Familial colonialism

While the recruitment of ‘quality’ colons with both financial and cultural capital was recognised as the sine qua non of the successful economic development of France’s overseas possessions, this condition alone, in the opinion of colonial advocates, would still not guarantee ‘true’ colonisation.

In advocating female emigration as a means to facilitate long-term colonisation, the Third Republic’s colonial lobbyists drew their inspiration from two precedents. One was the practice of the ancien regime of sending to the French Antilles and North America con­voys of young women as potential wives to the French colons. At the time, it was believed that the presence of French women would retain Frenchmen in the colonies by creating families, which in turn would lead to a more permanent form of settlement.⁶ The second model was taken from their neighbours across the Channel, whose highly successful women’s emigration societies were often cited as models worthy of emulation.⁷ What was particularly admired was the latter’s efficiency in recruiting large contingents of women for settlement in the empire.

In the French press, British women were often highly praised for their strong commit­ment to the empire. In an article on ‘Les femmes et la question coloniale en Angleterre’, the author attributed much of the phenomenal success of British colonisation to the uncanny ability of the British to take the ‘British home’ with them wherever they moved:

Beyond the oceans, in the faraway British colonies, the Englishman knows that he is at home. As the newcomer lands with the intention of taking root there, of establishing a family, an English family, it is the whole of England that descends with him to take possession of the land.

And such a rapid implantation was made possible by the presence of the British woman who, armed with her ubiquitous ‘teapot’, the synecdochal sign of Britishness par excel­lence, would bring about the instant transplantation of her entire home culture to the new country: ‘At the same time as an English woman lands in Africa with her teapot, part of England takes root there too’. From this observation, the author concludes that ‘all these tea tables will assure the British domination better than regiments of soldiers’.⁸

Following the British lead, the French advocates of colonial emigration also used the rhetoric of the politique de la famille (politics of the family) to encourage women to move to the colonies. Besides Chailley-Bert, Grace Corneau, author of La femme aux colonies, argued likewise that

The only means of founding a colony with a future is to establish Europeans as long-term residents, to set up families of colonists in such a way that the inhabitants of the colony will have not only material interests there, but also per­sonal ties. One becomes attached to the land where one’s children are born.⁹

Without the roots only a family could give, the colons would be constantly thinking of returning to the motherland once their work was accomplished. Speaking from first-hand experience, the Comtesse de Custine, who had spent almost two decades in Indochina from 1880 to 1899 with her husband, asserted that ‘Woman is still the most beneficial element to expansion and prosperity because she holds all the vital and intellectual forces in the home she keeps’.¹⁰