Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914

Abstract

ANY HISTORIAN IN THE FIELD OF modern European or American history sooner or later must confront one of the fundamental paradoxes of the last century: the acquisition and rule by force of colonies by the most advanced democracies, the United States, France, and Great Britain. Whatever the official claims, Western colonization during this period was in large part an act of state-sanctioned violence. On the crudest level, liberal regimes forcibly "pacified" native peoples who resisted colonization. On a more subtle level, their rule rested on a set of coercive practices that violated their own democratic values. Colonized persons were designated as subjects, not citizens. They had duties but few rights. In neither case, however, did the conquerors in question seem aware of any contradiction between their democratic institutions and the violent acquisition of overseas colonies. As even those among us who are only tangentially interested in the study of imperialism can attest, the faith of yesterday's empire builders in the moral legitimacy of their enterprise was all but absolute. In this essay, I would like to revisit the issue of Western belief in the moral legitimacy of overseas expansion, through an examination of how one modern democracy-France under the early Third Republic (1870-1914)-rationalized imperialism, both rhetorically and in practice, at the high-water mark of late nineteenth-century liberalism. In particular, this article provides an overview of the actions and ideas of a specific group of colonial administrators-the governors general of the French West African Federation, headquartered in Dakar, Senegal-from the founding of the federation in 1895 to the advent of World War J.1 It is, of This article draws on some of the same research presented in my book, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1997). Here, however, I seek to engage a broader set of issues about the relationship between imperialism and democracy in the West, which I believe to be of interest to all historians. Previous versions were presented at the "Violence and the Democratic Tradition in France, 1789-1914" Conference at the University of California at Irvine, February 11-13, 1994, and at the "Centennaire de l'AOF" Colloquium in Dakar, Senegal, June 16-22, 1995. I would like to thank the participants of both conferences for their incisive comments, as well as Philip Nord, Celia Applegate, Adrianna Bakos, Stanley Engerman, Daniel Borus, Harriet Jackson, and several anonymous AHR reviewers for their help in revising this article. 1 The colonial ministry in Paris established the Government General of French West Africa in 1895. France had been steadily expanding its territories in this part of the continent since the 1850s, although the most dramatic conquests had occurred in the 1880s and early 1890s. Headed by a single senior official in Dakar, Senegal, the Government General federated the colonies of Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Sudan, and Dahomey, and the military territories of Niger and Mauritania, into one super-colony named Afrique Occidentale Francaise. Although each colony retained its lieutenant 419