Municipal Imperialism in Decline: The Lyon Chamber of Commerce, 1925-1938

Abstract

Important segments of the Lyonnais population embraced the cause of formal and informal empire during the nineteenth century when two motives, the religious and the economic, lent impetus to overseas endeavor.1 The sometimes overlapping attractions of winning converts to Catholicism and increasing profits continued to exercise their spells well into the twentieth century. As late as 1943 the Propagation de la Foi estimated that the diocese of Lyon, encompassing 3.85 per cent of the French population, supplied France with 6.25 per cent of her missionary priests, 4.27 per cent of her missionary brothers, and nearly 6 per cent of her missionary nuns.2 But however deeply rooted the religious convictions of many of the magnates of the local silk industry, France's leading export industry until the advent of the Depression in 1929, there can be little doubt that they expected more from expansion than the salvation of souls. Working through the Lyon Chamber of Commerce, the local institution which most effectively represented their interests and hence the focus of concern here, they continued throughout the last forty years of the Third Republic to pursue economic goals of an essentially imperialist nature. Before the outbreak of World War I they attempted to extend and defend the positions acquired in the Far East during the previous century, interested themselves in developments in most of the French colonies, agitated for the acquisition of Morocco, and kept close watch