“A Toy in the White Man’s Hands”: Child-gifting, African Civilizability and the Construction of French National Identity in Marie Maréchal’s La Dette de Ben-Aïssa

This article focuses on an 1870s children’s story about an African boy offered as a doll to a French girl his own age. It shows how its author used various narrative conventions, including those of the doll novel, to teach her young female readership the principles of the civilizing mission.