Understandings of empire among the political and financial elites of the late Third Republic suggest that their assumption that colonial rule could be justified as much in economic as in cultural terms was far from the truth. The presumed capacity both to regulate colonial societies and to harness them to French commercial requirements belied the realities of structural economic change about which politicians, administrators, and the financial community could neither agree, nor control. French aspirations to reorder colonial society were consistently frustrated by reluctance to face up to the material costs involved.Footnote 1 There was certainly no shortage of reformist initiatives in the interwar years. But most ideas about changing governmental standards and behaviours were internally generated, emanating from within the new French colonial establishment. Admittedly, this official ‘establishment’ elite was expanding numerically and socially. Aside from the senior figures within individual colonial administrations, its core components were all in Paris. Among the most important were the Ministry of Colonies at the rue Oudinot, the training school for intending administrators, the École coloniale, and the Musée de l'homme, hub of the fast-developing sub-discipline of colonial ethnography. But this was an elite whose ideas had limited resonance either with politicians and political parties or with businesses, banks, and other potential colonial investors, most of whom professed a strong belief in empire nonetheless.
Reformist thinking never meshed with popular understandings of what running an empire entailed – and what its permissible costs should be. This disconnection points to one thing above all: the yawning chasm between the changing normative standards of specialist colonial policymakers and the unchanging expectations of imperialist supporters in France. It was in the interwar years that this gap first opened up both because the transition to colonial wage labour economies was by then well advanced and because the depression of the early 1930s was exceptionally protracted and severe. Reformers' plans to manage the process of colonial economic modernization and cushion the adverse economic effects of collapsing raw material prices in the depression years hit the rocks because so few in government, in parliament, in business, or in wider French society would face up to the obligations involved. The long-term effects would be devastating. By 1939 the empire was mired in political crisis, beset by worsening inter-communal tensions, and crippled by under-investment. The ultimate result would be imperial disintegration whether measured in terms of political strife and decolonization or in terms of economic disaggregation – the ‘divorce’ between France and the colonial economies, the origins of which Jacques Marseille rightly located in the depression years.Footnote 2
This article begins from the proposition that understanding how French elites thought about the economics of imperial rule tells us a good deal about the ultimate failure of interwar colonial reforms and, more broadly, about the French empire's incipient disintegration. It investigates four related colonial policy debates all variously linked to changing conceptualizations of economic obligation among France's law-makers in the interwar years. Each of these debates is instructive regarding the normative standards of colonial policy formation and, by extension, of French international power among the imperialist elites of the late Third Republic. The first concerns the most ambitious colonial infrastructural scheme of the early twentieth century: Albert Sarraut's eponymously named development plan, formally launched in April 1921 and eventually rejected over the subsequent decade. The second reviews discussions over the relative role of the state and private financiers as saviours of ailing colonial economies in the depression years of the early 1930s, focusing on the pre-eminent French colonial financial institution, the Bank of Indochina. The third debate revisits policymakers' arguments about colonial industrialization, itself part of a longer-running controversy over the social consequences of economic modernization. The fourth and final issue assessed here is the apparent failure of the investigative studies of economic and labour reforms conceived by the left-leaning Popular Front in the years 1936–8.
The point is not to overthrow conventional wisdom about these matters. Rather, it is to highlight the extent to which empire was – or was not – part of the way in which senior political figures viewed ‘colonial obligation’, less in the cultural terms of ‘civilizing mission’, a somewhat jaded, anachronistic term after the upheavals of the First World War, than in the material sense of economic outlay.Footnote 3 Disputes over spending, in turn, tell us much about what imperial elites imagined France's place in the world should be. What emerges is a paradox. Alongside an ebullient belief in the virtuous singularity of French imperialism sat the long-term refusal to confront the costs – human, economic, and political – of governing empire. Gary Wilder captures the contradiction nicely in his analysis of interwar conceptions of Greater France, which ‘reflected the confidence of an organized empire at the height of its power and revealed the anxiety of a colonial project facing an imminent crisis of colonial authority’.Footnote 4 Only gradually did the normative assumption of imperial strength give way to emerging recognition that, by 1939, the French empire was in an advanced stage of decay.
Before turning to these four case studies, a word needs to be said about where the study of policymaking elites relates to other facets of the study of the French empire. Historians of European colonialism face a dilemma. Without wishing to deny agency to colonized peoples, as individuals suffering under foreign tutelage or as groups organizing to resist it, the uncomfortable fact remains that the practices of colonial governance, colonial resource extraction, and colonial development were all, ipso facto, elite concerns. For most of the modern colonial period, the net flow of political power in colonial states was downwards and not up. That is not to deny the obvious truth that such power was strictly limited and always contingent. Colonial authority was generally mediated by the search for indigenous auxiliaries – whether clan elders, community leaders, village headmen, or colonial police, troops, and clerks – through whom and to whom much of the workaday business of colonial administration and social control was delegated.Footnote 5 But it is to suggest that the colonial relationship was necessarily an unequal one, which ranked European elites first. How, then, should we approach these elites, and what questions should we ask?
In the French imperial case, analyses of those at the top of the colonial administrative ladder, as well as those ascending the lower rungs, have revealed the sociological backgrounds, formative influences, and underlying assumptions about empire and colonial populations of these elite actors.Footnote 6 Other work has shown how processes of administrative engagement with colonized groups affected attitudinal formation.Footnote 7 Ideas of imperial and colonial identity have been rethought, patterns of colonial consumption reconsidered, visual representations of empire in colonial and post-colonial France and ways of seeing indigenous peoples in the francophone colonial world re-conceptualized.Footnote 8 In the realm of ideas, the tortuous efforts of the empire's most vigorous supporters to reconcile universalist republican beliefs with exclusionary concepts of ethnic hierarchy and racial difference are better appreciated.Footnote 9
Some of the most fascinating issues in colonial history lie at the interface between Europeans and indigenous populations, at the point where expressed policy intention met indigenous efforts to challenge it, to amend it, or otherwise to assuage its impact. These sites of contestation are often the most analytically rewarding, revealing the limitations of colonial power and the extent to which colonized people retained significant capacity to reconcile colonial intrusion with their enduring societal practices. French colonizers were no less influenced by these points of contact, deriving from them their normative standards, their modes of behaviour, and their administrative procedures.
Here we confront another analytical question. How did these behavioural norms within the empire feed back to imperial policymaking in France? Put differently, were the changing normative expectations of practical and permissible colonial rule driven from the periphery or from the centre? Perhaps this binary opposition is too rigid. If so, how are we to reach a workable, multi-causal explanation for changing understandings of colonial governance? The answer may lie in closer examination of the ways in which approaches to pressing colonial problems became embedded in the international thinking – the global view – of French political elites. As we shall see, the issue here was whether structural economic change to colonial societies could or should be controlled, encouraged, or resisted. It was this, more than any other clashes over political choices or cultural transformation that confronted central government, colonial administrations, and imperial investors with fundamental questions about the boundaries and purposes of state intervention in the empire.
