Civilizing mission

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The Civilization mission (French: Mission civilisatrice) was the underlying principle of French colonial rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was influential in the French colonies of Algeria, French West Africa, and Indochina.

The French felt it was their duty to bring Western civilization to supposedly backwards peoples. Rather than merely govern colonial peoples, the French would attempt to Westernize them in accordance with a colonial ideology known as "assimilation". The civilizing mission was initially championed by French Republican political leader Jules Ferry. Equal rights and citizenship were extended to those peoples who adopted French culture, including primary use of the French language in their lives, wearing Western clothes, and conversion to Christianity. Despite granting French citizenship to the residents of the "Four Communes" (Dakar, Saint-Louis, Gorée, and Rufisque), most West Africans did not adopt French culture or Christianity. Following World War I, "association" replaced assimilation as the fundamental tenet of the colonial relationships. It was thought that French culture might exist in association with indigenous societies and that these autonmous colonies might freely associate with France in the French Union.

[edit] See also

Blaise Diagne
Colonial Cambodia
Decolonisation
French colonial empires
French Equatorial Africa
French rule in Algeria
French Indochina
February 23, 2005 French law on colonialism (repealed start of 2006)
French West Africa
History of Senegal
La Francophonie

[edit] References

Robert Aldrich. Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion. Palgrave MacMillan (1996) ISBN 0312160003.
Alice L. Conklin. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa 1895-1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press (1998), ISBN 9780804729994.
Patrick Manning. Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 1880-1995. Cambridge University Press (1998) ISBN 0521642558.
Jean Suret-Canale. Afrique Noire: l'Ere Coloniale (Editions Sociales, Paris, 1971); Eng. translation, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900 1945. (New York, 1971).
Crawford Young. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. Yale University Press (1994) ISBN 0300068794