Free, compulsory, secular, these adjectives have been a hallmark of French schooling since the Third Republic. Yet while republican educational policies were developed as a means to implement the ideals of the French Revolution, they have not always been received as liberating by those educated under them. Specifically in colonial societies, where schools formed an indigenous elite to mediate between the French and the colonized who labored for them, republican values were often seen as a justification for economic exploitation and military occupation. In the 1950s, while anticolonial movements were gaining momentum, Francophone writers began to tease out colonial education's politi-coeconomic role, and in looking back on their own schooling, they sin-gled out literary pedagogy as central to the colonization of minds. Decades later, Raphael Confiant's Eau de Cafe (1991) would sum up their experiences in one character's brief encounter with Racine, meted out as punishment by the teacher qua language police:" Major Berard's first and last schoolmaster had aroused a permanent disgust in him for the study of books after catching him speaking Creole with his classmates and condemning him to memorize Andromaque"(214). 1 This passage offers, in condensed form, what might be considered a literary primal scene, in which the colonized child encounters French literature as a form of" correction" for the first time. 2 Such scenes reveal the French school to be a kind of" correctional facility," a performative space in which students are" encouraged" to perform Frenchness" correctly." Repeated throughout the colonial literature of the 1950s, these scenes are doubly literary: they reveal French literature to be a product of colonial pedagogy and stage the very mode of production of the colo-nial literary text.