The Lure of Empire: Why Frenchmen Entered the Colonial Service

Abstract

A revolutionary figure in Flaubert's Education sentimentale, frustrated by restrictions on liberty at home, exclaims, 'I feel like going off to live among the cannibals'. In the end he remains in France, but the readiness with which this remark was made is revealing. Throughout western thought the attraction of life among non-Europeans, among peoples thought to be primitive, has exercised a strange fascination. While the overseas areas had their own charm, the interest in exoticism was to a significant degree an outcome of the dissatisfaction which many Europeans felt with their own culture and society. Imperialism gave an official outlet to this urge to 'escape' from Europe. No single cause can be found for the attraction which the colonial empires exercised, once they had been established; but seen in their entirety the various motives reveal either an inability or a reluctance to cope with European society. This essay, limited to French imperialism, attempts to show why Frenchmen entered the colonial service, in particular the Corps of Colonial Administrators, the service charged with the administration of the French possessions in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar.1 The Corps provided the men who were in charge of regional administration; they were the equivalent of the British district officers. In the middle of the nineteenth century the French empire was still so small that it was hardly profitable to establish elaborate methods of recruitment. The colonies, considered as part of the French naval establishment, were administered by marine officers.