Indigénat - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Code de l'indigénat (kɔd də lɛ̃diʒena, Indigenousness Code) was a set of laws creating, in practice, an inferior legal status for natives of French Colonies from 1887 until 1944–1947. First put in place in Algeria, it was applied across the French Colonial Empire in 1887–1889. A similar strategy was also employed by other European colonial powers, under the concept of Indirect rule

Indirect rule

Indirect rule was a system of government that was developed in certain British colonial dependencies...

Theoretical underpinnings

French colonial policy is often contrasted with the British concept of Indirect rule

Indirect rule

Indirect rule was a system of government that was developed in certain British colonial dependencies...

pioneered by Frederick Lugard

Frederick Lugard

Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, 1st Baron Lugard GCMG, CB, DSO, PC , known as Sir Frederick Lugard between 1901 and 1928, was a British soldier, mercenary, explorer of Africa and colonial administrator, who was Governor of Hong Kong and Governor-General of Nigeria .-Early life and education:Lugard...

of the British East Africa Company in Uganda

Uganda

Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...

and later the Royal Niger Company

Royal Niger Company

The Royal Niger Company was a mercantile company chartered by the British government in the nineteenth century. It formed the basis of the modern state of Nigeria....

in what is today Nigeria

Nigeria

Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...

. Lugard devised a method of colonial administration which relied upon maintenance of pre-colonial chiefs and other political structures, who were in turn subject to the authority of British representatives.

The French government, in contrast, wrote much about the assimilation

Assimilation (French colonial)

Assimilation was one ideological basis of French colonial policy in the 19th and 20th centuries. In contrast with British imperial policy, the French taught their subjects that, by adopting French language and culture, they could eventually become French. The famous 'Four Communes' in Senegal were...

of colonial subjects, with the final aim of creating in their colonies integral parts of France, filled with African, Arab, or Asian Frenchmen. This combined with a Jacobin

Jacobin (politics)

A Jacobin , in the context of the French Revolution, was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary far-left political movement. The Jacobin Club was the most famous political club of the French Revolution. So called from the Dominican convent where they originally met, in the Rue St. Jacques ,...

tradition of centralizing government, has given weight to the argument that French colonial rule stood in stark contrast to other models. But only small areas of France's colonial possessions were ever afforded full rights as Overseas Departments of the French state. Between 1865 and 1962, only 7,000 Algerians became French citizens, this in a global empire which, in 1939, counted some 69 million subjects.

The Code de l'indigénat has been at the center of revised historical thinking about French colonial policy. The indigénat is an example of Association: French colonial indirect rule. It outlined an entire legal system by which the vast majority of colonial subjects were governed from the creation of the French Empire, until the reforms of the post World War II period. These laws provided for their enforcement by a system of administrative Cercles

Cercle (French colonial)

Cercle was the smallest unit of French political administration in French Colonial Africa that was headed by a European officer. A cercle consisted of several cantons, each of which in turn consisted of several villages, and was instituted in France's African colonies from 1895 to 1946.At the...

: appointed indigenous authorities, religious courts, and native police carrying out the orders of often distant French administrators.

The abolition of the indigénat, with its tax burdens, forced labor, and arbitrary exercise of authority was a primary demand of the resistance to French colonialism. Its removal was the first in a series of victories by native peoples which led to the end of colonialism.

Creation in Algeria

The Indigénat was first created to solve specific problems of administering France's North African colonies in the mid to early 19th century. There had been a royal Code Noir

Code Noir

The Code noir was a decree originally passed by France's King Louis XIV in 1685. The Code Noir defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire, restricted the activities of free Negroes, forbade the exercise of any religion other than Roman Catholicism , and ordered...

(decreed in 1685) determining the treatment of subject peoples, but it was in Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s that the French government began actively to rule large subject populations. Not only was it realized that this was impractical in areas without a French population, but French experiences with large groups of subject people convinced many that both direct rule and eventual assimilation was undesirable.

In Algeria a legal framework was developed piecemeal, which would later be formalised and exported around the globe.

^{from French rule in AlgeriaFrench rule in Algeria
French Algeria lasted from 1830 to 1962, under a variety of governmental systems. From 1848 until independence, the whole Mediterranean region of Algeria was administered as an integral part of France, much like Corsica and Réunion are to this day. The vast arid interior of Algeria, like the rest...}

Colonization and military control

A royal ordinance in 1845 called for three types of administration in Algeria. In areas where Europeans were a substantial part of the population, colons elected mayors and councils for self-governing "full exercise" communes (communes de plein exercice). In the "mixed" communes, where Muslims were a large majority, government was in the hands of appointed and some elected officials, including representatives of the grands chefs (great chieftains) and a French administrator. The indigenous communes (communes indigènes), remote areas not adequately pacified, remained under the régime du sabre (direct rule by the military).

Beginnings of indirect rule

The first Code de l'indigénat was implemented by the Algerian senatus consulte of July 14, 1865. Its first article stipulated that

"The Muslim indigenous is French; however, he will continue to be subjected to Muslim law. He may be admitted to serve in the terrestrial and marine Army. He may be called to functions and civil employment in Algeria. He may, on his demand, be admitted to enjoy the rights of a French citizen; in this case, he is subjected to the political and civil laws of France."

However, until 1870, fewer than 200 demands were registered by Muslims, and 152 by Jewish Algerians. The 1865 decree was then modified by the 1870 Crémieux decrees

Adolphe Crémieux

Adolphe Crémieux was a French-Jewish lawyer and statesman, and a staunch defender of the human rights of the Jews of France. - Biography :...

, which granted French nationality to Jews living in one of the three Algerian departments. In 1881, the Code de l'Indigénat officialized discrimination

Discrimination

Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...

