Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940 by Elizabeth A. Foster (review)

In their introduction to Pensée coloniale 1900 (a special issue of Mil neuf cent, 27 (2009)), Olivier Cosson and Yaël Dagan observed that ‘la colonisation n’est pas le fruit d’un système cohérent imposé par le centre sur la périphérie, mais le résultat de négociations entre acteurs différents et d’ajustements à des situations complexes’ (p. 11). By 2013 this contention — that metropolitan centralized ideals often translated into a heterogeneous range of practices across geographically disparate colonial contexts — has become axiomatic, with recent histories moving away from looking at how administrative elites shaped colonial policy to how local French functionaries and administrators from among the colonized practised it on the ground. Elizabeth Foster’s monograph, with its focus on French Senegal between 1880 (the year after the colony’s electoral institutions were definitively established) and 1940 (the end of the Third Republic), offers a meticulously researched case study of how French colonial officials, French Catholic missionaries, métis traders, métis politicians, Muslim, animist, and Christian Africans in Senegal collaborated and clashed in their implementation of French colonial rule. By concentrating on the place of missionaries in Senegal, particularly the Congregation of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit (the Spiritans), Faith in Empire also contributes to the growing historiography on the role of the Catholic Church in French colonialism. Foster’s central argument, which she demonstrates through six chapters ordered largely chronologically, is that the discourse of ‘republican colonialism’ was dislocated from Senegalese political reality. For Foster, colonial rule was more akin to Doyle’s interpretation of Ancien Régime France as a polity in which different territories were governed by privilege and thus ‘without uniform laws or institutions’ (p. 19). Accordingly, the granting of the vote to Africans in the Quatre communes, frequently cited as the zenith of French assimilation, marked in practice, for Forster, a ‘residual Old Regime-style privilege for a particular interest group’ (p. 145), while the disannexation of the North-West Sereer reinforced legal pluralism and legal differences between ‘rural Africans and their originaire urban counterparts’ (p. 67). By carefully teasing out how Catholic missionaries interacted with what she terms local ‘power brokers’ (p. 4), both French and African, Foster demonstrates the malleability and multivalent quality of a key tenet of Republican colonialism, la mission civilisatrice, particularly during the interwar period, when, for metropolitan functionaries, ‘civilizing’ involved a renewed emphasis on African tradition and custom (privileging an associative relationship), whereas, for missionaries, assimilation through conversion to Christianity was the only means to civilization and the production of citizens loyal to France (p. 144). If the strength of Foster’s work lies in this emphasis on the improvisational nature of colonial rule in Senegal — a colony whose relationship with France began under the Ancien Régime in the form of the Quatre communes — its one weakness is the failure to explore the tantalizing suggestion that such an uneasy combination of concessions and haphazard responses, resonating as it does with practices in other modern European empires, serves to challenge received ideas about the exceptionalism of the French empire under the Third Republic.