France's Modernising Mission

This volume explores how France-s -modernising mission- unfolded during the post-war period and its reverberations in the decades after empire. In the aftermath of the Second World War, France sought to reinvent its empire by transforming the traditional -civilising mission- into a -modernising mission-. Henceforth, French claims to rule would be based on extending citizenship rights and the promise of economic development and welfare within a -Greater France-. In the face of rising anti-colonial mobilization and a new international order, redefining the terms that bound colonised peoples and territories to the metropole was a strategic necessity but also a dynamic which Paris struggled to control. The language of reform and equality was seized upon locally to make claims on metropolitan resources and wrest away the political initiative. Intertwined with coercion and violence, the struggle to define what -modernisation- would mean for colonised societies was a key factor in the wider process of decolonisation. Contributions by leading specialists extend geographically from Africa to the Pacific and to metropolitan France itself, examining a range of topics including education policy, colonial knowledge production, rural development and slum clearance.

Ed Naylor is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages and Area Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He completed his PhD in History at Queen Mary, University of London and held the Deakin fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford, before joining the University of Portsmouth in 2014. Contributors: Tony Chafer, Françoise de Barros, Liz Fink, Abdellali Hajjat, Jim House, Neil MacMaster, James McDougall, and Benoît Trépied.

Chapter 1. Introduction; Ed Naylor.- Part I) Rethinking Education and Citizenship.- Chapter 2. Conflicting Modernities: Battles over France's policy of adapted education in French West Africa; Tony Chafer.- Chapter 3. Institutional Terra Non Firma: Representative democracy and the chieftaincy in French West Africa; Liz Fink.- Chapter 4. Decolonisation Without Independence? Breaking with the colonial in New Caledonia (1946-1975); Benoît Trépied.-Part II) Mental Maps and the Territory.- Chapter 5. Rule of Experts? Governing modernisation in late colonial French Africa; James McDougall.- Chapter 6. From Tent to Village regroupement: The Colonial state and social engineering of rural space, 1843 to 1962; Neil MacMaster.- Chapter 7. Shantytowns and Re-housing in Late Colonial Algiers and Casablanca; Jim House.- Part III) Metropolitan Legacies.- Chapter 8. Promoting 'Harmonious Cohabitation' in the Metropole: The Welfare charity Aide aux Travailleurs d'Outre Mer (1950-1975); Ed Naylor.- Chapter 9. Protests Against Shanty-towns in the 1950s and 1960s: Class logics, clientelist relations and 'colonial redeployments'; Françoise de Barros.- Chapter 10. Colonial Legacies: Housing policy and riot prevention strategies in the Minguettes district of Ve-nissieux; Abdellali Hajjat.