具体描述
This book addresses a central but often ignored question in the history of modern France and modern colonialism: How did the Third Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values, allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal of a “civilizing” ideology with distinct racist overtones? By focusing on a particular group of colonial officials in a specific setting—the governors general of French West Africa from 1895 to 1930—the author argues that the ideal of a special civilizing mission had a decisive impact on colonial policymaking and on the evolution of modern French republicanism generally.
French ideas of civilization—simultaneously republican, racist, and modern—encouraged the governors general in the 1890’s to attack such “feudal” African institutions as aristocratic rule and slavery in ways that referred back to France’s own experience of revolutionary change. Ironically, local administrators in the 1920’s also invoked these same ideas to justify such reactionary policies as the reintroduction of forced labor, arguing that coercion, which inculcated a work ethic in the “lazy” African, legitimized his loss of freedom. By constantly invoking the ideas of “civilization,” colonial policy makers in Dakar and Paris managed to obscure the fundamental contradictions between “the rights of man” guaranteed in a republican democracy and the forcible acquisition of an empire that violates those rights.
In probing the “republican” dimension of French colonization in West Africa, this book also sheds new light on the evolution of the Third Republic between 1895 and 1930. One of the author’s principal arguments is that the idea of a civilized mission underwent dramatic changes, due to ideological, political, and economic transformations occurring simultaneously in France and its colonies. For example, revolts in West Africa as well as a more conservative climate in the metropole after World War I produced in the governors general a new respect for “feudal” chiefs, whom the French once despised but now reinstated as a means of control. This discovery of an African “tradition” in turn reinforced a reassertion of traditional values in France as the Third Republic struggled to recapture the world it had “lost” at Verdun.
作者简介
目录信息
Introduction 1
1 The Setting: The Idea of the Civilizing Mission in 1895 and the Creation of the Government General 11
2 Public Works and Public Health: Civilization, Technology, and Science (1902-1914) 38
3 Forging the Republican Sujet: Schools, Courts, and the Attack on Slavery (1902-1908) 73
4 "En faire des hommes": William Ponty and the Pursuit of Moral Progress (1908-1914) 107
5 Revolt and Reaction: World War I and Its Consequences (1914-1930) 142
6 "Democracy" Reinvented: Civilization Through Association (1914-1930) 174
7 Civilization Through Coercion: Human Mise en Valeur in the 1920's 212
Conclusion 246
Notes 259
Bibliography 327
Index 355
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读后感
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我被作者叙事的节奏感深深吸引住了。他似乎掌握了一种奇特的魔法，能够将那些看似零散的史料碎片，编织成一张宏大而又精致的叙事之网。那种娓娓道来的语调，既保持了学术的严谨性，又充满了文学的感染力。读到某些关键转折点时，情节的推进简直让人屏息凝神，仿佛亲眼目睹了历史洪流的巨大漩涡。叙述者的高超技巧在于，他总能在宏观的历史脉络和微观的个体命运之间自由切换，让冰冷的概念变得有血有肉，让遥远的事件仿佛近在眼前。这种叙事张弛有度的把控能力，让原本可能枯燥的理论探讨，读起来却像是一部扣人心弦的史诗。我发现自己常常因为情节的跌宕起伏而忘了时间，沉浸在他所构建的世界里无法自拔。
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