Preface

Every new issue confirms the vitality of French Colonial History. Proposals abound of articles that are original—and sometimes even challenging—additions to the ongoing research on French colonial history. Volume 13 is no exception to the rule, and I hope readers will enjoy these new essays as much as I did.

The American continent is unusually absent from this year’s debates, but the rest of the French colonial world is well represented. The authorship of the articles and the even bilingualism of this year’s issue confirm the journal’s international dimension. As usual, some articles have been left aside for lack of room, and Volume 14 is thus well on its way. It is always an editor’s heartbreak to have to delay publication of an article that is fully ready, but it is certainly the price of the journal’s success.

This year’s issue examines, in extremely various forms, the question of colonial balance of power, but also the challenges colonial powers have to face, and the strategies the colonizing nations devise to assert and maintain their domination. Most articles deal with transitional periods in the French colonizing process, be they transitions to eras of new colonial rule or to decolonization. The articles echo each other in very productive ways that offer new dialectic visions of French colonialism.

Both Simon Imbert-Vier and Raffael Scheck examine recourse to violence in attempts to maintain or reassert threatened colonial power. From institutional violence in late colonial Djibouti to the repression, in Thiaroye, of the munity of demobilized Tirailleurs Sénégalais after World War II, the empire clearly had recourse to violence to maintain its supremacy over the colonized peoples. The question of decolonization—sometimes informal de facto decolonization—is also broached, in particular by Christine Mussard, who studies the commune mixte of La Calle to pinpoint an initial phase of decolonization in early twentieth-century Algeria, and by Didier Galibert, who, through the study of Albert Rakoto Ratsimamanga’s life and accomplishments, examines, in the context of postcolonial Madagascar, the relationships between imperial relations and the constitution of nation-states.

The other articles also deal with the troubled power relationships between various colonial authorities. Heidi Keller-Lapp, on seventeenth-century Pondicherry, and Charles Keith, on late colonial Vietnam, both examine the church/state relationships in connection with France’s mission colonisatrice. Other challenges to French colonialism and the mission colonisatrice are examined by Spencer Segalla in the context of education in French West Africa, and by Jeremy Rich through the claims put forward by the Gabonese chapter of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in the early twentieth century.

Once again, this year’s articles perfectly show the legitimacy of dealing with the whole of the French colonial empire, beyond geographical and historical differentiations, to grasp fully the various problematics of French colonial experience.

Before closing, I want to seize the opportunity to thank all those who make French Colonial History possible: the authors, first, who accept with much goodwill my many requests to revise their texts; the reviewers who toil in total anonymity and ensure the quality of our journal; and the whole Michigan State University Press team who make my work so much easier by their availability and sound advice.