Who were the French Colonialists? A Reassessment of the PartI Colonial, 1890–1914

Abstract

On 23 December 1910, Jean Victor Augagneur, deputy for the Rhône, directed this attack in the French Chamber on the influence and the methods of the parti colonial. Augagneur was not an opponent of French imperialist expansion, who would have been inclined to exaggerate the importance of the parti colonial for political or ideological purposes. On the contrary, he was a professional colonial administrator who had recently been governor general of Madagascar (1905–10). As such, he was deeply sympathetic to a policy of imperialist expansion and critical only of the process by which this policy was formulated and executed. His contention that a powerful pressure group existed which was capable of influencing decisively the making of French foreign policy has to a large extent been confirmed by subsequent historical research.