History 23/European Studies 23
The French Overseas Empire, 1830-1962
Prof. Kathryn Edwards Tues & Thurs 11:30-12:50
Converse 302
203b Morgan Hall
Office Hours: Tues 2-4 or by appointment
Course Description
The first French empire, which included territory in North America, the Caribbean and India, collapsed due to military defeat at the hands of Britain and others. The conquest of new territories beginning in the early 19th century led to a new empire, one which incorporated culturally, linguistically and politically diverse regions, primarily in Southeast Asia, North and West Africa. France governed through a variety of different regimes: some regions became protectorates, while others were actual colonies. This course will approach the topic of empire from both a chronological and thematic framework. We will begin with an examination of the establishment of French control, as well as the differences in the colonial regimes that were established. We will then discuss the impact of the shift from monarchy and empire in France to the Third Republic in 1871 on colonial policy and practice. From the fourth week on, we will alternate between chronological discussions, such as the role of the colonies in the World Wars and the increasing demands for independence, which resulted in lengthy wars of decolonization, and thematic discussions, such as the culture of empire, concepts of racial difference, colonial medicine, and urban planning.
Course Books
The primary text for the course is Robert Aldrich’s Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London: Macmillan Press, 1996). There are also a series of journal articles and book chapters that are required reading, all of which are available in the course reader or on e-reserves. The two-part course reader is available in the History Department office, 11 Chapin Hall, and the textbook is available for purchase at Amherst Books.
A small number of the readings have some passages in French; translations of these passages will be posted on the course website.
Course Requirements:
We will meet twice a week. Classes will be divided into roughly 40 min of lecture and 35 min of discussion, which will focus heavily, though not exclusively, on the readings. Lectures are intended to provide a basic framework for the course material, but not as a one-sided delivery of information; you are encouraged to ask questions and make comments.
Your attendance and participation are crucial components of your grade and your learning experience. You are expected to notify me ahead of time if you are unable to attend tutorial due to emergency (family, medical, or otherwise).
Attendance and participation: 25%
Response papers (3x2 pages): 15%
Discussion leadership: 5%
Short paper (4-5 pages): 20%
Research paper (8-10 pages): 35%
Response Papers
Students are responsible for writing three 2-page response papers over the course of the semester, each addressing the readings from a single day. The aim is to analyze the documents individually, particularly the arguments of the authors, and to draw out the links between the pieces. It’s up to you when you submit your response papers, although at least one must be submitted by week 4 (February 15-17). Papers must be submitted in class the day that the readings are due, and only one paper is to be submitted per week; each is worth 5%. Late response papers will not be accepted.
Discussion Leadership
You will be responsible for leading part of the discussion session once during the semester. You should come prepared with a list of questions that address the readings for the day. Please send your questions to me by 5pm the day before class so that I can review them and make comments and/or suggestions. You will sign up at the beginning of the term.
Short Paper
You will submit a short paper (4-5 pages) on Tuesday, March 8th. The goal of the short essay is to allow you to engage in greater detail with the course readings and material covered in class (including discussions); you will be given a choice of prompts to which to respond. No outside research is necessary.
Research Paper
The major research paper required for the course is intended to allow you to explore one issue in greater depth. It is to be based on significant research and analysis of primary (where possible) and secondary sources. You are free to choose whatever topic you like, as long as it falls within the parameters of the course; don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like to discuss your topic. You must submit a proposal on Tuesday, March 22nd, though I encourage you to start thinking about a topic earlier. The proposal should include a description of your topic (research question, possible approaches) and a preliminary bibliography of 7-8 sources. You must submit the proposal in order for your research paper to be accepted and graded at the end of the semester. The paper is due on Tuesday, May 3rd.
There will be a late penalty of 3% per day for all written work, including weekends. If your work is late and you wish to submit over the weekend, you may submit an email copy of the assignment, but it must be followed by a hard copy on the following Monday. Assignments that are more than 5 days late will receive a zero.
Film Screenings
Three films will be screened for this course, and we will decide in the second week whether you would prefer to watch them as a group outside of class time, or whether you would prefer to screen them on your own time.
