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Second French Colonial Empire - 1830-1965

The Second French Colonial Empire began in 1830 and lasted until the 1960s. The establishment of the French Protectorate over Morocco in 1912 was the culmination of eighty years of effort in North Africa. The French African empire, with the exception of Somaliland and Madagascar, was made up of contiguous territories, extending over a quarter of the continent, with numerous ports on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In this empire was included the Sahara Desert, a large part of the Sudan, the entire valley of the Senegal, two thirds of the Niger, and a portion of the Congo valley. All the colonizing European states, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain were somewhere France's neighbors. By her little colony in Somaliland, French territory touched Abyssinia in the east. Liberia was a neighbor in the west. In Madagascar France held the one large African island.

During the nineteenth century France gained a fresh colonial Empire, and by the time of the Great War her colonial domain had a total area of over five million square miles, an area only exceeded by that of the British Empire. The population of these overseas domains numbered about 50 millions. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the population of the British Crown Colonies and Dependencies, administered directly by the Colonial Office, was then just over 50 millions. This figure did not, of course, include the population of India (320 millions) or that of the great self-governing dominions.

Since 1870 there had been a continuous stream of explorers and adventurers. From the late 'seventies down to 1914 the exploration of Africa and especially of the Sahara and the Niger country almost became a favorite and a subsidised form of national sport. Most of the French Generals who became famous in the World War first won their spurs in Africa-Joffre, Gallieni, Marchand, Gouraud, Mangin,* Lyautey. Those daring pioneers have been generously assisted by the French Government. Algeria, Morocco, Senegambia, French Nigeria, Madagascar, had been used by the Mother Country as the chosen training ground for the French army. Native troops have been disciplined. Military highways and railways have been built. Aviation routes had been established.

Unfortunately, French capital persistently refused to invest in African enterprise. Thousands of millions of French money had been lent to foreign governments. But French money had not fertilised the colonies. There had been no big French chartered companies such as the British Niger Company or the South African or the Rhodesian companies. French colonisation has belied the dictum that trade followed the flag. It was a peculiar feature of French history which had often been noted that whereas there were always found in France daring individuals who were prepared to risk their lives, the French peasant or French middle-class cannot be persuaded to risk their savings. The French citizen was passionately patriotic. But French capital, unlike British capital, knew no country.

The most unpromising feature of the French-African possessions was that they contained very few French settlers. It used to be said before the Great War that Germany had colonists, but had no colonies; that France had colonies, but no colonists; while Great Britain alone had both colonies and colonists. That epigram remained true. The French possessions were only dependencies, they were not real colonies. In Algeria there were more Spanish colonists in the province of Oran than there were French and in Tunis there were more Italians. Indeed the economist Paul Leroy Beaulieu, the greatest French authority on colonial problems, described Tunis as an Italian colony administered by the French Government.

Instead of French colonists migrating to French Africa, millions of foreigners were filling the gaps created by the Great War. Whereas in the 1920s the total foreign population of Great Britain was only 270,000, the alien population of France was over 3,000,000. For every one alien in Great Britain, there were twelve aliens in France, or rather, taking the exact proportion to the population, there were fourteen to one.

The French African empire started on the Mediterranean under Louis Philippe, was spread to West Africa under Napoleon III, and across the Sahara and through the Sudan to Central Africa under the Third Republic. Algeria was the nucleus on the Mediterranean, and Senegal on the Atlantic. In the early 1860s, France prepared to subjugate Tunisia and Egypt, where it received a concession for the construction of the Suez Canal. In 1881, France established its protectorate over Tunisia and in 1883 over Niger. The colony of French Sudan was established in 1892. On June 14, 1898, France and Britain signed the Franco-British Convention, which delimited French and British possessions in West Africa. By the end of the 19th century, France had consolidated its possessions around Lake Chad, including Algeria, West Africa and the Congo Basin. It also formed the colony of French Coast of Somalia. In 1896, the island of Madagascar and its dependencies were recognised as a French colony.

Its rivalry with Germany over Morocco resulted in the establishment of the French protectorate with British support in 1912, although the final conquest of Moroccan territories was not completed until 1934. The French established a particularly discriminatory infrastructure there, treating Moroccans as second-class citizens. Land was much more expensive for the natives than for French settlers, and natives were not even allowed to buy land from the French. The colony was also obligated to import all goods exclusively from France. It had been a curious combination of foresight and luck, the building of this empire, and, as in the case of every other African colony and every other Power, more the latter than the former. Luck deserted the French only twice in all the nineteenth century when they let the British get a foothold in the delta of the Niger, and when they failed to push their expedition into the headwaters of the Nile before Kitchener started to reconquer the Sudan. After the end of the Great War, the French colonial empire expanded at the expense of territories formerly possessed by Germany and the Ottoman Empire. Syria and Lebanon became French mandate territories, while Togo and Cameroon were divided between Britain and France.

In studying the history of French colonial expansion, one was struck with several outstanding facts: the fewness of the men who dreamed dreams and thought the dreams could be realized; the peculiar suitability of Arab and desert warfare to the military genius of the French; the beginning of the solution of administrative problems and the realization of economic return only in the twentieth century. As with the British, generations passed of hit and miss, of blunder and improvisation, before government and people were converted to the wisdom and necessity of a colonial policy through placing before their eyes the goal of financial benefit. British imperialism, as a national and popular program, began with the reconquest of the Sudan and the Boer War. French imperialism, as a national and popular program, began with the humiliation of Fashoda. The new map of Africa was made during the fifteen years preceding the Great War.

