Download Daughton JP French colonialsm and hum 2011

Behind the Imperial Curtain:
International Humanitarian Efforts and the Critique
of French Colonialism in the Interwar Years
J. P. Daughton
Abstract&This article examines the work of French critics of empire in the context of an international effort
to minimize violence and suffering in Europe’s colonies during the interwar years. Rather than highlight individual political motivations, the article considers the important similarities of these critics’ works. Often writing
in the style of documentary reportage and concerned with how policies caused suffering among non-European
populations, authors as varied as Albert Londres, Félicien Challaye, and Paul Monet produced articles and
books that critiqued colonial practices at their most fundamental level. They shared an interest in the impact of
colonial rule with other European, American, and non-European individuals and institutions informally linked
by the networks of the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization. The existence of these new
networks removed key debates about colonialism from the national stage and opened them to the scrutiny of more
international and, at times, anticolonial perspectives.
Historians often identify the interwar years as a distinct juncture in the
history of modern Europe. The trenches of 1914–18 barred Europeans
from returning to the comfortable assumptions of the nineteenth century, just as carpet bombing, genocide, and the Cold War would forever
change Europe’s influence over the post-1945 world order. Significantly
altered—if not entirely new—ways of seeing abounded in the 1920s and
1930s, from attitudes about gender roles to faith in parliamentary politics, corresponding to changed social, political, and economic realities.
The French empire was no exception. The interwar years brought the
empire unprecedented challenges, including mounting uncertainty
about the cost of colonialism, ideological disagreements among administrators, and swelling nationalist movements from Algeria to Indochina.1 Even as procolonials championed the grandeur of la plus grande
J. P. Daughton is associate professor of history at Stanford University and author of An Empire
Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (2006).
The author would like to thank the dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford for supporting the research needed to complete this project. Audiences at the University of Geneva, the
Toronto Area French Seminar, and Stanford offered helpful feedback on earlier versions of this
article; the author thanks especially Eric Jennings and Sandrine Kott. Laura Monkman provided
invaluable research assistance. All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise noted.
1 See Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester, UK, 2005).
French Historical Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Summer 2011)&DOI 10.1215/00161071-1259166
Copyright 2011 by Society for French Historical Studies
504
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
France at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, it was hard to escape the fact
that the empire was as troubled as it was triumphant.
In addition to political and economic changes, the interwar years
witnessed a shift in how French men and women viewed and understood how non-Europeans experienced colonial rule. Nowhere was this
shift in perspective more evident than in how French writers, journalists, bureaucrats, and activists began to pay closer attention to the quotidian hardship, violence, and suffering that were a part of many colonial subjects’ lives. In books, newspapers, and official reports, as well as
in scholarly conferences and public lecture halls, the misery caused by
colonialism emerged both as a focus of interest and as a major point
of critique of European imperialism. Subjects of critiques and exposés
ranged from burdensome colonial tax schemes to brutal forced labor
systems. The motivations of those who found fault with colonial policies
varied widely, from procolonial, anti-Bolshevik administrators hoping
to salvage colonial authority to left-wing journalists whose perspectives
were deeply informed by their distrust of capitalism.2
Historians have been quick to point out that, no matter how passionate or committed they may have been, most outspoken French critics in the interwar years stopped well short of demanding an end to
colonialism. By failing to take an explicitly anticolonial stance, so the
argument goes, efforts to expose the inhumanity of certain policies
and practices ultimately defended liberal imperialism by asserting that
a compassionate model of colonial domination was possible.3 There is
much valuable in this argument; it proves particularly useful as part of
a larger story of when the tide in France started to turn against colonialism on political and moral grounds. But this line of analysis also has
its limitations. First of all, the approach tends to privilege “anticolonialism” as a morally purer position than mere calls for the reform of
destructive policies.4 While denouncing colonialism altogether was a
more radical political position to take, individual critics may have considered reform a more realistic, and therefore more effective, method
of achieving humane reform. In fact, it is misleading to conflate anti2 On the variety of colonial critics, see Jean-Pierre Bondi, Les anticolonialistes (1881–1962)
(Paris, 1992); and Claude Liauzu, L’histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France du XVIe siècle à nos jours
(Paris, 2007).
3 See, e.g., Marcel Merle, “L’anticolonialisme,” in Le livre noir du colonialisme, XVIe–XXIe
siècle: De l’extermination à la repentance, ed. Marc Ferro (Paris, 2003), 815–62; Gary Wilder, The
French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago,
2005); Nicola Cooper, “Investigating Indochina: Travel Journalism and France’s Civilizing Mission,” in Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s, ed. Charles Burdett and Derek
Duncan (New York, 2002), 173–86; Nicola Cooper, “Colonial Humanism in the 1930s,” French Cultural Studies 17 (2006): 189–205; and Liauzu, Histoire de l’anticolonialisme.
4 In his magisterial study Liauzu suggests that anticolonialists viewed colonialism as a
“crime against humanity” (Histoire de l’anticolonialisme, 13).
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
505
colonialism with humanitarian ideals, since many anticolonialists made
their arguments for political, economic, or nationalistic reasons, not
out of concern for the well-being of non-Europeans.
More important, hunting down anticolonialism limits the issue of
colonial critique to the realm of the nation-state—that is, to the extent
to which French men and women challenged the justification of French
colonialism in France. While the national context might have made
more sense in the nineteenth century, in the wake of the First World
War, critiques of French colonialism engaged with and were informed
by arguments made by a number of prominent nonstate organizations
that promoted an internationalist approach to monitoring and regulating colonial policies. For critics of colonial brutality, imperial capitals
like Paris, London, and Lisbon were no longer the only places to voice
their concerns. In the 1920s and 1930s a new center of debate about the
reform and regulation of European empires emerged: Geneva.
Historians of European empires have largely ignored the work
of the League of Nations and of its auxiliary, the International Labor
Organization (ILO), as well as that of many other independent, nonstate organizations that aimed to reform colonial policies.5 For decades
historians have viewed the League of Nations as an ineffectual and ultimately discredited organization.6 More recently, scholars of empire
have argued that the League and the ILO were institutionally procolonial and therefore that they supported, rather than challenged, European ideas about colonial rule.7 The League’s mandates system, after
all, promoted European rule based on the notions of trusteeship and
civilization.8 But both of these assessments ignore that the two organizations were at the center of a number of major efforts to study and
regulate colonial policies in the interwar years.
In particular, the process of investigating and drafting the Forced
Labor Convention of 1930 was one of the most wide-sweeping attempts
to document and reform cases of European colonial brutality and injustice ever attempted. While the convention officially targeted compul5 A few notable exceptions include Michael Callahan, Mandates and Empire: The League of
Nations and Africa, 1914–1931 (Brighton, UK, 1999); Susan Pedersen, “The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32 (2006): 560–82; and Frederick Cooper,
Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, UK,
1996). None of these authors, however, examines the ILO’s efforts to document colonial abuses.
6 For a discussion of the historical assessments of the League, see Susan Pedersen, “Back
to the League of Nations,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 1091–1117; and David R. Stone,
“Imperialism and Sovereignty: The League of Nations’ Drive to Control the Global Arms Trade,”
Journal of Contemporary History 35 (2000): 213–30.
7 The League’s pro-imperial roots are powerfully argued in Mark Mazower, No Enchanted
Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009).
8 On the influence of British colonial ideology on the League of Nations, see Kevin Grant,
A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (London, 2004).
506
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
sory labor across the globe, correspondence and reports archived at
the ILO make it clear that officials considered forced labor to be a specifically colonial problem, especially in the French, Belgian, and Portuguese empires. As such, ILO officials, as well as the scholars, journalists,
missionaries, and others who corresponded with them, saw forced labor
not simply as unjust exploitation but as a primary cause of violence and
suffering in European empires. This belief was not lost on supporters of
colonialism. Procolonial groups in Europe’s imperial capitals, including Paris, condemned the ILO’s work as a blatant attempt by internationalists to regulate—and meddle in—their nations’ rule abroad.9
Rather than regarded as a helpful attempt to improve colonialism for
colonialism’s sake, the efforts of the League of Nations and of the ILO
were often seen as a threat to the sovereignty of European empires.
