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

2 Losing Their Mind and Their Nation? Mimicry, Scandal, and Colonial Violencein the Voulet-Chanoine Affair

26 2 Losing Their Mind and Their Nation? Mimicry, Scandal, and Colonial Violence in the Voulet-Chanoine Affair bertrand taithe This chapter explores afresh the story of the “infernal colonne” led by two French colonial army officers, Voulet and Chanoine, across West Africa in 1898–1899.1 Accumulating some eight hundred slaves along their way, this roving column behaved increasingly brutally, revealing much about the forms of violence that marked colonial conquest. Ever since their deaths on 15 and 16 July 1899, respectively, Captains Voulet and Chanoine have left a controversial imprint on colonial memory. If we add to these two names that of their French victim, Colonel Klobb, whom they murdered on 14 July when he attempted to arrest them, one arrives at a complex colonial triptych. Voulet and Chanoine were to be arrested by Klobb to answer for a long trail of devastation that stretched from the outpost of Say, a border town of French colonial Soudan, to the environs of the sultanate of Zinder.2 Ultimately, both captains were killed by their own soldiers soon after Klobb’s murder on 14 July. Their crimes and grizzly fate illustrate contradictions central to republican colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century. As an event the “VouletChanoine Affair,” including the crimes committed before 14 July 1899, has variously been portrayed as a fait-divers, an incident symptomatic of a complex and menacing pathology of empire, or as a window upon widespread but hidden practices. For the Parisian authorities it was a scandal at a moment when the French army could least afford it. Losing Their Mind and Their Nation? 27 The scandal arose not only from the mutiny of French officers against their superiors but also from how these men allegedly justified their acts. Hours after killing Colonel Klobb, Paul Voulet reportedly declared: “I do not regret anything that I have done, I am an outlaw, I renounce my family, my country, I am no longer French, I am a black chieftain. . . . What I have just done is nothing more than a coup. If I were in Paris I would be the master of France.” Turning to his second in command, Captain Julien Chanoine, Voulet continued, “as a matter of fact, you were even more compromised than I was. I have read the papers of the Colonel, they were accusing you even more than us all [nous tous].” Chanoine then responded in a “failing yet cavernous voice”: “I am going to the bush, I am following you, long live freedom! [Moi je prends la brousse, je te suis, vive la liberté!]”3 Written by Joalland, then lieutenant of artillery and fourth in command in the Voulet expedition, this central section of the survivors’ account has shaped the way the Voulet-Chanoine story has been told ever since. The anecdote was then reported to the two consecutive inquests that took place between 1900 and 1902. Written conveniently by survivors attempting to salvage their honor (although one should note the nous tous that is the singular admission that crimes had been more widely shared than is otherwise admitted), it made Voulet and to a lesser extent Chanoine entirely culpable for Klobb’s murder. By association, it assigned full responsibility for every other crime to the commanding officers. Conveniently, it also left room for a postdiagnostic of insanity, which the only doctor of the mission, Dr. Henric, never seemed to have noticed prior to the events. Beyond homicide, and at the origin of this internecine killing, the manifestations of this madness were dual: the renunciation of French identity and civilized deportment; and its flip side, the “naturalization” of the war chieftains into native warlords. They had gone native. By a swift rhetorical device, Joalland and every single French writer, commentator, or filmmaker thereafter excised Voulet and Chanoine from the geste Coloniale.4 Their story became an African story framed and told according to African narrative tropes infused with irrationality. Did they not choose to have Griots singing their praise, comparing them to the African king Samori Touré?5 African scholars beg to differ from this Conradian analysis. So, too, Cultures of Violence in the Empire 28 this chapter considers the Franco-African “affair” in its context of the Dreyfus affair and the various ways in which it has been interpreted before concluding with an alternative postcolonial reading of the events that takes into account how it...