The following films will be shown this term; the dates are listed in the schedule:
Black and White in Colour (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1976; La Victoire en chantant)
Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1992)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Weekly Reading Schedule
Week 1
Jan 25 ~ Introduction
Jan 27 ~ Understanding Modern France and a Short History of the First Empire
Robert Aldrich, Greater French, Introduction “Reading and Writing about the Colonies” and
Prologue “The First Overseas Empire,” 1-23.
Week 2
Feb 1 ~ Colonialism and Imperialism
Jürgen Osterhammel, Chp 1 “ ‘Colonization’ and ‘Colonies’ ” and Chp 2 “ ‘Colonialism’ and
‘Colonial Empires’, ” Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997), 1-22.
Edward Said, excerpt from Orientalism, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 132-149.
Albert Memmi, “Does the Colonial Exist?” and “Mythical Portrait of the Colonized,” The
Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 3-18 and 79-89.
Feb 3 ~ Conquest: Africa and the Indian Ocean
Robert Aldrich, Greater France, and Chp 1 “The Conquest of Empire: Africa and the Indian Ocean,” 24-67.
John Ruedy, Chp 3 “Invasion, Resistance and Colonization, 1830-1871,” Modern Algeria: The
Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005), 45-79.
Week 3
Feb 8 ~ Conquest: Asia and the Pacific
Robert Aldrich, Greater France, Chp 1 “The Conquest of Empire: Asia, the Pacific and the Austral Regions,” 68-88.
Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, excerpt from Chp 1 “The Colonial Moment: The Making
of French Indochina, 1858-1897,” Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 2009), 15-48.
Feb 10 ~ Economics of Empire
Robert Aldrich, Greater France, Chp 5 “The Uses of Empire,” 163-198.
Martin Thomas, Chp 3 “The Empire and the French Economy: Complementarity or Divorce?”
The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester UP, 2005), 93-124.
Week 4
Feb 15 ~ The Colonial Project Under the Third Republic
Robert Aldrich, Greater France, Chp 3 “Ideas of Empire,” 89-121.
Alice Conklin, Introduction and Chp 1 “The Idea of the Civilizing Mission in 1895 and the Creation of the Government General,” in A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 1-37.
Gary Wilder, excerpt from “Working Through the Imperial Nation-State,” The French Imperial
Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3-9.
Feb 17 ~ Colonial Society
Robert Aldrich, Greater France, Chp 6 “The French and the ‘Natives’,” 199-233.
Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, “Chp 4: Colonial Society. The Colonizers and the
Colonized,” in Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 2009), 181-216.
Additional Recommended Reading: Robert Aldrich, Greater France, Chp 4 “The French
Overseas,” 122-162.
Week 5
Feb 22 ~ Education in the Colonies
Gosnell, Chp 2 “Colonial Schools and the Transmission of French Culture,” The Politics of
Frenchness in Colonial Algeria, 1930-1954 (University of Rochester, 2002), 41-72.
Gail Kelly, “Colonial Schools in Vietnam: Policy and Practice,” French Colonial Education:
Essays on Vietnam and West Africa (New York: AMC Press, 2000), 3-25.
Gail Kelly, “Learning to Be Marginal: Schooling in Interwar French West Africa,” French
Colonial Education: Essays on Vietnam and West Africa (New York: AMC Press, 2000), 189-208.
Feb 24 ~ Gender and the Colonies
Yaël Simpson Fletcher, “‘Irresistible Seductions’: Gendered Representations of Colonial Algeria
Around 1930,” in Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 193-210.
Marie-Paule Ha, “ ‘La femme française aux colonies’: Promoting Colonial Female Emigration
at the Turn of the Century,” French Colonial History 6 (2005), 205-224.
Martin Thomas, Chp 5 “Women and Colonialism and Colonial Education,” The French Empire
Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester UP, 2005), 151-184.
Week 6
Mar 1 ~ The Great War and the Colonies
Joe Lunn, “'Bons soldats' and 'sales nègres': Changing French Perceptions of West African Soldiers during the First World War,” French Colonial History 1 (2002), 1-16.
