Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

But then, with the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, the French entered on a new bout of overseas imperialism. [151]

Their motives were mixed. In one important case, France acted like ancient Rome, when in 1830 an attempt to rid the Mediterranean of pirates ended up with the full-scale invasion of Algeria, detaching what had been a province of the Ottoman empire. Still in accord with the Roman model, this was followed by an influx of settlers ( colōnī for the Romans, colons for the French), in fairly large numbers: there were already 110,000 of them in 1847, and their numbers rose to just under a million in the next century. [620]But this was an exceptional case, even though it loomed largest in French conceptions of their new empire. In many other cases, French action was led by missionary compassion or zeal, as with the protectorates claimed in the Indian Ocean ( Comores , 1840) and in the Pacific (in les īCles de la Société , 1843, Tahiti, 1846, Nouvelle-Calédonie , 1853). Similar motives, at some level, seem to have led to the expansion of French control from its ancient base in Senegal in the fifty years from 1817, training native infantry ( tirailleurs ) and priests and then taking action against malaria, and building schools and roads. It was persecution of Christian missions that gave France its justification for invading Cochin-China in 1859: by 1887 a French Union indochinoise controlled the whole of what is now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

But these colonial acquisitions came at a time when Europeans were beginning to be highly impressed by their own technical superiority over people anywhere else in the world. Once again France began to look for explanations of its success: characteristically, it came to see itself as a power that could make a difference to the world for the better, spreading not just Catholic Christianity and respect for law, but also freemasonry, Saint-Simonian industrial policy, and in short la civilisation franαaise. It was easy to combine this with an ambition to do well while doing good, and so there were few reservations felt when France, and Belgium too, joined in ’la course aux colonies’ , what Britain knew as ‘the scramble for Africa’.

The French and the British were the big winners in the sheer scale of territory acquired: both empires grew massively in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The French expanded from their existing possessions in Algeria and Senegal, but they also established new bridgeheads in Côte d’Ivoire (1842) and Gabon (1843). First, from 1876 to 1885, Afrique-Équatoriale Franαaise (French Equatorial Africa) was carved out from the Gabon shore, including what were to become Gabon, Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad; then from 1883 to 1894 Afrique-Occidentale Française (French West Africa) was taken from the west and south-west, comprising the modern Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger and Benin.

And the French were not the only francophones in the race. In 1877-9, Belgium’s King Léopold, adopting as his personal agent the British explorer Sir Henry Stanley, had brazenly claimed the area now known as the Congo, a claim accepted by the other European powers in 1885. Then, in 1896, the French went on to depose the queen of Madagascar, justifying their action by the immediate abolition of slavery in her old domains. And on top of it all, France was also claiming protectorates among Algeria’s neighbours along the Mediterranean coast, Tunisia in 1881, and Morocco in 1912.

By 1913, French was the language of the rulers of a good third of Africa’s land area, from the Atlas mountains on the north Atlantic to the Great Lakes of the Rift Valley. It was an expansion to compare with the adventures of Alexander, or the great Muslim jihad of the seventh century: fifty years earlier, the language had not been heard in Africa outside Algeria and Senegal.

In many ways, the French exerted themselves to be worthy of their sudden new domains, bringing roads, railways and the telegraph, scientific assaults on malaria and other tropical diseases, as well as the Christian faith, the French language, and—to a few privileged souls—an appreciation of Cartesian rationalism. They do seem to have succeeded in transmitting to their subjects a sense that the only practicable route to power and independence lay through mastery of their own skills: this kind of persuasion was one of their ideals, what they called rayonnement , ‘beaming’. Far more than other European empires, they struggled with the question of what their true interest in these subjects was: exploitation, assimilation, evangelisation, education or simple political association. Was it la gloire that France was seeking, or sa mission civilisatrice? Taking their own culture so seriously, the French could not see these domains as anything other than parts of France: la civilisation française was indivisible. Everywhere French was used for administration, and instituted as the language of instruction in secondary and higher education, even where—as in Indo-China and North Africa—there was an ancient tradition of literacy in some other language. [152]Colonials could in most places aspire to full French citizenship.

But, except in Algeria—where the native, Muslim, population were far less ready to see their Christian conquerors as role models—the French were always too thin on the ground truly to propagate their own society. There were few solid economic reasons to bring them out to these countries, or to keep them there, and rather soon it showed. In contrast to what happened in the other European empires, the typical Frenchman abroad remained a military man, a doctor, a missionary or a teacher. Napoleon, the pre-eminent French soldier, had famously slighted England as ’une nation de petits commerαants’ —a nation of shopkeepers—but it was precisely the lack of such people in the French colonies which demonstrated how unstable they were. Unlike Portuguese, Spanish, British or even Dutch possessions, there was no part of the French empire which attracted mass immigration. And the French government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not able or willing, as it had been in the seventeenth, to finance any emigration. Consequently, French remained, everywhere but Algeria, a language of the governing elite, even while—at least in black Africa—the rest of the population might be heartily aspiring to its values.

The number of colonies under French-speaking administration grew after the end of the First World War, when the German and Ottoman possessions were parcelled out. Cameroon and Togo came to France, and Rwanda and Burundi to Belgium. Syria and Lebanon were also placed under a French mandate. But almost all were granted independence in the fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The Near Eastern Arab countries were established as independent republics as part of the immediate post-war settlement. Indo-China and North Africa, as well as Madagascar and the Comoros, had to win their freedom by force of arms; in sub-Saharan Africa, by and large they were granted it at their earnest entreaty in 1960. The tiny nations of the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America are still, in effect, part of the empire: but they are now part of the French Union: according to the constitution adopted by the referendum of 27 October 1946,

la France forme avec les peuples d’ outre-mer une Union fondée sur l’ égalité des droits et des devoirs, sans distinction de race ni de religion.

France forms with the overseas peoples a Union founded on equality of rights and duties, without distinction of race nor religion.