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This article addresses the reasons behind the rapid escalation of French security force and vigilante violence employed to suppress the Sétif uprising that broke out in colonial Algeria on VE-Day, 8 May 1945. Recourse to overwhelming military force to put down the uprising illustrated French capacity to terrorize Algerian civilians, but it should not conceal the structural weakness of the colonial state. Political initiative passed inexorably to France's anticolonial opponents, precisely the outcome that state coercion was intended to avoid. Algeria's nationalists may have lost the battle in May 1945, but, thanks to colonial authorities' failings, they were already winning the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the "Pacha Affair," which centered around the journalist reports by André Gide regarding a low-level French colonial administrator Georges Pacha who was charged with overseeing the torture and murder of villagers in his efforts to meet recruitment quotas imposed by the Congo-Océan railroad project which was to link the city of Brazzaville in French Equatorial Africa to a new deep-water port on the Atlantic, a project administered by the French construction company Société de la Construction des Batignolles. The 320 mile railroad began construction in 1921 and was completed in 1934, and was built largely by manual labor under brutal conditions with an estimated 15,000 to 60,000 Africans dying while working on the project.

This article examines the dissimilation of Guadeloupean citizens of color in the early twentieth century and their marginalization within the French republic. Focusing on the "troubles" in Guadeloupe and the scandals surrounding the black deputy Hégésippe Jean Légitimus, the author shows how Guadeloupeans were gradually excluded from full citizenship. These incidents reveal a key moment in the construction of race in the early Third Republic and, above all, the consolidation of an imperial form of republicanism based on difference and political exclusion in the period prior toWorld War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1900 and 1939, the French empire devoted increasing attention to the problems of hunger and famine in the colonies. Influenced by discoveries associated with the emerging science of nutrition and under pressure from international organizations such as the League of Nations, French colonial administrations accepted food security as their most basic responsibility to their territories overseas. French scientists and administrators applied nutritional insights first to individuals in the fight against deficiency disease, then to "races" in an attempt to increase labor productivity, and finally to colonial populations as a whole. But as increasingly sophisticated notions of nutrition and public health influenced colonial administration, it became clear that the lofty promises of nutrition science were empty in a context in which subjects struggled to achieve minimum subsistence. The inability of the French empire to fulfill its responsibilities undermined the ideological justification for colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights a moment in the history of French West Africa when violence was both ubiquitous and forbidden. During the interwar period, French reformers pushed for the elimination of the routine use of violence by colonial administrators. The intervention of activist journalists and human rights groups put pressure on colonial policy makers to finally bring administrative practice in line with imperial rhetoric. Local administrators, however, felt that such meddling interfered with their ability to govern effectively. A case of torture and murder by French functionaries in the Ivory Coast village of Oguiédoumé shows how struggles over antiviolence reform played out from the ground up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the post-World War II history of Algeria between 1945 and 1962, focusing on the colonial administration of France, decolonization, and the Algerian Revolution. It considers the escalation of the Algerian crisis leading up to the late 1950s, the French use of emergency powers, issues of race and ethnicity, rule of law, citizenship, political violence, and nationalism.

