Re-civilising process

Besides refashioning Frenchness at home, the re-creating of French households governed by bourgeois norms and cultural practices also served the need to rehabilitate metropolitan civility, which was said to be sorely lacking in the white colonial enclave.

Indeed, colonial societies were often castigated for their licentiousness and immorality, a problem frequently imputed to the absence of white women. In France hors la France, Piolet warned that men would succumb easily to their basest instincts and the worst kind of debauchery once they were out of the supervision of women (read white Christian women). It was therefore critical to introduce the feminine element in the colony as ‘woman is made to civilise and police, to inspire and purify, to elevate and exalt all that surrounds her’. By her presence alone, she could ‘inspire the respect for and the observance of propriety and duty’.⁴⁷ Piolet’s critique of the colonial male community was later reiterated by Chailley-Bert, who wrote in the Depeche Coloniale that ‘A society without women... is not far removed from barbarism. Should a woman come on the scene, this society starts to police itself, becomes refined, adopts a disciplinary regimen which improves it, frees it from the tyranny of instinct’.⁴⁸ By the 1920s, even members of the military who used to consider the empire as an exclusively male preserve also came around to recognise the positive contributions of women in improving the moral wholesomeness in the colony. In Le Journal des Coloniaux et I'Armee Coloniale Reunis, the colonial officer P.B. claims that

The presence of a single European woman in an outpost, or a corner of the bush,—if she understands her role well—can be of considerable importance from the point of view of general morality: ‘the little wives’... become more discreet; everyone’s behaviour improves: the conversation of a female compatriot works its charm on many souls that would be otherwise unreceptive to the sweetness of family life.⁴⁹

But it is in the writings of Chivas-Baron that one finds the most elaborate development on the role of the French woman in the re-civilising process of the white communities in the empire.

For one thing, she attributed to French femininity a great many of the qualities she considered essential to French civility. We read that wherever she goes, a French woman would bring with her both physical and moral elegance as manifested in ‘her grace, her daintiness, her fantasy, her sentimentality and sensibility’ as well as her ‘qualities of finesse, adaptation, assimilation and courage’. Not only would her feminine charm help soften the uncouthness of men, by requiring greater comfort and refinement for herself and her family, but her demand for more luxury would also lessen the brutishness so endemic in colonial society.⁵⁰ Luxury, in Chivas-Baron’s view, constitutes one of the essential conditions for replicating the metropolitan society life in colonial cities, where, she informed her female compatriots,

Nothing will have changed for you—or so little! You will receive your ‘visits’ and you will return them in the same dazzling outfits. The rules of the game of tennis or golf being inflexible, you will observe them in Dakar as in Hanoi. Everywhere you will find partners for bridge. You will play with your children in some botanic garden instead of bringing them to the Jardin de Ville, the Luxembourg or the Parc Monceau.

As in Paris, one would be able to attend charity functions, artistic and musical gatherings, as well as art exhibitions.⁵¹ The promise of a glamorous social life awaiting French women in the colony had also been used by other emigrants as a promotional tool to make the empire more palatable to metropolitans. The same rhetoric of the ‘colonial good life’ likewise made its way in the periodical La Vie Coloniale in which we read about the vibrant society life in colonial cities whose sophistication could rival that of Paris with endless receptions, artistic soirees, races, cafes and theatre representations by Parisian artists.⁵²

In the staging of these social events, the coloniales were expected to replicate the savoir- vivre of the metropole.

In their guidebook on colonial living, Pretceille and Levare recommended that even when living in bush stations with fewer than a dozen other Europeans, it would still be essential to observe the proper protocol in one’s social relations. One should, for example, start the social calls with the persons at the top of the hierarchy and have oneself announced by a card or await an invitation.⁵³ Metropolitan etiquette should continue to rule even in the privacy of the colonial home. The housemistress is reminded to provide servants with uniforms which they should put on when serving table. But in the event of an official dinner they should be required to wear white cotton gloves for their service.⁵⁴ The display of such an elegant lifestyle, far from being prompted by mere frivolity and simple vanity as some male colonials claimed, in fact performs, in the view of the authors of Le confort, the highly political function of enhancing the colonisers’ dignity and prestige:

Thus will be gathered [in this book] some notions which are likely to give the European a little more comfort in his colonial life, whether in Africa, Asia or the Antilles. This comfort, which some may wrongly deem superfluous, allows for the organisation of a material life which is a determining factor in prestige and authority.⁵⁵

