The Human Cost of Mise-en-Valeur

In the wake of the First World War, issues of quotidian humiliation, beatings and murder became increasingly imbricated in questions of colonial mise-en- valeur, or economic development.

In 1920, for example, the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme published in its journal, Cahiers, a damning article entitled, ‘The Reestablishment of Slavery in New Caledonia'. The report, written by Ligue members from Noumea, provided an overview of both labour legislation and the actual treatment of Kanaks recruited for plantation work. Most pressing, plantation owners willingly ignored the law and efforts to protect free labour were regularly ignored. Employees who were ‘mistreated or wrongly paid' had, by law, the right to leave their employers. But in practice they were not allowed to go freely. Colonists wanted to have slaves and, in the report's assessment, through a series of weak laws and blatant abuses, ‘they succeeded'. The most common form of recruitment in New Caledonia was through an official who dealt with Indigenous affairs, a chef de service, who worked with tribal chiefs. It was this system, the Ligue's report argued, that was so open to abuse. ‘The administration writes to the chef [de service] and says it “needs” 50, 60, 80 people.

Once recruited, Kanak men, women and children had little idea what to expect. Some employers, ‘with humanity', provided their labourers with what regulations required: salary, lodging, clothes, food, medical care and, if necessary, hospitalisations. But many employers failed to do so, and recruits remained ‘badly fed, badly paid, badly cared for, [and] overwhelmed by work and punishments'. Such conditions were nothing new; sixteen years earlier, in 1904, a medical doctor complained that the administration of Indigenous affairs was woefully understaffed, leading to grave mistreatment at the hands of ‘inhuman' employers. The workers, the doctor reported, were left in ‘deplorable health', stricken by fatigue and tuberculosis.^[832]

Under colonial law, labourers could complain of poor living or working conditions, but employers were given a grace period to make improvements. The Ligue insisted this was unacceptable, as workers ‘had time to die before having obtained justice'. And that assumed workers had the opportunity to lodge a complaint. ‘Most often', when labourers denounced a powerful colonist they were simply put in prison, charged with ‘insubordination'. Workers could be sentenced to hard labour - usually breaking rocks from 5 in the morning to 8 at night - for eight to sixty days. Further insubordination meant solitary confinement in a concrete room without air, light or blankets.

The members of the Ligue in Noumea closed their report with an impas­sioned plea to end this form of slavery. It acknowledged that colonists in New Caledonia lacked adequate labour, but rejected the all-too-often made claim that it was necessary and ‘civilising' to force Kanaks to work. There was no moralising influence in this form of recruitment. Instead, recruiters intro­duced workers to alcohol and trafficked Kanak women as prostitutes. The Noumea section of the Ligue demanded that the French government no longer tolerate such abuses and that all labourers have the chance to address their complaints to competent tribunals.^[833]

When pushed by the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme in Paris to investigate, the colonial ministry did contact the governor for information. But the out­come of the governor's review was a standard non-denial. ‘The native question in New Caledonia', the colonial minister wrote, ‘is intimately linked to the problem of labour and my Department as well as the local administration accords all its attention to the examination of this question that interests the future of our colonisation of the Pacific. The appropriate instructions have moreover already been sent to the colony.'^[834] The colonial minister did not feel obliged, however, to tell the president of the Ligue whether his instructions included ending the alleged regime of slavery in New Caledonia.

While the ministry brushed over the accusations with typical aplomb, the Ligue report caused an intense backlash in the colony. Within three months of publication in the Cahiers of the ‘Re-establishment of Slavery' report, members of the Ligue in Noumea felt their livelihoods and jobs threatened by powerful political and economic interests.

The responses to the Ligue's report showed how many colonists in the French Empire justified severe treatment of non-Europeans by pointing to their own alleged sacrifices in trying to develop colonial economies. In December 1920, an article appeared in the influential Caledonian newspaper, Le Messager, called ‘The League of Rights of the Canaque' and written by the paper's editor-in-chief, Alin Laubreaux, a white native of New Caledonia who became a successful right-wing journalist in France. In his response, Laubreaux admitted that there was one truth in what the author of the Ligue's report had said: ‘It is, this truth, that slavery has been effectively re­established in New Caledonia... Yes, certainly. There are slaves in New Caledonia and these slaves, IT'S US.' The white man's master, according to this white Caledonian, was none other than ‘His Majesty the Canaque'.^[836]

Laubreaux expressed violent sentiments about Kanaks that were not uncommon among landowners in New Caledonia. The Indigenous, it was widely claimed, were overly protected, even pampered, by an administration that refused to force them to work for French settlers in dire need of labourers. According to Laubreaux, Kanaks were free of taxes, free of work obligations, and free to leave their land uncultivated, all at the expense of the white population. Progress, he argued, had made this kind of ‘communism' unacceptable: ‘You know full well, that the first of [our] duties is to produce at least as much as we consume, and that the lazy, the useless don't even have a right to exist.' Laubreaux argued that the Kanak's ‘ignorance, filth and laziness' was only augmented by the protection offered from the administration.