This paper delineates the political and aesthetic implications of the formation of West Africa's Historic Museum of Abomey by examining underlying colonial motives, display practices of the museum objects, the altering of architecture and reception by the Fon people. Secularising a once exclusive and religious royal space and the mode of display of the museum artefacts bolstered the colonial agenda of the French West African administration. The Historic Museum of Abomey was created, bolstered, and transformed by colonial public policy. Despite these problematic issues, the Historic Museum of Abomey became an important historic and cultural centre for the people of the colonial Dahomey, today the Republic of Benin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cette recherche analyse les discours qui ont propulsé la mission de Léger-Félicité Sonthonax dans la colonie de Saint-Domingue depuis 1792 à 1794. Cette étude explore la stratégie de l'expédition de Sonthonax et Étienne Polverel, les relations de pouvoir avec les groupes sociaux de la colonie et la causalité de l'abolition de l'esclavage. Cette enquête est en grande partie basé sur des sources primaires disponible dans la Collection Nemours de Histoire haïtienne de la Bibliothèque José M. Lázaro de la Université de Puerto Rico, Campus de Río Piedras; cette collection fournit une sélection varié de documents officiels et proclamations concernant l'expédition de Sonthonax et Polverel. Cette recherche considère aussi plusieurs documents disponibles dans la Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Ces sources primaires permis une rumination centrée sur les idées et les tropes de la politique d'émancipation et sur les relations coloniales qui distinguent cet épisode historique bref mais très influent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the influence of Vichy's National Revolution in the empire by looking at the establishment of the Office de la Famille Française (FFO) in Morocco in 1941. The purpose of the FFO was to develop reforms aimed at assisting French families and increasing the French settler birthrate. The Residency, in consultation with settler familialist organizations, created this administrative body in the hopes that it would encourage French population growth, something they considered to be essential to the preservation of French interests in the protectorate. The FFO dispensed a variety of financial benefits to French families including birth incentives and marriage loans. All French citizens were obligated to join the FFO, thereby making the colony's French children a collective responsibility. Those who lacked sufficient numbers of qualifying French children were required to pay the familial compensation tax to help fund the FFO and in this way support other French families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Compulsory smallpox vaccination was introduced to Algeria by decree on 27 May 1907. After World War I, the combination of public health crises, racialized fears of contagion, and the objective of mise en valeur prompted the colonial state to make Muslim villagers in the communes mixtes a more systematic target of smallpox vaccination. This was achieved in large part thanks to the efforts of Muslim medical auxiliaries. This article reconstructs the kinds of training, labor, and clerical skills embodied in these agents' administration of vaccination. It also examines the accommodation and contestation of their presence by officials, politicians, and villagers. The author argues that the administrative bureaucracy generated by vaccination may have preceded and enabled the expansion of state registration in rural areas during the interwar period, but ultimately was more effective at disciplining the medical auxiliary than it was at controlling villagers or the smallpox virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Postal and Telecommunication administration offers a complex picture of colonial society in Algeria. Men and women, citizens and natives, were employed as mailmen, telephone operators, middle managers or postmasters. This article focuses on the specific position of colonized Algerians employed inside this administration. Addressing the period from the early twentieth century to the Second World War, it highlights how legal barriers and illiteracy narrowed access to public sector jobs and inhibited career advancement. However, professional records found in the Algerian archive centers also reveal how much the sociological backgrounds of these employees varied. The native mailman rarely got a permanent position, his wage was not high, but he could achieve some stability. He was a public figure in urban districts, as well as in remote villages. The article concludes with a detailed analysis of interactions at work and within the colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antibureaucratic attitudes and ideas, distilled in the pejorative and untranslatable term fonctionnarisme, permeated political culture in late nineteenth-century France. Reacting to a rapid development of state employment, critics saw colonial expansion as a spillover effect of metropolitan administrative hypertrophy. Indochina was singled out in particular as a "colony of functionaries," serving more as a job creation program for French "déclassés" than as a beacon of French grandeur. Criticism centered on the filling of government positions through political patronage, a system at which Indochina excelled. The state employee majority among the colony's French population likewise produced political distortions that cemented Indochina's reputation for bureaucratic excess and motivated reform efforts for decades. The well-known ascendancy of association policy in this period, which focused on Indochina, was primarily driven by the conflation of assimilation and direct administration with fonctionnarisme. Antibureaucratic ideology thus came to constitute an influential force shaping French politics in both metropole and empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the history of local professional associations in Morocco under the French Protectorate and focuses on the period of Vichy rule in the colony (1940-1942). It examines the partial application of corporatism in Morocco as Vichy's preferred method of professional organization, which was expected to turn local attention away from a perceived nationalism to a seemingly benign economic activity. By investigating a local corporatist association operating in those years, this paper shows that the corporatist project unwittingly turned into a nationalist one not of its own making. The paper further examines the relationships between economy, colonialism, nationalism, racism, and Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco during the Vichy period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This roundtable essay on decolonization focuses on the civil register created in 1961 and 1962 to register the Jews of the Mzab, Algeria in order to conform to the French Assembly's Law 61-805 of June 1961 to naturalize Jews of the Southern Territories of Algeria as French citizens. The register was created by Jean Moriaz, assistant district commissioner of Ghardaïa, Algeria during the final years of the Algerian War of Independence and extended French citizenship rights to Jews previously categorized as indigènes (indigenous subjects).

