‘Mission Civilisatrice’: French Cultural Policy in the Middle East, 1860–1914

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathew Burrows
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
French Empire ◽  
The Third ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Cultural Components

Mission civilisatnce was one of the bywords of French colonial expansion under the Third Republic. Unfortunately until now there have been few works devoted to its study. Indeed, the notion itself has not been taken very seriously by scholars. As long ago as 1960 when Henri Brunschwig published his seminal work on French colonialism, he stated quite categorically: ‘en Angleterre la justification humanitaire l'emporta’ while ‘en France le nationalisme de 1870 domina’ even if that nationalism ‘ne s'exprima presque jamais sans une mention de cette “politique indigène” qui devait remplir les devoirs du civilisé envers des populations plus arriérées.’ Since then academics both in France and outside have tended to concentrate (in what few works have been written on French colonialism) on the political and economic aspects of the French Empire to the detriment of its cultural components.

The French Colonialist Movement during the Third Republic: the Unofficial Mind of Imperialism

1976 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 143-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. Andrew
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
French Empire ◽  
The Third ◽  
Sense Of Direction ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Napoleon Iii ◽  
Grand Design ◽  
Eastern Empire

British colonial expansion, it has been argued, was governed during the nineteenth century by the workings of the official mind. French colonial expansion was not. The official mind of French imperialism was slow to develop and at best half-formed. The first steps in the creation of the modern French Empire under the July Monarchy and Napoleon III followed no grand design or strategic obsession. Empire-building in Africa, Indo-China and the South Pacific proceeded instead by a series of fits and starts of whose significance successive governments were usually unaware. When the Third Republic embarked on colonial expansion in the 1880s, its policies proved almost as incoherent as those of precedessors. Intervention in Tunisia was swiftly followed by refusal to intervene in Egypt; a forward policy in Indo-China was first accepted, then violently rejected; in West Africa Army officers carved out a private empire on their own initiative. After 1880, however, French expansion at last acquired a clear sense of direction. French imperialism, in its final phase from 1890 to 1920, consciously pursued and substantially achieved a series of imperial grand designs; the unification of France's African Empire in the 1890s; the completion of Frenćh North Africa by the Moroccan protectorate in the early twentieth century; the acquisition of a Middle Eastern Empire and German West Africa during the First World War. These grand designs, however, were the product not of the official but of the unofficial mind of French imperialism. That unofficial mind forms the subject of this paper.

The Return of N’Guyen Van Binh

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Geoff Read
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
The Third ◽  
Original Sentence ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
One Year

This article explores the case of N’Guyen Van Binh, a South Vietnamese political prisoner exiled for his alleged role in “Poukhombo’s Rebellion” in Cambodia in 1866. Although Van Binh’s original sentence of exile was reduced to one year in prison he was nonetheless deported and disappeared into the maw of the colonial systems of indentured servitude and forced labor; he likely did not survive the experience. He was thus the victim of injustice and his case reveals the at best haphazard workings of the French colonial bureaucracy during the period of transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. While the documentary record is entirely from the perspective of the colonizers, reading between the lines we can also learn something about Van Binh himself including his fierce will to resist his colonial oppressors.

scholarly journals Wybrane płaszczyzny sporu o samorząd terytorialny w początkach III Rzeczpospolitej

2020 ◽  
pp. 86-103
Author(s):  
Paweł Gofron
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Round Table ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Implementation Scheme

Selected grounds of strife over the self ‑government at the beginning of the Third Polish RepublicThis article presents the selected grounds of strife over the self-govern-ment in Poland during the political transformation – from the end of the Polish People’s Republic to the beginning of the Third Republic of Poland. In the introduction the importance of the self -government re-form was emphasized. In the main content the discourse over the self--government during the Round Table Talks was reconstructed in outli-ne. Moreover, the projects of the implementation scheme of the reform were discussed. The last part of the text concerns the dispute over the introduction of poviats as the second level of self -government.

