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This chapter looks at the transformation of the French Empire to the French Union. The French Union would not acquire a juridical basis until the finalization of the new constitution in October 1946 and the meaning of the declarations about citizenship and federation were far from clear or generally accepted. However, a new name for empire had been introduced, the formula of federation had been invoked, and the possibility of an inclusive citizenship had been put on the table. Later, events in Indochina and Algeria would shape the debate over extending citizenship to Africans, but in contradictory ways. The conflicts led some to conclude that French control had to be more rigorous and others to emphasize the need to make overseas subjects feel included in an imperial community.

This afterword compares and contrasts both the positions of missionaries within the French and British empires, as well as the way historians have conceptualized the relationships between Catholic and Protestant missions and the two imperial states. With reference to a number of the chapters in this collection, the article reflects on the mutual suspicion and anxiety felt by missionaries and colonial officials that permeated both French and British empires.

This introductory chapter examines the unique ways the French empire in the Pacific developed historically in the 19th century. It proposes three basic arguments. First, that the French Oceanic empire was not thought of as a bounded territory, but rather as a web or grid of strategic locations called “points d'appui,” and that this allowed an “empire” to develop even where there were no actual colonies. Second, that the French Pacific empire depended upon an idea of romance, often contrasted with British “indirect rule” which became manifested in strong sentiments of “love of country” imposed upon and negotiated by local peoples. Third, that connected cases can be drawn to illustrate a “French Pacific” from histories that are often studied separately, for example Asia (Japan, Indochina), Polynesia (Tahiti), Melanesia (New Caledonia), Central America (Panama), Europe (France).

This chapter discusses the role of the travelogue, both as a locus for the safely bound exotic Other, and as the potential conduit for hybrid constructions of identity. It introduces the central concept of vagabondage, the search for identity through motion in women’s travel writing from Olympe Audouard and Isabella Bird to Isabelle Eberhardt. The chapter establishes a composite basis of gender and postcolonial theory, creating a nuanced critique of Edward Said and Judith Butler. It gives a historical overview of the British and French colonial empires from 1850–1950 and their representations in popular culture. It also analyses the persistent structures of Orientalism and their impact on European gender roles and travel writing. A brief biography of the main women travel writers discussed and an outline of following chapters are also given.

Chapter 4 begins in 1878 with American intercessions on behalf of Moroccan Jews during two international conferences, the Madrid Conference of 1880 and the Algeciras Conference of 1906. At the Madrid Conference, these discussions centered on maintaining the protégé system, which many believed was essential in protecting Moroccan Jews from oppression. At the Algeciras Conference, American elites explicitly endorsed the extension of French empire to Morocco. These actions were driven by American Jewish organizations such as the Board of Delegates of American Israelites and later, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, with the aid of prominent Jewish leaders such as Jacob Schiff. But such activism was facilitated by diplomatic and political elites, including Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and Felix Mathews, who had their own personal and diplomatic interests for participating in these conferences.

The role of Polynesia in the French Empire was more strategic than economic, but its sensitive location was of great interest. Victor Segalen's own first major literary work, Les Immémoriaux, has been recognized as one of the only early twentieth-century attempts to analyse Tahitian difference and to strive towards textual recreation of that very difference. For Segalen, the aesthetic attraction of exoticism is in the struggle to maintain difference rather than in the acceptance of the inevitability of its decline. Segalen's attitude to the role of Empire in the transformation of Polynesian culture and society is muted not only by its displacement into the context of early nineteenth-century evangelism, but also by the author's tendency to consider the processes of colonialism in the wider context of Westernization. The narrative of Les Immémoriaux is both obviously prescriptive and latently normative, suggesting a specifically Maori omniscience without any claims to universality.

This chapter illustrates the manner in which British explorers, promoters, and officials sought ways to overcome the physical and diplomatic barriers to British Pacific navigation. French officials observed these British efforts and contemplated their implications. The question raised was how the French Empire would respond to the prospect of its leading rival's obtaining the South Sea access that the Utrecht settlement and North America's obstinate impermeability had so far denied to France. One response was writing. French evaluations of British South Sea and North American probes appear in the letters and memoirs circulating among mid-eighteenth-century French ministers, ambassadors, and foreign ministry officials, and the availability of these papers allows analysis of the geostrategic considerations driving French diplomats between the two great mid-eighteenth-century European wars.

This chapter deals with the Anglo-French relationship and the British recognition of the French Empire and with it Louis Napoleon's new title of Napoleon III. It discusses the most important foreign policy question, which was how Britain should respond to the anticipated declaration of a new French Empire. Further, it explores the memorandum, which was sent to Austria, Russia and Prussia in November 1852. It had three key points; all of them leading to rejection of the President Louis Napoleon's claim that he had a hereditary right to the imperial throne. This memorandum was laid on the principle of co-operation between the great powers. It raises a discussion on how Aberdeen's ministry was responsible for the greatest failure of nineteenth-century foreign policy.

This chapter examines Napoleon Bonaparte's plan against the Allied Powers determined on bringing down his newly formed French Empire. It discusses criticisms on Napoleon's appointment of Marshal Davout as War Minister and explains Napoleon's constant meetings with his staff, imperial officials, ministers, and senior army officers, and his concern for his wife Empress Marie-Louise. It also describes some of the key problems in Napoleon's preparation for war including uniform procurement and soldier training.