This roundtable essay on decolonization focuses on the availability and access to archival source material related to the French colonization of Algeria. It considers competing narratives of how the history sources for the period of 1830 to 1962 became lost or misplaced through theft or destruction. An outline of the public dispute between France and Algeria regarding sources, including during the period of the Algerian Revolution, is presented.

The article presents a study of colonial society in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Martinique which consisted of three legal categories: slaves, free people of color, and whites. It informs that during this period the French colonial administration tried to maintain a hierarchy embodied by the color bar that separated free Black and Whites in order to address concerns about the colonial order.

A microhistorical inquiry into the life of Furcy, a man held in slavery in the French Indian Ocean colony of Île Bourbon (today Réunion), sheds light on shifting French policies and practices regarding race and slavery from the Old Regime to the general emancipation of 1848. The mobility of two enslaved domestic servants, Furcy and his mother Madeleine, who traveled between Bengal, Île Bourbon, Mauritius, and continental France, challenged French and British understandings of who could be legitimately held as slaves. Furcy's tenacious battle to win recognition of his freedom in multiple jurisdictions is a forgotten precursor to many international disputes over the juridical principle of Free Soil in the age of Emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of French Huguenots on St.Christopher's Island in the French West Indies. The author reflects on French colonization in the Caribbean area and the dividing of the island between the French and the English. Emphasis is given to topics such as the administration of governor Philippe de Longvilliers de Poincy and religious intolerance under the monarchy of King Louis XIV.

The distribution of the common law was conditioned by a colonial strategy sensitive to the colonies' level of endowments, exhibiting a more effective implantation of the legal system in initially sparsely populated territories with a temperate climate. This translates into a negative relationship of precolonial population density and settler mortality with legal outcomes for common-law countries. By contrast, the implantation of the French civil law was not systematically influenced by initial conditions, which is reflected in the lack of such a relationship for this legal family. The common law does not generally lead to legal outcomes superior to those provided by the French civil law when precolonial population density and/or settler mortality are high. The form of colonial rule in British colonies is found to mediate between precolonial endowments and postcolonial legal outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the mid-20th century French medical and sociological discourse concerning the consumption of tea by the populations of the French colonies in the Maghreb: Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. It reports that the colonial government of Tunisia formed a committee of experts in the 1920s which created the concept of "teaism," or excessive tea drinking with consequences including poor work performance, and discusses the committee's work in relation to French concepts of racial difference. Topics include the impact of imperialism on medical thought, the introduction of tea as a beverage in the Maghreb region, and the economic interests of French employers in the region.

