The Transformation of the World (96 page)

In October 1813 the Napoleonic Empire ended on the battlefields near Leipzig. France's nineteenth-century overseas empire, launched in 1830 by the conquest of Algiers (a typical opportunist diversion from internal political difficulties), was a completely new venture.
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As there is often talk of a first and a second British Empire, separated from each other by American independence in 1783, so we might differentiate four French empires:

▪
 a first, ancien régime empire, mainly covering the Caribbean, which ended at the latest with Haiti's independence in 1804; strongly mercantilist in its political outlook, weakly based on emigration, and built on slave labor;

▪
 a second, Napoleonic empire, consisting of
France-Europe
conquered in a series of lightning wars;

▪
 a third, colonial empire, built after 1830 on the slender foundation of the colonies returned to France in 1814–15 (e.g., Senegal) and dominated until the 1870s by Algeria; and

▪
 a fourth empire, involving expansion of the third empire, which was now global in reach and, from the 1870s to the 1960s, had its geographical centers of gravity in North Africa, West Africa, and Indochina.

What remains today from this fourfold history are, of all things, remnants of the first empire: above all the overseas
départements
of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which are integral parts of the European Union. The post-Napoleonic empires were from beginning to end responses to the British Empire, never managing to extricate themselves from its shadow. The invasion of Algeria, easy to sell
internationally as a punitive operation against a rogue state of Muslim pirates and kidnappers, was an attempt to intervene in a power vacuum that Britain had not yet picked out for itself. True, the British had controlled Gibraltar since 1713, confined Napoleon's navy to the Mediterranean, and held the island of Malta as a de facto possession since 1802 and as a crown colony and naval base since 1814. Nevertheless, until their occupation of Egypt in 1882 they had no other colonial interests in the region. Politicians and the public in France suffered for a long time from the trauma of their country's second-rank position in imperial geopolitics.

By other measures, however, France's colonial expansion was very successful. Its overseas empire, though far behind the British, was the second-largest in the nineteenth century. But territorial figures (9.7 million square kilometers in 1913 compared with the British 32.3 million
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) are somewhat misleading on their own, since the latter figure includes the dominions and the former the uninhabited wastes claimed by Algeria. On the eve of the First World War, the British had important possessions on
all
continents, the French only in northern Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco), western and central Africa, Madagascar, Southeast Asia (Indochina, i.e., Vietnam and Cambodia from 1887, plus Laos from 1896), the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Martinique), the South Seas (Tahiti, Bikini, etc.), and South America (French Guyana). France's colonial interests in Asia did not reach significantly beyond Indochina. In eastern and southern Africa it had no greater presence than in North America or Australia. And even in Africa, where French possessions were most numerous, Britain had the advantage of holding colonial positions on both the west and east coast all the way from Egypt to the Cape of Good Hope, together with the important Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

Later conquests never dislodged Algeria from its number one place among French colonies. Chronologically, the Algerian story fits into a wider periodization. The original invasion met well-organized resistance under the leadership of Emir Abd al-Qadir (1808–83), who from 1837 to 1839 managed to maintain an Algerian counterstate with its own judicial and fiscal systems.
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As was so often the case in the history of European imperialism (and of the North American frontier), the aggressors carried the day only because the indigenous forces were disunited. After four years of captivity following his capitulation in 1847, Abd al-Qadir was shown some respect as a “noble enemy” for the rest of his life—a fate similar to that of Shamil, the (in many respects) comparable leader of the anti-Russian resistance in the Caucasus.

While the conquest of Algeria was proceeding, the number of French and other (mainly Spanish and Italian) emigrants to the country shot up from 37,000 in 1841 to 131,000 ten years later.
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Most of them did not become agrarian pioneers but settled down in the cities. Although the conquest of Algeria had begun at a time when the only other part of Africa with European settlers was the far south—it coincided with the Great Trek of the Boers—the 1880s were as much
a watershed for the French colony in the north as for the rest of the continent. Napoleon III, an imperialist adventurer in Asia and Mexico, had never fully indulged the settlers' thirst for power and, at least on paper, had recognized the Algerian tribes as the owners of the land. But after the end of the Second Empire in 1870, this constraint ceased to apply. The French republic, unlike the British colonial power in the Cape, gave the
colons
a free hand in building their state, so that the 1870s and 1880s—after the brutal suppression of the last great Algerian rising in 1871–72—witnessed extensive land transfers through punitive expropriation, legislative measures, or judicial deception. The number of Europeans in Algeria climbed from 280,000 in 1872 to 531,000 twenty years later. Whereas the Second Empire had banked on private corporations to open up the country, the Third Republic propagated the model of farmers owning their own land. The aim was to produce a copy of rural France in the new colonial space.

There was no such thing as a typical European colony. Algeria was not one either, but it did play a major role in the emotional economy of the mother country and was at the origin of a new confrontation between Europe and the Islamic world; scarcely any other colony showed such disregard for the interests of indigenous people. Both logistically and historically, North Africa was not really “overseas” as far as Europe was concerned, and colonial apologists would exploit to the full the fact that it had been part of the Imperium Romanum. The sharpness of the clash with Islam in Algeria was paradoxical, because no other country than France has had closer and better contacts with the Islamic world in modern times.
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In neighboring Morocco, moreover, the resident-general after 1912, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, conducted a conservative policy of minimal intervention in native society and knew how to curb the influence of the relatively small number of settlers.
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A second paradox is that despite their strong local position, the Algerian
colons
did not display the normal settler impulse of seeking political independence. Unlike their British counterparts in North America, Australia, or New Zealand, they did not try create a “dominion” type of state. Why not?