This article examines critiques of French colonial practices in the
interwar years in the context of international efforts aimed at reforming European rule. It argues that the interwar years marked an important moment in the development of a compassionate concern for the
plight of non-Europeans not because of new levels of anticolonial sentiment but because of a significant shift in how many French men and
women viewed and understood the colonial experience. To understand
this shift, it is necessary to look in a rather unorthodox place: that space
where cultural and diplomatic history meet.
The years after the Great War saw the emergence of a novel form
of colonial documentary reportage that took great pains to describe
the injustices of European rule and the suffering it caused. This was
not a purely French phenomenon. Indeed, some of the most eloquent
voices on the suffering caused by defective colonial rule—including
French colonialism—were British, American, and non-European. These
accounts of colonial hardship informed an international campaign to
reevaluate how non-Europeans experienced colonialism. The gathering of information on and the sharing of ideas about colonial suffering
sponsored by the League of Nations and the ILO helped move political debates about the moral justification of European imperialism away
from domestic national politics and into a more fluid, international
venue. In this venue, individual motivations, whether self-interested or
selfless, became far less relevant, as a host of organizations and individuals could use reports of colonial misery for a variety of ends. As
a result, while many critics may have intended the liberal reform of
empire, the process of examining colonialism’s penchant for causing hardship ultimately put into question Europe’s monopoly on the
9 On British reactions to the League of Nations, see Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great
War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York, 2008), chap. 9.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
507
notions of “civilization” and “trusteeship,” notions so central to the justification of colonial rule in the interwar years.
Precursors to Interwar Colonial Critiques
Criticizing empire’s penchant for causing suffering was not new in the
1920s. It had a long tradition that can be traced back to Bartolomé de
Las Casas’s 1552 account of the destruction of the Indies.10 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edmund Burke, Abbé Raynal,
and a host of abolitionists, among others, made known the inherent
injustices found in colonial societies.11 But the second half of the nineteenth century, with its nationalist fervor and imperial competition, had
a stifling effect on this tradition of colonial critique. While there were
certainly outspoken opponents of aspects of colonialism in the decades
leading up to the Great War, they came from disparate corners of French
society and never accomplished a sustained critique of expansion.12
The patriotic rhetoric of the imperial civilizing mission made it
difficult for most Frenchmen to imagine that colonialism could cause,
rather than eradicate, hardship.13 Newspapers, speeches, and colonial
expositions abounded with stories of French men and women curing
illnesses, educating the ignorant, and defending the weak in distant,
godforsaken lands. Religious missionaries published journals and
books highlighting their commitment to the sick and the elderly, to
orphans, and to lepers.14 Be they doctors, officers, or missionary sisters, French men and women in the late nineteenth- century empire, it
seemed, worked abroad largely to provide succor and service.
Indeed, if anyone suffered in the colonial experience, it was the
European. Libraries contain ample collections of memoirs and other
accounts by French soldiers, settlers, missionaries, and officials who
described—often in salacious detail—the diseases, ferocious wildlife,
and inclement weather endured in the name of empire.15 As many
10 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, ed. José Maria
Reyes Cano (Barcelona, 1994).
11 On supporters and detractors of empire in this period, including Burke, see Jennifer
Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005); and Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des
Européens dans les deux Indes, 7 vols. (Paris, 1778).
12 Liauzu, Histoire de l’anticolonialisme, 69–122.
13 On the ideology of civilizing, see Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of
Empire in France and West Africa, 1890–1930 (Stanford, CA, 1997).
14 See J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (New York, 2006), chap. 1.
15 On prevalent nonfiction discourses, see David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC, 1993); on representations of colonial life in fictional accounts, see Martine Astier Loutfi, Littérature et colonialisme:
L’expansion coloniale vue dans la littérature romanesque française, 1871–1914 (Paris, 1971).
508
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
imagined it, the late nineteenth- century empire was a place where
the French put their lives and fortunes on the line in the selfless hope
of improving godforsaken lands. A favorite topic of the press was the
valor and sacrifice of European troops fighting brutal exotic enemies.
Against the image of civilized European soldiers, illustrated journals
demonized non-Europeans as cruel, immoral, hateful, and vindictive.
As H. Hazel Hahn has shown, the press loved to portray strong, heroic,
and noble European troops as the innocent victims of “massacres” and
“atrocities”—loaded terms that captured Africans’, Pacific Islanders’,
and Asians’ assumed predilection for blood.16 Procolonials insisted
that such sacrifice both strengthened French prestige and power and
brought civilization to the “backward” regions of the world.
Nowhere did the European’s innocence and untold suffering
emerge more forcefully than in reports of martyrdom. The Catholic
press was always quick to cover violent episodes that resulted in the
often bloody deaths of missionaries abroad. But not all colonial martyrs died violently. One of the most famous Catholic missionaries of
the nineteenth century was Père Damien. A Belgian who joined the
French Congrégation des Sacrés- Coeurs de Picpus, Damien died after
contracting leprosy from those he cared for in Hawaii. A photograph of
“the martyr of Molokai” in the late stages of the disease, his hands and
face swollen and disfigured, was widely reproduced after his death in
1889. Like many missionaries killed by either foreign enemies or tropical diseases, Damien was—and, through his sainthood and the Fondation Damien, still is—emblematic of Europeans’ supreme sacrifice for
the benefit of the outside world.17
Despite its prevalence in the late nineteenth century, the fascination with the challenges faced by white Europeans faded dramatically after the First World War. By the 1920s the image of the isolated
European suffering for humanity and empire had dissipated as more
people questioned the value of an empire that sapped French tax
money and manpower.18 Colonial existence started to lose much of its
air of danger and isolation in the popular imagination. Colonial soldiers and workers who had fought and sacrificed in France during the
war helped change perceptions of colonial subjects as threatening and
16 H. Hazel Hahn, “Heroism, Violence, and Sacrifice: Representing the Self, the Other, and
Rival Empires in French and English Illustrated Media, 1850–1910” (paper delivered at the conference “Germany’s Colonialism in Perspective,” San Francisco State University, Sept. 6–9, 2007).
17 The Fondation Damien continues to fight leprosy, tuberculosis, and leishmaniasis in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America. See www.damienfoundation.org/home.cfm. Damien was canonized by Benedict XVI in October 2009. The Belgian king and prime minister, as well as several
cabinet members, were present for the ceremony at the Vatican.
18 Thomas, French Empire between the Wars, 2–8.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
509
uncivilized.19 As the journalist Albert Londres put it in 1929, gone were
the days of romance, adventure, a hut in the bush, and “the conquest
of the Negro soul.” The empire was becoming a place where you could
take your wife, children, and mother-in-law to live a bourgeois existence.20 Londres no doubt exaggerated the ease of life in the empire,
which for many white Frenchmen remained less than idyllic. But with
improvements in medicines and the emerging tourist industry’s advertising campaigns highlighting luxury hotels and spas in colonies served
by ocean liners, it proved increasingly difficult to imagine the colonial
life as one of unending deprivation.21
As more and more writers traveled throughout the empire, the
respectability of French men and women abroad came under scrutiny.
In the pages of newspapers and novels, French authors showed colonial businesspeople and bureaucrats to be somewhat less than noble.
Rather than as a selfless soldier on the battlefield, the Frenchman
abroad was increasingly portrayed as petty, boorish, and violent. In his
1926 account the acclaimed writer Léon Werth said that, en route to
Cochinchina, his fellow passengers behaved like “poorly raised princes”
who had little to do but complain about the awful service aboard ship.
