Pogroms: A Documentary History

Abstract

Ferry was forced to defend his overseas activities, and with it provided one of the most trenchant rationales for republican empire to date, citing the spread of civilization and racial superiority as justifications for overseas expansion. As Ferry and his allies explained, this civilizing mission was the basis for France’s politique coloniale, a policy aimed at promoting human progress that theoretically differed markedly from the colonial conquest of the past. It wasn’t simply that republicans were obfuscating the racist logic and militarist implications of their own politique coloniale that makes these debates significant. Nor that the Tonkin Affair compelled republican ideologues to clarify their position on empire. For Carroll, the significance of these disputes is in the arguments that framed the controversy, with opponents levying accusations of Bonapartism against republicans committed to proving the contrary. “The specter of Napoleon III... ,” as Carroll writes, “continued to loom over conversations about republican colonialism across France” (161). Yet if the Tonkin Affair marked the culmination of efforts to define a republican brand of empire, it was also the last salvo in these battles. As the 1890s dawned, contentions over the Bonapartist past began to fade from public memory, and with it competing views of colonial conquest. Colonial expansion was criticized on matters of strategy and military competence in the press or before the assembly, but allusions to Bonapartism were notably muted. According to Carroll, by the 1890s, political elites had reached a consensus regarding the meaning and import of empire. In distancing themselves from Bonapartism, republicans had successful shaped their own model of colonial empire. Advocacy groups and lobbies supported the politique coloniale and politicians frequently nationalized the overseas imperial project, presenting it as a collective effort of national rejuvenation that eschewed political factionalism. Most importantly, empire abroad no longer translate into empire at home, and the term “colonial empire” touted by republicans embodied this mental shift. “Empire” had been freed from its Bonapartist trappings, making republican colonial empire imaginable and even desirable. Carroll has offered a compelling argument that draws attention to the ways in which political culture and discourse combined with historical memory to influence the evolution of republican empire in France. Yet even as she is sensitive to the dialogic nature of this evolution and treats competing visions and memories in detail, there is one voice that seems absent, and this becomes apparent in the concluding remarks of the book. Carroll repeatedly insists that native colonial subjects never had opportunities to participate in these debates and that the conversation was dominated by metropolitans and settlers. This is no doubt true to an extent. Yet the conclusion offers a possible alternative to this claim with the relatively brief mention of Ben Ali F ekar and the Young Algerians. Groups like the Young Tunisians and later Young Algerians did contribute to debates on empire, and by the eve of the First World War would find metropolitan allies that would amend if not propose alternative visions of the nation’s imperial polity. Writers like the pseudonymous Esp e de Metz who sided with the indig enophile camp highlighted notions of imperial citizenship and federation that deviated from the republican model focused on my Carroll. (For example, see the articles in Ezp e de Metz, G. 1913.) Whether or not these ideas were taken seriously is another matter. They are enough to consider the fact that activists like the Young Tunisians and Young Algerians were not necessarily passive and had the ear of certain metropolitans, even if many of their ideas were ignored or disregarded by the colonial state. This omission in no way detracts from Carroll’s attractive thesis. If anything, it demonstrates the multi-valent character of empire that Carroll has posited and suggests other possible contexts in which debates over empire could be imagined.