Preface

As the new editor of French Colonial History I am delighted to present a collection of essays that not only represents the broad scholarly interests of the French Colonial Historical Society, but is on the cutting edge of international scholarship in our field. The articles in Volume 9 come from papers delivered at FCHS conferences in Dakar, Senegal, and La Rochelle, France; however, the Society encourages submissions to French Colonial History from members regardless of whether or not they've presented their work on a conference program. We hope that this policy will encourage members to submit for publication even when they cannot attend a particular conference.

As the table of contents immediately shows, the majority of the ten essays in this volume focus on issues of French colonialism in Africa, a direct reflection of the intellectual brio and enthusiasm that characterized the Dakar meeting. All the essays are linked through the broader questions of colonization, the establishment of identity, and the need to make sense of the civilizing mission. They show how colonialism had the power to affect and connect all aspects of human life, from the larger societal levels of army and office to the daily experiences of health, marriage, body art, and school. Arnaud Balvay explores the practice of tattooing among Amerindians, and its adoption by some French officers and traders as a "tool of power" and identity in North America. David Aliano examines how nineteenth-century French historians grappled with the meaning of the Haitian Revolution, especially the role of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and sought to impose their own intellectual order over the historical questions of race and colony that continued to affect the empire. Arnaud Berthonnet details the imposition of structure on a grand scale with his analysis of French civil engineering projects and infrastructure in Algeria, and their subsequent abandonment in 1962. Like Aliano, Daouda Loum examines three African intellectual approaches to the idea of metissage, particularly the ways in which public intellectuals frame and inform debates about even the most intimate of relationships.

Many of the authors in this volume write eloquently about France's "civilizing mission" in Africa. Simon Duteuil analyzes the motivations of French teachers in Madagascar during the Third Republic, revealing how biases in race and class influenced approaches to education. Kathleen Keller shows how broadly the idea of a civilizing mission was interpreted by people at the margins of French colonial society, such as communists and adventurers, who found themselves the subject of surveillance by the French government; despite their tensions with official governmental powers, these oppositional figures propagated their own brand of external order vis-à-vis colonial subjects. Alexander Keese in turn discusses the influence of communist movements as direct challenges to metropolitan power in Africa in the Post World War II period. Likewise, El Hadji Samba Amadou Diallo examines the North African organization, the Tijāniyya Brotherhood, and its historical relationship with the French government throughout the colonial period. Sokhna Sané details French efforts to suppress arms and guns among African soldiers and citizens in the late nineteenth century. Mor Ndao explores institutional and colonial efforts to create prenatal health care systems for women and children in Senegal during the first half of the nineteenth century, as a step toward lessening infant and maternal mortality.

These ten essays thus reveal how concerns with order and control permeated French colonialism, both in its physical manifestations through infrastructural and healthcare programs, for example, and in the ways intellectuals sought to make sense of it historically and philosophically. I would like to thank Sue Peabody and Leslie Choquette for their support, and the past editors of French Colonial History for their institutional knowledge. I would also like to thank all the board members and peer reviewers, without whom this journal would not exist. Thanks finally to the people at MSU Press who make the journal happen.