Werth gave an even less charitable assessment of his compatriots in Saigon. While they had known “social constraint and discipline” at home,
he wrote, Europeans in Indochina—from the governor- general to the
policeman on the street—acted like “potentates” who freely abused any
Vietnamese who displeased them.22
Fictional accounts of the pettiness of Europeans abroad could be
even more excoriating. Georges Simenon’s 1933 colonial Libreville was
peopled by French men and women paralyzed by their dehumanizing
appetites for sex, alcohol, violence, and vengeance. In his novel Le coup
de lune—a dark account that got Simenon more or less banned from
traveling in the empire—Frenchmen in Equatorial Africa drank all the
time, shared advice on how to whip a black man without leaving scars
on his back, and sometimes murdered Africans who displeased them.23
Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s fictional account, which like Simenon’s was
based on personal experience, was little different. The ship that sailed
for West Africa in Céline’s 1934 Voyage au bout de la nuit bobbed along
in a stupor of boredom, hatred, and alcohol. For Céline’s narrator, the
19 On the complexities of interwar French perceptions, see Dan S. Hale, Races on Display:
French Representations of Colonized Peoples, 1886–1940 (Bloomington, IN, 2008), pt. 2.
20 Albert Londres, Terre d’ébène (Paris, 1998), 17.
21 See Eric T. Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas
(Durham, NC, 2006).
22 Léon Werth, Cochinchine (Paris, 1997), 18, 41–42.
23 Georges Simenon, Le coup de lune (Paris, 1933). Simenon was denied a visa in 1936 when
he sought to return to Africa.
510
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
warm air of the tropics brought forth the “terrifying nature of white
men,” the likes of which he had seen only in the Great War. “In the
European cold,” Céline noted, “under gray, puritanical northern skies,
we seldom get to see our brothers’ festering cruelty except in times of
carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface.”24 With its bile, brutality, and heavy drinking,
the colonial life captured in these two accounts was far more sordid
than Londres’s image of an empire tame enough for children, wives,
and mothers-in-law. But either way, life abroad certainly lost its heroic
mystique for the French.
As critics took a closer look at French behavior abroad, they also
turned a more discerning eye to the experiences of non-Europeans.
There were certainly writers and critics before the war who had
expressed outrage at the treatment of local populations. Reports like
Paul Vigné’s 1911 La sueur du burnous, which condemned “the crimes
and abuses of all sorts” perpetrated by the French administration in
Tunisia, offered powerful indictments of colonial mismanagement.25
And episodes such as the 1905 case of Georges Toqué and FernandLéopold Gaud, two administrators in the Congo who blew up an
indigenous man with dynamite to celebrate Bastille Day, caused occasional public outcries.26 But such exposés and incidents infrequently
drew sustained attention in the forum of public opinion that resulted
in calls for significant colonial reforms.
Interwar Critiques of Colonial Rule
Starting in the late 1920s, an unprecedented number of articles, books,
and reports documented the raw experience of colonialism. While still
few compared to the legions of travelers, scientists, and adventurers
who supported the empire, many of those who criticized the mistreatment of colonial subjects in the interwar years were prominent literary
or political figures. Londres, arguably the most influential investigative journalist in interwar France, exposed the violent abuse of laborers
in French Africa in the pages of Le petit Parisien and later in the book
24 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York,
1983), 95.
25 Paul Vigné d’Octon, La sueur des burnous: Les crimes coloniaux de la IIIe République (Paris,
2001), 10. For a full discussion of Vigné’s critique of colonialism before 1914, see Jean Suret-Canal,
Essays on African History: From the Slave Trade to Neocolonialism, trans. Christopher Hurst (London,
1988), chap. 5.
26 The incident caused Savorgnan de Brazza to return to the Congo to investigate. His assistant on that trip was Félicien Challaye, who wrote about the investigation in Un livre noir du colonialisme: “Souvenirs sur la colonisation,” new ed. (Paris, 2003), 48–71. Georges Toqué offered his own
account of the Congo in La terre qui ment, la terre qui tue: Les massacres du Congo (Paris, 1907). On the
coverage of the episode, as well as Brazza’s return to Africa, in the press, see Edward Berenson,
Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (Berkeley, CA, 2010), chap. 6.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
511
Terre d’ébène. Werth, whose travelogue Cochinchine took colonial society
to task, was a respected writer and a close friend of Antoine de SaintExupéry (who dedicated his famous Le petit prince to him). In 1925
Roland Dorgelès, riding the fame of his war memoir, Les croix de bois
(1919), published the journals of his travels in Southeast Asia. In 1927
the future Nobel laureate André Gide published his own account of
the heart of darkness in Voyage au Congo. Paul Monet, a leading expert
on Indochina, wrote a damning exposé in 1930 of the treatment of
Vietnamese coolies in New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. In 1933
the French Guyanese writer René Maran, whose novel Batouala won
the 1921 Prix Goncourt, reported on “the great suffering of the blacks
of French Equatorial Africa” in a series of articles in Le peuple. Louis
Roubaud and Andrée Viollis, prominent journalists in their day, wrote
powerful accounts of torture and political oppression in Vietnam. And
in 1939 Albert Camus wrote a series of wrenching articles about the
poverty and famine that gripped the Kabyle in Algeria.27
Though of diverse backgrounds and political perspectives, these
and other writers shared key characteristics. Individual techniques
certainly varied (Gide, for example, was far more impressionistic than
most), but almost all of these authors wrote in a first-person documentary style that mingled their own travel experiences with outside
information from a variety of official and published sources. These
writers took great pains to capture the experiences—experiences often
defined by violence or deprivation—of the people living under French
rule, often with skepticism or outright indignation about the hollow
official promises regarding the “civilizing” work of empire.
In the interwar years the documentary style was not limited to the
French empire; rather, it influenced journalism, photography, and filmmaking around the world.28 The political Left from the United States
to China particularly favored documentary reportage; the progressive
and left-wing press used reportage as a way of revealing social realities
often ignored by both government studies and the mainstream press.29
27 Roland Dorgelès, Sur la route mandarine (Paris, 1995); André Gide, Voyage au Congo (Paris,
1927); Paul Monet, Les jauniers: Histoire vraie (Paris, 1930); René Maran, “La grande souffrance des
nègres de l’Afrique Equatoriale Française,” Le peuple, Aug. 21, 24, and 28, 1933; Louis Roubaud,
Viêtnam, la tragédie indochinoise (Paris, 1931); Andrée Viollis, Indochine S.O.S. (Paris, 1949); Albert
Camus, Misère de la Kabylie, in Chroniques algériennes: Actuelles III, 1939–1958 (Paris, 1958), 33–90.
28 On the documentary tradition, see William Stott’s classic study Documentary Expression and
Thirties America (Chicago, 1986); on documentary film in the interwar years, see Lewis Jacobs, The
Documentary Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York, 1979).
29 On socialist reportage in China, see Charles A. Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics
of Historical Experience (Durham, NC, 2002), chap. 6. Daniel Rodgers argues that American progressives were particularly fascinated with reportage from the Soviet Union in the 1920s (Atlantic
Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age [Cambridge, MA, 1998]). On the aims of radical documentary reportage in the 1930s, see Stott, Documentary Expression, 67–73, 171–89.
512
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
Following in the prewar tradition of Friedrich Engels (1845), Jacob A.
Riis (1890), Jack London (1903), and others who wrote about (and
often lived among) society’s poor and outcast, writers as diverse as John
Reed, Maryse Choisy, George Orwell, and James Agee experienced
firsthand the lives of their subjects before publishing their accounts.30
Often one writer’s account inspired another. Londres was motivated
to travel to Africa in part by Gide’s experiences there.31 Though they
diverged ideologically, the activist and colonial critic Félicien Challaye
paid respects to Monet and his work.32
Influences spread beyond Europe. For example, Choisy’s 1928 Un
mois chez les femmes, which documented her experience living among
French prostitutes, influenced writers in the empire. Two authors who
cited Choisy’s inspiration were Tam Lang and Vu Trong Phung, prominent Vietnamese writers who in the early 1930s went undercover as a
rickshaw driver and a household servant, respectively, to document
the troubled lives of society’s lowliest.33 As Peter Zinoman has shown,
investigative reportage was a mainstay of the dozens of newspapers
that came into existence during the publishing boom in 1930s Indochina. Vietnamese writers’ firsthand accounts of the horrors of colonial
prisons were deeply influenced by Londres, Viollis, and Jean- Claude
Demariaux, who wrote numerous articles in the 1930s about the bagne
at Poulo Condore.34
Colonial reportage was no doubt inspired by the general popularity of documentary journalism in the interwar years, though it could
also be traced more specifically to the beginning of the twentieth century when Roger Casement, E. D. Morel, and others exposed grave
abuses in Leopold II’s Belgian Congo.35 Casement’s famous “Congo
30 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (New York, 1887); Jacob A.
Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York, 1997); Jack London, The People of the Abyss, in Novels and
Social Writings, ed. Donald Pizer (New York, 1982); John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New
York, 1919); Maryse Choisy, Un mois chez les femmes: Reportage (Paris, 1928); George Orwell, Down
and Out in Paris and London (New York, 1933); Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London, 1937); James
Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston, 1941).
31 Albert Londres, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Francis Lacassin (Paris, 2007), 539.
32 Archives de la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (hereafter ALDH), F Delta Res, 798/5L:
typed note, no title, no date, from Challaye. This letter explained the work that Challaye had done
to publicize the “Mussolinian” effects of colonial rule. The League’s archives are housed at the
Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, Nanterre.
33 Both Tam Lang and Vu Trong Phung’s reportage is collected in The Light of the Capital:
Three Modern Vietnamese Classics, trans. Greg Lockhart and Monique Lockhart (Oxford, 1996). Tam
Lang notes Choisy’s influence in “I Pulled a Rickshaw,” 53 (he also cited Londres and others); Vu
Trong Phung does so in “Household Servants,” 123. On Vu Trong Phung’s other works, including
five books of reportage, see Peter Zinoman’s introduction to Vu Trong Phung, Dumb Luck, trans.
Nguyen Nguyet Cam and Peter Zinoman (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), 1–30.
34 Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 244–45; see also Jean- Claude Demariaux, Les secrets des îles Poulo- Condore: Le grande
bagne indochinois (Paris, 1956).
35 E. D. Morel’s publications, while often not based on his own experiences, drew heavily
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
513
Report” of 1903 appeared just two years before Challaye’s first investigation of similar atrocities in the French Congo.36 The two men’s
accounts not only shared much in terms of content on the brutal methods of administrating the countryside and extracting labor; they also
approached the investigation of colonialism in similar ways. Both made
considerable efforts to witness firsthand the devastating impact of corrupt colonial policies on local inhabitants, many of whom they interviewed directly. Where firsthand accounts were unavailable, they relied
on witnesses, often missionaries, travelers, and administrators. Casement also reproduced informant narratives to give affective force to
his discoveries.37 In so doing, the two writers, rather than simply report
what they saw, captured the full impact colonial policies had on the
everyday lives of the indigenous population.
This method of investigation and writing, with its focus on the torment endured by colonial populations, thrived in the interwar years.
For metropolitan readers comfortable with the mellifluous promises of
procolonial rhetoric, critics’ accounts of conditions in the empire could
make for jarring reading. Of particular concern was the daily humiliation of the indigenous population. Challaye, for one, noticed such mistreatment on both of his voyages to Indochina, the first in 1901 and the
second just after the war. He arrived in Southeast Asia with ideas typical of the day, namely, that the French cared a great deal for the natives
and that the Vietnamese loved living under French law. But he quickly
changed his mind: “I constantly saw Frenchmen offend, injure, brutalize the indigène.” Challaye wrote of one colonist he saw who publicly
slapped an old Vietnamese man and pulled him through a village by
the ear, and of another who beat and kicked young Vietnamese women
who had come to his hotel to have tea.38 In her 1928 travel account
the activist Camille Drevet noted with horror a sign in her hotel room
in Phnom Penh that prohibited the beating of servants.39 Werth also
highlighted the abuse of domestic help—especially of the ubiquitous
“boy”—as a common problem in Vietnam; indeed, he noted that the
governor- general ultimately felt it necessary to publish a circular prohibiting the beating of the indigenous population.40
on eyewitness accounts and government reports. See, e.g., King Leopold’s Rule in Africa (London,
1904) and Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Which Flourished on the Congo for Twenty Years,
1890–1910, new ed. (London, 1919).
36 See Séamas Ó Síocháin and Michael O’Sullivan, eds., The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement’s Congo Report and 1903 Diary (Dublin, 2003); and Challaye, Livre noir du colonialisme. Challaye’s
reports on the Congo were published in various journals and in Le Congo français (Paris, 1906).
37 On informant narratives, see Stott, Documentary Expression, 190–210.
38 Challaye, Livre noir de colonialisme, 33–35.
39 Camille Drevet, Les Annamites chez eux (Paris, 1928), 20.
40 Werth, Cochinchine, 47.
514
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
Viollis captured the distance between metropolitan and colonial attitudes by comparing the experiences of Vietnamese students
who had studied in Paris with what she found in Indochina. Living
in the Latin Quarter, she argued, Vietnamese could meet whomever
they pleased and read whatever books or papers they liked. They were
invited into French homes and treated, as she put it, as “citizens like any
others.” But back in Vietnam, regardless of their accomplishments, they
were treated like “boys,” addressed as “tu” by even the lowliest French
fonctionnaire, excluded from white people’s homes, and prohibited from
reading even L’humanité. The only time the Vietnamese mingled with
Europeans was in prison, and even there white murderers and thieves
received better treatment than Vietnamese political prisoners.41
Werth acknowledged a similar sense of French entitlement. For
him, Frenchmen abroad were “only a caricature of Europeans” who at
best imitated European civilization, having given up the faith in reason
to live by what he called a “tradition of colonial morals.”42 The poet
and travel writer Luc Durtain documented how he encountered “a
white man” who interspersed his cultivated dinner conversation about
Michel de Montaigne and Paul Valéry with tirades against the wait staff.
“Damned nha-qué! Idiot!” the man screamed, throwing punches at his
servant for forgetting the champagne and a spoon for the mustard.43
The irony of beating the staff for forgetting the finer points of manners
was apparently lost on French men and women abroad.
In addition to daily humiliation and violence, misery in the workplace was another common theme in critical accounts of the empire.
Interspersed in Dorgelès’s otherwise conventional 1925 travel narrative
of Indochina is the description of an encounter with “pitiful” coolies
who were essentially sold by a “marchand d’hommes.”44 In the coal mines
of the north, he found blackened men, women, and children, some as
young as ten, working for a few sous a day. The indigenous population
so dreaded this work, he noted, that only in famine years could the
mining company find willing laborers. Playing on the irony of the scene
when compared to stereotypes associated with Indochina, he wrote:
“No lotus, no pagodas, no flowered hedges: modern labor does not like
fantasy. . . . [Here] it is not incense that smokes, only burning coal. . . .
oh exoticism!”45 Dorgelès also contrasted the supposedly heroic efforts
of French business interests to clear the forest for rubber production
41 Viollis, Indochine S.O.S., 46–48.
42 Werth, Cochinchine, 41–42.
43 Nha qué (nhà quê ) is a pejorative Vietnamese term meaning “peasant” (Luc Durtain, Dieux
blancs, hommes jaunes [Paris, 1930], 120).
44 Dorgelès, Sur la route mandarine, 19–20.
45 Ibid., 95–96.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
515
with the high number of Vietnamese cadavers the work produced.
Once the rubber trees grew out of the cleared ground, he wrote, they
were “slender and in line, like rows of crosses.”46
Laborers in Africa endured even harsher conditions. In his report
on the building of the Congo- Océan railroad in Equatorial Africa, Londres revealed the devastating working conditions of laborers: “Spent,
mistreated . . . , injured, emaciated, desolate, the blacks die en masse.”
