperor into a puppet ruler. Not satisfied with these conquests, the French invaded neighboring Laos in 1893 in an effort to solidify their hold on the Mekong River and gain additional land for plantations. These actions completed the establishment of a French colonial empire that by1914 boasted 63 million colonial subjects and 12 million square kilometers of territory.

   Administrative Policy and Structure

   Unlike other colonial powers that thought of their empires as possessions, France regarded its colonial empire as noncontiguous extensions of France itself. They were considered literally part of France, not because they had been annexed, or even because they contained French settlers, but because the French were committed to the idea of assimilation and expected colonial peoples to one day take on the status, rights, and responsibilities of citizenship. Belief in assimilation, which had its roots in the French Revolution, not only led to efforts to “civilize” native peoples through exposure to French language, culture, industry, and education, it also had a profound impact on colonial administration.

   Because the colonies were considered part of France, they were afforded no special treatment whatsoever. Metropolitan laws, tariffs, and forms of government were simply extended to newly acquired possessions. Hence, as in France itself, power was concentrated in the hands of the National Assembly in Paris and was transmitted through a series of lower level officials down to towns and villages. As only Frenchmen could fully understand and appreciate this system, France adopted a concept known as direct rule in which all officials in the colonies were French. Africans and Asians were employed by colonial administrations as clerks and aides, but they served in subordinate roles that left all decision-making authority in the hands of white officials. Although bypassing local rulers ensured French political control at all levels, it had the disadvantage of making French colonial policy ponderous and slow to adapt to local conditions. These factors were partly offset by the ability of French citizens in some full colonies such as Algeria, Senegal, and Cochin China to elect deputies to serve in the National Assembly. Since few nonwhites acquired citizenship, however, most indigenous peoples remained unrepresented.

   Although the National Assembly could not deal with everyday colonial matters, the French did not develop a colonial minister or colonial office for most of the nineteenth century. Before the Scramble for Africa, France never had a suf-ficient number of colonies to warrant creating a high-level government position to coordinate colonial policy. Moreover, creating such a position flew in the face of assimilation by implying that, rather than being subject to the jurisdiction of regular government bodies, the colonies instead had some sort of special status. In the absence of a single colonial ministry, France therefore developed a tradition whereby any ministry with sufficient reason could dabble in colonial affairs. This situation, which made the drafting and implementation of colonial policy chaotic and difficult, changed slightly during the 1890s, as France began to acquire newer and larger colonial holdings. France finally created a colonial minister in 1894, but his position remained ambiguous. Not only was the colonial ministry the smallest and least prestigious agency within the government, but, in a nod to tradition, it never took over full responsibility for colonial affairs. Instead, it remained subject to constant budget scrutiny from the National Assembly and continued to face periodic intervention from other ministries, government agencies, and committees representing special interest groups.

   Below the colonial minister were governors and governor-generals who administered individual colonies or the three federations of French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, and French Indochina. Like the colonial minister, the governors and governor-generals were in an ambiguous position. On the surface they were quite autocratic and could issue decrees; control their own administration, police, military, and legal systems; and run native affairs. At the same time, however, their power was restricted in several ways. In addition to requiring colonies to generate tax revenues to pay for their own administration and share of common expenses like defense, the National Assembly also reviewed all other expenditures by local administrations. Governors who raised additional monies to pay for pet projects inside their own colonies risked signaling Paris that they could possibly afford to contribute more in the future toward joint expenses. As a result, Paris exercised tight fiscal control over the governors. French colonial governors also had to obey orders from the colonial ministry, were watched by inspectors, and were subject to influence from pressure groups and the press. Moreover, they also had to contend with advisory councils made up of local colonial officials who could influence policy by threatening to appeal to metropolitan officials.

   Individual colonies were subdivided into districts - Subdivisions and cercles or circonscriptions - in the hands of white bureaucrats who gathered reports, carried out the governor’s policies, administered justice, and collected taxes. Despite having sole authority for huge geographic areas, colonial administrators were usually young men with little training. Furthermore, tropical diseases, long separation from friends and family, lack of amenities, and distance from the metropole combined to make colonial posts less desirable than other branches of government. As a result, in addition to suffering high turnover rates, those who served in the colonies often had little interest in the lives of indigenous peoples, few ideas about how to promote commerce or education, and little incentive to act without specific instructions from Paris. Paris tried to deal with this problem by setting up the École Coloniale in the late 1880s to train colonial officials. Still, its curriculum was largely irrelevant and, and, even at its peak, less than 20 percent of colonial administrators were alumnae. Rather than concentrating on practical matters or languages, the École Coloniale emphasized French law, history, and obedience to existing government policies. Consequently, French administrators were less well trained, less efficient, less capable, and ultimately less effective than their British counterparts.

