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

Introduction: Mapping Violence onto French Colonial Minds

xi Introduction Mapping Violence onto French Colonial Minds martin thomas Mental Maps, Disorder, and Colonial Violence It was political scientist Alan Henrikson who introduced us to the term “mental maps” as a determinant of social action.1 The idea that the attitudinal outlooks embedded in minds as a result of cultural formation and past experience are integral to political choices has gained purchase ever since. Among the specialist communities quickest to recognize the usefulness of the “mental maps” idea have been Henrikson’s fellow political scientists, international historians, and scholars of the “missing dimension” of intelligence service activity interested in processes of cognition—the way the world is understood—and resultant analytical thinking.2 Historians of empire and colonialism have, by contrast, tended to use the idea of mental maps piecemeal, sometimes to explain the diffusion of Orientalist thinking, sometimes to account for (usually misguided) policy decisions, but more often in a rather nebulous way to illustrate the misapprehensions of European publics about the colonial empires held in their name. The first volume of this collection on French “colonial minds” suggested that one issue uniting the various people and events described is that thought normally precedes action. But the actions of those in positions of colonial power in the French Empire were also, to a greater to lesser extent, reflective of established patterns of behavior. Furthermore, as the phrase implies, a pattern of behavior necessarily took shape over Introduction xii time through repetition and reinforcement of certain actions.3 In the case of army or police organizations, such repetition and reinforcement could entrench certain patterns of behavior, sometimes disbarring consideration of alternative perspectives that cut against the grain of prevailing military assumptions about subject populations and how they were to be regarded, policed, or otherwise “controlled.” The organizational cultures of France’s colonial security forces, in other words, often acted as a barrier to reflective engagement with colonial peoples. As a result rarely were innovations, whether in operational practice or in military cultures, internally generated outside crisis conditions. Only after dramatic political failures or violent outbreaks were attitudes likely to change, which is part of what Edgar Schein, a leading theorist of organizational culture, terms the process of “trauma learning.”4 But were colonial military minds susceptible to such learning in less overtly violent times? Here we come to perhaps the most challenging and often the most revealing aspect of colonial minds at work: those situations in which, it seems, thought hardly preceded action at all. Indeed, in some instances historians posit that the behavior of Europeans in unfamiliar colonial settings was anything but rational. Numerous colonial encounters, from initial contact to protracted exposure, have been described in terms of irrationality, mental disorder, even madness, or, less dramatically, as the abandonment of European norms and manners, the dread outcome of which was “going native.”5 A distinct subdiscipline of “colonial” psychiatry, many of whose practitioners and critics achieved lasting notoriety , looked on the racial differentiation inherent to colonial societies as pivotal to new delineations of mental disorder and supposed African inferiority that helped entrench colonial power.6 The metaphor of psychiatric disorder will also be familiar to anyone acquainted with the work of Martiniquan psychiatrist and anticolonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, as well as to scholars of decolonization more generally. As Ann Laura Stoler has recently reminded us, Fanon’s central concern with the lasting physical distress, the personal degradations , and psychological disorders left among Algerians scarred by French colonial rule was very much a study in the ruination of minds.7 And as Benjamin Brower and Marnia Lazreg have emphasized in the same context, any study of colonial “official thinking,” whether in the Mapping Violence onto French Colonial Minds xiii first phases of imperial conquest or in the final years of colonial collapse, must engage with the cruelties and coercion perpetrated as part of the imperial claim to govern groups and communities judged subordinate and inferior.8 If Fanon’s primary purpose was to explain the injustices of colonialism in terms of their corruptive effects on the minds of colonizers and colonized alike, his preoccupation with violence—whether that perpetrated in the name of the colonial state or that demanded of colonial subjects freeing their bodies and purifying their minds through acts of insurrection—suggests that the study of colonialism must encompass the study of violence. Such investigation must attempt at least two things. First...