I
Albert Sarraut could lay claim to be the most influential imperialist within the republican establishment of the late Third Republic. Twice governor-general of French Indochina, twice minister of colonies, four times interior minister (with responsibility for Algeria), and de facto leader of the largest single interest voting bloc within the National Assembly – the so-called ‘colonial group’ of 190 parliamentarians – Sarraut was every inch an empire man. But he was no unthinking, reactionary imperialist; quite the reverse. Returning from his second term as governor in Hanoi in early 1919 to join Alexandre Millerand's first ‘Bloc national’ government as minister of colonies, Sarraut was by then convinced of the need for fundamental revision in French thinking about the obligations inherent in colonial governance. (His governorship almost came to an abrupt end on 15 December 1918 when he was shot, not by a Vietnamese revolutionary, but by a disgruntled French building contractor dismissed for shoddy workmanship on a government project.Footnote 10) He spent much of the next two years finalizing a package of public spending designed to transform the scale of infrastructural development and the pace of economic growth throughout the colonies of black Africa, French Indochina, and the Pacific. First scrutinized by the National Assembly on 12 April 1921, the resultant composite project was dubbed the Sarraut Plan.Footnote 11
Influenced by Max Weber's sociological connection between bureaucratic professionalization and the legitimacy of state power, Sarraut's Ministry of Colonies insisted that investment in basic infrastructure would also stimulate improvements in the speed and scale of European knowledge transmission to dependent societies. Like Weber, Sarraut regarded administrative rationalization and economic modernization as inter-dependent. Each would complement the other, extending the reach of colonial government with beneficial consequences measurable in everything from indices of industrial production to falling infant mortality rates. Convinced though he was of France's cultural superiority – and, thus of its ‘right’ to rule dependent territories – Sarraut disparaged the still commonplace racial thought which insisted that the inherent inferiority of colonized races precluded the kind of economic modernization he envisaged.Footnote 12 Following Sarraut's precedent, his successor at the Ministry of Colonies, Edouard Daladier, another Radical-Socialist who was won over to the cause of administrative rationalization, fostered links with the Institute of Ethnology, finally established with the Ministry's financial backing at the Sorbonne in 1925.Footnote 13 Similarly, as premiers in 1936 (Sarraut) and 1938–40 (Daladier) both men later endorsed the École coloniale's mid-1930s turn away from a curriculum dominated by legal doctrine and historical precedent towards greater study of ethnography and social anthropology.Footnote 14
The integration of ethnography into French academia and career officials' training was intended to change the normative standards of colonial administrators from patriarchal, condescending concern for their native subjects to a more ‘scientific’ analysis of local society and indigenous custom.Footnote 15 This new ethnology was avowedly humanistic. It rejected ideas of innate racial difference, substituting them with the conviction that cultural singularities were instead explicable in purely social terms.Footnote 16 Thus equipped with a Durkheimian, and non-racist (or, at least, less racist), sociological methodology, the ‘new’ ethnographers could pursue their state-funded social studies in colonial territories with a clear conscience. While they conducted their fieldwork in the empire, they did not necessarily endorse the political hierarchies of colonial rule.Footnote 17 Unlike nineteenth-century anthropology, the new ethnography was not the ‘handmaiden’ of old-style colonialism; if anything, it was the opposite: professional ethnographers, while ardently imperialist, would lend the weight of academic research to reformers like Sarraut who insisted that the norms of colonial practice had to be vastly improved if empire was to survive.Footnote 18
This shift in outlook, in turn, mirrored another. Applying Michel Foucault's terminology of ‘political rationality’ to describe a self-consciously modern style of colonial rule predicated on population management, socio-economic regulation, and rudimentary social welfare, Gary Wilder presciently suggests that French colonial officials developed new standards of ‘scientific administration’ based on the evaluation of indigenous tradition as a force for social cohesion. The interwar years witnessed a constant stream of anthropological studies and ethnographic data sent by officials, investigative missions, and government-appointed fieldworkers to the Ministry of Colonies, the Institute of Ethnography, the École coloniale, and, from its rebranding in 1938, the Museum of Man (formerly the Museum of Ethnography) at the Paris Trocadéro.Footnote 19 The result was a torrent of information about the organizational features of colonized societies from family and kinship ties to ritual and religion. The information collected not only classified and stratified indigenous groups in new ways, but quantified them as well. Aside from the effort to codify indigenous societies the better to safeguard them, as the interwar years progressed this new science of colonial ethnology constructed colonial subjects as human resources with ascribed value within the process of economic modernization whether as agricultural producers, workers, child-bearers, property-owners, or consumers.Footnote 20 This underlying element of economic utility brings us back full circle to the original launch of the Sarraut Plan in 1921.
Totalling 366 pages, the proposal had four features salient here. First was its commitment to long-term public investment in colonial development, regardless of the vicissitudes of French coalition politics. Projected over fifteen years, the second core element to Sarraut's plan was the expectation that the French state should take charge of infrastructure projects in the least wealthy territories of the dependent empire, focusing, above all, on integrated transportation systems and displacing the trading company conglomerates that had dominated the few major capital projects in black Africa and Indochina in particular. Linked to this shift was a third transition: Sarraut made plain that it fell to government, and not the private sector, to assume primary responsibility for colonial economic growth. Finally, and most importantly, Sarraut insisted that this engagement entailed careful consideration of the needs of indigenous populations as well as the demands of French business and government.Footnote 21 The project's major financial outlay was designed to increase export output through improving communications infrastructure, urban electrification schemes, port construction, and extended railway networks.Footnote 22 But Sarraut tied this expenditure to the expansion of a rudimentary welfare system. He envisaged that at least some of the greater wealth generated by economic modernization would be recycled back into the colonies that generated the profits, for example through an expansion of basic rural medical dispensaries, the Assistance Médicale Indigène.Footnote 23 Put simply, the Sarraut Plan's central objective was to reconcile accelerated economic modernization with improved living standards for colonized peoples. Perhaps unremarkable in hindsight, this two-part step-change was nothing short of revolutionary at the time. It also required fundamental alterations to the normative standards of the French political elite.
