The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism

8 The French Colonial Mind and the Challenge of Islam: The Case of Ernest Psichari

202 8 The French Colonial Mind and the Challenge of Islam The Case of Ernest Psichari kim munholland Among the young French intellectuals of the post-Dreyfus years who rebelled against the secular, scientific, and pacifist values of their fathers’ generation, none was more uncompromising than Ernest Psichari. A number of accounts, notably that of Agathon (pseudonym for Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde), prominently feature Ernest Psichari’s trajectory from his early secular skepticism and materialism toward the Catholic Church by way of the colonial army.1 His evolution was typical of a new generation, seen in the experiences of Psichari’s friends, Jacques Maritain and Charles Péguy, who embraced a taste for action, celebrated an ardent nationalism under the influence of Maurice Barrès, and searched for spiritual meaning by returning to the Catholic faith. What distinguishes Psichari’s rebellion is that he escaped the confines of republicanism as well as the intellectual atmosphere of Paris by choosing a career in the colonial army. His experiences in the Congo and the desert of Mauritania would convince Psichari that the republic’s secular civilizing mission would be inadequate without the church, which provided a spiritual dimension to offset the appeal of Islam in Africa. In going beyond the intellectual confines of Paris, Psichari brought a colonial dimension to this generational rebellion. Most writers on Psichari have cast his African epiphany in personal terms. This essay argues that his moment in the desert and the encounter with Islam reinforced his The French Colonial Mind and Islam 203 critique of contemporary France and provided an authoritarian, military, and ardently Catholic map of France’s civilizing mission. Although other right-wing intellectuals came to see the importance of the empire as a source of renewal for a decadent France, Psichari used Catholicism as the necessary means to combat the strength of Islam. The Young Psichari Grandson on his mother’s side of the philologist and biblical scholar Ernest Renan, Psichari has left a series of writings that chronicle a personal , spiritual quest that led first toward a military career in the French colonies and then brought him to the Catholic Church on the eve of the First World War when he entered the Third Order of St. Dominic.2 Within nine months of Psichari’s admission to the Dominican Order, war broke out in Europe, and the young Catholic officer, serving at his colonial army garrison in Cherbourg, went to the front to lead his men in the cause of France. On 22 August 1914, he fell in battle, one of the first casualties of that deadly conflict. Like his friend Charles Péguy, who also had followed a course from republican secularism and pacifism to an ardent French nationalism and who also would be killed in battle, in September 1914, Ernest Psichari became a symbol and martyr for this staunchly nationalistic and intellectually conservative generation’s sacrifice.3 As a young lycée student, Ernest Psichari adhered to the values of his father’s generation. In religious matters he was a skeptic and anticlerical . At the end of the 1890s he became engaged in the great French cause célèbre, the defense of Captain Dreyfus and republican justice in opposition to the military’s condemnation of the Jewish officer wrongfully accused of treason. In a lengthy letter to his father, Ernest Psichari deplored the way that “Catholicism and clericalism, anti-Semitism and narrow ideas have invaded France.” The lycée student was among those who were active in condemning the forces of reaction, seen in the French Army and the Catholic Church. Yet even in this early, Dreyfusard phase of Ernest’s life, he greatly admired France, a France, as he put it, “that surpassed all other nations with its beautiful and great ideas.”4 While Ernest Psichari, at least in his early writings from the Dreyfusard years, had very little to say about France’s colonial role, the seeds of his later, Colonial Minds and Empire Soldiers 204 ardent nationalism were already present at the time of Dreyfus. The colonial role would follow when he discovered his true France in the Congo and then in the desert of Mauritania, proclaiming that one could serve France, but not the France that had been deformed by the arid debates of the Dreyfusards and their antimilitary republicanism.5 Within...