The French colony of Pondichéry, India, was roiled by religious struggles in the eighteenth century. In 1701-15 colonial French officials repeatedly attempted to restrict the practice of local religion in the town. Local laborers, artisans, and merchants responded with four different work stoppages and threats of abandoning the colony. Again and again local residents emerged from these conflicts with the upper hand, as the strikes resulted in near-complete French capitulation and a removal of the religious restrictions. This study explains these events by demonstrating that the administrators of the French trading company, the Compagnie des Indes, and French Jesuit missionaries could not agree on how to address the workers' demands to practice their religion in the Catholic-ruled town. Fundamental conflicts between company officials and missionaries about the priorities of colonial rule, coupled with a mobile local labor system, allowed native actors a surprising measure of control over the development of this Indian Ocean colony and posed a significant challenge to French authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few years, our understanding of police forces in Africa has increased significantly. Whilst in previous literature the police tended to be presented as a mere instrument in the hands of state elites, recent studies have shown the ability of policemen to defend their group interests. This article analyses a pivotal moment in the history of French West Africa, namely the creation of the Service de Sûreté in the early 1930s. Drawing on archival evidence from Togo, it takes a close look at the shift from military to urban policing, arguing that the bureaucratization of security modified the agency of African policemen. Whereas previously their forms of protest were very much connected with the specific setting of military camps (indiscipline, desertion, rebellion), these now increasingly included written protests within the administration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cut off from the metropole and coerced into trade with Japan, the French administration in Indochina under Governor General Jean Decoux had to find ingenious ways to produce locally what it had been accustomed to importing. Through the creation of a substitution economy, the nurturing of the artisanat, and appeals to Indochinese solidarity, Decoux designed policies to minimize the impact of Indochina's isolation and exalt the benefits of French tutelage, as part of a final effort to convince the peoples of Indochina that French civilization could drive their societies forward -- an approach founded on linearity that in itself reveals much about the colonial mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay considers how kinship played a part in the social and political relationships between French and Tamil inhabitants of the colony of Pondichéry on the Coromandel Coast of India in the eighteenth century. French colonial rule under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes orientales, a French trading company, often considered local families in their decision-making processes. The correspondence of the widow of Guruvappa, a chief commercial broker for the Company, is explored.

This article examines the experiences of immigrants from British and French West African colonies in the Accra lunatic asylum in the first half of the twentieth century. Placing particular emphasis on how immigrants got into and out of the asylum, the article argues that immigrants were marginalized and manipulated by colonial psychiatric institutions to a greater extent than non-migrant colonial subjects in Gold Coast. In making this argument, the article argues for the value of adding colonial origin and subjecthood to the racial and gendered perspectives that have dominated the history of health and medicine in Africa to date. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the putative paradox between the French humanism and its imperial administration of West Africa during the early 20th the century. Particular focus is given to the French applying the principles regarding patriarchy and gender in West Africa. The article often references the book "La Famille en AOF—Condition de la femme," (also referred to as the "Savineau Report") by Denise Savineau. The French's study of West African ethnography is discussed.

The presence of North African colonial migrants during the interwar years spurred the Parisian Prefecture of Police to adopt some elements of colonial administration. From 1925 to approximately 1970, the Parisian police engaged in the specialized surveillance of the North African community. While official North African police services existed only from 1925 to 1945 and again from 1958 to 1962, a durable conception of North Africans as prone to violence and susceptible to anticolonial politics led the police to undertake systematic if at times unofficial surveillance of North Africans for the entire period under study. This colonial perspective on policing became integrated into the general policing of Paris and outlasted colonialism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this case study, the authors explore the relationship between scientific knowledge production and colonial governance within old regime France and its Atlantic colonies through an analysis of the career of Jean-Antoine-Joseph-Charles-Elzéar de Riquety, Governor of Guadeloupe from 1753 to 1755. It is argued that the scientific knowledge promoted by the absolutist French government and its colonial administration undermined imperialism by bringing about criticism of mercantilism and slavery.

