The French Colonialist Movement during the Third Republic: the Unofficial Mind of Imperialism

Abstract

British colonial expansion, it has been argued, was governed during the nineteenth century by the workings of the official mind. French colonial expansion was not. The official mind of French imperialism was slow to develop and at best half-formed. The first steps in the creation of the modern French Empire under the July Monarchy and Napoleon III followed no grand design or strategic obsession. Empire-building in Africa, Indo-China and the South Pacific proceeded instead by a series of fits and starts of whose significance successive governments were usually unaware. When the Third Republic embarked on colonial expansion in the 1880s, its policies proved almost as incoherent as those of precedessors. Intervention in Tunisia was swiftly followed by refusal to intervene in Egypt; a forward policy in Indo-China was first accepted, then violently rejected; in West Africa Army officers carved out a private empire on their own initiative. After 1880, however, French expansion at last acquired a clear sense of direction. French imperialism, in its final phase from 1890 to 1920, consciously pursued and substantially achieved a series of imperial grand designs; the unification of France's African Empire in the 1890s; the completion of Frenćh North Africa by the Moroccan protectorate in the early twentieth century; the acquisition of a Middle Eastern Empire and German West Africa during the First World War. These grand designs, however, were the product not of the official but of the unofficial mind of French imperialism. That unofficial mind forms the subject of this paper.