Colonial Policy - Early 19th Century Expansion
By the middle of the 19th Century England was the great colonial power of the world, and some complacently assumed from the qualities of the English-speaking people that it was foreordained that such should be her destiny. It was by no means clear that this was a necessary result. A century and a half earlier it seemed possible and even probable that India and a great part of America would be under French control.
Had Pitts, instead of Pompadours, ruled France in the eighteenth century, had another Richelieu arisen a hundred years later to support the genius of such men as Dupleix and Montcalm, French governors might have administered the affairs of Hindustan, the lilies of France might float at Montreal, and the French tongue be the only one heard in Florida and Louisiana and the vast territories west of the Mississippi. Of all the evils that France suffered from the century of misrule and imbecile rule prior to the Revolution, none was more serious than the overthrow of her hopes of colonial development from the Bay of Bengal to the waters of the great lakes.
About 1750 France bade fair to be the great colonial power of the world. The century-long duel with England was then half over. "New France" was written on the map across the valley of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, and the richest lands of the Orient seemed within the French grasp. Fifty years later saw France stripped of all possessions outside Europe, except a few unimportant islands in the Indian Ocean and in the Antilles and some small ports in India.
But in the nineteenth century France became again a colonial power. France, which was engaged with the problem of its reorganization after Napoleon, of the evacuation of its territory, of the cultivation of a soil that had been so long left fallow, gave but little thought to its possessions beyond the seas; and it appears that the government of the Restoration, which was so thoroughly devoted to reestablishing commercial intercourse with other nations, to encouraging the progress of agriculture by a series of preservative measures, to developing manufactures by suitable enactments of protection, did not think seriously of extending this parental care to the colonies that still remained, or of uniting them by mutual interests to the mother country.
Undoubtedly, under the influence of ministers like Chabrol and Hyde de Neuville, the government of the Restoration wished to preserve, and even to organize politically, French colonies, or at any rate what was left of them; but the decrees of February 9, 1827 and of September 21, 1828, take into account only political organization, and do not deal at all with the commercial or agricultural interests of the various establishments. The Restoration simply took charge of the arrangement and organization of the colonies that remained in French hands or were restored to France by treaty. In 1830, the government of Charles X took advantage of an insult by the Dey of Algiers to a French consul to seize territory in North Africa.
However, there were some vague but evident signs of a veering of public opinion, and the French government was gradually forced, in spite of itself, to increase its colonial domain. It may be asserted that the unreasonable hatred which the French then felt against Great Britain considerably promoted this evolution. It was, indeed, in order to emphasize its opposition to English interference that, in 1842, France extended its protectorate over the islands of Oceanica. It was as an answer to this occupation of Australia and its tremendous development that Dupetit-Thouars established French missionaries in New Caledonia. At the same time, some persistent promoters of colonial expansion assured to France, on the shores of the Soudan, possession of Grand Bassa and of Butu (1842), both banks of the Garroway River, and the posts of Assini and Dabu (1843). On the other hand, in 1839, Major Bouet-Willaumez acquired the left bank of the Gaboon and a regular treaty, in 1844, (April 1) made the acquisition permanent.
There were, moreover, at that time, insignificant places that gave no indication of the importance which they were to acquire later. So, in 1848, on the part of France, there is scarcely anything but absolute indifference. And yet its older colonies had, during this period, as a result of the suppression of the slave trade and the incessant changes in the sugar taxes, experienced serious crises, which to some of them, especially Guadeloupe and Martinique, were well-nigh death blows.
In the middle of the century this foothold had grown, through savage and bloody wars, into complete military occupancy of Algeria; and in the early years of the Third Kepublic civil rule was introduced. The conquest of Algeria, the necessity of which seemed evident later, was an accident rather than the result of careful political reasoning. The expedition to Algiers was not so much for the purpose of ensuring to France control over the two shores of the Western Mediterranean, as to humor by a foreign war the patriotic feeling of the French people and to ward off an inevitable revolution. The proof of this is that, once in control of Algiers, the government of Louis-Philippe, which held the same views on colonial policy as did that of Charles X., deliberated a long time before deciding to retain the conquered territory, and only in 1834 decided to organize the "Possessions of French North Africa." And this hesitation, which seemed so strange to later patriots, was shared and encouraged by the Chambers and the whole of France.
In the early years of the 19th Century French traders, missionaries, diplomats, and naval personnel came in increasing numbers to Vietnam. French diplomats in China began to express the view that France was falling behind the rest of Europe in gaining a foothold in Asia. Commanders of a French naval squadron, permanently deployed in the South China Sea after 1841, also began to agitate for a stronger role in protecting the lives and interests of the missionaries. Given tacit approval by Paris, naval intervention grew steadily. In 1847 two French warships bombarded Tourane (Da Nang), destroying five Vietnamese ships and killing an estimated 10,000 Vietnamese. The purpose of the attack was to gain the release of a missionary, who had, in fact, already been released. In the following decade, persecution of missionaries continued under Emperor Tu Duc, who came to the throne in 1848. While the missionaries stepped up pressure on the government of Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III), which was sympathetic to their cause, a Commission on Cochin-china made the convincing argument that France risked becoming a second-class power by not intervening.
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