In a work destined for both publication and the desk of the colonial
minister, Londres wrote of thousands of workers—as many as sixteen
thousand—taken from villages by force, often lassoed or yoked around
the neck, and then worked to death: husbands, fathers, and sons
who left home and never returned. And, Londres added, there still
remained more than three hundred kilometers of rail to build.47 Like
Londres, Gide, citing reports from various administrators, described
how villages he visited in the Oubangui- Chari were devastated by the
brutal working conditions endured by the corvée. Destined for portage,
many villagers preferred death to labor under the French. Fleeing into
the forest to evade capture, people starved or died of exposure, leaving
the countryside gravely depopulated.48 A census estimated that the
region’s population dropped by more than seventeen million between
1911 and 1930.49
Witnessing such suffering and humiliation drove writers to different conclusions. To Werth, colonialism seemed no more than “a system founded on crime and abuse.”50 To Challaye, it was hardly “the
humanitarian enterprise” that the apologists celebrated; born of war, it
had its roots instead in crime and folly.51 But not all critical assessments
of colonialism were so damning. Paul Monet insisted in Les jauniers that
he was a resolute exponent of republican imperialism. Nonetheless, his
book detailed how the republican goal of improving the plight of the
Vietnamese had gone awry, corrupted by big businesses that treated
their employees as slaves. Londres made clear that France’s empire in
Africa should embarrass all Frenchmen. But it was improvement that
was needed, he stressed, not an end to rule.52
Regardless of their political motivations or the extent to which
writers sought reform instead of an end to colonial rule, their assessments regularly drew the ire of procolonial groups. Procolonial lobby46 Ibid., 200.
47 Londres, Terre d’ébène, 246–48.
48 Gide, Voyage au Congo, 88–93.
49 Challaye, Livre noir du colonialisme, 81.
50 Werth, Cochinchine, 41.
51 Challaye, Livre noir du colonialisme, 84, 137.
52 Pierre Assouline, Albert Londres: Vie et mort d’un grand reporter, 1884–1932 (Paris, 1989), 490.
516
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
ists, for example, pummeled Gide and Londres mercilessly. The president of the Fédération Nationale des Anciens Coloniaux declared Londres a liar and his reportage “ridiculous.”53 Defenders of empire also
pursued a vigorous campaign in the press and in government against
Challaye, one of colonialism’s most outspoken opponents. Throughout
the 1920s and 1930s Challaye gave lectures frequently about the hardships endured by colonial subjects, in large part, as he put it, to counter
“la grande presse,” which remained “systematically silent on the disagreeable facts in the colonies.”54 A longtime member of the Ligue des
Droits de l’Homme, Challaye was the organization’s preeminent voice
on colonial matters. In 1928, after one of his lectures at a Ligue event
in Ariège, Challaye became embroiled in a national “affaire” when a
writer in L’express du Midi denounced his message as antipatriotic. A
handful of Ligue members resigned to protest Challaye’s comments,
though a larger number of socialists and radicals apparently joined for
the same reason.55
The flap became a national scandal when Ernest Outrey, the deputy
from Cochinchina, demanded that the ministry of public instruction
investigate whether the lycée professor Challaye should be able to question the government in such a public forum. For a time, Challaye faced
the possibility of losing his position at the Lycée Condorcet.56 But the
Ligue, which was well versed in defending individuals’ rights, steadfastly defended his prerogative to voice his personal opinions. Left-wing
commentators and politicians took up his cause, as well. Even a group
of students in Challaye’s Philosophy A class signed a petition voicing
an “energetic protest against the attacks” on their teacher.57 Challaye
eventually—in 1930, more than two years after his lecture in Ariège—
emerged from the flap with his job secure. The incident, however,
revealed how doggedly defenders of empire would attack any critic of
colonial brutality.
It is possible to try to assess the impact of critics’ work by looking at their reception in France and the debates they fed. But to do so
would be to underestimate their significance in shaping much larger
reassessments of colonial policies taking place in Europe in the inter53 Archives Nationales, Paris, 76as/10: clipping of Georges Barthélémy, “Celui qui calomnie: Albert Londres a menti,” Journal officiel de la Fédération nationales des associations et syndicats de
fonctionnaires et agents coloniaux, no. 120 (1929): 734.
54 ALDH, F Delta Res, 798/65: Letter from Challaye to “Mon cher Collègue,” Le Vesinet,
Dec. 8, 1933.
55 ALDH, F Delta Res, 798/5 contains a file of correspondence, clippings, and other
material related to Challaye’s detractors and defenders.
56 ALDH, F Delta Res, 798/5: “Note à M. le Secrétaire général,” Dec. 17, 1928; and “Le
Cas de M. Challaye,” in La Ligue—Information, feuille quotidienne d’informations de la Ligue des droits de
l’homme, May 30, 1930.
57 ALDH, F Delta Res, 798/5: “Petition,” Paris, June 4, 1930.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
517
war years. Indeed, one of the main reasons that advocates of colonialism responded so stridently to accounts of violence and suffering across
the empire is that it was no longer a subject of discussion simply in the
French press or parliament. The suffering of colonial populations came
under increasing scrutiny by a host of potential adversaries, including
nationalist independence movements in the colonies, the Comintern,
and—perhaps most worrisome of all to the colonial lobby—the League
of Nations and other ostensibly liberal international organizations.58
French supporters of empire thus read Londres, Challaye, Monet, and
others for what they were (whether the individual authors intended it
or not): material evidence for those who questioned European powers’
ability to regulate their own empires.
International Efforts at Colonial Reform
Documenting the effects of destructive colonial practices was not a specifically French phenomenon in the interwar years. The suffering of
colonial populations was emerging as a political issue in a number of
imperial capitals and, perhaps most important, in Geneva, especially
at the League of Nations and the ILO. The League first faced the issue
of the treatment of colonial populations with the creation of the mandates system. But colonial brutality truly came to the fore in 1926 during debate over the Slavery Convention, when the use of forced labor
in European empires emerged as an unavoidable issue. Realizing the
political pitfalls of discussing colonial forced labor alongside slavery,
the League called on the ILO to investigate and debate the issue and
eventually to draft a separate Forced Labor Convention in 1930. It was
in this context that the ILO emerged as a major center for the documentation of living conditions in Europe’s empires.
Created during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the ILO
addressed conditions of employment and social justice in member
nations.59 While most of its work dealt with domestic issues such as
working hours and factory safety, the ILO took on the controversial
question of forced labor in the late 1920s. Albert Thomas, the French
socialist who directed the ILO and “gave it life” throughout its first
decade,60 saw the “protection of indigenous workers” as inseparable
58 On communist anticolonialism, see Merle, “L’anticolonialisme,” 852–53. For supporters
of colonialism, accusations of abuse from communists were easily denied as mere propaganda.
Criticisms from more centrist organizations were harder to ignore.
59 On the origins and structure of the ILO, see G. A. Johnston, The International Labour Organisation: Its Work for Social and Economic Progress (London, 1970). The notion of “social justice” was
nebulous at best, and not accepted by all; see Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2005), 367–68.
60 Thomas was widely credited within the ILO for its success. See “Albert Thomas,” International Labour Review 25, no. 5 (1932): i–iv.
518
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
from the organization’s general mission.61 While politically left of center, the ILO was not overtly anticolonial in the interwar years. Just as
the League of Nations’ mandates system was founded on the notion of
trusteeship, the ILO remained committed to the idea that European
colonial rule was a necessary step in bringing civilization and economic
development to backward societies.62 Harold Grimshaw, a British lawyer who directed the ILO’s Native Labor Section and also sat on the
Permanent Mandates Commission in the 1920s, did not even oppose
compulsory labor as long as it was carefully regulated and fulfilled
essential needs of colonial states. Grimshaw and others at the ILO,
however, were deeply disturbed by reports of violence and injustice,
both for humanitarian reasons and out of concern that severe abuses
would undermine colonial rule. Thus, in addressing the forced labor
issue, the ILO defended colonial workers’ rights to humane treatment
without raising ethical or political objections to the legitimacy of colonial rule.