Tyler Stovall, “The Color Line Behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France During the Great War,” American Historical Review (June 1998), 737-769.
Film: Black and White in Colour
Mar 3 ~ Visions of Empire
Robert Aldrich, Greater France, Ch 7 “Colonial Culture in France,” 234-265.
Odile Goerg, “The French Provinces and ‘Greater France’,” in Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur,
eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 82-101.
Week 7
Mar 8 ~ From Assimilation to Association
Raymond Betts, Chp 6 “A New Policy: Association,” Assimilation and Association in French
Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (Columbia UP, 1961), 106-132.
Martin Thomas, Chp 2 “Colonial Planning and Administrative Practice,” The French Empire
Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester UP, 2005), 54-89.
Marie-Paule Ha, “From ‘Nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ to ‘Leur culture ancestrale’: Symbolic
Violence and the Politics of Colonial Schooling in Indochine,” French Colonial History 3
(2003), 101-117.
Short Paper Due
Mar 10 ~ The 1931 Colonial Exhibit
Herman Lebovics, Chp 2, “The Seductions of the Picturesque and the Irresistible Magic of Art,”
True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1992), 51-97.
Patricia Morton, Chp 3 “Challenging the Exposition: The Anticolonial Opposition,” in Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 96-129.
WEEK 8 – SPRING RECESS
Week 9
Mar 22 ~ Colonialism Experienced: The Case of Vietnam
Truong Bun Lam, Ch 2 “The Vietnamese Perception of Colonialism,” Colonialism Experienced:
Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 39-68.
Phan Boi Chau, “The New Vietnam,” excerpts, Truong Bun Lam, ed., Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 105-124.
Hoang Cao Khai, “On the Wisdom of Our Country to Rely on France,” Truong Bun Lam, ed., Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 157-161.
Research Proposal Due
Mar 24 ~ Colonizing the Body: Race, ‘Hybridity’ and Métissage
Emmanuelle Sibeud, “ ‘Negrophilia’, ‘Negrology’ or ‘Africanism’? Colonial Ethnography and
Racism in France around 1900,” Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds., Promoting the
Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 156-167.
Claude Blanckaert, “Of Monstrous Métis? Hybridity, Fear of Miscegenation, and Patriotism from Buffon to Paul Broca,” in Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003), 42-72.
Christina Firpo, “Lost Boys: ‘Abandoned’ Eurasian Children and the Management of the Racial
Topography in Colonial Indochina, 1938-45,” French Colonial History 8 (2007), 203-221.
Week 10
Mar 29 ~ Colonizing the Body: Colonial Medicine
Anne Marcovich, “French Colonial Medicine and Colonial Rule: Algeria and Indochina,” in Roy McLeod, ed., Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London and New York: Routledge, 1988) , 103-117.
Eric Jennings, “Ch 1, Acclimatization, Climatology and the Possibility of Empire,” in Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology and French Colonial Spas (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006), 8-39.
Michael Vann, “Of Le Cafard and Other Tropical Threats: Disease and White Colonial Culture in Indochina,” in Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee, France and Indochina: Cultural Representations, 95-106
Mar 31 ~ Colonizing Space: Architecture and Urban Planning
Zeynep Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage 17 (1992), 58-77.
Gwendolyn Wright, “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930,” in Ann Laura Stoler and Nicola Cooper, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, 322-345.
Nicola Cooper, “Urban Planning and Architecture in Colonial Indochina,” French Cultural
Studies 11 (2000), 75-99.
Week 11
Apr 5 ~ Intellectuals and Anticolonial Resistance in the Colony
Aimé Césaire, excerpts from Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1972), 9-32.
Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture” (excerpts from The Wretched of the Earth), in Patrick
Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 36-52.
Ho Chi Minh, excerpts from Walden Bello, ed., Down With Colonialism! (London and New
York, Verso, 2007) – readings 1, 3, 4, 6, 19.
Apr 7 ~ Intellectuals and Anticolonial Resistance in the Metropole
Jonathan Derrick, “The Dissenters: Anticolonialism in France 1900-1940,” in Tony Chafer and