This article draws on recent archaeological research on coastal Senegal to examine how the concept of 'vernacular cosmopolitanism' can contribute to scholarship about the construction of cultural hybridity in West Africa during the Atlantic era. It argues that Senegambia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries was a vibrant theater of international exchanges, and that archaeological examinations of these processes can both assist our understanding of regional history and enrich discussions about the African diaspora, diasporic identities, French imperialism, and Atlantic modernity. The study of material experiences can also raise critical questions about our conceptual categories and limits to our understanding of the Atlantic past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the conquest of New France, the British had already built a long tradition of purchasing Aboriginal land. This policy, made official in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, was implemented in an extensive portion of the Canadian territory, but not in the Saint Lawrence Valley, heart of the former French empire in America, and what is now the province of Quebec. The British, followed by the Canadian government, adopted a policy of unilateral land appropriation in that area, dispossessing the Aboriginals without reliance on a treaty system. This particularity of the Indian land policy in Quebec has given rise to divergent interpretations that rest on the same implicit premise that a structuring legal framework existed, which, when reconstituted, gives meaning to history, either by legitimizing the unilateral dispossession process or by stigmatizing it. This article attempts to locate the process of dispossessing Aboriginal land outside the normative framework imposed by the law. The objective is not to identify a standard to explain why the British did not conclude treaties, but rather to follow a process of legal standardization, in which colonial practice is inscribed, through trial and error, detours, shifts in meaning, and improvisations into a legitimizing framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Senegal was unique in French West Africa for the nature and extent of electoral institutions that operated in its colonial towns. In the 1870s, Third Republic France elaborated on earlier short-lived policies by re-establishing local assemblies and a legislative seat for Senegal in Paris. Although histories of modern politics focus on Blaise Diagne's 1914 election to the French National Assembly, a local assembly called the General Council held greater power over economic and political matters affecting the colony between 1870 and 1920. This article reconsiders the history of urban politics in colonial Senegal by examining the ways that the métis (mixed race population) used the General Council as their field of engagement with French officials, sometimes facilitating the consolidation of French rule but at other times contesting colonial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much postcolonial theory assumes a continuity of both behavior and representation between colonial rule and what has succeeded it across sub-Saharan Africa. The maltreatment of political prisoners in Guinea in the wake of its brief invasion by Portuguese troops in November 1970 provides a challenging but ultimately fruitful empirical record against which to test this theory. I use an analytical approach informed by history, law, anthropology, and communications theory to explore continuities between the legal practices of French colonial and contemporary revolutionary regimes, on one hand, and Guinea's pursuit of supposed traitors, on the other. Though there is more discontinuity than direct inheritance in the administration of justice, the article argues that the representation of Guinea's colonial heritage was a central part of how President Sékou Touré legitimized his state and his own rule. I suggest that the colonial legacy operated more as a benchmark of what behavior might be acceptable in a postcolonial revolutionary state such as Guinea than as a linear precedent from French colonial rule to the Guinean revolution. The regime's representation of its colonial legacy also helps to explain the form, medium, and content of the political prisoners' broadcast confessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police surveillance in interwar Dakar, Senegal, was initiated because of anxieties about the influence of international politics in the empire, but surveillance quickly became a phenomenon of urban control. This article analyzes the emergence, implementation, and broader implications of police surveillance to shed light on the way French colonial authorities imagined and attempted to impose order on cities. Surveillance of "suspicious" persons developed primarily in urban areas because the profile of a suspect was shaped by fears of an increasingly cosmopolitan and diverse population in the interwar era. Police tactics were influenced by republican-style methods from the metropole and relied on the legibility of urban space, creating a unique urban surveillance that contrasted with rural methods. Despite this desire for ubiquitous surveillance, some urban spaces escaped the purview of colonial authorities and some individuals evaded state control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1887 to 1946, the administrative apparatus known as the indigénat provided French administrators in New Caledonia with a set of exceptional measures to streamline the governing and summary repression of persons defined as indigènes (‘natives’). This paper examines the place of the indigénat, the role of colonial administrators in defining one or more communities of race and the variable status of the category of indigène in New Caledonia in the period to 1946. Particular consideration is given to the influence (or absence thereof) of the science of race on administrative thinking about native policy in New Caledonia, the distinctions drawn between different categories of indigène, the extent to which cultural and political divisions between the Grande terre (mainland) and the Loyalty Islands were imagined or constructed in racial terms and the situation of métis (‘half-castes’). The paper argues that an incipient definition of the indigène as a person of Melanesian, Polynesian, mixed or Oceanian race must be understood in the context of the development of the indentured labour and immigration regimes (the importation of workers from Asia and other parts of Oceania) as well as the ways in which the indigénat was differently applied and experienced between New Caledonia's mainland and its dependencies (notably the Loyalty Islands), as well as by métis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses a 1763 trading grant offered by French diplomat Jean-Jacques Blaise d'Abbadie to merchants Gilbert-Antoine Maxent and Pierre Laclède Liguest regarding trade with Native Americans living in French colonial holdings in the present-day U.S. The author begins by explaining that no primary document laying out the terms of the grant actually exists. It is also noted that this grant led to an expedition by Maxent and Liguest that ultimately brought about the founding of St. Louis, Missouri. Other topics discussed include colonial French-Native relations, the dissolution of French society in the Louisiana territory, and speculation in the French-Native trade.