Opposition to forced labor was nonetheless a tricky issue that
put ILO officials in a position of confrontation with the very European imperial powers they were trying to regulate. European powers
had long insisted that the governing of colonies was strictly a domestic
political concern not open to international critique. The ILO’s efforts
on forced labor met with outrage in procolonial quarters. Paul Bourdarie, the founder of the Académie des Sciences Coloniales, deemed
the ILO’s work “manifestly hostile,” claiming that it would bring “irreparable prejudice” against the imperial powers.63 Well aware of the
opposition they faced, especially in Paris, Lisbon, and Brussels, leaders
at the ILO trod lightly. To avoid confrontation, they made sure that
all official publications and public discussions of forced labor focused
on regulatory progress and rarely documented specific deeds or cast
blame on any nation.
As a result, the debate over the convention itself had little to do
with the hardship experienced by colonial subjects. In fact, it is striking how benign and legalistic discussions of the issue could be. For
example, in Geneva in 1929, at the Twelfth Session of the International
Labor Conference, where forced labor had its moment as a main item
on the agenda, the debates made no reference to beatings, depopulation, or any kind of suffering. Returning to the tropes of the nine61 International Labor Organization Archives, Geneva (hereafter ILOA), N206/1/22/7:
Letter from Thomas to M. Archimbaud, Député, Dec. 28, 1927.
62 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge,
UK, 2004), 137. On the ideological underpinnings of interwar colonial rule, see Pedersen, “Meaning of the Mandates System.”
63 Académie des Sciences d’Outre Mer, MSS 324: Letter from Bourdarie to the Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Paris, no date (ca. 1929).
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
519
teenth century, many speakers emphasized the hardships suffered not
by laborers but by Europeans in their selfless pursuit of empire.64 Those
who mentioned working conditions, violence, or coercion were either
reprimanded or silenced by the session’s president. And, as one Indian
delegate pointed out, there was a noticeable absence of the “coloured
people . . . most affected by this question.”65
In the end, the predominant argument to emerge from the conference debate was bland enough to be palatable to all. In 1930 the ILO
Governing Body adopted a convention that called for the end of forced
labor, in the words of Article 1, “in all its forms within the shortest possible period,” allowing recourse to it only as an “exceptional measure”
for public purposes. In the thirty-three articles and eighty subsections
of the final Forced Labor Convention, there was not a single mention
of the violence or hardship caused by decades of colonial rule. It is easy
to see why historians have found in the convention little more than “liberal moralizing” about the importance of free labor. Frederick Cooper
has shown that the convention had minimal impact on serious debates
about the social and political contexts of colonial labor.66 Conventions
generally, as statements of political will, were fast becoming a relic of
an outdated “Victorian faith” in the power of international laws and
agreements.67
But few at the ILO saw the convention as their only means of changing colonial practices. Even as officials encouraged nations to ratify the
convention, they realized that governments alone could not be trusted
to monitor conditions in their own empires. In the years leading up to
the drafting of the convention, the ILO’s Native Labor section learned
only too well that individual governments often concealed evidence of
conditions in their colonies. An early, instructive lesson was the experience of Raymond Leslie Buell, a respected American scholar, Harvard
professor, and expert on foreign affairs who was a close adviser to the
ILO and the League on a range of African issues.68 In 1926 Buell traveled to French Cameroon, a League of Nations mandate, and was deeply
troubled by what he found. First, there were games of official deception. In Edea, an important regional capital, he met a French administrator who initially “fell over himself ” to provide Buell with documen64 See, e.g., the discussion of the Portuguese and Australian representatives. Proceedings of
the International Labour Conference, Twelfth Session, vol. 1 (Geneva, 1929), 44, 53, 58.
65 Even for pointing out this obvious fact, the Indian workers’ delegate was censured (ibid.,
45–48).
66 Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 30.
67 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 142–43.
68 Buell’s most enduring work is his massive study The Native Problem in Africa, 2 vols. (New
York, 1928). Dead at fifty, he had already authored some three dozen books on subjects as varied
as American foreign policy, protectionism, Liberia, Cuba, Poland, Nicaragua, Haiti, opium, Japanese emigration to the United States, and European politics.
520
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
tation of living conditions there. But within a day the officer changed
his mind and even prohibited Buell from meeting with certain officials
he had asked to interview. “I don’t know what had got in to him,” the
American wrote, “unless he had received instructions from the government to turn me off this way.” It mattered not. “I have already got
enough from their own reports,” he noted in a dispatch that would end
up at the Native Bureau of the ILO, “to show that the administration of
the Cameroon is in some ways worse than the Congo.”69
The story Buell told stood at odds with official French accounts
of their administration of the mandate. In regular updates to the
League of Nations, the French government had always shown itself
“sympathetic to the native,” as Buell put it. But Buell’s visit to Cameroon proved that French assurances were misleading at best. While the
French had adopted the extensive legislation demanded by the mandates system, Buell found that the daily administration of the region
was “much worse here than in a regular French colony.” Local services
were “nearly non- existent,” and basic infrastructure, such as road building, was maintained not by officials but by unsupervised local chiefs.
The result was the widespread abuse of African men and women. Buell
followed leads from villagers and missionaries who claimed that chiefs
sold their followers’ labor to French businesses, accepting handsome
payment for their services but passing nothing on to the workers. He
found dozens of women working as porters, despite a law prohibiting
them from doing so. He collected some “beautiful examples” of the
justice system that allowed administrators to imprison inhabitants “for
almost any conceivable offence” for up to fifteen days without a hearing. “I could go on like this for pages,” Buell wrote in his report. “But I
think I have said enough now until I have cooled off a little.”70
Such interactions with colonial governments left a deep mark on
the Native Labor section. To offset its limitations in policing Europe’s
colonies, the ILO became a major international center for documenting and studying labor abuses and related hardships in the colonial
world. Thomas, Grimshaw, and their associates not only worked with
government officials; they also looked to other kinds of witnesses, many
of whom were openly critical of colonial policies. It was in this effort
to document and assess the state of indigenous labor conditions in
Europe’s empires that the ILO came to know the work of many wellknown French critics like Gide, Londres, Monet, and Dorgelès. The ILO
developed direct relationships with a number of French critics, includ69 ILOA, N206/1/88/1: Raymond Buell, “Seventh Report to the Committee of International Research of Harvard University and Radcliffe, Period from Jan. 30 to Date,” Edea, French
Cameroon, Mar. 16, 1926, 3–4.
70 Buell, “Seventh Report,” 5–7.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
521
ing in particular Challaye, whose network included politicians, former
colonial officials, and writers like Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland.
Thomas used his close ties with French politicians and intellectuals to
help the ILO’s cause. He was a widely published journalist before the
war, having been appointed by Jean Jaurès to the staff of L’humanité,
and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1910, the start of an
illustrious career in government. Thomas’s experience gave him great
insight into the political climate in France and into prevalent attitudes
about colonial reform, and he clearly saw debates in France as part of
broader European concerns about colonial populations.71
The ILO did not, however, merely respond to debates in France.
The organization’s international composition and focus allowed it to
gather information from a range of sources in all of Europe’s empires
and to shape the terms of debate about the plight of indigenous populations. From the mid-1920s on, the ILO corresponded with European and American scholars, missionaries, and travelers for accounts
of understudied regions. And it collected complaints from indigenous
people who had themselves experienced or witnessed abuse. Equally
important, literally anyone could mail a concern or observation to the
ILO. No matter how humble the source, officials discussed how best to
deal with particularly pressing issues brought to their attention. In one
such case from 1927, for example, a Mme. Marcelle Müller wrote to
the ILO to report that she had seen women coffee sorters in Djibouti
(French Somaliland) working twelve-hour days under a blistering sun
and with little food. Having found a letter from the previous year from
another traveler who had passed through the region and reported similar details, ILO officials determined that the information warranted a
confrontation with the French administration.72
The ILO was not a sounding board for random complaints,
rumors, or personal vendettas. It privileged documentary-style, firsthand accounts of colonial labor systems that provided clear evidence
of abuses and that could be corroborated with government reports and
other published materials. Officials from the director on down corresponded with one another constantly, sharing reports, scrutinizing their
methodologies, and debating their reliability. In one case, for example,
an ILO official counseled his colleagues to distrust a certain individual
whose writing “contained statements in the nature of personal opinions
which could not be verified” and might be “very damaging” to them.73 In
1927.