Sarraut was articulating new ideas of what the standard practices of colonial administration, backed by long-term state investment, should be. Yet his Plan went largely unfunded. Why? Investment in infrastructure, heightened commercial activity, and broader educational provision to underpin it were unquestionably aspects of societal modernization. Much as Sarraut welcomed this, his critics abhorred it. For modernization brought with it the prospect of self-consciously ‘modern’ forms of political organization within the colonies. For conservative imperialists, new industries and the recruitment of wage-workers to power them foreshadowed the emergence of labour activism and colonial class politics, the dangers of which outweighed the material benefits of increased economic activity.Footnote 24 Underlying anxiety about colonial proletarianization drove Bloc national supporters in the National Assembly and the federal authorities in Dakar to reject Sarraut's development plans in favour of increased state investment in cash-crop production. Likewise, the major colonial business lobby group, the Union coloniale had long urged government to invest in increased productivity from traditional industries, and agriculture in particular, rather than contemplate industrial diversification.Footnote 25 It was a message that reverberated through the chambers of the National Assembly. Far from kick-starting the empire's infrastructural development, Sarraut's proposals suffered the parliamentary equivalent of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ as they were picked over time and again by parliamentary watchdog commissions. One of these standing committees, the Chamber of Deputies' Commerce and Industry commission, did endorse Sarraut's ideas, recognizing the fundamental attitudinal shift involved from ‘conquest and domination’ to ‘development and partnership’.Footnote 26 But it articulated a minority view. In other, more powerful finance committees the spending envisaged was whittled away over the course of the 1920s. By 1924 Sarraut's Plan was already unrecognizable.Footnote 27
Battles over colonial economic obligation were not confined to French metropolitan politics, something that Sarraut was soon to discover. In 1925 Maurice Viollette replaced Théodore Steeg as governor-general of Algeria. So began a stormy two and a half year term marked by unbending settler hostility to Viollette's planned reforms. Assisted by his political patron, Alexandre Millerand, Viollette had emerged as a liberal imperialist planner after becoming parliamentary rapporteur of the French colonial budget in 1911. Much like Sarraut, Viollette, too, was an economic determinist at heart. Though his name would later be associated with the Popular Front government's attempts to enact limited extensions to the franchise in Algeria during 1936–7, as governor-general a decade earlier, Viollette's central objective was to modernize the Algerian economy, raising Muslim living standards in the process. The agricultural sector still dominated the colony's economic output. Land reform, focused upon improving farming opportunities and credit facilities for Muslim cultivators, inevitably brought Viollette into conflict with the grands colons that controlled the lion's share of prime agricultural land.Footnote 28 Still more problematic, Viollette's plans to increase the settlers' tax burden in order to finance agricultural modernization and limited welfare support for Algeria's subject population catalysed an unprecedented challenge to a governor-general's authority by the Délégations financières. Dominated by settler representatives, the Délégations were a proto-parliament with limited powers to scrutinize and modify the Algerian budget. This settler intransigence was reinforced by sections of the Algiers press, itself dominated by grand colon proprietors with influential parliamentary and media connections in Paris. Jacques Duroux, the son of a humble Armée d'Afrique soldier who had risen to become a leading industrialist, senator for Algiers, and owner of what might be termed an Algerian ‘media empire’, quickly emerged as Viollette's most acerbic critic.Footnote 29
Matters came to a head when the colon members of the Délégations financières voted to reject Viollette's proposed Algerian budget for 1928. In practice, a settler legislature was in open revolt against the French colonial executive. By requesting Viollette's ministerial boss, Interior Minister Sarraut, to arbitrate in the dispute, the delegates claimed the right to bypass the Algiers authorities and appeal direct to Paris. Duroux, among others, hoped that this tactic might also set the two economic modernizers against one another. He was right. Superficially, the Radical Sarraut's ambitious projects of colonial development hardly differed from Republican Socialist Viollette's plans to tax and spend on Algerian agricultural modernization. But where Sarraut's ideas of colonial mise en valeur pivoted around state investment in colonial development, Viollette's proposals attacked settler oligarchy by tapping their wealth and loosening their stranglehold over the Algerian economy. To Sarraut this was unacceptable.Footnote 30 He abandoned Viollette in favour of another of his leading detractors, the Algiers prefect Pierre Bordes, thus guaranteeing settler support for Raymond Poincaré's government, reconstituted in November 1928. The new governor immediately resumed the traditional orthodoxy of low taxation and budgetary equilibrium. The Délégations financières were conciliated, Viollete's reforms dropped.Footnote 31
The corrosive effect of parliamentary scrutiny of the Sarraut Plan and parliamentary division over the fate of Governor Viollette gives the lie to any idea that the ‘colonial group’ of pro-empire deputies and senators acted as a cohesive lobby group of equivalent influence to the so-called Parti colonial of the belle époque.Footnote 32 Several factors militated against any such continuity. For one thing, party discipline was somewhat stronger after the First World War than before it, making it harder for the supporters of empire development to buck their party leaderships, especially as pressure on the franc intensified and strict financial orthodoxy prevailed. For another, the imperialism of French politicians was less total than might be imagined. Much as in the Parti colonial days, those representing regions and business interests with ties to particular colonies – for instance, Bordeaux with Atlantic Africa, Marseilles with the North African territories, Lyons with the silk industries of Vietnam and Lebanon – typically put their special regional interest above endorsement of Sarraut's more comprehensive scheme.Footnote 33 Ironically, it would be the catastrophic falls in commercial trade during the depression that undermined these urban networks, breaking what John Laffey terms ‘the silken threads of empire’, and proving, if only in hindsight, that Sarraut was right to argue that the economic bonds between France and the colonies were dangerously reliant on private sector investment flows.Footnote 34 As this implies, the Sarraut Plan had failed in its declared objective to alter the norms of limited colonial state interventionism.
Extraneous factors also played their part. The protracted French currency crisis of the mid-1920s, followed by revaluation and the launch of the franc Poincaré in 1926–8, set narrow parameters to permissible public expenditure. And this before the shock of the depression, plus the concomitant pressure to rearm as hopes faded of multilateral disarmament. Taken together, these problems pushed colonial spending even further down the list of governments' financial priorities in the early 1930s. In these more straitened circumstances, few of the parliamentarians that professed support for empire shared Sarraut's conviction that colonial rule necessarily entailed burdensome financial responsibilities – regardless of wider economic or strategic circumstances. In short, the normative standards of the old pacte colonial, which assumed that imperial markets were there to serve French economic interest, survived intact into the depression years, at which point they were, if anything, reinvigorated. Faced with declining profit margins, from the late 1920s trading company executives pressed colonial administrations to concentrate their economic efforts on keeping European businesses afloat, leaving even less scope for support of indigenous producers and workers.Footnote 35 Within this political elite even the most experienced and inventive colonial ministers of the period – Laurent Perrier, François Piétri, Paul Reynaud, and Sarraut himself, not to mention Albert Thomas, the arch economic modernizer and first head of the League of Nations' International Labour Organization – acknowledged that the political economy of empire was not some charitable enterprise.Footnote 36 Whatever the rhetoric of economic modernization, cultural transmission, and social improvement, colonies were supposed to benefit France, not to drain it.
