Empire and Culture: The French Experience, 1830-1940

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Empire and Culture The French Experience, 1830-1940

Edited by Martin Evans

Empire and Culture

Empire and Culture The French Experience, 1830–1940 Edited by

Martin Evans

Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 1 © Martin Evans 2004 Chapters 2–12 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–79181–9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evans, Martin 1964– Empire and culture: the French experience, 1830–1940 / Martin Evans. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–79181–9 (cloth) 1. France–Colonies–History. 2. Imperialism–Social aspects. 3. Politics and culture–France–History. I. Title. JV1811.E9 2004 909’.09712440821–dc22 2003063298 10 13

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Preface

vii

Notes on the Contributors

x

1

1

Culture and Empire, 1830–1962: An Overview Martin Evans

Part I Film 2

Poor Propaganda: French Colonial Films of the 1930s Martin O’Shaugnessy

27

3

Un de la Légion: Myth Conception and Misconceptions Marie-Hélène Heurtaud-Wright

41

Part II Photography 4

Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography David Bate

57

5

Documents against Civilization David Evans

71

Part III Food, Music and Dance 6

7

8

Indigestible Indo-China: Attempts to Introduce Vietnamese Food into France in the Interwar Period Erica Peters

91

The ‘Ballet blanc et noir’: A Study of Racial and Cultural Identity during the 1931 Colonial Exhibition Dana Hale

103

‘Frenchmen in Disguise’: French Musical Exoticism and Empire in the Nineteenth Century Tom Cooper

113

Part IV Promoting the French Empire 9

Making Indo-China French: Promoting the Empire through Education Nicola Cooper v

131

vi Contents

10 The Empire and the Nation: The Place of Colonial Images in the Republican Visions of the French Nation Timothy Baycroft

148

11 Portrait of the Young Woman as a Coloniale Marie-Paule Ha

161

12 ‘All the World’s a Stage’, Especially in the Colonies: L’Exposition de Hanoi, 1902–3 Michael G. Vann

181

Bibliography

192

Index

204

Preface During the nineteenth century France acquired a huge empire, second in size only to Britain. Between 1880 and 1895 alone French colonial possessions expanded from 1.0 to 9.5 million square miles and by the time of the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in May 1931 this empire, now ofﬁcially referred to as Greater France, was said to be made up of 110 million people across the globe. 1 Beginning with Hobson and Lenin the economics of empire has been a subject of huge research for historians. The commercial motivations for imperialism and the links with a speciﬁc stage in the western world’s level of capitalist development have been endlessly debated.2 Only recently, however, have historians begun to turn their attention to the complex relationship between imperialism and culture. In this respect the work of the Palestinian cultural historian, Edward Said, has been absolutely crucial. Through a series of books, but most importantly with Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, he has analysed the modern western empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 In particular he has looked at the novel which, he argues, was immensely important in western culture in the formation of imperial attitudes, references and experiences. As Said puts it: The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future – these issues were reﬂected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. As one critic has suggested, nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.4 Taking Said’s arguments as a starting point, this volume explores the impact of the colonial encounter on French culture between 1830, the year of the invasion of Algeria, and 1940, the year of the fall of France, an event which fatally undermined the idea of French invincibility across the empire. Above all, however, the chapters within this volume will focus on the 1920s and 1930s when, because of the additions of vii

viii Preface

the ex-German colonies of Togo and the Cameroons, along with the former Ottoman possessions of Syria and the Lebanon (which meant that the empire reached its height territorially speaking), the Third Republic went to enormous lengths to make Greater France an integral part of metropolitan culture. Within Imperialism and Culture Said examines the novel. In this volume the contributors will be exploring other cultural forms such as ﬁlm, photography and dance. As such the notion of culture as a key word will be used in four speciﬁc ways. First, there will be the impact on lived culture or day-to-day French life. How did the experience of imperialism transform food, cooking, music and language? Second, there will be the representations of the empire within culture. How was empire represented in ﬁlm and photography? How did the notion of empire become part of the French cultural imagination? Third, there will be the impact of empire upon the ofﬁcial culture. How did the Third Republic between 1870 and 1940 promote the imperial idea to the French populace through schools and popular exhibitions? How did the political elite try to map out a world view whereby French people conceived of themselves as being at the centre of a superior culture whose manifest destiny was to civilize the rest of the world?5 Finally there is the notion of the counter-culture. How did the opponents of empire, such as the surrealists, produce alternative ways of looking at colonialism? In understanding culture this volume does not see culture as a crude reﬂection of economics. As Said argues: ‘I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class, or economic history, but authors are, I also believe, very much in the histories of their own societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in different measure.’6 In this sense cultural analysis is about revealing a precise web of connections, decisions and collaborations which link culture and empire. This volume, therefore, is made up of eleven such snapshots which are divided into the following four parts. The ﬁrst part looks at ﬁlm; the second part at photography; the third part at food, dance and music; whilst the ﬁnal part examines the way in which empire was promoted within ofﬁcial political culture. This book originates from a conference on the same theme which was held at the French Institute in London in September 1997 and organized by the Francophone Research Group at the University of Portsmouth. As such it is part of an ongoing research project assessing the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism in French history.7 I would like, therefore, to thank the French Institute which hosted the original conference and the Centre for European Studies Research at

Preface ix

Portsmouth which has generously supported the completion of this project. Importantly too I would like to thank all the contributors for their cooperation and scholarship, as well as Luciana O’Flaherty who has been patient throughout the lengthy gestation period of this book. At the same time I would like to thank Emmanuel Godin and Tony Chafer who have given me so much encouragement over the years. Finally I would like to dedicate this book to Georges Mattéi, who died in 2000. Notes and References 1 See Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France, 1871–1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972) and Stuart Michael Persell, The French Colonial Lobby (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983). See also Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1996). 2 On the French case see Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français: histoire d’un divorce (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986). 3 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). 4 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 8. 5 Here it is important to understand the connections between all three, So the Third Republic leaders could draw upon the notion of French achievements in novel writing and the advancement of scientiﬁc ideas as evidence of a superior culture. Similarly in 1931 the government produced a set of stamps glorifying the empire to coincide with the Colonial Exhibition of May 1931. As such they are examples of ofﬁcially commissioned representations of the empire which were then used on a day-to-day basis to send letters. 6 Culture and Imperialism, p. 24. 7 The other books published as part of this project are Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, The Popular Front and the French Empire (London: Macmillan, 1996) and Martin Alexander, Martin Evans and John Keiger, The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954–62 (London: Macmillan, 2002).

Notes on the Contributors David Bate is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster, London, where he teaches photography. He has written widely on photography, its history and criticism and contributed to several books on photography including The Photography Reader. His own book Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent was published in 2004. His photographic exhibition works have also been exhibited internationally in contemporary galleries. Timothy Baycroft is Lecturer in Modern French History at the University of Shefﬁeld. He is the author of Culture, Identity and Nationalism: French Flanders in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2004), and is co-editing a volume on European nationalism in the long nineteenth century. Nicola Cooper is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Bristol and works on French colonialism, post-colonialism and issues arising out of migration. She is the author of France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters (2001) and is currently working on a cultural history of the French Foreign Legion. Tom Cooper is Associate Lecturer in the Humanities at the Open University, and studied at the Royal College of Music and at Liverpool University. He has performed as a pianist in Britain, France, Iceland and the USA. David Evans teaches at the Arts Institute in Bournemouth. His publications include the catalogue raisonné John Heartﬁeld: AIZ/VI 1930–38 (1992) Martin Evans is Reader in Contemporary History at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War 1954–62 (1997) and the co-author of France 1815–2003 (2003). He is also the co-editor of War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (1997) and The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954–62 (2002). He is presently ﬁnishing a history of contemporary Algeria. He is a regular contributor to History Today.

x

Notes on the Contributors xi

Marie-Paule Ha is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Department at the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Figureing the East: Segalen, Malraux, Duras and Barthes (2000). Dana Hale is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Howard University in Washington, DC. She is completing a book on colonial propaganda and racial representations during the Third Republic. Her most recent publication is ‘French Images of Race on Product Trademarks during the Third Republic’, in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, edited by Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (2003). Marie-Hélène Heurtaud-Wright has her main research interest in the exploration of visual representations of the colonial enterprise (paintings, photographs, posters and ﬁlms) from a post-colonial and gender perspective. She has published a number of articles and essays on the topic and has a book in preparation on hybridity, masculinity and nostalgia in French colonial cinema of the 1930s. Erica Peters is Assistant Professor in History at University of Maryland University College. Martin O’Shaughnessy is Reader in French Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University. He has written widely on French cinema, is the author of Jean Renoir (2000) and is currently working on a book on the return of the political in post-1995 French cinema. Michael G. Vann, a specialist in racial formations in the colonial world, teaches French, European and Southeast Asian history at Santa Clara University and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A native of Honolulu, Hawaii, he received his PhD. from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is currently preparing his study of colonial white identity in French Hanoi for publication.

1 Culture and Empire, 1830–1962: An Overview Martin Evans

On 6 May 1931 France’s Colonial Exhibition ﬁnally opened at the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. Four years in the making, covering some 110 hectares, the vast scale of the project had created an eager sense of anticipation. People had been talking about the event for weeks and, as President Gaston Doumergue was driven from his residence to the main gate of the Exhibition, escorted by a squadron of colonial cavalry in full dress uniform, crowds cheered and clapped from the roadside. The motorcade was accompanied by a one-hundred gun salute and when Doumergue disembarked his entourage were visibly moved by this impressive display of imperial pageantry. Within the Great Hall, adorned with sumptuous frescos glorifying the empire, native troops mixed with dignitaries and colonial governors before taking their places for the opening addresses. In respectful silence they listened as successive speakers underlined the symbolic importance of the Exhibition. Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, the USA, Italy, The Netherlands and Portugal had all sent exhibits and, speaking on their behalf, Prince Lanza di Scalea, Mussolini’s minister of the colonies, was lavish in his praise. Claiming that the French Republic and Fascist Italy were engaged in a common ideological mission, he talked proudly of the ‘Homeric Odyssey of the white race, which, having now reaching every corner of the world, has transformed or is in the process of transforming, barbaric continents into civilized regions.’1 Warming to this theme, Paul Reynaud, France’s minister of colonies, explained that the aim was to make imperialism an integral part of the French consciousness. By laying out the overseas domains for popular consumption the intention was to widen horizons beyond Europe, producing a new national and cultural identity that was intimately connected to empire. In this precise sense the Exhibition was 1

2 Culture and Empire: An Overview

an emphatic statement about French culture. By marking the hundredth anniversary of the invasion of Algeria and the ﬁftieth anniversary of the annexation of Tunisia, the Third Republic wanted to demonstrate that France, through the possession of a superior way of life that stretched to every part of the globe, was one of a handful of nations that was worthy of having an empire. As such imperialism was an expression of France’s manifest historical destiny: to bring French values to rest of the world. The Colonial Exhibition, therefore, gave imperial expansion a sense of cohesion and purpose, although to project the empire as the product of such a grand design, where a nation was united behind the colonial mission, was nothing short of an invention. In truth the empire was acquired during the nineteenth century in a haphazard manner by a motley array of settlers, soldiers and fortune hunters. For some the motivation was economic exploitation, for some it was military glory, whilst for others it was a question of converting the heathen to Christianity.2 In each case they were largely acting upon their own initiative to the indifference of governments and public opinion. Only gradually did the political class come to see the management and expansion of empire as an essential part of state activity. Here a crucial step towards a consolidated vision was the creation in 1894 of a ministry for the colonies which brought the various strands of imperial policy under one roof in order to give it a clear sense of direction.3 The need to develop a coherent imperial policy became even more urgent during the First World War at which point the empire became a crucial source of soldiers and materials. In this way 1914–18 was a vital turning point because it led to a new awareness of empire. Thus in ofﬁcial circles there was the realization of the huge economic and military potential of empire, whilst on a popular level the imperial contribution to the war effort created a new bond between France and the colonies. The crux of this volume, therefore, is an exploration of the impact of the empire, annexed largely by accident, on French culture. For the majority of chapters the focus is upon the 1920s and the 1930s and here the Colonial Exhibition is a continual reference point because it was during this time that a consolidated vision, the notion of ‘Greater France’, emerged within the ofﬁcial culture. In each case the intention is to assess the cultural resonance of the imperial experience through the prism of particular snapshots, ranging from ﬁlms, such Pépé-leMoko, through to cooking, music and dance. As outlined in the Preface we will be using the word culture in four precise ways: lived culture; cultural representations; ofﬁcial culture; and counter-culture.

Martin Evans 3

However, whilst all the other chapters are concerned with precise snapshots, the purpose of this chapter is to provide the overall context. In giving this overview, which will frame the way in which we understand the relationship between empire and culture, it will be argued that the colonial experience is comprised of ﬁve phases. The ﬁrst phase, running roughly from 1798 to 1871 – (that is, from the Egyptian expedition to the Franco-Prussian War) – was marked by the acquisition of knowledge. Self-conﬁdence in the achievements of French culture, fusing with deeply embedded prejudices about Islam and the nonEuropean world, led to the elaboration of a whole set of theories and ideas, in particular the delineation of primitive and civilized cultures, that were subsequently used to legitimize the annexation of overseas territory. The second phase of 1871–1918 (that is, from the humiliation of the Franco–Prussian War to the end of the First World War, the point when the empire reached its height in terms of territory),4 is the moment when the acquisition of empire, which had already begun with the invasion of Algeria in 1830, really took off in what Eric Hobsbawm has characterized as the ‘age of empire’.5 The third phase, which ran from 1919 through to 1947, in other words from the Versailles Peace Treaty through to the beginning of the Indo-China War, was when the integration of empire into French culture became evident at all levels. The fourth phase from 1947 to 1962 was decolonization, which for France was to be a protracted and bloody disengagement from empire, whilst the ﬁnal, unﬁnished phase has been the creation, through the arrival of immigrants from the former colonies, of a post-colonial culture. Given that the Colonial Exhibition was an invented history that projected the empire as a coherent story of expansion, intimately connected to the French national genius, the whole enterprise has to be understood as a key episode in the relationship between France and the colonial ‘other’, a relationship that Edward Said has charted in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.6 In his analysis of the West and Islam Said shows how the distinction between the Orient and the West has served as a starting point within Western culture for art, poetry and literature, as well as a whole series of elaborate theories about history, sociology and economics. In doing so Said underlines the fact that this has never been a static relationship, but one that has gone through several historical phases. In the ﬁrst instance the dramatic rise of Islam during the seventh century AD as it expanded out of the Arabian peninsula and into North Africa and Europe was a huge psychological trauma for Christendom. In the century that followed the Prophet’s death in 632 AD the expansion of

4 Culture and Empire: An Overview

Islam was relentless. Muslim armies conquered Syria, Palestine, Persia and Egypt with lightning speed before expanding into North Africa and, in 711 AD, crossing over into Spain, overwhelming the Visigoths and breaching the Pyrenees before being repulsed at the battle of Poitiers in 732 AD. From that moment on, therefore, Christian Europe entered into a confrontation with Islam that was simultaneously cultural, religious and military. Constantly viliﬁed as the ‘other’, the image of Islam as the ‘dark’ villain that was about to overrun Christendom became deeply embedded within Western culture. From the Crusades, which were launched in France in 1098, through to the confrontation with the Ottoman empire across the Mediterranean during the sixteenth century Islam was seen as the enemy and here Muhammad was constantly seen as an impostor, a deadly rival to Christ in close alliance with Satan. So, prior to the nineteenth century, a network of cultural prejudices and meanings was already well established within France with the result that the desire to assert oneself against Islam was a key impulse for imperialists from Napoleon onwards. However, Said underlines the way in which this relationship between East and West underwent a seismic shift during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At this point Western Europe became the powerhouse of the world when the combination of technical innovation and economic power produced a dynamism that far exceeded anything previously known to humanity. The advent of the locomotive, and then later the telephone and the motor car, symbolized this new civilization based on technology and speed as Western Europe, but above all France and Britain, began to outstrip the Islamic world in industrial terms. Now a new power relationship emerged which moved irrevocably in favour of Britain and France. Signiﬁcantly too industrialization transformed the idea of Europe. Increasingly Europe was synonymous less with religion and much more with secular notions of science, cultural achievement and technological progress. In large part this was derived from the advent of the Enlightenment during the eighteenth century which, by championing reason and rational inquiry, had not only paved the way for industrialization but also undermined organized religion in the form of Catholic Church. In this way this secular Europe came to think of itself as the most advanced culture and the Orient, stigmatized as backward and inferior because it was deemed to be stuck at the feudal level of development, was seen as the ‘other’ to this brave new world based upon science and technology. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to talk of the nineteenth century as the European century. Western Europe was the centre of economic

Martin Evans 5

power and this achievement was used to justify imperialism. Industrialization and colonialism were seen as great steps forward for everybody without question. Together they represented the progress which everybody should aspire to and this meant that imperialism came to be seen as a duty and obligation because by building an empire the beneﬁts of civilization could be brought to the nonEuropean world. So partly through imperialism the nineteenth century witnessed the creation of a single global economy; a uniﬁed entity that reached into the remotest corners of the world. The upshot was a set of dense economic transactions which involved the movements of goods, money and people on an unprecedented scale, thereby dividing the world into the industrialized and the backward economies. Of course this division between European colonizers and their non-European colonized peoples was not a rigid dichotomy (across this division there were inumerable transactions and exchanges), but none the less at a fundamental level there was a strict social and cultural hierarchy between members of the dominant and members of the subject race. In Said’s view this new symmetry of power was to have profound impact upon culture and to understand this cultural correlative he points towards the signiﬁcance of Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian Expedition. For Said this was to prove to be a moment of enormous cultural signiﬁcance, not just for France’s but indeed Europe’s relationship with the rest of the world. Although the expedition was a military failure – Napoleon had hoped to cut off Britain’s supply route to India but instead he was forced into an ignominious withdrawal – its long-term cultural impact was profound. Teams of scientists and archaeologists accompanied the expedition in order to chart and measure the remnants of Egyptian culture, above all the Pyramids, and large numbers of these objects were transported back to France to be put into the museum at the Louvre where they were labelled and categorized. For Said such a process is a measure of a new self-conﬁdence: it assumes that French academics have the superior knowledge and understanding to categorize whole cultures in this way. By doing this, Said contends, they are making a statement about the hierarchy of cultures at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For the likes of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, who was the moving force behind the publication of a mammoth 24-volume account of the expedition’s ﬁndings, the Pyramids are to be admired because in their time they represented the pinnacle of civilization. But now their time has passed and their cultural achievements are in the past, a fact that is underlined by the way in which present day Egypt is brutal and uncivilized. In contrast French culture is the new centre of

6 Culture and Empire: An Overview

civilization because it is France that is now leading the forward march of history. Such assumptions framed the way in which the Egyptian pavilion was designed for the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, one in a long line of international exhibitions which now became a prominent feature of French culture, and within such exhibitions representations of the non-European world and French overseas possessions were increasingly central. So there were colonial sections within the World Fairs of 1878, 1889 and 1900, and Marseilles organized exhibitions about the empire in 1906 and 1920. In each case they were statements about imperial power relations as colonial cultures were ordered, ranked and objectiﬁed. Thus, in terms of how the French intellectual elite understood different cultures, there is a straight line between the 1798 Egyptian Expedition and the 1931 Colonial Exhibition. In the short term, though, Said points towards the relationship between the cultural assumptions of 1798 and the invasion of Algeria in June 1830, an event of enormous international signiﬁcance because this was the ﬁrst Arab country to annexed by the West and it thus set the pattern for the way in which the Arab world was to be carved up by Britain and France over the next hundred years7. Ostensibly the pretext for the invasion was revenge for an incident in 1827 when the Dey of Algiers, Khodja Hussein, incensed at the French refusal to repay loans from the Napoleonic wars, attacked the French consul with a ﬂy whisk, shouting: ‘You are a wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal.’ In reality the motivations were political, economic, religious and cultural. Politically, the Algerian adventure was a cynical attempt to divert attention away from Charles X’s weak and unpopular regime, and as such it failed dismally because his regime was overthrown shortly after with the July Revolution. Economically, French traders wanted to expand outwards from the trading posts which they had already established on the Algerian coast. For them Algeria was a terrain of untapped potential. It was supposedly a country of fabulous wealth, an image that was fuelled by the legend of the kasbah treasure, the gold that had been plundered over the previous three centuries by the pirates operating out of Algiers.8 Religiously, the Mediterranean was still seen as a zone of confrontation between Christians and Muslims and for this reason the invasion was trumpeted as a victory over Islam.9 Finally, there was the cultural dimension. Dynamic, modern, vibrant: France saw itself as a coherent nation state with a superior culture. In contrast the Ottoman regime was viewed as a non-state. In the ﬁrst instance it was a threat during the sixteenth century, principally because Algiers sponsored the corsairs that regularly attacked European shipping in the Mediterranean, but by the

Martin Evans 7

beginning of the nineteenth century the country had become chronically unstable. The Ottoman sultan was too weak to offer protection; the regime was no longer able to contain the strength of autonomous tribal groups; and the economy was increasingly falling under the domination of European ﬁnanciers. Not surprisingly Algeria was seen as an inviting target for colonization.10 The complex interrelationship between culture and imperialism is exempliﬁed by the French painter Eugène Delacroix’s visit to Algeria and Morocco in 1832 just two years after the French invasion. As the art historian Roger Benjamin has noted, his journey became the archetypal Orientalist experience, the one that set the agenda for subsequent artists such as Eugène Fromentin in 1846, Auguste Renoir in 1881 and Henri Matisse when they made their own voyages of discovery South and East.11 Even before the trip Delacroix had a set of pre-existing ideas about the Orient. The depiction of the East already had a prominent place in his output, notably Scenes from the massacres at Chios, ﬁrst exhibited in 1824 and based upon an incident from the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman empire. Within the painting, which depicts a Greek family about to be hacked down by a muscular and expressionless Ottoman horseman whilst in the background other half-naked Christian women are being dragged along by their hair, Delacroix’s sympathy for the Greek victims of Islamic violence was selfevident.12 For Delacroix the crux of the conﬂict was Christian heroism versus Ottoman barbarism and in trying to move his audience’s emotions in this manner many of the stock themes of the orientalist tradition are already clearly deﬁned. So the Orient is place of brutal bloodletting; it is a place where violence and the exotic are intertwined; and it is a place where despotism is the natural order of things. Eight years later Delacroix travelled to Morocco at the behest of the Comte de Mornay who wanted him to act as the artist accompanying his diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco. In the wake of the French invasion of 1830 France was seeking an alliance with Morocco. Thus Delacroix’s journey to a country that had been closed off to Europeans for centuries was now possible because he was able to travel under guard as part of a diplomatic mission. In this precise way it was bound up with imperial expansion because he was able to travel in territory that had been made secure by military conquest. The group was given safe passage from Tangier through to Meknès. He himself was overwhelmed by the aesthetics of North Africa, above all how the light differed from that of the North, and during the course of the whole trip he ﬁlled seven notebooks with hundreds of drawings and sketches.

8 Culture and Empire: An Overview

The most famous painting to result from the expedition was Women of Algiers in their apartment which was ﬁrst exhibited in 1834 and now hangs in the Louvre. The painting itself was of three French models dressed in North African costumes and based upon poses of Muslim women that he had sketched in Algiers, and it would be no exaggeration to say that it has become an iconic image in terms of the orientalist tradition. So if Delacroix’s aesthetic preoccupations are obvious (this being a seductive image dominated by effect of colour and light), so too are his cultural assumptions. This is a colonial gaze because, in portraying the Algerian women as submissive, sensual and inviting, he is implicitly saying that the country is a place of fertile riches and ripe therefore for colonization. This depiction of the Orient as lazy, indolent and incapable of selfadvancement now became the central aspect of the whole orientalist tradition from Jean-Léon Gérome to Henri Regnault. Within this way of looking the relationship between culture and conquest was selfevident because such stereotypes justiﬁed the French imperial mission. For example, the recurring portrayal of Arab market scenes where native women were being sold into slavery was about the projection of a basic male colonial fantasy. In essence such images assumed that native women welcomed colonization because they wanted to be saved from such oppression. As Rana Kabbani argues: Oriental males… are almost always portrayed as predatory ﬁgures in Orientalist painting. They are mostly shown as ugly or loathsome, in contrast to the women who are beautiful and voluptuous. This leaves the woman free for the abduction of the viewer’s gaze since she is not attached within the painting, being mismatched with a male who is her obvious inferior. Thus, she must desire to be saved from her fate in some way. By such projection, the European fantasised about the Eastern woman’s emotional dependency on him.13 The example of Delacroix points towards the way in which orientalism became a key aspect of French culture during the nineteenth century. Said himself underlines the way in which the period 1800–50 saw the elucidation of what he terms pre-ﬁgurative discourses, bodies of knowledge that then were used to justify the subsequent formal annexation. Consequently, Said argues, oriental studies formed an integral part of French material civilization: a way of seeing with its own supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship imagery and doctrines. The study of the Orient and its peoples and customs assumed a

Martin Evans 9

scientiﬁc status and this knowledge depended upon a positional superiority that put French people into a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing the upper hand. Scientists, traders, missionaries and painters could think about the Orient with very little resistance on the part of the Orient itself and this in turn produced a set of cultural assumptions that made huge generalizations both about France and the East. So the Orient became a laboratory for a whole series of theories about linguistics, racial theories and economics.14 The idea of the backward Orient straddled from Left to Right, and on these grounds Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels welcomed the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 because for them the rule of the bourgeois, bringing as it did the free market, was a victory for the impersonal historical forces that would eventually lead to socialism. Lacking the dynamism of capitalism Algerian society, in their opinion, was destined to die out because it was inherently static and despotic.15 Drawing upon the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said shows that although orientalist discourse might claim to represent the truth, in practice it was the product of a power relationship between the East and the West. Equally, Said is at pains to stress that culture is not some crude reﬂection of an economic base. Consequently when Said analyses Giuseppe Verdi’s majestic opera Aida, commissioned by the Egyptian ruler, Khedive Ismail, for the new opera house in Cairo which opened in November 1869 as part of the celebrations surrounding the completion of the Suez Canal, he wants to chart the precise circumstances of its commission and composition. He wants to reveal a network of interconnections and relationships that led to its eventual ﬁrst performance in December 1871. Speciﬁcally he underlines the vital contribution of the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette in supplying the ideas for the huge set piece scenes, who drew heavily upon the knowledge and information derived from the 1798 expedition, the signiﬁcance of which has already been underlined above.16 The result was an opera which, in recreating the French view of ancient Egypt, encapsulated the view that it was only this period of Egyptian history and culture which was worthy of consideration. To be properly understood, therefore, Aida has to be seen, like all forms of cultural production, as a ‘web of afﬁliations, connections, decisions and collaborations’ which in this case were shot through with assumptions about domination and control from gestation through to production.17 Overall, then, orientalism became a mechanism of ordering and sense making. It was a way of dividing up the world into those who have culture and those who do not; it was a network of cultural

10 Culture and Empire: An Overview

afﬁrmation and denigrations which put French civilization, with its national canon of great writers, thinkers, and scientists, at the centre of the world. In turn this gave France the moral right to appropriate and exploit virgin territories that were being wasted by the natives; to open up the world to the global economy; and to elevate others to the level of this superior culture.

Colonialism and the Third Republic, 1870–1940 By the time of the Colonial Exhibition in May 1931 the idea of empire, now termed Greater France, was a central aspect of the ofﬁcial political culture of the Third Republic.18 However, it is important to understand that for the ﬁrst 20 years of the Third Republic there was much opposition to the imperial enterprise within the political elite. Within socialist circles imperialism was seen as a capitalist plot to reap ever-greater proﬁts; whilst on the monarchist right colonialism was seen as the expression of Jewish ﬁnancial interests.19 Likewise, for somebody such as the conservative deputy Paul Déroulède, the major issue was return of the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine which had been humiliatingly handed over to the new united Germany after defeat in the Franco–Prussian war in 1870–1. In this sense colonial expansion was a wasteful exercise which was playing straight into German hands because, no matter how large the empire, this could not compensate for the lack of power on continental Europe. In reply the champions of colonialism, most notably Jules Ferry (who, as a member of the Republican governments between 1879 and 1885, was the driving force behind the annexation of Tunisia in 1881 and the ﬁnal conquest of Indo-China), offered up a triple argument. First, there was the economic justiﬁcation: securing raw materials and markets was a matter of economic survival. Second, there was the question of national prestige. Empire was the measure of great power status and, especially since the Franco–Prussian débâcle, France could not risk falling behind. And third, there was the belief in the civilizing mission. French culture was a universal model and for this reason France had a duty to liberate others from superstition and ignorance. By the last decade of the nineteenth century it was the procolonial arguments that had won out and at this point colonialism, along with a belief in the values of positivism, science and primary education, became an integral part of the Third Republic’s unitary political culture. In this way the leaders of the Third Republic held up the new republican culture as dynamic and forward-looking.

Martin Evans 11

Particular pre-eminence was given to rationalism and the rejection of Catholicism, which was equated with superstition and prejudice. Reason, it was argued, would eventually win out over the last vestiges of religion, a conﬂict which culminated in the separation of Church and state in 1905. The Third Republic, therefore, stood for progress and emancipation, and these ideas easily fused with colonialism to produce the notion of the civilizing mission in the colonies. Here the French role was to bring light, in the form of science and medicine, to the dark peripheries. It was an act of liberation because France had to raise non-Europeans to the level of French civilization. The colonial natives were seen as children that now had to be educated and the images of teachers and doctors, overcoming illiteracy and disease in a disinterested manner, became the heroes of the French colonial narrative. Likewise the Bastille Day celebrations were refashioned to underline the notion that France was at the centre of a world empire, whilst across the country street names lionized pioneers of empire such as Bugeaud and Brazza.20 In Algeria the establishment of the Third Republic inaugurated what has come to be seen as the golden age of the settlers. It was the high point of their power, the moment when they probably felt the most secure about their long term presence. In large part this selfconﬁdence was motivated by a backlash against the Second Empire. Napolean III was a hate ﬁgure amongst the settlers because he was seen as much too sympathetic to Muslim culture. The fact that he condemned the conﬁscation of native land and declared Algeria to be an Arab kingdom in 1863 made the settlers into a bastion of republican sentiment. They wanted an end to military power and the extension of civil power to Algeria and for these reasons, even if the settlers were dismayed by defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, they still welcomed the collapse of the Second Empire through the establishment of the so-called Algiers Commune. Such sentiments were bolstered still further by the spectre of Muslim insurrection in 1871. Economic discontent, the fear of a civilian regime, the granting of citizenship to the Jews, the spectacle of French humiliation at the hands of the Prussians – widely seen as an act of God – as well as the desire to recover independence: all of these factors provoked a huge rebellion involving some 800,000 Muslims. However, the French replied with systematic terror and once Algerian resistance had been crushed, the way was opened for vigorous and uncompromising colonization. Thus, the leaders of the rebellion were deported to New Caledonia, land was conﬁscated on a huge scale and Koranic schools put under

12 Culture and Empire: An Overview

surveillance. From now on the only interests that counted were those of the settlers, which in turn explains why the Third Republic became so closely associated with the attempt to make Algeria French. At a fundamental level imperialism was about the right to settle land. For the Third Republic possession of the land was justiﬁed because France was the bearer of a superior way of life, so for Ferry the annexation of Algeria was perfectly reasonable because the French settlers, using their superior agricultural techniques, had transformed an inhospitable landscape in a way which the natives had never had. For Ferry the planting of vineyards was symbolic of how Gallic genius had made the desert bloom, reinforcing the wider myth that prior to the arrival of the French, North Africa had just been an empty space. The fact that for Muslims wine cultivation was deeply offensive – a permanent affront to their religious sensibilities and savagely sapping of food resources for the local population – did not enter into the equation. Neither did the way in which native agriculture was unable to cope with the dramatic rise in population, which tripled in Algeria between 1856 and 1940 to 6,500,000 ironically due to the impact of French medicine in reducing infant mortality. By 1930 only 1 per cent of Algerians had a farm of more than 100 hectares as hunger became part of everyday life for the native population; but in the eyes of the French administration their predicament was their own fault because they had not adapted to modern culture. The result was that the Algerian way of life became invisible for the Third Republic and this became even more obvious when the empire was hit hard by the Great Depression during the 1930s. In Algeria the French ruthlessly protected the settlers’ interests, thereby provoking a pauperization process which produced a huge rural exodus on the part of the native population to the major coastal cities.21 This ﬂight from the countryside climaxed tragically with the 1937 famine, widely remembered amongst North Africans as the terrible year of hunger, when people literally dropped dead of starvation on the roadside. In the face of such misery local authorities took fright. Some introduced relief measures, but most tried to send victims back in lorry-loads to their place of origin, and what underpinned such a reaction was the belief that Muslim Algerians did not constitute a modern nation. Theirs was a primitive culture based upon tribes and religion which, because it could not compete, was predestined for extinction. In looking at local culture in Algeria the French authorities operated a policy of divide and rule, making judgements (based upon ethnography and anthropology) as to how open different parts of the

Martin Evans 13

population were to French civilization. The Jews were seen as the group that it would be the easiest to assimilate and so they were given full citizenship on 24 October 1870, one of the ﬁrst acts of the Third Republic.22 In contrast, the Arab culture and way of life were seen as fundamentally medieval and obscurantist. 23 Still dominated by religion and by tribal vendettas this was seen as an inferior, prepolitical society which, because it was rooted in a nomadic life style, was incapable of productivity.24 In characterizing the Arabs thus the French tried to make a distinction between the Arabs that had arrived after the seventh century AD and the Berbers, the original population. For many natives to talk of such a distinction, given the fusion of Arabic and Berber cultures over the subsequent centuries, made no sense. 25 None the less the French tried to introduce such a distinction and in particular tried to court the largest Berber group, the Kabyles. The fact that the Berbers were seen as Indo-European in origin, and the fact that the Kabyles in particular led a sedentary lifestyle, fostered the idea that they were similar to the small-holding peasant in the metropolis. Their mountain culture made them hard working, independent and less dominated by Islam. 26 Crucially too Kabyle society already had elements of democracy through the djemmaa or village councils which had developed beyond Ottoman rule. This meant that not only were they more open to French ideas of democracy and progress, but also, because of their language and cultural cohesion, that they were further down the road to modernity. They could be considered as having the basic components for nationhood whilst the nomadic Arabs, still under the stranglehold of the Muslim religion, could not. The Kabyle myth indicates the extend to which Islam was held up as an object of contempt. The idea that Islam was incompatible with modern values was also the central argument of the leading French academic Ernst Renan whose lecture, given at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1883, was entitled ‘Islam and science’.27 For Renan Islam is a void not a culture. The motor of culture is now science and rationality. Faith and revelation are now in the past, but Islam is particularly despised because it came so long after Judaism and Christianity. Furthermore Islam cannot regenerate itself because Arabic is incapable of expressing complex scientiﬁc ideas. Arid in a fundamental way, the Arabic language is opposed to reason, rational philosophy and progress. It is a primitive state of mind that is by deﬁnition cut off from the modern world.

14 Culture and Empire: An Overview

The upshot of such views, which exerted a powerful inﬂuence, is that although the Third Republic offered up the image of a generous culture, in practice the cultural and racial barriers to assimilation were enormous. The way in which cultures were deﬁned had a quasibiological aspect because being Muslim and being French were seen in some way as being incompatible. So until 1947 Muslims were automatically categorized as subjects rather than citizens and so they came under the umbrella of Islamic, as opposed to French, law. In theory this arrangement was designed to protect local religion and culture but in practice it acted as a barrier against assimilation. It made the route to citizenship difﬁcult and controversial because the price of French nationality was the signing away of the right to be governed, in non-criminal jurisdiction, by Islamic law, an act of apostasy in the eyes of most Muslims.28 The negative perceptions of Muslim culture emphasize how far the twin notions of waged work and industry were fundamental to the credo of the Third Republic. This was the base of the superior French culture, so to refuse waged work was to refuse civilization and, following the logic of this argument, the Colonial Ministry introduced forced labour on a grand scale during the 1920s and 1930s. Harsh codes stipulated that every ﬁt male had to work for a set number of days each year. For the colonial authorities work only meant work for wages, whilst work in non-cash systems of rural production was deﬁned as idling, and their non-culture a symptom of the inherent laziness of the native populations. In practice in the Ivory Coast alone 42,000 were forced to work on grand schemes such as the construction of the Abidjan–Ferkessedegou railway line, whilst 16,000 were coerced into timber felling and plantation work. Forced labour on this scale allowed colonial companies to reap fantastic proﬁts, but for the indigenous population the prolonged absence of workers was a disaster. In many places local production collapsed completely. If many of the leaders of the Third Republic talked about the need to export French culture, so that the native population could eventually be assimilated, an equally strong current of thought was that of association, championed by the hero of Moroccan colonization, Marshal Louis-Hubert Lyautey.29 In his letters Lyautey talked about association through a hierarchic relationship where unequal races would have different rights and obligations. The natives would not be made into French citizens because ruling over them involved the introduction of clear lines of separation and subservience. In this way local cultures were to be respected and nurtured whilst the French were left in charge

Martin Evans 15

of the lands and the resources. So when Lyautey became the Resident General in Morocco in 1912 he immediately declared that the city of Fes was a historical monument that had to be saved and preserved, but implicit in this action was the belief that the city was not a living culture. For Lyautey Fes’s cultural achievements were in the past and he further ensured this eclipse by transferring Fes’s economic and political functions to Rabat and by building a new, modern French city nearby.30 Apart from the ofﬁcial political culture, the gathering importance of the colonies was also apparent within wider French culture. During the course of the late nineteenth century there was a dramatic expansion of the reading public due to increased literacy and the dissemination of cheap books. Through the novels of Jules Verne, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet and Pierre Loti the colonial setting was made familiar to a French audience.31 Collectively they offered up images that were enticing and exotic. The colonies were a seductive a terrain of adventure where the French, by dint of their superior culture, had a right to be. In painting, too, the empire became increasingly prevalent. Here we have already noted the importance of the orientalist tradition from Delacroix onwards. However, art from the colonies also had an enormous inﬂuence on the avant-garde in France. Seeing African masks displayed in the 1907 International Exhibition in Paris was a revelation to Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and led directly to their development of cubism.32 Of course, in deﬁning the masks as primitive they were still operating within the dominant cultural framework. Thus they were not interested in the ceremonial or religious signiﬁcance of the masks for African societies; they were only concerned with how they could imbue them with their own meanings. Likewise the surrealist prophet, André Breton, saw the Orient as irrational, but for him this was positive trait because it was an irrational force which, he hoped, would eventually engulf bourgeois society. So, although the surrealists opposed the repression in Morocco in 1924 as well as the Colonial Exhibition seven years later, their views were shot through with many of the same assumptions. The signiﬁcance of the First World War in creating a new bond between France and the colonies has already been underlined. On a popular and ofﬁcial level the contribution of native troops to victory was widely recognized and shortly after 1918 the Paris Mosque was built to commemorate the sacriﬁces of Muslim troops from the colonies.33 In other ways, too, the empire became part of French life.

16 Culture and Empire: An Overview

Postcards from the colonies now reproduced images of an erotic Orient on a mass scale, thereby reinforcing existing stereotypes.34 The colonies also became an important setting for French ﬁlms as well as the subject of many songs, most famously Edith Piaf’s Mon Légionnaire which became a best seller in the 1930s.35 Not all the images, though, presented a glorious image of the colonial mission. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1932 novel Voyage au bout de la nuit contained a grim portrayal of life in the colonies, whilst Juilien Duvivier’s 1937 ﬁlm Pépé-le-Moko was shot through with ambivalences about the colonies. On the run from the police and holed up in the kasbah of Algiers Pépé, played by Jean Gabin, is eventually psychologically unhinged by his predicament and at the end of the ﬁlm he commits suicide. The pessimistic conclusion underlines the ambivalent message at the core of the ﬁlm. The movie shows the casbah as a site of both fear and fascination for the French imagination. This is not a straightforward narrative where Pépé goes out to Algeria and lords it over the natives. His ﬁnal fate is a warning that the casbah, and by extension the empire, has a fatal power. It is a place of sexual passions (shots of Arab prostitutes occur repeatedly, echoing Delacroix’s image from a century earlier) and violent urges which can easily engulf outsiders.36 However, in terms of underlining the new importance of Greater France the most important event was the Colonial Exhibition. Marshal Lyautey was put in charge of the Colonial Exhibition in 1927 and the whole project took four years to prepare. When the Exhibition ﬁnally opened in 1931 he was 77 years old and, as the architect of Moroccan colonization, already a legend. With his white moustache and hair cut en brosse he was the epitome of the muscular colonial hero and from the outset his relentless energy was ﬁrmly stamped upon the Exhibition. For him it had a triple purpose. First, it had to touch hearts and minds in lasting way. By stressing the curious, the wondrous and the exotic, the Exhibition had to excite the popular imagination, opening people up to the untapped possibilities of empire. Second, it had to stress the economic necessity of empire, a line of argument which was reinforced still further by the impact of the Wall Street Crash in 1929. As the crisis created an introspective mood the Exhibition offered up the empire as a huge trading bloc that would insulate France from the Depression. Third, the Exhibition projected the civilizing mission within the Empire. Possessing a superior culture, the French had a moral duty to bring the beneﬁts of the Enlightenment to the non-European world. So colonization was presented as a liberation: it was cast as a relentless battle, a struggle of

Martin Evans 17

light against darkness, of civilized culture against uncivilized culture, of progress against feudalism and religious bigotry. In the guise of the teacher, the soldier and the doctor, France was held up as a guide and model, a universal ideal to which all must aspire. As the visitor’s guide put it: Our protection you must understand, delivered millions of men, women and children from the nightmare of slavery and death. Do not forget that before we came, on the African continent the stronger dominated the weaker, a woman was but a beast and a child counted for little. There where we found the vestiges of an old civilization with outdated beliefs … how much work we have accomplished.37 The Exhibition began with a triumphal arch followed by a gilded statue of France as colonial genius. Thereafter visitors followed a carefully laid-out route of mud-brick fortresses, Moorish palaces and Tunisian market places, culminating with a majestic reconstruction of the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat. Indeed this became such a popular attraction that entry to it was restricted to the weekends. The manner in which its ﬂoodlit image dramatically dominated the Exhibition’s night skyline was symbolic of Lyautey’s grand ambition, his desire to thrill the imagination. The notion of a seductive spectacle was always uppermost in his mind and within the Exhibition visitors found an aquarium, a zoo and a fairground, as well as belly dancers, snake charmers and native musicians. Through entertainment Lyautey wanted to make empire into a familiar landscape. The didactic aim was reﬂected in the emphasis on information. All aspects of the colonial life were meticulously documented from tourism through to economic opportunities and agricultural practices. Likewise ﬁgures of the colonial troops killed in the First World War, some 24,762 from West Africa alone, provided a telling reminder of the empire’s contribution to French victory in 1918. The government marketed the Exhibition to the public with great skill. To coincide with the opening a collection of stamps showing imperial scenes was released which, along with the powerful media of cinema and broadcasting, aimed to stimulate popular interest. Postcards, photographs and prints were also widely disseminated, whilst the monthly magazine L’Illustration produced a special Exhibition edition. Everywhere posters proclaimed that visitors would experience ‘a tour of the world in a single day’ and in this respect

18 Culture and Empire: An Overview

Lyautey remembered that many still blamed imperialism for the 1914–18 war. He wanted to promote the image of a Greater France which was promoting friendship, harmony and cooperation. Under the umbrella of France, the Exhibition claimed, many cultures were thriving side by side. The Exhibition was a huge success. Visitors could reach it via the specially extended underground and in the months following the opening some eight million passed through the turnstiles. Did they identify with the culture of Greater France? On this speciﬁc point it is difﬁcult to say. Some were deﬁnitely impassioned imperialists, but for others it was just a good day out where the propaganda was superﬂuous or an intrusion. None the less it is signiﬁcant that opposition was conﬁned to the Communist Party and the surrealists. Through the Colonial Exhibition it is possible to talk of a consolidated vision from above which combined with other aspects of state intervention (most signiﬁcantly the promotion of empire within the classroom) to produce an imperial world view. So in terms of ofﬁcial political culture the empire was very important by the end of the 1930s. It showed that France was not alone in the face of Nazi Germany and the empire was to be equally important for the Vichy regime, the Free French and the Fourth Republic. Ironically, however, this was just at the moment when anti-colonial nationalism was asserting itself which in turn explains why the French retreat from empire was to be so bloody and so protracted.

Decolonization and post-colonial French culture The focus of this book is on the impact of colonialism upon French culture. How were the colonies presented to a metropolitan audience and how did they transform the French way of life? At the same time French colonialism had an enormous impact upon native culture, an issue that has been addressed elsewhere but which is surely a huge avenue for future research. From 1798 onwards the conundrum here was what to do about the challenge of the French way of life. Put simply was the civilizing mission about the imposition of another, alien way of life or did it contain ideas and knowledge which could be adapted and appropriated? For Islamic scholars in the nineteenth century, such as Muhammad ‘Abdu and Jamal al-Din al Afghani, this was a huge debate. They were in no doubt that reform was urgently needed, but the question was what direction should this reform take? Should Islam modernize in order to compete with the West or should

Martin Evans 19

it return to its Meccan roots in order to resist this cultural assault? In the 1920s and 1930s assimilationists in Algeria led by Ferhat Abbas believed that there was no contradiction between being a Muslim and being French.38 They held the view that Islam could be successfully fused with republican ideology. Elsewhere the Négritude movement, launched in Paris in the 1930s by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, rejected the idea that French culture was superior to African culture. Writing in French, but this time making the French language their own and using it against the colonizer, they insisted upon the rediscovery of Africa, thereby challenging the basic assumptions of the ofﬁcial political culture.39 Then ﬁnally, and perhaps most emphatically, there was Frantz Fanon, the psychologist from Martinique who joined the Algerian National Liberation Front in 1956. Writing in a direct and confrontational manner, he called on the people of the Third World to reject European culture, which after all had produced imperialism, Nazism and two world wars, and make a new beginning for humanity.40 The ideas contained in Fanon’s anti-colonial narrative challenged and eventually defeated the French empire between 1947 and 1962. In doing so anti-colonialism overturned many of the basic assumptions of the ofﬁcial French culture. Henceforth the idea of the civilizing mission had no legitimacy as the gathering colonial crisis sapped the strength of the Fourth Republic, leading to its eventual demise in May 1958. Once in power de Gaulle quickly saw colonialism as a thing of the past which in practice was blocking the creation of a forwardlooking political culture. So, once the decolonization process had been pushed through, colonialism became a taboo subject in ofﬁcial circles as de Gaulle busily went around reinventing France as a friend of the Third World and the champion of non-alignment. In the place of colonialism the Fifth Republic offered up the concept of the Francophone community, a ‘family’ of nations united by the shared heritage of a universal French language and culture, and it is important to understand that this concept found enthusiastic supporters from the former colonies, particularly in West Africa. By stressing the global presence of French culture, and associating English with American cultural domination, Francophone supporters have presented themselves as the defenders of cultural pluralism and diversity Not only did decolonization transform the ofﬁcial political culture, it also had a profound impact upon French intellectual culture. The French colonial narrative was premised upon the progressive role of the Republic and was intimately connected to beliefs in rationalism

20 Culture and Empire: An Overview

and science. By relativizing French cultural values and showing that they were not universal, Fanon was fatally undermining one of the fundamental tenets of the Republican narrative. In understanding Fanon in this way Robert Young argues that the subsequent poststructuralist moment has to be understood as a product of the Algerian war.41 Now other certainties were questioned in an equally fundamental manner by the likes of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. For them Enlightenment discourses were not about liberation or humanitarian reform but control. Foucault, in particular, through his subtle analysis of the relationship between power and the origins of the prison and the mental institution, showed how the Enlightenment culture did not bring about emancipation but merely new, and more insidious, forms of domination. Finally, the legacy of colonialism has made a deep impact upon everyday French culture. The empire might have formally ended in 1962 but the arrival of immigrants from the former colonies, in particular from North and West Africa, has transformed French society. Islam is now the second largest religion in France (estimates of the number of Muslims in France varies from 1.75 to 4 million) and by bringing with ‘them’ their food, their music, their way of life, these Muslims have intermingled with the French to create a new hybrid, post-colonial culture. This is evident not only in the novels by secondgeneration immigrant writers, the so-called beur literature, but also in street slang and music by rap bands such as IAM.42 The presence of these immigrants, who were supposed to leave their memories, culture and history elsewhere, has produced a postcolonial racism. 43 This is particularly evident with the National Front which has inherited and adapted much of the colonial language but within a new context. For Jean-Marie Le Pen cultural and ethnic differences between different human groups are ﬁxed and reiﬁed. In his eyes the culture of the former colonial immigrants is incompatible with the French way of life and this is why ‘they’ are such a threat. If ‘they’ are allowed to stay, ‘they’ will eventually swamp French culture, and what underpins this view is a continuing set of cultural assumptions about ‘inferior’ and ‘subject races’. Part of Le Pen’s continuing success has undoubtedly been his ability to exploit this colonial syndrome; yet, in the same measure these fears are testament to the way in which the legacy of the colonial encounter has transformed French culture. Whatever Le Pen says or does, hybrid identities are now a fundamental part of the French post-colonial culture.

