Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (review)

French colonialism has recently seen major fascinating developments and produced original studies that greatly enhanced our knowledge. The new directions in the study of French colonialism focus on questions that have not been dealt with before; they adopt the view that French colonial history should be perceived as an integral part of French metropolitan history. Thus, these new studies contribute to the understanding of not only the history of individual French colonies, but also French history and the colonial experience at large.Examining the colonial issue from several perspectives is not an easy task, as it necessitates knowledge about France and the histories and societies of its former colonies. Eric Jennings's second book is a successful example of this kind of research. As in his previous book, Vichy in the Tropics, he demonstrates an impressive ability to examine vast areas of the French empire and combine their histories with that of France, creating a coherent story of the French colonial enterprise. He makes an interesting shift from Vichy the notorious political regime to Vichy the spa town, and examines the colonial situation through the prism of French hydrotherapy, an industry that flourished (not coincidently) in parallel with France's colonial expansion. He relies on varied and rich primary material collected in a large number of archives in France, several ex-colonies, and Norway.

Jennings's proclaimed aim is to illuminate through the colonial spas some of the foundations of empire. He opens by reviewing the acclimatization theories that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around the question of the possibility of Europeans to live and survive in tropical climates. These theories were part of the "scientific" racism of the era. As Jennings shows, the claim that Europeans cannot adjust to certain climates contributed to the development of colonial spas as a solution that would enable Europeans to continue living in the tropics with the help of curing waters. The colonial spas created "European spaces" within the colonies—spaces to which Europeans serving in the colonial administration could periodically escape. The debate around the utility of hydrotherapy in combating tropical diseases is discussed in the second chapter. Jennings then discusses French hydrotherapy in the colonies.

Each of the next three chapters focuses on a specific colonial spa, in Guadeloupe, Réunion, and Madagascar. Chapter 6 deals with the site of Korbous, in Tunisia, which hosted a Roman spa and later a hammam (Turkish bath) and became a favorite French location for the construction of a colonial spa. The final chapter brings us back to the metropole to the "queen of spas": the town of Vichy.

The chapters that deal with the three tropical spas essentially provide further examples to the basic claim that the French colonizers needed the spas so as to feel at home and protect themselves from the dangers of colonial space. The discussion of Madagascar adds to that an interesting description of the transformation of the specific spa location from the precolonial period to the time of French presence.

The last two chapters constitute, in my opinion, the best part of the book and completely justify the examination of an ostensibly narrow subject of colonial spas as a prism for understanding the basic foundations of French colonialism. Indeed, it is in the chapter on the Tunisian spas and in the final chapter, which brings us back to Vichy, that the full strength of the book becomes evident. Jennings demonstrates how Muslim beliefs in the power of the water to heal and in the twenty-one days' duration of the treatment were regarded by the French colonizers as religious superstitions, while French identical beliefs were considered purely scientific. This chapter reveals the complexity of the colonial situation, in which the divisions not only were between colonizers and colonized, but were related to questions of class, religion, and gender. The chapter about Vichy enhances even more the understanding of the complexity of the colonial situation by examining it...