When Leon Leconte beat, blinded and threatened to kill Chief Tieou he had little reason to fear recrimination.

In 1908, at the time of the attack, Leconte's father was one of the richest and most powerful Frenchmen in the Pacific colony of New Caledonia. Both father and 29-year-old son had, as the governor of the possession put it, ‘reputations for brutality' as well as records of beating and injuring local residents stretching back nearly twenty years.

As Chief Tieou told the story, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, he was walking into the village of Kone, in the north of the island, on his way to pay his tribe's taxes when Leconte assailed him without saying a word. Leconte knocked him to the ground and kicked him, cutting his head and right eye, covering the chiefs face in blood. Tieou fled his assailant, escaping to a nearby river to wash his wounds. But Leconte found him and attacked again, this time chasing him into the river, yelling, ‘Give me a knife and I'll kill him.' Tieou would not be caught; he swam across the river to the opposite bank, and ran to a nearby village. A Kanak witness named Levi saw the altercation but did not get involved for fear of being beaten himself. ‘Leconte', Levi later explained, ‘is the terror of the country.'^{[811] [812]}

When interrogated by the local gendarme, Leconte felt no obligation to say anything at all about the affair. A few days later, Leconte tried to convince Tieou to retract his complaint, but the chief, who would be left incapacitated for a month and permanently blinded in one eye, refused. Leconte soon appeared in court in the capital, Noumea, with his attorney who happened also to be a high-ranking administrator in the district.

Leconte's attack on Chief Tieou was not an uncommon event in the modern French empire. Many French civilians - be they settlers, merchants or travellers - believed beating, kicking and verbally abusing non-Europeans to be an expected, and even necessary, part of daily colonial life. Africans, Asians and Pacific Islanders in the empire lived at the bottom of a social hierarchy defined by race, class and social status. As in the Jim Crow American South, many colonial subjects were systematically kept in positions of political and economic weakness by laws that excluded them from govern­ment decisions, tax schemes that pushed many from subsistence to misery, and labour expectations that made it impossible for them to produce enough food for their own consumption. In everyday social interactions, their sub­servience to white settlers and officials was punctuated by acts that could run the broad gamut from verbal abuse to murder. Colonial populations were left wondering why, as one African subject put it in 1922, when ‘blacks and whites are the children of the French republic', they were exposed to the most degrading humiliations.^[816]

That colonialism is synonymous with violence has become a truism, so much so that it is tempting to see the colonial world, to quote Frantz Fanon, ‘cut in two'.

Acts of violence carried out by non-state actors - that is, by European settlers, merchants and travellers like Leon Leconte in New Caledonia - remain far less explored in the historiography of French colonialism. In important ways, brutality perpetrated by non-state actors helped perpetuate the Manichean dynamics of colonialism so powerfully described by Fanon and others. Such violence helped harden the racial, political and social hierarchy of coloniser and colonised. The prevalence of violence suggests that quotidian brutality was central to settlers' sense of power and identity in regions where they felt under constant threat from larger non-European populations.

But the ways in which civilians mistreated colonial subjects often differed starkly from the state's efforts to legitimate its own use of violence in military, administrative and judicial capacities. As the Leconte case makes clear, in possessions where subjects greatly outnumbered white colonists, daily acts of violence were potentially threatening to the colonial adminis­tration. They undermined administrative control of French citizens and destabilised what were often delicate balances of power between officials and subject populations. Equally important, uncontrolled violence jeopar­dised the central rhetorical claim that colonisation brought rationalism and civilisation to allegedly less-developed societies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Such issues were brought increasingly to the fore in the interwar years when internationalist organisations increasingly scrutinised the treatment of colonial subjects in all European empires.^[819]