Martin Evans 21

Notes and References 1 Herman Lebovics, True France: Wars over Cultural Identity 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 2 On the history of French colonial expansion see Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of Overseas Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1996), Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France 1871–1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972); Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, Annie-Rey-Goldzeiguer and Jacques Thobie, Histoire de la France coloniale: des origines à 1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991) and Jacques Thobie, Gilbert Meynier, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de la France coloniale, 1914–1990 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990). 3 On how the Third Republic came to manage the colonies and the role of the colonial lobby within the National Assembly see Stuart Michael Persell, The French Colonial Lobby (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983). 4 At this point France received the former German colonies of the Togo and the Cameroons, in addition to the Ottoman possessions of Syria and the Lebanon which were placed under French control by the League of Nations. 5 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). 6 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). 7 On this point see Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), pp.263–4. 8 On Western perceptions of the Ottoman regency in Algeria and in particular the threat of piracy see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). 9 On the religious justiﬁcations for the invasion see Andrew Wheatcroft, Inﬁdels: The Conﬂict Between Christendom and Islam 638–2002 (London: Viking, 2003). 10 The French subjugation of Algeria took seventeen years. In the respect it is important to understand that it took some years for a coherent policy to emerge. Initially many in the military supported the idea of a limited occupation of the coastal regions. 11 Roger Benjamin (ed.), Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee (Sydney: The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997). See also Jack Cowart, Pierre Schneider, John Elderﬁeld, Albert Kostenevich and Laura Coyle, Matisse in Morocco (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990). 12 There was a huge amount of support within France for the Greek struggle against the Ottoman empire. Invariably the struggle was presented as one of courageous Christians versus cruel Muslims. For example on 25 May 1821 the Gazette de France compared Turks to bloodthirsty wild beasts. 13 Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (London: Pandora, 1988), pp.79–80. 14 The French academic Ernst Renan argued in 1883 that Arabic could not express complicated political and scientiﬁc ideas. 15 On this point see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism, Articles from the New York Tribune (New York: International, 1972). On 9 November 1989 I interviewed Roger Rey who was involved in the underground opposition movement to the Algerian war in France. He underlined that in the 1930s his father was a member of the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière), a trade unionist and a freemason. Growing up in Oran in the 1930s he remembered how his parents, even if they were on the extreme Left, were nationalist and paternalist. They looked down upon

22 Culture and Empire: An Overview

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25

26

Algerians because they considered themselves to represent a political culture and tradition that was superior to that of the Algerian peasantry. It simply did not enter their heads to question the legitimacy of the French presence in Algeria. On this point see Martin Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War 1954–1962 (Oxford: Berg, 1997), pp.96–100. Said notes that Mariette knew the canal’s architect, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and that they collaborated on a number of restorative schemes. Both, he feels, were inspired by a similar theatrical vision going back to earlier SaintSimonian and Masonic ideas about Egypt. Said, Imperialism and Culture, p.151. On this point see Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire (eds), Culture coloniale: La France conquise par son empire, 1871–1931 (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2003). For a summary of these debates see Martin Evans, ‘From colonialism to post-colonialism: the French Empire since Napoleon’, in Martin Alexander (ed.), French History Since Napoleon (London: Edward Arnold, 1999). In 2003 there are 150 Paris streets named after people from the colonial period. These events are the focus of Mohammed Dib’s 1952 novel La Grande Maison (Paris; Seuil, 1952). The Jews ﬁrst arrived in North African with the Phoenicians around 1100 BC. Some Berber tribes also converted to Judaism. The numbers in North Africa were augmented by the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. On the speciﬁc history of the Algerian Jews see Joelle Alouche-Benayoun and Doris Benisimon, Les Juifs d’Algérie (Paris: BHP, 1989) and Joelle Bahloul, The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Leila Sebbar (ed.), Une Enfance Algérienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) which includes childhood recollections of Albert Bensoussan, Hélène Cixous, Annie Cohen and Jean Daniel and Nancy Wood, ‘Remembering the Jews of Algeria’, Parallax, vol. 4, no. 2 (1998), pp.169–83. For a perceptive analysis of these polices see Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995). See also Charles Robert Ageron, Les Algériens Musulmans et la France (1871–1919) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). For a local study of the impact of French rule see David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bone, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The French were keen to stress that the Arabs had done nothing positive since their arrival in the seventh century AD, so for the settler novelist Louis Bertrand the colonial presence was perfectly natural because they were taking up the Roman heritage that had been allowed to fall into rack and ruin under Muslim domination. On this point see Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths, Narratives of Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). This was the view of the leader of the Ulama movement Sheikh Ben Badis. Founded in 1931 the Ulama movement was based in Constantine and upheld the view that Algeria constituted a separate nation. For example, it was argued that the Kabyles seldom practised polygamy and that the women were unveiled. This, therefore, showed that, in contrast to

Martin Evans 23

27 28 29

30

31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

43

the Arabs of the plain who were still polygamous, they did not have contempt for women. For a detailed analysis of Renan’s arguments see Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1983). By 1936 a mere 2,500 Muslims had sought citizenship in this way. For a fascinating insight into Lyautey’s mindset see his letters contained in Pierre Lyautey (ed.), Les plus belles lettres de Lyautey (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1962). Many of the supporters of association were army ofﬁcers who were hostile to the Third Republic. For them colonization was a way of serving the eternal France because, in creating a hierachical society, it gave them the opportunity to return to a pre-1789 way of life. On this see Alec G. Hargreaves, The Colonial Experience in French Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1983). The colonial exhibits were shown the grounds of the Colonial Garden which was established in Paris in 1899 and modelled on Kew Gardens in Britain and the botanical gardens in Berlin. On this see Robert Aldrich, ‘Vestiges of the Colonial Empire: The Jardin Colonial in Paris in Robert Aldrich and Martin Lyons (eds), The Sphinx in the Tuileries (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1999). 170,000 Algerian troops fought in the French army in the First World War. On this see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Within this he analyses how many of the orientalist themes were reproduced in posed photographs of Algerian women. The photographs presented the women as inviting and sexually available. On the importance of the colonial setting for ﬁlms see Ginette Vincendeau, Pépé-le-Moko (London: BFI, 1998). On this see Chapter 2 by Martin O’Shaugnessy below. L’Illustration, May 1931, p.8. On this see Ferhat Abbas, Le Jeune Algérien: De la colonie vers la province (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1931). The failure of reform in Algeria, most notably in 1936, radicalized Ferhat Abbas. In 1958 he became the president of the Provisional Algerian Government in Tunis: see Ferhat Abbas, La Nuit coloniale (Paris: Julliard, 1962). Léopold Senghor, Anthologie de la poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947). Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre (Paris: Maspero, 1961). Robert Young, White Mythologies Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990). Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction: Voices From the North African Community in France (Oxford: Berg, 1997). IAM are a rap group from Marseilles. Their name stands for ‘Invasion Arriving from Mars’ and their ﬁrst album, De la Planète Mars, released in 1991, dealt with issues of racism, exclusion and opposition to the National Front. On this see Max Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992) and Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 1999). See aslo Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–62 (London: Macmillan, 1997).

Part 1 Film

2 Poor Propaganda: French Colonial Films of the 1930s Martin O’Shaughnessy

This chapter will argue two key related points. It will suggest, ﬁrst, that it is a mistake to seek uniform propagandist intent across a range of dissimilar texts and artefacts. There seem to be no sound grounds for assuming that forms as diverse as ﬁction ﬁlm, advertising or government tracts are part of a coherent and consistent ideological project, even if we can ﬁnd considerable evidence of overlap and interpenetration between them. It will argue, second, that it is a mistake to treat something we call ‘colonial discourse’ as a selfenclosed and self-sustaining archive. If we accept, as we surely must, that colonialism was not an accidental extra but an integral component of French national identity in the 1930s and beyond, we must surely conclude that discourses engaging with the colonial are inevitably part of a complex intertextual web that reaches well beyond any narrow framing of the colonial proper. 1 These points may seem all too obvious. However, by looking at some key texts on colonial ﬁlm from about the last decade I hope to show why they none the less need making. The ﬁrst text considered is an article by Pierre Sorlin entitled ‘The fanciful empire: French feature ﬁlms and the colonies in the 1930s’ (1991). In it, Sorlin provides an overview of some of the recurrent features of the cinematic output of that period. Focusing on ﬁlms set in Morocco and the Sahara, he remarks, ‘it seems that the whites experience a constant vague feeling of fear’, and adds, ‘most of the time the good guy is killed by the natives’, explaining that ‘the soldiers were put on the screen to die while the army was put on the screen to win’.2 The native assailants are rarely seen, Sorlin tells us, before explaining that ‘French ﬁlmmakers never staged a French army offensive in the colonies’, and commenting that ‘the French army never does anything 27

28 Poor Propaganda: 1930s French Colonial Films

to help the natives’.3 Sorlin concludes that ‘the discrepancy between the power of the French army and the permanence of danger is too obvious for comment. It leads to the … conclusion …[that] the French assume ownership over the colonies but implicitly admit that they are not the owners.’4 While Sorlin’s comments usefully point to some of the paradoxes of the ﬁlms and help to undermine any notions of feature ﬁlms as simple propaganda, they rest on the two closely related and problematic assumptions that ‘colonial’ ﬁlms are simply about the colonies (that the elusive ﬁgures who assail the French are natives not the shadows of other unnamed fears and threats) and thus that their paradoxes can be explained by reference to colonial discourse as a self-contained archive. Similar assumptions about the internal coherence of colonial discourse can be found in Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism (1996). Dina Sherzer, the editor, tells us that certain ﬁlms of the 1930s: presented the colonies … as territories waiting for European initiatives, virgin land where the white man with helmets and boots regenerated himself or was destroyed by alcoholism, malaria or native women. They displayed the heroism of French men … and reinforced the idea that the Other is dangerous … They contributed to the colonial spirit and to the construction of white identity and hegemony.5 Colonial ﬁlms are assumed to serve a uniform ideological function. When Sherzer views a ﬁlm such as Princesse Tam-Tam (Gréville, 1935), she comments on the racism of the French characters and on fears of miscegenation and concludes, ‘the interracial relationships were tropes that contributed to the legitimisation of the colonial ideology and the feeling of superiority of the French’.6 As a consequence of her initial assumptions of propagandist intent, Sherzer seems blind to some of the ﬁlm’s complexity, notably to its humorous but pointed criticism of sectors of French society, a feature that should drive us to question any analysis of it simply in terms of racialized binaries. This is not of course to say that racialized binaries are not part of the complex interaction of differences of gender, race and class within the ﬁlm. Ezra’s more recent account of the ﬁlm notes its playing-off of the ‘under-cooked’, uncivilized natives against the ‘over-cooked’, decadent, upper-class French, exploring in detail how the ﬁlm’s segregationist ideology does not preclude the kind of sharply critical look at elements of French society that I merely point towards here.7

Martin O’Shaughnessy 29

Abdelkader Benali’s recent contribution to the ﬁeld, Le Cinéma colonial au Maghreb, is, along with the next work we consider, the most thorough exploration of colonial cinema to date. Highly conscious of the need to engage with the speciﬁcity of colonial ﬁlm (its treatment of space, place, character and narrative), Benali is still partly constrained by the same assumptions as Sherzer and Sorlin. Noting, like Sorlin, that Maghrébin insurgents are usually invisible, he reads this as a delegitimation of their struggle and as a refusal of combatant status that has its roots in colonial propaganda.8 He presents the repeated opposition of orderly European space to disorderly or virgin North African territory as a justiﬁcation of conquest.9 Noting that colonial heroes are outcasts or self-exiled, he explains this by the familiar notion of regeneration through participation in the colonial adventure. This ‘regeneration’ is then linked, more than a little improbably, by the need to encourage the population of the colonies.10 However, ﬁnding that his own material resists reading in terms of propaganda, Benali then introduces another level to his analysis by identifying a décolonisation ﬁctive in his corpus. Noting that the emblematic ﬁgure of colonial cinema, the legionary, fails to adapt to North Africa, builds roads that goes nowhere and is rejected by the terrain and by the indigenous people, he ﬁnds a repeated unconscious avowal that the colonial project is condemned to fail.11 This discovery of a somewhat improbable decolonizing political unconscious allows him to deal with some of the complexity and ambiguity of his chosen corpus while still retaining notions both of propaganda and of a self-contained colonial discourse (albeit one that unconsciously contradicts itself). As he draws to a conclusion, he begins to explore avenues that might deal more adequately with the complexity of ‘colonial’ ﬁlms of the 1930s. He points to the need to consider colonial cinema in the context of the broader national imaginary, noting how it feeds off metropolitan mythology and, more speciﬁcally, how it offers a terrain upon which other anxieties can be explored. He notes too that 1930s France no longer assumes its own national mythology and that colonial cinema increasingly translates the metropolitan anguishes of this troubled period.12 In the light of his own insightful conclusions (conclusions that move us in similar directions to this chapter), it is all the more surprising that his preceding analysis is largely in terms of a self-contained colonial discourse that is often discussed in terms of its supposed propagandist function. Benali’s important overview of colonial ﬁlm has just been complemented by David Slavin’s rich and stimulating study, Colonial Cinema

30 Poor Propaganda: 1930s French Colonial Films

and Imperial France, 1919–1939 (2001). Less systematic on the ﬁlms than Benali, Slavin undertakes a richer and more complex engagement with the context, an engagement that allows him to address the interdiscursive complexity, spatial variation and historical shifts of those ﬁlms we label ‘colonial’. He notes, for example, how colonial cinema can usefully be explored alongside a range of high- and popular cultural intertexts (orientalist art, postcards, tourism and Hollywood cinema) as well as more overtly political discourses around questions such as eugenics, race, anti-Semitism or prostitution. He considers too how race intersects with discourses of class and gender. He suggests – and this is surely one of the most interesting aspects of the book – how, largely as a result of the Rif war, the dominant tone of colonial ﬁlm shifted from a paternalist, Lyauteyist vision to a more overtly racist and separatist one, with this shift being paralleled by a move from Morocco to Algeria as the preferred location.13 Yet despite this recognition of the shifting complexity of the colonial, Slavin does not seem to have broken entirely free of the kind of functionalism that equates colonial ﬁlm to colonialist propaganda. When he introduces his argument with the assertion that, ‘colonial ﬁlm reﬂected and reinforced the machinery of cultural hegemony, noncoercive social control, and the underlying politics of privilege’,14 we might be tempted to agree broadly, while doubting the aptness of the implication of uniﬁed purpose in the word ‘machinery’. But what of the unidimensionality of the subsequent claim that ‘legion ﬁlms took over the colonial genre because they were the most suitable vehicle for the racially polarized worldview that lent credence to the policies of white rule’?15 And what do we make of the wilful move from intertextual complexity to functionalism in the following: ‘Film traced its media origins to the nineteenth century – to orientalist painting, postcards and expositions – but its discourse came mainly from the classroom’?16 It is undoubtedly possible to read colonial cinema as pedagogy, but is the inevitable cost of this not gross reductionism and the concomitant production of an inassimilable remainder constituted by all those aspects of the ﬁlms that do not ﬁt the required picture? Evidence for this is provided when Slavin comments, ‘a common thread of pessimism runs through the colonial ﬁlms, a sense that despite repeated displays of power the European presence in Africa was tentative and its colonial ventures ﬂeeting’.17 The initial equation of ﬁlm with propaganda drives to the inevitable conclusion that, on the whole, it may not have been very good propaganda. A better starting point might be to recognize that although it is shot through with racist and colonial

Martin O’Shaughnessy 31

attitudes, it is a commercial product that cannot simply be equated with ofﬁcially sponsored discourses. The richness of Slavin’s multi-faceted engagement with colonialism is paralleled by the astonishing range of ﬁlm that Colin Crisp engages with in Genre, Myth and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939 (2002). Reaching far beyond the usual canonical works, Crisp aims to provide a systematic survey of 1930s French cinema and the discourses that framed it. As part of his mapping of the organizing themes of collective mythology, he devotes a chapter to nation and race in a way that usefully allows us to situate colonial ﬁlm in the broader context of the representation of the foreign and the exotic. He also makes connections between the colonial and representations of class, noting, for example, how the criminality linked with the Gabin roles in key colonial ﬁlms such as La Bandera and Pépé-le-Moko connects to a broader trend in French cinema (and beyond) to associate the laborious and the dangerous classes.18 Again in the context of an exploration of class inequality, Crisp notes the widespread presence of dreams of escape in the ﬁlms of the period, suggesting that the nostalgic longings for a return to a lost France found in some colonial ﬁlms are a variant of a more general trend.19 Given this strong sense of cinematic intertextuality and of overlap, repetition and variation within his broad corpus, it is surprising to say the least that he conﬁdently ﬁnds a colonialist ‘grand narrative’ in colonial ﬁlms of the period. He splits this grand narrative into ﬁve sub-sections as follows: exploration of virgin territory; paciﬁcation; the missionary work of colonizers and missionaries; civilization (essentially infrastructural modernization); integration. These ﬁve public narrative stages interweave with three private narratives, namely the foreign legion story of individual redemption, the story of interracial relations and the Freudian drama which allows repressed desires to be worked out in exotic space. This is a sophisticated model, allowing for multiple permutations and variations within an essentially ﬁxed frame. It is none the less triply problematic: ﬁrst, because, unlike Slavin’s account, it pays insufﬁcient recognition to differences between ﬁlms or shifts that may be motivated by broader historical evolutions; second, because of an implicit assumption that colonial ﬁlm is straightforwardly about the colonial project, an assumption undermined both by Crisp’s own identiﬁcation of complex intertextuality and by his suggestion that illicit desires and political strife tend to be displaced into exotic space; and third, because of the by now familiar assumption that colonial ﬁlm somehow tells an ofﬁcial and propagandist story. It is again

32 Poor Propaganda: 1930s French Colonial Films

unsurprising, given the recalcitrance and unevenness of the raw material, that the cracks show through. With reference to legion-centred ﬁlms, Crisp notes; ‘the standard heroics of the small band of brothers overcoming hordes of indigenous tribes people forms a climax to many of these ﬁlms. It is common for the protagonist, if not the whole detachment, to die tragically.’20 While wholesale tragic death might begin to cast doubt on the triumphalism implicit in the grand narrative identiﬁed by Crisp, and perhaps point the way towards real difference as opposed to formulaic variation in the corpus, it could still clearly be recuperated for propaganda. But what do we make of Crisp’s statement that ‘unlike exploration and paciﬁcation, colonization and civilization are not for the most part, represented heroically in North African stories. Colonials are most commonly found in the seedy bars and bistros of remote outposts, surrounded by the debilitating decline into native ways of life.’21 Here, Crisp’s own conclusions would seem to point to both the dubious applicability of his grand narrative and to the internal inconsistency of the corpus. A clear pattern seems to have emerged from the discussion so far. Even when they perceive complexities, tensions and contradictions, important recent analyses of French colonial ﬁlm deny themselves access to more adequate interpretative models by struggling to explain ‘colonial’ ﬁlms largely or purely within the colonial frame and constructing colonial discourse as a coherent, self-contained whole, often assuming propagandist intent. Yet more complex and more adequate interpretative frames are not lacking. They have been generated notably by critics of Edward Said’s Orientalism who have questioned the notion of a monolithic and internally consistent discourse on the East (and, by implication, other parts of the colonized world) by suggesting that colonial texts are subject to interwoven historical, political, socio-economic and psychological determinations, and are traversed by the interaction of multiple discourses of race, class, gender and nation.22 But, as we saw, similar conclusions were paradoxically outlined by those critics of French cinema engaged with above, even if presupposition of the propagandist intent or self-contained consistency of colonial ﬁlm prevented their full development. While we cannot deal adequately here with the interdiscursive complexity and overdetermined nature of ‘colonial’ ﬁlm, we can take an initial step towards recognizing it by focusing on the tension in 1930s French ‘colonial’ cinema between two Frances: the imperial France of ofﬁcial propaganda and the conﬂict- and fear-ridden France of the 1930s. On the one hand, France is a country that invites all its inhabitants to

Martin O’Shaughnessy 33

share in its world role and grandeur, that projects a forward-looking image of civilization, modernity and strength (expressed through the virile domination of feminized colonial peoples); on the other, France is a deeply divided country in lingering economic crisis. It is a country terriﬁed of decadence, overtaken by history, and threatened with unmanning by younger, more vigorous powers, which was increasingly inward and backward looking and which retreated into a xenophobic and narrow vision of nation.23 While not wishing to assert that the tension between these two irreconcilable visions of France can account for all the complexities of French colonial ﬁlms of the 1930s, I would suggest that it may provide a more promising initial focus for an analysis than self-enclosed or propagandist models of colonial discourse. I should perhaps also stress that I am aware of the danger of treating this broader national context as an ‘expressive totality’ that imprints itself mechanistically on cultural forms. The context I identify is one against which the ﬁlms should be read but of which they clearly are not unmediated reﬂections. Pépé-le-Moko (Duvivier, 1937) initially suggests that it may provide a propagandist depiction of colonial Algiers. It opens as French policemen discuss how they may catch a famous outlaw, Pépé, in a sordid, labyrinthine, lawless and ethnically chaotic Casbah. The group is united in a common intent to impose modern, colonial order on native disorder. This initial positive image soon crumbles. The purposive attitude of the police is overwritten by the decadent voyeurism of some French tourists who, with no regard for high colonial purpose seek pure spectacle and escape in the Casbah. It is overwritten too by the vision of Pépé for whom the Casbah signiﬁes being trapped in an oppressive and routine present. All the French males are paralysed in one way or another despite their monopoly on individual vigour, ﬁnancial muscle and legal coercion. Pépé cannot move out of the Casbah, while the police and rich male tourists dare not venture into it. The French are markedly divided too along class lines, between the wealthy tourists and the gangsters with their popular roots. Reconciliation seems possible in the form of the love between Pépé and the bejewelled and elegant tourist, Gaby, as they remember the utopian community of 14 July festivities but, by the end, class divisions reassert themselves and the lovers are kept apart. Negative features such as tedious routine, ethnic confusion and threatening illegality are projected on to the Casbah so that a cosy, harmonious and mono-ethnic Paris can be imagined, but this positive image of France is located ﬁrmly in the past in the form of nostalgic memory

34 Poor Propaganda: 1930s French Colonial Films

and sentimental song. Ultimately, class division, male paralysis and regressive introspection suggest that the obsessions of the fearful, divided and backward-looking France of the 1930s have outweighed the positivity suggested by the initial colonial vision of the police. While Pépé-le-Moko undoubtedly feeds off and into the racist hierarchies that bolstered the colonial project, it seems far-fetched to assign any propagandist intent to it. In her recent study of the ﬁlm, Ginette Vincendeau arrived at some similar conclusions. Distinguishing Pépé from overtly propagandist ﬁlms, she notes that it is none the less ‘steeped in colonialist culture and ideology’.24 She also notes that, along with La Bandera, it played a key role in racializing the persona of Gabin, the key French screen star of the age.25 The presence of three very different French voices in the ﬁlm further questions the wisdom of assuming the existence of a monolithic ‘colonial’ discourse. The ofﬁcial voice of the police comes the closest to what we might call colonial propaganda and is markedly different from the escapism of the tourists who, indifferent to their precise location, seek escape and titillation through consumption of the exotic. Different again is the voice of Pépé, the nostalgic Parisian exile for whom the Casbah is largely a space for the projection of the negative features of the present and for the encounter with an increasingly unbearable otherness (note the famous sequence when one of Gabin’s celebrated rages is directed at Algerian music). These three voices cannot entirely be separated, of course. The police for example, take a prurient interest in exotic women and participate in the sanitization of Paris, by projecting illegality on to the Casbah while simultaneously operating a verbal cleaning-up of even notorious parts of the capital: ‘Place Pigalle, le sort de Pépé serait réglé depuis longtemps’ [(if the Casbah was the) Place Pigalle, the fate of Pépé would have been decided a long time ago], comments one. None the less, the three voices clearly fail to converge on a coherent and simple position, not least in the way they successively construct the French spectator as serious colonialist, frivolous tourist or nostalgic, xenophobic exile. 26 No one ﬁlm can ever encapsulate a corpus, but the ambivalent and shifting voices proposed by Pépé-le-Moko are useful pointers to the complexity of ‘colonial’ cinema and the inadvisability of analysing it either in functionalist terms as propaganda or as a coherent and uniﬁed discourse. La Bandera (Duvivier, 1935), which predates Pépé-le-Moko by two years, recounts the story of Gilieth (Gabin), another exile, who kills a man in Paris, escapes to Spain, joins the Spanish foreign legion and is

Martin O’Shaughnessy 35

eventually killed in combat, just after ﬁnally making peace with a French policeman who has been dogging his steps. As with the previous ﬁlm considered, one can identify elements that can be used to argue for the presence of a coherent colonialist discourse. There are images of marching ranks of soldiers with their suggestions of collective strength and purpose. The French ofﬁcer is an exemplary character, devoted to his men and to his duty and willing to put his own life on the line. The invisible rebels are in the end defeated by a well-equipped relief column that sweeps all before it. But some of the negative features we found in Pépé can again be identiﬁed. The characters’ imaginations are turned towards the past not the future, and this past is itself problematic and ambivalent. The hero’s comrade can imagine a Paris of beautiful women and accordion-playing where the Seine meanders to prolong its stay, but he is escaping from a France that would not feed him. The men have all responded to a poster that addresses them as: Vous que la vie civile a déçus, Vous qui restez sans travail Vous qui traînez dans une ville sans horizons une vie sans espoir … [You who have been let down by civilian life You have been left without work You who drag out a life without hope through the unending city streets …] Gillieth himself is haunted by an image of Paris where the sentimental and the conﬂictual are inseparable, as he remembers the night when, stained in the blood of another man, he blundered into two playful lovers. The ﬁlm is dominated by Franco-French conﬂict, from the initial murder, through the period in Spain (where, despite an ethnocentric desire for his own countrymen’s company, Gilieth is robbed by compatriots), to the period in Morocco, where the hero is trailed by a French policeman. National community is only achieved when, having volunteered for death, the French bury their differences as they are picked off one by one by an invisible foe. A conventional explanation would suggest that the hero had atoned for his crime by his heroism and thus achieved re-integration into the national community. But there is no evidence in the ﬁlm of any stable national community into which one might integrate. Moreover, the image of France

36 Poor Propaganda: 1930s French Colonial Films

is such an ambivalent mixture of the ideal and the dystopic that it is incapable of shoring up the kind of binary opposition that nationalist propaganda relies upon. Any lingering temptation we have to interpret the ﬁlm as propaganda should be dispelled by the absolute non-coincidence of the hero’s desires and the collective military project. The audience identify with the dying Gilieth (Gabin) rather than the winning army, and it is thus impossible to see how the ﬁlm might lock the spectator into any suitably imperial mindset. While in Pépé-le-Moko colonialist ideology was overwritten by pessimistic introspection, it would seem that in this ﬁlm they sit uneasily side by side, with the more positive images of military strength and honour unable to absorb negative aspects into a narrative of national triumph. A similar analysis could be applied to Le Grand Jeu (Feyder, 1934), another ﬁlm involving the legion. Again there are elements that could be ascribed to colonialist propaganda. The heroism of the leading male character, the reluctance of an old soldier to miss out on the ﬁghting and the benevolent superior ofﬁcer could all be seen as contributing to a positive vision of the army as it sought to pacify the natives. But once again the audience identify with a hero who is completely detached from the colonial project and whose apparent heroism is due to an indifference to his own fate. The only man he is seen to kill is another Frenchman. He is haunted by the past in the shape of an upper-class woman who has shared a luxurious and irresponsible lifestyle with him, only to desert him when the money ran out. He ﬁnds an identical looking prostitute who loves him as the other woman never did, but whose dowdy, mournful persona fails to captivate him as the other woman had. The action focuses not on military deeds but on the garrison town, a sad parody of France that suggests both nostalgic yearning and its inevitable frustration. The café concert where the sad prostitute sings a dirge-like chorus of, gaiement, gaiement, is called Les Folies Parisiennes while the seedy bar where the soldiers go for peace is La Normandie. The ﬁlm ends when the hero rediscovers the upper-class woman and comes to realize her hollowness and thus the emptiness of the past that haunted him. He re-enlists. His death is foretold by the grand jeu, the telling of his fortune through the cards. This particular colonial soldier is thus a passive victim of fate and not a maker of history. One might try to recuperate the interracial turmoil of the Moroccan street for colonial propaganda by suggesting that it called for the imposition of French order, but there is no positive vision of such an order to buttress such an interpretation; instead it might be suggested that the street evokes a chaotic and alienating

Martin O’Shaughnessy 37

present from which there is no escape except in death. Its vision of a futile upper-class lifestyle and a depressing lower-class one, together with the distorted echo of an absent festive France, owes more perhaps to the impact of the economic slump that was being so sharply felt when the ﬁlm was made than to imperial consciousness. L’Appel du silence (Léon Poirier, 1936), paid for by French Catholics by subscription, is a vehicle for Catholic nationalism. Its hero, Charles de Foucauld, whose life is recounted from his birth in the mid-nineteenth century to his death at the time of the First World War, is committed to French grandeur. His soldier friend, Laperrine, shares his vision so that the religious project of the conversion of hearts and minds is complemented by the military project of conquest and paciﬁcation. The ﬁlm cannot simply be claimed for colonial propaganda, however. De Foucauld rejects a modern France that has abandoned its spiritual vocation in search of temporal progress. The noise and chaos, which characterized Arab streets in the other ﬁlms, are here relocated in the heart of Paris in the shape of noisy trafﬁc and hurrying pedestrians. It is only when he ﬂees his country and seeks the silence of the desert that De Foucauld can rescue a positive image of it: ‘Il faut vivre dans le bled pour voir la grandeur de son pays’ [You have to live in a rural out-of-the-way place in order to understand your country’s greatness], he comments. The France he yearns for is again located ﬁrmly in the past, this time in a traditionalist vision of rural labour and cathedrals. The natives are more religious than his own countrymen while we are told that ‘le monde civilisé est devenu une cacaphonie effroyable’ [The civilized world has become a cacophony]. If civilization is uncivilized and modernity a form of chaos, the hierarchical binaries that might justify colonialism again crumble. The colonial project is thus clearly undermined even while it is being defended, and the ﬁlm can better be seen as an inward and backwardlooking polemic that should be viewed in the context of the intense political division in the France of the 1930s. The ﬁnal ﬁlm considered, Les Pirates du rail (Christian-Jaque, 1938), at last seems to provide us with an example of pro-colonial propaganda. It shows a heroic railway boss defending rail, telephone and telegraph lines against Chinese warlords and bandits. The audience is invited to identify with this self-sacriﬁcing, dedicated and ultimately triumphant ﬁgure as he struggles to defend order and the beneﬁts of civilization from chaos and barbarity. He is aided in his work by the company doctor who has devoted his life to helping the ungrateful Chinese. ‘Malgré tout ce que nous avons créé, les hôpitaux, les chemins de fer, les écoles, nous restons

38 Poor Propaganda: 1930s French Colonial Films

leurs ennemis. [Despite all that we have built for them, hospitals, railways, schools, we remain their enemies’]. French hysteria, evident in Gabin’s performances in Pépé and La Bandera, is now shouldered by the women, thus allowing for the restoration of national virility. However, the need to evoke and displace this hysteria shows that broader anxieties still break through the surface of what might otherwise seem a straightforward celebration of France’s mission civilisatrice. The indefensible hundreds of miles of railway line suggest the fragility of civilization while the marauding Chinese and images of beleaguered French groups surrounded by hostile forces cannot help but evoke France’s fears of being overrun in the pre-war period. Moreover, the French are initially divided between those who reject their duty and those who do it. Some continue to seek amusement even as danger looms. Thus, fears of decadence and of a loss of any sense of shared national purpose are clearly expressed, even if the French ultimately hold ﬁrm. The ﬁlm evokes some of the same fears and tensions as the previous ﬁlms considered, but this time they are contained and channelled by a narrative of shared national achievement and, crucially, by the possibility of identiﬁcation with a positive hero who has fully internalized the colonial project. This brief analysis of a selection of celebrated and less-known prewar ‘colonial’ ﬁlms shows that once we move away from a view of them as simple propaganda or as part of a self-contained archive of colonial discourse and ﬁnd in them displaced fears, desires and conﬂicts, interpretation becomes hugely difﬁcult. But by replacing them in the socio-historical context of the 1930s and, more speciﬁcally, by focusing on the incompatibility of the colonial project and the backward and inward-looking and profoundly divided and beleaguered nation of the 1930s, one can begin to cast light on some of the complexities and contradictions that run through them. Viewed in this way, they can be a key site for the exploration of France’s evolving crisis of identity, community and national purpose in the 1930s. It is precisely because the colonial space offers an apparent guarantee of dominance and superiority that it can be used to explore fears, threats and divisions. Precisely because it is a space that the French can exploit imaginatively as well as economically, that the negative features of the present can be projected on to it. Finally, it is precisely because the real France is absent in colonial space that an ideal, absent France can be imagined. It is this combination of the projection of negativities and the imagination of an absent ideal that makes the colonies a fantasy land where the shadows of two Frances (‘la plus grande’ [greater] and ‘la plus petite’ [smaller]) can overlap and interact, and it is perhaps for this

Martin O’Shaughnessy 39

reason, returning to Sorlin’s analysis quoted at the start of this chapter, that the soldiers that we identify with die while the army always wins. The French can live out their neuroses vicariously in an overall context that seems to guarantee security, except that in the 1930s the empire was never quite reassuring enough. This engagement with a fuller socio-historical context may begin to provide some more convincing explanation of some of the paradoxes and ambiguities of colonial ﬁlm than one that simply locates the ﬁlms in the context of colonialism per se. Yet it is not enough in itself to provide a rounded account of the ﬁlms; we must also be sensitive to their complex intertextuality, an intertextuality that never stops at the edge of some mythically coherent, self-contained or ofﬁcial colonial discourse. We must be sensitive also, as my analysis of Pépé-le-Moko suggested, to how colonial ﬁlms may speak to us in plural voices, inviting us to take up divergent viewpoints (legal seriousness, tourist frivolity or nostalgic xenophobia) on the colonial world and on the mobile modern more generally. We should ﬁnally be aware both of the very real differences between near contemporaneous ﬁlms and of broader historical shifts in patterns of representation. Notes and References 1 On this point, see the introduction to E. Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 2 P. Sorlin, ‘The fanciful Empire, French feature ﬁlms and the Colonies in the 1930s’, French Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, No. 5 (June 1991), pp.140–1. 3 Ibid., p.141. 4 Ibid., p.148. 5 D. Sherzer, Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1996), p.4. 6 Ibid., p.235. 7 Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious, pp.113–28. 8 A. Benali, Le Cinéma Colonial au Maghreb (Paris: Editions du Cerf), pp.171–3. 9 Ibid., p.148. 10 Ibid., pp.195–8. 11 Ibid., pp.311–12. 12 Ibid., pp.312–26. 13 For a complementary discussion of the evolution of colonial discourse, for its differential address and appeal to different groups and for regional variation in audience receptiveness, see M. Evans, ‘From colonialism to post-colonialism: The French empire since Napoleon’, in M. Alexander (ed.), French History since Napoleon (London: Arnold, 1999), pp.391–412, particularly pp.403–8. 14 D. Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p.4. 15 Ibid., p.145.

40 Poor Propaganda: 1930s French Colonial Films 16 Ibid., p.150. 17 Ibid., p.170. 18 C. Crisp, Genre, Myth and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp.82–8. 19 Ibid., pp.95–102. 20 Ibid., p.47. 21 Ibid., p.48. 22 On these points, see two seminal articles: D. Porter, ‘Orientalism and its problems’, in Barker et al., The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), pp.179–93 and B. Parry, ‘Problems in current theories of colonial discourse’, in Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 9, Nos 1–2 (1987), pp.27–58. 23 For this vision of France, I have drawn on a range of authors, notably: S. Berstein, La France des années trente (Paris: Colin, 1988); P. Burrin, La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1995); P. Laborie, L’Opinion française sous Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1992); H. Lebovics, True France: the Wars over French Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); R. Schor, L’Opinion française et les Etrangers en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: Sorbonne, 1985). For a fuller discussion of their vision of France in the 1930s and the contrast I seek to draw between ‘la plus grande France’ and ‘la plus petite’, see M. O’Shaughnessy, ‘Pépé-leMoko or the impossibility of being French in the 1930s’, French Cultural Studies, Vol. vii (1996), pp.247–58. 24 G. Vincendeau, Pépé-le-Moko (London: BFI, 1998), p.57. 25 Ibid., pp.62–6. 26 I have suggested in a recent article (‘The Parisian popular as reactionary modernisation’, Studies in French Cinema, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2001), pp.80–8) that tourism and exile are recurrent motifs in colonial ﬁlms of the 1930s, and should be seen as part of a broader and largely regressive engagement with the uprooted, transnational modern in the French cinema of the period.

3 Un de la Légion: Myth Conception and Misconceptions Marie-Hélène Heurtaud-Wright

After the First World War, anti-militarism reappeared in France, splitting French society along a Left–Right dividing line. On the one hand, as Raoul Girardet suggests, the military idea incarnated in the collective mind of the Right the related principles of political order, social preservation and ﬁdelity to the nation.1 On the Left, however, between 1922 and 1934, papers such as L’Œuvre, Le Canard enchaîné or L’Humanité ﬁercely and doggedly attacked the military institution in all its aspects. However, from 1934, several events occurred which brought about a dramatic change: the realization of the true nature of Hitler’s politics, the Ethiopian crisis of 1934–6 which contributed to Mussolini’s rapprochement with Germany, and, of course, the Spanish Civil War. From then on, the army regained prestige and popularity, and the anti-militarist diatribes gradually disappeared from the Leftwing press.2 Such a context might help to explain why, from 1934 onwards, noticeably more ﬁction ﬁlms than before took the army as their subject. Among those, several portrayed heroic deeds performed by men serving in the French colonial army. The colonial corps which aroused much interest and curiosity in the public was the French Foreign Legion, and a number of ﬁlms were devoted to charting the lives of these rugged soldiers. These movies foregrounded the much-vaunted virile qualities of the men, their sense of duty and honour, and their readiness to die. The concept of military valour thus elaborated functioned as a homogenizing myth around which the nation could unite. As George Schöpﬂin writes in his study of the functions of myth, military myths ‘give saliency to the special regard in which a collectivity holds itself because it has performed deeds of military valour’.3 At the same time, these ﬁlms expressed a deep nostalgia, on the part of people who saw the rise of the Popular 41

42 Myth Conception and Misconceptions

Front with grave concern, for a strong male hierarchy and a regimented society where determined and trustworthy leaders furnished a true sense of purpose.

The French Foreign Legion and the popular myth The legionnaire who lived in people’s imagination was a man different from any other men, an ambiguous mix of strength and fragility, both single-minded and confused, wishing to ‘wipe the slate clean’ and yet unable to forget the past, intent on cheating death whilst morbidly fascinated by it, irresistible to women, but happiest in the company of men. In the 1930s, the myth of the legionnaire had never thrived so successfully. This myth began its public life in earnest at the beginning of the twentieth century, notably with a book written in 1911 by Georges D’Esparbès.4 D’Esparbès’s work contributed to the creation of the myth of the legionnaire with a mysterious past, the gentleman driven to the Legion by unrequited love, gambling debts or association with gangsters, who joins up under a false identity and becomes part of a nearreligious brotherhood. Later on, the myth was to evolve simultaneously towards both extremes of the human spectrum to include sorrowful Russian princes and hardened dangerous criminals. As a result, the Legion’s myth as a place where a man could redeem his shameful past protected by l’anonymat (anonymity) came into being. However, there could be neither remedy nor redemption without a ﬁrm but fair and magnanimous guiding hand. Thus arose the other great myth of the Legion, that of the ofﬁcer totally devoted to his men who, in turn, were ready to die for him. The Legion is inextricably linked to the French colonial conquests. Created in 1831 by Louis-Philippe in order, among other aims, to rid the streets of Paris of the many politically oppressed Europeans who had come to the ‘homeland of the Revolution’, 5 its ﬁrst home was Algeria. Furthermore, there was one important restriction: it could only serve outside the ‘continental limits of the kingdom’.6 Thus the future of the Legion as an overseas corps at the forefront of colonial expansion was secured. In the words of Douglas Porch, ‘the fact that they were Europeans ﬁghting in bleak foreign lands bestowed upon them the mantle of civilization conquering barbarism’. 7 It was not long before the image of legionnaires besieged by hordes of ‘savages’ in their desert outpost became commonplace in l’imaginaire français.

Marie-Hélen`e Heurtaud-Wright 43

The Legion was not, however, without vices and diseases. They, too, were part of the mythology. D’Esparbès cites malaria and syphilis (for which he blames the women in the colonies!) and le cafard (the blues), which he blames on alcohol. Alcohol was a scourge of the Legion. As Georges Blond points out, hard drinking has always been a part of the Legion’s way of life but, by way of compensation, it is also the corps where it is most common to die of thirst.8 Mysterious past, redemption in faraway deserts, cafard and alcohol: the picture is more or less complete. After the First World War, the propagation of the myth acquired a new momentum with various publications, ﬁlms and even songs about the Legion. Some publications were memoirs from disgruntled exlegionnaires who put the accent on the appalling conditions, the sadistic ofﬁcers, the cruel punishments and draconian discipline they claimed to have found in the Legion.9 In compensation, several hagiographies were produced such as, in 1933, Les Hommes sans nom, by Jean des Vallières, which also became a ﬁlm in 1936. The 1930s saw the emergence of songs which gloriﬁed the legionnaire, this deliciously dangerous being ‘qui sentait bon le sable chaud’ (who exuded the sensual smell of hot sand). Some of the best-loved realist songs to rise from the street, were sung by Fréhel or Edith Piaf, and were called Le Fanion de la Légion (1936) or Mon Légionnaire (1937). Accompanied by the sad sound of the bugle, one could hear verses such as: Les ‘salopards’10 tiennent la plaine Là-haut dans le petit fortin Depuis une longue semaine La mort en prend chaque matin La soif et la ﬁèvre dessèchent les lèvres … Il reste trois dans le bastion Le torse nu couvert de gloire Sanglants, meurtris et en haillons Sans eau ni pain, sans munitions …11 (The ‘bastards’ are on the plain Up there, in the little outpost For one long week now Death has been picking them off every morning Thirst and fever dry their lips …

44 Myth Conception and Misconceptions

Only three remain in the bastion Their bare chests covered in glory Bloody, wounded and in rags Without water or bread, without ammunition …) Un de la Légion, a ﬁlm made by Christian-Jaque in 1936, was inscribed in this popular imagining of the Legion and will be considered here in relation to it. I therefore propose to examine the discursive position of the ﬁlm as regards the Legion and its mythology, before exploring the kind of slippages one can also detect, which open a textual space for the expression of anxieties and fears concerning, amongst others, France’s imperial identity.

Un de la Légion (Christian-Jaque, 1936) Un de la Légion starred one of the best-loved comic actors of the times, Fernandel, a Marseillais who was already ﬁrmly linked to the comique troupier12 tradition many French loved so much in the 1930s. The combination of Fernandel with the exoticism of the colonies was a stroke of genius on the part of the producers, for it offered two of the nation’s favourite ingredients when it came to entertainment. Indeed, Un de la Légion was one of the box ofﬁce hits of 1936.13 However, Un de la Légion is a generically hybrid ﬁlm, for it starts as a comedy in the traditional Fernandel mould, but soon turns into a documentary about the Legion which is close to propaganda, and then into an epic war ﬁlm which demands to be taken seriously. This points to a complexity which belies the initial impression of shallowness imparted by the improbable plot, and makes the ﬁlm, on one level, the fascinating repository of a certain conservative mentality. David Slavin too believes that ‘the ﬁlm clearly proclaimed the Legion’s message’.14 In it, Fernandel plays Fernand Espitalion, a hen-pecked husband who has been made to wait in the street by his wife, Antoinette. However, he disobeys her orders not to leave this spot and, enticed by a small-time criminal, goes to a bar across the square. The criminal, who has just enlisted in the Legion, promptly changes his mind at the sight of Fernand’s fat wallet. He gets him drunk and operates a switch of identity, with the result that Fernand wakes up the next morning on a ship bound to Algeria. Initially protesting his identity, Fernand comes to love the Legion, where he ﬁnds understanding ofﬁcers, camaraderie, and a mistress. He grows into a ‘real’ man and a hero by distinguishing himself on the battleﬁeld. On becoming a civilian again, he ﬁnds that

Marie-Hélen`e Heurtaud-Wright 45

his status as hero has won him the respect of his now dutiful and obeying wife; but he cannot live without the Legion and rejoins the corps, this time under his real name. A pro-Legion text As a critic wrote about Un de la Légion in the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1939, ‘The ﬁlm is far from being undiluted comedy … it is, rather, an elaborate boost for life in the Legion.’15 Although the ﬁlm leaves us in no doubt that training is hard, the atmosphere of the Legion is indeed portrayed as extremely supportive, affectionate even. For instance, when Sergeant Leduc guides his new recruits through Sidi-bel-Abbès and asks them, somewhat unsuccessfully, to march in rows of three: ‘I have said in rows of three, not four. Come on, children, use your brain a little’,16 he addresses them with the voice of a father gently chiding his brood. This sets the tone for the rest of the movie: throughout, the Legion is represented as a place where ‘one could almost believe that the Sergeant went round and tucked his charges up in bed’.17 At a time when censorship was very pernickety where the representation of the armed forces was concerned, it is fair to assume that ﬁlms like Un de la Légion would have been closely scrutinized. The very fact that Un de la Légion was passed by the censor conﬁrms that the ﬁlm’s content was not perceived as controversial. Despite its comic tone, the ﬁlm certainly extolled the moral and educational virtues of military life. The virile education of body and soul which the orphan Fernand did not receive in civilian life is plentifully available in the barracks. As Sergeant Leduc says kindly to him: You will get up in the early hours of the morning and you will go to bed early in the evening. In between times, you will work hard. I give you ﬁve minutes to wave good-bye to lie-ins, laziness and leisure. You are about to start a new life, tiring, but virile. As the saying goes, ‘a physical hell, but a moral paradise’.18 And to prove that Leduc was right, Fernand declares after his ﬁrst 30-kilometre march in full kit: ‘My body feels happy.’ He will go on to win the heart of the local bar hostess, defeat in a ﬁst-ﬁght the toughest and meanest of the other legionnaires, save by his courage the life of 40 of his comrades and reduce his nagging wife to tender submission! In a time of political and social instability, economic difﬁculty, international threat of war and a sense of distrust in French institutions, boosting the image of the army – the institution that is the daughter of

46 Myth Conception and Misconceptions

the nation and yet transcends politics and social inequalities whilst symbolizing loyalty, honour, action and virility par excellence – must have seemed a worthy endeavour. A close examination of the ﬁlm suggests that the more unsavoury myths concerning the Legion have been kept unobtrusively in the background, or been ridiculed, or even left out. Enough elements of the myth (the more inoffensive) remain, of course, to conﬁrm to audiences, who had certain expectations, that this was indeed a ‘legionnaire’ ﬁlm. First, one must mention l’anonymat. It is thanks to this that Fernand ends up in the Legion under an assumed name. In true epic fashion, he then crosses the sea, still a simple man, achieves great deeds unrecognized, regains his identity and returns to his native land a hero. Fernand, however, does not have any of the typical problems normally associated with legionnaires. He has committed no crime, he has plenty of money (or at least his wife does), and he does not suffer from unrequited love. On the contrary, early on in the ﬁlm, he tells us that he does not love his wife. He is, nevertheless, in a sizeable predicament: he is not a ‘man’ but a bullied husband who dares not stand up to his wife. So he is the perfect ﬁgure to exhibit the character-building side of the Legion. As the debonair Leduc tells him during the march, echoing the famous ‘Marche ou crève’ (Walk or die) motto, ‘You’re a legionnaire. You’ll hold on till the end’. And Fernand does because his pride, and possibly his life, depends on it. Throughout the ﬁlm, camaraderie amongst men is heavily stressed: for instance, when Fernand, during the same march, is virtually ‘mothered’ by his friends who tell him, during a pause, not to drink alcohol because ‘It’ll make your legs go’ and to walk on the spot lest ‘your blisters become unbearable’. They even carry his gun for him. When Vander, the Belgian legionnaire, is killed, it gives rise to great displays of emotions. Turlot even brings to Fernand, who is recovering from his wounds in hospital, some ﬂowers which he has gathered on Vander’s grave, and they cry together. Finally, loyalty amongst soldiers is epitomized by Charlin, the ‘don’t-mess-with-me’ legionnaire, who goes to rescue Fernand when he is wounded on the battleﬁeld, thus also proving that the Legion never abandons its dead or its wounded. Anonymity, virile friendship, redemption: the myth is unmistakably at work here. As for the less pleasant aspects of the Legion – alcoholism, violence, or womanizing – they are only vaguely hinted at. On the whole, the Legion is a healthy place to be. Finally, the single allusion to the harsh discipline of the Legion renders the very idea of it quite preposterous. When Antoinette, still seeking her husband, ﬁnally

Marie-Hélen`e Heurtaud-Wright 47

gets to meet the captain in Sidi-bel-Abbès, the following exchange takes place: Antoinette: What state of mental and physical weakness must my poor Fernand be in not to have the strength to shout for help. It frightens me. They say that discipline is draconian here. Capitaine: Quite so. Well, if among the three thousand or so legionnaires who are presently here I ﬁnd one who is mentally and physically degenerate, I will certainly let you know. This is a moment of dramatic irony, for the members of the audience know the truth of Fernand’s situation. These remarks also contribute to making light of the much-publicized inhuman discipline. How could it be otherwise in such a modern Legion, au fait with the research of the eminent neurologist Joseph Babinski, as the doctor who examines Fernand demonstrates, with spotless barracks, immaculate hospital wards, whiter-than-white bed sheets and ﬂowers everywhere? There is no doubting the fact that the Legion of Un de la Légion is a happy place. As such, the ﬁlm reinforces the sanitized image of the Legion which other ofﬁcial documentary ﬁlms of the period conveyed as a means of counteracting the adverse publicity to which the Legion had been subjected in the early part of the 1930s. By way of a conclusion to this part of the discussion, I hope to have shown that, as the critics have written, Un de la Légion is very much a ﬁlm about the Legion, extolling its nicer sides and virtues. This, however, cannot be achieved without obfuscating its more contentious aspects. It is tempting to argue that the story itself is but a pretext for an extended document about life in the Legion and the successful ﬁght against the rebels. Indeed, the ﬁlm, which is some 85 minutes long, regularly lapses into documentary style, be it of the tourist or military kind, for a total of nearly 23 minutes. However, this is not the whole story. The invisible rebels When Captain Carron welcomes the new recruits to the barracks, he tells them that ‘More often than not, we’ll put tools rather than arms in your hands.’ This may be so, but what the ﬁlm actually shows us at length is not the Legion’s celebrated building genius, but its preparedness for war and its ﬁghting ability. Nevertheless, when it comes to staging the Legion in combat against the rebels, I would suggest that the ﬁlm bears witness to uncertainties surrounding France’s imperial enterprise.

