Judeoconservatives as the modern heirs of France's Parti Colonial:
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Excerpt:
The French Third Republic began its overseas expansion at the initiative of the moderate republican politician, Jules Ferry, who served twice as prime minister during the early 1880s. Within two decades, France acquired vast new possessions in Africa and Southeast Asia. The arguments Ferry used to justify overseas expansion focused on material interest. He hoped to win the support of his mainstream, bourgeois political constituency for his policies in Indochina and Tunisia by appealing to their pocket books. Colonies, he argued, would provide France with investment markets and sources of raw materials that would facilitate its renaissance as a great power in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war.
Some historians have argued that Ferry's neo-mercantilistic arguments were little more than a misleading rationale for a policy that was motivated by an obsession with national grandeur [1]. Others have rejected this, arguing that Ferry's economic and political conceptions complemented each other since in the industrial age, economic power was seen as both a foundation and manifestation of political power. Moreover, the fact that most imperial ventures were unprofitable does not mean that perceived economic interests could not have motivated them initially. One scholar recently pointed out that - regardless of the essentially imponderable, overall balance sheet - the empire did give a much-needed boost to certain vital sectors of the French economy from the 1880s to the 1930s. For example, the traditional, family-run manufacturing firm won an extended lease on life due to the control of a protected export market in the colonies.
Ferry's economic arguments were echoed by a number of interest groups that coalesced by the 1890s. The parti colonial [2] was a somewhat grandiose name for a loose coalition of colonialist societies that drew members from a heterogeneous array of businessmen, journalists, diplomats, military officers, and politicians from various (mostly centrist) parties. The parti colonial lobbied effectively on behalf of imperial interests, and took advantage of the chaotic nature of French party politics to win the support of crucial government agencies for continued overseas expansion.
Ferry's overseas adventurism did not immediately win widespread popular support. Instead, it became the target of considerable criticism from a broad spectrum of political perspectives. Nationalists on both the Right and Left insisted that France's energies must be focused on the paramount goal of revenge for the humiliation of 1870-71 [3]. Radical republicans argued, in addition, that imperialism was inherently undemocratic, and thus incompatible with France's republican identity. The naked conquest of Indochina or Tunisia could only undermine the legitimacy of France's own claims to Alsace-Lorraine. Right-wingers suspected colonial ventures as serving the narrow interests of a Jewish-capitalist cabal.
By the eve of World War I, most criticism of imperial expansion had dissipated. Even the Socialist leader Jean Jaures had come to accept certain forms of overseas rule. Indeed, some historians have gone so far as to argue that the Third Republic's imperialism became an exercise in consensus politics [4], as the distinction between national security and imperial ambition became blurred.
Such a consensus was, in fact, limited and superficial. All major political parties did come to take for granted the necessity of maintaining control of the overseas territories. When it came to the methods of control and the nature of the mission, however, there was little agreement. The period when opposition to Empire declined was marked by the political polarization of the Dreyfus Affair and its aftermath. The conflict over the future of France's domestic institutions did not fail to find its reflection in debate over the nature of the nation's imperial mission. Various ideological groupings, despite their superficial agreement on the inherent importance of the Empire, came to justify French colonial power in very different ways and to advocate extremely different administrative policies. This article focuses on the development of a distinctive ideological synthesis regarding imperialism by elements within the French right wing. Not only did these right-wingers have an idiosyncratic conception of the aims of imperialism, but their peculiar definition of imperial objectives led them to embrace a new theory of imperial administration.
In turn-of-the-century France, a novel doctrine that advocated a policy of indirect rule through association with traditional native elites challenged the longstanding predilection for centralized administrative control of colonies and cultural assimilation of the indigenous populations. In part, the attraction of this associationist approach was due to the general growth of racist thinking and to purely pragmatic considerations (based partly on lessons drawn from British and Dutch colonial methods). But the development of this idea also reflected the influence of new right-wing ideologies that weakened the Jacobin underpinnings of French imperial policy. Right-wing ideas on how imperialism could benefit France were closely connected to the tendency of the Right to advocate the doctrine of association. Right-wing conceptions of the means of imperialism were shaped not only by racist attitudes toward non-European peoples, but also by domestic concerns regarding the crisis of political leadership, social structure, and national character they believed afflicted France.
Single, definitive categorization of the French right wing is impossible since one must distinguish between more traditional, monarchist reactionaries and aristocratic conservatives whose ilk long dominated the military, and radical right-wingers who espoused proto-fascist views. But both traditional reactionaries and proto-fascist ideologues evinced a common hostility to capitalist materialism, parliamentary democracy, and the liberal tradition. Moreover, the radical Right cultivated a certain nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary France [5], while for their part, the aristocratic conservatives became increasingly inclined to embrace the populist, nationalist rhetoric of the extremists. The mutual influence of these two groups is particularly evident in the sphere of colonial ideology.
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[1] =today's US "national interest"
[2] = US Judeoconservatives
[3] = the humiliation of 911
[4] = US bipartisan consensus as regards Israel, the Mideast,...
[5] Just like the US Religious Right "cultivates a certain nostalgia" for antebellum America... |