After the First World War, many politicians sought, and ultimately failed, to replace universal suffrage with familial suffrage in French elections. This article analyzes how this new effort to think of French citizens in terms of gender and familial identities extended to the empire with the 1922 introduction of familial suffrage in Tunisia. This reform redefined the relationship between French settlers and their government. It also shows that Tunisia, which has thus far been absent from the developing literature on settler citizenship in the empire, represents a particularly compelling case study of the intersection of gender and familial status with definitions of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the legislative debate over the legal status of occupied North Africa during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. Frustrated by government reluctance to resolve the legal irregularity of the occupation, but confident that a resolution was possible, legislative leaders debated the characteristics of social organization entailed in, and guaranteed by, a legal order. The article focuses on the deployment of conflicting facts about social order and the lack of closure in the debate that resulted, as part of a larger effort to rethink the crucial early decades of the French occupation of North Africa. Instead of assessing the origin, aims, and future potential of the occupation from the vantage point of an uncontested definition of the law, the article approaches the occupation of North Africa as the expression of deep conflicts about the relationship between law and social order that defined the metropolitan "social question" during the 1830s and 1840s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De 1916 à 1939, un petit groupe d'intellectuels gabonais organisèrent une cellule de la Ligue des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen, la plus grande organisation e de défense des droits de l'homme en France durant la première moitié du XX siècle. La plupart des historiens considèrent la ligue comme une association qui ne s'intéressait pas aux questions coloniales, mais le comité central de la ligue à Paris soutint le chapitre gabonais de la ligue durant les années 1920. Les ligueurs gabonais critiquèrent les abus et la politique arbitraire des administrateurs au Gabon. Ils se présentaient comme les défenseurs courageux et disciplinés des libertés républicaines. Selon eux, les administrateurs français ne possédaient pas la discipline nécessaire pour maitriser leurs désirs sexuels et leur colère. Des administrateurs répondirent à ces critiques que les ligueurs gabonais n'étaient que des déracinés. La question de la masculinité était un aspect important des conlits entre l'état colonial et les ligueurs. Le chapitre gabonais de la ligue se délita durant les années trente, en raison des privilèges accordés aux métis et des réformes modérées initiées par l'administration français vis-à-vis des élites gabonaises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most striking aspects if the Vietnamese political disorders that erupted in Tonkin and Annam in 1930-31 was how the French colonial authorities represented them. The colonial authorities developed a distinct rhetoric of repression in the blame games that followed the outbreak of the Yen Bay mutiny in February 1930 and in the more protracted unrest associated with the Nghe-Tinh Soviets in Annam. The depiction of concerted political violence as self-interested criminal activity delegitimized its organizers, their motives, and their claims. Pointing to traditions of rural banditry and local particularism, Governor-General Pierre Pasquier's administration insisted to sometimes skeptical officials and parliamentarians in France that the extreme repression meted out by the colonial security forces was effective, appropriate, and popularly understood. In this way Yen Bay's rhetoric of repression drew on an established language of colonial social control to justify a strategy of extreme state violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of reconstruction, sport was a component of education and considered useful to complete the individual's training. Because sport brings people together, it was the ideal instrument to ensure the unity of a country racked by tensions and oppositions. Could not sport help restore the French Union, made vulnerable by the expression of Malagasy nationalism? The first part of this article describes the implementation and organisation of the new sports administration along the values it intended to promote. The second part covers the strategies developed by the colonial administration to regain control over sports structures, in line with the generalisation of the principle of free association in 1946. Thirdly, the paper analyses the revival of a sport policy officially focused on mass sports, but which in fact excluded the most popular activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the issue of colonial borders through a case study of the intra-imperial boundary between Tunisia and Algeria, two territories under French rule between 1881 and the first decade of the twentieth century. The aim here is to understand what was at stake when it came to separating two territories holding different legal status but both administered by the French: Algeria which had officially become a French colony in 1830 and Tunisia which was given Protectorate status in 1880. The paper considers some of the many disputes over the border that took place both in the field and in