II
The assumption that empire should register net cost benefits for France was brought into sharper relief by the impact of the global depression, a crisis that is often related in the French context to the idiosyncrasies of the metropolitan economy in the early 1930s. An overvalued currency, whose trading level reflected the large quantities of gold held on reserve by the Bank of France, put France out of step with Britain, Germany, the United States, and other dollar-based economies, where devaluation took place relatively early in the international economic downturn. Underpinning these monetary factors lay deeper structural differences peculiar to the French economy, including the major proportion of comparatively small-scale businesses and manufacturers that still figured large within the industrial sector. Finally, it bears emphasis that the Bank of France was more highly politicized than its British or American equivalents, and was thus more likely to determine, if not to dictate the scope of permissible financial intervention to alleviate the worst effects of collapsing international trade.
Turning to the empire, other factors come into play. First, in the absence of industrial diversification and more diffuse capital investment, in black Africa especially, large trading companies still dominated the export market. Conglomerates such as the Société commerciale de l'ouest africain and the Compagnie française de l'Afrique occidentale operated within a vertically integrated production system in which they controlled not only raw material production but also the transportation, processing, and marketing of goods for sale.Footnote 37 Secondly, colonial monetary policy was highly centralized, particularly in Algeria and French Indochina, the empire's two most remunerative regions. In each case, the local currency was tied to the level of the French franc. This fact alone was unexceptional: in French West Africa, too, local currencies were pegged against their metropolitan equivalent. But the greater value of Algerian and Vietnamese exports meant, in practice, that the colonial governments in Algiers and Hanoi faced the greatest pressure to adjust local monetary and fiscal policy, as well as customs tariffs and export quotas, in accordance with French domestic requirements. Ironically, the results were contradictory. In the Algerian case, French absorption of between 70 and 90 per cent of the colony's wine and foodstuff exports between 1928 and 1933 insulated the territory from the more catastrophic falls in export revenues suffered by raw material producers reliant on open market transactions. As Algeria remained overwhelmingly an agricultural producer, farm output totalling between 86·7 per cent and 91·5 per cent of the colony's total exports in the years 1928–6, one could even argue that metropolitan purchases kept Algeria's economy afloat throughout the depression years.Footnote 38 But in Indochina, metropolitan dependency had more damaging consequences. Monetary reform was, for instance, instituted in the Indochina federation by decrees of 31 May and 12 August 1930, which stabilized the piastre but diminished the currency's purchasing power to the detriment of domestic consumers.Footnote 39 Moreover, the colonial state did little to minimize the impact of the South-East Asian rice crisis on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia's peasant producers and rural labourers.Footnote 40 One reason for this was that the balance of monetary power in the Indochina federation was skewed by the overbearing presence of a dominant, privately owned financial institution: the Bank of Indochina. Both a retail and a commercial bank as well as the bank of issue for the Indochina Federation, the Bank of Indochina was an especially powerful institution financially, economically, and politically.Footnote 41
Friction between the Bank, the Ministry of Colonies, the colonial authorities in Hanoi and Saigon, and settler groups in Vietnam mounted sharply in the fifteen years before the Indochina Federation plunged into recession in 1929–30, but had deeper historical roots. Before the First World War the Indochina government-general often struggled to attract inward investment from French commercial lenders for the expansion of rubber plantation agriculture in Cochin-China.Footnote 42 This left the way open for the Bank of Indochina to consolidate its position as the pre-eminent provider of capital to settler enterprise, whether in the rubber industry or elsewhere. The Bank's runaway profits on the back of the 1920s rubber boom confirmed the widely held sense in government that shareholders creamed off huge profits without contributing to Indochina's social development. The Bank's returns in the decade 1921–31 were certainly exceptional, with interest earned on invested capital averaging over 50 per cent over the decade 1921–31. The nub of the matter was deceptively simple: the Bank's directors channelled lending towards capital-intensive and European-run commercial projects to the exclusion of loans to rice farmers and other indigenous agriculturalists in desperate need of short-term borrowing.Footnote 43 This had to change. Rice paddy farming, Vietnam's prevalent farming method, was unlikely to register increasing productivity and improved yields without greater access to loan funding to irrigate more paddy-fields or to buy new seed varieties, fertilizers, and basic equipment.Footnote 44 Loan funding was equally essential to redress the imbalance in land ownership, an issue that acquired a sharper political edge as indigenous Communism took hold in Vietnam. In Cochin-China, for instance, land, like capital, was concentrated in very few hands. By 1931 some 2·5 per cent of the colony's population owned 45 per cent of Cochin-China's cultivatable paddy.Footnote 45 Perhaps inevitably, the colonial authorities, reeling from the Yen Bay mutiny and Nghe-Tînh Soviet movement of 1930–1, saw landless rural labourers as prime targets for leftist radicalization.Footnote 46
State leverage over the Bank's governing board turned on the parliamentary requirement for periodic confirmation of the Bank's right to issue currency. In exchange for easing the renewal of this privilege through the National Assembly, ministers could demand concessions in return.Footnote 47 From 1917 to 1931 discussions within the Ministry of Colonies, within the parliamentary colonial commissions, and on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies over reform of the Bank of Indochina revealed just how far the normative standards of state interventionism in colonial financial management were shifting. As we have seen, Sarraut's ambitious development projects fell victim to parliamentarians' reluctance to invest state funds on colonial infrastructure. Reluctant to abandon the Plan's core objectives, Sarraut himself, Edouard Daladier, his successor at the rue Oudinot, and Cartel des gauches Finance Minister Etienne Clémentel, saw the enormous capital deposits of the Bank of Indochina, and of colonial banks of issue more generally, as an untapped resource that could take the financial strain of long-term development.Footnote 48 Daladier and Clémentel devised legislation in late 1924 to make the major colonial banks more answerable to the state and thus release Bank capital to help fund development and basic welfare spending. A combination of factors drove them on. One was sympathy for Sarraut's developmentalist thinking, a feeling perhaps intensified by guilt over their reluctance to support larger colonial budgets. Another was ideological hostility to the monopolistic power and fiduciary irresponsibility of colonial banks of issue. Still another was the need to respond to the clamour from colonial governments, settler lobby groups, and local elites to establish agricultural credit facilities to provide imperial farmers and plantation owners with the loans necessary for agricultural and commercial expansion.Footnote 49
The first, and most reformist Cartel des gauches administration under premier Edouard Herriot was short-lived, but it set in train fundamental revisions to the rules governing colonial banking. On 18 December 1924, the Cartel government signed into existence the Bank of Madagascar, first of the new-style colonial banks in which monopolistic control over currency and inward investment was diluted by state involvement in the Bank's management and allocation of loan capital. Protracted, acrimonious negotiations with the Banks of (French) West Africa and Indochina eventually produced similar outcomes in January 1929 and March 1931 respectively. The result was the institutionalization of a mixed-economy banking system and something of a quiet revolution in the norms of colonial government. Where the colonial state once limited its role to clearing an administrative path for French wealth creation, banking reform signalled that the state and financial sector were, henceforth, supposed to work hand-in-glove as interventionists serving the interests of colonial modernization and rudimentary welfare.Footnote 50 Extending the parameters of state intervention and improving the theoretical standards of financial behaviour was all very well, but it was questionable whether the political will existed to enforce such change within the colonies. Reformist willpower was soon put to the test as depression conditions worsened from 1931 to 1933.
