Violence and Everyday Colonial Life

The men, women and children who lived under French rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were reminded daily of their infer­iority to Europeans. The very language of the ‘civilising mission', with its promises of transforming backward, unclean ‘savages' into educated, moral human beings, made inequality the basis of all colonial relations and the chief justification of European rule.

While it is possible to find many descriptions of quotidian violence in published and archival sources, there is good reason to believe that the number of specific cases of abuse reported represent only a fraction of the incidents of violence that occurred. The mainstream press rarely picked up stories of whites harming Indigenous men, women and children, even when incidents were publicised in the radical press or by organisations like the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, France's premier defender of civil rights. A perusal of major colonial newspapers leaves the reader assuming that the empire was the exclusive domain of progress and civilisation. Memoirs written by those who defended colonial expansion, such as merchants, officials and soldiers, rarely reflected on Indigenous suffering. For mistreated Indigenous men and women, as well as white men and women who found the abuse unacceptable, little good resulted from reporting incidents. Africans, Asians and Pacific Islanders who reported cruelty at best found the administration unresponsive, and at worst could be imprisoned or further abused.

While the pressure to ignore abuses against non-Europeans was intense, there is also evidence that whites in the empire grew immune to even disturbing scenes of violence. Across the empire in the early twentieth century, for example, postcard producers not only capitalised on the exoti­cism of the ‘Orient' and the grandeur of colonial facades; they also sought profit by producing ‘real photo' images of killed rebels and bombed-out pirate dens. In Indochina, following the 1908 campaign against the legendary anti-colonial fighter De Tham in Indochina, Pierre Dieulefils, one of the colony's most prolific postcard makers, produced a series of images, ranging from half-starved conspirators captured to the executed bodies of the con­demned. Dieulefils's cheap, mass-produced postcards mirrored those gaining popularity in the USA that depicted the lynching of African Americans. Both types of photos emphasised the total vulnerability of non-whites to white violence and social and political power.^{[820] [821]} A final indignity could be levelled with a trifling salutation scribbled by the sender. On the back of one particularly graphic image of the severed head of a ‘pirate', a Frenchman wrote to a loved-one at home with a succinct, if startling, nonchalance: ‘I haven't forgotten you. A thousand kisses.'11

If cultural artefacts offer only suggestive evidence of French attitudes towards colonial violence, official reports, newspaper articles and travellers' accounts provided more detailed descriptions. In the more remote and understaffed colonies, where white settlers and businessmen were furthest from the administration's view, evidence of the mistreatment of Indigenous people was often vague but suggestive.

Even in a colony like Indochina, which many Frenchmen considered to possess an ancient and refined culture, colonial subjects were exposed to the pettiest mistreatment. White Frenchmen demanded to be treated with formality, regardless of their rank. Vietnamese of all ages and grades were expected by many Frenchmen to bow and tip their hats in their presence. Regardless of their accomplishments, the Vietnamese were addressed as ‘tu' by even the lowliest French fonctionnaire and regularly excluded from white people's homes.^[823] When shopping, whites believed they had the right to be served before Vietnamese customers. Even wealthy Vietnamese elites could be made to feel unwelcome in more exclusive stores, restaurants and hotels.

Felicien Challaye, an outspoken critic of colonial rule, was struck by the variety of mistreatment he witnessed in Indochina. In 1901, Challaye encountered a well-dressed and cultivated Vietnamese administrator arriv­ing home from a trip to France.

The most regularly mistreated non-Europeans were probably domestic servants. Regardless of the employee's age, the French used the English term ‘boy' to describe their menservants. For Challaye, ‘boys' appeared to be the white man's punching bag of choice. ‘I constantly see the Frenchman - stricken by the heat, absinth, opium - beating the indigenous domestic who poorly executed an order poorly given in a language poorly understood.’^[825] The activist Camille Drevet noted with horror that her hotel in Phnom Penh found it necessary to hang a sign warning clients that it was prohibited to beat the servants.^[826] Indeed, the governor general of Indochina ultimately felt it necessary to publish a circular outlawing the beating of the Indigenous population, though there is no evidence it was ever enforced.^{[827] [828] [829]} The poet and travel writer Luc Durtain witnessed similar behaviour.

Such mistreatment of servants was not only to be found in Indochina. A Frenchman in Equatorial Africa reported that the lieutenant governor of that colony had beaten his ‘boy’ to the point of unconsciousness, the servant’s body covered in blood. Though rumours swirled, the real reason for the attack was unknown; the ‘boy’ had served many other civil servants and had always received high marks.1⁹ This fragmentary piece of news is hauntingly reminiscent of the Cameroonian writer Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy (1956). In the novel, Toundi, the main character, is beaten to death essentially for knowing too much about the infidelity of his employer’s wife - a fact he could not help but learn working in her house.

Whether discussing assaults on elites or servants, reports of such daily humiliation did not come simply from appalled Frenchmen. Indigenous people across the empire expressed their own resentment of the treatment they received. In 1916, for example, a group of eight educated men from Gabon protested their treatment in a letter to the president of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in Paris. ‘The negre before the white man’, they com­plained, ‘is considered a bestial being.’ Some Europeans, including colonial officials, acted terrified of blacks, refusing to receive them in their offices or homes for fear, it seemed, of getting fleas or disease. One administrator, the men wrote, denied Africans the most basic courtesies: he refused to hold any afternoon meetings because, he said, at that hour ‘it was too hot to speak to blacks'. Such offensive behaviour came on top of beatings, injuries and other insults. The men, showing the extent to which racial hierarchies in the colonies could be internalised by Indigenous people, simply wanted appro­priate treatment: ‘Our desire is not to be equal to the European, but we desire certain improvements of our lot.'^[830]

The lieutenant governor of Gabon responded to the eight men's com­plaints in typical fashion: he brushed over the specifics of the claims with civilising rhetoric and patriotic flourishes.