The Republican Empire

The territorial empire built by the new Third Republic in Africa and Indochina after 1870 is the best known and most studied of France's imperial ventures. Historians have found particularly intriguing that one of Europe's first stable liberal democratic regimes should demonstrate such extensive appetite for colonial domination and so little respect overseas for its own republican principles.

The colonial ambitions of the Third Republic were also a major contributing factor to the acceleration of European expansion, especially in Africa, after 1880. But this last incarnation of French imperialism was also the most vainglorious. Rooted in fears of national decline and a desire to halt the erosion of its informal empire, it proved of limited economic worth and reinforced French dependency on good relations with Britain.

This is not to say that its imperial dimension was of secondary importance to republican France. On the contrary, it bolstered the regime's prestige and helped to reconcile the old elite to the advent of democracy at home. The new regime soon satisfied the main demands of European settlers in Algeria, with administrative assimilation to the metropole in 1871 and the removal of restrictions on the expropriation of indigenous farmers in 1873. After the republicans gained full control of the new regime's institutions in 1879, colonial expansion accelerated abruptly. Starting in 1880, a series of military expeditions sought to extend France's influence from its coastal comptoirs to the hinterland of Western and Central Africa, along the Senegal and Congo rivers. In 1881, a protectorate was established over Tunisia, partly to thwart the growth of Italian influence. An intervention to defend French interests in the Tonkin in 1882 escalated into two difficult wars with Annam and China (1883-1885), which paved the way for the formation of a French federation of Indochina in 1887.

Another expedition conquered Madagascar between 1883 and 1886. The main advocate of colonial expansion was Jules Ferry, an ardent republican, still celebrated in modern France as a successful promoter of universal and secular education. Growing parliamentary support for expansion coalesced into a groupe colonial, whose membership rose from 28 deputies in 1885 to nearly 200 in 1902, most of them moderate republicans.

This colonial lobby received the financial support of commercial interests in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, professor of political economy at the Collège de France, sought to highlight the potential economic benefits of colonial rule in his De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (six editions between 1874 and 1908). To justify colonial expansion, republican imperialists also drew on a growing body of academic literature on the hierarchy of races. Following the distinction drawn by Ernest Renan, the leading mandarin of positivism, between the white “race of masters and soldiers” and the black “race of land laborers” in his Reforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), considerations on the role of race proliferated in French intellectual and political life. The language of the mission civilisatrice therefore oddly combined the universalism of 1789 with the racialism offin-de-siècle Europe: France had a duty to spread the material and moral benefits of her civilization across the globe, but the natural rights of colonized populations were indefinitely suspended. Most inhabitants of the empire were considered as French nationals, but a legal abyss separated metropolitan (and a handful of indigenous evolues) “citizens” from the masses of indigenous “subjects” and the Code civil from the Code de l’indigenat. After 1900, even the “assimilation” of colonized populations as a long-term goal became decried as unrealistic and colonial administrators embraced instead the concept of “association” to describe the relationship between the metropole and its colonies.^[2244]

The new republican empire owed a great deal to the previous regimes' efforts to spread French influence through trade, language, and religion.

France's comptoirs in Africa and Asia often served as bridgeheads for colonial expansion. In order to draw on the resources of Catholic missions, republicans set aside anti-clericalism— their rallying cry in domestic politics—in foreign and colonial affairs.²⁶ But French territorial imperialism after 1880 may also be interpreted as an attempt to forestall the erosion of this informal empire. Not only did the defeat by Germany deal a formidable blow to French domestic and international prestige, but French commercial and cultural power began to ebb after 1870. France's share in world exports declined from the second rank, after Britain, with 15 percent in the 1860s, to the fourth rank, after Britain, Germany, and the United States, with less than 10 percent in the 1900s. German universities eclipsed Paris on the world's intellectual and scientific stage, while English began to supersede French as a medium of global communication. Britain's decision to intervene in Egypt, a country viewed as part of France's sphere of influence since Napoleon's expedition, to quell a nationalist revolt and replace the Anglo-French financial condominium of 1878 with a British protectorate in 1882 exacerbated fears of decline.

The occupation of Egypt by Britain contributed to a temporary breakdown in the Anglo-French partnership overseas and a furious intensification of rivalry in Africa. While the protection of Egypt was now a major concern of British diplomacy, seizing strategic territorial compensations to force a renegotiation of the 1882 Egyptian settlement became one of France's main objectives in Africa. This phase of antagonistic competition culminated with the crisis of Fashoda, a village on the White Nile in modern-day Southern Sudan, where a force of a hundred African tirailleurs led by a dozen French officers claimed the territory for France in 1898. Control of the area would have created a territory under uninterrupted French sovereignty from Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Red Sea and cut off Egypt from the rest of British possessions in Africa.

But an Anglo-Egyptian army of 25,000 arrived from the north and ordered the French force to leave. The ensuing standoff gave rise to a memorable exchange of bellicose abuse between the French and British press. But the disproportion of forces in Africa and at sea made war an unpalatable option, and the French government recognized Anglo-Egyptian rights over the upper Nile in March 1899. This peaceful settlement paved the way for a rapid rapprochement, sealed by the delimitation of the two powers' areas of influence and colonial boundaries at the Entente Cordiale treaty of April 1904. The renewed partnership enabled France to establish a protectorate over most of Morocco, despite German protests, in 1912.