In colonial politics, prestige and dignity, as Emmanuelle Saada argues, were used by colonial administrators as ‘charismatic and paternalistic strategies of legitimation’ to dominate the colonised.⁵⁶

While short of achieving the same kind of success as its British counterpart in recruiting women emigrants, the advent of the colonial female emigration movement at the turn of the century marked a significant shift in the colonial gender politics of the Third Republic in its attempt to enlist bourgeois domestic ideology to service the nation’s imperial project. The foregoing discussion of the colonial feminine mystique shows that one of the chief goals in promoting female emigration was to re-create what Piolet calls ‘la France hors de France’ (France outside France) as the foundation for a sustainable empire.

To this end, the family had been identified as the primary site for replicating the metropolitan milieu in the colony around the tripartite nexus of class, gender and race. The remaking of Frenchness was intended to sharpen the racial divide between whites and non-whites through emphasising the colonisers’ distinction in the dual sense of difference and superiority vis-à-vis the colonised. Within this rhetoric, the main task entrusted to the would-be coloniale was to incarnate a feminine version of the civilising mission with the mandate to bring about the domestication of the empire, domesticity being upheld in the early decades of the century as the sine qua non for ‘true’ colonisation-cum-civilisation.

Notes

1 Gabriel-Paul-Othenin d’Haussonville and Joseph Chailley-Bert, L’emigration des femmes aux colonies. Allocution de M. le comte d’Haussonville et discours de M. J. Chailley-Bert à la conference donnee le 12 janvier 1897 par l’Union coloniale frangaise (Paris, 1897), pp. 14, 19. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

2 Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledege and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley,

2002), p. 42.

3 On ‘the myth of the destructive female’, see Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, 1991).

4 The coloniale could be considered as the French equivalent of the British mensahib.

5 Haussonville and Chailley-Bert, L'emigration des femmes aux colonies, pp. 19-20.

6 On colonial settlements during the ancien regime, see Jacques Petitjean Roget, ‘Les femmes des colons à la Martinique au XVIe et XVIIe siècle', Revue d'Histoire de l'Amerique Franyaise (September 1955), pp. 176-235; and Yves Landry, Les Filles du roi au XVIIe siede: orphelines en France, pionnieres au Canada; suivi d'un repertoire biographique des Filles du roi (Montreal, 1992).

7 On British female emigration to the empire, see Una Monk, New Horizons: A Hundred Years of Women's Migration (London, 1963); James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830--1914 (London, 1979); and Rita S.

Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (New York, 1999).

8 ‘Les femmes et la question coloniale en Angleterre', Le Conseil des Femmes (April 1903), pp. 203-208, 203 and 205.

9 Grace Corneau, La femme aux colonies (Paris, 1900), p. 14.

10 Comtesse de Custine, ‘Les femmes fran^aises aux colonies', Le Conseil des Femmes (December 1903), p. 472.

11 H. de Varly, ‘Les carrières coloniales', La Vie Coloniale (September 1903), pp. 134-135, 135.

12 H. de Varly and Mirtan, ‘La femme aux colonies', La Vie Coloniale (June, 1904), pp. 97-98, 97.

13 ‘Colonisation through the Bed', in J.D. Hargreaves (ed.), France and West Africa: An Anthology of Historical Documents (London, 1969), pp. 206-209, 207.

14 This correspondence is in the folder Indochine GGI 7770 in the Centre des archives d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence.

15 A similar change in policy regarding interracial concubinage also occurred in the British Empire with the issuing of the Crewe circular. For a detailed discussion of the circular, see Ronald Hyam, ‘Concubinage and the Colonial Service: The Crewe Circular (1909)', The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1986), pp. 170-186.

16 Mme Pegard, ‘Societe fran^aise d'emigration des femmes', in 2e congrès international des izuvres et institutions feminines tenu au Palais des Congrès de l'Exposition Universelle de 1900. Compte rendu des travaux par Mme Pegard, Vol. II (Paris, 1902), pp. 236-244, 243.

17 Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, ‘La question de la population et la civilisation democratique', Revue des Deux Mondes, Vol. 143 (1897), pp. 851-889.

18 See Joseph Spengler, France Faces Depopulation: Postlude Edition, 1936--1979 (Durham, NC, 1979), pp. 182-183.

19 De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, Vol. II (Paris, 1908), p. 445.

20 See Spengler, France Faces Depopulation.

21 For a discussion of the effects of intellectual work on female fecundity, see Karen Offen, ‘The Second Sex and the Baccalaureat in Republican France, 1880-1924', French Historical Studies, Vol.

