Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic by Margaret Cook Andersen (review)

Margaret Cook Andersen examines the link between pronatalism and the colonial mentality of the Third Republic. She explains how the two intersected and why she considers that meeting to be worth scrutiny. The author leaves aside the political parties in the newly formed democracy, social reforming republicans, neo-Malthusians, socialists, and feminist movements campaigning to end infant mortality, create better conditions for motherhood and childcare, and secure a decent family wage to combat poverty. She concentrates instead on selected case studies of individuals and groups who were instrumental in transmitting the message that a successful colonial presence relied on a demographic expansion of ‘French’ citizens and the provision of a healthy pool to re-invigorate metropolitan France. Andersen claims that pronatalism is more significant than has hitherto been recognized in colonial studies. In Chapter 1 she presents a gendered analysis of the racist and socially conservative ideals held by pronatalists, in which she argues that the expansion of job opportunities in the white-collar sector is a threat to the renewal of the population working the land. For the colonies, the pronatalists saw the North American conquest of the Wild West as a model: they sought candidates with brawn not brain to face the rigours of the wild and lonely outback. Instead, the small numbers of single men and women who looked to improve their social position and marriage prospects by moving to the colonies preferred urban office jobs. What becomes most apparent through Chapters 3 (on maternity policies in Madagascar), 4 (on the familial vote in North Africa), and 5 (on pronatalism and settler politics in North Africa) are the contradictions and gaps between ideology and reality: those fearful of the fall in population of metropolitan France wished to encourage its growth by exporting seemingly scarce French citizens to populate the far-flung lands of the new and old French territories. The gap between the enthusiasm of the agents of colonial policy and the indifference — and especially under-funding — on the part of governments in Paris led to tensions and frustrations among the colons. Delays in bureaucracy created a backlog of unsuccessful applications, but above all there was a double-think about who should in fact be made French citizens. In the Conclusion the author shows how, after decades of lukewarm support from Third Republic governments, those fearful of population degeneracy or decline and favouring colonialism saw their measures enthusiastically adopted by the Vichy regime. Most of the schemes Andersen has uncovered never succeeded. The book is as much about the difficulties of those wanting to implement and activate emigration as part of colonial policy as it is about the arguments constructed around pronatalism. The period covered is nominally the inter-war years, but in fact the story really begins in the nineteenth century. Given current debates about an ageing population, citizenship, and the phenomenon of mass migratory movements from south to north, the book is timely not because it offers solutions to current problems, but because it illustrates the longevity of hostility to human rights and to migration within colonialism.