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Further Reading

French Colonies

Bismarck described the colonial positions of the three great Powers in the epigram, " England has colonies and colonists; Germany has colonists but no colonies; France has colonies but no colonists." This last clause accurately represented the case of France. The French colonies formed the happy hunting grounds of political partisans who successfully competed for the administrative posts in the faroff regions.

Many colonial administrator professed a fierce commitment to republicanism and to reshaping the lives of their colonial subjects consistent with the French republican vision. These administrators saw themselves as children of the Enlightenment, embarked upon a crusade to improve the lives the backward and oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. They were on a mission civilisatrice, a mission to "civilize" their colonial subjects.