The French in Central America: Culture and Commerce, 1820-1930 (review)

Thomas Schoonover, who has already made substantial contributions to our understanding of Central American relations with the United States and Germany, now turns his attention to relations with France. This work, therefore, is part of a long-term project to offer a more complex vision of the foreign relations of the Central American countries that goes beyond standard accounts of British and American imperialism.

The focus on France seems natural. After all, the main French ventures in nineteenth-century Latin America, the military intervention in Mexico and the Panama Canal project, took place in areas that bracket Central America. But these two examples, with their precipitous and messy endings, also suggest unsteadyness of commitment and belated awareness of long-term geopolitical trends.

French activities in Central America followed a similar pattern. Based on his reading of large quantities of available French diplomatic documents and other sources in English, German, and Spanish, Schoonover tells the story using a social-imperialism framework. He attempts to show that French actions in Central America were a response to "large and persistent unemployment, maldistribution of goods and services, the weakening of national prestige and patriotism, the uncertainty of preserving elite and class privileges, the desire for more rapid accumulation of wealth and power, the unreliability of progress under laissez-faire, the restricted national markets, and a lack of safe and productive investment opportunities" (p. xv). To do so he pays a great deal of attention to commerce and to economic conditions in France, and finds it necessary to make a case for a significant French presence in the region.

To this reader the evidence, rather than making the case for a strong French interest, suggests half-hearted and intermittent attention to the region. The correspondence of French envoys shows how their frequent suggestions to increase trade, support immigration projects, and invest in local ventures were rewarded with tepid responses from officials in Paris. Trade promotion also encountered unfavorable market realities: British, American, and German competition, American-controlled trade routes, and scarce local devotion to pricey French wines and textiles. Even when there was actual investment, failure loomed around the corner, witness the fate of investment in the failed Honduran interoceanic railroad.

While officials in Paris agreed with the desirability of a more vigorous Central American policy, they were aware of the American strategic posture. Even if French bankers were interested in finding outlets for their investments, they could not match the kind of vigorous debt-recovery enforcement mechanisms frequently applied by the English and the Americans. Official ambivalence is exemplified by the instructions that a French navy commander issued in 1881 to the effect that France "had a great interest in not allowing U.S. influence to dominate in South America, but that the French navy's role was limited to informing the government on this subject," this at a time when Ferdinand de Lesseps's Panama Canal project was at its peak (p. 69).

In this context, Central America was hardly the ideal place for France to practice its brand of social imperialism. French entrepreneurs may have sought to "find ways to preserve their own accumulation and well-being by collecting the value produced by foreign labor" (p. 57), but with the big (and disastrous) exception of the Panama Canal project, they did it elsewhere. North Africa and Asia proved to be more appealing destinations to them. In fact, as the book's appendix shows, there was not a single year between 1820 and 1930 when the total of imports from or exports to Central America amounted to one-fifth of one percent of French trade.

This does not mean that relations with France were irrelevant. French culture influenced Central American elites, secondary schools managed by French nuns and priests educated future politicians, French university degrees were highly valued credentials, French Positivism...