13, No. 2 (1983), pp. 252-286.

22 See Robert A. Nye, ‘Degeneration and the Medical Model of Cultural Crisis in the French Belle Epoque', in S. Drescher, D. Sabean and A. Sharlin (eds), Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse (New Brunswick, 1982), pp. 19-41; and Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848--1918 (Cambridge, 1989).

23 Haussonville and Chailley-Bert, L'emigration des femmes, p. 60.

24 J. B. Piolet, La France hors de France (Paris, 1900), pp. 413-414.

25 Quoted in Mme Pegard, ‘L'emigration des femmes aux colonies', Revue Coloniale, No. 1 (1901), pp. 252-258, 256-257.

26 On the question of dowry in France during the Third Republic, see Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-194.5: Ambition and Love (New York, 1979).

27 Quoted in Haussonville, Salaires et misères de femmes (Paris, 1900), p. 194.

28 Haussonville, Salaires et misères de femmes, p. 128.

29 Haussonville and Chailley-Bert, L'emigration des femmes, p. 23.

30 Ibid., pp. 5 and 7.

31 Corneau, La femme aux colonies, pp. 9-10 and 19.

32 Marcelle Tinayre, ‘Trop de femmes', La Fronde (14 August 1899).

33 ‘La femme aux colonies', La Fronde (22 October 1899).

34 Charles Lemire, ‘Le role de la femme fran^aise dans la colonisation', Bulletin de l'Oeuvre Coloniale des Femmes Franyaises (February 1903), pp. 5-6, 5.

35 Piolet, La France hors de France, p. 413.

36 Madeleine Pretceille and A. Levare, Le confort aux colonies (Paris, 1947), p. 51.

37 Clotilde Chivas-Baron, La femme franpaise aux colonies (Paris, 1929), pp. 183-184.

38 For a discussion of the influence of neo-Lamarckianism in France, see William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge,

1990).

39 A literary example of a European going native is Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899).

40 For an illustration of how this logic works, see Emmanuelle Saada's excellent study of the French metis in Les enfants de la colonie: les metis de l’empire fianpais entre sujetion et citoyennete (Paris, 2007).

41 Lemire, ‘Le role de la femme frangaise', p. 6.

42 R.L., ‘Chronique', Bulletin de l’Oeuvre Coloniale des Femmes Franpaises (April 1903), pp.13-14, 14.

43 S. Abbatucci, ‘L'habitation coloniale', in La vie aux colonies: preparation de la femme à la vie coloniale (Paris, 1938), pp. 63-83.

44 George Groslier, ‘Propos sur la maison coloniale', Extreme-Asie (July 1926), p. 7. The word ‘Annamite' was the name for Vietnamese during the French colonial era.

45 Gaston Valran, ‘Questions feminines et congrès coloniaux', Bulletin de l’Oeuvre Coloniale des Femmes Franpaises (July 1908), pp. 349-351, 350.

46 Pretceille and Levare, Le confort aux colonies, pp. 115-116.

47 Piolet, La France hors de France, pp. 415, 426.

48 Quoted in Georges Trabant, ‘La femme aux colonies', Bulletin de l’Oeuvre Coloniale des Femmes Franpaises (November 1909), pp. 461-464, 462.

49 P.B., ‘Le role et la situation de la famille frangaise dans nos colonies (suite)', Le Journal des Coloniaux et l’Armee Coloniale Reunis, No. 268 (February 1927), pp. 1-3, 1.

50 Chivas-Baron, ‘L'intellectualite feminine aux colonies', Congrès de la litterature coloniale organise par l’Institut colonial fianpais et la Societe des romanciers et auteurs coloniaux (Paris, 1931), pp. 1-12, 2-3.

51 Chivas-Baron, ‘Le milieu colonial', in La vie aux colonies, pp. 191-208, 196, 200.

52 H. de Varly and Mirtan, ‘La femme aux colonies', La Vie Coloniale (October 1904), pp. 182-183, 182.

53 Pretceille and Levare, Le confort aux colonies, pp. 64-65.

54 Ibid., pp. 59-60.

55 Ibid., p. 8.

56 Emmanuelle Saada, ‘The Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige, and Domination in “Colonial Situation”', French Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2002), pp. 98-120, 113.

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