71 ILOA, N206/1/22/7: Letter from Thomas to M. Archimbaud, French Député, Dec. 28,
72 ILOA, N206/0/8: Minute sheet and “Note sur les conditions de travail sur la Côte des
Somalis,” Nov. 23, 1927.
73 ILOA, N206/1/01/3: Minute sheet, note from Royal Meeker to the Director, Oct. 7, 1921.
522
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
short, they privileged just the sort of accounts that many French critics
were writing in the 1920s and 1930s: reportage based on a combination
of eyewitness and corroborating reports, preferably of an official nature.
In addition to individuals, a host of indigenous rights groups and
other independent organizations were important partners, such as
Swiss, French, British, and Australian groups like the Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes, the Ligue contre l’Oppression
Coloniale, and the Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection Agency.74
The ILO corresponded with missionary organizations, both Catholic
and Protestant, in Britain, France, Rome, Finland, New Zealand, and
elsewhere that shared information on subjects ranging from inhumane
colonial labor systems in Africa to the devastating impact of “grog” on
Pacific islanders. Not only did ILO officials deal with these organizations, but they also formed the center of a web, putting different groups
and individuals in touch and encouraging exchanges. Through this web
of connections, the ILO educated the public about the importance of
fair labor practices and spurred popular support of the convention.
The archive amassed by the ILO was not just about colonial labor;
it was likely, in its day, one of the most extensive depositories of records
concerning what we would now call human rights abuses. The collection documented a litany of colonial abuses, including racism, lynching, murder, rape, ritual humiliation, social dislocation, poor hygiene
conditions, disease, and the depopulation of entire regions—much
of which stemmed from insufficient or corrupted labor regulations.
Indeed, many of the abuses that the ILO and other individuals and
organizations uncovered were not cases of forced labor; allegedly free
labor systems, particularly plantation work using coolies or immigrant
labor, sometimes fostered the severe mistreatment of workers as well.
Subjects of inquiry could be as broad as the experiences of Filipino
laborers in the United States or as specific as the production of “thrill”
films that showed black people eaten by wild animals.
Because of the limits of its mandate, the ILO did not pursue all
of the reports it gathered. Certainly, as a bureaucracy it often moved
timidly when confronting major European governments with accusations of wrongdoing. But indirectly its impact came from sharing information with individuals and organizations that could bring issues to
governments’ or the public’s attention by other means. Such a distribution of information meant that critiques of colonial policies were no
longer limited to national debate; they were open to the scrutiny of an
ever- growing international network of individuals and organizations,
some procolonial, some not.
74 Correspondence with these organizations can be consulted in the N206 series of ILOA.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
523
Unmooring European Civilization
The ILO’s desire to document colonial hardship both coincided with
and contributed to a shift in how many people—including many French
men and women—examined and understood European colonial rule.
The scholars, missionaries, writers, and even common citizens who
corresponded with the ILO exhibited a concern about colonialism’s
brutality that was shared by Londres, Gide, Monet, Challaye, Viollis,
and other French reporters in the interwar years. What represented
a departure from late nineteenth- century views was the level of care
taken to examine, document, and understand the daily experiences of
common people living under colonial regimes. In particular, the suffering of populations—through humiliation and “casual” violence and
abuse—played a more prominent role in reports and narratives than at
any time since the abolition of slavery.
As such, the interwar years represented an important moment in
the history of humanitarian sensibilities regarding colonialism. Since
the eighteenth century, many Europeans had written about the way
non-Europeans suffered. For example, publications about the horrors
of slavery, as Karen Halttunen has shown, often described corporeal torment with pornographic salaciousness.75 But with abolitionism and the
disappearance of the villainous European slave owner, a similar fascination with the pain of non-Europeans did not follow the new imperial conquests of the latter half of the nineteenth century. There remained men
and women concerned for Africans, Asians, and Polynesians. Many journalists and commentators described, for example, the horrific consequences of droughts and famines in Algeria, India, and elsewhere.76 Missionaries documented the brutality of Arab slavery and violence between
rival tribes and religious factions. But in these cases, Europeans—and
European imperialism—were rarely deemed culpable in any way. Very
few writers explored the quotidian physical, social, and emotional impact
of colonial policies or governance on indigenous people.
The interests of the ILO and its myriad reporters and correspondents represented a departure from nineteenth- century sensibilities.
Many postwar critics set out to document what social scientists and
political activists today often call “social suffering”—quotidian miseries that result from living conditions created by political, economic,
75 Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American
Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 303–34.
76 As Mike Davis shows for India and China, the few radicals who denounced the empire
for failing to alleviate hunger in the 1870s and 1890s have been forgotten. Instead, the claim that
British railroads in Asia saved famine victims won out (Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and
the Making of the Third World [New York, 2002], 7–11).
524
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
and institutional power.77 This international effort to uncover and
understand the social suffering wrought by empires began a process
of making plausible what most scholars find self- evident today: despite
the promises of the civilizing mission, European colonial rule caused
violence, hardship, and social strife.
In addition to helping change the way Europeans viewed the
experiences of colonial subjects, the ILO and other organizations
represented a considerable force in shaping the way information was
shared and disseminated. The ILO and the League of Nations were
active players in the formation of international networks of scholars,
journalists, activists, and nonstate organizations concerned about the
potentially harmful by-products of European colonization. The gathering, sharing, and dissemination of information that the ILO oversaw
made it easier for an array of people to conduct more efficient research
and produce well- documented studies of colonial societies.
A single archived file offers a sense of the reach of the ILO’s networks. At the front of a file of correspondence with the Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes, officials at the ILO, including
Thomas, shared notes about these subjects: a recent visit of W. E. B.
DuBois, who was traveling in connection with the Anti-slavery and
Aborigines Protection Society; a letter received from the French
deputy from Guadeloupe; a meeting with the French feminists Gabrielle Duchêne and Madeleine Rolland (the sister of Romain Rolland) of
the Ligue Internationale des Femmes pour la Paix et la Liberté; and a
visit by Duong Van Fiao of Indochina and Mohammed Hatta of Indonesia. These men, women, and organizations were involved in issues
ranging from native lands in South Africa to the inclusion of more nonEuropeans in official discussions in Geneva.78 The ILO’s networks were
often concerned with labor issues, but not always. The Native Labor
Office, for example, tried to facilitate the creation of an independent
missionary bureau that would collect and publicize reports from the
field and help spur public opinion to demand investigations into subjects that did not deal with labor but that were related to other forms
of colonial privation.79
The ILO also helped organize or participated in international
conferences that brought together organizations, activists, and scholars
77 Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, “Introduction,” Daedalus 125 (1996):
10. This is a special issue of Daedalus on social suffering. See also Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death
without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, CA, 1992); Pierre Bourdieu, La misère
du monde (Paris, 1993); and Paul Farmer, “An Anthropology of Structural Violence,” Current Anthropology 45, no. 3 (2004): 305–25.
78 ILOA, N206/1/01/3: Minute sheets.
79 ILOA, N206/0/4/1: Letter from C. Weaver to Rev. Paton, International Missionary Council, Geneva, May 16, 1929. See also correspondence in ILOA, N206/0/4 and N206/0/4/1.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
525
who prior to the 1920s would seldom have shared a stage. In 1927, for
example, the ILO and the League of Nations played a prominent role in
a conference, directed by Challaye, called “The Relations between the
White Races and the Races of Color.” The list of speakers was as varied
as it was distinguished: Henri Junod, the director of a major international indigenous rights organization; Leo Frobenius, the German ethnologist; Albert Schweitzer; Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Indian prime
minister; Duong Van Giao, a prominent Vietnamese lawyer and activist for colonial reform; and Roger Baldwin, a founder and director of
the American Civil Liberties Union. Joining them were speakers from
Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico, Britain, and elsewhere.80
Such conferences, as well as the meetings and lectures that the ILO
helped organize, represented a departure from the prewar period in a
number of ways. Most obviously, they were remarkably international in
their makeup, allowing Europeans from competing imperial nations
to share insights with one another about the benefits and drawbacks of
colonialism. Added to these were the perspectives of participants from
nonimperial states, such as Switzerland, Mexico, and Germany. Such
international exchanges made the common government claim—that
imperial policies were domestic issues and not open to international
critique—less and less tenable.
