The French Colonial Party and French Colonial War Aims, 1914–1918

Abstract

For the first two years of the war the French government drew up no programme of its war aims. When the cabinet began to consider its aims in Europe during the summer of 1916, it still avoided serious discussion of war aims overseas. Faced with the overwhelming preoccupations of the Western Front, the government paid little heed to the future of the Empire. Such war aims as France possessed outside Europe by the time of the armistice were arrived at in two ways: first, by ad hoc agreenebts with her allies in the Middle East and in West Africa, agreements forced on the government by the course of the war; secondly, by a commission d'étude established in 1918 to prepare for the peace conference, a commission from which ministers were excluded. The colonial war aims that emerged in these two separate ways were the product not of the French cabinet but of the parti colonial and its sympathizers within the foreign and colonial ministries.