Vietnam's pressing requirement for better credit facilities, whether for established corporations, new commercial ventures, or rural proprietors, became more obvious once raw material prices collapsed and businesses, plantation owners, and farmers retrenched, cutting back on workers and wages. Yet this calamitous downturn only reinforced the Bank of Indochina's reluctance to lend short term, particularly when smaller, less prudent lenders, such as the Bank of Saigon, collapsed in 1931. With raw material prices falling by up to 80 per cent from their pre-depression peak, and with other commercial banks, including the Hong Kong and the Franco-Chinese Bank, cutting back their activities in Vietnam, the Bank of Indochina board was in a stronger position to ignore government strictures about the need for new lines of credit to hard-pressed farmers. As a damning Ministry of Colonies review put it, looking back over Bank of Indochina activities in the depression years:
It could be said that, in 1931, all equilibrium and competition within the Indochina federation's banking sector disappeared. Among the established pyramid of creditors from small-scale Vietnamese investors and Indian moneylenders, to commercial banks and the Bank of Indochina, only the latter remained at the top of what had become a kind of reversed credit pyramid.
The Bank's legal monopoly thus became a de facto commercial monopoly too, a shift reinforced by the almost complete absence of government direction or control, the authorities having surrendered any influence over Bank operations. It is hardly surprising that, in these circumstances, the Bank should have become a commercial creditor above all rather than remaining a lender of last resort. Nor is it surprising that it should try to eliminate other credit establishments to ensure that no commercial competition prejudicial to its interests survived.Footnote 51
The Bank of Indochina had won the depression-era contest with colonial state officials over the extent of the Bank's responsibility to rescue domestic agricultural producers. The norms of laissez-faire capitalism and tightly restricted lending remained unchanged, whatever the efforts of the Ministry of Colonies to alter the balance of power between government and Bank. This perhaps explains why, by the mid-1930s, the battle to redefine colonial economic obligations moved from banking to the industrial sector.
III
By now, the central demands of the economic modernizers were becoming quite familiar: genuine integration between metropolitan and colonial industries, the development of colonial market economies, improved access to credit for indigenous farmers, and investment in public works to catalyse industrial development.Footnote 52 If the substance of economic reform was much the same, the arguments used to justify it were not. Sarraut's parliamentary supporters were, by now, clustered in two discrete locations. One was the Chamber's commerce commission, the one branch of the National Assembly's committee network that still carried the torch for the Sarraut Plan. The other was the Conseil supérieur des colonies, an advisory body that Sarraut reorganized in the mid-1920s as a think-tank to produce workable economic modernization schemes. Endorsing Sarraut's March 1932 proposal for a 600-million franc emergency colonial loan, both groups recognized that the enormous falls in commodity prices reflected longer-term overproduction of raw materials for export. Rather than embark on yet another production drive based on working colonial labourers harder and longer, their preferred solution was to invest in more efficient and modern agricultural production to enable European and indigenous colonial producers to compete on price with alternative foreign sources of supply. Further investment in communications links was equally vital to bring down production costs. In short, the state should accept its obligation to run a managed colonial economy. Additional emergency funding of 340 million francs for French West and Equatorial Africa, plus 500 million devoted to long-term investment in agronomic and medical research, were also intended to kick-start the process.Footnote 53 Significantly, however, it was left to others to make the case for industrialization.
Also alarmed by the impact of collapsing commodity prices on peasant producers and rural wage-earners in the early 1930s were an emerging generation of colonial technocrats, many of them educated at the École polytechnique. This newer breed of economic reformer insisted on the urgency of investment in new industries of the kind that colonial banks, theoretically at least, might now support. Among them were Paul Bernard, employed since 1925 by the Société financière française et coloniale (SFFC – French and colonial finance group) an investment company tied to the Bank of Indochina, and Edmond Giscard d'Estaing, the former SFFC chairman and later inspector of finances, who compiled a critical report on French Africa's way out of depression in 1932.Footnote 54 Drawing on his experience in Vietnam, Bernard wrote two books in the mid-1930s in which he put the case for colonial industrialization.Footnote 55 Each highlighted the glaring contradictions of existing colonial economic policy. Incipient famine and under-employment in Tonkin's densely populated Red River Delta exposed the fallacy of resisting industrial diversification. Without alternative sources of employment, agriculturalists tried to produce more rice for market in an effort to finance their debts. It was a hopeless struggle.Footnote 56 Collapsing commodity prices meant that colonial producers of Vietnam's raw material staples – rice, coal, and rubber – were compelled to export increasing quantities of these products to a French market that did not want to buy them, while local Vietnamese could still barely afford sufficient rice to feed their families.Footnote 57
Arguments over industrialization brought to light another dispute about the direction of state economic policy, this time over the relative importance of fiscal revenue and loan funding as mechanisms to restore financial equilibrium. This was a colonial variant of the conflict between advocates of strict deflationary orthodoxy and supply-side enthusiasts for reflation who insisted that only by increasing the money supply – and thus rekindling economic activity – could the depression's impact be countered. It was an uneven contest. Supply-siders in the financial inspectorate were outnumbered and outgunned by senior officials in Hanoi, Saigon, and the Ministry of Colonies determined to maintain taxation levels and high customs tariffs to cover shortfalls in state revenue caused by falling commodity prices.Footnote 58 Ignoring mounting evidence of the disastrous economic (and political) consequences of unsupportable levels of personal debt among peasant producers, in early 1934 the Hanoi authorities definitively ruled out tax reductions or the amortization of farmers' debts. Here, too, the old norms of financial management triumphed over the supporters of bold reform.Footnote 59
Yet mercantilist understandings of imperial economics that assigned colonies a subsidiary, unchanging role as raw material producers and captive markets for French manufactured goods were short-sighted and self-defeating. A diverse colonial industrial base, the creation of a local middle class employed in modern businesses, and a labour force with better wages and increased purchasing power were equally essential to imperial profitability and political stability. Meanwhile, much as Sarraut had argued for the creation of ‘poles of development’, or colonial industrial centres capable of refining, processing, or otherwise manufacturing from primary products, so Giscard d'Estaing advocated investment in key colonial industries as an essential first step.Footnote 60 But these messages were unpopular in government circles. The tight restrictions imposed on labour forces in sub-Saharan Africa, the vigorous suppression of early African trade unionism, and the abrupt reversal of Popular Front liberalization in Africa, Indochina, and elsewhere revealed that modern industrial practices and workers' rights were simply incompatible with colonial domination.Footnote 61 And governmental responses to the economic downturn suggested that mercantilist exploitation was by no means discredited.
