Calculating Brutality

The question remains why officials in Paris, who so often waxed lyrical about the liberating power of their civilising mission, did not do more to curb quotidian violence. For experts interested in the theory of colonial rule, the suffering of Indigenous populations at the hands of colons had long been a core concern.

Half a century later, administrators had apparently not learned the lessons of their own reports. In 1929, Georges Hardy, one of the leading colonial experts of his generation, again identified both colonists and administrators as potential problems for achieving long-term stability across the empire. Of particular concern to Hardy was the colonist's moral judgement, especially when placed in tropical climes that proved so trying to what he deemed ‘the European's nerves'.

While all indications - from the 1879 commission's findings on the Kanak insurrection to Georges Hardy's 1929 study - suggested that the French government should shun acts of violence against Indigenous populations for the sake of stability, if not humanity, the administration lacked both the will and the means to do so. Violence was a subject that many regional officials refused to report and preferred not to discuss. To report the occur­rence of abuses in an administrator's region was tantamount to an admission of professional negligence. Officials in Paris associated disorder, including settlers acting unlawfully, with weak leadership. The few bold officials who did report abuses perpetrated by Frenchmen not only potentially tarnished their own reputations, but also regularly faced vicious recrimination from the colonial community.

Where the central administration was most negligent, however, was in not diligently investigating complaints. The colonial ministry was entirely willing to believe in the power of its own regulations. If certain violent behaviours, such as the mistreatment of labour, were unlawful, then most officials in Paris insisted that they did not occur. The ministry was also far too trusting of its own officials, even when they were implicated in cases of alleged corrup­tion and cruelty. With independent inspectors scarce in the empire until the 1930s, the colonial ministry regularly ordered investigations to be carried out by colleagues of the very officials accused of abuse. The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme pointed this out to the ministry: investigations that were carried out ‘with the collaboration of local officials, associated with the local quarrels' were done so ‘in vain'.^[858]

Not only did such investigations prove futile; they often made matters worse. As a Frenchman in Guadeloupe put it in 1930, failing to hold whites accountable for their violent behaviour only encouraged them to carry on with a sense of ‘impunity'.^[859] Considering the importance of the presence of a punitive authority in curbing violent behaviour, the ministry's insistence that abuses did not take place made colonies more prone to abuse, rather than less. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that critics in the interwar years would decry the lack of justice across France's African possessions, where there was no hint of a truly republican administration, but only a ‘sovereign master' that oversaw a ‘regime of terror'.^[860]