The making of the colonial French home
In the colonial context, the policing of biological bloodlines, while a necessary condition for maintaining racial purity, nevertheless could not guarantee authentic Frenchness. What was further needed was the re-creation of a French milieu with French norms and values.
For in the racial thinking of late nineteenth century, which was very much influenced by neo-Lamarckian ideas,38 biological heredity alone could not provide foolproof protection of one’s Frenchness, as seen in the cases of French adults ‘going native’ after a prolonged and close contact with the colonised.39 To preserve racial purity, biological reproduction of Frenchness had to be accompanied by its cultural reproduction through the reconstitution of the metropolitan milieu in the colony.40 The ideal person for carrying out such a task was none other than the coloniale, who with her charm would, in Lemire’s words, ‘make a colony for ever French’.41 This call to Frenchify the empire was later echoed in another article in the Bulletin de l'Oeuvre Coloniale des Femmes Francoises, which states that ‘By many means, women can aid in our colonial expansion more efficiently than the legislator can! They can make the colonies more French and turn them into real “overseas Frances”’.42According to the promoters of the colonial feminine mystique, the Frenchifying of the colony would require first the setting up of French homes in accordance with French aesthetics and style. Colonial homemaking guides often advocated the physical widening of the divide between colonised and colonisers. In his article on colonial living, Dr Abbatucci asked French expatriates to abide by what he called the ‘ethnic principle’ when choosing their home location. The ethnic principle required neighbourhood zoning along racial lines through the creation of white towns within the colonial city as a means to protect Europeans from the contagion of native epidemics.43
The same ethnic principle was also to be observed within the colonial home itself through detaching the kitchen and the servants’ quarters from those of the white masters and purging native elements from the French interior. In ‘Propos sur la maison coloniale’, which appeared in 1926, George Groslier, the founder and curator of the Musee Albert Sarraut in Phnom Penh, expressed strong reservations about using native furniture in the European home:
Of course we will never buy for our own use Chinese or Annamite furniture, first of all because we are French and we are uncomfortable when a dragon playing with the moon is sticking its horns in our back... and finally because these sculptures cannot be well cared for and do not correspond to our family life.44