The late Europeanization of the Mediterranean was the great enigma of modern history. While remote regions of the globe were being transformed and brought under the agis of European civilization, the Mediterranean remained under the shadow of Islam, a closed sea, whose waters washed nations in the embryo and vast coasts where anarchy had reigned for fifteen centuries since the disappearance of the Roman Empire. France went into Algeria in 1830, and inaugurated the modern era of the Middle Sea, not because of a conviction that the time had come to do away with the pirates of the Barbary Coast, but because of a trivial dispute between the Dey of Algiers and the French Consul over a question of grain! It was an auspicious moment, however. The sea power of the Ottoman Empire had been irrevocably destroyed three years before at the battle of Navarino. Mohammed Ali was severing in Egypt the essential link of the chain that bound Africa to Turkey. Christian civilization was being reestablished in the Hellenic peninsula. Italy was at the threshold of the generation which was to bring national unity. It took almost the entire reign of Louis Philippe to conquer Algeria. The Second Empire, although it made a beginning of West African conquest in Senegal, had no other policy for Africa than the intangible dream of reestablishing an Arab empire. Napoleon's energies were occupied in Turkey, Italy, Syria, and Mexico. France turned to Africa after the disastrous war with Prussia in order to find consolation for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. But there was no certain goal. Energies and money and men were dissipated in Indo-China and Madagascar. Siam received more attention than Algeria. Sentimentalists clung persistently to the hope of "getting back" Egypt. Even the imperialists who had faith and conviction in the colonial future of France groped blindly in the dark. Fashoda was the awakening. This humiliation had to come. For the first time since 1870, France' asked herself, "Quo vadis?" It aroused in the French nation a determination to hold and develop properly the heritage of whose possession the France of slippers and dressing-gown was scarcely aware. It pointed out clearly to the statesmen and empirebuilders of France the one course that would give practical results. There must be complete understanding and cooperation with Great Britain. Hence the agreement of 1899 concerning spheres of influence in the Sudan, and, five years later, the solid, permanent foundation for empire-building in the agreement of May 8, 1904. In the meantime an agreement was signed with Italy providing for the future of Tripoli. These international arrangements assured France a free hand and support in Morocco, sanction of her occupation of Tunis, the territorial changes and economic stipulations necessary for the proper organization and development of her West African and Equatorial African possessions. In return, Egypt was left to the British and Tripoli to the Italians. With aims definitely centered on definitely assured territories, the builders of the colonial empire were able to proceed to administrative organization along lines that would bring financial results. The money needed for economic development could then be solicited and obtained from Parliament and from private capital.

But it would be a mistake to ignore what had been accomplished during the first three decades of the Third Republic. Three achievements prepared the way for the Aladdin's lamp transformation that has been wrought since 1900. One of the "keys to the house" was secured between 1881 and 1883 by the invasion of Tunis and the establishment of a French Protectorate over the territory lying between Algeria and the Turkish vilayet of Tripoli. Intrepid explorers and brilliant soldiers carried the French flag from the Senegal to the Niger, to the coast through Kong and Dahomey, and from Gaboon to the Congo. Most important of all, the conquered of Sedan became the conquerors of Northern Africa through learning how to fight natives with natives and by using native methods.

The French Metropolis had proved an admirable organiser and administrator and civiliser. The French had truly and literally taken up the white man's burden. Like the Romans they were builders of roads and bridges. They cleared forests. They organised schools. They established law and order. The great test of their administration came with the Gret War. It might have been expected that French West Africa and French Northern Africa, which had been so recently pacified, might have taken advantage of the difficulties of the mother country and would have risen against her. But instead of drawing away troops from the mother country, the French-African possessions contributed half a million soldiers. And those African armies proved magnificently loyal and efficient. This military contribution must be looked upon as one of the most remarkable political triumphs which has ever been attained by any colonising power, after so brief a time and under such inauspicious conditions.

But if colonisation meant the settlement of surplus population and the exploiting of the economic resources of a colony, then French colonisation may be said to have been an almost complete failure and hundreds of millions had been sunk in vain in the sands of the Sahara. In a total of more than fifty million Africans, the French numbered about three hundred thousand, i.e., about one-half percent. No large fortunes were being made in French Africa. No large estates were being exploited by Frenchmen. The French colonies, instead of being an asset in a strict commercial sense, were a heavy fiscal and financial liability. The French colonies did not pay and could not be made to pay. The results bore no proportion whatsoever to the enormous expenditure, to the magnificent effort and to the tragic political sacrifices. The results did not justify the controlling influence of the colonies in French foreign policy.

The future of the French-African Empire must have given cause for considerable anxiety to any statesman who was gifted with foresight. The French natives have been given equal political rights with French citizens. They send their own Members to the Central French Parliament. But it seems inevitable that the newly enfranchised Africans will some day want to make use of their rights to secure their autonomy. "Africa for the Africans" was fasty becoming the watchword of native politicians. The French colonial press was filled wtih reportes find that agitators, subsidised from Moscow, were busy in every dependency, rousing Islam, stirring up the natives against the French, and the French against the Italians.

The Second French Colonial Empire therefore seemed to be ordained in the fulness of time to follow the vicissitudes of the two first. The French conquest of Africa, under the Republic, like the previous French conquest of North America under Louis XIII, of India under Louis XV, and of Louisiana under Napoleon, will only have been an interesting political and military experiment. It will have been infinitely costly in blood and treasure. It will have deflected the whole course of French foreign policy. And yet it will not be a permanent achievement. It will be an impressive object lesson illustrating the nemesis of Empire.