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

This is the first work that analyzes depopulation as a primary motive for France’s increased imperialist efforts between the devastating Franco-Prussian War and World War II. Margaret Cook Andersen explores the way in which post-1870 France encouraged migration to its colonies and more successfully, used pronatalist concepts to increase the populations of French settlers in Madagascar and North Africa. One of the seminal contributions of this work is the provision of evidence that pronatalists were intentional in their advocacy of the development of the French empire as a principal strategy for the regeneration of France (9).

Andersen’s first chapter skillfully sets the stage for this examination by emphasizing the critical nature of the “French depopulation crisis” following the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1872, and worsened by World War I (25–60). She describes France’s subsequent plan to augment its standing in Europe by raising its population, both in la métropole and in the colonies (2). Chapter 2 explores France’s efforts to recruit some of its citizens to these colonies (61–109). L’Union coloniale française aimed to recruit men to the colonies by valorizing the image of the rugged masculine settler and to convince unmarried and educated women (les non-classées) to move to the colonies, by stressing employment opportunities and in the hope that these settlers would marry and raise families (84, 89). Andersen frames Chapters 3, 4, and 5 as “case studies” of policies, based on pronatalism, that were used in Madagascar (Chapter 3), Tunisia and Morocco (Chapter 4) and le Maghreb as a whole (Chapter 5) in order to bolster their populations (20). In Chapter 3, Andersen analyzes the project of the colonial government in Madagascar to develop a “labor reservoir” for the French, taking advantage of their other possessions nearby (122). By incentivizing marriage, childbirth, and paternity (133–36), Governor-General Joseph Gallieni raised the population of Madagascar (150). He also established a system of public health care aimed at medicalizing more childbirths and preventing the spread of disease (124). Meanwhile, Chapter 4 takes the reader to French North Africa during l’entre-deux-guerres, examining the implementation of family suffrage in Tunisia and Morocco, largely motivated by French fears of losing these protectorates to Italy and Spain (185, 190). Familial suffrage, a system in which parents voted for their children and for themselves (160), gave more representation to large families, thus favoring population growth (180). While the enactment of family suffrage was encouraging to French pronatalists, ultimately, it did not result in a large increase in the French settler birthrate in North Africa and France itself never adopted family suffrage (198–99, 197). Chapter 5 examines advocacy for family rights among settler communities in North Africa after World War I, seen as a means to rectify the “depopulation crisis” there, and concurrent with the campaign for family rights in France (200–36). Familialist organizations in le Maghreb and French pronatalists strove to secure state support for the settler famille nombreuse (200–01), supporting naturalization laws aiming to make settlers from other European nations French (203). They also worked to have laws passed that would make it financially easier for French settler families to raise their children (211). Lastly, these organizations encouraged French settlement in North Africa (206), portraying it as a “colonial fountain of youth” (234).

Regeneration through Empire is a convincing, meticulously-researched, and thought-provoking work that establishes a strong link between metropolitan concerns with depopulation, pronatalism, and expansion into France’s colonies. Another admirable trait of this book is Andersen’s sensitivity towards the experiences of the colonized during this period. She often acknowledges the way in which the colonized sometimes defended their cultures from criticism from the French. For example, the Malagasy denied a causal link between Madagascar’s depopulation and their personal behaviors. Andersen categorizes some of this...