The contradictory impulses of imperialist reformers were well illustrated by the cadre of French administrators, the contrôleurs civils, appointed in the Tunisian protectorate to serve as agents of French colonialism and intermediaries to the surviving indigenous administration of the Tunisian Monarchy. The contrôleurs' official obligation to defend settler interest was tempered by a mounting disdain for colon greed and narrow-mindedness; their endorsement of infrastructural modernization offset by their anxiety regarding detribalization and social unrest. Most contrôleurs also walked a political tightrope, serving both as an instrument of French political surveillance in the Tunisian interior and as the primary liaison between the local community and the protectorate authorities. Here were the problems of changing normative behaviour personified. If the contrôleurs' first responsibility to uphold European interests was clear enough, the optimum means to do so became increasingly obscure as French land seizures and more unreservedly colonial practices intensified in the early twentieth century. As a consequence, contrôleurs civils found themselves compelled to limit the material damage done to the fabric of Tunisia's rural society by settler landowners, business lobbies in the major towns, and punitively high taxation of Tunisian smallholders and fellah labourers. These tensions crystallized in the early depression years of 1930–3 when a collapse in agricultural markets, the crippling debt burdens of peasant producers, and high unemployment among landless labourers caused severe hardship among Tunisia's rural poor. Much like the Bureaux arabes, their administrative antecedents in neighbouring Algeria, numerous contrôleurs lamented their compromised position. These original agents of French imperialism had perforce to reinvent themselves as one of the few remaining obstacles to rapacious colonial economic exploitation. Seen from their perspective, the contrôleurs' norms were much the same; it was the creeping iniquitousness of French-controlled monetary capitalism that had changed the terms of political engagement and inter-communal relations in interwar Tunisia.Footnote 62
The Vietnamese case illustrates the point. After the First World War the rising demands of Vietnam's rubber producers led to the development of the French empire's most extensive regulatory system governing the movement of migrant labour. The Hanoi government dispatched manpower recruiters to heavily populated provinces in Annam and southern Tonkin to find workers for the expanding rubber plantations of the Saigon hinterland. Some were tempted by three-year work contracts, and the promise of accommodation, basic healthcare, and an assured daily ration of 700 grams of rice. Others were employed informally in anticipation of a high attrition rate among existing plantation workers: to maintain a workforce of 22,000, some 75,000 plantation labourers were recruited in 1930 alone.Footnote 63 These workers, predominantly young male peasant sharecroppers, encountered appalling working conditions. Like their counterparts in French Soudan, they were denied freedom of movement. Most were housed in cramped plantation barracks with minimal sanitation in which tuberculosis transmission and malarial infection were endemic. Contracts were rarely honoured. Major employers including the largest of them, Michelin, cut wages and food rations once rubber prices began to tumble in 1929–30. Overseers were increasingly employed to stifle protest and extract additional labour from their workforce. And the colonial administration equivocated in response to mounting complaints about infractions of contract workers' rights.Footnote 64
All this was unsurprising. Governor-General Alexandre Varenne stirred lasting resentment among plantation owners after introducing a Federal Labour Inspectorate at the height of Vietnam's rubber boom in 1926–7. Varenne's network of government labour inspectors (contrôleurs du travail) became a model later adopted in other colonial territories. But, in the short term, Varenne's introduction of work contracts to Tonkin's coal mining industry and Cochin-China's plantations in October 1927 provoked a month of vigorous settler protests that culminated in his dismissal.Footnote 65 In the 1920s, Varenne's workplace reforms stood out as an attempt to change the normative standards of the colonial labour market. Elsewhere, the focus of economic planning was to stimulate additional commerce, not to regulate it, the foremost imperative being to generate greater export revenue.
In this calculation, the trade-off for cultural improvement and economic modernization under French auspices was acceptance of the iniquity of the pacte colonial as a commercial necessity. This belief in the trickle-down benefits of French economic, political, and cultural stewardship, whatever the short-term horrors of labour coercion, was by no means confined to diehard imperialists and Beni Oui-Oui-style indigenous collaborators. The liberal conscience of Third Republic republicanism, the Ligue des droits de l'homme (League of the Rights of Man), remained solidly pro-empire, despite occasional pangs of collective guilt when the worst abuses of colonial exploitation came to public attention.Footnote 66 When, in 1930, the League executive canvassed its local sections about the wisdom of extending citizenship rights to colonial ex-servicemen, a good number disparaged the idea in unabashedly racist language. One section, based in suburban Paris, vilified increased civil rights for Arab subjects, warning that North Africans were like tiger cubs raised in captivity: manageable at first, but instinctively ready to kill.Footnote 67
Jacques Marseille's reading of growing French reliance on colonial markets to salvage uncompetitive domestic industries in the depression years posits that it was in the 1930s that the economic relationship between France and its empire became irretrievably dysfunctional. So much, then, for the encouraging signs of changing normative standards indicated by the reform of colonial banks. Were these merely a flash in the pan extinguished by the cataclysmic effects of the depression? Was there a still more fundamental problem: the persistence of a colonialist political culture beset by the contradiction between a notional responsibility to civilize and improve and a material reluctance to make the colonial state the provider of last resort for colonized populations whose inferiority and, in some cases, indigence were taken as read?Footnote 68 The answer to both questions is part yes and part no. This ambiguity is well illustrated by the French governmental Colonial Economic Conference of 1934. Called to discuss measures to resuscitate colonial economies and alleviate chronic hardship, it is tempting to dismiss the conference as a fruitless talking shop. But if immediate relief measures were lacking, the new language of technocracy and state management was everywhere apparent in discussion of long-term investment, economic development, and social policy.Footnote 69 Significantly, the conference endorsed the recruitment of additional specialists to the Ministry of Colonies' political and economic affairs divisions.Footnote 70 The École coloniale, whose admission procedures, curriculum, and training practices were at the time undergoing thorough overhaul, would provide the administrative cadres to put Ministry directives into practice.Footnote 71 Sarraut's vision of a more professional, technocratic colonial bureaucracy to optimize the strategic allocation of state resources had taken root.
