|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
info@webafriqa.net