colonial administrative offices. It also raises the question of the scope of colonial rule by exploring the way the border was never fully determined and was constantly redrawn by the inhabitants of the border regions themselves, who were presented first as tribes, and later, as either Algerian or Tunisian by the French civil and military administrations, and by the political authorities in Algiers, Tunis or Paris. As they all had their own interests in the matter, disputes were common but were also sometimes resolved in unexpected ways. Finally, the paper raises a further issue concerning the question of national identity in the context of the definition of national territories, which reveals the full ambiguity of the concept of identity in the colonial situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the First World War, the discourse and methods used to determine and define boundaries changed radically. In Europe, the territorial agreements of 1919-20 put forward an ideal of territorial homogeneity, a concept based on the ideal correspondence of state, nation and territory. Meanwhile, in Africa, the French colonizers were also reconsidering their spatial arrangements along the same lines. In this context the expertise of the social sciences became crucial in defining territory and therefore in political decision-making. At the same time, prominent representatives of the new colonial sciences were responsible for developing and disseminating the idea of the 'artificiality' of African boundaries. This new generation of experts on French colonization considered the borders of Africa to be scars left behind by the old and arbitrary colonial order, which they wished to see replaced by a more humanistic rule. Their discourses, however, offered a vision of Africa based on the continent's exceptional character. In essence, Africa was considered as a continent defined principally along ethnic territorial lines, a logic excluding any political definition of territory. This discourse contributed to redefining the continent as something radically other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the study of projects conceived to shape colonial space, this article aims to reconsider the motives and means of French colonial expansion in West Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. The Plan Faidherbe, designed by the Governor of Senegal in the 1860s, outlined a plan for eastward development, including a road and rail link between the Senegal and the Niger Rivers (and beyond, between Algeria and Sudan). The implementation of these routes of penetration called for a number of military-led topographic missions. The study of these missions and of the maps that were produced at the time reveal how such projects and their implementation were mediated by both cartographic and field practices. The case of Captain Henry Brosselard (1855-93), General Faidherbe's son-in-law, is an interesting example because of the diversity of the missions he led and the extent of territory which he traversed and mapped. This case also shows how, in the course of a career, an officer could assume several different functions and come to conceive the process of building colonial territory from different perspectives. This paper questions a common view of the military as having a purely strategic vision of space as a field of conquest, a view which reserves a more development-oriented outlook for civil administrators and the business community. Indeed, Brosselard's varied career somewhat blurs the conventional divide between civilians and soldiers, requiring us to reconsider accepted ways of categorising colonial actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1880 and 1900, the conjunction of the development of higher education in France with the renewal of colonial expansion resulted in the creation of the 'colonial sciences'. 'Colonial geography' played a key role in the development of these new disciplines, alongside 'colonial history", 'ethnology', 'colonial economics and legislation' and 'colonial psychology'. This paper considers the social history of this field and of the institutions in which colonial geography was formed. This involves examination of the study of the teaching of 'colonial geography' in the universities and French grandes écoles, the gradual professionalisation of scholarship, and the increase in the number of doctoral theses and book publications, which all serve to demonstrate the vigour of the subdiscipline, leading to the emergence of a veritable research community. Under the Third Republic, 'colonial geography' in the universities was characterised by great diversity, irreducible to a single or homogenous 'colonial discourse'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at French Indochina, metropolitan France, and French West Africa from 1914 through 1946 to illustrate specific ways in which French colonial authority operated across the French empire. We look at how colonized people challenged the complex formal and informal hierarchies of race, class, and gender that French administrators and colonizers sought to impose upon them. We argue that both the French imperial prerogatives and colonized peoples' responses to them are revealed through directly comparing and contrasting various locales across the empire. Our case studies explore interracial families and single white women seeking compensation from the French in Indochina, black men de ning their masculinity, and Africans debating women's suffrage rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]