Laubreaux concluded his article by reminding the ‘League of the Rights of the Canaque' of a colonist named Grassin, who went to the bush, armed with the ideals of the Rights of Man, ready to defend the islanders. And what happened to him? ‘One day they came, savagely tattooed, armed for war, lit his house on fire, pillaged his stores.' Grassin, he reported, was decapitated and disembowelled; his wife killed, then raped. ‘Voila. Is that enough?' The reader was left with the question hanging: enough for what? Laubreaux added no further comment. But it is hard to read the article, which deemed Kanaks to be ungrateful murderers and rapists, as anything but a call to arms.

Certainly not all Europeans were so overtly violent. An article in La France Australe, also written in response to the Ligue's report, was less combative towards the government but argued that the Kanak had to be dealt with sternly or else he would ‘lose all consideration for the white man'. ‘The

Quotidian Violence in the French Empire native must be disciplined: he must, like a child who knows to obey his father, know to obey the administration. We must be very just with him, very good when he submits to orders, very severe when he tries to evade them.'^[837] While La France Australe left undefined what ‘severe' meant, other settlers were more to the point. A dozen years later, with an international depression underway, debates still raged about Kanak labour. Letters to the editor flowed into the offices of La France Australe. One reader, appalled by the insensitivity of his fellow colonists, summed up their opinions thus:

The humanitarian point of view has nothing to see here. We need labour before everything else. - Thus the canaques before daring to plant their own crops must work for the European... uniquely for him! At the same time, we claim the whole place... Let's make colonization 100% white... That day, there will be no more canaques but that doesn't matter...

In his letter to the editor, this reader condemned such ‘blind hatred' and violent - even genocidal - proposals as being ‘anti-French'. That may have been true; but they were not entirely uncommon in the French Empire. White men and women living in the empire regularly complained that metropolitan Frenchmen had no idea of what their lives were like and had no business criticising their treatment of the Indigenous population. In the opinion of many colonists, metropolitan misunderstanding of colonial ways of seeing stemmed from their inherent naivety that misled Frenchmen in France into believing that all Indigenous people were, as one writer put it, ‘the victims of European colonisers'.^[839]

In a particularly frank 1928 article on the subject, an ‘Old Colonist' from Madagascar wrote of his compatriots in France who ‘speak of our Colony and of our natives like a blind man [speaks of] colours and proclaim that it is us who are wrong when we do not share their opinions'. The ‘Old Colonist' consid­ered the apparent transformation that took place when the idealist metropo­litan moved to the colonies. ‘How to understand this immediate volte-face of the intractable diehard humanitarian, for whom all the Malagasy must be beloved brothers', he mused, ‘who suddenly becomes the level-headed,

calm, just, but mistrustful and distant man, characteristic of the true colon?’ For this writer, the difference was easily explained by experience. Whatever ‘humanitarian convictions’ the new arrival came with dissipated when he found himself ‘facing a reality completely different from that expected’.

What ‘hard and sometimes cruel experience’ revealed to the new arrival in Madagascar was little different from what Alin Laubreaux saw in New Caledonia. According to the ‘Old Colonist’, the new arrival slowly finds that the administration works primarily for the Indigenous population, and that the ‘character’ of the native is ‘deceitful, lying, lazy, and above all infinitely ungrateful’. Malagasies - like Kanaks, it seems - only understood tough treatment: they were weak and obsequious when they feared the white man; arrogant and insolent when they felt themselves safe from punishment.^[840]

Colonial administrators had at least two reasons for not cracking down on colonists who condoned the rough treatment of Indigenous labourers. First, inherent in the backlash against the Ligue’s article decrying slavery in New Caledonia was a volatile contempt for the administration, both in the colony and in Paris. Already reviled by many colonists for allegedly being on the side of the Indigenous population, local administrators shied away from further angering their compatriots by disciplining them for mistreating their work­force. Locally powerful and with strong support from the colonial lobby in Paris, planters had the political sway to oust officials who tried to undermine their business plans. Second, many officials agreed that Indigenous labourers needed to be forced, even with violence, to work. As the colonial ministry pointed out, labour shortages were a problem faced in many parts of the empire, from New Caledonia to Cochinchina to Madagascar to Equatorial Africa. If the colonies were to be profitable, labour was needed at any cost - a belief adopted by even some outspoken administrative critics of labour violations.^[841] Suffering was part of the political economy of empire. And for many Frenchmen - settlers, businessmen, officials - the price of humane treatment was too high.