   By 1900, the French began rethinking the premises behind colonial rule. In particular, they concluded that the policy of assimilation was a failure, as few Africans had renounced local custom and become French citizens. The pull of religion and indigenous social and cultural institutions proved to be too strong. At the same time, the rise of social Darwinism and racism made the French increasingly uncomfortable with the very idea of African assimilation. Consequently, at the turn of the century, France abandoned assimilation in favor of association , defined as a cooperative policy of colonial administration in which colonized peoples were recognized as junior partners and native institutions were to be allowed to continue developing according to local needs. In effect, the shift was in principle toward a more indirect form of rule whereby native authorities would retrieve and exercise some power. In practice, however, little changed, as most French colonial officials had been schooled in the old policy of assimilation and either fell back on it out of confusion or in resistance to the prospect of sharing political authority on any level.

   The Colonial Lobby

   Often lumped together under the general descriptor of Parti Colonial - a loose collection of interest groups rather than a political organization - the French colonial lobby was composed of a wide variety of private organizations eager to highlight the supposed benefits of colonies and acknowledge the achievements of missionaries, explorers, and settlers. In addition to missionary societies, urban chambers of commerce, and academic associations, the colonial lobby also contained large numbers of independent entities like the Comité de l ’ Afrique Française, which were organized around specific colonies or groups of colonies. These committees, most of which were formed between 1890 and 1905, held lectures, supported research, held exhibitions, and published journals to draw attention to colonial affairs or influence government policy. Similarly, in 1893, business interests created their own lobby in the form of the Union Coloniale Française to pressure the government regarding trade and colonial development policy. Collectively, these groups found a willing audience in the Groupe Coloniale, a caucus of pro-colonial deputies in the lower house of the National Assembly.

   The military and settlers also represented important interests. The army continued to lobby on behalf of colonial issues not only because its honor was at stake, but also because the maintenance of empire ensured its budgets from year to year. As for the settlers, they naturally petitioned Paris for protection, land, subsidies, labor, and the development of colonial infrastructure. Paris often distrusted their motives, leading to frequent disputes between settlers and administrators who resented settler demands and the difficulties they created. Colonial authorities were also suspicious of settlers because not all were of French origin. Because the country was relatively stable and prosperous after 1850, finding settlers to send to colonies was often challenging, so that France had to turn to immigrants from Italy and Spain, as well as imported laborers from India and Syria. The result was a heterogeneous colonial population, which, aside from Algeria, was never very large and only a limited success as a lobby.

   Economic Policy

   Although colonial propaganda claimed that the colonies were economically valuable, the reality is that they were of limited use to France in part because Paris had no coherent or coordinated economic plan until after World War I. Throughout the nineteenth century, the government paid lip service to the demands of the colonial lobby for public investment in infrastructure but remained wary of the expense and preferred instead to concentrate on the tasks of conquest and administration. Economic development was therefore left in private hands between 1880 and 1914. Private firms in the colonies and in the metropole underwrote and promoted many colonial ventures, but their efforts were insufficient. Consequently, the French colonial empire not only lacked adequate roads, railroads, and port facilities to exploit effectively the mineral and other resources of the interior, French merchants and manufacturers also blocked efforts to develop local manufacturing lest it interfere with their own exports. As a result, most colonies remained underdeveloped and their people too poor to be a real market for French goods. They were confined to supplying tropical raw materials such as coffee, spices, sugar, rice, bananas, coconut, citrus, margarine, peanut oil, cotton, rubber, minerals, and hardwoods. Although colonial exports were useful for propping up uncompetitive and declining French industries through the provision of cheap raw materials that could be sold internationally or shipped to France to be made into finished goods, by 1914, the colonies accounted for only 10 percent of French foreign trade. The bulk of colonial trade was concentrated in Indochina and parts of West Africa where France had established rubber, peanut, and palm plantations. Much of the remainder of the African empire, however, was desert and economically worthless. Efforts to change this were limited by the combination of direct rule, with its insistence on sending out expensive white administrators and soldiers to the colonies, and the requirement after 1900 that colonies be self-sufficient. Limited spending on health and education also took their toll in the form of higher absenteeism and poorly trained workers, all of which worked to slow economic development. It was not until the 1920s and the effort to rebuild from the destruction of World War I that France began making serious attempts to develop its colonies by expanding plantations, increasing road and railroad construction, and masking improvements in harbor facilities.