More important, the ILO fostered exchanges between Europeans
and representatives from the very regions that were potentially injured
by abusive labor practices. Geneva offered an intellectual and political
refuge of sorts, where colonial subjects could critique the behavior and
practices of European governments in an internationally recognized
space. Thus Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans had an opportunity to engage in debates that were at the center of European claims to
civilization. Since at least the early nineteenth century Europeans had
used their assumed superior level of civilization to promote and justify conquest. Now, in conferences and other meetings, the supposed
beneficiaries of European science, art, and humanity could debate the
promises and inconsistencies of civilization. In addition to “internationalizing” civilization, ILO- and League of Nations–sponsored events
lent legitimacy to the concerns of critics who were censored, imprisoned, or subjected to worse in the colonies.81
While the ILO and the League continued to support colonialism,
some of the information and perspectives that they helped produce
could inform any number of political agendas, including anticolonial
80 ILOA, N206/1/01/3: “Cours de vacances international, les rapports des races blanches
avec les races de couleur,” Aug. 26–Sept. 8, 1927.
81 See Mark Mazower, “An International Civilization? Empire, Internationalism, and the
Crisis of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” International Affairs 82 (2006): 533–66.
526
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
movements in Europe’s empires. In the interwar years the suffering
and hardship caused by colonial regimes became a cornerstone of anticolonial movements. As early as 1922, for example, Ho Chi Minh had
used the issue of forced labor as a rallying cry to all colonized peasants.
“More than your peasant brothers of the metropole,” he wrote, “you
suffer long days of work, of misery, of insecurity about the next day.
You are often constrained to forced labor, to murderous portage and
interminable corvées. . . . Capitalist imperialism . . . [places] you thus
below the rank of beast of burden.”82 Eight years later, at the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party, the allusions to violence and
humiliation continued to be as prominent as Marxist ideology in Ho’s
speeches. “They have built new factories to exploit the workers by paying them starvation wages,” Ho said of the French imperialists. “They
have driven our people to utter misery.”83
Such rhetoric was not unique. Abusive labor practices were used
across the globe to inspire subjects to throw off the yoke of empire.
Reports from even those critics who did not denounce colonialism
entirely, such as Albert Londres or André Gide, could inform even the
most extreme views. The communist and virulently anticolonial newspaper Le cri des nègres, for example, regularly ran stories about the horrors of work conditions, particularly in Africa. Their articles drew freely
on reports like Londres’s and Gide’s to make their point. One article
from 1934, for example, said that workers in French Equatorial Africa
were treated like slaves and that the countryside suffered from widespread depopulation. There was nothing here that could not have been
read in Londres’s reportage in Le petit Parisien. But Le cri des nègres had
a distinctly Leninist spin. “French imperialism,” the article argued,
“has put in place a brutal and oppressive government apparatus for
the unique profit of its colonization; it overwhelms the indigenous with
taxes to support its agents of oppression and corruption.”84 Londres
might have believed that he was unearthing abusive practices in need
of reform. But for many others—overtly anticolonial activists and independence movements throughout the empire—he was providing proof
of the violence and corruption inherent to colonial rule.
Labor-related violence was certainly not the only form of colonial violence to abhor: military conquests, police brutality, and politi82 Quoted in Babacar Fall, Le travail forcé en Afrique occidentale française (1900–1945) (Paris,
1993), 254–55.
83 Ho Chi Minh, “Appeal Made on the Occasion of the Founding of the Indochinese Communist Party (18 February 1930),” in Down with Colonialism!, ed. Walden Bello (London, 2007),
39–40. On Ho’s use of the issue of forced labor as a rallying cry, see also Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho
Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941 (Berkeley, CA, 2002), 60–61.
84 “Afrique Equatoriale Française,” Le cri des nègres, Nov. 1934.
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS AND FRENCH COLONIALISM
527
cal oppression were realities in many regions. But since employment
represented arguably the most fundamental relationship between
Europeans and indigenous people, many anticolonial activists associated poor labor conditions most closely with colonialism’s disturbing
capacity to disregard their humanity. Thus one of the perhaps unintended consequences of the ILO and the League of Nations—those
venerable organizations committed to trusteeship and continued colonial rule—was to aid, albeit indirectly, independence movements across
Europe’s empires.
Finally, empire’s adversaries were not the only ones influenced by
the new focus on colonial populations’ experiences. The dissemination
of a specific way of analyzing Europe’s treatment of colonized people
also influenced how governments started to gather and document the
experiences in their empires. In the interwar years, reports produced
by French administrators, both officially and anonymously, increasingly
bore the hallmarks of the documentary style used in and around the
ILO. In 1928, for example, an anonymous colonial inspector in Indochina published an account, fittingly titled “La grande pitié des travailleurs annamites,” of the sadism and brutality experienced by laborers
on French plantations in the paper La résurrection. Much like Londres or
Challaye, the author, who identified himself only as “M. D.” described
how workers experienced plantation life, from the hours they slept to
the food they ate to the distances they were made to walk each day.85
The impact of the documentary method on colonial governments
was most blatantly evident in the Popular Front’s efforts to organize
on-the- ground inspections of the colonies in 1936. These inspections
aimed at determining “the needs and legitimate aspirations” of people
living under French rule. It is perhaps not surprising that the commission included Gide and was led by Henri Guernut, who as a member of
the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme was well acquainted with Challaye’s
work on the empire.86 The fall of the Popular Front and the onset of
the Second World War ultimately minimized the effects of the Guernut commission’s findings. But the commission’s very existence, and its
chosen mode of investigation, bore the ILO’s stamp. In the immediate
aftermath of the First World War, few in France gave much thought
to the daily challenges and hardships faced by the men, women, and
children living in the nation’s distant possessions. But by the late 1930s
accounts of colonial suffering by French journalists and travelers,
amplified and disseminated by the networks of organizations in and
85 M. D., “La grande pitié des travailleurs annamites,” repr. in Challaye, Livre noir du colonialisme, 155–65.
86 Thomas, French Empire between the Wars, 287–88.
528
FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
around Geneva, had started to change how even the French administration viewed the empire.
The history of French critiques of colonial suffering could be told
very differently. Writers like Challaye, Londres, and others could be
placed—as historians have tended to do—within the specific contexts
of individual colonies and debates between the French Left and Right.
To do so, however, misses much of the relevance of their work. French
accounts of violence and suffering in the interwar years were an integral
part of a reevaluation of the impact of colonial policies that reached
not only beyond the borders of any single colony but also beyond the
expanse of the empire as a whole. In collaboration with organizations
like the ILO, a profound legacy of French critics’ documentation of
colonial abuses was the formation of novel modes of witnessing and
assessing common indigenous people’s experiences in the 1920s and
1930s.
That many European critics of colonial policies gave weight to
political claims that eroded the moral foundations of empire does
not vindicate them in any way. European empires were far from falling in the interwar years. France did not even completely abolish colonial forced labor until 1946. Documentary accounts of colonial abuses
were disputed by documentary films, exhibitions, and publications that
championed the triumphs of empire.87 And the League of Nations, with
its mandates system, no doubt aimed to legitimize the liberal ideological justifications of imperialism. But the interwar years also brought
about the unmooring of debates over European notions of civilization. No longer was civilization the exclusive domain of a select group
of colonial powers. By exploring how colonial policies and practices
shaped the lives of common people suffering under European colonial
rule, individual writers, in conjunction with organizations like the ILO,
may not have intended to call into question the fundamental tenets of
trusteeship and civilization that justified European colonial rule. But
intention is certainly not always the engine of history.
87 See Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis, MN, 2008).