Repopulating France through colonisation
One of the reasons for the wide appeal of female colonial emigration is the contention put forward by its advocates that sending French women to the colonies would also bring relief to a number of social ills plaguing the metropole.
One such major problem was the depopulation crisis, the gravity of which was brought home to the French after their defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. The falling natality was perceived as reaching an alarming level when during the period of 1890 to 1894 France registered 4,312,000 deaths versus 4,300,000 births.17 Among the various measures propounded as ways to improve the nation’s fertility, colonial emigration was presented as a possible solution. Such a proposal might appear at first sight paradoxical, given the fact that expatriation is traditionally used as a means to bring relief to over-population rather than solving the depopulation crisis. Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, pro-colonial observers argued otherwise. The pro-colonial publicist and economist Jules Duval contended that by creating more emigration opportunities for French nationals, French couples would be enticed to have more children.18 This view was later echoed by the eminent economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, who, citing the statistics of emigration and population growth in Britain and Germany, asserted that ‘regular sizeable emigration on which people could count will increase the population rather than restraining it’.19 The reason given is that emigration would create the perception that with the departure of a section of the nation’s citizens, more resources would be made available to those who stayed behind, which then would lure them into having more children.At the turn of the century, a wide range of hypotheses had been put forward to explain France’s demographic decline.20 Certain physicians blamed rural wet-nursing and infanticides by unwed mothers as a cause of high infant mortality, while others were concerned that intense intellectual work might be harmful to women’s reproductive capabilities.21 Another alleged main culprit was modern living, which was said to be conducive to lowering natural fertility.
Some social observers claimed that an overly active social life would affect women’s ability to bear children, while others warned of the threat of male degeneracy brought on by social, biological, medical and psycho-pathological ills.22 A remedy to restore the nation’s natural fertility was a change of environment from the over-civilised and decadent metropole to the colonial wilderness. In his inaugural speech for the SFEF, Chailley-Bert described the colonies as ‘true schools of heroism’ where a rugged lifestyle would help develop to the full one’s manliness. Using Cecil Rhodes as an exemplar of men endowed with extraordinary energy, Chailley-Bert explained to his audience that ‘such men could not have lived and blossomed in the metropole; they would need the life of ease in the colonies in order to freely develop this power and energy’.23 The assumption is that a replenished male virility would ‘naturally’ increase natality, which would in turn ward off the depopulation crisis.For advocates of female colonial emigration, sending French women to the colonies would not only facilitate repopulation in the metropole; it also had the added advantage of ensuring that a pure French race would thrive in the colonies. Such is, for example, the reasoning of the Jesuit J.B. Piolet, who counted on his female compatriots to create in the outposts of the empire ‘real’ French homes filled with, in his words, ‘happy pretty blond heads’. Otherwise, Piolet warned,
we would have there at the most a mixed population who would inherit from the French and the natives all of their vices without any of their virtues: they would be proud of the white blood by which they would call themselves French, but would retain all of the vitiated penchants of the black or yellow race.24
This concern with metis children was also expressed by General Gallieni, then governor of Madagascar, in an interview with Mme Pegard, secretary-general of the SFEF:
I want to prevent, by all the means in my power, the soldiers I turn into colonists at the end of their leave from setting up illegitimate or even legitimate households with Malagasy women, I do not want the island to be populated by a mixed race, but rather by a pure French race.25