The Formation of the Government General of French West Africa

Abstract

French colonial history, during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, was marked by two significant developments—a steady devolution of executive power from Paris to administrators abroad, and the creation of the Ministry for the Colonies in 1894. The basic reason for these changes was simply pressure of work. As communications with an expanding empire improved, the tendency to over-centralize the management of colonial affairs placed an excessive burden on the colonial section of the Ministry for the Navy. The appointment of an Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies who was responsible to a variety of ministers in the 1880's had provided no solution to the volume of business brought from Africa and Asia by the cable and the mail-steamer. Indeed, the example of Algeria where officials had been closely bound to government departments in Paris since 1871 had showed that the formulation of coherent colonial policy under these conditions was too often frustrated by divided responsibilities and changing politicians. Towards the zenith of French expansion, therefore, a single ministry took charge of all, territories except North Africa; and its first task was to apply to other areas the framework of federal administration set up in Indo-China some eight years previously. No longer were the colonies dependent for directives on a sub-department of the French Navy that had founded and protected them. The heterogeneous posts and annexed territories were grouped, as far as pacification and diplomatic conventions would permit, under governors-general who were at once military pro-consuls of empire and civil representatives of republican presidents.