48 Myth Conception and Misconceptions

Our ﬁrst encounter with a ‘native’ in the ﬁlm occurs when Antoinette arrives at her Sidi-bel-Abbès hotel and asks the ‘native’ porter where she can ﬁnd the Legion. The porter displays some of the signs of ‘civilization’ by wearing a semi-European costume, although his traditional headdress is there to indicate that total ‘civilization’ will always elude him. However, in recognition of his progress towards enlightenment, he is allowed to be heard, though ﬁlmed mostly in proﬁle in a way reminiscent of the anthropological drawings and photographs of the turn of the century.19 Thus, as a servant, the nearcivilized ‘native’ is there to attend to the colonizers’ needs and see to their well-being. The next sequence slips into a tourist documentary mode, as Antoinette searches for her husband in the crowd gathered in the main square: this is the pretext for the camera to capture the exotic ‘natives’. These ‘natives’ are wearing their traditional dress and are shown as a mass of undifferentiated, faceless beings. The way this mass is moving, dancing apparently aimlessly to the sound of an effervescent music, emphasizes its incoherence and its chaotic nature. The speed with which the camera pans further accentuates the sensation of dizzy mobility. The local music is to be contrasted with the persistent military music, symbol of order, purpose and noble emotions, that we hear throughout the ﬁlm and which accompanies the forward-moving legionnaires, emblematic of la civilisation en marche (the unstoppable march of civilization). The anonymous crowd is also to be contrasted with the well-deﬁned European characters whose story we have been following since the beginning of the ﬁlm. These ‘natives’, in their state of ‘arrested development’ somewhere in the Middle Ages, are the target of civilization. But because we have seen the hotel porter, we can imagine what future awaits them: they will be serving the colonizers, at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy. Following the logic of oppression that often leads exploited beings down the road to rebellion, the next time we encounter the ‘natives’ they are ﬁring at the Legion. As we have just seen, the less ‘civilized’ the natives – and therefore the more threatening they are – the more indistinct is their representation. The logic in the ﬁlmic text is followed through impeccably to its natural conclusion: as rebels, the ‘natives’ are at their most fearsome, therefore they are made invisible. In a most extraordinary battle sequence, the salopards are present only through the barrels of their single-shot guns. When a ‘native’ is hit, his gun topples over the edge of the rocky outcrop. It is as if the colonizers were unable to behold the reality of the colonial situation, which is

Marie-Hélen`e Heurtaud-Wright 49

that the French were mere intruders and were not wanted by the majority of the local population; that they were not in full control of the situation; that, as a result, life in the colonies was full of insecurity and anxiety; and that, despite the ofﬁcial discourse of the colonial lobby, the future of the colonies was far from secure. And just as the fearful colonizers must avert their eyes, as if this would make the problem go away, the camera steadfastly refuses to show the rebels to its audience. The invisibility of the ‘native’ ﬁghters confers upon them monstrous characteristics. Philippe Sellier explains how a hero normally ‘reveals himself to the world by mighty ‘works’,20 usually in combat against a monster. As he suggests, a great number of enemies, as opposed to a single one, denotes monstrosity which, in turn, justiﬁes eradicating this evil force. In the ﬁlm, the fact that the enemy is never seen contributes to creating a very disquieting force: the unseen is always more frightening because it has no face, it has no shape, and it is not human. It is potentially ubiquitous, encircling and dangerous. Furthermore, the rebels cannot be represented as a ﬂag-carrying organized army, for this would mean recognizing them as human, as defending their land against the questionable French invader, as capable of rational behaviour: all traits the Europeans need to suppress if the justiﬁcation of the great civilizing mission is to survive and with it the whole colonial enterprise. Even the use of the word salopard, which is heard several times in the ﬁlm, is signiﬁcant. As Barthes has pointed out, ‘The downgrading vocabulary serves here, in a precise fashion, to deny that there is a war, which in turn makes it possible for the notion of the interlocutor to be obliterated. “One does not negotiate with an outlaw”.’21 Not only was showing the Arabs as monstrous a way of justifying the civilizing enterprise, but it also occulted the means by which colonization was achieved: the spoliation of the land and plundering of its resources, as well as the military and legal subjugation of the population. Salopards, anxiety and ambivalence The myth of the salopard went hand in hand with the myth of the legionnaire. By this I mean that the latter depended to an extent on the former, for the extreme danger posed by the salopard contributed to deﬁning the legionnaire as virile, tough and fearless in the face of death. Prior to the battle scene, this is how the man in authority, the expert, Sergeant Leduc, introduces the rebels: ‘These brigands are sly and cruel. Their usual method is treachery; their preferred tactic is the

50 Myth Conception and Misconceptions

ambush; their favourite arm is the dagger. Masters in the art of hiding and camouﬂage, they are upon you without your having heard or seen them.’ The tone, the vocabulary and even the structure of the sentences used by Leduc are reminiscent of a well-prepared commentary, the kind one could hear in a documentary. This combination of authoritative voices carries the mark of authenticity. Furthermore, it also morally legitimizes, for Fernand as well as for the audience, the violence and killing which are about to take place: the rebels are ‘cruel throat-cutters’ who ‘ﬁght dirty’. They are denied the kind of respect a soldier might feel for another enemy soldier, each ﬁghting for a suitably just cause. The cause of the rebels cannot be just for they are the enemy of civilization. This perception of the rebels receives conﬁrmation from the vieux blédards (hardened colonial soldiers in the Maghreb) themselves. They, too, are experts, the kind of expertise that comes from experience. They advise Fernand to keep a bullet engraved with his name in his pocket. When Fernand fails to comprehend the signiﬁcance of this, they explain that, should he encounter the rebels, he would be well advised to shoot himself. ‘In case you are wounded or made prisoner … you’re better off topping yourself; it’s quicker and it’s cleaner, believe you me.’ This signiﬁes that death at the hand of the ‘inhuman’ and ‘sly natives’ is likely to be a slow and painful process. Seventeen years after the end of the Great War, the participation of the colonial ‘native’ troops in the war under the French ﬂag in the muddy and freezing trenches of Verdun is conveniently forgotten. The ‘natives’ were then human enough to die bravely for France and experience at ﬁrst hand Europe’s peculiar brand of civilization. They found themselves elevated to the status of ‘civilized’: the barbarians were the Germans under the leadership of ‘Haj Guillaume’, and the Turks, whom the French press in the Maghreb called ‘les Boches de l’Islam’. After the war, however, the ‘natives’ had to be returned to their subhuman status as ‘cruel rebels’, for nobody wanted to explain the rebellion in the colonies in terms of a legitimate reaction to services forgotten and exploitation. Un de la Légion is but one of several legionnaire ﬁlms of the 1930s in which yet more ritual ﬁghting against the rebels took place. Talking about the Western genre, Susan Hayward argues that it seeks to elevate the conquest of the West to the status of myth because it is not possible to show the colonization as it really was. But she also adds that, as a ritualistic narrative, the Western points to ‘fear of loss of control, of mastery’. As a result, ‘the eternal repetition, as represented by rituals

Marie-Hélen`e Heurtaud-Wright 51

and the formulaic construction of the genre … reﬂects the desire to reassert that control and that mastery’.22 Is there not a sense in which the legionnaire ﬁlms too reﬂect a similar desire to regain control by repeatedly staging the attack on the legionnaires’ outpost by the salopards who are repelled at the last minute by the relief troop? Certainly, Leduc acknowledges the permanence of the threat from the rebels, as well as the uncertain outcome of the battle – and, possibly, of colonization as a whole – when he says: ‘It’s up to us to be vigilant and to answer deceit with deceit. Those of you who know me are aware that I have several tricks up my sleeve. We’ve duped them more often than they us. It’s not today that we will be outdone.’ Today, perhaps not, but what about tomorrow? With the beneﬁt of hindsight, we have had an answer to this question since 19 March 1962. However, for the time being, as Leduc announces, the Legion will not be defeated. When the ﬁring gets under way, we hear the sporadic noise made by the single-shot guns of the ‘cruel and sly rebels’ against the continuous thundering rolls of the Legion sub-machine guns. This may very well point to the lack of equipment of the rebellion and thus reassure the audience that the colonies are safe, but it is also a powerful reminder of the unequal means available, at all levels, to the two communities. The French had better arms, better status and better land. Leduc quite unwittingly also acknowledges the ‘barbarous’ instincts that live within the self-righteous Europeans who claim to bring civilization to Africa. By proposing to answer deceit with deceit, he admits to using the same methods he attributes to the rebels. Philip Dine, in his discussion of Les Centurions, Jean Lartéguy’s novel of the Algerian war of independence, makes the point that by using the same ‘unclean’ method of killing as the FLN fellaghas, the paratroopers did not ‘act like soldiers’ but were reduced to the same ‘primitiveness’ as the ‘barbarians’.23 Leduc’s words point to the hybridity of the French soldiers who, through contact with the rebels, were going ‘militarily native’. Wilson Harris believes that this kind of ambivalence binds the two sides together. He writes that these practices ‘relate protagonist and antagonist, they relate to a mutual psyche. How can one know what the enemy is planning, if one does not in a sense share the biases of the enemy? One cannot know the enemy unless the enemy has something in common with oneself.’24 Thus transgression, paradoxically, was necessary to survival. In the colonies, soldiers ﬁghting in the name of European identity and civilization were put in a position that contained the risk of jeopardizing both.

52 Myth Conception and Misconceptions

In conclusion, we see that Un de la Légion, which has often been misconceived by critics as a purely monolithic jingoistic celebration of the imperial vocation and manly virtues of the French Foreign Legion, is in fact a multi-layered polysemic text which, through a number of slippages, gives voice to the kind of deep-seated anxieties which pervaded the colonial enterprise, and which could not be articulated in the ofﬁcial discourse of colonialism if its stability and coherence were to be preserved. Notes and References 1 See R. Girardet, La société militaire dans la France contemporaine – 1815–1939 (Paris: Plon, 1953), p.314. 2 See ibid., p.316. 3 G. Schöpﬂin, ‘The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myths’, in G. Hosking and G. Schöpﬂin (eds), Myths and Nationhood (Hurst, 1997), p.32. 4 G. D’Esparbès, Les Mystères de la Légion (Paris: Flammarion, 1911). 5 D. Porch, The French Foreign Legion – A Complete History (London: Macmillan, 1991), p.xvii. 6 A.-P. Comor, La Légion étrangère (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), p.20. 7 D. Porch, The French Foreign Legion, p.428. 8 G. Blond, Histoire de la Légion étrangère (Paris: France Loisirs, 1981), p.16. 9 For example, the books written in the 1930s by ex-Legionnaire 1384, with suggestive titles such as Hell Hounds of France or Legion of the Lost. 10 Derogatory name given to the Arab rebels. Translate loosely as the ‘bastards’. 11 R. Asso and M. Monnot, ‘Le Fanion de la Légion’ (1936) quoted in A. Ruscio, Que la France était belle au temps des colonies … Anthologie de chansons coloniales et exotiques françaises (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), pp.181–2. 12 This is a military farce. 13 Raymond Chirat lists Un de la Légion as one of the important ﬁlms of 1936. See R. Chirat, Le Cinéma français des années trente (Paris: Hatier, 1983), p.112. 14 D. Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p.147. 15 Anonymous, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 68 (31 August 1939) p.165. 16 All quotes from the ﬁlm’s dialogue have been translated by the author of this article. 17 This is how a critic assessed the ﬁlm in Kinematograph Weekly, No. 1,685 (3 August 1939). 18 Porch, The French Foreign Legion, p.184. 19 G. Boëtsch, ‘Anthropologue et indigènes: mesurer la diversité, montrer l’altérité’, in P. Blanchard, S. Blanchoin, N. Bancel, G. Boëtsch and H. Gerbeau (eds), L’Autre et Nous – ‘Scènes et Types’ (Paris: Achac-Syros, 1995), p.56. 20 P. Sellier, ‘Heroism’, in P. Brunel, Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes (London: Routledge, 1992), p.558.

Marie-Hélen`e Heurtaud-Wright 53 21 R. Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957, reprinted 1970), p.138 [my translation]. 22 S. Hayward, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), p.413. 23 See P. Dine, Images of the Algerian War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp.36–7. 24 Quoted in B. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory – Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), p.182.

Part II Photography

4 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography David Bate

Surrealism was an important avenue for anti-colonial thought at the beginning of the twentieth century in French culture. Such a proposition goes against common assumptions of how surrealism is understood today. A typical view of surrealism in contemporary Anglo-American culture regards it as the antics of a group of sexist young men totally preoccupied with their own chaotic internal thoughts who were the initiators of scandalous asocial activities. Accounts of historical surrealism have become a caricature and, even in a sociology of art interested in the European avant-garde, surrealism is described as doing not much more than creating a ‘shock’ to other members of its petty bourgeois class and a frisson of excitement for a bored native bourgeoisie.1 Against such clichés and preconceptions I want to begin to consider the relations between surrealism and anti-colonialism as revealed in historical documents of the period. In general this is very much a neglected part of the history of surrealism, one that has been ignored or repressed. Consequently, the contribution of surrealism as a discourse to the ﬁeld of anti-colonialist politics and thinking in early twentieth-century French culture needs to be recognized and included within post-colonial history and criticism. The relations between surrealism and anti-colonialism can be found in three different but overlapping ways. First, surrealists were engaged in direct, active support for anti-colonial struggles. Through images and texts (in individual and collective works), across exhibitions, published periodicals and manifesto statements, the surrealists participated in anti-colonial politics and culture. Second, surrealism itself opened up a new discursive space as a vital forum for new cultural politics, inviting discussion and criticism on a range of issues. Within this discursive space, colonial subjects found themselves a place in which they 57

58 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography

could enunciate anti-colonial issues which otherwise did not exist. Third, as an emergent cultural discourse, surrealism acted as a sphere of inﬂuence in and on other contemporary disciplines. It might of course be argued that, within such relations, surrealism was an inevitable part of the ‘colonizing culture’ since it was a product of ‘the West’, but this would be to homogenize relations of colonizer/colonized into a binary opposition that is far from constructive for historical analysis. To refuse to consider how the hierarchy of colonizer/colonized power relations were opposed, rejected or resisted within European culture is to repeat precisely the power relations assumed by colonialism within a writing of its history. If histories of culture are condemned to repeat the same colonialist dynamics of power and oppression, they unwittingly reinscribe histories of the powerful and powerless. It is therefore important to address the resistances to the historical processes of colonialism to which all were subject. But in this context, just as I want to argue that surrealism was part of a resistance and needs to be considered in terms of its contribution to anti-colonialism, so the reverse is also true: that is to say, colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle were central to, and formative of, developments within surrealism itself.

The Signiﬁcance of the Moroccan war In 1934 André Breton, the self-appointed ‘pope’ of surrealism, gave a public lecture in Brussels entitled ‘What is Surrealism?’ (1 June 1934). Looking back over the previous ﬁfteen years of surrealist activity, Breton divided it into two ‘epochs’ which pivoted around a colonial event.2 The ﬁrst epoch Breton characterized as ‘a purely intuitive epoch’ (1919–24) and the second as ‘a reasoning epoch’ (1925–34).3 What dramatically made the difference between these two moments of ‘intuitive’ and ‘reasoning’ surrealism, Breton argued, was the Moroccan war: No coherent political or social attitude, however, made its appearance till 1925; that is to say (and it is important to stress this), till the outbreak of the Moroccan war, which, re-arousing our particular hostility to the way armed conﬂicts affect man, placed suddenly before us the necessity of making a public protest … [and] created a precedent that was to determine the whole future direction of the movement. Surrealist activity, faced with a brutal, revolting, unthinkable fact, was forced to ask itself what were its proper resources and to determine their limits; it was forced to

David Bate 59

adopt a precise attitude, exterior to itself, in order to continue to face whatever exceeded these limits.4 Breton’s idealist uniﬁcation of interior and exterior world was forced to face the political problems of material reality. Having experienced at ﬁrst hand the social barbarism of the First World War – which was truly a world war, involving colonized peoples ﬁghting on the side of their European colonizers – this new Moroccan war reminded the surrealists of the political violence of that war. For Breton, the deﬁning moment of surrealist political maturity was this colonial war. It is because of this war that the surrealists began to shift their activity from an idealist one, ‘the view that thought is supreme over matter’, to a dialectical materialist one, ‘the supremacy of matter over mind’.5 Breton was clear about what this meant: Surrealist activity had to cease being content with the results (automatic texts, recital of dreams, improvised speeches, spontaneous poems, drawings and actions) which it had originally planned; and how it came to consider these ﬁrst results as being simply so much material, starting from which the problem of knowledge inevitably arose again under quite a new form.6 With the French intervention in the Moroccan war, surrealists acted as a magnet for other dissident intellectuals and politically Leftist groups who refused to be ‘patriotic’: that is, they refused to lend their support for the war. They publicly opposed French involvement in what was clearly the putting down of an anti-colonial uprising. Surrealists continued to be active in opposing colonial wars from the Moroccan War onwards and also promoted indigenous cultures as having their own values. Some examples: André Breton’s speech in Haiti, December 1945, made at the invitation of Haitian poets, incidentally sparked the overthrow of the government when it suspended the newspaper in which Breton’s speech on liberty had been published.7 In 1949 a collective surrealist tract called ‘Freedom is a Vietnamese Word’ critiqued the lack of media attention in France to the ‘imperialist war’ in Indo-China. In 1956, the surrealists published another collective tract (‘Hungary: Sunrise’) denouncing the Stalinist repression of the Hungarian uprising. Again, in 1960, the surrealists initiated a collective tract, supported by many intellectuals outside the movement, against the (by then) six years of war in Algeria.8

60 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography

With the arrival of colonial peoples from ‘Greater France’ to study in France, surrealism, itself increasingly established by the 1930s as a ﬁeld of intellectual cultural activity, became a discursive space critically open, enabling and sympathetic to the articulation of ‘black’ cultural politics and the voice of colonized peoples. The establishment of journals such as Légitime défense, L’Etudient noir and Tropiques, which drew on European surrealist cultural politics (Marxism, psychoanalytic thinking, surrealist poetic writing) in the name of a ‘collective consciousness’ project of ‘négritude’, were a forum for the development of a black cultural politics within capital culture. The critical debates around the term négritude developed into the critical question of whether there were indigenous African or Caribbean forms of cultural expression extrinsic to a dominant European culture (including surrealism); and, if so, what was it, thus opening up questions that are still central to ‘post-colonial’ studies today.9 Yet one can also see the impact of surrealist thinking on those who left surrealism for other, more traditional disciplines and careers. Among those who were thrown out of surrealism by Breton in 1929 (and those who left of their own volition) were individuals who took surrealist strategies (dreams as signiﬁcant and valuable material and, similarly, spontaneous writing for its intuition of the unconscious) to other disciplines. Michel Leiris, for example, was one of those who took surrealist techniques to ethnographic ﬁeld-study and French anthropology, disciplines that had otherwise been implicated in following in the trail of colonial power relations.10 All these aspects of surrealism and their relation with anti-colonialism are neglected and deserving of further historical study. However, what I want to consider here in more detail is one example of such relations, the role of photography in surrealism as a means of representing anti-colonialism.11

Photography Historically, the social use of photography from the moment of its invention in 1830s onwards has been as a testament to reality through its ‘realism’.12 The truth value of photography is established in its ability to ‘ﬁx’ an image (stereotype) and to reproduce it, disseminating that image to a mass audience. Any typical photograph puts the viewer, in the ﬁrst instance, in the same point-of-view and position as the camera. In this respect, photographic representations are like recruiting agents, offering a spectator a position – which is always

David Bate 61

already ideological – from which to ‘see’ and in which to imagine (fantasize) their relation to the things and peoples represented in the pictures through the very geometrical relations depicted by the scene. By the repetition of certain such ﬁxed viewpoints and scenes in pictures, the image of the colonized, ‘what they look like’, could be identiﬁed, named and recognized as ‘other’, not different. In the now well-worn and well-known series of stereotypes, they were: inferior, primitive, dirty, sexually vulgar and, inherently, ‘behind the times’ of Europeans, living in an archaic time. Through the structure of the photographic visibility as truth, a ‘here it is!’, colonialism could function within the visual ﬁeld and the realm of the scopic drive.13 In other words, this visual ﬁeld of culture established a truth effect for colonial power relations. Photography legitimated the ‘this existed’ and ‘that is how it looked’. This power of truth of the photographic image (selection and re-presentation) establishes itself in the dominant ideological form (myths, images and concepts) of visual representation through the mass media within the cultural sphere in the 1920s. How did surrealism negotiate this orthodox power of the photographic image in their anti-colonial work? The surrealists did as they did with any power structure to which they were opposed: they undermined the values which sustained it. Take one example, with reference to the part played by the surrealists in their contribution to the Anti-Colonial Exhibition, an exhibition that was explicitly set up in opposition to the International Colonial Exhibition held in Paris in 1931.

The Colonial and Anti-Colonial Exhibitions A Colonial Exhibition had been planned to be held in Paris for 1925 to follow the previous Exposition coloniale of Marseille in 1922. Rescheduled for 1926, then 1929, it was delayed for six years and ﬁnally opened in May 1931, by which time it had been turned into an international Exposition coloniale, thus contextualizing French colonialism within a larger international ‘community’ of colonialist enterprise. The massively state-supported Exposition coloniale was held at Vincennes, Paris, from May to November 1931 and was opened by the President of the Third Republic, Gaston Doumergue. The exhibition was to have a ‘modern concept’, unlike the ‘Oriental bazaar’ of the 1922 ‘bric-à-brac’ Marseille exposition.14 It was planned to show, through statistics and modern methods of display, the deep ‘formidable richness’ of colonies.15 The Exposition Coloniale was advertised as ‘a tour of the world in a day’, a miniature ‘authentic’ colonial world all in

62 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography

one place: Paris.16 A spectator could sample the global – colonial – village of the major empires (French, Danish, Belgian, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese) without leaving the site. (The exception was Britain whose territories were hardly represented, with only a small exhibit that had an emphasis on Britain’s motto for its Empire: ‘the ﬁrst wealth is health’.17) The whole exhibition site was set out as colonial villages connected by roads, with cafés and restaurants serving indigenous foods and markets of ‘native’ clothes in fake souks. There were dancers, displays of rituals, African orchestras, camel rides and ‘authentic’ shops.18 A cinema constructed out of earth showed documentary ﬁlms about the colonies.19 In the City of Information a vast array of publications, posters, guide books, postcards, press presentations and guided tours were pressed into production and circulation. Books were displayed, showing different parts of the colonies, illustrated with idealized scenes of natives and colonialists working together (but separately) and living in harmony. Photographs and drawings showed (or produced) images of ‘normal’ colonial life, with the aim of making the colonies seem familiar and, indeed, more attractive for those Europeans contemplating a colonial career.20 The various bloody revolts of the Yen Bai, the Rif wars in Morocco, the suppression of the Arabic press in Tunisia, and the scandal of the railway built in the Congo were obviously not part of such displays. As a massive spectacle backed up by mass media publicity machines it was a formidable, authoritative set of statements, a discursive event constituting a colonial ‘reality’. For six months people visited the exibition, with a total of eight million visitors in all.21 All the major publications, newspapers and magazines covered it, with dozens of others focusing on whatever aspect suited their particular interests. L’Illustration (the large weekly magazine with circulation ﬁgures around 154,00022) had a special issue (23 May 1931), as did other picture magazines, for example, Vu (3 June 1931) and Paris Soir, which ran photographic stories on the exhibition. Reports of the exhibition were generally thought to be favourable, with the exception of the hostile communist daily L’Humanité and the satirical Le Canard enchaîné.23 However, exactly what people thought of it cannot be certain. One commentator is reported as saying, ‘We found the characteristics of colonializers expressed as much as, if not better than the characteristics of colonized races.’24 The International Colonial Exhibition was an unashamed celebration and promotion of colonialism. Its aim was to bring a supposed experience

David Bate 63

of colonial life to its western populations. Employing all the thenavailable technological means, the exhibition presented the ‘colonial’ as a spectacle, reinforced by written and visual representations, images, myths and concepts. The exhibition attempted to recruit its visitors to an identiﬁcation with colonialism or sympathy with it as a project.25 This is evident in much of the Colonial Exhibition materials. Posters, for example, showed colonialists sympathetically shoulder to shoulder with natives but invariably with their arms around them or holding something to signify their superiority.

Anti-Colonial Exhibition It should be remembered that in the early twentieth century the word ‘colonial’ did not have the overriding negative connotation that it does today. For a European to be a colonialist was indeed positive and regarded with some respectability. In contrast to the massive authoritative statement of the Colonial Exhibition, the exhibition organized in oppositional to this, ‘The Truth of the Colonies’, was jointly organized by the surrealists, the Communist Party and the League of AntiImperialism. An altogether more modest affair, this exhibition used loaned premises belonging to the Communist Party and trades unions, in what had been the modern, wooden, ‘constructivist’ Soviet pavilion of the 1925 International Exposition des arts décoratifs et industries modernes on the rue Mathurin-Moreau (near Place du Fabien) in the 19th arrondissement. The Colonial Exhibition was in a different part of Paris, in Vincennes (12th arrondissement), so the two expositions were not especially close to one another. The ‘Truth of the Colonies’ exhibition had three sections over two ﬂoors. Each section, although not speciﬁcally labelled as such, was more or less arranged by each of the three contributing groups to the exhibition: the Communist Party, the surrealists and the League of Anti-Imperialism. The League of AntiImperialism was an international afﬁliation of anti-colonialists from across the world whose ‘facilitators’ were ﬁgures associated with the Comintern.26 One account says it was Alfred Kurella who initiated ‘The Truth of the Colonies’ by approaching the surrealists through André Thirion: ‘Thirion asked Louis Aragon to present the cultural issues and Georges Sadoul to do the propaganda and publicity.’ 27 Thirion, Aragon and Sadoul were already surrealists, though Aragon and Sadoul were wavering over joining the Communist Party and about to turn their backs on surrealism. Nevertheless, it was Louis Aragon,

64 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography

Paul Eluard and Yves Tanguy, with the support of André Breton, who contributed to and organized the surrealist part of ‘The Truth of the Colonies’. The difﬁculties in organizing the exhibition were considerable and not without difﬁculty. Any activities associated with the Communist Party at this time were under scrutiny by the police and so any counter-exhibition was certainly regarded with suspicion. Nevertheless, the exhibition opened ﬁnally on 19 September 1931, almost ﬁve months after the Exposition Coloniale.28 The exhibition was organized in three main sections with the League of Anti-Imperialism, the Comintern and the surrealists taking responsibility for each one. The League of Anti-Imperialism section, drawing on information gathered from its members, from their various countries across the globe, emphasized the litany of atrocities and brutal treatments of natives and their territories which had occurred under colonialist rule. The Comintern, obviously, promoted the revolutionary Soviet Union as a model for progress in an idealist view of communities working together in peace and ethnic plurality. However, here I want to focus on the surrealist section, in order to return to their use of photography in anti-colonialism. In the third, surrealist, part of the exhibition, one room was dedicated to the art of ‘colonial peoples’ lent from collections of friends or supporters of the League of Anti-Imperialism who had refused to lend them to the Exposition coloniale at Vincennes, including surrealists such as Breton and Eluard. Sculptures were organized culturally as African art (‘l’art nègre’), Oceanic and North American ‘native art’. Among the African objects were a chair from Cameroon that had two sculpted ﬁgures 1.75 metres high and a ‘motherhood’ ﬁgure of a woman with a suckling baby laid outstretched on her knees. These were accompanied by short quotations recalling the destruction of the art of colonial peoples by the religious missions who, ‘for the sake of Christian progress’ collected and burnt all that they considered as fetishes. In the same room was a display of objects labelled as ‘European fetishes’: for example, black virgin ﬁgures, church adaptations of Christianity for colonial use and photographs showing indigenous people in work or enterprises belonging to the religious missions. Also, postcards published in profusion for the Exposition Coloniale at Vincennes showed that blacks were not the only ones to like kitsch trinkets. To ﬁnish the exhibition there were examples of French school books open at the pages dedicated to the display of demonstrating colonial conquests.

David Bate 65

Visits to the whole exhibition were heightened by music playing, radio broadcasts during the exhibition and lectures. Notebooks were laid out around the exhibition where spectators could note their own opinions, remarks, criticisms and proposals. Every day new and old documents contributed to the development of the exhibition like a living exhibit. Group visits, such as trade union members, workers, social and cultural groups, were organized and pamphlets and leaﬂets were printed and distributed beyond the exhibition. The surrealists wrote their own tract, Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale (Boycott the Colonial Exposition), proclaiming: The dogma of French territorial integrity, so piously advanced in moral justiﬁcation of the massacres we perpetrate, is a semantic fraud; it blinds no one to the fact that not one week goes by without someone being killed in the colonies. The presence at the Exposition opening of the President of the Republic, of the Emperor of Annam, of the cardinal-archbishop of Paris, and of assorted governors and roughnecks cheek by jowl with the missionary pavilions and the Citroën and Renault stands, clearly marks the complicity of the bourgeoisie in the birth of a new and particularly loathsome concept, the notion of Greater France. It was to implant this larcenous notion that the pavilions were built for the Vincennes Exposition. For of course we must imbue our citizens with the requisite landlord mentality if they are to bear the sound of distant gunﬁre without ﬂinching.29 Such pamphlets still exist, and the war of words that they use to criticize the links between commerce and state in their collaboration over colonialism is clear. However, what still remains of the actual exhibition is unclear. The two photographs of the surrealist exhibition rooms published in Le surréalisme au service de la Révolution (No. 3/4, December 1931) is the only remaining visual evidence of the surrealist installation of the exhibition (within their publications: see Figure 4.1).30 These two pictures were the only ones to be shown in their magazine which came out just as the Colonial Exhibition was closing in December. But the use of these two images by the surrealists should not be taken for granted, or regarded as simply ‘documents’ of the exhibition as commentators have done in the past. In one sense, they can be compared with written documents about the ‘Truth of the Colonies’ exhibition alongside other representations; yet this underestimates the extent to which the surrealist journal was already

66 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography

‘surrealist’. To treat the photographs as reproductions of the exhibition (rather than primary representations within the surrealist journal) represses the fact that these photographs are how the surrealists chose to represent ‘anti-colonialism’ in their journal. Thus, not only are they denotative ‘reproductions’ of an exhibition, but they are also connotative of the surrealist attitude to the exhibition, laying bare the unconscious of colonialism. First, the image on the left shows a room with a number of African objects in the distance. On the left of the picture is the tall chair described earlier with two ﬁgures as back rests. On the right there is a series of sculpted ﬁgures. The anchoring text draped, apparently behind these objects, but in front of the window is the phrase attributed to Marx: ‘A people who oppress others could not know how to be free’. The African objects are made to signify as signs in a struggle against oppression. Second, the image on the right shows three statues with a handwritten label in the foreground naming the objects as ‘fétishes Européens’. The central ﬁgure is a colonial collection box, a black boy with a collection sack. On the left is an unspeciﬁed black native ﬁgurine, a sort of exotic European doll (modelled on the icon of

Figure 4.1 The Truth of the Colonies from Le surréalisme au service de la révolution (no. 3/4 December 1931)

David Bate 67

Josephine Baker?) and to the right is the Catholic ﬁgure of a Virgin and child. These three ‘European fetishes’ are a sort of trilogy, faith, charity and hope; hope (vitality) for the black exotic body of a female dancer; faith in the Christian ﬁgure of a black virgin mother; and charity for the boy charity ﬁgure. The caption effects a reversal of colonialist assumptions about the fetishistic cult value of other cultures to show the primitivism in European culture. In the background of the image can be seen, indistinctly, pinned up photographs, implying that the photograph is itself a European fetish, the photograph as the child of industrialized society. The pairing of these two images on the page produces a contrast between a display of African objects on the left and the ‘de-based’ objects of, in the language of the day, European imperial culture on the right. One set of objects is identiﬁed as l’art nègre, as fragments of an indigenous people’s culture, held up with esteem by the surrealists who owned these objects (mostly Breton and Eluard) but also regarded elsewhere as the barbaric fetishes of ‘primitives’. Juxtaposed with this image is the photograph of European objects, fetishes whose culture is here, inverted, shown to be of low esteem, trite, ‘kitsch’. What is striking about this particular surrealist argument is how this anti-colonial work tries to shift the culturally signiﬁed meanings attached to the objects. Here the ‘truth of the colonies’ (in their work) attempts to destabilize the meanings of things within Western culture showing their ‘other’ meaning. By using photography in an orthodox way, its veracity reinforces the message of their anti-colonial work. The assumed objectivity of the photographic image serves to reproduce an inversion of the values of the colonialist image. Here, the photographic is used to scrutinize the values of the colonizer in contrast with their discourse upon the colonized. With comparatively meagre and makeshift resources, the exhibition had assembled a considerable amount of information, statistics, images and objects to counter the Colonial Exhibition. The materials were gathered from numerous sources. The League of Anti-Imperialism with its international links could collect information, statistics, instances of brutality, atrocities and famine reports and, similarly, the Communist Party with its branches in various colonies had access to information, reports, the production of photographs and documentation. The surrealists, some of whom were avid collectors of African art or colonial objects (such as André Breton), lent objects from their collection to the exhibition. Other images were begged or borrowed. Of some things we can guess their source. The photographs of European soldiers holding

68 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography

decapitated heads of colonial subjects in the other sections of the exhibition were once themselves photographs taken as representative trophies of a victory. But even such horriﬁc photographs have no political allegiance, since what was used to serve one master could easily be appropriated for another. What once served a victor could be used against them. The shift of meaning involved in such inversions is always conditioned, by the context, but contexts are never ﬁxed; they are always contingent and this was how the surrealists mobilized the meaning of photographs for their alterity and political ‘unconscious’. What the anti-colonial exhibition attempted to do in a small and modest way (but no less important for that), was to change the signiﬁcation of the Colonial Exhibition from the discourses of imperialism to one of anti-colonial support. The surrealist means of doing this was to tackle the very discourses with which the colonial reality was constituted, using the rhetoric of display to show the values attributed to the colonized by the colonizers. Then they photographed this display to show it existed and reproduced it in their journal. Thus the surrealists, far from preoccupied with artful techniques of photography, used whatever form of image would serve their particular purposes. In this instance of anti-colonialist activity they used photographs in their status of documents to criticize the signiﬁed meanings of colonialist discourse. In this way, the common view – that surrealism was an aesthetic doctrine of obscure and bizarre fantasies, or merely concerned with adolescent desires – could not be further from the truth. Notes and References 1 See, for example, Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1984) pp.53–4. 2 André Breton, ‘What is Surrealism?’, translated by David Gascoyne (ﬁrst published in English in London: Faber & Faber, 1936). Reprinted in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited by Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto, 1989). 3 Breton, ‘What is Surrealism?’, p.116. 4 Ibid., p.117. 5 Ibid., p.117. 6 Ibid., p.117. 7 André Breton’s ‘Speech to Young Haitian Poets’ is published in What is Surrealism?, pp.258–60. See also Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (New York: Paragon, 1988), pp.161–4. 8 See ‘Declaration Concerning the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War’, reprinted in What is Surrealism?, pp.346–8. 9 There are too many examples to cite here, but see, for example, Homi Bhabha’s essays in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1990) which

David Bate 69

10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20

21

22 23 24 25

26

is almost wholly devoted to the problematic of what one culture does when it comes into contact with another. James Clifford gives an assessment of the surrealist contribution to ethnography in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp.117–51. David Bate’s essay, ‘Photography and Colonial Vision’, Third Text, No. 22 (Spring 1993) and book, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (London: IB Tauris, 2004). There are many texts which discuss the issue of photographic realism. For an introduction, see John Tagg, ‘Introduction’, in The Burden of Representation (London: Macmillan, 1988). See, for example, Victor Burgin’s discussion of a colonial photograph in his ‘Looking at Photographs’, Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982). Palà, Documents Exposition Coloniale, Paris 1931 (Paris: ville de Paris, 1981). Quote from publicity material for the 1931 Exposition. Sylvie Palà, Documents Exposition Coloniale, pp.29–30. A display listing 19 ‘Diseases of Importance to British Colonialism’ marked their notable absence at the exhibition. See the bi-lingual British Exhibition Guide catalogue (a document of the British display), Section Britannique Cité des Informations, exposition coloniale internationale (Paris, 1931). See also Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘L’Exposition coloniale’, in Pierre Nora, (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p.574. For an account of the French ﬁlm industry in relation to the colonial enterprise see David H. Slavin, ‘French Cinema’s Other First Wave: Political and Radical Economies of Cinéma colonial, 1918–1934’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 37, No. 1 (1997). He argues that documentaries gave way to narrative ﬁlms in the 1920s with ‘the stunning box ofﬁce success of L’Atlantide (1921)’. Film companies preferred Morocco as a location. See, for example, the photographs used as illustrations in the book published for the exhibition by Victor Chazelas, Territoires Africains sous mandat de la France, Cameroun et Togo (Paris: Société d’Editions, 1931). These ﬁgures do not include entries with forged tickets. Catherine Hödeir and Michel Pierre, L’Exposition coloniale (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1991), p.101. Carlton J.H. Hayes, France, A Nation of Patriots (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), p.130. Hödeir and Pierre, L’Exposition Coloniale, p.102. Palà, Documents Exposition Coloniale, p.30. Herman Lebovics, True France, The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (London: Cornell University Press, 1992) describes the Colonial Exhibition as ‘an effort to promote a French identity as a colonial people’ (p.93). Broadly speaking his argument on the Colonial Exhibition follows the ‘semioclasm’ of Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1979). See Barthes’s own 1971 preface to this book for his discussion of the fate of dismissing myths. The ﬁrst congress of the Anti-Imperialist League was held in Brussels in late 1928. According to Babette Gross the Anti-Imperialist League was supported ﬁnancially by the Mexican government, who were themselves trying to

70 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography

27 28 29

30

push Standard Oil out of their country. See Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg: A Political Biography (Michigan University Press, 1974), pp.188–9. Lebovics, True France, p.106. The author does not give a source for this information. Archives, Institut Maurice Thorez (microﬁlm) bob. 69, series 461. The tract was published as a pamphlet, also issued with their journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 4 (December 1931). See also the Bulletin Colonial, published by the Communist Party. I have not, at this point, been able to ascertain the whereabouts of any archive with better visual evidence of the exhibition materials.

5 Documents against Civilization David Evans

The two decades between the First and Second World Wars were the high point of the French empire. It was rigorously defended by successive governments and enthusiastically endorsed by a broad cross-section of the population. Dissenting voices were rare. Two examples were the French Communist Party and the Surrealist group surrounding André Breton, whose joint attempt to stage a revolutionary alternative to the immense, state-sponsored Colonial Exhibition of 1931 is analysed in Chapter 4 (above), where David Bate writes about groups who openly supported colonial liberation. In contrast, this chapter investigates a more oblique form of dissent: Documents (1929–30), a French academic journal which had informal links with the Surrealist movement in Paris. 1 In particular, it analyses various items in the journal related to jazz. My argument is that the provocative writing and picture editing around a jazz revue called the Black Birds provides an example of how Documents challenged mainstream understandings of civilization, a term which was regularly used to justify the French empire.

Civilization The First World War was an important moment in the history of the French empire.2 Imperial reserves, both human and material, were mobilized on an unprecedented scale as part of a French effort to overcome the stalemate on the Western Front. The breakthrough never came. Nevertheless, the use of these imperial reserves was widely perceived as a major factor in France’s eventual victory. Consequently, the imperial idea was promoted with zeal by post-war French governments. The building of a ‘Greater France’ was presented 71

72 Documents against Civilization

as the key to successful reconstruction, and the most obvious way of overshadowing the old enemy, Germany, which was deprived of the few colonies it did possess through the Treaty of Versailles. Such ofﬁcial thinking informed the most elaborate celebration of empire in French history, the Colonial Exhibition of 1931. The exhibition’s underlying assumption was that France was the premier civilization, ably qualiﬁed to chaperone less advanced peoples. Indeed, the organizers were so conﬁdent about France’s cultural hegemony that they were able to acknowledge the past achievements of some of its colonies, as well as to present themselves as the responsible guardians of any surviving traces. Replicas of the temples of Angkor Wat were a prominent part of the exhibition, for example, and publicity stressed how the originals had been reclaimed from the jungle through French endeavours. In other words, France’s sensitive custodianship of past civilizations was presented as further conﬁrmation of its own cultural pre-eminence in the present.3 A belief in France’s civilizing mission was by no means the only reason for a commitment to empire during the Third Republic. On the contrary, it was one of a complex of arguments recently unravelled by Martin Evans.4 He notes economic arguments: national survival in an uncertain world necessitated the acquisition of colonies which could supply raw materials and markets.There were religious arguments: ofﬁcially anti-clerical, the Third Republic was happy to support the missionary endeavours of the Catholic Church in the French colonies. And there were also military arguments: France could match Germany by supplementing its army with colonial troops. Social arguments also played a part: the colonies could be used for the dumping of troublesome populations such as the former Communards, sent to New Caledonia in the 1870s. Evans stresses the nationalist arguments, too, with the Left particularly keen on presenting empire-building as an opportunity to export French civilization: For the left, any nationalist justiﬁcation for colonialism was intimately connected to the belief in colonialism’s civilizing mission. Here colonialism was portrayed as an essentially humanitarian impulse, an act of deliverance liberating the colonies from superstition and ignorance. As the country of the rights of man, France was a universal model and in any description of French rule the image of light versus darkness became an all-pervading metaphor, summarizing colonialism as the battle of Enlightenment values against despotism and feudalism.5

David Evans 73

For much of the Republican Left, then, imperialism was a form of emancipation, a liberation of minds through the global propagation of French civilization.

Documents: the text Conventional ideas of French civilization were rejected by Documents. Examples of how they were rejected emerge in the journal’s treatment of Lew Leslie’s Black Birds, a black American jazz revue which had a summer season at the Moulin Rouge, Paris, in 1929. In the audience were contributors to Documents and references to the revue appeared in the fourth issue (September 1929). In this section I consider the writing about the Black Birds; a subsequent section concentrates on the photographs. One regular feature in Documents was a ‘critical dictionary’ which had little resemblance to a conventional dictionary.6 Straightforward deﬁnitions were avoided, topics were diverse, and their treatment was unpredictable. Georges Bataille was the main contributor to this section, and for the fourth issue he wrote an entry called ‘Black Birds’: BLACK BIRDS. – Pointless to seek any longer an explanation for coloured people suddenly breaking, with an incongruous extravagance, an absurd stutterers’ silence: we are rotting away with neurasthenia under our roofs, a cemetery and communal grave of so much pathetic rubbish; while the blacks who (in America or elsewhere) are civilized along with us and who, today, dance and cry out, are marshy emanations of the decomposition who are set aﬂame above this immense cemetery: so, in a vaguely lunar Negro night, we are witnessing an intoxicating dementia of dubious and charming will-o’-the-wisps, writhing and yelling like bursts of laughter. This deﬁnition will spare us any discussion.7 Bataille’s short text is more a visionary prose poem inspired by the Black Birds than a review. Apart from the title, the only explicit reference to the jazz revue is a footnote which mentions the recent engagement in Paris, and refers the reader to related writing by Michel Leiris and André Schaeffner, plus a photograph of the revue, all found elsewhere in this issue of Documents.8 Bataille’s dominant metaphor is a great, rotting cemetery, lit up by feux-follets or will-o’-the-wisps, a light caused by the combustion of gases from decomposing corpses. The cemetery is clearly the USA and Europe, western civilization, and

74 Documents against Civilization

the will-o’-the- wisps are their black populations, dancing on the tombs of former masters. Further considerations on the Black Birds were contained in an article by Michel Leiris called ‘Civilisation’.9 Like Bataille, he proceeds metaphorically. The surface of the earth is fragile, liable to be broken up at any moment by a range of natural catastrophes, such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. So-called civilization is equally fragile, and barely contains one’s ‘horrifying savageness’. Revues such as the Black Birds have the ability to induce a trance, shattering this civilized veneer and acquainting humans with their animal instincts. Alas, Leiris regrets, their Parisian audience was too spineless to respond actively to this challenge. The closest to a conventional review came from André Schaeffner, an ethnographer who had already co-written one of the ﬁrst histories of jazz.10 For Schaeffner, the Black Birds were, quite simply, the only event in Paris that deserved the label ‘music’. He relates them to earlier successes such as the Revue nègre (Paris, 1925), which had launched the career of Josephine Baker, but he also makes comparisons between the Black Birds’ interpretation of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the choral work of the Russian composer Musorgski. Such a comparison does not imply that the rest of the performance was mere jazz or mere musichall, he stresses. On the contrary, for Schaeffner, the Black Birds provided further proof that upper-case Music, meaning the French or European classical tradition, should be abandoned for a lower-case use of the word that acknowledges the validity of all forms. Three texts, three perspectives, but a shared target: dominant understandings of civilization. Schaeffner’s article most clearly registers the receptivity of Documents towards recent adademic work which condemned the usual meanings associated with the word ‘civilization’ as restrictive and value-laden. Instead, the term began to be used to describe the total way of life of any human group, historic or contemporary, without any value judgement. This approach, pioneered in the 1920s by innovative French historians and social scientists, informed the re-organization of the Museum of Ethnography, better known as the Trocadéro. The museum’s new director, Paul Rivet (appointed in 1927), and deputy director Georges Henri Rivière (appointed in 1928), were on the editorial board of Documents and used the journal to present their radical perspective. According to Rivet: It is essential that the ethnographer, like the archaeologist, like the historian of pre-history, study everything which constitutes a civilization,

David Evans 75

that he neglect no element, however insigniﬁcant or banal it may seem… Collectors have made the mistake of a man who wishes to judge contemporary French civilization by its luxury goods, which are encountered only in a very limited sector of the population.11 In 1929 Rivet invited André Schaeffner to take responsibility for the creation of a new department of ethnomusicology in the re-organized museum. Schaeffner, too, used Documents to publicize his curatorial agenda: Whoever says ethnography admits necessarily that no object designed to produce sound or music, however ‘primitive’ or formless it may seem, no musical instrument – whether its existence is accidental or essential – shall be excluded from a methodical classiﬁcation. For this purpose any percussive procedure, on a wooden box or on the earth itself, is of equal importance with the melodic or polyphonic means available to a violin or a guitar.12 Schaeffner offers an expansive notion of a musical instrument and Rivet stresses the inadequacy of a viewpoint which merely associates the French way of life with its luxury goods. Both relativize the term ‘civilization’, locating it wherever there is organized social life. Theirs is an expansive and neutral usage, at odds with the sense promoted at the same time by the Ministry of the Colonies. Schaeffner’s review of the Black Birds is informed by new directions in radical academics, but the related texts by Bataille and Leiris are marked by different preoccupations. Leiris’ article ‘Civilisation’ draws on Freud’s recent speculations on culture and civilization found in essays such as The Future of an Illusion (1927).13 Freud’s main claim is that every culture or civilization, terms he uses interchangeably, is built on coercion and the renunciation of animal instincts such as unrestrained aggression or sexual activity. Cultivation or civility deﬁnes the human species, but Freud stresses the proximity of the animal kingdom. Even in so-called advanced societies, he warns, there were those who could not, or would not, accept the restraints which are the foundations of civilization. Freud’s arguments are duplicated In Leiris’ essay ‘Civilisation’, but the value judgements are inverted. For Leiris, civilization is bad, animality is good, and the Black Birds were extraordinary because they offered their audiences the rare opportunity to leave civilization and return to a realm of freedom supposedly enjoyed by animals.