This chapter examines the Allied Powers' formation of the seventh coalition on March 25, 1815, aimed at bringing down Napoleon Bonaparte's freshly reconstituted French Empire. This destroyed Napoleon's hope for negotiating a peaceful solution for their coup d'etat. Left with no other choice but to fight, Napoleon started organizing and building his army and called up troops to defend the country against the hateful injustice of the Allies and the military threat they posed.

This chapter traces the emergence of a sense of place among French New Orleans residents of all conditions through the analysis of the uses of ethnic and national categories. It demonstrates that the French Regime did not witness the birth of a single “Creole” identity that united all historical actors across racial boundaries. Racial formation prevented the development of a shared relationship to the city between settlers, slaves, and free people of color. Nevertheless, after the succession of two generations by the end of the 1760s, as the elite fought to keep the colony within the French Empire during the 1768 revolt, New Orleans emerged as a distinctive place in relation to both the metropole and Saint-Domingue.

This chapter explores how the French discovery of Roman ruins in Algeria was used to legitimate its annexation of the territory. Intellectuals and politicians argued that the Ottoman Empire was illegitimate; France was the true heir of the shared Latinate civilization created by the Roman Empire. The new French Empire would simply reunite the Mediterranean world. These efforts were, however, thwarted by both human and material actors. Parisian museum administrators thought that the North African finds were of low quality and not of much interest. French colonists argued, by contrast, that the Roman artifacts should stay in Algeria, to help build a French imperial identity. And the things themselves resisted; they broke when soldiers tried to extract them and their weight sank the ships used to transport them. The chapter then suggests that nineteenth-century campaigns to steal, export, and re-signify art and antiquities sometimes fell short of their ambitions.

This chapter examines the role of legal pluralism in the construction of sovereignty in New France. More specifically, it considers how courts established colonial sovereignties in the French Empire. After providing a historical background on French attempts at colonization in North America during the sixteenth century, the chapter turns to struggles for power in New France and the French admiral's extension of his authority to New France. It then considers the interplay between a legally and politically plural order in France and the solidification of French claims in North America. It also discusses six specific legal conflicts among parties active in the colony: the first two involved the selective use of law, personal authority, and force, while the remaining four consider the role of New France in interjurisdictional rivalries in France, especially over the consolidation of maritime authority. It suggests that the ununified political and legal order in the imperial center influenced claims to governance and trade in New France.

This chapter explores France’s role in the First World War by keeping “La plus grande France” (or “Greater France,” as the combined entity of the nation and its overseas possessions was known) in focus. n keeping with the volume’s aim to widen the story of the war beyond the Western Front and Europe, the essay examines both the ways the war affected France’s colonies, reaching into the lives and spaces of empire in profound ways, and the contributions of the colonies to the war effort, providing men and other resources to help France prosecute the war on the Western Front and beyond. The participation of more than 500,000 non-European colonial subjects as soldiers, and another 200,000 as workers, in the war effort in Europe is an important and vivid part of this story, but this chapter will also detail the economic and financial contributions of the colonies. These were significant, and had important effects on the war, metropolitan France, and the colonies themselves. Greater France’s war story is critical to an understanding of the Great War as a whole not only because the decisive fighting on the Western Front occurred on French soil, but also because the huge extent of the French colonial empire at the time—then the world’s second largest and stretching from North and West Africa, to Madagascar, Indochina, the Pacific, and the Caribbean — helped ensure that the war was truly global.

This chapter explores Kennedy’s pre-presidential political career. By the end of World War II he had emerged as a well-connected Harvard graduate, author of a popular book, a decorated navy veteran of the Pacific War, and a budding young journalist with the Hearst chain. His political career began in 1946 when he was elected Representative for Massachusetts’s 11th Congressional District. In 1952 he was elected to the Senate, where he gained a reputation for sharp anti-colonial rhetoric that often targeted French policy. Throughout his pre-presidential political career, from 1946 to 1960, Kennedy’s most biting commentary was consistently reserved for the French in Vietnam and later Algeria. While Britain had negotiated its way out of India and later ran a successful counterinsurgency campaign against communist Malayan rebels, Kennedy worried openly that French colonial rule would drive the most rebellious of the Fourth Republic’s subjects toward the Sino-Soviet camp. Early postwar decolonization cemented Kennedy’s perception that the British were clear thinkers with long-term vision, while the French by contrast were characterized by a toxic mixture of short-sightedness, stubbornness, and indifference to the collective interests of the West.

This chapter explores the history of military service in Algeria and across the colonial world before and during the Great War. It introduces the reader to key concepts from the fields of colonial history and First World War studies that are crucial to understanding the political legacies of the entanglement of the colonies and, especially, Algeria with the Great War. Taking a comparative approach, it explains the range of legal categories that underpinned colonial rule within the different empires and considers how the rights and responsibilities they implied were connected to and altered by military service. The chapter also examines the variety of attitudes toward the use of colonial soldiers in the different imperial polities and asks how these influenced the expectations of post-war reform in the colonies.