By 1913, France's new empire extended over 11,000,000 square kilometers. But its population outside the metropole stood at less than 50 million, against 400 million for the British Empire. Although the matter is disputed, the empire's contribution to the French economy appeared modest: despite territorial expansion, the share of colonies in French foreign trade only grew from 5 to 10 percent between 1870 and 1913. As a result of the collapse of French trade with the rest of the world during the Great Depression, this share would rise to 30 percent in the 1930s. But exports to the colonies increasingly relied on public subsidies or investments, confirming the prevailing view of the empire's economic role as buttressing the most uncompetitive sectors of the French economy. Only a few mining concerns in North Africa and rubber plantations in Indochina proved valuable sources of raw materials.^[2245] But apart from Algeria, where formal annexation by France resulted in exorbitant fiscal costs, nor did the empire prove a significant burden: colonial expenditure, two-thirds of which was of a military nature, did not exceed 7 percent of the French state's average expenditure between 1880 and 1913, and net transfers to the colonies remained well below 1 percent of the metropolitan GDP.^[2246] Despite the grandiloquent rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice, investment in education and infrastructures remained low, and the vast federations of Afrique Occidentale, Afrique Equatoriale, and Indochine under-administered, with for instance less than 500 French officials to govern the 5,000,000 square kilometers of Afrique Occidentale Fran^aise.

In most colonies, collaboration with the indigenous elite remained crucial to the government of the empire.

The empire also made a substantial, if not decisive contribution to France's war effort in 1914-1918, with 600,000 soldiers from the colonies making up 7 percent of French fighting forces and 200,000 colonial subjects working in metropolitan factories. Victory over Germany and the Ottoman Empire resulted in new colonial acquisitions in areas of traditional influence (Lebanon, Syria) and Africa (Togo and part of Cameroon). A brief moment of imperial hubris followed, as France seemed to have recovered its predominance on the European continent and plans were drawn up to use the expected German reparations to finance the mise en valeur (economic development) of the overseas empire. The financial difficulties of the 1920s dispelled these illusions, although the rise of imperial consciousness in politics and culture helped to mask the resurgence of the German threat: in 1931, a colonial exhibition held in Paris attracted eight million visitors. In retrospect, however, the interwar period appears more remarkable for the outbreak of the first anti-colonial insurgencies in Syria, Morocco, and Indochina in the mid- 1920s, and the rise of protests against the broken promises of republican universalism. Aime Cesaire, Ho Chi Minh, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Habib Bourguiba began to articulate their radical critiques of colonialism as students and activists in interwar Paris.^[2247]

The Second World War confirmed that France's republican empire was not a serious contender for global domination, but rather a more or less useful auxiliary of the British Empire (until 1940, and after that date for the colonies that rallied to Charles De Gaulle's Free French) or of the would-be Nazi empire (the Vichy option between 1940 and 1944). After the Allies' victory, the Fourth Republic, a resurrection of the Third, sought to consolidate the empire with a combination of political reforms, investments in infrastructures and the brutal repression of insurgencies in Madagascar, Indochina, and North Africa.

This costly strategy proved unsustainable and a series of military and political setbacks brought about the dislocation of the empire in just eight years, between 1954 and 1962. The humiliation of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the embarrassment of Suez in 1956, and the Algerian quagmire also brought about the collapse of the republican regime and its substitution by the monarchical type of republic invented by De Gaulle in 1958. The Gaullist regime quickly recognized that the costs of formal empire now outweighed the benefits. It also had sufficient authority to impose a more peaceful—if sometimes perfunctory—process of decolonization in Sub-Saharan Africa in 1960 on the army and the independence of an Arab Algeria on recalcitrant European settlers in 1962.

The rapid economic growth of the 1960s—France grew faster than any other OECD country apart from Japan—facilitated the integration of1.5 million refugees from the empire and accelerated immigration from the country's former colonies. It also confirmed that the formal empire had not been vital to modern French economic development. Finally, decolonization facilitated the reorientation of France's geopolitical ambitions toward a partnership with Germany in the context of European integration. But it would be a semantic exaggeration to describe the European Union as a new French Empire, especially as the balance of power within it has tilted ever more toward Germany since the 1990s.

Even though French imperial ventures often proved ephemeral or disappointing, France's large domestic resources and relentless ambitions made it an important laboratory of the reconfiguration of modern European empires, from their predatory guise in the mercantilist era to a more developmental model after the midnineteenth century. The relentlessness of French imperial efforts also underlines the intimate connection between attempts at global empire-building and the gradual emergence of the modern nation-state in Europe. Successful imperial expansion facilitated the consolidation of the central state, whereas imperial setbacks, from the late eighteenth century until the aftermath of the Second World War, were major factors of domestic instability. The history of French imperial efforts demonstrates that the rise of the modern nation-state was not an alternative to empire, but a form of reorganization of the central power base designed to permit new forms of imperial expansion.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

The Republican Empire

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