76 Documents against Civilization

Georges Bataille’s thoughts on the signiﬁcance of the Black Birds are part of his elaboration of the concept of ‘base materialism’, constructed in the pages of Documents as a battering ram against all systems of thought which idealize human relations.14 He sees enemies everywhere in contemporary France, ranging from the Catholic Church and the Republican state to the supposedly subversive avant-garde. Against his enemies, Bataille posits ‘base matter’, any form of embarrassment which alleged idealists seek to ignore, exclude or domesticate. The main task of the ‘base materialist’, then, is to confront ‘the great ontological machines’, whether religious or secular, with the awkwardness of ‘base matter’.15 The nature of Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ becomes clearer through further reﬂections on his interest in the Black Birds. For Bataille, the jazz revue and black Americans in general constitute ‘base matter’ for the way they destabilize conventional notions of civilization and its antithesis, savagery. Why? Because the black American, Americanized but of African origin, poses an acute category problem for this system of classiﬁcation. Africa, deﬁned in an equally vague way by Negrophiles and Negrophobes alike, continues to be associated with savagery. However, by the start of the twentieth century, the USA is associated with advanced civilization. Thus, the black American is simultaneously savage and civilized, a living oxymoron. The simplest way of solving the conundrum is to present the black American as more African than American, more savage than civilized. This perspective was facilitated by the familiarity of the French public with the so-called savage as a source of entertainment.16 In 1877, the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris began to exhibit live humans as well as animals, and by 1912 had staged around 30 ‘ethnological exhibitions’. Its success encouraged others. The idea of displaying savages, usually in cages, enclosures or some form of dramatic tableau, was taken up and developed by the Universal Exhibitions (Paris, 1878, 1889 and 1900), Colonial Exhibitions (Marseilles, 1906 and 1922; Paris,1907 and 1931), a large number of more modest provincial fairs and exhibitions, as well as theatres such as the Folies-Bergère in Paris. The prevalence of human zoos like the villages nègres provided a context for treating black entertainment from the USA as another African novelty, further reinforcing the frontier between savagery and French civilization. On the other hand, the sense that the Black Birds and comparable forms of black American entertainment needed to be embraced as part and parcel of a new civilization which was in the process of overshadowing France could not be wished away.17 The French craze for ragtime

David Evans 77

and the related dance called the cakewalk occurred in the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century, and these were quickly adapted by indigenous music hall entertainers such as Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier. This was the very moment when the USA overtook its European rivals to become the world’s leading industrial nation. Jazz, a term which only gained currency in New York in 1916, was introduced to France by the bands of the all-black regiments who were part of the American Expeditionary Force, which intervened decisively in the First World War. For the ﬁrst time in modern history, a conﬂict begun in Europe appeared to be settled by extra-European intervention. To put it another way, the New World seemed to be sorting out the problems of the Old, and black Americans and their music were part of this revolution. In the 1920s, the neologism ‘Americanism’ began to circulate across Europe. It was an umbrella term, condensing a range of images of a fresh economy, culture and polity which offered a striking contrast with an exhausted post-war Europe, including France. Understood as part of ‘Americanism’, black American music and dance could not be easily contained as the primitive antithesis of French civilization; rather, it is associated with a new notion of civilization which simply by-passes familiar Franco-centric ways of dividing up the world. Georges Bataille was delighted by the category problems posed by black Americans and made no attempt to offer a solution in his text on the Black Birds. Savage? Civilized? Civilized savages? Resolving these problems was not part of his agenda. In reality, the problem was a system of classiﬁcation which could not contain black Americans. In this respect, the Black Birds were ‘base matter’, challenging a triumphalist version of human history which continued to give pride of place to France and its achievements throughout the Third Republic.

Documents: the photographs Georges Bataille wrote for Documents, but was also the journal’s informal picture editor. In this section I analyse how his selection and arrangement of photographs in Documents 4 added a visual dimension to his ‘base materialist’ interpretation of the Black Birds. Bataille was attracted by the ‘base’ possibilities of photography.18 He believed that every attempt to establish photography as an art had been compromised by its less elevated uses. The photograph as record or document had ‘base’ potential since it offered traces of the real which were ouside art. Consequently, contemporary art photography interested him less than newsreel or news photography. Bataille’s

78 Documents against Civilization

search was for photographic documents which could unsettle the viewer in the same way that stressful events could cause an extreme, emotional shock. He wanted photographs which could, literally, induce a trauma. For Documents, Bataille usually selected anonymous items found in archives and agencies, but sometimes new work was commissioned (for instance, Eli Lotar’s photographs of the slaughterhouse at La Villette, Paris). Bataille used three of Lotar’s photographs to supplement his short text ‘Slaughterhouse’, another entry in the dictionary section of Documents.19 The text relates the modern slaughterhouse to ancient temples in which animals and humans were sacriﬁced. In the past, there was an acceptance of the connection between prayers and killing, and the centrality of both in communal life. In the modern era, no one can stand the sight of blood. Religion is detached from its sacriﬁcial origins, and the continued killing of animals for human consumption takes place in secret. Now, the slaughterhouse is ‘cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship’.20 The related photographs show the butchers at work, and the results of their activities. They have recently been analysed with insight by Yve-Alain Bois who detects a horror which is ‘ﬂat, without melodrama’.21 He suggests that the absence of violence is deliberate, since Bataille’s main interest is ‘its civilized scotomization that structures it as otherness (which needs to be quarantined)’.22 In other words, to show ‘the visual equivalent of the squealing pigs one butchers… would be a sure way of denying that such a repression had in fact occurred’.23 These remarks provide a useful starting point for analysing the images related to the Black Birds. The footnote to Bataille’s dictionary entry refers the reader to a portrait of the review located towards the end of the journal24 (Figure 5.3). It is a low-key press photograph showing their arrival at Le Havre. The men and women are fashionably dressed, adopting a pose which is informal and jovial. Here are sophisticated passengers, at ease with their sophisticated means of transportation, the ocean liner Le France. A dramatic image of the Black Birds performing would have been less useful for Bataille, since Negrophile clichés about jazz and primitivism would have been conﬁrmed, and the Black Birds would have ceased to function as ‘base matter’. Instead, he opts for an image of relaxed urbanity which contrasts with the ferocity of his prose in ‘Black Birds’. Text and image do not neatly match. Instead, there is an apparent mis-match, reinforcing Bataille’s ideas about the dangerous ambivalence of black Americans who cannot

79

The talkie ﬁlm Broadway Melody

Children from Bacouya School, Bourail Figure 5.1

Figure 5.2

Kanaks from Kroua. Koua-oua, côte est (Albums E. Robin)

80

81

Penitentiary Garrison in New Caledonia

Lew Leslie’s Black Birds arriving in France Figure 5.3

82 Documents against Civilization

be obviously located in the classiﬁcatory system which deﬁnes France and its place in the world. Bataille also used photographs taken from a nineteenth-century album about New Caledonia.25 One shows a French garrison guarding a penitentiary, placed in Documents above the group portrait of the Black Birds26 (Figure 5.3). Another photograph from the same source shows Kanaks, the indigenous population of New Caledonia, and accompanies Schaeffner’s review of the Black Birds27 (Figure 5.2). A further photograph shows naked Kanak schoolboys with imitation riﬂes, standing to attention in the presence of a French ofﬁcer, which is placed on the page preceding Leiris’ article ‘Civilisation’28 (Figure 5.1). New Caledonia is never mentioned in any of the texts related to the Black Birds, or anywhere else in the journal, for Bataille assumed that his predominently French readership had the ability to make sense of his chosen photographs with the minimum of written clues. There are two reasons why a ‘base materialist’ picture editor was interested in New Caledonia: Kanaks and convicts.29 First, New Caledonia was the home of the Kanak, often regarded as the ultimate savage, and generally considered too primitive to be assimilated to French civilization. Uniquely in the history of French colonialism, therefore, the Kanak was mainly conﬁned to reservations, a system which was gradually reﬁned in the second half of the nineteenthcentury and enforced until 1946. The underlying assumption was that the Kanak was closer to Neanderthal Man than to Homo sapiens, an anachronism doomed to eventual extinction. Second, New Caledonia became an important penal colony in the second half of the nineteenth-century, and the convicts were not just common criminals. For example, over 4,000 Communards ended up there from 1872 onwards, as well as around 1,000 Algerians involved in the Kabyle Revolt of 1871. Convicts ceased to be sent from France in 1897, but the penitentiary system only came to an end in 1931. For Bataille, New Caledonia was the imperial equivalent of the Parisian slaughterhouse. Like La Villette, it was a ‘plague-ridden ship’, a remote spot in the Paciﬁc where the Third Republic ‘quarantined’ its troublesome populations. Just as Lotar’s photographs show no ‘squealing pigs’, so the images of New Caledonia contain no Kanaks engaging in cannibalism or convicts grimacing. To have shown images which merely conﬁrmed their metropolitan reputations would undermine their use value as ‘base matter’; what interests Bataille is drawing attention to the existence of reservations and penitentiaries which metropolitan France prefers to forget. The civilizing mission of the Third

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Republic is based on repression, he wants to emphasize. For this purpose, an unexceptional portrait of penitentiary guards is more effective than one of Communards or Kabyle rebels. ‘Base materialism’ aims to identify the ‘base matter’ which any system wants to repress, but also to stress the the limitations of this repression, for ‘no repression is ever totally achieved, no shield hermetically protects against the sneaky return of the excluded’.30 These comments are particularly applicable to the photographs of Kanak males. Their lack of clothes poses a problem for the photographer. How could a portrait show nakedness, thereby conﬁrming the savage status of the Kanak, without offending French notions of propriety? One solution involves an elaborate positioning of the Kanaks to conceal their genitalia (Figure 5.2); another solution is crude retouching (Figure 5.1). Whatever the means, the end result seems to simply draw further attention to what is being censored. Take the portrait of the schoolboys involved in drill practice. The intention is a message of reassurance, suggesting that even Kanak adolescents can respond to French tuition. However, their riﬂes and erect stance forcefully remind the viewer of what had been removed by the retoucher. Savagery sneaks back to trouble civilization. Bataille also adapts the montage procedures associated with contemporary cinema and the illustrated press. Through a calculated arrangement of photographs he wants to generate additional forms of visual disturbance. For example, the photograph of the Kanak schoolboys is paired with a still from a Hollywood musical called The Broadway Melody (Figure 5.1). The two images are the same size and format and they both show groups formally posing for the camera. These shared features are sufﬁcient to encourage the viewer to relate the two photographs, despite their radically different provenance. Nevertheless, an understanding of why they are related requires some preliminary remarks about the treatment of cinema in Documents. For Bataille and Leiris, cinema had a ‘double use’ like still photography. Attempts to develop it as a serious art medium were always stalked by less elevated concerns. Documents published articles about avant-garde ﬁlm, but Bataille and Leiris were more interested in the commercial output of Hollywood. They were especially fascinated by Hollywood musicals featuring all-girl dance troupes, a new genre which emerged as a result of synchronized sound introduced in 1929. Leiris responded to this technical breakthrough with a dictionary entry called ‘Talkie’ in which he foregrounds the new musical Our Dancing Daughters.31 For the author, this talkie is historically signiﬁcant because

84 Documents against Civilization

it signals ‘the appearance of a totally new form of sentimentality in ﬁlms, with the charm of an easy life, unspoiled by any concern other than to show protagonists of a sparkling youth and grace’.32 A few months later he returned to the same theme in a piece devoted to another musical called Fox Movietone Follies.33 ‘The women alone dominate because they are very beautiful and consequently as touching in their gaiety as in their sentimentality’, he writes.34 The ﬁlm is ‘popular, admirably cheap’ without ‘the slightest suspicion of an aesthetic’.35 Bataille shared Leiris’ belief that the appeal and signiﬁcance of such ﬁlms had nothing to do with art. He offered a mock ethnographic perspective in the article ‘Places of Pilgrimage: Hollywood’.36 Hollywood creates modern divinities who can be worshipped in cinemas. Cinemas are sanctuaries, ﬁlmgoers are pilgrims and the price of an admission ticket is an offering to the gods. Overall, Hollywood provides illusory distraction, often erotically charged, from a wretched world, he suggests. His main illustration is a production still from the musical Hollywood Revue.37 It is an apt choice. The tableau corresponds to hackneyed conceptions of heaven as a place full of female angels in ﬂowing white robes, rejoicing in a rocky landscape. In addition, the photograph clearly shows the director and his crew overseeing the set piece in a studio. In other words, Bataille presents a single image which simultaneously shows heaven, Hollywood-style, and brings it down to earth. Similar thinking informed his coupling of the still from The Broadway Melody and the nineteenth-century album photograph of Kanak youths. Contemporary Hollywood and mid-nineteenth-century New Caledonia confront each other on the page. If the top image represents heaven on earth, then the bottom one is hell, the place where the Third Republic sought to contain the ultimate savages beyond civilized redemption. However, both photographs show groups in a state of undress, involved in comparable forms of drill. They do not appear all that different. Indeed, they are made for each other, Bataille implies. To emphasize how the Hollywood dancers resemble the Kanak schoolboys implicates heaven in hell. To emphasize how the Kanaks resemble the actresses implicates hell in heaven. The end result is a two-way penetration which effaces the supposed barriers between savagery and civilization. The Black Birds were paired with the portrait of the penitentiary guards in New Caledonia (Figure 5.3). Again, the similarities of the frontal group compositions encourage the viewer to seek a deeper connection. Unlike the previous example, however, the differences come

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to the fore. The earnest guards and chic Black Birds seem to share no common ground. They are worlds apart. This is Bataille’s message, but only part of it, for his main interest is not in the guards but in those they are guarding. If the real subject matter of the top photograph is the absent convict, then another message emerges, drawing out the afﬁnities between two types of ‘base matter’: the convict whom French civilization seeks to exclude and the black American jazz musician who deﬁes its system of classiﬁcation. The picture editing around the Black Birds had little to do with either conventional academic illustration or the self-contained picture story developed in the illustrated press in the 1920s. Bataille’s selection of images had no obvious relation to the texts which deal with the Black Birds, apart from the portrait of the revue, and the combination of images fail to cohere into unambiguous, composite messages. In Bataille’s hands, photographs ceased to know their place and began to act independently. Their behaviour was insubordinate, unpredictable, volatile, at odds with the apparent formality of Documents. In short, photographs became ‘base matter’.

Afterword In the early 1970s, Bataille’s text ‘Black Birds’ was used as an epigraph for a French book with an English title: Free jazz Black power.38 Written by Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, the book offers a history of jazz, with an emphasis on free jazz of the 1960s. It is a polemic against the aesthetic emphasis of most critics, insisting that free jazz only makes sense in relation to contemporary black political struggles in the USA and as a reaction against the attempted détournement of black music for the beneﬁt of white interests. The use of Bataille’s writing was not an isolated incident, but part of a complex re-discovery of, and engagement with, avant-garde French culture of the interwar period which was especially intense in the 1960s and the ﬁrst half of the 1970s. To put it another way, in the era of high imperialism Documents’ arguments against dominant notions of civilization had only a marginal impact. A larger, more receptive audience emerged for these arguments later, in the the very different era of colonial and metropolitan revolt. Notes and References 1 A facsimile was published in the early 1990s: see Documents (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1991). For accounts of the exchanges betweem academics and

86 Documents against Civilization

2

3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14

the avant-garde in Documents, see ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, in James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp.117–51; Denis Hollier,’ The use-value of the impossible’, in Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed.), Bataille: Writing the Sacred (London: Routledge, 1995), pp.133–53. On the First World War as a Materialschlacht or battle of materials, see Michael Geyer, ‘The Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945’, in John R. Gillis (ed.), The Militarization of the Western World (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp.65–102. On the French state’s eagerness for empire after the First World War, see Martin Evans, ‘Projecting a Greater France’, History Today, vol. 50, no. 2 (February 2000), pp.18–25. My references to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition draw on L’Effort Colonial dans le Monde, a special issue of Le Sud-Ouest Economique, No. 213 (August 1931). Martin Evans, ‘From colonialism to post-colonialism – The French Empire since Napoleon’, in Martin S. Alexander (ed.), French History since Napoleon (London: Arnold, 1999), pp.391–412. Ibid., p.401. The ‘critical dictionary’ plus related texts from Documents have been published in English in Alastair Brotchie (ed.), Encyclopaedia Acephalica (London: Atlas Press, 1995), pp.29–106. Georges Bataille, ‘Black Birds’, Documents 4 (September 1929), p.215; English translation in Brotchie, Encyclopedia, pp.36–7. Michel Leiris, ‘Civilisation’, Documents 4 (September 1929), p.221; English translation in Brotchie, Encyclopedia, pp.93–6; André Schaeffner, ‘Les “Lew Leslie’s Black Birds” au Moulin Rouge’, Documents 4 (September 1929), p.223. The photograph of the Black Birds is on p.225 of the same issue. Ibid. Schaeffner, ‘“Lew Leslie’s Black Birds”’; Le Jazz by André Couroy and André Schaeffner was published in Paris, 1926. A facsimile appeared in 1988, published by Jean-Michel Place, Paris. Paul Rivet, ‘L’étude des civilisations matérielles: ethnographie, archéologie, préhistoire’, Documents 3 (June 1929), p.133; cited by Hollier, ‘The use-value’, p.141. André Schaeffner, ‘Des instruments de musique dans un musée d’ethnographie’, Documents 5 (October 1929), p.248; cited by Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, p.131; and Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, p.131. My remarks draw on the useful discussion of Freud in Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.23–9. See Georges Bataille, ‘Matérialisme’, Documents 3 (June 1929), p.170; translated as ‘Materialism’ in Allan Stoeckl (ed.), Georges Bataille – Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p.15. Useful discussions of Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ are YveAlain Bois, ‘Base Materialism’, in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp.51–62; Pierre Macherey, The Object of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.112–31; Benjamin Noys, ‘Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism’, Cultural Values, vol. 2, no. 4 (October 1998), pp.499–517.

David Evans 87 15 The quotations are from Georges Bataille, ‘Le Bas Matérialisme et la Gnose’, Documents 1 (1930), pp.1–8, English translation in Stoeckl, Georges Bataille, pp.45–52. 16 On human zoos in the Third Republic see Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, ‘Ces zoos humains de la République coloniale’, Le Monde Diplomatique, No. 557 (August 2000), pp.16–17. 17 The French reception of black American culture in the early decades of the twentieth century is examined in Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: AvantGarde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000); Jody Blake, Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 (University Park, Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); James Clifford, ‘Negrophilia’, in Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp.901–8. For ‘Americanism’, see Peter Wollen, ‘Modern Times: Cinema/Americanism/The Robot’, Raiding the Icebox: Reﬂections on Twentieth-Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993), pp.35–71. 18 My comments draw on a review of a photographic exhibition, intended for Documents, but unpublished. It is included in Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p.122. 19 Georges Bataille, ‘Abattoir’, Documents 6 (1929), p.329. Lotar’s photographs are on pp.328 and 330; English translation, ‘Slaughterhouse’, plus the photographs in Brotchie, Encyclopedia, pp.72–4. 20 Ibid., p.329. 21 Yve-Alain Bois in Bois and Krauss, Formless, p.46. 22 Ibid., p.46. 23 Ibid., p.46. 24 Documents 4, p.225. 25 The photographs were by E. Robin who produced albums speciﬁcally for the Company of New Caledonia, Paris, in the late 1860s and early 1870s. I examined one album – Souvenirs de la Nouvelle Calédonie, 1870–71 – in the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence. Bataille’s use of nineteenthcentury photographs from New Caledonia is assessed by Didi-Hubermann, La ressemblance informe ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995), pp.47–50, and Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, pp.152–7. Both authors assume that the photographs depict ‘Africans’. There are two consequences; ﬁrst, they unintentionally perpetuate the Negrophile’s casual association of blackness and Africa which Archer-Straw, especially, wishes to challenge: second, they fail to appreciate why Bataille was speciﬁcally interested in New Caledonia. 26 Documents 4, p.225. 27 Ibid., p.223. 28 Ibid., p.218. 29 New Caledonia was occupied by the French in 1840 and formally annexed in 1853. For accounts of its history and metropolitan reputation, see Allan Bensa,’Colonialisme, racisme et ethnologie en Nouvelle-Calédonie’, Ethnologie française, Vol. 18, No. 2 (April–June 1988), pp.188–97; Allan Bensa, La Nouvelle-Calédonie: un paradis dans la tourmente (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). 30 Bois, ‘Base Materialism’, p.46.

88 Documents against Civilization 31 Michel Leiris, ‘Talkie’, Documents 5 (October 1929), p.278; English translation in Brotchie, Encyclopedia, pp.82–3. 32 Ibid. 33 Michel Leiris, ‘Fox Movietone Follies of 1929’, Documents 7 (December 1929), p.388; English translation in Michel Leiris, Brisées: Broken Branches (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1989), pp.38–40. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Georges Bataille, ‘Lieux de pélerinage: Hollywood’, Documents 5 (October 1929), pp.280–2. 37 Ibid., p.281. 38 Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz Black Power (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1971).

Part III Food, Music and Dance

6 Indigestible Indo-China: Attempts to Introduce Vietnamese Food into France in the Interwar Period Erica Peters

At the 1922 Colonial Exhibition, a journalist for L’Illustration reported that organizers had brought in the most talented Vietnamese chefs for the Vietnamese restaurant there, but to no avail: ‘The French cook [at the restaurant] prepares knowledgeably all the best dishes of our national cuisine. Let’s be frank; ordinary Frenchmen are not very adventurous when it comes to culinary explorations … All around me no one was eating anything except the most classic offerings of our cordons bleus.’1 The French at the exhibition as well as those who stayed home preferred to eat foods they considered to be French; products and dishes from the French colonies did not easily ﬁnd membership in that exclusive set. In contrast, by the 1920s, the British had been eating Indian curry regularly for half a century, and even the French thought of curry as a formerly exotic but now fairly standard food.2 Most French people in the metropolis had never tasted Vietnamese food, nor had any real sense of what it was, although the French had controlled Vietnam for approximately the same half-century. It took the massive waves of Vietnamese immigration after Dien Bien Phu to overcome French resistance to eating in Vietnamese restaurants, even though there had been such restaurants in France since the early 1920s, serving the Asian immigrant community. While the French were busy integrating regional cuisine into their national culture of food, they did not expend the same energy to treat foods from their far-off Indo-Chinese colonies as national resources and sources of pride, the way the British did with Indian food.3 Such neglect was not due to a lack of opportunity: Vietnamese dishes and Vietnamese agricultural products were both available in France due to the efforts of interested parties. This chapter 91

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argues that food from France’s Asian colonies made hardly a mark on the French culinary map during the ﬁrst half of this century because the French focused instead on the grandly imagined culinary traditions of their narrowly deﬁned nation-state. Starting during the First World War, with the arrival in the metropolis of Vietnamese soldiers and workers, the French state began to take an interest in the extent to which race or culture ought to determine diet, examining closely the question of whether the Vietnamese tirailleurs (infantrymen) and travailleurs (workers) could eat French rations. Inspectors who were sent to monitor conditions decided the Vietnamese should not be urged to give up their traditional diet. Some cited health, such as Dr Maurel, who argued against giving the Vietnamese the same amount of meat as the French: ‘Meat should remain a condiment for them, as it is in their homeland.’4 If meat formed a signiﬁcant part of their diet, claimed Maurel, the Vietnamese would risk intestinal infections. He also opposed including wine in their rations, on the theory that it would overly excite their nervous system and generate insubordination. His implicit claim is that not only would the Vietnamese be incapable of digesting the physical food of Europeans, but they would be just as incapable of managing the European level of licence. Inspector Bosc, on the other hand, saw no health concerns when he visited Vietnamese workers who had been served French food since their arrival. When they had arrived in Toulon, the Directeur de l’Arsenal had asked the workers if they preferred to be fed according to their ‘tastes and customs’, or if they would rather eat as the French sailors did. Inspector Bosc reported: ‘The workers unanimously expressed the desire to be treated just like the sailors and to have the sailors’ diet. That diet is indeed excellent, as can be observed from the indisputably robust appearance and the ﬂourishing health of the Vietnamese workers.’ He noted that their request had apparently been motivated by their desire to partake in every way of the European personnel’s situation, and claimed that they now regretted that decision, and in particular that they missed eating rice. Bosc thought, however, that it would be difﬁcult, now that they were used to French food, to return them to the ‘traditional diet of their country’.5 Difﬁcult, and yet desirable because – despite their current ﬂourishing health – he thought they would be better off eating food that was culturally appropriate for them: A third inspector, du Vaure, also observed a group that ate à la française: The cooking is done by a French chef … It’s remarkably

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clean and well-kept. The Vietnamese are housed and fed like the French … They eat exactly like the French, with rice as an extra. My impression is that they eat too well, because when they return home, how will they meet their new needs, how will they readapt to their national food? And yet they are not satisﬁed. Just before my visit, for instance, they had complained that the bread was not fresh.6 Spoiled by eating food from a European tradition, in du Vaure’s view the workers had grown presumptuous, and now thought themselves entitled to opinions on that food, which would create further problems once the war ended and the time came to return the workers to their appropriate diet. At the same time as these inspectors were emphasizing the dire consequences of feeding European food to the Vietnamese, a different part of the French military had decided to increase the amount of rice served to French soldiers to a staple of their regular diet, instead of leaving it as a rare side-dish. While the army stressed culture and race as the reason for feeding the Vietnamese workers Vietnamese food, it cited rationality instead when it came to feeding rice to French troops.7 Either way, the military urged everyone to eat more rice, especially once supplies of wheat and potatoes began running short. Of course, rice is not exclusively an Asian food, and even less a purely Vietnamese food. It had been imported from many regions, such as India and Italy, before the French conquest of Vietnam.8 But it was the colonization of Vietnam and the subsequent realization that Vietnam’s main export crop would always be rice that led directly to a serious propaganda effort to convince the French to eat more rice, in any form. It was colonialism that made one pamphleteer claim that rice was a national food – ‘une denrée nationale’9 – even at a time when jokes about the French inability to cook rice correctly were commonplace. And it was the colonization of Vietnam that caused the military to see rice as a logical source of nourishment for the troops. The soldiers’ dislike of rice was legendary: in 1915 a député pleaded that rice be eliminated from the ration, since the troops refused to eat it.10 In a 1928 novel about the First World War, an overachieving colonel swore he would make his men like rice. By his orders, it was prepared in every manner, with meat or without, with sugar or with fat; no matter, the soldiers always described it as ‘a gluey paste’. And, according to the novel, for weeks by the side of the road one could see the rice in ‘little sticky piles like milestones’.11 Despite the soldiers’

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unhappiness, rice offered too many advantages in ease of transport and preservation, and the Ministère de la Guerre refused to give it up. The military was committed to a new rationality when it came to rations, and rice, a cheap product of French territory, was a logical resource. Informed of this debate, the Comité de l’Indochine discussed the need for a good recipe for cooking rice. One member offered to bring ‘the exact recipe used by the Vietnamese’ and another suggested that once the group found this perfect recipe, they should publish it widely, since the general French population was just as incompetent at cooking rice as the army cooks.12 The wartime conditions, and the efforts to ﬁnd ways to stretch necessary commodities to meet consumer demand, led to another issue: could the French population in France substitute rice for wheat in signiﬁcant quantities, to avoid having to buy expensive wheat from foreign sources? This question of substituting rice for wheat in small quantities in the making of bread had in fact been raised intermittently in France, from the very beginning of colonialism in Vietnam. It was clear from the ﬁrst that this would allow a cheaper bread, but agricultural interests always prevented any action from being taken to promote such an idea.13 With the destruction of France’s wheat supply in the First World War, however, the suggestion began to sound less absurd. Everyone knew that the pressure to add 10–20 per cent of rice ﬂour to bread was coming from importers of Vietnamese rice, but that did not change the fact that such an action would signiﬁcantly reduce the rapidly rising price of a loaf at a time when the government dearly desired that result. The supporters of the infusion of rice ﬂour created a major propaganda campaign, sending hundreds of sample little petits pains to all the members of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies in order to demonstrate that the bread tasted just as good as ordinary wheat bread. 14 The proponents of allowing bread to be made with rice ﬂour, led by Ernest Outrey and other members of the Comité de l’Indochine, convinced the Chamber of Deputies to vote for it; the Senate, however, refused to go along. Efforts to increase French imports of rice continued after the war. In the late 1920s and especially with the approach of the 1931 Exhibition, the propaganda movement found a new burst of energy. The famous chef Escofﬁer put out a book in 1927 called Le Riz: l’aliment le meilleur, le plus nutritif, which promoted the increased use of rice. Under the heading, ‘La vie à bon marché’, Escofﬁer stated that everyone ought to think about how to reduce the nation’s cost of living, and that rice

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should be considered one of the main factors in that effort. According to him, increased use of rice would not only keep down the cost of food, but would also increase hygiene and health, by reducing French people’s intake of bread.15 By reading Escofﬁer’s arguments, we can see what concerns the French people had regarding rice. For instance, he addressed the question of ‘the stubborn constipation which afﬂicts so many people in these times’, and derided the popular belief that rice had astringent properties which caused constipation. Quite the contrary: ‘Rice regulates intestinal health, by means of its incomparable ease of digestion.’16 Another concern he addressed was the question of class: after repeating that rice could help the French eat more cheaply, he nevertheless added: ‘in its simplicity, rice is the economical food par excellence, but one can accompany it with so many good things, that, quite often, the dish is no longer within the reach of all pocketbooks’.17 Escofﬁer’s insight was to see that if rice were just a worst-case scenario, only adequate when one could not afford better, then not even poor people would want to eat it. In 1928, another pamphlet on rice declared that only ignorance, ‘the mother of routine and prejudice’, prevented the French from appreciating this food which fought dyspepsia, diarrhoea and ﬂatulence.18 According to the pamphlet, each French person ate only two kilograms of rice per year: ‘For a colonial power controlling eastern Indochina, which is one of the greatest producers of rice in the World, this situation is incomprehensible.’19 In 1931 the Cordon Bleu published a cookbook to encourage consumers to eat rice, ‘but above all … Rice from Indochina, because Rice from Indochina is a French product’.20 In 1933 the Association des Colons Français sold a propaganda booklet for four francs called Français: manger du riz in which they made the mandatory joke about how badly the French cooked rice and declared that all housewives needed to learn that it takes less time to cook rice than to cook pommes frites.21 Clearly the movement hoped that rice would take over the way the potato had over a century earlier, but French nationalism had reached a different stage by this point. French cuisine was now so important to the French sense of national identity that the foods included could only be conventional French foods. The fact that rice was a colonial product did not make it count as authentically French for the French public. Given its importance as Vietnam’s main export crop, rice remained a central aspect of the attempt to persuade French consumers to eat Vietnamese food throughout the interwar period. Nevertheless, it was not the only issue. At the 1922 Colonial Exhibition, the ofﬁcial report reminisced about pleasures taken at the pretty octagonal ‘restaurant

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annamite’, or Vietnamese restaurant, which was overseen by M. Frasseto, the owner of Saigon’s Hôtel Continental. At his Vietnamese restaurant, ‘amateurs of good French and Far-Eastern cooking would gather … [and] the public could order birds’-nests, shark-ﬁns and other Vietnamese dishes’.22 It is telling that the phrase used was ‘could order’: there were after all other items on the menu, and the French items were ordered much more frequently.23 Charles Regismanset noted in his own loving review of the restaurant: ‘Along with the most appetizing Vietnamese food, one can have the best European, French or Marseillais dishes.’24 He himself ate the exotic food, but he made it clear that one could still have an exotic experience just by eating French food in the unusual environment. At the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, the ofﬁcial guide again encouraged visitors to expand their meal horizons: ‘Don’t forget to dine with our friends from Indochina. An African proverb says that ‘those who eat the same dishes end up having the same saliva’, and indeed, one can only get to know the people of another country by sitting down at their table.’25 L’Illustration, however, again reassured its readers that they could avoid any disturbingly unfamiliar tastes: at the IndoChinese restaurant, ‘one can taste a little native cuisine at the same time as some excellent French food’.26 A sardonic representation of the exposition, A Lyauteyville, purported to reveal that the restaurants at the exposition presented the appearance of exotic dining, but that the unfamiliar, exotic-sounding names were in fact only disguises for ordinary French dishes, such as ‘les petits pois à la française’.27 Feeding off the excitement of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition were several books which set out to introduce the idea of exotic colonial dining to the French who had themselves never left France. Catherine’s La cuisine exotique chez soi told its readers: When it comes to planning a menu, veal with peas turns up every time. … Exotic cuisine? Don’t be frightened; you managed to accept the tomato … Curry went, slowly, from being an exceptional curiosity to being a basic ingredient in the kitchen. We have, until now, resisted culinary exoticism much more than other people … But why should we deny ourselves those luxuries? We have French cooking, the best in the world. Yes. Fine, especially for everyday meals, but French cooking is not the only thing there is.28 She included an interview with Albert de Pouvourville about his years in Vietnam, in addition to emphasizing aspects of Vietnamese cuisine

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that would appear bizarre to the French, such as dog and the nuoc mam ﬁsh condiment, he also made sure to mention some more accessible foods, even describing a curry sauce that he suggested could accompany Vietnamese chicken and pork dishes.29 Indeed, curry seems to have been a common means for French consumers to feel they were being exotic without having to eat anything too difﬁcult; after all, many of them had probably been introduced to curry on the relatively familiar ground of England, and they were certainly familiar with it long before the First World War.30 Regismanset suggested eating curry on one’s Vietnamese rice at the 1922 Exhibition. Escofﬁer gave recipes for curry in his book on rice. The author of a 1931 book, La Bonne cuisine aux colonies, provided his favourite method for cooking rice, and then added that while the Vietnamese ate their rice with nuoc mam, that could be replaced ‘easily and pleasantly’ by a curry sauce.31 In 1930, curry even was offered (as well as a choice of bread instead of rice) on the menu of a Chinese restaurant in Paris.32 Just as they seemed more willing to eat curry than to eat speciﬁcally Vietnamese food, the majority of the French seem not to have wanted to eat in Vietnamese restaurants. Though such restaurants existed in Paris, Marseilles and other French cities, they were frequented predominantly by the Vietnamese who were in France. The major exception to this general rule were the French girlfriends and wives of the Vietnamese immigrants, who do seem to have eaten with their companions in Asian restaurants.33 One element which increases the difﬁculty of studying Vietnamese food in France is the comparatively large number of Chinese restaurants which sprang up in the major cities in this period.34 Unfortunately for the historian, in between the two categories of restaurant was a grey area of ambiguous ethnicity. What is one to think, for instance, of the fact that the 1938 Paris Didot-Bottin Annuaire listed a restaurant called ‘Nuygnen’ as a Chinese restaurant? Assuming that ‘Nuygnen’ was a misspelling of the common Vietnamese name ‘Nguyen’, one is left with the apparent oddity of a Vietnamese-owned restaurant claiming to serve Chinese food. But it is only an apparent oddity, because I would argue that no one at that time in France, regardless of nationality or ethnic background, paid much attention to the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine. Vietnamese immigrants often congregated in Chinese restaurants, as shown in police reports, 35 and the Chinese people who ran them sometimes had come to France from Vietnam’s large Chinese population. Additionally, a Vietnamese person might have picked a

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Chinese-sounding name for his restaurant if he thought that might appeal more to French or Chinese customers. A story remembered by one Chinese immigrant indicates that some of the Chinese restaurants in Paris may have been owned and run by Vietnamese. In the 1920s, his brother went every day to a Parisian restaurant with the Chinese name ‘Wanhualou’, or ‘Ten thousand ﬂowers’. Upon hearing this, their father became furious: ‘What! He goes to the whorehouse every day?!’ To the father, ‘Ten thousand ﬂowers’ sounded like a euphemism. The immigrant telling the story thought that a name which would seem so suggestive and inappropriate to the Chinese could only have been picked by someone Vietnamese.36 The ﬁrst Chinese restaurant started advertising in Paris’s Didot-Bottin Annuaires as early as 1914, the second in 1916, and after 1920 the Annuaire always listed a handful of Chinese restaurants. In 1926, the ﬁrst Vietnamese restaurant started advertising, but then stopped in 1928, and from then until 1936 no obviously Vietnamese restaurant advertised. Only after the mid-1930s did a number of explicitly Vietnamese restaurants spring up, such as the Saïgon, the Restaurant Indo-chinois, and A l’Indochine. But at the same time, many restaurants started up which were named, simply, ‘Restaurant Chinois’ or a similar name, and the ethnicity of their owners cannot be read from such names. In Marseilles, the ﬁrst Chinese restaurant started advertising in 1924, and lasted three years before closing. Then, in 1928, one opened on the rue Torte, where there would continue to be from one to three Asian restaurants until the start of the Second World War. In 1932 the ﬁrst clearly Vietnamese name appeared; Trung Nguyen Quan’s restaurant lasted until 1943. When his restaurant disappeared, it was not because of a sudden drop-off in interest in Vietnamese food, for several new restaurants started during the war, with names such as Restaurant Haiphong, Nguyen Van Mô, and Restaurant Annamite. That last was run by the same Frasseto who had run the ‘Restaurant annamite’ at the 1922 Marseilles exhibition. In addition to these ofﬁcial, advertising restaurants, whose owners may have hoped for and even obtained a partially European clientele, we also have reports from police agents about tiny hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurants. Usually unmarked and up a ﬂight of stairs, these restaurants provided regular meals to poor students and workers, and in port cities such as Marseilles, Bordeaux and Le Havre served crowds of Vietnamese sailors as well.37 The police tried to keep a close eye on this genre of eating establishment, since they knew that these seedy places generally became spaces of resistance to French authority

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and provided their clientele with not just nourishment, but also access to opium, cocaine, gambling and frequently Communist and anticolonial ideas. By 1927, the police noted a couple of these restaurants in Le Havre and more in Marseilles, and by the 1930s Bordeaux and Paris also had a number of these sites where the Vietnamese immigrant community met.38 One might ask why a signiﬁcant number of Vietnamese immigrants chose to open restaurants, despite not having run restaurants before coming to France and despite the lack of French interest in eating in these restaurants. Le Huu Khoa explains in his book, Les Vietnamiens en France: Insertion et Identité, that owning restaurants allowed them to avoid competing directly against French commerce, and to avoid France’s taxes by underreporting their revenues. More positively, it meant they could always feed their families, even when business was bad. Additionally, restaurants generated economic solidarity within the Vietnamese community: Le Huu Khoa cites a restaurant owner who declared, ‘When one has a restaurant project, it is easy to borrow money from fellow countrymen.’39 The solidarity, moreover, worked in both directions. A Vietnamese immigrant who opened a restaurant in Bordeaux in 1928 recalled proudly: ‘Because of my restaurant, I could give work, lodging and food to Vietnamese students at the time and help them continue their studies. In 1936, I opened a restaurant in Paris … I gave all the proﬁts to an association of students who were ﬁghting for Vietnam’s political independence.’40 While the illicit restaurants tended to open and close rapidly, as the Vietnamese owners tried to stay ahead of the police, legitimate restaurants often did not endure much longer. Given the distance between France and Vietnam, the authentic ingredients that Asian immigrants wanted were hard to obtain. Competition between restaurants was ﬁerce, and restaurants frequently folded because the police had received anonymous tips regarding illegal activities on their premises, tips which were likely to have come from other Vietnamese restaurant owners.41 The solidarity of the Vietnamese community had evident limits. Moreover, even the Vietnamese never ate exclusively in Asian restaurants: many ate European breakfasts, for instance, and the police reports show that the Vietnamese also frequented ordinary French cafés.42 Indeed, as their politics grew more radical, some Vietnamese preferred meeting in French cafés and restaurants, to avoid the police informants who targeted Asian restaurants.43 Furthermore, aside from the police, the majority of the French ignored the very existence of Vietnamese restaurants until after the Second World War.

100 Indigestible Indo-China

If the French occasionally did display some interest in Vietnamese food, as when Regismanset raved about shark-ﬁns or when Escofﬁer promoted rice, generally the French were at least as interested in food from places that were not their colonies, such as China and India. Colonial provenance did not serve as a decisive factor in determining whether the French would take to a given product. In the early part of the century, the French mainly wanted to eat what they saw as authentic French food, regardless of how recent or artiﬁcial a category that actually was, including many provincial dishes but hardly any from the colonies. To the extent that the French did, gradually, take an interest in colonial products, that interest was only a small part of France’s growing twentieth-century interest in products from Asia and all over the world. Notes and References 1 L’Illustration, 21 October 1922, pp.377–8. 2 See S. Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 16, nos 2–3 (1996), pp.51–68; N. Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, Western Women and Imperialism (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp.238–42; C. Driver, The British at Table, 1940–1980 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), p.73; ‘Curry’, Larousse Gastronomique (Crown Publishers, 1989), p.352. For comparisons between French and British attitudes regarding food, see S. Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1996), particularly pp.1–5, 291–300, and 327–32. 3 On the use of food in shaping French modern identities, see T. Zeldin, ‘Eating and Drinking’, France 1848–1945: Taste and Corruption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); J.-P. Aron, Le mangeur du XIXe siècle (R. Laffont, 1973), pp.7–10; J.-V. Pﬁrsch, La Saveur des sociétés: sociologie des goûts alimentaires en France et en Allemagne (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1997), pp.20–4, 102–111, 182. On French adoption of food from around the world, see A. Capatti, Le goût du nouveau: origines de la modernité alimentaire (Paris: A. Michel, 1989); C. Fischler, ‘Le supermarché planétaire’, L’homnivore (Paris: O. Hacob, 1993); Aron, Le mangeur, pp.181–4. For a discussion of French colonizers’ attitudes towards Asian food in colonial Vietnam, and Vietnamese attitudes towards French food, see ‘Seeking familiar foods under the disruptions and dislocations of colonialism’, ch. 5 of my dissertation, Negotiating Power Through Everyday Practices in French Vietnam, 1880–1924 (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2000). 4 Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (hereafter CAOM): Service de liaison avec les originaires des territoires français d’Outre-Mer Series 1, Carton 1, Dossier 12 (hereafter SLOTFOM 1: 1/12) (7 November 1916). 5 CAOM: Archives of the Governor General of Indo-China, dossier 15670 (15 February 1917).

Erica Peters 101 6 SLOTFOM 1: 1/12 (30 July 1916). 7 On the use of rice in European institutions (prisons, orphanages, and so on), see P. A. Coclanis, ‘Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformations it Wrought’, American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4 (October 1993), p.1,052. 8 Ibid., p.1,054. 9 P. Cordemoy, L’alimentation nationale et les produits coloniaux: le Riz (Publications de l’agence économique du Gouvernement Général de l’Indochine, 1928), p.6. 10 CAOM: Minutes of the Comité de l’Indochine (hereafter CI) (14 October 1915), p.142; coded as 100 APOM 724. The Comité de l’Indochine was a lobbying group for French business interests in the colony. 11 R. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme (Paris: A. Michel, 1928), p.172. Cited in Capatti, Le goût, p.152. 12 CI (14 October 1915), p.142. 13 A. Lahille, Projet d’utilisation du riz indochinois dans la metropole (1916), p.3. 14 CI (9 September 1915), p.125. 15 A. Escofﬁer, Le Riz: l’aliment le meilleur, le plus nutritif; 120 recettes pour l’accommoder (Paris: Flammarion, 1927). p.5. 16 Ibid., p.67–8. 17 Ibid., p.6. 18 Cordemoy, L’alimentation nationale, p.6. 19 Ibid., p.9. 20 Cordon Bleu, L’Art d’accommoder le riz: Petit Recueil de Recettes Pratiques pour mettre en valeur et faire apprécier un excellent Produit Colonial Français (1931), p.6. 21 M. Pasques, Français: mangez du riz: 150 recettes pour accommoder le riz et lui permettre de ﬁgurer sur toutes les tables (1933), p.6. 22 A. Artaud, Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille: Rapport Général (Marseille: Commissariat général de l’exposition, 1923), p.205. 23 L’Illustration, 21 October 1922, p.378. 24 C. Regismanset, 8 Jours à l’Exposition coloniale de Marseille (G. Crès, 1922), p.35. 25 A. Demaison, A Paris en 1931: Exposition coloniale internationale: guide ofﬁciel (Paris: Mayeux, 1931), p.36. 26 L’Illustration, 25 July 1931, p.433. 27 J. Camp and A. Corbier, A Lyauteyville: Promenades Sentimentales et Humoristiques à l’Exposition Coloniale (Société nationale d’éditions artistiques, 1931), p.105. 28 Catherine, La cuisine exotique chez soi, avec des souvenirs gastronomiques recueillis par Charlotte Rabette (Paris: Éditions des Portiques, 1931), pp.12–14. 29 Ibid., p.25. 30 For example, E. Richardin’s L’Art du bien manger (Paris: Editions d’art et de littérature, 1907) provided two curry recipes on p.677. 31 R. de Noter, La Bonne cuisine aux colonies: Asie – Afrique – Amérique: 400 recettes exquises ou pittoresques (L’Art culinaire, 1931), p.18. 32 Live Yu-Sion, La diaspora chinoise en France: immigration, activités socioéconomiques, pratiques socio-culturelles (EHESS, 1991), p.472. 33 SLOTFOM 3: 1/41 (30 September 1929); 3: 23/1 (11 February 1929.)

102 Indigestible Indo-China 34 On the Chinese community in France, see Live, La dias pora; Wang HungHsi, Un petit coin de Chine en France: cuisine, shopping, traditions (Paris: Julliard, 1973); Li-Hua Zheng, Les Chinois de Paris et leurs jeux de face (Paris: Harmattan, 1995); Tan Yim Phong, ‘Restaurants et ateliers: le travail des sino-khmers à Paris’, Asie du Sud-Est et Monde Insulindien (Paris), vol. 25, nos 1–4 (1984), pp.277–92. Much more work has been done on Chinese restaurants around the world than on Vietnamese restaurants. See Chi Kien Lao, The Chinese Restaurant Industry in the United States: Its History, Development and Future (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University School of Hotel Administration monograph, 1975); Chung Yuen Kay, At the Palace: Work, Ethnicity and Gender in a Chinese Restaurant (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1985); F. N. Pieke, ‘Immigration et entreprenariat: Les Chinois aux Pays-Bas’, in Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 8, no. 3 (1992), pp.33–50; S. Lu, ‘The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment’, Sociological Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3 (Summer 1995), pp.535–53. 35 SLOTFOM 3: 27/87 (2 February 1921). 36 M. Holzman and Tsong-Heng Liang, Chinois de Paris (Paris: Seghers, 1989), p.40. 37 SLOTFOM 3: 27/87 (2 February 1921 and 10 April 1931). 38 SLOTFOM 3: 27/87; 3: 1/56; 3: 1/327. 39 Le Huu Khoa, Les Vietnamiens en France: Insertion et Identité (Paris: Harmattan, 1985), pp.58–9. 40 Ibid., p.35. 41 SLOTFOM 3: 1/56 (4 January 1927). On this competition, see also 3: 4/unnumbered dossier (3 March 1927). 42 SLOTFOM 3: 23/1 (16 January 1929); 3: 22/1 (21 October 1929); 3: 27/87 (29 August 1931). 43 SLOTFOM 3: 14/714 (3 July 1930).

