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Cultured Force: Makers and Defenders of the French Colonial Empire

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Singer and Langdon, both university professors, reassess French imperialism; which along with the imperialism of other Western nations, has been negatively portrayed in the colonial and postcolonial studies of recent decades. They do so through biographical and historical studies of key French proconsuls in French colonies in Africa and Asia. They do not try to make the simplistic point that French imperialism and colonialism was good, or even desirable. But they aim to balance the picture of this colonialism, and by extension all Western colonialism. While not trying to gloss over brutalities and atrocities committed by colonial masters, the authors note that colonialism also worked to "reduce feudal inequalities, abolish serfdom, establish constitutions, build roads...and extend educational opportunities." This was seen by France--and other colonial powers--as "civilizing backward peoples." But it could also be seen as raising the living standards of the inhabitants of the colonies. Shedding a light on French colonialism by biographically and analytically looking at the specific colonial officials of Thomas Robert Bugeaud of Algeria, Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey of Southeast Asia, and others, the authors inject a human dimension, with all of its aspirations and faults, into the subject. This is a scholarly work which reads almost like history for the general reader for dealing with historical characters and seeing historical issues in terms of their personalities and actions. With its balanced, broader view of French colonialism, "Cultured Force" restores an ambiguity to its subject, thus making it a subject of true history and human enterprise rather than an ideological or myopic one.