One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The “Assimilation” Theory in French Colonial Policy

Abstract

During World War II, Jacques Stern, a former French Minister of Colonies, wrote almost lyrically of the “patient labor of assimilation” by which France had been “consolidating the moral and material ties which bind together forty million continental Frenchmen and sixty million overseas Frenchmen, white and colored” in the French Empire. When the Brazzaville Conference met in 1944 under the auspices of the Free French government to consider the postwar future of that empire, its final resolution declared that the aims of the work of colonization which France is pursuing in her colonies exclude any idea of autonomy and any possibility of development outside the French empire bloc; the attainment of self-government in the colonies even in themost distant future must be excluded.