La Fièvre de la Raison: Nationalism and the French Right

1958 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 560-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugen Weber
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
The Third ◽  
Traditional Language ◽  
The Right ◽  
Politically Active

An epigram coined under the Third Republic presents the political Frenchman as torn between the claims of his heart on the Left and of his pocketbook on the Right. At a time when a nationalistic policy in Algeria draws heavily on all pocketbooks this idea seems out of date: today a good section of the French public is trying to reconcile accepted attitudes with a new policy, and the old phraseology of the Left conceals less and less successfully an ideology of the Right. The trend is strengthened by transfusions of new blood from a colonial domain lost or endangered in the last few years; that is, by the arrival in metropolitan France of tens of thousands of politically active and actively resentful citizens from Indo-China, Morocco, Tunisia, impenitently expressing their disrespect for democratic values, their wartime sympathies for Pétain and Vichy, and their contempt for the traditional language of political conformity.

Reflections on Race and Ethnicity in North Africa Towards a Conceptual Critique of the Arab–Berber Divide

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-288
Author(s):  
Mohamad Amer Meziane
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
Cultural Minority ◽  
The Status ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractThis essay argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the Algerian government and Berber activists alike should be analyzed in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, has shaped both the status and the grammar of the Arab-Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. In order to understand the distinct modes by which these categories function in Algeria today, one needs to analyze how the language of the nation-state determines their grammar, namely how they are deployed within this political context. Hence, by focusing primarily on French colonial representations of race such as the Kabyle Myth and by asserting simplified colonial continuities, the literature fails to make sense of the political centrality of the nation-state in the construction of the Amazigh question.

Pomiędzy decentralizacją a omnipotencją. Stosunki samorządu terytorialnego i administracji rządowej w II i III Rzeczypospolitej

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Tomasz Bojarowicz ◽  
Keyword(s):  
System Approach ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Government Administration ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Government

The aim of the study is to compare the institutional solutions and practical activities of the government and local government administration in two periods: the Second and the Third Republic of Poland. Because of the need to refer to the documents from the period of the Second Republic of Poland, it was necessary to refer to the historical method. The study is based on the comparison of two orders from different periods, therefore it was necessary to use the comparative method for the purpose of the analysis conducted. In the study also a system approach was applied to the analysis of institutional solutions. Decentralist and centralist concepts clashed both in the period of the Second Republic of Poland and during the political transformation. The beginnings of the political change were characterised by the predominance of naturalist tendencies, while in the further stages of the development of the Polish state there were growing tendencies to increase the omnipotence of the state.

Recepcja idei „nowego średniowiecza” w polskiej myśli nacjonalistycznej

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (247) ◽  
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Radomski
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
Civic Religion

The research aim of this article is to analyze the ideo-political reflections of the publicists andactivists connected with the young nationalists movement in the 1930s on the background of the political philosophy included in the book by a Russian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) New Middle Ages. The fate of a man in a contemporary world, translated by MarianReutt – idealistically and organizationally connected with the nationalist formation of the1930s the research ambition of the author is to show the idea of “new Middle Ages”, accentingthe meaning of collective ethics (Decalogue ethics) as a factor of social solidarity, which isnow called “civic religion”, which means values and rules fundamental for the conceptof a national country – in a shape dictated by the publicist of the “Myśl Narodowa” in theyears of the Third Republic. The author refers to the contemporary phenomenon of ideasecularization and the atrophy of the “civic religion”, which – as Berdyaev convinces – is anopportunity to manipulate the consciousness of an entity and allows for releasing in it a stateof uncritical adaptation of the politically dangerous offers (various forms of totalitarianism).Furthermore, in the face of the progressive dechristianisation and ateisation of the society,the postulates by Berdyaev and his young nationalist successors lose the value of usefulnessand are included into the catalog of the idealist system concepts, becoming an utopian versionof the democratic system.Key words: nationalism, political theology, New Middle Ages idea

The Political Thought of the Young Turk Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Banu Turnaoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Language ◽  
The Third ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Liberal Constitutionalism ◽  
Second Constitutional Period ◽  
Institutional Foundations

This chapter analyzes how the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 had provided a different conception of what politics should mean and how it should operate in the Ottoman Empire, along with a new conception of state and society. Drawing on the political language of the French Third Republic, democracy and liberal republican ideas slowly transformed the terminology and categorization of central issues in Ottoman politics and laid the most salient intellectual and institutional foundations for the young Republic. The revolution opened the Second Constitutional period (1908–18). Its first phase revitalized the liberal constitutionalism of the Young Ottomans. Political thinking drew heavily upon Montesquieu's formula for the separation of powers in combination with the ideas of the Third Republic and Ottoman positivism.

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