IV
The first major test of this new bureaucratic professionalism came with the challenge of codifying and implementing Popular Front colonial reform. As is well known, the advent of left-wing government in France in May 1936 triggered an explosion in demands for improved working conditions bolstered by more or less spontaneous sit-in strikes in some of France's largest factories. Employers and government quickly conceded numerous concessions that, although ultimately reversed, seemed to herald a shift in the balance of power between capital and labour in France.Footnote 72 Would the release of pent-up pressure from below elicit similar results in the colonies? Much as in France itself, in some places, notably the three French North African territories, briefly yes, but, in most places, no in the longer term.Footnote 73 Specific colonial reforms, from the release of political prisoners to the recognition of colonial trade unions' right to collective bargaining, were diluted, blocked, postponed, or rescinded, so much so that by late 1938 the Popular Front's colonial legislative achievements were nugatory.Footnote 74
Historians recognize that this is far from the whole story. The legislative record may expose the institutional barriers to structural reform, but it reveals less about the attitudinal factors and, more specifically, the prevailing political cultures at home and in the empire that shaped this outcome.Footnote 75 To use Pierre Bourdieu's terminology, administrative elites' behavioural habitus and their political field of action had to expand if economic modernization and fundamental changes to relationships between employers and colonial labour were to be achieved.Footnote 76 A deeper question is thus whether or not the change of political direction in French government in 1936 precipitated any equivalent alteration to the norms of colonial rule. Did the Popular Front deliberately or even inadvertently expand the norms of permissible reformism within the colonies? The incoming minister of colonies, the Socialist deputy, Marius Moutet, a long-standing critic of the timidity of past colonial franchise and welfare reforms, insisted that the new government would take up the mantle of ‘republican colonialism’, not so much a pre-determined policy as a humanistic outlook that made the well being of colonial subjects the state's foremost obligation.Footnote 77
The impetus behind Moutet's reformism was less ideological than pragmatic. His resolve to achieve material change was shared by the reformist team he gathered around him in Paris. Moutet brought in trusted associates to run the colonial inspectorate at the rue Oudinot, the Ministry's economic division, and its all-important personnel department. René Barthes ran Moutet's ministerial office with ruthless efficiency. Gaston Joseph, director of political affairs, drove the reform process day-by-day, crafting the fine detail of Ministry directives and Robert Delavignette became a pivotal figure in policy formulation from his position as director of the newly rebranded École nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer.Footnote 78 The National Assembly's colonial commission also came under Socialist direction a fortnight after the Popular Front victory when its long-serving vice-president, Georges Nouelle, defeated the right's preferred candidate, Pierre Taittinger, as commission president on 16 June.Footnote 79 Nouelle immediately declared his blanket support for sweeping colonial reform and proved his worth to the government alongside fellow Socialist, the Martiniquan Joseph Lagrossillière, by grinding down Interior Ministry and Algiers government opposition to Algeria's inclusion within the orbit of the colonial commissions of inquiry appointed to make recommendations regarding urgently needed welfare reforms.Footnote 80
Immediately the Popular Front took office, the new minister of colonies told the empire's governors and senior administrators that he expected patterns of administrative behaviour to change. Taking the Matignon industrial accords as his cue, on 30 June 1936 Moutet advised these officials that his ‘principal concern’ was to improve the living standards and working conditions of colonial subjects. A rash of legislative initiatives followed, including restrictions on the employment of child labour (August 1936) to the regulation of working hours and the introduction of compensation for industrial injuries (both October 1936).Footnote 81 If the altered standards of central government were clear, their colonial echo soon faded. The key problem here was that individual colonial governments retained the initiative to implement labour and welfare reforms as local circumstances permitted. Allowing colonial authorities to implement industrial legislation and social reforms at differing rates was depicted, not as surrender to the entrenched conservatism of imperial bureaucracy, but as an appreciation of the marked variations in cultures, working practices, and labour markets between individual territories. In the hands of colonial governments, however, the rue Oudinot's concession to ethnographic particularity became a watertight justification for obfuscation and delay.Footnote 82 It was no accident that the Colonial Ministry's retrospective assessment of its economic achievements under Moutet's direction downplayed changes to workers' rights, preferring to stress the resuscitation of internal colonial markets, improved foodstuff distribution, and wider rural access to credit facilities.Footnote 83
Although it fell outside the Ministry of Colonies' purview, the Algerian experience is instructive. The Blum government's reformism quickly dissipated once the industrial stoppages, wildcat strikes, and demands from within Muslim civil society for greater civil rights took hold in the colony between June and August 1936. Never enthusiastic about the extension of metropolitan industrial legislation to Algeria's three départements, Georges Le Beau's Algiers administration dragged its feet in recognizing equivalent collective bargaining rights for Algerian workers. Albeit disappointing, this outcome was predictable given that the unionization of Algerian labour was, as elsewhere in the empire, severely restricted. More remarkable were the fissures that opened among left-wing supporters of Popular Frontism, French and Algerian, when it came to wider questions about the civil rights, religious freedoms, and basic economic entitlements of the subject majority. Algerian Communists and Socialists split over whether Popular Frontism was inherently anti-imperialist or not. Industrial trade unions in Algeria remained, for the most part, solidly European in composition and direction, and Confédération générale du travail representatives adhered to the principle of racial differentiation in wages between settler and Algerian mineworkers performing the same task. Terrified that the June strike wave might spread to the agricultural economy, the colonial authorities deployed additional police, troops, even settler vigilantes to prevent any ‘peasants’ revolt'.Footnote 84 On the other side of the racial divide, by mid-August the indigenous elites that dominated Algeria's Muslim Congress were at loggerheads with the colony's foremost nationalist group, Messali Hadj's Parti du peuple algérien over support for the government's centrepiece constitutional reform, the Blum-Viollette project, which promised citizenship rights and thus enfranchisement for a wider spectrum of Muslim public servants and military veterans.Footnote 85 Most significant, the religious scholars of the Association of Reformist ‘Ulamas spurned the atheistic integrationism of liberal republicans.Footnote 86
The Popular Front's inability to transcend the socio-economic, cultural, and, above all, racial divisions of colonial Algeria should not surprise. Indeed, it would be a gross distortion to suggest that even the most reformist government supporters ever envisaged such an ambitious goal. The fault-lines in Algerian society and the underlying assumptions of official thinking were, in fact, little changed. To take a small, but telling example: on 5 December 1937 the head of the Section française de l'internationale ouvrière's (SFIO) Algiers federation accused the colonial government of flagrant obstructionism towards Popular Front social policy, highlighting the authorities’ recent ban on Socialist party charitable collections for destitute Algerian children.Footnote 87
Government ministers, Algiers officials, and lowly European fonctionnaires still shared several preconceptions, themselves a reflection of widely shared prejudices, about Algeria's ethnic composition and changing demography. One was that, despite increased immigration to the colony, Europeans were dangerously outnumbered, a problem magnified by increasing Muslim fecundity and falling mortality rates. Another was that the indigenous Arabized majority was too racially and culturally alien to be capable of assimilation. In practice, this meant that any ‘new race’ of French Algerians would be overwhelmingly European in composition, albeit with Algeria's Jewish population and ‘loyal’ Kabyle Berbers theoretically admitted to the ethno-dominant group subject to rigorous cultural qualifications.Footnote 88 In plain language, the one normative standard that still preceded all others was social exclusion, justified in terms of degrees of racial and cultural difference.