First
, the settlers' weak demographic position meant that right until the end they were dependent on French military protection. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, by contrast, could rely on their own security forces by 1870 or thereabouts.
Second
, from 1848 on Algeria was legally not a colony but a part of the French state, whose high degree of centralism allowed no scope for political autonomy or intermediate status of any kind. The result was more a tribal than a national consciousness among French Algerians, comparable to that of the Protestant British in Northern Ireland. On the other hand, Algeria was more marked by indigenous nationalism than almost any other European colony. After the humiliating French defeat in the war of 1870–71 with Prussia, it became an important arena of national regeneration through colonization.
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Third
, the Algerian colonial economy remained both dependent and precarious, being organized after 1870 mainly in small enterprises and with no reliable export other
than wine—whereas the British dominions had large companies producing and exporting cereals, wool, and meat.

With the exception of Algeria, the French colonial empire got off to a late start. Only with the extensive conquests in western Africa, and eastward from there in what are now Mali, Niger, and Chad, did it create a territorial basis for competition with the British Empire. But in 1898, when colonial troops of the two powers clashed at Fashoda on the Upper Nile, the French retreat expressed the real relationship of forces. The African savannah belt offered little economically, whereas Vietnam proved from the beginning to be a productive colony ripe for exploitation. In the long process through which the three components of Vietnam (Cochin China, Annam, and Tonkin) lost their independence, the decisive year would be 1884. But even afterward resistance continued on a considerable scale, and it was only at the turn of the century that Vietnam and the other two parts of Indochina could be said to have been “pacified.” In the next four decades Indochina became the main imperial turf for banks, mining companies, and agribusiness. Yet here too, there were limits to colonial economic influence: for example, it never became possible to replace the silver piastre and other local currencies with the French franc, so that Indochina, like China, remained on a silver standard that was exposed to major fluctuations.
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For this reason—and also because of underdevelopment of the credit sector—the diversified activities of French banks were a symptom not only of aggressive finance imperialism but also of serious adjustment problems. Of all the French colonies, Indochina brought in the greatest yield for private businesses, both from exports and from the relatively large market in a densely populated region. Moreover, Vietnam had direct links with Marseille and functioned as a base for French economic interests in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Siam, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. A source of high profits for individual companies, Indochina also helped French capitalism in general to prosper.
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All in all, the French colonies were much less integrated than those of the British into the global system of the time. With the exception of Algeria, there was no significant movement of settlers from France; nor was Paris comparable to London as a center for the international movement of capital. The largest capital flows anyway went not to the colonial empire but to Russia, followed by Spain and Italy. France was also very active in lending to the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and China, where much of the credit helped to develop outlets for French industry (especially weapons production) as well as to express an independent finance imperialism. Even less than in the British case did the geography of France's financial interests coincide with its formal empire; it did not have a tradition of overseas colonies comparable to those of England or the Netherlands. Until after the First World War, the French public showed relatively little interest in such matters; small lobbies—especially the colonial army and navy and geographers—were therefore a strong force in shaping colonial policy. On the other hand, there was less criticism of colonialism and imperialism in France
than in Britain. In the 1890s a social consensus developed around the view that colonies were good for the nation, and that they provided an excellent opportunity to deploy its cultural prowess and
mission civilisatrice
.
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The political sterility of French imperialism is quite astonishing. The land of
citoyens
exported no democracy, most of its colonial regimes were exceptionally authoritarian, and later decolonization was relatively smooth only in West Africa. The early history of French expansion also involved far more frequent mistakes than those committed by the British. In 1882 Britain's success in snatching Egypt from under the noses of the French was an especially cruel blow. The main cultural effect of French expansion was the spread of the French language, with especially long-lasting results in western Africa. Otherwise, assimilation was left open for few members of the newly developing educated classes in the colonies, and the cultural change expected of them was extremely radical. Since this did not give rise to a genuinely integrative imperial culture, the French empire could not later develop into a looser structure along the lines of the British Commonwealth.

Colonies without Imperialism

There was also colonial possession without empire. An extreme case in point was the Belgian Congo (France had its own Congo-Brazzaville, created when the adventurer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza raised the flag on its behalf in 1880
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); it was only in 1908, after innumerable atrocities were uncovered, that the Belgian government took over responsibility for the territory from King Leopold II—or, in the language of international law, annexed it. Leopold was one of the most ruthless and ambitious imperialists of the age. The Congo under his rule was not even minimally developed: it was a pure object of exploitation. All kinds of violence and arbitrary action forced a defenseless population into hard labor to produce extremely high quotas of export goods such as rubber and ivory. The profits flowed into the pockets of the king and into public buildings that still adorn Belgian cities. The Welsh journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who in 1877 became the first European to cross Africa from east to west at the level of the Congo, later worked for Leopold II and organized armed expeditions that at first met with little resistance. From 1886 the Force Publique, an exceptionally brutal army of African mercenaries later supplemented by locally recruited warriors, was responsible for order in the Congo, while in the east of the country it fought Swahili slave dealers (often called “Arabs”) in bloody operations that caused tens of thousands of deaths. The actual state apparatus, in the euphemistically named Congo Free State, was therefore extremely rudimentary, and Belgian settlers were few and far between; neither did the large concession companies that subsequently shared out the wealth of the Congo provide significant employment for Belgians. As for the Africans, they scarcely came into the field of vision of the whites, virtually none of them—unlike in the French or British empire—receiving higher education in the “mother country.” Cultural
transfers in either direction were close to zero.
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Since Belgium's overseas interests were so slight, it played scarcely any role in high-level imperialist diplomacy, being a significant factor at most in the financing of the Chinese railroads.