7 The ‘Ballet blanc et noir’: A Study of Racial and Cultural Identity during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition Dana Hale

For six months in 1931 colonial advocates of the Third Republic offered the world a chance to discover the glories of modern France and other imperial powers. The International Colonial Exhibition, held at the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern edge of Paris, was designed to awe, entertain and, above all, educate visitors of all classes on the geographical expanse, commercial signiﬁcance and civilizing mission of the empire. Marshal Lyautey, conqueror of Morocco and commissioner general of the 1931 exposition, explained at the inaugural ceremonies in May that the lesson to be learned from the exposition was that of ‘union’: union among the European powers, union among the French in support of the colonial enterprise, and union between France and the colonial races.1 While both Lyautey and the Colonial Minister, Paul Reynaud, spoke of this ‘union’ and of a French policy of association based on respect for the peoples of their overseas territories, the exhibition displays, publications and festivals communicated clearly another theme: French pride in an empire of subject races that provided labour for their ‘civilized’ tutors. The French exhibitions, like the British colonial celebrations studied by John MacKenzie and others, combined economics, education and entertainment to expose the masses to the imperial agenda.2 One element that permeated virtually all aspects of the exhibitions, however, was a focus on the exotic and ‘racial’ difference. Patricia Morton and Sylviane Lebrun explored this in their studies of architecture and representation at the 1931 exposition. Scholars such as Catherine Hodeir, Michel Pierre, Herman Lebovics, Elisabeth Ezra and 103

104 The ‘Ballet blanc et noir’

Panivong Norindr have viewed an analysis of the International Colonial Exhibition as essential for understanding perceptions of French culture and of colonized peoples in the interwar years.3 At colonial exhibitions during the Third Republic (1871–1940), much of the public’s attention focused on recreated African villages, native craftsmen and exotic songs and dances by ‘authentic’ sub-Saharan Africans. Colonial ofﬁcials used the traditional villages and their inhabitants to represent ‘primitive’ Africa opposite the European manufactures and modern technology displayed in the Metropolitan Section of the exposition. Organizers for the International Colonial Exhibition planned early on to ‘charm the eye of the visitor by a variety of shows able to create an exotic atmosphere and familiarize him with the mores, customs and numerous aspects of the lives of our native populations’.4 The French drew in crowds with exotic music and food, vendors selling imported wares, ﬁlms, parades of colonial peoples, plays and dance performances. One of the more unique performances, the Ballet blanc et noir, paired together two unlikely partners: classically trained ballerinas from the National Opera Theatre and 100 soldiers from French Equatorial Africa. The soldiers, ethnic Saras from southern Chad, participated in a variety of exhibition events, impressing audiences and the press with their physique and athletic abilities. In this essay, I will argue that the Ballet blanc et noir exempliﬁes colonial propaganda at the interwar exhibitions that reinforced racial and cultural stereotypes about Africans. The Ballet offers a paradox, however, in that it produced ambiguous meanings that could have actually subverted the stated intent of its creators. Such ambiguities permeate the colonial encounter. The Commissariat of Festivals sponsored the ﬁrst performance of the Ballet blanc et noir in the Grand Hall of the Cité des Informations on 15 June 1931.5 An important exposition site, the Cité des Informations was the clearing-house for all economic data related to the French colonies. Decorated with maps, paintings, sculptures and informative plaques, the building held ofﬁces where interested entrepreneurs could consult representatives of the colonial territories. The Grand Hall within the Cité was the ideal setting for the private party that Commissioner Lyautey gave on 15 June for 4,000 inﬂuential guests, including government ofﬁcials, French and foreign exhibition representatives, elites such as Robert de Rothschild, and ﬁgures from the literary world. A performance of the Ballet blanc et noir closed the entertainment portion of the party. In mid-July, Lyautey hosted another celebration that featured

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the dance. At this event the new president of the Republic, Paul Doumer, a former governor general of Indo-China, and 5,000 dignitaries were entertained with the Ballet and various performances by Africans, Asians and Antillais.6 In addition to these private shows, the Ballet appeared during the summer in the regular ‘African Extravaganza’ programme organized by the Commissariat of Festivals. The ballet’s ﬁnal performance was at a Saturday evening programme in mid-October. The idea of mixing colonizer and colonized on stage probably originated with Fernand Rouget, an ofﬁcial in the colonial ministry. Rouget served in Africa before the First World War and wrote several government texts on the colonies, two of which had been published for colonial expositions. For many years, Rouget was drawn to writing and the arts. Using the pseudonym Rouvray, he penned several short plays and operettas during his administrative career. It appears that his theatrical talents and knowledge of the colonial empire persuaded Lyautey to appoint him as the exhibition’s Commissioner of Festivals. Rouget’s personal ‘formula’ for the evening theatrical shows was ‘to have presented, by artists from subventioned theatres and major theatres of Paris, all the attractive elements of our overseas possessions’.7 The shows he organized combined short musical and dance scenes using European artists – such as the Carlton Tiller Girls – as well as colonial performers. This plan made vivid the idea of ‘union’ between métropole and colonies. A committee of ﬁgures from the Paris cultural scene, selected in 1928, assisted Rouget in planning the general entertainment programme. Publicists, writers, military ofﬁcials and sports advocates such as Olympic Games’ promoter, Pierre de Coubertin, created the rich programme of theatrical, athletic and musical performances held throughout the six-month long exhibition.

From Central Africa to centre stage Many of the ‘attractive elements’ chosen to entertain exhibition-goers were colonial soldiers. The Ministry of War provided the commissioner general with over 1300 indigenous and French colonial troops for exhibition guard duty and festivals. Organizers divided up the troops into three categories: detachments serving the commissariats of individual colonial sections, detachments assigned to the commissioner general of the exhibition, and a corps of 200 men to be trained at the Ecole Supérieure d’Education Physique at Joinville-le-Pont, south-east of Paris. Founded as a military school in 1853, Joinville provided special

106 The ‘Ballet blanc et noir’

training in physical education and fencing. By the 1920s Joinville had also become a national training site for physical education instructors who were to train public school monitors at regional centres.8 Among the 200 Joinville athletes were 100 Saras from Equatorial Africa called the ‘Bloc noir’. These men were brought to Joinville in late January 1931 to begin training for performances. The training schedule for the athletes and the 600 other colonial troops from Africa and Asia combined physical education, artistic performance and language studies. In the morning the soldiers had three hours of exercise; afternoons were set aside for training in song and dance and special rehearsals. At the end of the day the men received French lessons from instructors sent by the League Against Illiteracy. The French commander of the colonial troops at the Joinville school and the adjacent Camp Saint-Maur, Lieutenant Colonel Delayen, assigned an indigenous colonial ofﬁcer to oversee the men of his own ‘colour’. African Lieutenant Néouné led the Dahomeans, Saras, Mossis, Bambara and Soussous troops.9 It is not clear from exhibition records if the Sara troops were sent directly from the colonies or were already stationed in France when army ofﬁcials assigned them to special exhibition duty. Probably, like many other colonial troops, they had been posted in France and had passed through the Fréjus Transitional Centre of Indigenous Colonial Troops in Provence, a processing station. The Transitional Centre at Fréjus played an important role in establishing the use of colonial soldiers in public festivals after the First World War. In the early 1920s, Colonel Lame from the Centre organized festivals with colonial troops in cities on the Riviera such as Cannes, Nice, Toulon and St. Raphaël. Lame had African and Asian soldiers under his command sing, dance and parade in costume to the music of traditional drums and instruments. The soldiers wore costumes which they sewed themselves in a makeshift camp tailor’s shop.10 According to one journalist, the black African soldiers were the highlight of the Riviera colonial shows.11 The Transitional Centre at Fréjus ran on two schedules: from 1 April to 31 October when relief units arrived and were transferred quickly to their French posts, and from 1 November to 31 March when convalescents from various metropolitan posts and men deemed unable to tolerate the climate in their regular French garrisons wintered at the Centre. It appears that army commanders organized the regional colonial fêtes during the cooler season when they had a stable resident population.

Dana Hale 107

Black soldiers stationed in Provence were used to entertain at the 1922 Marseilles National Colonial Exhibition. At a festival presided over by General Charles Mangin – who played an instrumental role in determining the recruitment policy for African forces – units from Toulon and Marseilles competed in foot races, archery, javelin and grenade throwing contests.12 Mangin’s book, La force noire (1910), helped to establish the myth of the tirailleur sénégalais (a term used for the black African soldier) as an effective element in the French army. The premise of La force noire was that in light of France’s declining population, the solution to the foreseeable shortage of military manpower was the African soldier. Mangin argued that sub-Saharan Africans had warrior qualities, a strong loyalty to France, and great physical strength and endurance that could be harnessed to the beneﬁt of the state. He presented a detailed history of African forces in the ancient world and accounts of African bravery during the French conquest of the continent. Mangin also addressed the concerns of those who feared that black Africans posted in Algeria would become Muslim fanatics or that his plan could result in racial mixing. After the Great War, military and government ofﬁcials publicly praised colonial forces for their service and worked to increase the number of recruits. The Marseilles National Colonial Exhibition and the regional festivals that featured African soldiers in the 1920s served as showcases where the public could observe the qualities of French colonial forces from sub-Saharan Africa. As a consequence of the success of the festivals in the 1920s, ofﬁcials for the Colonial Exhibition requested that the Fréjus soldiers perform at Paris. The military transported the men and their costume workshop to the capital to prepare for the exhibition entertainment programme. Of all the athletes trained at Fréjus and at Joinville, the Saras were featured in the largest variety of events. They performed their acrobatic moves in the ‘Visions from Africa’ and ‘African Extravaganza’ evening revues. They rowed canoes around the fountains and lights of Lake Daumesnil in two water theatre shows. They marched at the July Military Festival. They also were called on to entertain an audience after a special exposition lecture on the ‘Black Soul’.13 The Africans’ inclusion in the Ballet blanc et noir corresponded to the desire of Rouget to make the exhibition shows colonial while lending support to a Paris entertainment scene weakened by the new economic crisis. With the creation of shows such as the Ballet blanc et noir, Parisians and visitors could enjoy exotic performances and traditional opera or dance on the same billing.

108 The ‘Ballet blanc et noir’

Colonial ‘union’ in black and white And this was the Ballet blanc et noir: frail white ballerinas, powerful black athletes, a simple and clever choreography uniting strength to grace, in short, one of those rare and perfect things that only Paris knows how to invent.14 The Ballet blanc et noir (choreographed by Leo Staats with music by the respected composers Raoul Pugno, Charles Lippacher and André Messager), was well received from the start. Press accounts that mention the ballet performances call attention to the beauty and contrasting forms. Writers in all the major papers – with the exception of the Communist press, which vehemently opposed the exhibition – lauded the unique dance.15 Photographs of the Ballet show about two dozen barefoot soldier-athletes, dressed only in black shorts, on stage with 20 dancers from the National Opera Theatre. The ballerinas, wearing white chiffon tutus and white wigs, posed in groups and pairs. Generally, the Sara soldiers stood in the background, forming a ‘bronze frieze’ behind the ballerinas.16 However, one scene pictured two soldiers at the front of the stage in a stance with clenched ﬁsts (see Figure 7.1). In another scene, the Saras positioned themselves around the dancers. Some crouched on the ground and others stood beside the women as they prepared to move into a new formation. In a signature pose, probably the ﬁnale, the men of the Bloc noir lifted three French dancers high overhead. A writer from Volonté reported that: ‘the svelte and gracious dancers of the Opera were lifted up in the arms of the 100 black athletes from the Ecole de Joinville. The contrast of colours and ﬂuid silhouettes on the one hand, and stocky on the other, gave the most pleasant vision.’17 Other reviews of the perform- ance referred to the contrast between the beautiful white ballerinas and the powerful black Saras. The Ballet demonstrates the complexity of race and culture in interwar France. In the controlled setting of the metropolitan stage black men and white women interacted, came into physical contact, and elicited applause, not fear. Here, framed in the celebration of art and of the colonial empire, there was no danger in the African subject representing virility opposite the feminine and pure France. On the other side of Paris, at the Bal nègre in the 14th arrondissement, the black man was viewed as an ‘uncivilized’ sexual threat. The Bal nègre’s unrestrained dance space where blacks and whites often mixed provided a setting for the French to imagine black primitive sensuality.18 For the exhibition, the French trained black subjects such as the Saras to execute precise

Dana Hale 109

movements in a regulated dance space to demonstrate the effectiveness of civilizing efforts to control Africans. The perform- ance served to educate, entertain, and to garner new support for the empire.

The ballet as symbol If one evaluates its elements, the Ballet blanc et noir can be seen as an interpretation of the exhibition themes articulated by government ofﬁcials such as Marshal Lyautey and Reynaud. In artistic form, it demonstrated the ‘union’ created between metropolitan France and its colonies, or what Reynaud called a relationship between ‘associates’. Each party in the association provided its talents to the other. Nevertheless, the more egalitarian terminology of association did not preclude the image of a saviour France looking down on inferior subjects. Only weeks after his 6 May ‘union’ speech, Lyautey claimed that there remained much work to do to ‘reclaim’ indigenous peoples ‘from misery, ignorance, all the bad forces of nature’. He believed that to colonize meant not only to bring development and technology to backward regions, but also to ‘gain to human kindness the ﬁerce hearts of the savanna or desert’.19 The International Colonial Exhibition was meant to show the public the work that had been accomplished, but also the task

Figure 7.1 A scene from the ‘Ballet blanc et noir’. Photo courtesy of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

110 The ‘Ballet blanc et noir’

that stood before the civilized nations. Ofﬁcials declared that the colonial exchange was not between equal partners, and the artistic presentation of performances like the Ballet blanc et noir reinforced this idea. The Ballet’s choreography accentuated a stereotypical view of African cultures. Most often, the blacks stood behind the whites in a subservient and submissive position, but the strength displayed in some of the movements of the Sara athletes represented the idea of the force noire that supported France in its time of need. Newspaper articles and ofﬁcial reports referred to the Bloc noir athletes as ‘magniﬁcent’, ‘bronze’, and ‘powerful’. As the soldiers placed the white dancers on their shoulders, the men symbolically demonstrated how the African colonies served as a buttress for the French state. Africa provided the métropole with goods and labour, but the French assisted their African ‘associates’ by, as Reynaud phrased it, ‘bringing light into the darkness’, carrying civilization into a land once characterized by slavery, raids, famine and ignorance.20 Although the African soldier-athletes represented a source of power that France lacked, their physical strength was emphasized as a primitive quality. The female dancers poignantly embodied France and ‘civilized’ culture. Physically beautiful, talented and reﬁned, their feminine identity made them desirable. Reviewers referred to them as ‘svelte’, ‘graceful’ and even ‘ravishing’. Their white costumes and ﬂowing movements communicated purity and elegance. As an art form, classical dance symbolized a high level of civilization and western culture (a culture that viewed its forms of expression as superior to African ones). Thus, the Ballet blanc et noir demonstrated a cultural triumph of France over Africa. Nevertheless, the ballet’s impact came because of the coordination of the Sara soldiers with the Opera Theatre dancers. The beautiful, graceful dancers were ‘frail’ and limited, and the ballet was ordinary without the masculine strength of the Saras. Likewise, without its African possessions, France was restricted in wealth, stature and cultural inﬂuence on African societies. Subsequently, the performance, which can be viewed as symbolizing French racial and cultural superiority, simultaneously implied French weaknesses.

Conclusion On close evaluation, ofﬁcial discourse, publications and performances at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition presented sub-Saharan Africans as subservient, equal, and even superior in certain qualities to their colonizers. Each of these visions was moulded to respond to the

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speciﬁc political needs of the French to maintain control over their imperial territories. The Ballet blanc et noir displayed both the French and the sub-Saharan African in positions of power and weakness, but the idea of a special African physical ‘strength’ was built on the premise of this quality as characteristic of the primitive nature. For French colonial advocates, racial and cultural differences made subSaharan Africans inferior to whites. The exhibition ofﬁcials and artists who created the Ballet blanc et noir offered an image of cooperation and ‘union’ that could also reinforce the idea of African inferiority. Nevertheless, one recognizes a subtle irony in the Ballet, a performance ultimately designed to magnify the superiority of France and the ‘colonial idea’. As a symbol of the empire, the Ballet revealed the ambiguous nature of France’s relationship with sub-Saharan Africa, hinting that one day African strength might prevail. Notes and References 1 Lyautey’s inaugural speech is recorded in M. Olivier, Rapport général, Exposition Coloniale Internationale de 1931, vol. IV (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1933), p.376. (Hereafter cited as Rapport général, vols IV or V-1.) 2 See J. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p.97. Two works that consider Britain’s presentation of the colonies are R. W. Rydell’s World of Fairs: The Century of Progress Expositions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and P. Greenhalgh’s Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 3 P. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and S. Leprun, Le Théâtre des colonies: Scenograhie, acteurs et discours de l’imaginaire dans les expositions, 1855–1937 (Paris: Harmattan, 1986). Other authors who have examined the expositions include C. Hodeir and M. Pierre, L’Exposition coloniale [1931] (Bruxelles: Complexe, 1991); H. Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1940 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1992); E. Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2000); and P. Norindr, Phantasmatic Indo-China: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996). 4 Rapport général, vol. V-1, p.195. 5 ‘Grâce à un Maréchal de France, les Parisiens ont pu connaître enﬁn la “Mille et deuxième nuit”’, Paris Midi, 17 June 1931. 6 ‘La Nuit cosmopolite’, L’Illustration (4,611), 18 July 1931. 7 Rapport général, vol. IV, p.117. 8 Rapport Particulier, No. 168, 30 December 1932. Ecole Supérieur d’Education Physique de Joinville-le-Pont. Carton 8 N 184-1, Archives Nationales, Service historique de l’Armée (SHAT).

112 The ‘Ballet blanc et noir’ 9 ‘Une Babel coloniale aux portes de Paris: Le camp Saint-Maur’, Le monde illustré, 10 October 1931, p.231. 10 ‘Une Babel coloniale’, p.230. 11 Ibid. 12 A. Artaud, Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseilles, Rapport général (Marseilles: Sémaphore, 1924), p.445. 13 Rapport général, vol. IV, p.325. The lecture was given by writer Pierre Bonardi, author of Le visage de la brousse. 14 ‘La Nuit cosmopolite’. 15 The Ballet was mentioned in Le Temps, Le Figaro, L’Intransigeant, La Croix, L’Illustration (10 July 1931), and Volonté (3 November 1931). The Temps article, however, makes no reference to the participation of the African soldiers. 16 ‘Le Ballet Blanc et Noir’, photo and caption in L’Intransigeant, 10 July 1931. 17 ‘Ce que furent les fêtes de l’Exposition coloniale’, Volonté, 3 November 1931. 18 On the Bal nègre see B. A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France (Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), particularly ch. 8. 19 ‘Le sens d’un grand effort’, L’Illustration, 23 May 1931. 20 Rapport général, vol. IV, pp.383–4.

8 ‘Frenchmen in Disguise’: French Musical Exoticism and Empire in the Nineteenth Century Tom Cooper

The starting point for this outline of some of the issues concerning the development of the exotic genre in nineteenth-century French music is a lecture given by Edward Said on 20 May 1997 at Cambridge University, on an opera with exotic elements, Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz.1 Said’s lecture, entitled ‘Les Troyens and the Obligation to Empire’, forms a continuation of his interest in theories of Orientalism and imperialism with regard to their connection with music. The connections between classical music, culture and politics have begun to be explored by several historians of music, and work such as Said’s has contributed greatly to facilitating this process.2 With regard to exotic music, Said’s direct contribution has previously been conﬁned primarily to a study of Verdi’s opera Aida, the political context of which was explored at some length in his Culture and Imperialism.3 His statements in his Cambridge lecture are therefore of importance as they broaden the application of his ideas concerning art, politics and culture into the realm of music still further. Les Troyens is more typical of an exotic work than Aida, in that it has a wholly metropolitan frame of reference. Its ﬁrst partial production was in Paris at the Opéra in 1863, when the second half of the opera was given under the title Les Troyens à Carthage (Berlioz did not live to see a production of the complete work). Aida, as is well known, was ﬁrst performed in the colonial context of the new opera house in Cairo, and was indeed commissioned speciﬁcally to celebrate this aspect of the westernization of the Egyptian capital. Berlioz’s opera is harder to link to a speciﬁc colonial event as it is concerned with the Fall of Troy and the wanderings of Aeneas and his companions before their eventual arrival in Italy as the founders of Rome. However, in his lecture Said skilfully drew out the 113

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imperial links between this opera plot and the colonial pretensions of the Second Empire. He convincingly equates the Trojans with their heirs, the French. The Carthaginians (their main antagonists and opposites) he identiﬁes with the contemporary North African natives. The compulsion placed upon Aeneas and his companions to keep moving on towards their imperial destiny is paralleled with the contemporary French conception of their ‘Obligation to Empire’, as Said terms it. It is when he comes to discuss the music of the opera itself that Said is not always so successful. While he has many important things to say about the political signiﬁcance of the musical characterization of the Carthaginians, for example, he is perhaps on less sure ground when he is describing the phenomenon of musical exoticism itself. One of Said’s main points in the lecture is that Berlioz creates a synthesis between Oriental and Occidental music. Said sees this as a metaphor for the power of western imperialism to absorb and reshape subject races, reforming them in its own image. However, I would like to argue that musical exoticism actually performs a very different function from that of synthesis in the nineteenth century in general. Said’s formulation also seems to overlook the resistance of folk material to incorporation into the body of western music. In addition, much of Said’s comments on exotic opera seem tantalizingly incomplete as they tend not to take into account the history and development of the genre as a whole. Musical exoticism in France appears to have become fully established in the seventeenth century, at a somewhat later date than exoticism in either French pictorial representation or in literature. It was from the beginning associated with the staged vehicles of opera and ballet, which gave the greatest possible scope for exotic spectacle. The connection between opera and the exotic remained strong in France throughout the nineteenth century. Other vehicles for the exotic genre in French music, while less numerous, include songs, cantatas, orchestral and keyboard pieces. These works are largely ignored today, but were often extremely popular at the time and formed a large part of French musical output. They intermingled with (and were produced against) a background of other genres with a pedigree completely separate from that of exoticism, such as opéra-comique and opéra-bouffe, and had to compete with other popular themes, such as historical subjects or magical romances.4 The familiarity, to a greater or lesser extent, of audiences with works (particularly operas) by Italian and German composers such as the perennially popular Mozart and Weber, or the more contentious Verdi and Wagner, formed another strand of nineteenthcentury French musical culture.5

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A typically productive year for French musical exoticism was 1865. The spread of subject-matter and genre of the works produced in this year is also fairly typical of exotic music as a whole. As mentioned above, opera was a particularly popular medium for the presentation of exoticism, partly because the staging allowed recourse to the maximum of exotic effect in terms of sets and costumes while also permitting the inclusion of dances which were perennially popular with the operagoing public. Opera was also seen throughout the nineteenth century as the principal means of a composer achieving fame and fortune, a fact which can easily be overlooked from later perspectives which typically give more value to instrumental music. Several of the exotic works produced in 1865 showed a concern with Africa, and some speciﬁcally with Algeria, which had been increasingly colonized since 1830. Some of these had potential links with imperial schemes. One opera, L’aventurier, by the amateur composer Prince Józef Poniatowsi, was set in Mexico, its location apparently inﬂuenced by the initial success of Napoleon III’s military expedition to that region, and its failure partly due to the ignominious defeat of that venture. L’africaine, the last opera of Giacomo Meyerbeer and a spectacularly successful work which held the stage for decades, concerned Vasco da Gama’s voyages to India; the fourth Act was set in an unnamed African island, probably intended to be Madagascar (perhaps coincident with the fact that a French outpost had been established there since 1843). The now little-known ﬁgure, Salvador Daniel, produced an Album de chansons arabes, mauresques et kabyles, presenting Algerian native song in Europeanized form, with a French text and piano accompaniment. Louis Boieldieu’s cantata, France et Algérie, and Léo Delibes’s cantata, Alger, were more straightforward celebrations of French achievement in the colony, while Charles Gounod’s songs Chanson arabe and Medjé continued the year’s fascination with the Arabic theme. The reasons for all this activity at this speciﬁc moment are difﬁcult to pinpoint with certainty. A great deal of chance would sometimes seem to be involved, as for example with L’africaine itself, which Meyerbeer had been working on since 1838 but which he had repeatedly shelved in favour of other projects.6 A response to ephemeral public taste must also be considered, particularly with more proliﬁc or commercial composers such as Gounod or Jacques Offenbach. Nevertheless it is noticeable that the period of maximum production of exotic works in French music coincides with that of the greatest expansion of the French empire. From the annexations of Cochin-China and Somaliland in 1862 to the establishment of protectorates over Tunisia

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in 1881, Annam in 1883, Madagascar and Tongking in 1885 and the Ivory Coast in 1889, the interest in the exotic broadly follows political fortunes. However, although there may be some chronological convergence of the popular taste for exotic music among French audiences on the one hand and the expansion of the French empire on the other, the connections between the two were not this simple. For example, the subjects of French exotic works, while broadly located as the possessions of the French empire, are not equally distributed. Relatively few nineteenth-century compositions deal with Indo-China or the territories of Afrique noire, for example. Even fewer are concerned with the islands of the South Paciﬁc such as Tahiti, which is an odd omission for music when compared, for example, with the rich artistic response to that island contributed by Paul Gauguin.7 More numerous than any of these are those works which deal with lands only marginally occupied by the French empire, or those which had been to some extent under its sway only in a now-distant past, such those which take Indian subjects. Territories over which the French ﬂag never ﬂew, such as Japan, feature as much as (if not more than) many set in the colonies. An example of such a case is André Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème (1893), based on a novel by the romance- and travel-writer, Pierre Loti. By far the most frequent subject is that of the Arab world. Many compositions draw their material from the territories of Algeria, Morocco and Tunis, but many more take Egypt, Turkey or Persia as their theme. Also, a great number of exotic works deal with the Arabia of legend, which has an essentially mythical location. Subject matter alone, however, whether set in a colony or not, cannot be used solely as a means of identifying these works as exotic. European music had been inﬂuenced by the musical manners, customs, instruments and cultures of other parts of the world (particularly the Arab world in the medieval period) for thousands of years, and these inﬂuences had been incorporated into European culture in a way which prevents their being seen as ‘exotic’. The main characteristic which marks out particular art-works as exotic in the customary sense of the term is the manner in which the subject-matter is treated. The most notable feature of this treatment is the level of imagination used to depict the subject-matter, allied to a constant reminder of the distance and difference between the ‘foreign’ object and the ‘domestic’ audience which observes it. Naturally, this need be no more of a contentious issue than the superﬁcially similar borrowing of Italian styles of music commonly

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undertaken by German, French and English composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to name only one example. It would surely be difﬁcult for anyone but an advocate of strict cultural apartheid to object to the establishment of a synthesis between Occidental and Oriental styles in music.8 However, while the Italian styles mentioned above became a fully integrated part of the musical language of those European composers who drew upon them, the principal feature of exotic treatment of all periods is that it insists on maintaining the distinction between the ‘exotic’ culture which provides the spectacle and the ‘domestic’ audience which observes it. The whole point of such exotic musical clichés as the melodic interval of the augmented second, still held to denote things Oriental in the West, is that it remains recognizable as foreign and does not easily become incorporated into European musical language.9 Musical exoticism emphasizes the ‘otherness’ of foreigners as part of a general insistence on their difference from what is seen as ‘normal’ (that is, western). This concentration on ‘otherness’ is particularly apparent in the colonial period. When the source from which the exotic material is taken comes from a subject-people, as the Arabs of Algeria or Tunis were to the French of the nineteenth century, the borrowing could be interpreted as akin to the appropriations of imperialism itself. Several separate traditional subject-areas can be traced in exoticism, forming distinct strands within it. In the realm of opera (which is the most numerous for the reasons given above), these include those dealing with the harem (by far the most frequent, reﬂecting the harem’s position as a central image of the Orient in the west), the ‘noble savage’, the native (usually a woman) who sacriﬁces herself for the European hero, and the native who turns out to be European. Each of these has an internal coherence which is basically separate from external factors and documented practices of the cultures depicted within them. A further potent image of the Orient was added to these stereotypes by a work, described as an ode-symphonie, for chorus, tenor and orchestra by Félicien David entitled Le désert, composed in 1844. The work had a massive success, and was performed continually throughout Europe for many years. Unusually for an exotic piece, it was unstaged, and relied for its effect on innovative orchestration and the use of some ‘authentic’ (or at least authentic-sounding) melodies. At least one of these melodies, which appears in the second section of the piece where it is marked ‘rêverie du soir’, was transcribed by David during his sojourn in Egypt with the proto-colonialist Saint-Simonian expedition in 1833–5. The impact of Le désert on contemporaries was

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profound, and the work is taken to herald a new phase of development of musical Orientalism. Berlioz was among those who hailed the composer, commenting particularly on ‘the aspect of immense solitudes’ conjured up by the piece. He was especially struck by the ﬁrst note, a long-held C on second violins and violas marked ppp (extremely soft), against which the lower strings play a solemn, slow-paced descending melody, the whole forming a background to the initial spoken narration. Berlioz describes this opening as ‘a sustained sound which, by being prolonged thus without end, without movement, without harmony, without nuances, immediately brings to life in the soul of the listener the image of the desert’.10 The powerful effect of this opening is to make the chief character of Le désert the desert itself. While the desert had featured in earlier exotic works, such as André Grétry’s La caravane du Caire (1783), it had there been seen mainly as a place of danger. This new conception of the desert was made possible by the emergence of Romanticism. The text of Le désert was written by a fellow Saint-Simonian, Auguste Colin, who was in Egypt as a member of David’s company and who remained there after the latter’s departure for France in 1835. Several of the incidents in the text, such as the sandstorm in the ﬁrst section of the piece, were supposedly experienced by David himself during his stay in Egypt. This, and several choruses in the piece which exalt ‘the freedom and vigor of life in the desert’, has led various commentators to suppose that the work is concerned with ‘authentic’ Arab life.11 However, this is to ignore other aspects of the text and the effect these have on the set-pieces featuring the ‘Arabs’ of the chorus. The ﬁrst of these is the manner in which the text places the desert and its inhabitants at the disposal of the European onlooker, who regards the objectiﬁed scene from a superior position of surveillance strongly reminiscent of the attitude of the Description de l’Égypte undertaken as a corollary of Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign of 1798, the imperial signiﬁcance of which has been described by Said.12 The purpose of the desert and its interest for the westerner is, as the opening narration makes clear, principally to provide the onlooker/tourist with an uplifting sublime experience, as ‘the spirit, exalted before such grandeur … sounds the depths of the inﬁnite’.13 This image of the desert, which has retained its power over the western imagination to the present, crucially (and inaccurately) depicts the landscape as unchanging and without an internal life of its own. It is seen as subject only to (often violent) external intervention, either from human agency (the caravan) or from natural phenomena (the sandstorm, the night). There is a clear

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parallel between this representation and the typical western view of the Orient. The Orient, like the desert, is seen as being immemorially static, uniform and ﬁxed in character, the stage-set within which the dynamic west moves and acts. The desert thus takes its place alongside the harem as an enduring western image of the Orient. Further, what is identiﬁed as the sublime character of the desert is depicted pointedly in Le désert as being capable of being comprehended chieﬂy by western minds, in the person of the narrator. This opens the possibility of the desert being seen more as the proper sphere of action for the discriminating westerner than it could possibly be for the uncomprehending natives. There is a parallel here with the colonial myth that natives and their country could be better understood by the foreign dominators than by the natives themselves. Viewed in this light, the choruses of Arabs declaiming sentiments of delight in their desert life and their view of its hostile environment as their homeland become deeply ironic, particularly as they are expressed at a historical moment when the Sahara in Algeria was coming increasingly under the military control and possession of the French. Even as they are being enunciated by the chorus, these aspects of the desert are appropriated by the text and setting and become the possession not of the supposedly Arab speakers, but of the western audience. This appropriation, amounting almost to a recreation of the desert in the image given it by the western imagination, is strikingly illustrated in the travel writing of the Comtesse de Gasparin, an enthusiast of the exotic who undertook a journey following in David’s footsteps in the late 1840s. Writing of the scenery she observed in Egypt, the Comtesse describes how tonight we saw a painting à la Claude Lorrain [sic]. The sun sets behind a forest of palm-trees and bathes their trunks in luminous rays, and disappears … As our eyes are lost in this ocean of ﬁre, there rises in my heart the magniﬁcent hymn from Le désert: “Allah, Allah, à toi je rends homage” [the opening choral invocation] … Félicien David does not imitate the silence of the solitudes; he creates it in the musical order. He evokes a new world, and this world obeys … If this is not creation, where is it? What is it?14 This is the Romantic view of the desert, and of the power of the artist to create a world of his own. The difﬁculty for exotic representation lies in the moment when that imaginary world comes into contact with the reality of the colonial situation. In the Romantic view, natives are not as important to the onlooker as the effect they and their environment

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produce on the western beholder. The quasi-imperialist nature of this masterful vision is encountered in other extra-colonial contexts of later years (for example, in Pierre Loti’s descriptions of Japan mentioned earlier). Concepts of race obviously form one of the principal ideas underlying the expansion of the French empire. These varying conceptions may also be traced in French musical responses to other cultures. There is very little representation of actual non-European music in exotic works until the mid-eighteenth century. The explanation for this appears to be that put forward by Richard Rodgers in 1951 when, in answer to the query as to why there was no authentic Thai music in The King and I, he replied ‘Western ears wouldn’t be able to stand authentic Thai sounds for very long.’ While this may be the case, it obviously ignores the question of why authentic Thai sounds should be so off-putting. Are they merely ghastly, as Rodgers seems to suggest, or is this more a matter of a lack of understanding on our part? An important early contribution to the conceptualisation of the music of other cultures came from Jean Baptiste de la Borde, who remarks in his Essai sur la musique of 1780, concerning the music of China: ‘None of the ancients knew of more than parts at the unison or at the octave [de la Borde refers to the perceived monophonic texture of Chinese music, where all the instruments play the same notes at the same time]; and in this respect, as in many others, the Chinese are like the ancients’ (my italics).15 This view came to be applied to practically all non-western music, and even in recent times many ethnomusicological studies equate ‘Ancient’ and ‘Oriental’ music.16 Claude LéviStrauss, in his Structural Anthropology 2, describes this reasoning as ‘false evolutionism’, ‘an attempt at suppressing the diversity of cultures while pretending to recognize it fully’ by treating the ‘different states of human societies, both ancient and distant, as stages or steps of a single development which, starting from the same point, must converge towards the same goal’.17 This notion of historical hierarchy is of obvious use to imperialism, as it acts as a precedent and starting-point for other hierarchies of tutelage and domination. It permits the division of cultures into those with and those without history. The former are, according to this view, the progressive, advanced, European imperialist nations, and the latter those seen as the backward, childlike or degenerate subject races. This concept was undoubtedly one of the most powerful justiﬁcations for the expansion of empire in the nineteenth century. The representation of non-western music by Europeans is as much involved in this project as any other branch of the arts.

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The concept of the ‘noble savage’, put forward most famously by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality of 1755, appears to take a more positive view of other cultures. Rousseau argues that a decline in the quality of human life set in after the invention of metallurgy, and that modern Europeans were neither as happy nor as innocent as in previous ages. The ideal state of human existence is, according to Rousseau, best exempliﬁed by the American Indians who lived closest to nature, the original condition of mankind. However, Rousseau stops short of advocating a similar regime of what he calls ‘living with the bears’.18 But this is only to state the historical argument noted above in a different way. Any idea of ‘noble savages’ possessing a valid culture of their own is omitted from Rousseau’s argument, as it was from de la Borde’s; it is merely the value placed on that perceived lack that differs. Not all Europeans focused totally on difference in their conceptualization of other races. However, those who emphasized shared characteristics between the races still tended to highlight qualities which might be identiﬁed with the values of European culture. Returning once more to the indefatigable Rousseau, in his Dictionnaire de musique (1768), for example, we ﬁnd him comparing a Chinese, a Persian and two American Indian melodies, on which he comments: ‘We ﬁnd in these pieces a conformity with the modulations of our music, which gives rise to an admiration of both the harmoniousness and universality of our rules.’19 At ﬁrst glance, such universalist views should operate in favour of subject peoples by assuming a shared humanity between them and their conquerors. In practice, however, the differing customs of others struck the French, in common with other Europeans, as a sign that native peoples were sub-human as they did not live up to ‘universal’ standards of behaviour. Representations of such native groups in music frequently show differing western racial views contesting with each other for mastery. As Said points out, Berlioz’s opera Les Troyens is a clear example of this. The Trojans, who stand in for their European imperial successors, the French, are active, mobile and forward-looking. Their music is frequently martial and western. They are drawn inexorably towards their destiny, which is to found Rome, seen as the ancestor of the French empire. The Carthaginians, on the other hand, are characterized as passive and static. Their music is Oriental in colouring, marked by sensuality and lassitude. They are destined to be conquered. In common with that of other European nations, exotic representation in French exotic opera tends to focus on staging, costume, character

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and plot, with a decided taste for the spectacular. By the time of JeanPhilippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes of 1735, the spectacles include a volcanic eruption, and the ceremonies a preparation for Inca human sacriﬁce. Gasparo Spontini’s Fernand Cortez of 1809 went one better, featuring not only earthquake and human sacriﬁce, but also the blowing up of the Spanish ﬂeet, the heroine’s intrepid dive from a height into a lake, and an on-stage cavalry charge. As can be seen from these examples from the early nineteenth century, Said is mistaken when, in his lecture, he says that the stage effects available at the Paris Opéra in the 1850s were limited. In fact, the French led the way in the introduction of many stage effects, particularly those involving lighting, such as sunrises and conﬂagrations. These were particularly common in exotic operas, though there are also famous examples from other operas of the time, notably the winter sunrise in Meyerbeer’s Le prophète produced at the Paris Opéra in 1849, which struck contemporaries by the realistic effect of what is considered to be the ﬁrst use of electric lighting on stage. The same composer’s opera L’africaine included even more grandiose manipulations of theatrical space as it contains a full-scale representation of a ship at sea. The realistic motion of the ship was provided by complicated stage machinery operated by teams of sweating stage hands. To reach further back into the history of French exotic representation, Grétry’s opera La caravane du Caire, enormously successful in its time but now fairly obscure, was produced as early as 1783, but it included practically all the musical devices which were to sufﬁce composers of exotic material for most of the nineteenth century (the opera also threw in a couple of harem scenes for good measure). These musical devices consisted almost entirely of the use of certain melodic features thought to be characteristic of Oriental music: modal scales with intervals such as the augmented second, particular rhythmic patterns thought to be Oriental in origin, the use of drone basses and the widespread employment of percussion instruments such as cymbals, tambourines and the so-called pavillon chinois, a pole covered with jangling metal ornaments. These instruments were associated with the importation of military bands originally used by the Janissary corps in Turkey which had been introduced to Europe in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, and were typical of a strand of exotic representation popular in the last half of the eighteenth century, known as ‘Turkish’ opera.20 While these clichés bore some superﬁcial resemblance to genuine Oriental musical features, it is important to note that they are not accurate in any objective sense. Their purpose is, on

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the contrary, entirely symbolic. As in the earliest exotic works, the use of these devices was generally reserved for scenes of ceremonial, parade and dance. Others (such as love scenes) were generally cast in western musical styles. The effect of this is to characterize ‘natives’ most strongly as exotic when they are seen en masse. The association of this with the racist idea that natives all look and behave the same is clear. Basically this format was followed by all other composers of exotic music, David, Berlioz, Bizet and Delibes among the rest. Said perhaps lays too great a stress on the particular use of exoticism in the scenes of parade and ceremonial in Les Troyens. Berlioz was following a convention of exotic opera in such usage, and it is probably signiﬁcant that his knowledge of earlier operas, such as those of his teacher JeanFrançois Le Sueur and Spontini, was as extensive as his familiarity with classical literature.21 The clichés outlined above, once popularized, were used to denote the exotic regardless of the geographic locale of the subject. For example, the same instrumentation is used within a matter of a few years for Nicolas Isouard’s comic opera Le médécin turc of 1803, set in Turkey, Nicolas Dalayrac’s comic opera Koulouf of 1806, set in China, Henri Berton’s comic opera Aline, reine de Golconde of 1803, set in India, and Spontini’s grand opera Fernand Cortez of 1809, set in Mexico. The effect of treating these widely differing cultures as basically the same is, it could be argued, to emphasize the fact that, in western eyes (or ears), differences between non-European cultures are not as signiﬁcant as their primary difference, which is between them and Europe. This can be seen even in the costume designs for some exotic operas, such as those for Spontini’s Fernand Cortez, where the High Priest looks suspiciously Druidic, and the heroine positively Egyptian.22 The reconstruction of the cultural identity of non-Europeans by the west is not only apparent in the realm of imaginative representation. Examples of physical reconstruction, which in the process brought the music of the subject territories closer than ever before to the metropolis, were provided by the Paris Expositions Universelles, particularly those of 1878, 1889 and 1900. At these events, the colonial experience was literally uprooted and transported whole to Paris, entire villages and their inhabitants appearing overnight from Algeria, Mali and Vietnam on the Champs Elysées. This was, of course, a sanitized colonial experience, with none of the more distressing aspects of imperial rule, such as forced labour, on display. A selective demonstration of aspects of the subjects’ cultural lives included displays of their music and dancing,

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and it was these that caught the imagination of composers such as Claude Debussy and Charles Koechlin in the late nineteenth century. From this time, the implications of the sonorities of non-western music increasingly penetrated the previously largely impervious body of western music itself, an early example of which is the Rapsodie cambodgienne (1882) by the famous professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire who later taught Debussy, Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray. This is a completely different process from the previous use of exotic clichés by earlier composers, which simply lay on the surface of western music. A key moment in this process is the piano piece Pagodes by Debussy (1905). On the surface, this appears to be simply an imitation of the sonority of the Javanese gamelan music which the composer heard at the Exhibition of 1889. However, the implications of Debussy’s adoption of the gamelan’s typical interrelation of pitch and duration stretch far into the music of the twentieth century, affecting the ideas of composers such as Messiaen.23 The far-reaching effect on twentieth-century music of Debussy’s use of gamelan sonorities and its related structural elements raises the question of the resistance of native musics to simple incorporation and absorption into the masterful body of the European compositional system. Previous composers had largely not attempted to incorporate many genuine Oriental elements into western music, and so the problem of resistance had mostly not arisen: these composers were content merely to use cliché to represent others. When more subtle and far-reaching elements of Oriental practices were adopted, the impact on the body of western music was profound. In critical responses to Orientalism, Said was criticized for not sufﬁciently recognizing native resistance to imperial rule. Culture and Imperialism was in part an attempt to remedy this defect.24 However, it seems that the lack of recognition of the resistance to European domination shown by native musical material reappears in Said’s writings on exotic music. This may reﬂect the writer’s own deep understanding and cultural awareness of the western musical idiom at the expense of indigenous music. It may be remembered that Said revealed his relative lack of sympathy for the Egyptian music he heard in his youth in his 1997 televised interview with Tariq Ali, when he commented on performances by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum that ‘they started too late, and went on too long’.25 Exotic representation of the modern period in Europe essentially stands outside any cultural process of assimilation and synthesis. It seeks to put forward some kind of imaginative vision or interpretation

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of the subject rather than simply attempt an accurate depiction of it and, by so doing, resists any kind of synthesis. Such representations stand in for the subject material, replacing its reality with symbols. These in turn are understood speciﬁcally by the audience for which the representation is produced, and may have little or no relevance to the meanings which the subject material might possess for its own culture. The personnel of many nineteenth-century French exotic works reveal themselves to be, in Berlioz’s telling phrase, nothing more than ‘Frenchmen in disguise’. It is only the imagined essence of the music of subject peoples which is truly synthesized into the imperial system. The native musical reality lies outside the system, resisting incorporation, and with the power to transform the body of western music should it be appropriated. Notes and References 1 These issues, and the history of the genre itself, will be explored more fully in my book on French exotic music and imperialism in the nineteenth century, currently in preparation. Various broader aspects of musical exoticism are covered by such eminent scholars of exotic music as Ralph P. Locke and Richard Taruskin in Jonathan Bellman (ed.), The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998). 2 See, for example, Jane Fulcher’s ‘Vincent d’Indy’s “Drame anti-Juif” and its meaning in Paris, 1920’, Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1990), pp.295–319; Ralph P. Locke’s ‘Constructing the oriental “other”: SaintSaëns’s Samson et Dalila’, Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1991), pp.261–302; Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Susan McClary’s Carmen in the Cambridge Opera Handbook series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Steven Huebner’s ‘Naturalism and supernaturalism in Alfred Bruneau’s Le Rêve’, Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1999), pp.77–101. 3 See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp.133–57. 4 For a fuller discussion of the overall character of French opera and ballet of the nineteenth century, see my essay ‘Nineteenth-century spectacle’, in Caroline Potter and Richard Langham Smith (eds), French Music since the Death of Berlioz (London: Ashgate, forthcoming). 5 The production of Verdi’s operas in Paris, which he took great pains to adapt to the conventions of the French stage, prompted a war of words in the musical press partly fuelled by competing publishing interests, an account of which is given in Katharine Ellis’s Music Criticism in NineteenthCentury France: La revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Wagner’s operas, which he pointedly refused to adapt, created a furore at various times and places, most famously in 1861 (Tannhäuser) and 1891 (Lohengrin), the latter partly due to anti-German feeling in the capital, a residue of the war of 1870.

126 ‘Frenchmen in Disguise’

6 7

8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22

Performances of his operas in the provinces met with much less hostility than in Paris. The opera was completed after Meyerbeer’s death in 1864 by FrançoisJoseph Fétis. One opera that took Tahiti as its theme was the ‘Idylle polynésienne’, L’île du rêve by Reynaldo Hahn, produced in 1897. The importance of exotic location to the genre is underlined by the setting of Act I by the famous Fataoua waterfall. Such a synthesis is, of course, now increasingly heard in popular music. J.S. Bach, for example, generally avoided the melodic use of this interval, though its recognition by a listener as exotic remains dependent to some extent on its context. See Hector Berlioz, Les musiciens et la musique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1969), p.229. Notably Ralph P. Locke, in Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p.208. This early example of Locke’s output, while containing many instances of his impeccable scholarship, is nevertheless unrepresentative of his current, extremely valuable contribution to the understanding of the interactions between music and culture. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp.79–87. Said is inaccurate on some details of the Egyptian Campaign, but his assessment of the implications of the venture for the future of imperialism remains unequalled. See Félicien David, Le désert (Mayence: Schott, 1870), pp.1–2. Quoted in Paul Gradenwitz, ‘Félicien David (1810–1876) and French Romantic Orientalism’, Music Quarterly, Vol. lxii (1976), p.505. See Jean Baptiste de la Borde, Essai sur la musique, Vol. I (Paris: Ph.-D. Pievres, 1780), p.134. An example is the (admittedly not so new) New Oxford History of Music, vol. I, edited by Egon Wellesz (London: Oxford University Press, 1957) which juxtaposes ‘Ancient’ and ‘Oriental’ music in precisely this way (see title page). See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology 2, trans. Monique Layton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp.330–1. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London: Everyman, 1986), p.125. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1969), p.314. Another more famous example of the ‘Turkish’ genre is Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, produced the previous year. His later opera Die Zauberﬂöte (1791) also contains certain ‘Turkish’ elements, though the supposedly Masonic references are more often commented on. Both operas were popular in France, the latter performed around the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign under the title Les mystères d’Isis. Berlioz’s knowledge of Grétry’s opera is proved by his complaint that the Paris Opéra were still performing it in 1825. The illustration of these costumes, designed by François-Guillaume Ménageot for the original production of Fernand Cortez in 1809, is reproduced in The New

Tom Cooper 127 Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), Vol. 2, p.513. 23 Following on from these, Messiaen’s use of Hindu rhythms had far-reaching consequences, early examples of which are to be found in Cinq rechants (1949) and the Livre d’orgue (1951). 24 See Said, Culture, p.xii. The passages that drew such criticism are exempliﬁed by his comment that ‘the scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part’. See Said, Orientalism, p.7. 25 Umm Kulthum (?1904–75) began singing as a child, when she appeared with her father’s ensemble, frequently dressed as a boy to avoid the censure associated with allowing females to perform in public. Among other repertoire, she sang religious songs customarily reserved for male performers. After the family moved to Cairo in 1925 she sang traditional and newly-composed popular songs, accompanied by a relatively small orchestra including violins, qanun and ‘ud. She had a successful recording career and became a cultural icon in the 1950s and 1960s. See Virginia Danielson’s ‘Umm Kulthum’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edn 2001), Vol. 2, pp.68–9.

Part IV Promoting the French Empire

9 Making Indo-China French: Promoting the Empire through Education Nicola Cooper

France’s Third Republic had set great store by education as a means of propagating and diffusing state-created notions of national identity within the hexagone [mainland France]. By the turn of the century, once France had accumulated its vast overseas empire, it became necessary to extend national identity in order to incorporate its new possessions into that very sense of nationhood. The notion of la plus grande France [Greater France], stretching out the hexagone’s limits to envelop the overseas territories, required a signiﬁcant shift in the composition of the Third Republic’s sense of nationhood. The reworked sense of national identity which the Third Republic now sought to popularize meant not simply an inward-looking sense of what it was to belong to metropolitan France; it involved an understanding and appreciation of the implications of France’s role and status as an imperial nation. National identity, in other words, had now to encompass and complement a conscience impériale [imperial mentality].1 Whereas, in metropolitan France, a successful form of colonial education was highly desirable if France were to establish and anchor this new sense of identity and to popularize Empire amongst a generation of youth, in the colonies it was clearly imperative. Education is a crucial way in which to maintain and strengthen domination over a colonized people. It is a pillar of national identity: education props up and underpins national identity, and reﬂects the nation’s sense of self. In the case of the colonized/colonizer relationship, education is also a superlative form of control. It is the means through which the colonizing nation asserts its Orwellian desire to appropriate the past in order to regulate the present. Educating the colonized is to gain privileged 131

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access to (and ultimately ownership of) their culture heritage and national history. It should not be surprising therefore, that the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a signiﬁcant effort scolaire [education drive] overseas.

