An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (review)

This fascinating book’s central contention, in the words of its author, is that “the discord over the role of religion in the young [French] republican empire exposes unexplored themes that are crucial for understanding French political and cultural history between 1880 and 1914” (p. 261). J. P. Daughton, now teaching in the history department at Stanford University, has elected to explore this theme in the French colonial locales of Indochina, Polynesia, and Madagascar. These three settings, with Indochina as the far most important one in demographic as well as economic terms, are exemplary of the second phase of French colonialism, a phase that unfolded over the nineteenth century and lasted until the end of the Algerian war of liberation in the 1960s. About that period, Daughton assesses accurately that the politics of colonial expansionism under the first half of the Third Republic (1870–1940) deserved special attention as a determining moment in French history and the heyday of the French push as a modern and industrial colonial power.

Under the Third Republic, the French Catholic Church became an integral part of the colonial project. Many other agents of the state were active in the field, but the Catholic missionaries, as unattached men committed to staying on location for their whole life, learning local languages and customs, and reporting to the religious as well as civilian authorities on anything that might have threatened the Pax Gallica on the colonial frontier, constituted an unmatched source of dependable intelligence on the ground. Their efficiency was, however, hampered by competition between religious orders both in metropolitan France and in each of these colonies, while the relationship between overzealous bishops and a fiercely secular colonial administration was anything but easy, as show in the case of Bishop Paul-François Puginier, the vicar apostolic in Hanoi. Devotion to the Mère-Patrie could indeed take many forms, some happening to be plainly contradictory.

Daughton’s work is exhaustive and scholarly; his detailed understanding of the particulars of societies very distant from one another is praiseworthy. Inevitably, comparison on such a scale results in some vagueness here and there, but Daughton’s overall analysis remains balanced, grounded, informed, and subtle.

This book constitutes an outstanding addition to the growing body of studies in history written in English devoted to making French colonial history, as well as the geste of the French Catholic Church, better known outside France.