Provocation Versus Performativity: Launching la littérature coloniale française in 1909

Abstract

In 1909, the colonial newspaper La Dépêche coloniale launched an enquiry entitled La Littérature coloniale de la France comparée à celle d'Angleterre. It was through this initiative that the idea of a ‘French colonial literature’ first caught wider public attention and generated polemics in literary circles and beyond. The aim of this article is to study the aesthetic and ideological agendas driving the enquiry and the polarised reactions it produced, from a sociological perspective inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's work. The author argues that La Dépêche coloniale's questionnaire encoded a set of assumptions designed to guide the answers and impose a vision of colonial literature, rather than elicit debate. One of the respondents, Pierre Mille (1864–1941), preferred provocation: in a piece published in a high-circulation daily Le Temps ahead of the results of La Dépêche coloniale's enquiry, he proclaimed Rudyard Kipling to be the model colonial author, only to conclude that French colonial literature was inexistent. The ensuing debate marked a watershed in the conceptualisation and the institutionalisation of French colonial literature, by setting in motion a process that would be brought to completion in the interwar period.