Educating the Indo-Chinese The Third Republic was not, however, uniformly even-handed in its educative drive abroad. Education in the colonies was provided along hierarchical lines drawn up by metropolitan France in relation to the perceived relative educability of the respective colonized populations. Indo-China occupied a comparatively privileged place in metropolitan educational programmes, and was treated as something of a showcase for French colonial efforts in the ﬁeld of education. The collocation of nations (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) which came to be known as Indochine française had been acquired in piecemeal fashion over a period of some 30 years, from approximately 1860 to 1890. Indo-China enjoyed a privileged place in the metropolitan imagination: it was perceived as ‘la perle de l’Extrême-Orient’ [the pearl of the Far East], a colony to rival Britain’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’. Competition within South-East Asia, but particularly competition with Imperial Britain and that benchmark of colonialism, British India, was a crucial point of reference for French colonialists. The imperatives of maintaining and visibly demonstrating metropolitan prestige and grandeur, of impressing le génie français [French brilliance] upon the international community, meant that Indo-China received considerable care and attention in the domain of education. More importantly however, Indo-China was perceived as occupying a higher rung on the ladder of civilization than the African colonies. Its populations, as Félicien Challaye had noted at the beginning of the century, should not be treated in the same way as [ ‘n’importe quelle peuplade nègre du centre de l’Afrique’ ‘any old negro tribe from central Africa’].2 More than any other colonized people, the Indo-Chinese were perceived as at least approaching the metropolitan level of civilization, and therefore of being capable of achieving the most improvement. It was a fertile people to educate.3 As early as the 1860s, the conquering Admirals of the French Navy had attempted to set in place a school system to counteract the inﬂuence of the traditional teachers who had consistently agitated against French intervention. Unrest in Indo-China had often been fed, sometimes engendered, by the mandarin teachers who had tradition-

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ally been at the forefront of opposition to colonial rule. Thus in the nineteenth century, Indo-Chinese schools had been perceived as recruiting-grounds for anti-French agitators, and the mandarins were viewed as capable of mobilizing political opinion against French rule. Consequently, the French education system had been most highly organized in places where Indo-Chinese resistance was strongest. However, by the 1920s and 1930s – the period principally under scrutiny in this chapter – the French drive for educational reform in Indo-China arose from somewhat different criteria. Concerns over the state of indigenous education in Indo-China were raised by the Résident supérieur of Indo-China in 1919. It was thought that the system currently in place was outdated and no longer sufﬁcient ‘pour les besoins de la vie sociale actuelle’ [for the needs of current society].4 As Albert Sarraut’s5 observations reveal, reform of the education system in IndoChina, it was hoped, would provide a two-fold beneﬁt for imperial France: the increased economic viability of the colony, and the creation of an Indo-Chinese elite who would assist the French in their government of the colony: L’instruction, en effet, a d’abord pour résultat d’améliorer largement la valeur de la production coloniale en multipliant, dans la foule des travailleurs indigènes, la qualité d’intelligences et le nombre des capacités; elle doit, en outre, parmi la masse laborieuse, dégager et dresser les élites de collaborateurs qui, comme agents techniques, contremaîtres, surveillants, employés ou commis de direction, suppléeront à l’insufﬁsance numérique des Européens et satisferont à la demande croissante des entreprises agricoles, industrielles ou commerciales de la colonisation.6 [Education results ﬁrst and foremost in the improvement of colonial production by increasing the level of intelligence and number of skills amongst the native masses. Furthermore, education should serve to help us to separate out and train an elite class of indigenous collaborators who, as technicians, foremen, supervisors, and assistant managers, will make up for the lack of Europeans in IndoChina, and will satisfy the growing demands of the agricultural, industrial and commercial enterprises of colonization.] These chefs indigènes were to act as ‘intermédiaires entre nous et populations indigènes’ [intermediaries between us and the native populations],7 and were to be educated in such a way – ‘avec la conscience

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plus claire des bienfaits de notre civilisations–[with a clearer understanding of the beneﬁts of our civilisation] – as to ensure that they disseminated amongst the masses ‘les raisons profondes de la [la civilisation française] servir et de la défendre’ [the fundamental reasons for serving and defending French civilization].8 Their education was clearly intended to facilitate the dissemination and inculcation of French ideals amongst the Indo-Chinese populations. Thus the ﬁrst aim of education in Indo-China was to be the formation of a second ‘tier of inﬂuence’. Metropolitan propaganda was to be reinforced by an ideologically loyal section of the indigenous community. However, whilst education might indeed have allowed certain sections of the indigenous community to improve their chances of advancement, these chefs indigènes would never attain the same status as their colonial masters. Furthermore, for the majority, the reformed education programmes ﬁtted them solely for manual work, and subservience to the colonizing elites. These objectives demonstrate the unspoken limits and restrictions which lay behind colonial discourses of metropolitan generosity. The second imperative of reformed colonial education was therefore one which served the economic interests of imperial France. It was noted of revised school manuals to be adopted following the reform programmes of the 1920s: Ils ont été rédigés de manière à assurer au petit paysan ou au petit citadin de condition ouvrière qui quitte l’école pourvu de son certiﬁcat d’études élémentaires le minimum indispensable de connaissances dont il aura besoin: lecture, écriture, calcul, langue locale, éléments de français, histoire de l’Indochine, géographie de son canton, de sa province et de sa région, morale traditionnelle, rudiments d’enseignement manuel.9 [They have been written in such a way as to ensure that the lowly peasant or lowly city-dweller who leaves school with his certiﬁcate of elementary education has acquired the indispensable minimum of knowledge which he will need: reading, writing, arithmetic, local language, basic French, the history of Indochina, the geography of his village, province and region, traditional morality, and the rudiments of manual education.] These modest aims reﬂect the reluctance on the part of many colonial administrators and thinkers to spread ideas from the Enlightenment thinkers, or to allow indigenous populations unsupervised access to the

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inquistive tenets of modern science. Whilst school manuals held out the promise of an equality of education between the mainland and the colonies, as in the following quotation: ‘La France s’efforce d’ouvrir de plus en plus largement devant ses enfants d’Asie comme devant les ﬁls de sa race, le vaste domaine où les fruits du savoir tendent à qui sait cueillir leur nourriture saine et puissante’,10 – France is endeavouring to open up ever more widely, for her children of Asia as well as her own sons, that vast domain where the fruits of knowledge can be picked by those who are capable of seizing their wholesome and powerful nourishment – most commentators still considered it dangerous to permit the peoples of Indo-China even technical education beyond the most basic level, lest they become ‘ambitious’. The educational needs of the colonized Indo-Chinese populations were thus perceived to be rudimentary, and largely of a practical rather than intellectual nature. Education in Indo-China thus resembled a form of modest vocational training rather than an education in its traditional and accepted sense. Some contemporary commentators have perceived this reluctance to offer the Indo-Chinese a more traditional and intellectual education as a means of reasserting the difference between colonized and colonizer. As Lebovics11 has noted, the aim of French education reformers was to avoid jeopardizing French colonial rule by creating a generation of Indo-Chinese whose educational background enabled them to contest French rule, or to contest the superiority of their French rulers. On the contrary, the aim of education in Indo-China was, as Lebovics suggests, to ‘reroot the Vietnamese in their villages’: Conservatives’ fears for the loss of traditions, and with them of a certain essential identity … fueled the anxieties and projects of Frenchmen concerned with Indo-China. If bad imitations of Frenchmen could be turned once more into good Vietnamese peasants, the disorder of the world would subside.12 Although it must be stressed that the education reforms of the 1920s were not intended to re-establish a pre-colonial Indo-Chinese identity – on the contrary, the aim was very clearly to reassert French inﬂuence and a French-dominated cultural identity within Indo-China – there is indeed a sense in which the reform of education in Indo-China aimed to reinforce racial hierarchies between metropolitan rulers and their colonial subjects. In response to these new educative concerns, a series of reforms was carried out between 1924 and 1926.13 The reformed Code de l’Instruction publique provided a breadth of schooling ranging from elementary to

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university education. Elementary education consisted of a three-year programme (cours enfantin, cours préparatoire, cours élémentaire), followed by a three-year primary cycle (cours moyen 1, cours moyen 2, cours supérieur). This in turn was followed by a four-year primary superior course and three years of secondary education leading to the Indo-Chinese version of the baccalauréat. The Commission de lettrés organized a public competition in order to create new school manuals for Indo-China. Besides their educational content, these reformed school manuals were intended to ensure the diffusion of the French language, just as had Ferry’s reforms in mainland France during the 1880s. The French language was not only to be used as a propaganda tool, through which to propagate French ideals of Franco–Indo-Chinese cultural identity,14 it was also to have an extremely important role in the homogenization of Indo-China, since the creation of a coherent linguistic area would facilitate the indigenous acceptance of a reformulated geographical and political entity: l’Indochine française. It was thus equally the intention of manuals to render the various dialects within the various countries and regions of Indo-China uniform: Il est incontestable que cet effort d’uniﬁcation du vocabulaire doublé d’un effort identique en ce qui concerne la syntaxe et la ﬁxation de l’orthographe, aura pour effet de répandre dans les contrées proprement annamites l’usage d’une sorte de langue commune que ces livres généraliseront15 … Le développement de l’enseignement du français correspond trop aux voeux des indigènes et aux besoins de notre pénétration pour que la Direction générale de l’Instruction publique ne considère pas comme son principal devoir de l’assurer par tous les moyens.16 [This drive to standardize vocabulary, coupled with a similar drive as regards syntax and the clariﬁcation of spelling, will undeniably result in the dissemination of a sort of common language in the Annamite territories, which in turn the school books will help to spread further. The Directorate General of Education can only but ensure by all means that the development of the teaching of the French language be its primary duty, given that this corresponds both to the wishes of the natives and to our own needs in establishing our rule.] A much smaller place was to be given to the teaching of indigenous languages (a minimum of two hours and a maximum of three), thereby

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ensuring the gradual adoption of French as the language of common communication in Indo-China. Indo-China was thus furnished with a highly centralized education system. An Ofﬁce of Public Instruction supervised the hiring of teachers, their performance, commissioned textbooks, drew up lists of texts permissable for use in classrooms, published curriculum guides, inspected schools and set exams. A series of initiatives was implemented to create publications aimed at indigenous teachers in Franco–Indo-Chinese schools. These monthly publications were intended to provide the indigenous teachers with material, and also to keep them informed of new educational reforms and the latest accepted pedagogical methods. They contained model lessons, lesson plans and references. The French administration thus kept a tight rein upon both the material taught and the methods in which it was taught in Franco-indigenous schools.

Making Indo-China French This reformed education system and programme in Indo-China embodied France’s political, cultural and ideological aims there. Offset against the colonial ideals of protection, benevolence, progress and development which the French nation believed it both embodied and exported to the colonies, there existed a mirror image of qualities which colonial education abroad was intended to engender: gratitude, loyalty, duty and submission to a greater cultural and political power. The propagandist value of education thus served a two-fold purpose: it was the means through which the empire was ‘sold’ to the colonized, but it also served the political purpose of averting dissension, promoting loyalty to the French Republic, and thus assuaging potential rebellion. These two goals were married in the overarching aim to ‘make Indo-China French’. Indo-China,17 as the territory’s name suggests, was initially perceived as a hybrid entity. In the early days of conquest and paciﬁcation, IndoChina was referred to as Indo-Chine, with the hyphen reﬂecting this hybrid status, for the nomenclature ﬁxes the territory geographically as ‘in between’ India and China. The term conceals the partitioning of Vietnam into three regions or Ky (Annam, Tonkin and Cochinchina), and entirely annexes the separate states of Laos and Cambodia to this supranational entity. The term Indochine française, signifying the geographical space imagined by imperial France, was thus an artiﬁcial construction which sought concomitantly to homogenize the various regions and cultures within that geographical space, and to reclaim them as French.

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Education in this newly-created colonial possession had to popularize the notion of l’Indochine française and to forge new cultural and political loyalties. As Benedict Anderson has noted, French educational policy in South-East Asia was intended to break the existing politicocultural ties between the colonized peoples and the immediate extraIndo-Chinese world, most particularly China, but also (in the case of Laos and Cambodia), Siam.18 Points of comparison and cultural models in the reformed school manuals thus all took metropolitan France as their central point of reference, creating an identity which placed the Indo-Chinese populations ﬁrmly within the political, cultural and historical sphere of inﬂuence of la plus grande France. The concern to eradicate inﬂuences from neighbouring Asian cultures, to dissolve those former attachments and references, and to ‘make Indo-China French’ thus resulted in an overweening emphasis on the history and qualities of the French nation in Indo-Chinese school manuals. These descriptions fall into two categories: the status and speciﬁcity of France within the global arena, and her role in Indo-China as a colonial power. Both hold up France as a model to be emulated and revered. Vaunting the values of mainland France thus became a means through which a French Indo-China too could be popularized. In the following extract, (which is reminiscent of Lavisse’s catechistic section entitled ‘Les devoirs patriotiques’ [Patriotic Duties] in which ‘la France est la plus juste, la plus libre, la plus humaine des patries’ [France is the most just, the most free, the most humane of nations]),19 France is described in superlative terms as a superior nation: La France est habitée par un peuple actif, industrieux et bon. C’est un des pays de la terre où la civilisation a atteint son plus haut degré. La France a mis tout son génie à améliorer les conditions de l’existence humaine. La France a toujours cherché à répandre ses bienfaits dans le monde entier.20 [France is inhabited by a people who are active, industrious and virtuous. France is one of the countries in the world where civilization has reached its highest degree. France has placed all its genius in the service of improving the human conditions of existence. France has always sought to extend its blessings to the rest of the world.] Emphasizing the humanitarian and universalist tradition of Republican France, this type of narrative allows for negative comparisons which place Indo-China in an inferior position. The quotation draws on traditional

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Orientalist myths of Asia as passive and slothful by implying a series of antitheses which posit the French as active, industrious and good, and the Indo-Chinese populations as passive, lazy and bad. More important however, is the carrot held out to the effect that a close relationship with France will result in the endowment to Indo-China of those ‘beneﬁts’ or ‘blessings’ (bienfaits) and ‘improvements’ (améliorations) which such a civilization can bestow. Indo-China alone, it is implied, cannot compare with France, but yoked to France and that nation’s ‘génie’ as l’Indochine française, Indo-China could also gain status in the world. To similar ends, France was often evoked in contrast with other imperial nations. The following interpretation of the conquest of IndoChina emphasizes the debt owed by the Vietnamese to the French conquerers, and highlights the comparative good fortune of the Indo-Chinese in comparisons with the perceived imperial mercilessness of France’s colonial rivals. Here, the distinguishing feature of French colonialism is its generosity: ‘Les grands colonisateurs des autres pays n’ont pas agi aussi généreusement que les explorateurs français. L’Anglais Stanley, au service de la Belgique, traita les Noirs sans pitié.’21 [The great colonisers from other countries have not acted as generously as French explorers. The Englishman Stanley, in the service of Belgium, treated the Blacks without pity.] By contrast, La France a paciﬁé ses colonies: elle a chassé les pirates et empêché les différentes tribus de se battre entre elles; elle a supprimé l’esclavage, ainsi que la traite, c’est-à-dire la vente des nègres esclaves. Grâce à la paix apportée par les Français, les indigènes ont pu travailler et s’enrichir.22 [France paciﬁed its colonies. It got rid of pirates and prevented different tribes from ﬁghting amongst themselves. France suppressed slavery and the slave-trade – the sale of negro slaves. Thanks to the peace brought by the French, the natives have been able to work and become wealthier.] The result of French colonialism here is to protect, liberate, to bring peace and harmony, and ﬁnally to allow the indigenous populations to embrace capitalism and to adopt the French national characteristics of industry and application. Some school manuals were even more blatant in their enumeration of the attributes and attitudes which made France a worthy and desirable colonizing force. Indeed, they reveal much about France’s sense of

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self (as an imperial nation), and serve as a form of national selfjustiﬁcation, as an apology for imperialism: La France se montre généreuse et juste; elle est humaine, elle a pitié des peuples arriérés et malheureux; elle leur prodigue ses soins et ses bienfaits sans compter. Pour l’Indochine, ces bienfaits sont immenses. Les troupes françaises protègent nos frontières, contre les ennemis du dehors et débarrassent notre pays des bandes de pirates et de brigands. Le paysan vit heureux et tranquille, il peut vaquer à ses travaux sans être inquiété. La France nous apporte la science occidentale. Elle nous fait bénéﬁcier des proﬁts de cette culture pratique et cherche toujours à élever notre niveau intellectuel. Sous la bienveillante direction de savants maîtres qu’elle envoie, l’Indochine fait ﬁgure aujourd’hui parmi les pays les plus civilisés de l’Extrême-Orient. La France se préoccupe aussi de notre éducation morale. Les bons exemples qu’elle nous donne et le bien-être matériel qu’elle nous procure contribuent à nous rendre meilleurs.23 [France is generous and fair: France is humane and feels pity for peoples who are backward and unhappy. France lavishes care and kindness unstintingly. For Indochina those beneﬁts are immense. French troops protect our frontiers against external enemies and rid our country of pirates and brigands. The peasant can now live happily and peacefully; he can attend to his work without worries. France has brought us Western science. France has allowed us to beneﬁt from the proﬁts of its practical culture and always strives to raise our intellectual standards. Under the benevolent guidance of the learned masters France dispatches to us, Indochina is now looked upon as being amongst the most civilized countries of the Far East. France is also concerned with our moral education. The good example we are set by France, and the material good fortune France bestows upon us, both contribute to making us better people.] France is thus held up as a model on both a national and international scale. In comparison with other imperial powers, the very qualities embodied in France’s national identity and heritage render its colonizing role and actions more ethical and altruistic. France’s imperial identity and role are thus justiﬁed through reference to unimpeachable national characteristics. The inherent superiority of the nation’s civilization, and its generous sharing of its scientiﬁc, cultural and economic

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wealth coupled with its humanitarian ‘pitié’ [pity] can but render the miserable and backward Indo-Chinese ‘meilleurs’ [better people], and l’Indochine française ‘plus civilisée’ [more civilized].

Autrefois/maintenant: rewriting the history of Indo-China The elevation of French models and the ‘selling’ of French culture to Indo-Chinese youth through education also involved tampering with Indo-Chinese history. The archetypal rhetorical method of positing a turbulent, catastrophic past (as in the last quotation) in contrast with a prosperous present was widely employed in many school manuals. The past/present dialectic allowed for the redescription of Indo-China, and the rewriting of (or at least the reworking of elements of) Indo-Chinese history. In school manuals at least, Indo-China was to be understood only within the totalizing schema of historicist imperial ideology and essentialist universalism. According to the reformed education programme, history lessons were to focus upon two main features: ‘Notions d’histoire locale, et de celle du pays de l’Union où se trouve l’école. L’oeuvre française en Indochine’24 [basic notions of local history, the history of the country of the Union where the school is located. The work of the French in Indochina]. This recommendation demonstrates once more the importance accorded to the colonizing nation in the history of the colony itself. In Altbach’s and Kelly’s comparative work on educational policy in colonized countries, the authors make the general observation that the teaching of the history of colonized territories tended to avoid the evocation of pre-colonial history as far as possible: What history was taught revealed a devaluation of indigenous cultures. History, in the main, if it touched on the colonized’s past, was only the history of the colonized since they were ruled by Europeans. If precolonial history was touched on, it usually emphasized, through chronology, civil wars, tribal conﬂicts, famines, and barbarism in order to contrast them with the peace and orderly progress under colonial domination.25 Indeed, the pre-colonial history of Indo-China is presented in school manuals in extremely limited, general and underdeveloped terms, as the following extracts demonstrate: Le Viet-Nam existe depuis plusieurs milliers d’années. Il a été sous la domination chinoise et il a beaucoup souffert. Mais ses souffrances

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n’ont pas été vaines, car elles l’ont fait aimer davantage de ses enfants qui travaillent sans cesse à le rendre plus riche et plus puissant. Le Viet-Nam a beaucoup prospéré depuis qu’il est placé sous le protectorat de la France. Cependant, il est encore peu de chose à côté des Grandes Puissances du monde. Il faut pour le classer parmi elles, que ses habitants redoublent d’efforts physiques et intellectuels.26 [Vietnam has existed for several thousand years. It was under Chinese domination and suffered greatly. Its suffering was not in vain however, because it made its children – who work unceasingly to make Vietnam richer and more powerful – love their country even more. Vietnam has prospered greatly since it became a French protectorate. However, Vietnam is still small-fry when compared to the world’s Great Powers. In order to reach those heights, Vietnam’s inhabitant must redouble their physical and intellectual endeavours.] Given the need of the colonizing nation to maintain and strengthen its control over the indigenous populations, it is not surprising that school manuals based their ‘history’ of Indo-China around an axis which contrasted a negative view of the period before colonial rule with a laudatory narrative of the country’s situation since colonial rule began. Here, as elsewhere, the autrefois/maintenant formulation of IndoChinese history highlights past suffering and repression under Chinese domination in contrast with the benevolent protection offered by the French nation. ‘History’ in Indo-Chinese school manuals thus mirrors the view of French colonialism as protective, and reactive: a response to aggression, and disorder. This autrefois/maintenant dichotomy operated in many forms and was extended to most domains in these manuals. Descriptive texts, for example, always noted the improvements to indigenous life that French changes had wrought. La maison commune de mon village a été remise à neuf l’année dernière. Elle est grande et belle.27 Une grande route traverse mon village. Mon père m’a dit qu’autrefois il y avait à la place un sentier étroit et mal entretenu. On ne pouvait y marcher qu’à la ﬁle. La moindre pluie le rendait boueux et glissant. Maintenant, c’est une route large, propre, empierrée et bordée d’arbres.28

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Hanoi est la capitale du Tonkin. Cette ville, construite à la française, est maintenant la plus jolie.29 Le Viet-Nam a beaucoup prospéré depuis qu’il est placé sous le protectorat de la France.30 [Our village hall was rebuilt last year. It is large and beautiful. A great road cuts through my village. My father told me that previously in its place was a narrow path which was in poor repair. You could only travel single ﬁle along the path. The littlest amount of rain made it muddy and slippery. Now it is a wide road, clean, laid in stone and lined with trees. Hanoi is the capital of Tonkin. This city, constructed after the French fashion, is now the prettiest. Vietnam has greatly prospered since it became a French protectorate.] Although these improvements are not always speciﬁcally attributed to French colonization, the contrast between autrefois and maintenant clearly pitches previous backwardness, poverty, or lack of prestige against current progress, development and prosperity. Often, these contrasts are more overtly articulated to the detriment of pre-colonial Indo-China. A section in one manual on ‘l’Assistance médicale’, for example, eulogizes the work of the Pasteur Institute in Indo-China, whilst denigrating the Indo-Chinese medical resources in place before the arrival of the French: ‘Avant l’arrivée des Français, les malades n’avaient aucune ressource. Les médecins étaient rarement bons; la plupart étaient des charlatans qui tuaient plutôt leurs clients avec leurs médicaments douteux’ [Before the arrival of the French, those who were ill had no resources. The doctors were rarely competent; most were charlatans who were more likely to kill their patients will their dubious medicines.]31 Although Indo-China clearly did beneﬁt from some of the technological advances which colonial rule brought with it, this comparative axis nevertheless strips the precolonial society of any cultural value, thus once more rendering a French Indo-China more desirable. The purpose of the autrefois/maintenant axis is clear: through the systematic denigration of Indo-Chinese history and society, and the equally systematic portrayal of an exemplary French nation and people, the new French identity of IndoChina could be made popular and sought after, thus anchoring l’Indochine française in young minds as a rightful repository of their patriotic affection.

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Duty, loyalty and submission In return for the gifts of French protection and generosity, educational texts sought to implant the notion of reciprocated duty. Many school manuals took the form of moralistic fables, which exhorted young members of the indigenous community to work hard at school, and not to cheat or be lazy. During the ﬁrst year of their cours moyen, indigenous students were to be taught la morale, which comprised ‘devoirs de l’enfant dans la famille, à l’école, hors de l’école et après l’école, envers lui-même et envers autrui’ (the child’s duties towards the family, at school, outside and after school, towards himself and towards others) (p.11). Alongside personal and community morality, most school manuals sought to extend their inﬂuence into cultural and political domains, an aim which had been mooted in the reform programme: Dès maintenant, à côté de la presse indigène, les manuels contribueront à former l’opinion populaire.32 Il convient aussi d’escompter que ces manuels, en combattant certaines habitudes néfastes et certaines routines ﬁniront par exercer une inﬂuence bienfaisante sur l’hygiène et les moeurs des populations.33 [From now on, alongside the native press, school manuals will contribute towards the formation of public opinion. It should also be acknowledged that school manuals, by combatting certain harmful routines and practices, will end up by exercising a beneﬁcial inﬂuence over the hygiene and customs of the natives.] Moreover, these ‘leçons de morale’ were also to include sections on loyalty to France, and the instruction of what Indo-China owed to France. This ideologically-orientated propagandist tool, masquerading as moral education, enabled educators to inﬂuence (if not transform) not only the customs and practices native to Indo-China, but also the political and ideological mindset of generations of Indo-Chinese. Many of the texts used in Indo-Chinese schools contained veiled threats: either of a return to past disorder, former poverty or pre-colonial conﬂict. The school manuals therefore consistently present Indo-China as occupying a weak, inferior and potentially dangerous position, should French colonialism be removed. Although, as a previous quotation showed, France claimed to ‘prodigue[r] ses soins et ses bienfaits sans

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compter’ [lavish care and kindness unstintingly], most texts clearly made a reciprocated duty on the part of the Indo-Chinese a requirement of continued French protection, aid and generosity: En reconnaissance de tous ses services, nous devons aimer la France, notre patrie d’adoption, d’un même amour que nous avons pour notre propre pays.34 Nous lui devons encore du respect et ce respect nous oblige à nous conformer aux ordres du Gouvernement qui la représente ici, à nous instruire à l’Ecole française, et à lui vouer une grande ﬁdélité.35 [In recognition of all its favours, we must love France, our adopted fatherland, with the same love that we have for our own country. We owe France even greater respect, and this respect obliges us to conform to the orders of the government which represents France here, to educate ourselves at French school and to vow great ﬁdelity to France.] In the above extract, that required duty is at once political and ideological. It demands loyalty and patriotism, conformity and obedience. In spite of France’s seeming conﬁdence in its own civilizing mission and sense of imperial identity, threatening discourses – implicit or explicit, blatant or comparatively subtle – resurface with regularity and undermine those apparent certainties. If France’s belief were so unshakeable, would it be necessary, as this last quotation shows, to bolster the French and to denigrate the Indo-Chinese so overtly? ‘Ce Monsieur est français, il est plus fort que celui-ci qui est annamite. Il faut protéger les personnes faibles’ [This man is French, he is stronger than the Annamite man. Weak people must be protected.]36

Conclusion Education is obviously a domain where propaganda (imperial or otherwise) is often at its most overt. Aimed at an impressionable and untutored audience, school texts are unnuanced and unﬁltered, simpliﬁed and schematic. Their narrative of the colonial relationship therefore provides telling insights into the nation’s ideal image of its colonial role. Indeed, ‘colonial history’ in school manuals reveals far more about the imperial nation than it does about the colonized territory. The educative texts under discussion presented a validation of French imperial identity and of colonial action, serving as a form of self-promotion on the part of imperial France.

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Indigenous peoples of Indo-China were taught a limited amount about their own culture and their own countries. What they were taught about their own history was clearly a metropolitan view of that history; for school manuals rewrote the history of Indo-China in such a way as to emphasize the beneﬁcial inﬂuence of French colonialism, and the altruistic motives which purportedly lay behind imperial gestures. These narratives operate principally around an axis which contrasts former disorder, poverty and susceptibility to aggression with present order, progress and prosperity under French protection. In school manuals, Indo-China was thus totally deﬁned by the presence/absence of the colonizing nation. Finally, the education policies and programmes adopted by France in Indo-China reveal the latent unease of the colonizing nation. Whilst Indo-China was perceived as a fruitful investment in terms of education, France none the less severely limited the degree to which the indigenous populations were permitted to advance. The liberty, equality and fraternity which the Republic claimed to extend to la plus grande France was not only restricted and curbed in political terms, but also in cultural and educational ones. Notes and References 1 Thirty-eight hours were given to colonial education in the mainland following the reforms of 1925. Many commentators still believed this to be too little. 2 F. Challaye, Souvenirs sur la colonisation (Paris: Picart, 1935), p.20. 3 This hierarchical and racial approach to colonial education is thrown into relief if one compares educational policy and practice in Indo-China and in French West Africa. See G. Kelly, ‘Colonialism, indigenous society and school practices: French West Africa and Indo-China 1918–1938’, in P. Altbach, and G. Kelly, (eds), Education and the Colonial Experience (London: Transaction Books, 2nd rev. edn, 1984), pp.9–32. 4 B. Bourotte, La Pénétration scolaire en Annam (Hanoi: Imprimerie de l’Extrême-Orient, 1930), p.1. 5 Albert Sarraut was twice Governor General of Indo-China, 1911–14 and 1915–19. 6 A. Sarraut, La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923), p.95. 7 Ibid., p.96. 8 Ibid. 9 Loubet, L’Enseignement en Indochine en 1929 (Hanoi: Imprimerie de l’Extrême-Orient, 1929), pp.5–6. 10 Pham-Dinh Dien and Vu-Nhu’-Lâm, Manuel d’Histoire d’Annam (Nam-Dinh: Imprimerie My Thang, 1931), p.114. 11 H. Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity 1900–1945 (London: Cornell University Press, 1992). See chapter entitled: ‘Frenchmen into Peasants: Rerooting the Vietnamese in their Villages’, pp.98–134. 12 Ibid., p.l33.

Nicola Cooper 147 13 See Plan des études et programmes de l’Enseignement primaire supérieur francoindigène: réglementation du Diplôme d’études primaires supérieurs franco-indigène. 14 These reforms are set out in detail in Les Manuels scolaires et les publications pédagogiques de la Direction générale de l’Instruction publique (Hanoi: Imprimerie de l’Extrême-Orient, 1931). 15 P. Barthélémy, (Inspecteur de l’Instruction publique), Direction de l’Instruction publique , L’Enseignement du Français à l’école franco-indigène (Hanoi: 1927), p.22. 16 Ibid., p.3. 17 The etymology of this term is unclear. Norindr has traced the hyphenated orthography to the Danish geographer Conrad Malte-Brun in the early nineteenth century. See P. Norindr, ‘Representing Indo-China: the French colonial fantasmatic and the Exposition Coloniale de Paris’, French Cultural Studies, vol. vi, (February 1995), pp.35–60. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, asserts that the name ‘Indo-China’ was coined by John Leydon (1775–1811), a Scottish poet and Orientalist. It is not clear when the hyphen disappeared from current French usage. It seems to have gradually been dropped from the late nineteenth century onwards. 18 See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. edn, 1991), pp.124–7. 19 E. Lavisse, ‘Le Devoir patriotique’, in Histoire de la France – cours moyen – préparation au certiﬁcat d’études primaires (Paris: Armand Colin, 1912), p.246. 20 Nguyen Duc Bao, Pour nos jeunes écoliers: lecture courante et expliquée (Hanoi: Tan-Dan Thu Quan, 1925), p.192. 21 P. Paquier, Histoire de France à l’usage des élèves du cours supérieur des écoles franco-annamites et des candidates au certiﬁcat d’études primaires franco-indigènes (Hanoi: Editions Tan-Dan, 1932), p.137. 22 Ibid. 23 Pham-Dinh-Dien and Vu-Nhu’-Lâm, Manuel d’Histoire d’Annam (Nam-Dinh: Imprimerie My Thang, 1931), p.116. 24 Barthélémy, L’Enseighnement du Français, p.11. 25 Altbach and Kelly, Education, p.14. 26 Nguyen Duc Bao, Pour nos jeunes écoliers, p.190. 27 Ibid., p.70. 28 Ibid., p.76. 29 Ibid., p.128. 30 Ibid., p.190. 31 Pham-Dinh-Dien and Vu-Nhu’-Lâm, Manuel, p.110. 32 Plan d’études et programmes de l’enseignement primaire supérieure franco-indigène: réglementation du diplôme d’études primaires supérieures franco-indigènes, p.22. 33 Ibid. 34 Pham-Dinh Dien and Vu-Nhu’-Lâm, Manuel, p.116. 35 Ibid., p.117. 36 Méthode de langage français et annamite destinée aux Ecoles de l’Indochine (Quinhon: Imprimerie de Quinhon, 1923), p.69.

10 The Empire and the Nation: The Place of Colonial Images in the Republican Visions of the French Nation Timothy Baycroft

Representations of the French nation, and the development of national identity and culture, have occupied a large place in the historiography of France in the late twentieth century. Among the images of the French nation in Republican France, be it in monuments, literature, ﬁlm, festivals, building and street names, advertising for French products or in history manuals (ofﬁcial or unofﬁcial), can almost always be found a selection which have their origin in, or draw upon, the French colonial empire.1 What is striking is that while an absence of colonial images in any area of national representation is rare, it is equally rare for them to occupy a central or even prominent place in any dimension of the national or Republican discourse. The primary purpose of this chapter is to examine the place of the French colonial empire in the images and identity of the French nation, and to come to terms with this paradox of their omnipresence and marginality. It will begin by examining the imperial or colonial policies of the Republic, and then attempt to place them in the context of other Republican policies, particularly those of the building of the Republican nation and the assimilation of the regions. It will examine similarities and differences in the intention of the architects of the policies, in the practical results they achieved, and in the way in which historical analysis has coloured our perception of what they thought they were doing. It will also consider the inﬂuence the two policies may have had upon one another, including the way they have been perceived, and then go on to look speciﬁcally at a selection of images drawn from the colonial empire in 148

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order to analyse their place in the overall image and identity of the French nation. French attitudes towards their colonies differed in several respects from those of other European colonial powers. Where Britain sought opportunities for investment and trade, and Germany used the acquisition of colonies primarily to divert attention away from social problems at home, neither sought, even in rhetorical terms, to integrate their colonies closely with the mother country as did the French.2 In his famous speech to the Chamber of Deputies in 1885, Jules Ferry provided three motivations for the French Republic to engage in colonial expansion: to provide markets and raw materials to beneﬁt the French economy, to increase the grandeur of the French nation, and for ‘humanitarian’ reasons, to help to spread the French enlightenment throughout the world.3 Each of these motivations, with greater or lesser emphasis, was used by the leaders of the Republic to justify previous, existing or planned colonial policies and projects throughout the many decades of French colonial expansion, and to generate a ‘colonial myth’ using the abstract philosophical language of French Republican nationalist tradition.4 While similar in some respects to the discourse justifying colonial expansion in other countries, France’s position as a republic, and Republican attitudes towards the Enlightenment permeate French colonial discourse in such a way as to distinguish it from other European nations, which makes for an interesting comparison with another major Republican discourse, that of the integration of the regions and the development of the Republican nation. Beginning immediately after the ‘victory of the Republic’, the Opportunist Republicans sought to consolidate their hold on power and to spread Republican and national values to the population through their compulsory schools, military service, the increasing presence and prominence of Republican national symbols and a programme of improvement of the communication networks within France.5 In the case of both colonial and national policy, the spread of Enlightenment and Republican ideology, as well as the increase of French greatness and glory through the development of the French economic, territorial and military strength, were important aims of the Republicans who formulated the two policies. For the purposes of this study, the Republican internal policy of regional or national integration can indeed be seen as a kind of imperialism, and regions as a kind of colony. D. George Boyce deﬁned ‘colonial identity’ as somewhere between cultural and national identity,

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with national identity coming from the mother country, and cultural identity shaped by local conditions.6 This deﬁnition would certainly ﬁt many regions of metropolitan France during the early Third Republic. Regions, with their own cultures, languages, traditions and customs, and regional cultural identities to go with them, even referred to themselves in some cases (such as the Flemish) as a separate race from the French. Nevertheless, they always deﬁned a part of their identity, in political terms, as French.7 That over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the national dimension of their identity as well as national culture came to predominate demonstrates only the success of the Republican policies of integration and assimilation. In terms of objectives, therefore, both policies sought to improve France’s economic and political position in the world, and also in both cases a strong secondary motivation was the desire to civilize others by bringing liberty and enlightenment to, respectively, the regions or the colonies. The avowed goal for both region and colony was the complete integration and assimilation of the populations, stemming from the Republican belief in the universalism of their values, and ‘pour satisfaire à un goût d’uniformité bien français’.8 As Alfred Rambaud put it in 1886: ‘La France est presque la seule nation qui se soit approchée de la solution pour le problème de l’administration des races étrangères: elle ne les détruit pas comme ont fait trop souvent les autres peuples; elle sait mieux que personne les assimiler. [France is all but the only nation which has come close to resolving the problem of administrating foreign races: she does not destroy them as other nations all too often do; she knows better than anyone how to assimilate them.]’9 In the early decades of the Third Republic, the discourse of colonial empire and nation was similar with respect to the desirability and the means of spreading French culture and the Republican vision of enlightenment and the nation. It was thought that through the spread of the French language, school textbooks teaching the same version of French history to the regions and the colonies, the centralized administration, the populations would be assimilated into the Republican national culture without distinction of policy between the mainland and the colonies. The colonies were merely ‘un prolongement de la France’.10 In Rambaud’s words again: ‘[La France] seule, jusqu’à présent, a osé concevoir le métropole et les colonies comme formant une seule patrie, un seul Etat. [only (France); until now, has had the courage to think of the metropole and the colonies as forming one single homeland, one state.]’11 The future success envisaged in the assimilation of the colonies would itself be proof of the universality of Republican principles.

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The fact that much of the Republican rhetoric of empire was similar to that of the nation, and that the objectives of the colonial and regional Republican policies can be seen as similar should not, perhaps, be seen as surprising, given the fact that in many cases it was the same individuals who developed and implemented the two policies. The most obvious example is Jules Ferry, quoted above, the principal force behind the early Republican colonial empire, and whose name was also given to the primary school laws which were so crucial in the Republican regional or national policies. In their reception, their implementation, their success and their interpretation by subsequent generations, however, the two policies were not completely in parallel, and numerous differences can be seen. The ﬁrst signiﬁcant difference between the two policies is the political support which they commanded within the Republican majority, in the wider political spectrum, and among the French public. Republicans, both in and out of power, displayed a striking consensus behind the policy of national unity and regional assimilation, but were divided over the colonial policy. Those in favour of supporting and extending the colonial empire were a restricted elite among the ruling Republicans who had an excess of zeal, including, in addition to Ferry, Paul Bert, Berthelot and Combes. This elite acted often on its own initiative, rather than in response to a general demand or sustained interest on the part of the majority.12 It was often difﬁcult to maintain continuity in colonial policy, ﬁrst because of the elite, individualistic nature of the impetus behind the colonial expansion, which meant a change of personnel in the government could easily lead to a different vision of the colonies and a consequent shift in policy. One contemporary observer criticized just that: ‘A la vérité, la République pratique, non pas une politique, mais une conduite contradictoire, une conduite incohérente, une conduite qui varie et qui variera avec tous les Ministres qui se sont succédé ou qui se succéderont au Ministère des Colonies. [In truth, the Republic does not implement a policy, but a direction that is contradictory and incoherent, a direction that changes and will always change with each new minister who arrives in the Ministry for Colonies.]’13 Within the group of Republicans in favour of colonialism, there was a minority who favoured a policy of association rather than assimilation, and numerous examples can also be cited of individual Republicans who for a variety of reasons out and out opposed colonial expansion, and articulated an underlying difference in attitude towards the people in the regions and those in the colonies (even though

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neither were culturally ‘French’ at the time).14 Clemenceau thought that before turning attention ‘abroad’ one had to complete the uniﬁcation of the nation, referring to metropolitan France. Paul Déroulède made the comment, in response to the promise of colonial gains, that France was being offered 20 domestics when she had lost two sisters (referring to Alsace and Lorraine).15 A second reason that it was difﬁcult to maintain continuity and coherence in colonial policy is that ‘most of French Imperialism was belated governmental response to activities undertaken away from Paris by individuals who frequently altered, deﬁed or simply ignored ofﬁcial policy’.16 With distance and variety of personnel, it was more difﬁcult to keep track of and to control the agents in the ﬁeld. Thus through time, and because of decisions beyond the control of the government, colonial policy suffered some inconsistency; this was much less true of the regional policy, which commanded a relatively long-standing Republican consensus, and was less subject to circumstances and individuals beyond direct control and supervision. Colonial policy thus brought into opposition two sorts of nationalism which went beyond the Republican camp, the one looking for national grandeur in general, and the other concerned primarily with state unity and the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. Many on the Right fell into the camp of Déroulède, wishing to concentrate upon the lost provinces and revenge upon Germany, and on the Left, the preoccupation with class issues left little room for anything but opposition to capitalist expansion policies, and where they looked outside France it was towards the international, rather than towards French colonies.17 The Catholic Church also made a distinction between regional policies and colonial ones, though in a different way from the Republican elites. It can be seen in many regions as resisting the regional policy of assimilation, especially in the form of the secular Republican schools, but came out as one of the larger supporters of the colonial Empire, providing missionary zeal as well as large numbers of personnel to travel out to the colonies to set up schools and materially advance the process of colonization. In a period when anti-clericalism and the Republican–anti-Republican conﬂict were at the heart of French politics, the Church’s relatively favourable position with respect to the colonies helped to keep the colonial question on the margins of mainstream political debate, and contributed to the disagreement over colonial policy within the Republican Party. Thus the colonial policy was far from receiving universal support among the political classes in France, not even among the Republicans

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whose policy it was. That being said, the criticism of France’s colonial expansion was never particularly vehement, and neither was it ever the primary platform of those who opposed it. The division of the Republicans over colonial policy meant that there was an antecedent for criticism of Empire which would develop through the twentieth century, whereas the only antecedent for criticizing the cultural imperialism of the regions was to side with the Church, arguably the greatest loser in the political struggles of the Third Republic, and therefore not a popular choice of position thereafter. The division which existed among the political elites was mirrored among the French population at large. While a segment of the population was willing to go off to the colonies in search of adventure, proﬁt, to further some ideological or other goals, or simply because they were sent, thus making colonial expansion possible, the colonial ideal did not touch the majority of the population of France during the early decades of the Third Republic. This population at large was not instinctively colonial: ‘La France ne s’est jamais senti spontanément coloniale; elle ne fut colonisatrice que par intermittance et les excès d’enthousiasme colonial d’une partie de son élite furent régulièrement suivis d’un retour à l’indifférence générale. [France has never felt instinctively colonial; she has only ever been a sporadic coloniser and any excesses of colonial enthusiasm by part of the French elite were regularly followed by a return to general indifference.]’ 18 Not widely thought about or debated in public, French colonial expansion was left largely in the hands of the republican leaders, who were able to pursue the glory they felt colonies would provide, and greeted largely by indifference, punctuated by occasional, relatively feeble opposition. A second major difference between the Republicans’ regional and colonial policies was the way in which they were viewed as means and ends. The primary motivating factor behind Republican France’s colonial expansion was the contribution to the greatness of the French nation. The colonies were then viewed and treated as the rest of France, and the same principles of assimilation applied to them, but they remained primarily a means to an end: the greater glory of the French Republic and an outward symbol of France’s importance in the world. The assimilation of the regions, on the other hand, was an end in itself, and seen as necessary for the very survival of the Republic itself. This difference goes some way to explaining the variable strength of feeling which lay behind the two policies from within the Republican camp.

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A third difference between the assimilationist policies directed towards the regions and the colonies can be found in the role played by local elites and the general conditions of their implementation. Looking ﬁrst at the integration of the regions, it is clear from recent work that assimilation was much more of a two-way process than is often thought. Such writers as Caroline Ford, in her work on Brittany, stress the fact that the building of the national identity was a combination of central values being combined with local ones, and the local having a certain degree of inﬂuence on the national.19 The local elites played a crucial mediating role, having their origins in the region, and encouraging integration which permitted the retention and adaptation of certain local characteristics while also directly contributing in their own way, to the form of the nation which was created. In the colonies, the mediators between the colony and the centre were most often drawn from the centre rather than the colony, and were less able to draw the two societies closer together. They were also much less able (or willing) to fall in line directly with centralized policies, and had to rely upon their own initiatives, which varied from place to place and, as we saw above, depended upon the individuals concerned. The material conditions of the implementation of the assimilation policy also made for a difference in practice between the regions and the colonies. In the colonies those seeking to assimilate the local populations into French traditions and culture were limited in their ability to do so by the availability and the reliability of the manpower at their disposal, by available equipment, as well as the nature of local resistance encountered in the different colonies.20 The regions very proximity to the centre meant that they were much easier to monitor and control administratively, and the relative quantity of resources devoted to the promotion of the integration of the people in the towns and countryside was much greater than that of the colonies. One ﬁnal difference in the conditions of implementation was the possibility of the appropriation of cultural characteristics which was quite different between the regions and the colonies. A process of cultural assimilation can be divided into two basic types. The ﬁrst is the actual shift in cultural practice on the part of the integrated population, examples being the abandonment of one festival for another, or a change from speaking a regional language or dialect to speaking the national language. The second is the re-baptism of certain cultural practices such that although nothing actually changes, the way they are labelled, thought of and identiﬁed with changes, so cultural practices are no longer ‘local’ or ‘regional’, but ‘national’. Examples are: an

Timothy Baycroft 155

element of regional cuisine, such as the drinking of pastis or the making of ratatouille, which cease to be ‘provençal’ and become ‘southern French’, or the re-labelling of what is strictly Burgundian architecture, built in the period when it was not a part of the kingdom of France, as one style of ‘French’ architecture. In this way, when cultural practices themselves cannot be changed, they are simply appropriated as characteristics of the nation, and it is the identity which is derived from such a practice which is altered, or ‘nationalized’. The difference between the regions and the colonies was rooted less in the difﬁculties of teaching French language and history (though partly) than in the facility of appropriating traditions as ‘French’ which were so far removed physically and in practice from other French traditions. For more on the distinction between appropriation and assimilation, see Timothy Baycroft, Culture, Identity and Nationalism: French Flanders in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Boydell & Brewer 2004). Hence the two policies of regional assimilation and colonialism were similar in nature, orientation and rhetoric, and dissimilar in the support they received among the political community, the material conditions surrounding their implementation, in their success, and also in the legacies they left behind. In their interpretation and analysis by contemporary society, the attempt to assimilate the colonized peoples has become loaded with the negative undertones of cultural imperialism and lack of respect for indigenous populations, but the policies of national assimilation are still talked of by the French with a sense of great pride. As we have seen, the objectives and rhetoric used to describe the two policies at their inception were not substantially different. Unity, liberty, equality, fraternity: these were values that needed to be carried to others, and it was the application of this ideology of enlightenment which made France great. The leaders of the Third Republic can be seen to have exported their ‘home’ policies to the colonies, and the French speciﬁcity in style of colonialism, as compared with that of other colonial powers, was simply consistent with France’s other policies. While the colonies never attained the central place in French Republican imagery which the original architects of the French empire had hoped, they nevertheless occupy a large and pervasive space in the art and literature of the Republican period, and have an enigmatic place in French identity. ‘Colonial literature’, from Louis Bertrand, Pierre Mille, Jean Marquet, Pierre Loti and Paul d’Ivoi in the nineteenth century, through to Pierre Benoit, Albert Camus and Marguerite Durras in the twentieth, was plentiful and popular with the French public,

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and colonial themes were also treated by other major literary ﬁgures such as Emile Zola and Marcel Pagnol.21 From the works of Léon Poirier in the 1930s through to more recent works such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (1992), the colonies have been a prominent subject in French ﬁlms which have retained a wide audience.22 Other visual images of the colonies were also prominent in Republican France, from works of art through to photography and advertising.23 The sheer quantity of novels which are set in the colonies, or have characters who spend decisive moments there, the number of ﬁlms devoted to colonial subjects, the presence of colonial images in advertising, photographs and on postcards all demonstrate that the colonies did capture the imagination of large numbers of the French, and at the very least became familiar to the majority of the population. The fact that the colonial experience was only ‘real’ for a relatively limited number of French men and women – soldiers, administrators, missionaries, traders or simple adventurers – did not in any way prevent such works from being commercial successes, and meant that the majority of the French population had an exposure to colonial images. Colonial culture in France was, in the words of Robert Aldrich, a signiﬁcant sub-culture.24 The popular success of works with colonial themes, the attraction to colonial displays at the exhibitions and the successful use of colonial images in advertising can in part be explained by a fascination with the exotic which was found all over European society, rather than because all French people necessarily felt an acute sense of kinship and similarity of experience with those in the colonies. In this sense, the colonial experience was familiar to, but not close to the heart of many Frenchmen. Even if many found the colonies exciting to read and to dream about, Greater France was a part of their consciousness, but not a signiﬁcant part of their identity. In seeking to treat, at least in theory, the colonies in the same manner as the home country, the Republicans responsible for French colonial expansion wanted to make colonialism central to Republican thinking and priorities, and hoped to forge one, large uniﬁed nation, ‘la plus grande France’, which would encompass both the mainland and the colonized territories as one whole, making the colonies an integral part of the French national image and identity. The fact that in 1940 Marshal Pétain’s government refused to carry on the ﬁght from the colonies, but chose instead to seek an armistice, bears witness to the overall failure to have the colonies conceived as a true part of France by the end of the Third Republic. Pétain said that his government ‘s’est résolu à rester en France’ [was determined to stay in France],

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clearly demonstrating that he did not think of the colonies as ‘France’, in spite of the efforts of previous generations to integrate them in the minds of the French.25 By the end of the Third Republic, the ‘colonial myth’ had not gained the kind of acceptance which the Republican or national myth had among the elite; throughout the regions of France and from the dual perspectives of the actual assimilation of the populations in the colonies, and the conception of the colonies as an integral part of the nation from within metropolitan France, the assimilationist colonial policies of the Republicans had failed. The ﬁnal failure of the French colonial myth came with the constitutional negotiations which followed the Second World War. In attempting to re-afﬁrm the unity and indivisibility of the French Union, the French leaders who drafted the constitution of the Fourth Republic were unable ‘to break out of the intellectual limits imposed by the traditional version of the colonial myth in order to confront the reality of colonial nationalism’.26 The dominant ideological model of assimilation would not give way to any model of association which involved real powersharing. The new constitution allowed enough freedom in local selfgovernments to strengthen colonial nationalist movements, while remaining sufﬁciently inﬂexible to push them increasingly into violent and extra-legal measures to bring about reform.27 The subsequent decolonization over the following two decades marked the complete failure of the assimilation process, and of French colonialism in general. The fact that some opposition to the Republican colonial adventure had been found within the Republican camp from the beginning allowed for a certain distance to be maintained from the colonial failures later on, such that the Republic, and French Republican values themselves, were not tainted with failure. It is striking to note how in the post-war period the colonial past has somehow been edited out of the national past, in keeping with the interpretation that the colonies were not a part of France, and the tradition of considering the greater France and metropolitan France as one has simply disappeared. The absence of the colonies in such works as Robert Gildea’s The Past in French History, or the fact that in the three volumes of Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de Mémoire, about the Republic, the Nation and ‘Les Frances’, only one article touches on the colonies (on the subject of the Colonial Exhibition in 1931) show just how little the colonial past is considered a part of France by historians.28 For the representatives of ofﬁcial Republican France, as well as for the majority of France’s ‘national’ historians, colonialism is something which France did, not a part of what France was.

