The French Colonial Imagination

Writing the Indian Uprisings, 1857-1858, from Second Empire to Third Republic

Nicola Frith

The Indian uprisings (1857–58) against British rule in India represent an iconic period within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Numerous works have considered these historical events from British and Indian perspectives, but none have yet questioned how they were viewed by Britain’s foremost colonial rival in India, the French. The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony at the hands its own colonial “subjects” allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance. The uprisings offered the attractive possibility that France could undergo a colonial revival in the wake of British defeat, thereby reversing the devastating losses inflicted upon France’s former empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Notable among these losses was Britain’s decision (in the Treaty of 1814) to permanently reduce France’s presence in India to five small trading posts scattered around the periphery of British territory. The extent to which to the French colonial imagination of the nineteenth century was shaped by the memories of such defeats forms a primary concern of this monograph. This investigation into French responses to the Indian uprisings reveals that French colonial discourse was determined as much by its visions of the colonized “other,” as by the dominance of their British rivals.

Drawing from journalistic, historical, political, and fictional texts written during Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1852–70) and in the early years of the Third Republic (1870–1944), The French Colonial Imagination shows how the uprisings gave French writers the opportunity to speak out against the rapacity of British colonialism and its treatment of colonized Indians, while simultaneously constructing a competing colonial discourse that would justify further expansion in North Africa and South East Asia. Standing at a crossroads between the “loss” of Ancien Régime’s empire and the Third Republic’s ideological investment in overseas expansion, this understudied period of colonial history reveals the centrality of loss, fracture, and political emasculation as core preoccupations haunting the French colonial discourse in its quest to regain cultural and ideological ascendancy over its greatest political enemy.

Lexington Books

Pages: 228 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-0-7391-8000-6 • Hardback • April 2014 • $114.00 • (£88.00)

978-0-7391-8001-3 • eBook • April 2014 • $108.00 • (£83.00)

Series: After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / French, Literary Criticism / Asian / Indic, Political Science / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

The French Colonial Imagination

Writing the Indian Uprisings, 1857-1858, from Second Empire to Third Republic

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The Indian uprisings (1857–58) against British rule in India represent an iconic period within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Numerous works have considered these historical events from British and Indian perspectives, but none have yet questioned how they were viewed by Britain’s foremost colonial rival in India, the French. The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony at the hands its own colonial “subjects” allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance. The uprisings offered the attractive possibility that France could undergo a colonial revival in the wake of British defeat, thereby reversing the devastating losses inflicted upon France’s former empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Notable among these losses was Britain’s decision (in the Treaty of 1814) to permanently reduce France’s presence in India to five small trading posts scattered around the periphery of British territory. The extent to which to the French colonial imagination of the nineteenth century was shaped by the memories of such defeats forms a primary concern of this monograph. This investigation into French responses to the Indian uprisings reveals that French colonial discourse was determined as much by its visions of the colonized “other,” as by the dominance of their British rivals.

Drawing from journalistic, historical, political, and fictional texts written during Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1852–70) and in the early years of the Third Republic (1870–1944), The French Colonial Imagination shows how the uprisings gave French writers the opportunity to speak out against the rapacity of British colonialism and its treatment of colonized Indians, while simultaneously constructing a competing colonial discourse that would justify further expansion in North Africa and South East Asia. Standing at a crossroads between the “loss” of Ancien Régime’s empire and the Third Republic’s ideological investment in overseas expansion, this understudied period of colonial history reveals the centrality of loss, fracture, and political emasculation as core preoccupations haunting the French colonial discourse in its quest to regain cultural and ideological ascendancy over its greatest political enemy.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 228 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-0-7391-8000-6 • Hardback • April 2014 • $114.00 • (£88.00)

978-0-7391-8001-3 • eBook • April 2014 • $108.00 • (£83.00)

Series: After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / French, Literary Criticism / Asian / Indic, Political Science / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

Author

Nicola Frith is lecturer in French at Bangor University, UK, and is a specialist in Francophone Postcolonial Studies.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Beyond the Binary—Triangulating Colonial Discourse
2. A War of Words: The Politics of Nomenclature
3. Villains and Heroes: Ventriloquizing the "Revolutionary'
4. Massacring the Myth: Telling Tales of Revenge
5. Compensating for l'Inde perdue: France's "Civilizing Mission"
Conclusion: From Empire to Republic
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Reviews

This highly readable and meticulously documented study is the first to offer an analysis of French perspectives on a pivotal event in Indian history: the widespread uprisings of 1857–58, which the British imperial establishment termed the ‘Indian Mutiny’. Examining how the events were represented across a range of texts, it charts how French writers used a serious threat to the empire of France’s frère ennemi to reflect upon French conceptualizations of colonialism. By exploring how the eighteenth-century ‘loss’ of French influence in India could be deployed during subsequent periods of colonial expansion, the monograph significantly augments scholarship on a period until recently dismissed in the historiography of the French empires as a lapse in activity between two more significant waves of expansion, the first under the Ancien Régime and the second under the Third Republic. The French Colonial Imagination: Writing the Indian Uprisings, 1858-1859, from Second Empire to Third offers valuable insights into French and British encounters with India in the nineteenth century, into imperial rivalries, and into colonial discourses more generally. It should appeal not only to those interested in French expansion but also to all scholars of nineteenth-century European imperialisms.
— Kate Marsh, University of Liverpool

Carrying the inquiry into a barely studied field—the effect of France-England rivalry in the making of French colonial civilizing mission—Nicola Frith provides a new reading of French republican colonialism. She offers an invaluable resource for academics and students of European colonialism.
— Françoise Vergès, Goldsmiths College