Algeria, though, was a special case. It was unrepresentative of the major thrust of colonial reform, which, in tune with the limited geographical jurisdiction of the Ministry of Colonies, centred on the dependent territories in Indochina and sub-Saharan Africa. In these so-called ‘colonies of exploitation’, there were more encouraging signs of changing normative standards under Popular Front direction. One such affected the most basic tenet of state activity – ensuring the survival of colonial populations. In his preliminary discussions with colonial governors during his first month in office, Moutet made much of his determination to combat recurrent colonial famines, identifying this as a yardstick of the ‘humanistic colonialism’ he espoused.Footnote 89 In some places his message struck home. On 24 April 1937 the Laos Residency summarized the steps taken to assuage the second successive year of poor rice harvest in the country. On this occasion, government intervention was guided by the primordial requirement to feed the rural poor rather than to maintain state revenues from the agricultural sector as in the early depression years. On 12 December 1936 the Residency outlawed unauthorized rice exports and instituted measures to prevent price increases. Regional officials organized the distribution of grain stockpiles, their priority being to prevent famine.Footnote 90
Recognition of the state's responsibility for the weakest in society was matched by a willingness to challenge financial orthodoxy regarding the limits of government interventionism. On 6 January 1937 the Ministry of Colonies political affairs directorate submitted a preliminary report on colonial tax reform, prepared at Moutet's instigation after the Colonial Governor's Conference held the previous November. The report justified reductions in direct and indirect taxation of colonial subjects on economic, humanitarian, and practical grounds. It rehabilitated the supply-side arguments of the Inspectorate of Finance, noting that lower taxes would lead to increases in personal spending. A ‘virtuous circle’ would be created as greater colonial consumption stimulated overall economic output by augmenting domestic demand for goods and services.Footnote 91 Earlier versions of these proposals emphasized more pragmatic factors, noting that tax reductions were anyway imperative in light of the franc and piastre devaluations of late 1936. The fall in real currency values reduced colonial subjects' purchasing power at a time when foodstuff prices were rising sharply from their depression-era lows of 1934. Other, more systemic changes were proposed. On the one hand, tax rates should be adjusted colony-by-colony to reflect the capacity to pay of differing indigenous communities. On the other hand, the entire fiscal structure was to be simplified and made more transparent, the task of revenue collection being devolved to indigenous auxiliaries where possible.Footnote 92
V
France in the interwar years was an imperialist nation with its head in the sand about the economic burdens inherent in its presumed right to rule dependent territories overseas. Its specialist colonial reformers were ambitious and innovative, and most recognized that long-term funding was the prerequisite to the success of their schemes. Time and again, their projects fell at this first, financial fence. Why? This article has suggested that an answer lies in the disconnection between the changing standards of these reformers and the unchanging expectations of the wider political elite. The former grasped the importance of economic obligation to effective colonial rule; the latter refused even to consider it seriously.Footnote 93 This is not to imply that economic restructuring and a few doses of constitutional concessions might have made the empire secure for an indefinite future; far from it. But it is to suggest that the clash of outlooks – the very different visions of those who recognized incipient crisis and those who did not – was pivotal to the manner and timing with which socio-political conflicts would develop from the 1930s onwards.
Even the reformism espoused by Albert Sarraut in the 1920s and by the supporters of limited colonial industrialization such as Paul Bernard and Edmond Giscard d'Estaing in the 1930s – each politically conservative in their underlying objective to enable the colonies to withstand severe economic downturns without worse impoverishment of the indigenous majority – failed to persuade parliamentarians, investors, and members of imperialist lobby groups that fundamental change was essential. Apparently callous, this reluctance was perhaps rooted in a deeper problem: the fact that at no stage in the interwar years did France possess the financial resources needed to match the economic costs of colonial reform. Development, modernization, industrialization, whatever the precise meanings of these terms, all implied the expansion of state interventionism in colonial economic management. By identifying these new criteria of economic obligation, the reformers only highlighted the chronic limitations of actual French capacity to maintain the empire. This was something that opponents of empire understood much better than many of its defenders in France. Central to the discourse of anti-colonial nationalists across the empire by the 1930s was the insistence that their colonial rulers never matched words with deeds.Footnote 94
Did things change significantly over the interwar period? Apparently not: if anything, the ongoing failure to fund major reformist projects had a cumulative effect, heightening the imbalance between grand imperialist rhetoric and the poverty of colonial state interventionism. Nor was there significant pressure for greater state responsibility towards colonial populations from within French society. The resurgence in French popular attachment to empire, if such it was, as the threat of war in Europe increased after 1936 was, according to Charles-Robert Ageron, more a reflex reaction – a clutching at obvious straws of manpower and materials – rather than evidence of a reasoned assessment of the colonies' importance to French economic, military, and international power.Footnote 95 And, at the level of imperialist elites, the Popular Front's attempt to prioritize imperial reform within its legislative programme alienated leading figures of the very colonialist groups that had for fifteen years pressed for greater government commitment to empire. During 1936–7 both the Blum-Viollette project and the long-delayed signature of draft independence treaties with Syria and Lebanon were fervently attacked by supporters of the foremost imperialist lobby group, the Ligue maritime et coloniale. Elsewhere, the fitful interest and occasional discomfort of the French left regarding state-driven colonial projects and the reluctance of the French right to back imperialist rhetoric with capital funding were never dispelled.Footnote 96 If brought into the metropolitan family fold at all, France's interwar empire was always more distant relative than darling child.
Not surprisingly, the Popular Front, product of what by 1936 was a profoundly divided society, fell short of fulfilling its reformist mission. The failure of previous attempts at major economic reform had indicated not only that normative standards of economic obligation needed to be rethought but that consensus was a prerequisite for success. And by 1936 any such common ground was lacking. Government reformists' deeper appreciation of what colonial obligation meant found no echo, either among the wider political elite or among the French population as a whole. Normative standards had not changed. The impending World War, with all its tragic consequences for France and the colonies, should not obscure the fact that twenty years of missed reformist opportunities, in large part a product of limited horizons among France's imperialist elite, had placed the empire on the road to disintegration.