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The failure of French colonialism and the process of decolonization did not stop the production of images of the colonies and the colonial period in France, which remained ever-present in the French mental and physical landscape. Insofar as the colonial episode continued to permeate the national consciousness of France in the post-colonial period, it did so increasingly as a source of trauma for a restricted segment of the French population (those who had been directly involved), and as a kind of unease and wish not to have to think about it for the rest. The continual production of images and inquests into France’s colonial past in the second half of the twentieth century has tended to come from individuals returning from the former colonies, or historians whose interest is speciﬁcally in the colonial empire. The distancing from responsibility on the part of ofﬁcial policy only served to heighten the sense of isolation of the repatriated groups such as the pieds noir or former colonial soldiers. In terms of images, while the period of the Third Republic produced works which gloried in the colonial Empire and defended France’s civilizing mission, much of what has been written about the colonies in the mid- to late twentieth century conveys above all else a sense of failure, betrayal, isolation and frustration.29 While the images produced have continued to reach a wide audience, the passionate preoccupation with the colonies has remained restricted to certain groups within French society. In this sense, the colonial images have remained, as was stated at the outset, omnipresent but peripheral to the French national image and identity. Notes and References 1 Speciﬁc discussion of colonial images has been a topic of growing interest in recent years: see, for example, the remainder of this volume; Dina Sherzer (ed.), Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone World (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996); Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Pascale Blanchard and Armelle Chatelier (eds), Images et colonies (Paris, 1993); and also Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp.234–65, and Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (eds), Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 2 See Jean Bouvier, René Girault and Jacques Thobie, L’impérialisme à la française 1914–1960 (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1986) for a comparison of British, German and French styles of colonialism. 3 Jules Ferry, speech to the Chamber of Deputies, 28 July, 1885, reproduced in Guy Pervillé, De l’Empire Français à la décolonisation (Paris: Hachette, 1991), pp.47–8. See also Jean Ganiage, L’expansion coloniale de la France sous la Troisième République (1871–1914) (Paris: Payot, 1968), p.47.

Timothy Baycroft 159 4 For a contemporary rationalization of France’s colonial policy of expansion, see Paul Gaffarel, Les Colonies Françaises (Paris: Librarie Germer Bailliere, 1880), pp.1–16, and for a comparison of the colonial myth with the Republican national myth see D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1973), pp.4–6. 5 For more detailed descriptions of the Republican’s policies of national integration, see Brian Jenkins, Nationalism in France: Class and Nation since 1789 (London:Routledge, 1990). 6 D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.18–19. 7 See, for example, Timothy Baycroft, ‘Changing Identities in the Franco–Belgian Borderland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, French History, vol. 13, no. 4 (December, 1999), and Paul Lawrence, Timothy Baycroft and Carolyn Grohmann, ‘“Degrees of Foreignness” and the Construction of Identity in French border regions during the inter-war period’ (forthcoming). 8 Jacques Thobie and Gilbert Meynier, Histoire de la France coloniale. II L’apogée (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991), p.302. 9 Alfred Rambaud, La France coloniale (1886) quoted in Charles-Robert Ageron, France coloniale ou parti coloniale? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), p.194. 10 Jean Brunhes, ‘manuel scolaire’, classe de seconde’, quoted in Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France (Paris: la Table Ronde, 1972), p.186, but see pp.185–95 for more on the afﬁrmation of colonial or imperial images. See Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘L’Exposition coloniale de 1931: mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 1997), p.493 for more about the colonies in school manuals. 11 Rambaud in Ageron, France coloniale ou parti coloniale?, p.194. 12 See Ganiage, L’expansion coloniale, p.47, and Ageron, France coloniale ou parti coloniale?, p.198. 13 François Nicol, La politique coloniale français, Rapport au VIIe congrès national de la paix à Clermont-Ferrand (1911), p.2. 14 On the assimilation–association debate, see Ageron, France coloniale ou parti coloniale?, and Raymond Betts, Tricouleur: The French Overseas Empire (London and New York: Gordon & Cremonesi, 1978). The number of proponents of association as a model increased during the twentieth century. 15 Quoted in Robert Tombs, France 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1996), p.204. 16 Betts, Tricouleur, p.19. 17 See Jacques Binoche-Guerda, La France d’outre-mer 1815–1962 (Paris: Masson, 1992) , pp.65–71. 18 Ageron, France coloniale ou parti coloniale?, p.43; see also Ganiage, L’expansion coloniale, p.20. 19 Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 20 See Betts, Tricouleur, p.20.

160 The Empire and the Nation 21 See Aldrich, Greater France, pp.236–46, for an overview of colonial literature, and also Lynn A. Higgins, ‘Pagnol and the Paradoxes of Frenchness’, in Ungar and Conley, Identity Papers, pp.91–112, and Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France, pp.183–5. 22 See Sherzer, Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism; David H. Slavin, ‘Heart of Darkness, Heart of Light: The Civilizing Mission in L’Atlantide’, in Ungar and Conley, Identity Papers, pp.113–35; and Aldrich, Greater France, pp.257–60. 23 One has only to think of the Banania advertisement. On art see Aldrich, Greater France, pp.250–6. 24 Aldrich, Greater France, pp.234–5. 25 Marshal Philippe Pétain, ‘Appel du 25 juin, 1940’, La France Nouvelle: Principes de la communauté, appels et messages (Paris: Fasquelle, 1941), p.23. 26 Marshall, The French Colonial Myth, p.9. 27 For descriptions of the post-war constitutional negotiations see ibid., and Jacques Thobie, Gilbert Meynier, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de La France Coloniale 1914–1990 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), pp.355–71. 28 Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994), and Nora Les Lieux de Mémoire. The one article is Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘L’Exposition coloniale de 1931’, vol. I, pp.493–513. 29 For a description of works describing the civilizing mission, see Slavin, ‘Heart of Darkness, Heart of Light’, pp.113–35.

11 Portrait of the Young Woman as a Coloniale Marie-Paule Ha

In ‘Gender and Imperialism: Mapping the Connections’, Clare Midgley distinguishes three approaches in the study of the relationship between European women and imperialism. She describes the ﬁrst approach as one of ‘recovery’ which aims at reclaiming women’s involvement in the empire. Closely related to the ‘recovery’ mode are ‘recuperative’ works whose main thrust is to debunk the ‘myth of the destructive females’ according to which the memsahibs were to be blamed for the ruin of the empire. A major problem common to these two approaches, Midgley thinks, is that they tend to represent women as either patriarchal victims or plucky feminist heroines without taking into account the racial factor, which regulates all power relations in colonial context. 1 As a corrective to the ﬁrst two approaches, a third group of works adopts a more critical stance that brings out both the complicitous and resistant aspects of white women’s relationship to colonial order.2 This last category of studies focuses on the imperial ‘maternalism’ exerted by notable women, 3 Christian missionaries4 and feminists5 on their Oriental and African sisters, who have often been portrayed as helpless victims of ‘barbaric’ native customs awaiting the interventions of their more enlightened European counterparts. In this chapter, moving along a slightly different track, but one most inspired by the third approach, I propose to investigate further the rhetoric of the ‘white women’s burden’ of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century by examining the discursive formation of the coloniale as articulated in a wide range of documents such as ofﬁcial speeches, personal narratives, interviews, novels, and advice literature for would-be coloniales.6 My analysis of these texts will bring out the contradictory impulses of the civilizing mission au féminin, which cast colonial women simultaneously as 161

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guardians of bourgeois tradition and agents of a modernizing project that was itself fraught with internal tensions. My discussion draws on sources mainly from Indo-China, which is the area of my research, even though texts dealing with the experience of French colonial women in other parts of the empire will also be used. As the voluminous body of works on colonial conquests attests, the tradition/modernity binarism is one of the most widely deployed rhetorical constructs of the civilizing mission to justify the superiority of western ways. Within this narrative, tradition is invariably associated with the colonized cultures and is often perceived as stagnant, obscurantist and primitive. 7 Native cultural practices branded ‘traditional’ are presented as barbarous, immoral and cruel. 8 Interestingly enough, the most often cited examples of the savagery and inhumanness of indigenous customs are those that victimize women such as female circumcision, foot-binding, child marriage, suttee and polygamy.9 Modernity, on the other hand, being the prerogative of the enlightened and technologic west, is said to bring salvation to the ‘lesser’ races in the form of social, economic, political and moral advancement. The examples used to illustrate such developments are, no less interestingly, often taken from areas conventionally associated with male spheres of action such as the building of railways and roads, the penetration and exploitation of ‘virgin’ lands, and the eradication of diseases.10 If, in colonial discourse, tradition is associated with the female realm and modernity with the male, the gendered division of tradition/modernity became rather blurred in the métropole as a result of socio-economic changes. At the turn of the century, in response to the social ills arising from industrialization, female labour and urbanization, many of the social reformers of the Third Republic turned to the domestic realm to seek remedy, for it was believed that the home was the primordial site for the nurturing of future good citizens.11 As Janet Horne points out in her study of the mission of the Musée Social, an independent research and advisory group on social policy,12 social reformers of the late nineteenth century, pursuing the ideas of Frédéric LePlay, came to view women (and, in particular, middle-class women) as essential players in carrying out moral and social regeneration. In the thinking of the Musée Social members, women were to assume the dual role of guardians of traditions at home and agents of modernization in the colonies with the mission of imparting the lessons of French modernity to the native subjects. If, in the colonial setting, modernity is presented as diametrically opposed to tradition, it seems that these two irreconcilable modes of

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being became quite compatible, not to say complementary, in the métropole. Horne’s explanation for this apparent paradox is that the modernity French women were asked to represent abroad was still based upon ‘an essentialist, maternalistic discourse’ and that the modernizing mission they were invested with ‘remained rooted in the general cult of domesticity and motherhood long established as a nineteenth-century archetype’ (p.36). In the mind of the social reformers of the time, middle-class women were the ideal emissaries for propagating bourgeois values of thrift, orderliness and cleanliness to their less fortunate working-class sisters at home and imparting the science of good housekeeping, child care and hygiene to their ‘backward’ counterparts in the colonies. The casting of white women as ‘torch-bearers of civilization’ is featured in a great many publications that promoted female colonial emigration in the early decades of the twentieth century. One such example is the report that came out of the Etats généraux du féminisme held over two days at the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale in Vincennes.13 In their speeches, long-time coloniales, such as Clotilde Chivas-Baron, Suzanne Karpelès, Mme Maspero and Mme Querillac, detail all the good work that France did to improve the social and moral conditions of the natives. In her presentation Mme Querillac starts with a list of the ills plaguing indigenous societies before French occupation: insecurity, piracy, murders, and terrible famines which caused ‘considerable wretchedness and congenital debility’ (p.25). She then dwells on the horrendous plight of the native women, who not only had to endure malnutrition and overwork during pregnancy, but were also victims of those ‘barbaric ancestral rites’ that caused untold harm to both mothers and their newborns (p.26). The lack of the most elementary hygiene, the speaker explains, gave rise to numerous diseases that were further aggravated by the hereditary disorders resulted from alcoholism, a problem most serious in West Africa, Madagascar, Réunion and Polynesia. After exposing the dire fate of native societies, Mme Querillac goes on to enumerate the remedial measures put in place by the colonial administration as well as private groups: the creation of leprosy centres for children and old people, orphanages and clinics. Besides social hygiene and medical care, other topics in the two-day conference include the legal reforms introduced by the colonial administration concerning the plight of repudiated wives, the conditions regulating native women’s work, educational reforms and the predicament of mixed-blood children. While many of the speakers tend to

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portray indigenous women as an undifferentiated group of helpless and passive victims of their own patriarchal oppressive mores, the one participant who presents a less squalid image of the colonized is Karpelès, a member of the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient who had been working in Indo-China for several years.14 In her account, the Indo-Chinese women come across as individuals with distinct cultural and class backgrounds playing an active role in their own society. The narrative of the ‘white women’s burden’ also occupies a central place in the non-ﬁction writing of Clotilde Chivas-Baron, another long-time coloniale and a key participant of the Etats généraux at the 1931 colonial exhibition. In La Femme française aux colonies (1929), a book written to initiate young women into colonial life, Chivas-Baron urges her female compatriots to engage in ‘oeuvres de bienfaisance et d’humanité’ such as the protection of abandoned children and the teaching of hygiene to indigenous women. This same advice is reiterated in her essay ‘Le Milieu colonial’15 in which she assures the wouldbe coloniales that with their help ‘our morality, our hygiene, our well-being and our progress’ could easily penetrate the native milieu since as women they would have inspired enough conﬁdence that ‘yellow and black mothers would entrust their little ones in their white hands’ (p.206). Similar views are expressed by Georges Hardy, former director of the Ecole coloniale and long time administrator in Western Africa. In ‘La Femme et la politique indigène’ Hardy asks French women to act as advisers to their native counterparts in ‘feminine domains’ such as child care, hygiene and morality.16 Exhortations of the same order also feature in the articles written by a certain Ch. Chenet in the periodical Le Devoir des femmes in 1936. In ‘Le Rôle de la femme française aux colonies: Protection des enfants métis abandonnés’, Chenet starts off with a description of the deplorable plight of the abandoned mixed-blood children in the colonies and urges French woman to care for these orphans and teach them the essential ‘qualities that characterize our race’ such as kindness, taste and a sense of morality.17 In another piece entitled ‘La femme française aux colonies: L’assistance à la famille indigène’, Chenet draws attention to the ‘inherent laziness of the black race’ who still clung to their ‘traditional harmful ways’ in spite of the remarkable effort of the colonial administration. It would be once more up to the French woman, the author alleges, ‘to lift up her native counterpart to her moral level without however uprooting the latter from the native milieu’.18 To what extent has this rhetoric been translated into action? The speakers at the 1931 Etats généraux du féminisme provide some

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accounts of coloniales’ philanthropic undertakings. For example, Mme Querillac mentions the work of the Red Cross women who helped by distributing medicine, milk and warm clothes to children in Madagascar. Other participants also refer to the work of French professional women such as doctors, nurses and teachers in the colonies. One recurrent observation in the speeches is the urgent need for women doctors in those native societies (the examples given were Indo-China and North Africa) which would not allow their women to be examined by male physicians. One speaker evokes the impressive achievements of Doctor Françoise Legey who was credited with founding single-handedly during the three ﬁrst decades of the century an extensive network of clinics in North Africa that provided medical services to a huge number of Arab women and children. While we do not know how many Doctor Legeys there were in the empire not all women who served in the colonies did so for philanthropic reasons only. In fact, many professionals (both men and women) were attracted to colonial service by its very generous package that included, among other beneﬁts, ‘double solde’ (double pay), paid passage, year-long paid leave, and different advantages. The terms French colonial civil servants, notwithstanding their ranks, enjoyed were not only many times superior to those of the natives,19 but also to those of their metropolitan counterparts. A document listing the salary structure for ‘dames lingères’ (women in charge of the laundry service) in the hospital in Hanoi in 1911 displays two columns, one of which indicates the metropolitan scale and the other the colonial scale: the pay of ‘dames lingères’ class one in France was 1,500 francs, while that of her counterpart in Hanoi was 3,000 francs.20 My own research which is centred on Indo-Chinese sources, shows that apart from the members of religious orders – such as those of Saint-Paul de Chartres and Saint-Joseph de Cluny who ran many of the orphanages for the abandoned mixed-blood children – there is little documentation of white lay women engaging in extensive voluntary social work in the colonies. In the interviews and personal narratives of the one-time coloniales that I have access to, allusion to their participation in charity work for the colonized is quite rare.21 When mention is made at all, it tends to refer to the work done by other French women rather than themselves. In fact, one frequent remark made by many of the Indo-Chinese coloniales in the interviews conducted by Locret-Le Bayon is that apart from their native domestics they hardly ever had contact with indigenous people. Some even admitted that they never bothered to acquaint themselves with the language and culture of the

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latter. Among the dozen returns to a questionnaire I sent out to former coloniales who had lived in Indo-China to elicit information on, among other things, the relation between French women and natives, one respondent said that her mother provided medical care to the coolies of her father’s plantation and used old sheets to make clothes for the workers’ newborn babies. This form of colonial maternalism had also been practised, but on a much larger scale, by Madame de la Souchère, the ﬁrst woman plantation owner in IndoChina whose rubber plantation in Suzannah was held as a model for other planters. According to Henriette Célarié who had visited la Souchère, the latter’s success was a result of her hard work as well as her benevolent treatment of the coolies, because ‘Not only did Mme de la Souchère pay them their salary, she also gave them her intelligence and her heart.’22 We read that she laboured side by side with her coolies under the most strenuous conditions and had a health centre and an inﬁrmary built for their use. It is quite evident that the modernity colonial women were asked to embody in the texts discussed above is linked to the Enlightenment grand narrative of progress that is rooted in rationalist and scientiﬁc modes of knowledge; yet there exists another facet of modernity that is quite different from, not to say antithetical to, the rationalist ideal. In The Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski explores in detail what she describes as the ‘feminization of modernity’ from the standpoint of the logic of consumption.23 The acceleration and intensiﬁcation of consumerism were brought about by the rapidly expanding capitalist economy in France, which had been undergoing the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization. Felski points out that in the late nineteenth century as the consumer came to be represented as a woman, ‘the category of consumption situated femininity at the heart of the modern’ (p.61). Consumption, while being a crucial part of capitalist economy, also posed a major threat to the traditional bourgeois values of thrift, self-restraint and order since the modernity that was associated with female consumerism was perceived as excessive, self-indulgent and pleasure-seeking and even often equated with the irrational and the chaotic.24 Besides catering to the capitalist imperative that required an everexpanding circulation of goods, female consumerism also fulﬁlled a socio-cultural function under the Third Republic. In Taste and Power,25 Leora Auslander demonstrates the vital role of domestic objects in the construction of the bourgeois social identity in late nineteenth-century France. In the section of her book entitled ‘Republicanism, and the

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Gendered Labor of Forging the Nation’, Auslander shows how, in the mass of advice handed out by taste professionals in etiquette books, decorating and fashion magazines whose readership consisted of mainly middle-class women, there was an unremitting effort on the part of the Third Republic to fashion a national unity ‘in the everyday and by means of commodities’ (p.381). Such a determination was based on the belief that the domestic sphere was ‘essential to the making of citizens, not only through education as it is usually understood but through objects by which the child was surrounded’ (p.382). Hence the importance of developing a taste that was distinctively ‘French’, for ‘in French Republicanism there was supposed to be only one French soul out of which would emanate one French style and one French taste’ (p.378). If, then, being ‘French’ was a matter of acquiring and surrounding oneself with the ‘right’ objects, what better place to study the making of ‘Frenchness’ than the department store? In his study of Au Bon Marché, at one time the largest department store in nineteenth-century France,26 Michael Miller examines the contradictions of the bourgeois culture as manifested in the mechanism of the grand magasin. Through an analysis of the advertising strategies used by the management of Au Bon Marché, Miller shows how the department store shaped and deﬁned the very meaning of the concept of a bourgeois way of life by creating for its patrons (mostly middle and upper-middle class women) images of the proper household, the correct attire, and the good bourgeois lifestyle, such that ‘a purchase of a Bon Marché tablecloth or a coat for the theatre became a purchase of bourgeois status too’. The implication of such a perception, Miller concludes, is that bourgeois culture became ‘a mere matter of consumption’ (p.184). What we see here are the multiple contradictory demands the Third Republic made of its middle-class women who found themselves caught between the traditional bourgeois feminine virtues of frugality and self-denial and the logic of the modern capitalist nation-building project, which urged them to promote ‘Frenchness’ through the consumption of objects representative of French taste, a project made all the more urgent after the defeat of 1870 which rendered visible France’s vulnerability vis-à-vis the newly united Germany.27 As the studies of Felski, Miller and others show,28 it was in the female yet public space of the department store that these contradictions came into the open. If Au Bon Marché, as Miller argues, served the bourgeois ideology by disseminating through consumption its values and

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lifestyle, the department store was also perceived as a lieu de perdition that brought about the loosening of bourgeois moral ﬁbre through its seductive inﬂuence on its female customers who were encouraged to indulge in sensuous pleasures and narcissistic self-gratiﬁcation. Besides sapping middle-class moral values, the culture of consumerism au féminin, as Felski shows in her reading of two novels by Zola, Au Bonheur des dames29 and Nana, also subverted the traditional model of patriarchal authority. In the section entitled ‘The All-Consuming Woman’, Felski points out how the women in these two novels challenged male authority through their uncontrollable and defying consumerist behaviour which, in the story of Nana, led to the ﬁnancial, moral and physical destruction of the men around her. We have noted earlier that in the ofﬁcial speeches promoting female colonial emigration in the early part of the twentieth century, women were cast as agents of modern civilization in the colony. Yet given the multiple contradictions of the modernizing project, could French women assume unproblematically their role as representatives of the empire? In the second part of this chapter, I shall address this issue by examining another set of images of the coloniale as represented in some colonial texts promoting the civilizing mission au féminin, colonial novels and personal narratives. One of the colonial writers whose works exemplify vividly the contradictions of the civilizing mission au féminin is Chivas-Baron. In La Femme française aux colonies, besides encouraging her female compatriots to act as civilizing agents for the natives, Chivas-Baron also reminds them of their responsibilities to uphold bourgeois norms in colonial society. The coloniale in her book was presumed to be a middle-class woman as suggested by the Parisian social activities of her circle: evenings at the Opéra, recitals at the Salle Pleyel, visit to the atelier of an artist acquaintance. As a member of the middleclass, the coloniale was expected to display all the markers that deﬁned her class: La Coloniale must maintain her sense of beauty, grace, and propriety, for it will bring her and others moral comfort … Elegance and taste are among those feminine charms which, under certain circumstances, rise up to the level of duty, clothing being a sign of dignity. More than anyone else, the colonial woman must maintain decorous attire. She is constantly being watched … as a representative of the newly imposed civilization she must show that the French woman is well-mannered and digniﬁed.30

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Besides cultivating an appearance of elegance, the coloniale must also be a tasteful and skilful homemaker. To help out the would-be coloniales, Chivas-Baron provided them with detailed advice on the creation of a proper ‘foyer colonial’. In the section of her book devoted to home furnishings, Chivas-Baron urged her readers to heed the advice of Georges Groslier31 warning colonial housewives of the inappropriateness of having indigenous furniture in a French home: ‘It is understood that we should never buy Chinese or Annamite furniture for our own use because we are French.’ According to Groslier, when one is French, one would not feel comfortable sitting in a chair decorated with a dragon. In any case, native objects, ‘do not ﬁt in with our family life’.32 These views on furnishings seem to substantiate the study of Auslander on the Third Republic notion of ‘Frenchness’ according to which part of being ‘French’ meant acquiring the ‘right’ objects. Indeed, this theme is central to La Femme française whose author untiringly reminds her readers of the importance of being surrounded by French objects. For example, before her departure for the colony, we see a young woman (engaged to a colonial administrator) busy packing her bags. We read that she would bring with her a silver teapot, two Louis-Philippe style lamps, a crystal cone, a medallion mirror, and curtains made of toile de Jouy, objects chosen precisely for their power to signify ‘Frenchness’. For after all, the coloniale is ‘the one’, ChivasBaron afﬁrms, ‘who would create France everywhere, with the habits of France, the visions of France, with small objects and great feelings, with her silver teapot and her Louis-Philippe style lamps, with the grace and morality of France, with the kindness and courage of France’ (p.187). As expected of the Third Republic bourgeoise, the coloniale was to assume the twin role of mother and wife. Thanks to her presence in the colony, the Frenchman would be kept out of harm’s way, for he would have no need to ﬁght his loneliness with alcohol or opium. More important still, he would no longer run the risk of ‘going native’, or ‘bounioulisation’ as Chivas-Baron put it, since with her around, he would have no more use of the services of native mistresses such as the congaï or mousso. Besides bringing both material and moral comfort to the man she followed to the colony, the coloniale was also responsible for reproducing the next generation of colonial leaders as her sons, having grown up among the colonized, would boast of a certain superiority even vis-à-vis their metropolitan peers, for they would have beneﬁted from, Chivas-Baron assures her readers, ‘the prestige of those

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who had crossed … the oceans; of those who had lived in the country of pineapples and bananas …; of those who had heard the growling of the rhinoceros, the mewing of the tigers; of those who had seen with their own eyes “negroes and Chinese”’ (pp.183–4). Chivas-Baron’s portrait of the coloniale as custodian of French traditions and values pertains to a time-honored iconography of the bourgeois woman who, because of her gender, ﬁnds herself in a unique position to bring moral regeneration wherever she goes. For example, in his La France hors de France (1900), a book written to promote colonial emigration, J.B. Piolet warns that men would succumb easily to their basest instincts and the worst kind of debauchery once they were out of the supervision of women (for ‘women’ here, read white Christian women). It is therefore vital to bring in the feminine element as ‘woman is made to civilize and police, to inspire and purify, to elevate and exalt all that surrounds her’.33 Her availability was all the more valuable in that her salubrious inﬂuence actually extended beyond her husband to reach other men as ‘her sole presence’, an article in La Femme blanche au Congo states, ‘would induce single men to behave with more decency and restraint’.34 Curiously enough, the colonial woman (cast as both civilizing agent for the natives and upholder of bourgeois moral standard for men) that is so prevalent in ofﬁcial pronouncements ﬁgures quite rarely, if at all, in colonial ﬁctional narratives, many of which were written to promote colonialist ideology.35 In fact many of the female protagonists in colonial novels are almost in every way the negative opposites of the coloniale as depicted in La Femme française. Instead of helping their husbands to succeed in the colony, these women practically destroy the latters’ careers as none of them could live up to the ideal set in Chivas-Baron’s book. Among the colonial novels that feature these ‘destructive memsahibs’, one, interestingly enough, is authored by Chivas-Baron herself. Her book La Simple histoire des Gaudraix, subtitled Roman des moeurs coloniales (1923)36 relates the colonial adventures, or rather misadventures, of Denise and Sylvain Gaudraix, a young couple from Chastevert, a Dauphiné village, who move to the colony in search of the ‘bonheur exotique’ (exotic happiness), and the ‘colonial good life’. During their stay in Indo-China the Gaudraix mix with the wrong crowd and end up in ﬁnancial, professional and psychological ruin. It is clear from the beginning of the story that the main culprit in this tragedy is Denise who aspires to a life of material pleasure. When she sees her cousin, Laure-Marie, return to the village wearing a hat with a

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veil, the sight awakes her own desire to become a ‘dame’. To realize this dream, she entices her husband into seeking a position in the colony which would increase their income and standard of living. Once in the colony, she again pressures Sylvain to move from the small village where he was initially posted to the more urban Tourane. There, Denise changes totally as she tries to imitate the luxurious lifestyle of other colonial women, wanting to dress like them and decorate her house like theirs. Denise’s insatiable thirst for the latest fashion is fuelled by the catalogues the Parisian department stores sent to their customers in the colonies.37 At one point in the novel, we read that Denise waits with impatience for the arrival of the liner that would bring her the catalogues. Browsing feverishly through their pages, Denise feels the need for another dress, more lace, and why not a new hat for her late afternoon visits?38 This uncontrollable spending eventually leads to the couple’s ﬁnancial ruin, ending Sylvain’s colonial career. Denise Gaudraix is but one among a long line of ﬁctional colonial women who destroy their husbands’ lives by their unrestrained consumerist cravings. Colette Suzyer, the heroine in L’Ame de la brousse (1923) by Jean d’Esme,39 is another colonial wife who squanders all the earnings of her spouse, Pierre Kérazel, through her reckless consumption. Pierre, an Indo-Chinese colonial civil servant, meets Colette in Nice during his vacation and takes her to Saigon with him after their marriage. Soon after her arrival, Colette discovers the ‘colonial good life’ with its unending parties, receptions, balls and dinners. Because of her beauty and her elegant dresses, Colette in no time establishes herself as the queen of tout-Saigon whose presence is eagerly solicited everywhere. Needless to say, such an active social agenda requires large sums of money as there is a constant need to replenish the wardrobe with new clothes, the latest hats and shoes, more lace and jewels. With his modest salary of a civil servant, Pierre can hardly pay his wife’s bills, and in order to increase his revenue, he starts gambling heavily, which leads to even more debts. After a period of time, Pierre realizes that he is totally ruined and, on the advice of his supervisor, he decides to move to the countryside with the hope of changing Colette. But things turn out to be quite the opposite as Colette, resentful of the fact that Pierre is depriving her of feminine luxuries, schemes to destroy him physically and psychologically by luring him into smoking opium. Obviously, neither of the heroines in the two novels makes any attempt to live up to the ideal of the coloniale as ‘torch-bearer of

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civilization’, or rather they did insofar as the civilization they represented was its consumer side run amok. But in both stories, Denise and Colette are not presented as aberrations of their sex, since the other women around them behave in the same way, if not worse. In fact, the consumerist penchant of Denise is greatly stimulated by a colonial old-timer, Maryvonne, who initiates her into ‘la vie large coloniale’. The former makes ‘Madame-toute-neuve’ understand that she has to keep up with her peers lest she become an object of ridicule. Indeed, the image of white women as found in many colonial novels at the early part of the century is hardly a ﬂattering one. They are often portrayed either as bored and miserable wives unadjusted to the colonial milieu, 40 or as frivolous, spendthrift and proﬂigate females whose chief preoccupations are fashion, partying, gossiping and amorous intrigues, all anathema to the traditional bourgeois gender code.41 How should one interpret these strangely contrasting images of colonial women? The most common explanation is to attribute the negative portrayal of the coloniales to the misogynous attitude of colonial writers. Misogyny, while a real problem in the colonial milieu, is, I believe, the manifestation of much deeper tensions underlying the civilizing project. We have noted that in La Femme française, the coloniale is called upon to duplicate the middle-class social and cultural habitus through her elegant attire and her exquisite taste in home furnishings. And since one important means to achieve this is through the consumption of objects that signify Frenchness it is therefore no surprise that women such as Colette and Denise, who aspire to bourgeois status, engage in reckless spending. In other words, these colonial heroines are driven by the same logic of consumerism as their metropolitan sisters as portrayed in Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames (that is, fashioning their national qua bourgeois identity by means of commodities). At another level, the problematic imaging of women in colonial narratives also bespeaks the fragility and vulnerability of the bourgeois ideology itself. In the stories discussed above, it is not just the women who, as the ‘weaker’ sex, cannot resist material temptations; the men too seem to be quite powerless as they stand by watching helplessly the undoing of their lives and works. Why are these men, the vaunted builders of the empire, unable to come to the rescue of their womenfolk? Behind what is commonly perceived as ‘the myth of the destructive female’, what we ﬁnd, I suggest, is an expression of the anxiety surrounding the solidity and viability of the bourgeois value system outside the hexagon. Indeed, it is interesting to note that a common

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topos in colonial novels is the rapid transformation of the female protagonists during the journey to the colony. In La Simple histoire, Sylvain detects a noticeable change in Denise on board the ship only 20 days after leaving the metropolitan shores: ‘It was now a Denise more coquette, more complicated … A Denise with a more agitated air’ (p.71). A similar transformation comes over Françoise, the narrator-protagonist in Jeanne Leuba’s L’Aile de feu (1920). During the boat trip to Indo-China with her husband, Françoise also notices that she has become a much more voluptuous woman: ‘Voluptuousness … I uttered this word myself, a word that would have frightened me less than a month ago. How I change! Physically as well as morally. What I left behind in Paris is a kind of a dull, mild, shy, and doleful double.’42 Evidently, what emerges in Françoise’s musings during the crossing is a woman surer of herself and more in tune with her sexuality. Such a transformation can be read concomitantly as a form of liberation of women from the constraints of the bourgeois gender code that constantly disciplines their bodies and selves, and as a testimony of the fragility of the system itself that became ineffectual as soon as its members slipped out of its direct surveillance. In a certain way, the stories of these ‘lost’ women are not without resemblance to that of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, a brave soul said to be lost to the civilized world, perhaps with a slight difference: while the Conradian hero effected a return to savagery by ‘going native’, the heroines of the novels experienced the return of the repressed via the consumer culture of modern civilization. Some of these situations described in the novels also arise in the accounts of real-life coloniales, albeit in a much less melodramatic form. One recurrent topic common to both groups of narratives is the importance of socializing. The women from Indo-China that Locret-Le Bayon interviews often mention the many soirées, balls and receptions they attended. In Notre Indochine 1936–1947, Madeleine Jay evokes some of the embarrassing moments she experienced as a newcomer in the colonial society of Tonkin. In one of the ﬁrst soirées she attended, she was the only woman wearing a short dress whereas all the other female guests had long ones on. The situation was reversed on the occasion of the second dinner as she was the one with an evening gown while everybody else wore short dresses. In her letters to her family, Geneviève Emmery-Rous de Fenerols (who followed her husband, a military ofﬁcer, to Saigon) also talks about the many parties they attended at the Cercle Sportif and Club Hippique. Because of these frequent social functions, Fenerols wrote home to ask for fabrics

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for an evening gown. Likewise, in the diary she kept as a young girl in Indo-China, Roberte Désolme makes frequent mentions of activities she took part in with her friends: parties, outings, dances, dinners and balls. While these entertainments had not brought ruin to the families, they seemed to have caused in some cases ﬁnancial strain. One of the women interviewed for Locret-Le Bayon’s project states that: contrary to what one used to think in the past, that one went to the colonies in order to save and make money, people in fact spent everything. My parents spent all their pay and the result is that at the end of their careers, they could only afford a very small apartment and they are not the only ones in that situation (p.176). Why is socializing so important in the lives of middle-class coloniales? The colonial novels attribute the cause to the ‘vanity’ of the female protagonists; but I believe that there are more valid reasons than mere frivolity. In fact, not every woman was unreservedly fond of socializing as a number of the coloniales (such as Madeleine Jay) did not feel particularly comfortable at those ofﬁcial receptions where fellow coloniales took pleasure in sizing each other up by the look of their outﬁts. In Women of the Raj, Margaret Macmillan argues that socializing served important purposes in the Raj as it enabled the British to keep as much of ‘Home’ alive as possible, thereby averting the risk of ‘going native’.43 In Indo-China many of the social functions were likewise organized by and for the French only as the coloniales themselves admitted that they hardly ever invited local people to their gatherings. One important purpose that the social activities served was the creation of a French community in which ‘Frenchness’ could be preserved. In the letters of Fenerols and the diary of Désolme, we read how their families maintained the many French cultural practices such as the celebrations of Christmas, New Year, baptisms, birthday parties and courtship. Indeed, the importance of keeping ‘Home’ alive has consequences that go beyond the private sphere, a fact that has not escaped Fenerols, who reported that the Saigon-Cholon of the mid-1940s had become a ‘mauvais lieu’ with more and more men getting addicted to alcohol and opium. If she and her family managed to stay clear of trouble it was thanks to ‘our family life that protected us from all these bad habits. But such could not be said of single men’ (p.127). She was particularly critical of those high-level administrators whose behaviour caused great scandals in the community, for not only did they set a

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poor example for their junior colleagues, but more damaging still was the fact that their misdeeds took place under the very nose of both Annamite and European personnel. Fenerols’ concern is with the possible loss of the credibility and prestige of her fellow countrymen vis-à-vis the natives, which makes her wonder, ‘What image of ourselves did we give to this people we were supposed to re-conquer?’ and ‘whether this moral corruption did not after all plant the seed of our defeat’ (p.128). Similar worries have been expressed by the interviewees of Locret-Le Bayon’s project, who were alarmed by the dissolute lifestyle of their compatriots in the colony where ‘anything goes’ for, to quote one of the colonial women, ‘The French left their soul in Marseille upon boarding the ship’ (p.199). The same view was conveyed by another coloniale who moved to Saigon in 1939. She too felt a great deal of apprehension about the moral laxity of the single males in Saigon, ‘a city of immorality’. The diagnostic was no better in Tonkin where, Madeleine Jay notes, ‘moral code is not respected. There are several faux ménages … and divorces are not rare’ (p.186). Fenerols’ remark about the importance of family life as a safeguard for the moral well-being of her family in Saigon ﬁnds an echo among the coloniales interviewed by Locret-Le Bayon. They too attach a great deal of importance to the ‘home’, which is perceived as a ‘bastion against insecurity … a privileged site where life goes on just like in the métropole’ (p.199). So much anxiety is indeed symptomatic of the fragility of the colonial order, which was riddled with internal contradictions. On the one hand, there was a strong conviction that because of their superior culture the French could serve as models to the colonized; on the other hand, there was the recognition that the system became dangerously vulnerable in the absence of the many safeguards of ‘civilized society’ in the colony (the same argument had been put forward by Marlow to explain the downfall of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness). As a rescue measure, womenfolk were dispatched to the outposts of the empire where they could, according to the author of La Femme française, refashion ‘Frenchness’ with French objects, habits and traditions. Their mission was two-fold: protecting their men from the danger of ‘going native’ by re-establishing the habitus of ‘civilized’ society, and afﬁrming the prestige of French culture through the display of a distinct ‘French’ taste to be embodied in the women’s elegant attire and sophisticated lifestyle. Yet these objectives, if achieved, would ironically undermine the success of the civilizing mission au féminin. For one thing, the making of ‘Frenchness’ required women to engage in extravagant spending that would generate grave ﬁnancial and

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psychological problems and destabilize the bourgeois family as dramatized in La Simple histoire des Gaudraix and L’Ame de la brousse. But more importantly, the mission of keeping ‘Home’ alive in the colony would not only deprive the coloniales of the time and energy they would need to act as civilizing agents to the colonized, it was in fact at odds with the call on French women to penetrate the indigenous culture and milieu since its goal was to preclude the French from getting too close to the natives. Caught between these contradictory demands, it is no surprise that few colonial women could hope to attain the ideal Chivas-Baron set for them in her portrait of the young woman as a coloniale. Notes and References 1 For a critical discussion of these approaches, see Jane Haggis, ‘Gendering Colonialism or Colonising Gender? Recent Women’s Studies Approaches to White Women and the History of British Colonialism’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 13 (1990), pp.105–15. 2 Besides Midgley’s own work and that of the contributors in her edited volume, Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), other studies along this vein are Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the Century China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1994); Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule (London: Routledge, 1993); Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995); and Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Virginia: Virginia University Press, 1998). 3 Women such as Mary Kingsley, Flora Shaw, or activists such as Annette Akroyd Beveridge, Margaret Noble and Eleanor Rathbone. Several articles in Chaudhuri and Strobel’s edited volume and Jayawardena’s book discuss the actions of these women in the British empire. 4 Besides Hunter’s work on American women missionaries in China, Jane Haggis also discusses the role of women missionaries in India in Midgley, ‘White Women and Colonialism: Towards a Non-Recuperative History’ in Midgley, Gender and Imperialism, pp.79–103. Jayawardena likewise devotes a whole chapter of her book to the impact of women missionaries in South Asia. 5 See Burton, Burdens of History. 6 The majority of the sources used for this essay assume the background of the coloniale to be middle-class even though some of the personnel ﬁles of the Indo-Chinese colonial administration at the Archives d’outre-mer in Aix indicate that a number of French women were employed by the

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7

8

9

10

11

12

customs service as second-class assistant clerks (commis auxiliaries deuxième classe) or supervisors (surveillantes) in the factories producing opium and matches, or as telephone receptionists (dames-téléphonistes) for the PTT (telephone and telegraph service). Many of them were widows with young children or fatherless young girls and a few were divorcees. While my research thus far has not yet uncovered any narratives by this group of women, the very limited information I gathered from their dossiers seems to suggest that they probably were not middle-class. In fact, one PTT document states that temporary dispensation of the regulation requiring that recently married women to give up their jobs could be granted to those newly-wed couples with ‘modest’ means. See Fonds GGi cote 7500 and Fonds RSTNF cote 140. For a philosophical discussion of the tradition/modernity debate, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reﬂections on the African Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Yet in certain situations, the colonial government might seek to recuperate those indigenous traditions that could help them to control the colonized in their promotion of the politics of association. One of the best-known practitioners of such a politics in French colonial history is Marshal Lyautey in Morocco. There exist numerous post-colonial critical works on European interventions to ‘save brown women from brown men’. Some examples are the study of Gayatri Spivak on the colonial politics surrounding the abolition of suttee in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp.271–313; Lata Mani, ‘Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.392–405; Himani Bannerji, ‘Age of Consent and Hegemonic Social Reform’, in Midgley, Gender and Imperialism, pp.21–44, which demonstrates that the reforming impulse of the British colonial state in the introduction of the Age of Consent Act of 1891 had little to do with women and girls even though initiated in the latter’s names; and Uma Narayan, ‘Restoring History and Politics to ‘Third-World Traditions’: Contrasting the Colonialist Stance and Contemporary Contestations of Sati’ in her Dislocating Cultures/Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.43–80. For an example of this type of colonization as modernizing project, see the piece written by Albert Sarraut, former governor-general of Indo-China, Indochine (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1930). For a detailed discussion of the politics of gender of the Third Republic, see Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs and Mary Lynn Stewart (eds), Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France 1870–1914 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Janet Horne, ‘In Pursuit of Greater France: Visions of Empire among Musée Social Reformers, 1894–1931’, in Clancy-Smith and Gonda, Domesticating the Empire, pp.21–42.

178 Portrait of the Young Woman as a Coloniale 13 Etats généraux du féminisme. 30–31 mai 1931 (Exposition Coloniale Internationale, 1931). For a general discussion of the reports, see Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier, ‘Un Bilan provisoire en 1931, Les Etats généraux de féminisme à l’exposition coloniale 30–31/5/1931’ in Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier, ‘Femmes et colonization’: rapport terminal au ministère des relations extérieures et de la cooperation (Aix: Institut d’histoire des pays d’outre-mer, Provence University, 1987), pp.15–44. 14 Suzanne Karpelès (1890–1968) was born in Paris but spent her early childhood in India where her father had his business. She studied Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan in the Ecole de Langues Orientales in Paris under famous French Orientalist scholars such as Silvain Lévi, Alfred Foucher and Louis Finot. In 1923 she became the ﬁrst woman member of the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi. In 1925, she was appointed as the ﬁrst curator of the Royal Library of Cambodia. In 1930, under her initiatives, two Buddhist Institutes were founded, one in Cambodia and the other in Laos, for the publication and dissemination of religious works. For a detailed account of her work, see ‘Suzanne Karpelès (1890–1968)’ in Femmes médecins, June 1969, pp.203–11. 15 ‘Le Milieu colonial’, in La Vie aux colonies: Préparation de la femme à la vie coloniale (Paris: Larose, 1938), pp.191–208. 16 Georges Hardy, ‘La Femme et la politique indigène’, La Vie aux colonies, pp.241–270, esp. p268. 17 Le Devoir des femmes, 15 February 1936, p.8. 18 Le Devoir des femmes, 15 May 1936, p.8. 19 It is interesting that at the meeting of the Etats généraux in Vincennes, one speaker commented on the huge discrepancy in salaries (amounting to 75%) between native women workers and their metropolitan counterparts, which was explained in terms of differences of living cost between the two places, yet no mention was made of the even more drastic disparity between the pay of native women and that of their French counterparts in Indo-China. 20 CAOM Indochine GGi cote 16347. 21 For examples of personal narratives, see Geneviève Emmery-Rous de Fenerols, ‘Itinéraire d’une famille française outre-mer Indochine-AlgérieMaroc au miroir d’une correspondence personnelle 1946–1969’ (PhD, Nice University, 1987); Delphine Sherwood, ‘The Saigon Journals of Roberte Désolme’, Viet-Nam Forum, vol. 16 (Yale University Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1997), pp.293–320; and Antoine and Madeleine Jay, Notre Indochine 1936–1947 (Valms: Presses de Valmy, 1994). For interviews of former colonial women, see Sylvie Locret-Le Bayon, ‘Les Femmes françaises et la colonization. Etude de leur présence coloniale’ (PhD, Nice University, 1986). Locret-Le Bayon’s dissertation consists of two parts: the ﬁrst part is her own analysis of the interviews and the second part consists of 100 life narratives of French women who had lived in the different parts of the French empire outside North Africa from 1903 to 1960. 22 Henriette Célarié, Promenades en Indochine (Paris: Editions Baudinière, 1938), p.224. 23 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Marie-Paule Ha 179 24 In Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in ﬁn-de-siècle France (Berkeley, CA: California UP, 2001), Lisa Tiersten speaks about the phenomenon of ‘marketplace consumerism’ in the late nineteenth century which supposedly helps women to become rational consumers. 25 Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, CA: California UP, 1996). 26 Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981). 27 One example of the effort to construct a strong and well deﬁned French national identity in late nineteenth century was the promotion of Jean Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: devoir et patrie, a reader for schoolchildren which Jacques and Mona Ozouf refer to as ‘The little red book of the Republic’. See the latter’s ‘Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: the Little Red Book of the Republic’, in Piere Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), vol. II (1997), pp.125–48. 28 Besides the studies of Miller and Felski, there exist other more recent works that investigate the many contradictions of modernity as consumption in late nineteenth-century Europe. See, for example, Mica Nava, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City, and the Department Store’, in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds), Modern Times: Reﬂections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge 1996), pp.38–76; G. Crossick and S. Jauman (eds), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); and Lisa Tiersten, Marianne. 29 For discussions of the consumer theme in Au Bonheur des dames, see also Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985); Barbara Vinken, ‘Temples of Delight: Consuming Consumption in Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames’, in Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast (eds), Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp.247–67; Naomi Schor, ‘Before the Castle: Women, Commodities, and Modernity in Au Bonheur des dames’ in her Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995), pp.149–155; Brian Nelson’s introduction to his translation of the novel – Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995), vii-xxvii; and Kristin Ross’s introduction to her translation of the novel (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1992), pp.v–xxiii. 30 Clotilde Chivas-Baron, La Femme française aux colonies (Paris: Larose, 1929), p.121. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 31 Georges Groslier was born in Phnom Penh in 1887. After his schooling in France, he returned to Cambodia where he was put in charge of arts education. Besides a number of novels, he wrote numerous books and articles on Cambodian art. 32 La Femme française, 124. This quotation is taken by Chivas-Baron from an article by Groslier entitled ‘Propos sur la maison coloniale’ which initially appeared in Extrême-Asie, July 1926. 33 J. B. Piolet, La France hors de France (Paris: Felix Alcanm editeurs, 1900), p.426. 34 Quoted in Locret-Le Bayon, ‘Les Femmes françaises’, p.21. 35 For discussions of the ideological positions of French colonial ﬁction, see Marius-Ary Leblond, Après l’exotisme de Loti: le roman colonial (Paris: Vald

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36

37 38 39

40 41

42 43

Rasmussen, 1926); Roland Lebel, Etudes de littérature coloniale (Paris: Peyronnet, 1928); Martine Astier Loutﬁ, Littérature et colonialisme: l’expansion coloniale vue dans la littérature romanesque française, 1871–1914 (Mouton, 1971); Hubert Gourdron, Jean-Robert Henry and Françoise HenryLorcerie, Roman colonial et idéologie coloniale en Algérie. Special issue of Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques, économiques et politiques, vol. 11, no. 1 (March 1974); Le Roman colonial (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987); and Denys Lombard, Catherine Champion and Henri Chambert-Loir (eds), Rêver l’Asie: exotisme et littérature coloniale aux Indes, en Indochine et en Insulinde (Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1993). Chivas-Baron, La Simple histoire des Gaudraix: Roman des moeurs coloniales (Paris: Flammarion, 1923). For a review of this novel of the time, see René Die, ‘Chronique litteréraire’, Pages Indochinoises, No. 5 (May 1924), pp.185–7. According to Miller, Au Bon Marché maintained a mail order business in the colonies. Chivas-Baron, La Simple histoire, pp.136–7. Jean d’Esme, L’Ame de la brousse (Paris: J. Farenczi & Fils, 1923). This novel, as well as d’Esme’s other works, was often severely attacked by his contemporary Indo-Chinese critics. See, for example, Die, ‘Chronique littéraire’, Pages Indochinoises, no. 6 (June 1924), pp.227–9. An example of such an ill-adapted colonial spouse is Raymonde, the female protagonist in Groslier’s novel, Le Retour à l’argile (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1928). The list of works that portray women in this light is too long to be cited in any detail. Besides La Simple histoire des Gaudraix and L’Ame de la brousse whose female protagonists and most of their women friends all engaged in extra-marital affairs, a similar portrayal of women is found in the novel by Claude Farrère, Les Civilisés (Paris: Ollendorff, 1905). Jeanne Leuba, L’Aile de feu (Paris: Plon, 1920), p.42. Margaret Macmillan, Women of the Raj (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996).