   Education Policy

   Throughout the nineteenth century, French colonial policy was committed to the mission civilisatrice , which held that it was an imperial duty to civilize or uplift backward natives by exposing them to the benefits of French culture, language, education, industry, and justice. For most of the century the intent was to actually assimilate colonized peoples to the point where they would acquire citizenship by renouncing native law and customs in favor of French language and culture. Although education was considered the key to this transition, successive governments continually struggled with the format, content, and direction it should take in the colonies. The result was significant variation in terms of the size and quality of school systems from one colony to the next. Generally speaking, colonial officials refused to spend much time or money on schools, preferring instead to leave them in the hands of missionaries. Government schools were therefore few in number and were geared toward schooling low-level clerks or providing vocational training. Trainees were drawn from native elites and the best students of mission schools and were presented with curricula and textbooks imported from France. Yet the education they received was not equivalent to one received in France. Instead pupils in the colonies were taught basic literacy, acceptance of their secondary status, and obedience to the colonial order. Moreover, because diplomas earned in the colonies were not recognized in France, pupils of government schools found their prospects for future advancement outside the colonial environment highly restricted. Mission schools were similarly limited. Although missionaries maintained extensive school systems that extended deep into the interior and down to the village level, their curriculum was a mixture of Christianity, manual labor, and limited academics. Because Protestant mission theology held that conversion was best achieved through exposure to Scripture in one’s own language, mission schools often taught in local vernaculars. Moreover, as the missions felt that the bulk of their pupils were destined to lead lives as farmers and laborers, mission schools eschewed academic preparation beyond primary school in favor of vocational training, often employing pupils on school farms, plantations, and other money-making ventures in lieu of charging tuition. Although the pupils of mission schools often pushed for more academic instruction, particularly French-language literacy, as a means of obtaining better paid clerical jobs with local business or administration, their requests met with limited success before 1914. The failure of mission schools to be more responsive to these requests led to discontent among pupils and exposed mission schools to criticism from administrators who complained that they were not doing enough to spread French language and culture or even train sufficient numbers of clerks to fill the needs of local government and business firms. The combination of these charges, combined with growing anticlerical sentiment in France, stripped mission schools of government subsidies after 1900, and led to repeated clashes with administrators over the content of curriculum right up until the outbreak of World War I.

   The Status of Native Peoples

   France established two forms of political status within the empire. Citizens included nationals from France, whites born in the colonies, and the handful of natives who naturalized. Although citizens enjoyed full civil liberties, voting rights, and preferential treatment under the law, few Africans or Asians were willing or able to meet the conditions for naturalization that varied from place to place yet always included complete linguistic and cultural assimilation. Most colonized peoples were ignorant of the requirements or even the possibility of acquiring full citizenship. They were also discouraged from naturalizing, as it cut them off from their own communities and meant giving up inheritance rights established under native law. Instead, the majority of colonized peoples were classified as colonial subjects and were denied voting rights. They were also subjected to forced labor known as prestation and were legally answerable to native courts run by administrators who applied their own interpretation of local customary law in civil cases. Colonial subjects were also subject to the indigénat , an extra-judicial code that began in Algeria in the 1870s and was soon extended to all of French Africa. Under the indigénat, French administrators could impose punishments in the form of short jail sentences and fines for a series of offenses ranging from failure to pay taxes to disrespect of colonial officials. The arbitrary nature of the indigénat was deeply offensive to Africans and continually underscored the inequality of French colonial administration.

   With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, France relied heavily on its colonies to provide men and resources for the war effort in Europe. After the armistice of 1918, France clung to its colonies and used their resources to facilitate reconstruction of the metropole. In light of the many sacrifices of colonized peoples during and immediately after the war, the French failure to address the inequities in treatment of colonized peoples - including retention of the hated indigénat, the use of forced labor, poor education, and limited economic opportunities - led to a gradual rise in colonial nationalism during the interwar period and eventually triggered decolonization in the 1960s.

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   FURTHER READING:

    Aldrich, Robert. Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996;

    Canale, Jean-Suret. French Colonialism in Tropical Africa 1900-1945. New York: Pica Press, 1971;

    Cohen, William B. The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880. Reprint ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003;

    Cooke, James J. New French Imperialism 1880-1910: The Third Republic and Colonial Expansion. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973;

    Fieldhouse, D. K. The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Study from the Eighteenth Century. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1982;

    Hoisington, William A., Jr. “Colonial Mission: France Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In William B. Cohen, ed. The Transformation of Modern France. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997, pp. 97–108;

    Johnson, G. Wesley. Double Impact: France and Africa in the Age of Imperialism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985;

    Manning, Patrick. Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880-1995. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998;

    Quinn, Frederick. The French Overseas Empire.

    Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002;

    Wesseling, H. L. The European Colonial Empires 1815-1919. New York: Longman, 2004.

   KENNETH J. OROSZ