12 ‘All the World’s a Stage’, Especially in the Colonies: L’Exposition de Hanoï, 1902–3 Michael G. Vann*

Academics in a variety of ﬁelds have documented the history of colonial exhibitions staged in France.1 Both the Marseilles exhibition of 1922 and the larger and more famous Parisian Exposition Coloniale Internationale of 1931 provide important insights into the numerous economic, political, cultural, intellectual and racial processes involved in French colonial rule. From popular colonial kitsch to the academic work of anthropologists, ethnologists and archaeologists, and from the bottom-line nationalist economic rationale to the moral justiﬁcation of France’s mission civilisatrice, these events were multi-faceted manifestations of imperial rule staged within the safety and order of the hexagon. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to colonial exhibitions outside the home country, which were manifestations of imperial domination in the colonies themselves.2 How were expositions used in the colonial world? The Hanoi Exhibition, which ran from 3 November 1902 to 26 February 1903, offers a remarkable case study. In many ways the Hanoi Exhibition was a mirror image of the Parisian Exhibition which followed. It served many of the same functions as its metropolitan counterpart, but always with a decidedly colonial twist. On several occasions this colonial twist resulted in small disasters which ironically point out the failings of France’s imperial project in Indo-China.

* I would like to thank the Fulbright Program for the grant which allowed me to start this research at the Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives d’OutreMer (CAOM), Aix-en-Provence, France, and the History Department of the University of California at Santa Cruz for the grant which let me ﬁnish this research at the Hanoi National library and the Hanoi National Archives I (HNA), Vietnam. The staff of all three institutions were extremely helpful in my work. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Bradley Nowell (1968–96). 181

182 L’ Exposition de Hanoi, 1902–3

This chapter considers four aspects of the exhibition: Hanoi as imperial city, the economic promise of Indo-China, the French geo-political designs as expressed at the Exhibition, and the Exhibition as a gathering of ‘colonial experts’. Taken as a whole, these perspectives provide a revealing look at a crucial aspect of French colonial ideology, the implantation of imperial rule in the colonized lands. This process was as much intellectual and cultural as it was political and administrative. By explaining, rationalizing and promoting the new colonial order in Indo-China, the Hanoi Exhibition was a metaphor for the French project in Asia. Yet the image that the event wished to communicate, that of order and prosperity, was an illusion and a myth. The apparent order and rationality of the Hanoi Exhibition, and by extension Hanoi and the entirety of colonial Indo-China, was merely a smoke and mirrors trick which disguised the chaos and lack of control which characterized l’Indochine Française. The Hanoi Exhibition was the ﬁnal great act of Paul Doumer’s solidiﬁcation of French rule in Indo-China. The exhibition can only be understood in the context of the recent history of Indo-China and especially of Hanoi. Doumer’s tenure as Gouveneur-Général d’Indochine, 1897–1902, marked an important transition in the colony’s history. He attempted to forge a united and coherent political and economic entity out of the ﬁve French possessions in Indo-China.3 Via massive public works and administrative reforms, the grandeur of Doumer’s vision would take Indo-China from wild-west style chaos to a peaceful and prosperous future. Two elements were central to his plan: road and railway building and administrative centralization. The symbolic and geographical cornerstone to his two–pronged approach was his new imperial city, Hanoi. At the core of Doumer’s decision to make Hanoi his capital and to move the administrative heart of Indo-China away from Saigon was his desire to have a blank slate upon which to work.4 Saigon was captive to entrenched local ﬁnancial interests hostile to the new GovernorGeneral’s schemes. By making his capital in the recently paciﬁed north, Doumer’s Hanoi would be a peaceful and calm Versailles to the corrupt and decadent Paris–Saigon to the south. Saigon also suffered from too many existing structures, some of which, such as the Hôtel de Ville, were in terrible taste. Hanoi, on the other hand, was, from the colonizer’s point of view, a relatively undeveloped city. In Doumer’s words, Hanoi was a city yet to be built. During his reign, Doumer gave Hanoi the look that it maintains to this day.5 He extended the city’s grid of streets to the south and to the

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west. He expanded the urban infrastructure’s lighting, water and sewer systems.6 He blessed the city with numerous impressive state buildings including the Palais du Gouveneur Général, the University of Hanoi, the medical school and the train station. He also built pavements and planted trees to give the European quarter its famous charm.7 His greatest monument, the nearly two kilometre bridge over the Red River, was the culmination of his efforts and vision. Symbolizing French technological skill and economic drive, the bridge linked Hanoi by rail to the port of Haiphong and to South China which greatly facilitated France’s role in the Asian opium trade, as the product could travel from the ﬁelds of Yunnan through Tonkin, and off to the markets of Shanghai.8 At least on paper, Hanoi became the hub of Doumer’s rail and road network for all of Indo-China.9 Yet the bridge reveals the hubris, irrationality and self-delusions of French rule in South-East Asia. Despite the bridge’s impressive length and height, it was dysfunctionally narrow, allowing space for only one set of rails and limited foot trafﬁc. As one critical observer remarked: ‘If one did not believe in the future of Hanoi, it was useless; if one did believe in the future of Hanoi, it was insufﬁcient.’10 The gigantic structure was Paul Doumer’s signature on the city and bore the name le Pont Doumer throughout the colonial period. Once his piece of art was completed, Doumer decided to put it on display. Following the examples of Paris and Cairo, he staged an exposition in the newly renovated city. This called for the construction of an exhibition hall. Construction of the enormous hall began in 1901 and ﬁnished rather quickly the following year. The political/racial economy of labour in the colonies can explain the speed of its completion. Manual labour was plentiful and cheap in the colony. Wage labour supplied by non-whites was a bargain. In Indo-Chinese piastres, indigenous women were paid 14–16 cents for an eight-hour day of hauling materials, and semi-skilled men earned between 20 and 35 cents, with a few earning as much as 50 cents, for a day’s work. By contrast, the lowest paid European brought in four piastres per day.11 If a builder found these prices too steep, he could appeal to the colonial administration to use penal labour. The yoked prisoner hard at work in the tropical heat became a commonplace sight as the new capital grew.12 State-sponsored projects could also call upon the Vietnamese to work off their newly imposed tax burdens via corvée labour. The conditions under which the Vietnamese worked were difﬁcult and they were often vulnerable to abusive and violent employers.13 Despite the impressive speed with which the colossal structures were built, the

184 L’ Exposition de Hanoi, 1902–3

quality of work was often rather poor and failed to meet the rigorous demands of the Tonkinese climate. The Palais Central of the exhibition suffered serious damage to its foundation after a typhoon struck Hanoi on 7 June 1903. An ofﬁcial investigation blamed the destruction, which cost 16,000 francs in repairs, upon poor workmanship and inferior building materials.14 Thus, despite the apparently solidity and grand scale of the architectural monuments to French colonial rule, Doumer literally built the entire enterprise upon shaky ground. Hanoi also lay upon an unstable political terrain. Tonkin was the last area of Indo-China to be paciﬁed by the French conquerors. In fact, when the entire history of the French presence in Tonkin is considered, the true extent of this paciﬁcation appears questionable. The monthly reports from the Résident Superieur du Tonkin to the GouveneurGénéral d’Indochine for the year 1902 reveal that a variety of serious problems plagued the region. These ranged from simple banditry to mobile piracy and from semi-organized tax revolts (including violent attacks on tax collectors) to the various poorly understood conspiracies of Chinese secret societies.15 La vie indochinoise, a Hanoi periodical, regularly lampooned the region’s dangers. A cartoon entitled ‘Pays paciﬁé’ depicted colonials as needing suits of armour to venture into the countryside. Another cartoon showed soldiers seeking the safety of Hanoi and read, ‘the city of Hanoi can be considered as shelter from all danger’.16 The case of De Tham, the pirate-cum-nationalist hero, is a notorious example of the imperfect paciﬁcation of Tonkin. His freedom of action and movement, going so far as to kidnap French ofﬁcials sent to track him down, illustrates the chaos of the region.17 Hanoi, Doumer’s imperial capital, stood in contrast to the rest of Tonkin. The city was policed, protected and guarded. Hanoi was an island of safety in a hostile sea. Other than the Hanoi–Haiphong transit, Doumer could not guarantee safe travel for Europeans going to the Exposition. Another concern was the health of visitors. The climate of South-East Asia is an ideal incubator for a variety of illnesses and parasites. Cholera, for example, regularly passed through Tonkin and had taken numerous lives during the conquest and paciﬁcation of the region.18 It was one of the central tenets of French colonial ideology that the construction of the empire led to the spread of healthier conditions. In particular, the French saw colonial urbanism as a weapon in the ﬁght against tropical illnesses. In the empire, the process of city building and the construction of quartiers européens, by deﬁnition, meant sanitization. In the colonial mentality, cities were a refuge from microscopic, as well as human sized, threats. Medical experts of the time claimed a

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direct link between heat and health. Saigon’s extreme temperatures threatened the European body while Hanoi’s cool winters made it a safer and healthier city. Doumer’s Exposition conveyed Hanoi as a hygienic triumph in the annals of French science. Ironically, the Exhibition itself created a medical crisis. With arrival of numerous people and cargo from around the world, it was inevitable that some illness would arrive in Hanoi. Apparently, rats carrying ﬂeas infected with the bubonic plague were among some of the uninvited guests.19 The rats escaped into the newly-created sewers of the European quarter causing a small outbreak of the disease, which spread through Hanoi and Tonkin in the following months.20 Considering the problems that beset the region, it was only natural that Hanoi would be the site for Doumer’s big show, the Exhibition. Hanoi, with its newly constructed European quarter, was the only place in Indo-China that was under Doumer’s full control. His local enemies dominated Saigon and the rest of Tonkin was too dangerous for white people to travel. Yet Doumer was not just putting Hanoi on display; he wanted to show off all of his new Indo-China. But how does one give a tour of a region that cannot be entered? By means of the exhibition, obviously. If visitors to Indo-China could not taken be taken around the colony and shown the various points of interest, the various points of interest would be taken to them. Thus, the Hanoi Exposition served the ironic function of recreating the colonies within the safety of the city. Throughout their entire voyage in the East, these colonial pilgrims, many guided by organized tours, remained shielded from the world in which they were travelling.21 Contact with the natives was kept to a minimum as the travellers moved through a very European social space within the Asian geographic space. Arriving by steamship in Haiphong, after having passed through Hong Kong or Saigon, they took the train or a local steamer up the river to Hanoi. Once in Hanoi they stayed in the comfort and safety of the shady treelined streets of the white quarter, only a few blocks from le Palais de l’Exposition. After travelling half way around the world, the visitors stayed in a very French city where they went to very French buildings in order to see the very non-French things of the colonial world. The most important mission of the Hanoi Exposition was to convince the visitors and, via publicity, the home population and certain Parisian ﬁnanciers that the vast sums of public and private money expended on l’Indochine française were justiﬁed.22 Doumer wanted the exhibition to communicate the potential wealth offered to France by the colonization of Indo-China. By displaying various agricultural

186 L’ Exposition de Hanoi, 1902–3

products and local handicrafts, the Hanoi Exposition constructed IndoChina as a land of seemingly limitless wealth which could be easily and rapidly exploited by France. Products were organized by region, with special signiﬁcance going to the Protectorate of Tonkin. The organization of the displays stressed the raw materials which could be grown or mined in Indo-China. The Service Géologique and the Service des Forêts, both captive to commercial interests, reinforced the idea of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian land as simply an exploitable resource for France. With little in the way of an anthropological or ethnographic presentation, the human element was only considered in terms of a cheap labour supply for the manufacturing sector.23 The Hanoi Exposition commodiﬁed both the land and people of IndoChina, and this commodiﬁcation was an essential component of French colonial ideology. The Exposition Métropolitaine, which represented France, stressed French industry and the synergistic relationship between l’hexagone and French South-East Asia. The ‘galerie des machines’ and ‘exposition d’automobiles’ showed French technological achievements on a grand scale.24 The contrast between French industry and native handicrafts underlined French superiority. It was a stated goal that the ‘interesting comparisons’ between ‘Asian methods of work (Annamites, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Malaysian, etc.) and European methods of labour’ would teach the native population something of French methods of production; this lesson could only be to their beneﬁt.25 The metropolitan exhibit’s other goal was to incite desire in the colony for French industrial products. The organizers hoped to transform the IndoChinese masses into loyal consumers by demonstrating the quality of French goods.26 The development of industrial consumerism was a crucial cultural component of colonial economic expansion. The goal of incorporating Indo-China into France’s economic system was part of the Exposition’s larger pan-colonial dream. The organizers gave space to numerous other French possessions (including Madagascar, Tunisia, Algeria, Réunion, New Caledonia, Pondicherry and Djibouti) to present themselves. While Madagascar, like Indo-China a new and promising French territory, staged an impressive display, the other colonies generally had a poor and disorganized showing.27 None the less, the message was clear: France was building a transcontinental political, economic and cultural system. According to the propagandists, membership in this system, the empire, would beneﬁt both colonizer and colonized. The displays thus cast the expansion of France’s markets and suppliers in a positive light.

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The regional value of the new Indo-Chinese possessions, especially Tonkin, was not lost on the visitors to the Exhibition. Many saw the real economic signiﬁcance of Indo-China in the river and rail access to inland South China via the Red River valley. The Yunnan–Hanoi line gave France rapid and reliable transport into a region rich in silk, opium and other products. This sino-El Dorado was present at the Exposition in the form of numerous displays of the products China had to offer the world. While France could not directly colonize this region, control of this back door allowed it to exert a regional inﬂuence. We must consider Doumer’s railroad building and the importance placed upon his new capital in the north-east of Indo-China in the context of the zero-sum game that was European competition in China. Even if the Yunnan connection was not of immediate value, it blocked British, German and Russian expansion into the area. France had scented its territory. Far from being absent, such geopolitical concerns were an omnipresent sub-text of the Hanoi Exposition. France’s colonial mission in Asia was a direct extension of its drive to maintain world power status. Clearly behind its two traditional rivals, Britain and Germany, in industrial development and production, proponents of empire held that France could ﬁnd success only in overseas expansion. This line of argument also soothed patriots bitter after the humiliating loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco–Prussian War. Despite some concern in Paris and Hanoi,28 the organizers invited other colonial powers to participate in the Exposition de Hanoi. A number of regional colonies responded. While Australia, the Straits Settlements, the Dutch Indies, the Philippines and Singapore sent a variety of ethnographic and commercial items, the small area the organizers gave to them and the chaos in which they were displayed suggests that their inclusion was merely a token gesture.29 The presence of the other colonial powers provided a background of colonial competition and transcolonial commerce. The international pavilion was also designed to draw ofﬁcial visitors from rival colonial powers to Hanoi.30 By attending, they sanctioned and legitimized French control of Indo-China as well as the work of Paul Doumer. Another aspect of the Exhibition de Hanoi was truly international. An array of scholars came to Hanoi in 1902 and 1903 as experts on the colonized world. Associated with the main event, the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient held its ﬁrst International Congress of Far Eastern Studies on the ﬁrst weekend of December 1902. The conference drew Orientalists from France, Britain, Germany, the USA, Italy, Japan,

188 L’ Exposition de Hanoi, 1902–3

Scandinavia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.31 The congress celebrated western learning about the ‘East’. Such a ritual was essential to the creation of colonial knowledge as discussed by Edward Said.32 While several Vietnamese scholars submitted papers, their work consisted only of translation and not interpretation. Furthermore, they were not in attendance at the conference, their work being read by a stand-in.33 At the conference, the colonizer possessed all intellectual agency. The scholars deemed the colonized unﬁt to understand (and thus control) the world around them. The white man was the colonial expert who saved the old, traditional and valuable culture of the East from the current state of decline and decadence. The Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient’s display at the Exposition de Hanoi expressed this intellectual process. The school put on display a large sample of its pan-Asian art collection. In a narrow hall, the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient presented pieces from such diverse cultures as Cambodia, Vietnam, China, India, Ceylon and Tibet. The Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient played its role as a collection of experts who had mastered Asian civilization by organizing, naming and describing these artefacts. The school was most proud of its work in preservation. Arguing that these treasures would be lost if not kept under the watchful eye and protective hand of the white expert, the school saw itself as on an archaeological rescue mission. Here we see some of the most striking machinations of the colonial mind at work. Deeming the natives too childish to understand the value of lost civilizations such as the Cham or Khmer, the European is compelled to step in and save humanity’s cultural patrimony. The ‘white man’s burden’ lies in his connection with earlier great civilizations and his duty to protect them from the barbarians. It is sufﬁciently ironic that the colonizers saw it as necessary to save the symbols of the very societies they were destroying. Yet farce became tragedy when the typhoon of 7 June 1903 hit Hanoi. The storm blew the iron doors off the Palais d’Exhibition, damaging and destroying numerous pieces.34 Despite this disaster, the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient continued in its role as colonial expert and self-appointed guardian of native culture throughout French rule in Asia. Thus, from a variety of perspectives, we have seen several of the diverse processes at work at the Exposition de Hanoi. Both an expression of ideology and propaganda, the event was an important moment in the implementation and consolidation of colonial rule in Indo-China. Paul Doumer went to great lengths to use the exhibition to present an image of Hanoi and Indo-China as tranquil and

Michael G. Vann 189

promising French possessions, yet a closer examination of the event reveals that the city was almost a Potemkinville. Doumer’s orderly, safe and regulated colony was a mere façade hiding a chaotic and dangerous situation. Furthermore, the reality of Indo-China’s racial political-economy makes a mockery of France’s civilizing mission in the colonies. The Exposition de Hanoi illustrates the importance of illusion and bluff in French imperial rule. Notes and References 1 Catherine Hödeir, Sylvain Leprun and Michel Pierre, ‘Les expositions coloniales’ in Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Laurent Gervereau (eds), Images et Colonies: Iconographie et propagande coloniale sur l’Afrique française de 1880 à 1962 (Paris: BDIC, 1993), pp.129–39; Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp.51–97; Catherine Hödeir, ‘Etre ‘indigène’ aux Exposition: Paris 1931 et Paris 1937’, Joël Dauphiné, ‘Les Canaques et l’Exposition Coloniale de 1931’, Patrick Boulanger, ‘Des danseuses cambodgiens aux cavaliers algériens, visions d’Empire: les afﬁches des Expositions coloniales de Marseille (1906–1922)’, in N. Bancel, P. Blanchard, S. Blanchoin, G. Boëtsch and H. Gerbeau (eds), L’autre et Nous: ‘Scènes et Types’ (Paris: ACHAC, 1995), pp.157–70. 2 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). 3 Cochin-China, Annam, Tonkin, Laos and Cambodia. I leave out Quang Tchéou Wan as it continued to be an all but forgotten backwater. 4 Paul Doumer, Indochine Française (Souvenirs): Nouvelle Édition (Paris: Librarie Vuibert, 1930), p.140. 5 Hanoi’s colonial skyline is presently threatened by the global forces of postCommunist open-door modernization. When I lived in the city in early 1997, it seemed as if the transformation was measurable on a daily scale. Some voices have been raised against the rapid changes. See the work of the Friends of Hanoi, a non-governmental organization advocating more responsible growth. 6 Hanoi National Archives, Mairie de Hanoï (MDH), dossier 38: Note sur le développement de la Ville de Hanoi du 1er Janvier 1902 au 30 Juin 1907 (1907); CAOM, Gouveneur Général d’Indochine (GGI) dossier 6.329: Primes pour les construction de maisons en briques (Octobre 8 1901); René Théry, L’Indochine Française (Paris: Les Editions Pittoresque, 1931), pp.82–4; M.C. Rodreiguez, Les enjeux de la vie municipale. à travers l’exemple de Saïgon, Cholon, Hanoï, Phnom Penh et Vientiane (Fin XIXème–1930) (Mémoire de D.E.A., Institut d’histoire des pays d’Outre-Mer, University of Provence Aix-Marseille I, Novembre 1993), pp.134–42. 7 CAOM, Indochine Ancien Fonds, carton 9, dossier A 20 (50): ‘Rapport périodique sur la situation intérieure de l’Indo-Chine par GGI’ (11 March 1901). 8 Chantal Descours-Gatin, Quand l’opium ﬁnançait la colonisation en Indochine: L’élaboration de la régie générale de l’opium (1860 à 1914) (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1992), pp.141–52, 181–238.

190 L’ Exposition de Hanoi, 1902–3 9 David Deltesta, Paint the Trains Red: Labor, Nationalism, and the Railroads in French Colonial Vietnam (PhD dissertation in History, University of California at Davis, 1999). 10 Brieux, Voyage aux Indes et en Indo-Chine: Simples Notes d’un Touriste (Paris: Librarie Ch. Delagrave, 1910), p.37. 11 Darndenne, Labouche and Desbois, Construction des chemins de fer: Lignes Hanoi–Vinh, Hanoi–Haiphong, Hanoi–Vietri. Infrastructure et bâtiments. Devis et cahier des charges (Hanoi: Schneider, 1899). 12 HNA, MdH, dossier 3943: ‘Emploi de la main d’oeuvre pénale’ (1888–1899), and dossier 3945: ‘Emploie de la main d’oeuvre pénale’ (1898–1905); Joleaud Barrol, La Colonisation française au Tonkin et en Annam (Paris: Plon, 1899), p.163, E. Brousmiche, Etude sur la création d’un jardin d’acclimatation au Tonkin (Haiphong: Schneider, 1890), p.12, and La vie Indochinoise, no. 1 (21 November 1896). 13 CAOM, GGI dossier 6465: ‘Incident entre l’indigène Dô-van-Tiên, entrepreneur des remblais de l’Exposition et MM. Balliste et Dufour, entrepreneurs des remblais de la gare de Hanoi’ (1901). 14 CAOM, GGI dossier 6469: ‘Malfaçons constatées dans les fondations du Palais Central de l’Exposition de Hanoi’ (1903). 15 CAOM, GGI dossier 64173: ‘Tonkin 1902’: ‘RST à GGI, Rapport politique mois de Juillet et Août, 1902’ and ‘RST à GGI, Rapport politique Septembre et Octobre 1902’. 16 La vie Indochinoise, no. 57 (8 January 1898) and no. 61 (12 February 1898). 17 Trois Margouillants Tonkinois, ‘Hanoi-sur-scène: Revue locale en trois actes et un prologue’ (Hanoi: Impriméne de l’Avenir du Tonkin, 1912); GGI 19211: ‘Réunion publique tenue à Hanoï (Hôtel Métropole) le 6 juillet, 1909’ (1909); GGI 64179: ‘Tonkin 1908’ (1908), and GGI 64187: ‘Tonkin 1913’ (1913). 18 CAOM, GGI 13011: ‘Rapport du Consul à Hanoï’ (1879); Dr H. Bey, Le Tonkin: Contribution à la géographie médicale (Paris: Octave Dion, 1888), pp.117–56; L. Kreitmann, Le Service du Génie au Tonkin sous l’Administration de la Marine (Paris: Librarie Militaire Berger-Levraut, 1889); CAOM, GGI 64164: ‘Tonkin 1891’ (1891); ‘Hygiène d’Hanoi’, L’Indo-Chine Française, vol. 1, no. 114 (4 June 1896); Dr Grall, Pathologie exotique: Indo-Chine, Etudes statistiques et cliniques (Saigon: Imprimérie coloniale, 1900); Dr Gaide and Bodet, Le Choléra en Indochine (Hanoi: IDEO, 1930). 19 CAOM, GGI, dossier 6675: ‘Destruction des animaux, Hanoi-Ville’ (1902); CAOM, RST, dossier 34580: ‘Santé Publique. Mesures à prendre contre la peste et le choléra’ (1903); Dr V. Roufﬁandis, ‘La peste bubonic au Tonkin’, Annales d’Hygiène et de Médicine Coloniale, vol. VIII (1905), pp.609–30; Dr Ortholan, ‘La peste en Indo-Chine. (Historique)’, Annales d’Hygiène et de Médicine Coloniale, vol. XI (1908), pp.633–8. 20 HNA, MdH, dossier 38: ‘Note sur le développement de la Ville de Hanoi du 1er Janvier 1902 au 30 Juin 1907’, CAOM, RST dossier 34580: ‘Santé Publique. Mesures à prendre contre la peste et le choléra’ (1903); Gaide and Bodet, La Peste en Indochine (Hanoi: IDEO, 1930) 21 ‘L’Exposition de Hanoï en 1902’ in Les Actualités Diplomatiques et Coloniales, special edition, Sept. 1902, pp.10–11.

Michael G. Vann 191 22 Alfred Cunningham, The French in Tonkin and South China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Daily Press, 1902), p.87; Paul Bourgeois and G.-Roger Sandoz, Exposition d’Hanoï, 1902–1903: Rapport Général (Paris: Comité français des expositions à l’étranger, 1903); ‘Liste des Récompenses décernées par le jury de l’Exposition de Hanoi, 1902–1903’, Journal Ofﬁciel de l’Indochine Française (annexe), 9 March 1903. 23 ‘Mission à l’Exposition de Hanoi et en Extrême-Orient: Rapport Général’, Journal Ofﬁciel de Madagascar et Dépendances, special edition, 10 December 1903, pp.31–5, 40–63. 24 Ibid., pp.13–15. 25 ‘L’Exposition de Hanoï en 1902’, Les Actualités Diplomatiques et Coloniales, special edition, September 1902, pp.9–10. 26 Ibid., p.10. 27 ‘Mission à l’Exposition de Hanoi’, pp.8–12. 28 ‘L’Exposition de Hanoï en 1902’, p.20. 29 ‘Mission à l’Exposition de Hanoi’, pp.65–9. 30 ‘Les artistes à l’Exposition de Hanoï: Projets de M. Marx’, La revue d’Asie, 15 November 1901, p.13. 31 Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, Prémier congrès international des études d’Extrême-Orient: Hanoi (1902), Compte rendu analytique des séances (Hanoi: Schneider, 1903), pp.6–12. 32 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 33 Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, Prémier congrès international, pp.80–3, 119–21. 34 Henri Parmentier, Guide au musée de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (Hanoi: IDEO, 1915), p.6.

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Journals Asie du Sud-Est et Monde Insulindien, Paris, 25: 1–4, 1984 American Historical Review, 98: 4, October 1993 Annales d’Hygiène et de Médicine Coloniale, vol. VIII, 1905 Annales d’Hygiène et de Médicine Coloniale, vol. 11, 1908 Cambridge Opera Journal, 2, no.3, 1990 Cambridge Opera Journal, 3, no.3, 1991 Cambridge Opera Journal, 11, no.1, 1999 Cinema Journal, 37, no. 1, 1997 Cultural Values, 2: 4, October 1998 Documents, 1, 1930 Documents, 3, June 1929 Documents, 4, September 1929 Documents, 5, October 1929 Documents, 6, 1929 Ethnologie française, 18:2, April–June 1988 Femmes médecins, 203–11, June 1969 French Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 5, June 1991 French Cultural Studies, vi, February 1995 French Cultural Studies, vii, 1996 French History, vol. 13, no. 4, December 1999 Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 16: 2–3, 1996 History Today, 50:2, February 2000 Journal Ofﬁciel de l’Indochine Française, 9 March 1903 Journal Ofﬁciel de Madagascar et Dépendances, numéro special, 10 December 1903 La revue d’Asie, 15 November 1901 La vie Indochinoise, no. 57, 8 January 1898, and no. 61, 12 Febuary 1898 Le Devoir des femmes, 8, 15 February, 1936 Le Devoir des femmes, 8, 15 May, 1936 Les Actualités Diplomatiques et Coloniales, numéro special, September 1902 Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 68, 31 August 1939 Music Quarterly, lxii, 1976 Oxford Literary Review, vol. 9, nos 1–2, 1987 Pages Indochinoises, no.5, 185–7, May 1924 Pages Indochinoises, no. 6, 227–9, June 1924 Parallax, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998 Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 8: 3, 1992 Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques, économiques et politiques, 11.1, March 1974 Sociological Quarterly, 36: 3, Summer 1995 Studies in French Cinema, 1: 2, 2001 Viet-Nam Forum, 16, Yale University Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1997 Women’s Studies International Forum, 13, 1990

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Index Abbas, F. 19 administrative centralization 182 advertising 156 al Afghani, J. al-Din 18 Africa 19, 30, 60, 115 africaine, L’ 115, 122 Afrique noire 116 Aida 113 Aile de fue, L’ 173 Album de chansons arabes, mauresques et kabyles 115 alcoholism 43, 46, 174 Aldrich, R. 156 Alger 115 Algeria 2, 3, 11, 12, 16, 19 invasion of vii, 6–7, 9 musical exoticism 115, 116, 117, 119 National Liberation Front 19 portrayed in ﬁlm 30 surrealism, colonialism and photography 59 Ali, T. 124 Aline, reine de Golconde 123 Altbach, P. 141 Ame de la Brousse, L’ 171–2, 176 Anderson, B. 138 Annam 116 anonymity 46 Anti-Colonial Exhibition 61–8 anti-colonialism 19, 57, 59, 60, 64, 66, 67, 68 Appel du silence, L’ 37 Arabs 13 Aragon, L. 63–4 art 15, 156 assimilation 150–1, 153–4, 155, 157 Auslander, L. 166–7, 169 aventurier, L’ 115 Babinski, J. 47 Bacouya School, Bourail

79

Baker, J. 74 ballet 114 ‘Ballet blanc et noir: racial and cultural identity during International Colonial Exhibition 103–12 ballet as a symbol 109–10 Central Africa 105–7 colonial ‘union’ 108–9 Bandera, La 31, 34–5, 36, 38 Barthes, R. 49 base materialism 76, 77, 82, 83 base matter 78, 82–3, 84 Bataille, G. 73, 74, 75, 76, 77–8, 82, 83–5 Bate, D. 57–70, 71 Baycroft, T. 148–60 Benali, A. 29 Benjamin, R. 6 Benoit, P. 155 Berbers 13 Berlioz, H. 113–14, 118, 121, 123, 125 Bert, P. 151 Berthelot, M. 151 Berton, H. 123 Bertrand, L. 155 Bizet, G. 123 Black Birds 71, 73–4, 75–6, 77–8, 81–2, 84–5 ‘Bloc noir’ 106 Blois, Y.-A. 78 Blond, G. 43 Boieldieu, L. 115 Bonheur des dames, Au 168, 172 Bosc, Inspector 92 Bourgault-Ducoudray, L. 124 Boyce, D. G. 149 ‘Boycott the Colonial Exposition’ 65 Braque, G. 15 Brazza, P. 11 Breton, A. 15, 58–60, 64, 67, 71 204

Index 205

Britain vii, 4, 6, 19, 132, 149 Indian food 91, 97 and Indo-China 187 musical exoticism 117 surrealism, colonialism and photography 57 women as coloniales 174 Broadway Melody 79, 83, 84 Bugeaud, T. 11 camaraderie 46 Cambodia 132, 137, 138 Cameroon viii, 64 Camus, A. 155 Canaques de Kroua, Koua-oua 80 Canard enchaîné, Le 41, 62 caravane du Caire, La 118, 122 Caribbean 60 Carles, P. 85 Carlton Tiller Girls 105 Catherine 96 Catholic Church 4, 11, 37, 72, 152 Célarié, H. 166 Céline, L.-F. 16 censorship 45 Central Africa 105–7 Centurions, Les 51 Césaire, A. 19 Chad 104 Challaye, F. 132 Chansons arabe 115 Charles X 6 Chenet, Ch. 164 Chevalier, M. 77 China 100, 120, 121, 138, 142, 187 Chinese restaurants 97–8 Chivas-Baron, C. 163, 164, 168–71, 176 Christ 4 Christian-Jaque 37 Christianity 2, 4, 6, 7 Cinéma colonial au Maghreb, Le 29 Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism 28 ‘Civilisation’ 74, 75

civilization 71–3 civilizing mission 10–11 class divisions 31, 33–4, 152 classical music 113 Clemenceau, G. 152 Cochin-China 115 Code de l’Instruction publique 135–6 Colin, A. 118 Colonial Cinema and Imperial France 29–30 Colonial Exhibitions 1906 6, 7 1907 76 1920 6 1922 61, 76, 91, 95, 97, 181 1927 16 1931 1–2, 3, 10, 15, 16–18, 96, 157, 164–5, 181 Documents 71, 72, 76 colonialism (1870–1940) 10–18 Combes, E. 151 Comintern 63, 64 Commission de lettrés 136 commodiﬁcation 186 Communards 82 Communist Party 18, 63, 64, 67, 71 Comolli, J.-L. 85 Congo 62 Constitution 157 construction 183–4 consumerism 166–8, 172 convicts 82 Cooper, N. 131–47 Cooper, T. 113–27 Coubertin, P. de 105 Crisp, C. 31–2 cubism 15 cultural identity 149–50 cultural practices 154–5 Dalayrac, N. 123 Daniel, S. 115 Daudet, A. 15 David, F. 117, 118, 119, 123 De Gaulle, C. 19 de la Borde, J. B. 120, 121 De Tham 184

206 Index

Debussy, C. 124 decolonization 18–20, 157 Delacroix, E. 6–7, 15, 16 Delayen, Lt. Col. 106 Delibe, L. 115, 123 department store 167–8 Déroulède, P. 10, 152 Derrida, J. 20 désert, Le 117–19 Désholme, R. 174 d’Esme, J. 171 D’Esparbés, G. 42, 43 Devoir des femmes, Le 164 di Scalea, Prince L. 1 Dictionnaire de musique 121 Dine, P. 51 discipline 46–7 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality 121 d’Ivoi, P. 155 Documents 71–88 civilization 71–3 photographs 77–85 text 73–7 domestic sphere/objects and home 166–7, 169, 175–6 Doumer, P. 105, 182–4, 185–7, 188–9 Doumergue, G. 1, 61 du Vaure, Inspector 92–3 Durras, M. 155 duty 144–5 Duvivier, J. 16, 33, 34 Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient 164, 187–8 Ecole Supérieure d’Education Physique 105–6, 107, 108 economics 10, 103 education 10, 103 education in Indo-China 131–47 autrefois/maintenant: rewriting history 141–3 chefs indigènes 133–4 Code de l’Instruction publique 135–6 Commission de lettrés 136 duty, loyalty and submission 144–5

French inﬂuence 137–41 Indochine française 137–9, 143 Egypt 4, 9, 116, 117, 119, 124 Egyptian Campaign 118 Egyptian Expedition 5–6 Eluard, P. 64, 67 Engels, F. 9 Enlightenment 4, 20, 72, 134, 149, 150, 155, 166 entertainment 103 Escofﬁer, A. 94–5, 97, 100 Essai sur la musique 120 Etats généraux du féminism 163, 164–5 Ethiopian crisis 41 Etudient noir, L’ 60 Europe 3, 4, 5, 73, 161, 187 musical exoticism 116, 117, 120, 121, 123 surrealism, colonialism and photography 58, 59, 60 Evans, D. 71–88 Evans, M. 1–23, 72 Ezra, E. 28, 103 famine (1937) 12 ‘fanciful empire, the: French feature ﬁlms and the colonies in the 1930s’ 27–8 Fanon, F. 19–20 Felski, R. 166, 167–8 Femme blanche au Congo, La 170 ‘Femme et la politique indigèné, La’ 164 Femme française aux colonies, La 164, 168–9, 170, 172, 175 Fenerols, G. E.-R. de 173–5 Fernand Cortez 122, 123 Fernandel (Fernand Joseph Deseté) 44 Ferry, J. 10, 12, 136, 149, 151 ﬁlms 16, 43, 79, 83–4, 156 First World War 2, 15, 71 Flaubert, G. 15 Folies-Bergére 76 forced labour 14 Ford, C. 154 Foreign Legion 41 popular myth 42–4

Index 207

Un de la Légion 44–52 invisible rebels 47–9 pro-legion text 45–7 salopards, anxiety and ambivalence 49–52 Foucault, M. 9, 20 Fourier, J. B. J. 5 Fox Movietone Follies 84 France et Algérie 115 France hors de France, La 170 Frasseto, M. 96, 98 Free French 18 Free jazz Black power 85 ‘Freedom is a Vietnamese Word’ 59 Fréhel 43 French Equatorial Africa 104, 106 ‘Frenchness’ 169, 172, 174, 175–6 Freud, S. 75 Fromentin, E. 7 Future of an Illusion, The 75 Gabin, J. 16, 34–5, 36, 38 Gasparin, Comtesse de 119 Gauguin, P. 116 ‘Gender and Imperialism: Mapping the Connections’ 161 Gender of Modernity, The 166 Genre, Myth and Convention in the French Cinema 31 geopolitical concerns 187 Germany 10, 18, 41, 72, 117, 149, 152, 167, 187 Gershwin, G. 74 Gildea, R. 157 Girardet, R. 41 Great Depression 12, 16 Grétry, A. 118, 122 Gréville, E. 28 Groslier, G. 169 Grounod, C. 115 Ha, M.-P. 161–80 Hale, D. S. 103–12 Hanoi Exhibition 181–91 administrative centralization 182

commodiﬁcation 186 construction 183–4 Ecole Française d’ExtrêmeOrient 187–8 geopolitical concerns 187 health and illnesses 184–5 infrastructure 183 road and railway building 182, 183, 187 Hardy, G. 164 harem 117 Harris, W. 51 Hayward, S. 50–1 health 184–5 Heart of Darkness 173, 175 Heurtaud-Wright, M.-H. 41–53 Hitler, A. 41 Hobsbawm, E. 3 Hobson, J. vii Hodeir, C. 103 Hollywood Revue 84 Hommes sans nom, Les 43–4 Horne, J. 162–3 Humanité, L’ 41, 62 Hungarian uprising 59 Hussein, K. 6 Illustration, L’ 17, 62, 91, 96 imperialism 5, 7, 12, 18, 19 Documents 73, 85 images 149, 152, 155 musical exoticism 113, 120 women as coloniales 161 Indes Galantes, Les 122 India 93, 100, 174 Indo-China 10, 59, 116 women as coloniales 162, 164, 165, 166, 173, 174 see also education in IndoChina; Hanoi Exhibition; Vietnam Indochine 156 industrialization 4, 5, 14 infrastructure 183 integration 150–1 intellectual culture 19 International Colonial Exposition 163 intuitive epoch 58

208 Index

Islam/Muslims 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 13–14, 18–19, 20 insurrection (1871) 11 Ismail, K. 9 Isouard, N. 123 Italy 93, 116, 117 Ivory Coast 14, 116 Japan 116, 120 Jaque, C. 44–52 Jardin d’Acclimatation 76 Jay, M. 173, 174, 175 jazz 71, 77 Jews 13 July Revolution 6 Kabbani, R. 8 Kabyles 13 Kanaks 82, 83, 84 Karpelès, S. 163, 164 Kelly, G. 141 King and I, The 120 knowledge, acquisition of Koechlin, C. 124 Koulouf 123 Kulthum, U. 124 Kurella, A. 63

3

Lame, Col. 106 land possession 12 Laos 132, 137, 138 Lartéguy, J. 51 Lavisse, E. 138 Le Huu Khoa 99 Le Pen, J.-M. 20 Le Sueur, J.-F. 123 League Against Illiteracy 106 League of Anti-Imperialism 63, 64, 67 Lebanon viii Lebovics, H. 103, 135 Lebrun, S. 103 Left/Leftists 41, 59, 72, 73, 152 Legey, F. 165 Légitime défense 60 Leiris, M. 60, 74 Lenin, V. I. vii LePlay, F. 162 Leslie, L. 73

Leuba, J. 137 Lévi-Strauss, C. 120 Lieris, M. 73, 75, 82, 83–4 Lieux de Mémoire, Les 157 Lippacher, C. 108 literacy 15 literature 16, 155–6 Locret-Le Bayon, S. 165, 173, 174, 175 Lotar, E. 78, 82 Loti, P. 15, 116, 120, 155 loyalty 46, 144–5 Lyautey, L.-H. 14–15, 16–18, 30, 103, 104–5, 109 MacKenzie, J. 103 Macmillan, M. 174 Madagascar 116, 163, 165 Madame Chrysanthème 116 Mangin, C. 107 Mariette, A. 9 Marlow 175 Marquet, J. 155 Marx, K. 9, 66 Maspero, Mme 163 Matisse, H. 7 Maurel, Dr 92 Médécin turc, Le 123 Medjé 115 Messager, A. 108, 116 Messiaen, O. 124 Meyerbeer, G. 115, 122 Midgley, C. 161 ‘Milieu colonial’ Le’ 164 Mille, P. 155 Miller, M. 167 Ministry of the Colonies 75 Ministry of War 105 misogyny 172 Mistinguett (Jeanna Marce Bouryaois) 77 modernity 166 moral laxity 174–5 Mornay, Comte de 7 Morocco 7, 14–15, 16 musical exoticism 116 portrayed in ﬁlm 27, 30, 35 Rif wars 62 war, signiﬁcance of 58–60

Index 209

Morton, P. 103 Mozart, W. A. 114 Muhamad ‘Abdu 18 Muhammad 4 Musée Social 162 musical exoticism 113–27 Africa 115 Aida 113 Algeria 115 ballet 114 costume designs 123 desert, Le 117–20 gamelan sonorities 124 harem 117 historical hierarchy 120 imagination 116–17 imperialism 115 instrumentation 123 musical devices 122–3 ‘noble savage’ 117, 121 opera 113–15, 117 opéra bouffe 114 opéra comique 114 ‘otherness’ 117 racial issues 120–1 spectacles 122 Troyens, Les 113–14, 121, 123 ‘Turkish’ opera 122 Universal Exhibitions 123–4 Muslims see Islam/Muslims Mussolini, B. 41 Mussorgski, M. 74 Nana 168 Napoleon 5, 11, 115, 118 National Front 20 national identity 149–50, 154 National Opera Theatre 104 Négritude movement 19 Néouné, Lt 106 New Caledonia 81, 82, 84 ‘noble savage’ 117, 121 Nora, P. 157 Norindr, P. 104 North Africa 3, 12, 20, 29, 32, 165 Notre Indochine 1936–1947 173 Occidental music 114, 117 ode-symphonie 117

OEuvre, L’ 41 Offenbach, J. 115 opera 113, 114, 115, 117 opéra-bouffe 114 opéra-comique 114 opium addiction 174 Orient 4, 9, 15, 16, 114, 117, 119, 124 orientalism 8, 9–10, 113, 118 O’Shaughnessy, M. 27–40 ‘otherness’ 117 Our Dancing Daughters 83–4 Outrey, E. 94 overview of culture and empire 1–23 Algeria 6–7, 9, 11–12 art 15 Colonial Exhibition 1–2, 3, 6, 16–18 colonialism (1870–1940) 10–18 decolonization and postcolonial culture 18–20 Delacroix, E. 7–8 Egyptian Expedition 5–6 Enlightenment 4 ﬁlms 16 ﬁrst phase (1798–1871) 3 forced labour 14 fourth phase (1947–1962) 3 imperialism 2, 10, 19 industrialization 4–5 Islam/Muslims 4, 11–12, 13, 18–19, 20 Kabyles 13 land possession 12 literacy 15 literature 16 Orientalism 8–9, 10 racism 20 second phase (1871–1918) 3 songs 16 third phase (1919–1947) 3 Pagnol, M. 155 Pagodes 124 Palestine 4 Paris Soir 62 Past in French History, The pay packages 165–6

157

210 Index

Pépé-le-Moko 31, 33–4, 35–7, 38–9 Persia 4, 116, 121 Pétain, Marshal 156 Peters, E. 91–102 photography 77–85, 156 see also surrealism, colonialism and photography Piaf, E. 16, 43 Picasso, P. 15 Pierre, M. 103 Piolet, J. B. 170 Pirates du rail, Les 37–8 ‘Places of Pilgrimage: Hollywood’ 84 Poirier, L. 37, 155 political culture 19 political issues 184 politics 113 Polynesia 163 Poniatowsi, Prince J. 115 Popular Front 41–2 Porch, D. 42 positivism 10 post-colonial culture 18–20 Pouvourville, A. de 96 power 5, 58, 61 prestige 10 Princesse Tam-Tam 28 propaganda: ﬁlms (1930s) 27–40 Appel du silence, L’ 37 Bandera, La 31, 34–5, 36, 38 Cinéma coloniale au Maghreb, Le 29 Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism 28 Colonial Cinema and Imperial France 29–30 ‘fanciful empire, the’ 27–8 Genre, Myth and Convention in the French Cinema 31–2 Pépé-le-Moko 31, 33–4, 35–7, 38–9 Pirates du rail, Les 37–8 Princesse Tam-Tam 28 prophète, Le 122 Public Instruction Ofﬁce 137 publications 43

Pugno, R.

108

Querillac, Mme

163, 165

racial issues 20, 28, 30, 120–1 Rambaud, A. 150 Rameau, J.-P. 122 Rapsodie cambodgienne 124 rationalism 11 reasoning epoch 58 Regismanset, C. 96, 97, 100 Renan, E. 13 Renoir, A. 7 representations of France 148–60 art 155–6 association 151–2 Catholic Church 152–3 colonialism, failure of 157 Constitution 157 cultural practices 154–5 decolonization 157–8 Enlightenment 149–50, 155 ﬁlms 156 integration and assimilation 149–51, 152, 153–4, 155, 157 literature 155–6 photography 156 Réunion 163 Revue Nègre 74 Reynaud, P. 1, 103, 109–10 Right/Rightists 41, 152 Rivet, P. 74–5 Rivière, G. H. 74 road and railway building 182, 183–4, 187 Rodgers, R. 120 ‘Rôle de la femme françasie aux colonies, Le’ 164 Rothschild, R. de 104 Rouget, F. (aka Rouvray) 105, 107 Rousseau, J.-J. 121 Sadoul, G. 63 Sahara 27 Said, E. 4–5, 6, 8, 9, 118, 121, 122, 123, 188 Culture and Imperialism vii–viii, 3, 113–14, 124 Orientalism vii, 3, 32, 124

Index 211

Sarraut, A. 133 Satan 4 Schaeffner, A. 73, 74, 75, 82 Schöpﬂin, G. 41 science 4, 10 Sellier, P. 49 Senghor, L. 19 separatism 30 Sherzer, D. 28, 29 Siam 138 Simple histoire des Gaudraix, La 170–1, 173, 176 ‘Slaughterhouse’ 78 Slavin, D. 29–30, 31, 44 socializing 173–4 Somaliland 115 songs 16, 43–4 Sorlin, P. 27–8, 29, 39 Souchère, Mmm de la 166 South Paciﬁc 116 South-East Asia 132, 138 Soviet Union 64, 187 Spain 4, 35 Civil War 41 Spontini, G. 122, 123 Staats, L. 108 Structural Anthropology 120 submission 144–5 sub-Saharan Africa 104, 107, 110–11 surrealism 18, 71 surrealism, colonialism and photography 57–70 Anti-Colonial Exhibition 61–8 Colonial Exhibition 61–3 Moroccan war, signiﬁcance of 58–60 photography 60–1 Syria viii, 4 Tahiti 116 Tanguy, Y. 64 Taste and Power 166 technology 4 text 73–7 Thirion, A. 63 Togo viii Tongking 116

tradition/modernity binarism 162, 166 Transitional Centre 106, 107 Trocadéro (Museum of Ethnography) 74 Tropiques 60 Troyens, Les 113, 121, 123 ‘Troyens, Les, and the Obligation to Empire’ 113 Trung Nguyen Quan 98 ‘Truth of the Colonies, The’ 63–4, 65, 66 Tunisia 2, 10, 62, 115, 116, 117 Turkey 116, 122 United States 19, 57, 73, 76, 77, 85, 121 Universal Exhibitions 76, 123, 124 Vallières, J. de 43 Vann, M. G. 181–91 Vasco da Gama 115 Verdi, G. 9, 113, 114 Verne, J. 15 Versailles, Treaty of 72 Vichy regime 18 vie indochinoise, La 184 Vietnam 132, 135, 137, 139, 142, 143 Vietnamese food in France 91–102 Chinese restaurants 97–8 curry 91, 97 French soldiers’ dislike of rice 93–6 restaurants and illegal activities 98–9 workers eating French food 92–3 villages nègres 76 Vincendeau, G. 34 violence 46 Vu 62 waged work 14 Wagner, R. 114 Wall Street Crash 16 Wargnier, R. 155

212 Index

Weber, L. 114 West Africa 19, 20, 163 womanizing 46 women as coloniales 161–80 civilizing mission 168–9 colonial service and pay 165–6 consumerism and the department store 166–8, 171–2 domestic realm/home 162, 166–7, 175–6 Enlightenment 166 ‘Frenchness’ 169–70, 172, 175 maternalism 161, 165–6

moral laxity 174–5 ‘recovery’ 161 ‘recuperative works’ 161 socializing 173–4 tradition/modernity binarism 162, 166 ‘white women’s burden’ 161, 164 Women of the Raj 174 World Fairs 6 Yen Bai revolts Young, R. 20 Zola, E.

62

155, 168, 172