, by creating specific penalties for indigènes and organizing the seizure or appropriation of their lands.

The Franco-Algerian philosopher Sidi Mohammed Barkat has described this legal limbo as: "Not truly inclusion nor in fact exclusion, but the indefinite hanging on for some future inclusion". He has argued that this legal limbo enabled the French to treat the colonised as a mass less than human, but still a subject to a humanising mission; only able to become fully human when they cast off all the features that the French used to define them as part of the indigen mass.

In practical terms, by continuing the fiction that the "indigenous is French", the Code de l'indigénat enabled French authorities to place a large, alien population under their rule through a legal separation and a practice of indirect institutions to substitute for a tiny French governing force.

Expanding empire 1887–1904

While the Indigénat grew from circumstances of the colonial rule of North Africa, it was in sub-saharan Africa and Indochina that the code became formalised. As French rule expanded during the Scramble for Africa

Scramble for Africa

The Scramble for Africa, also known as the Race for Africa or Partition of Africa was a process of invasion, occupation, colonization and annexation of African territory by European powers during the New Imperialism period, between 1881 and World War I in 1914...

, the government found itself nominal ruler of some 50 million people, with only a tiny retinue of French officials. The Berlin Conference

Berlin Conference

The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period, and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power...

specified that territory seized must be actively ruled, or other powers were welcome to seize it. The Indigénat was the tool with which France ruled all its territories in Africa, Guiana

French Guiana

French Guiana is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America. It has borders with two nations, Brazil to the east and south, and Suriname to the west...

, New Caledonia

New Caledonia

New Caledonia is a special collectivity of France located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, east of Australia and about from Metropolitan France. The archipelago, part of the Melanesia subregion, includes the main island of Grande Terre, the Loyalty Islands, the Belep archipelago, the Isle of...

, and Madagascar

Madagascar

The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...

without having to extend the rights of Frenchmen to the people who lived there.

Punishment

The commandant de cercle, or any white man in practice, was free to impose summary punishment for any of 34 (later 12) vague headings of infractions of the code: from murder down to 'disrespect' of France, its symbols, or functionaries. These could range from fines, to 15 days in prison, to being executed immediately. While the statute stated that all punishments must be signed by the colonial governor, this was almost always done after the fact. Corporal punishment was outlawed, but still regularly used. And while reforms were periodically placed upon these powers, in practice they became common and arbitrary. Over 1,500 officially reported infractions were punished under the indigénat in Moyen Congo in 1908–09 alone.

Taxes and forced labor

Beneath these punishments, were a set of tools for extracting value from colonial subjects. In Africa, these included the Corvée
Corvée
Corvée is unfree labour, often unpaid, that is required of people of lower social standing and imposed on them by the state or a superior . The corvée was the earliest and most widespread form of taxation, which can be traced back to the beginning of civilization...

(forced labor for specific projects), Prestation (taxes paid in forced labor) Head Tax (often arbitrary monetary taxes, food and property requisitioning, market taxes) and the Blood Tax (forced conscription to the native Tirailleur

Tirailleur

Tirailleur literally means a shooting skirmisher in French from tir—shot. The term dates back to the Napoleonic period where it was used to designate light infantry trained to skirmish ahead of the main columns...

units). All major projects in French West Africa

French West Africa

French West Africa was a federation of eight French colonial territories in Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan , French Guinea , Côte d'Ivoire , Upper Volta , Dahomey and Niger...

in this period were carried out by forced labor, including work on roads, mines, and in fields of private companies.

Tax and forced labor application depended largely upon the local French Cercle, and in some areas, forced labor continued as a staple of the colonial economy, where private enterprises could not attract workers, or for personal projects of colonial officials The vision of a 'forced modernization' of even the most well intentioned officials (that 'progress' would only result from coercion), combined with tremendous power given to French created 'Chiefs', saw a massive increase in forced labor demands in the inter-war period. Unsurprisingly this resulted in enrichment for chiefs and the French, and suffering for other Africans.

Plantations, forestry operations, and salt mines in Senegal continued to be operated on forced labor, mandated by the local commandant and provided by official chiefs through the 1940s. Forced agricultural production was common in sub-Saharan Africa from the 19th century until the Second World War, sometimes mandated by the central government (rubber until 1920, rice during the Second World War), sometimes for profit (the cotton plantations of Compagnie Française d'Afrique Occidentale and Unilever

Unilever

Unilever is a British-Dutch multinational corporation that owns many of the world's consumer product brands in foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products....

), and sometimes on the personal whim of the local commandant (such as an attempt to introduce cotton into the Guinean highlands by one official). Unlike the Congo Free State

Congo Free State

The Congo Free State was a large area in Central Africa which was privately controlled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Its origins lay in Leopold's attracting scientific, and humanitarian backing for a non-governmental organization, the Association internationale africaine...

, infamous for its 19th-century forced rubber cultivation by private fiat, the French government administration was legally bound to provide labor for its rubber concessionaires in French Equatorial Africa

French Equatorial Africa

French Equatorial Africa or the AEF was the federation of French colonial possessions in Middle Africa, extending northwards from the Congo River to the Sahara Desert.-History:...

and settler owned cotton plantations in Côte d'Ivoire.

Native governance

In addition, native sub-officials, such as the appointed local chiefs, made use of forced labor, compulsory crops, and taxes in kind at their discretion. As the enforcers of the indigénat, they were also, in part, beneficiaries. Still, they themselves were quite firmly under French authority when the French chose to exercise it. It was only in 1924 that chiefs du canton were exempted from the Indigénat, and if they showed insubordination or disloyalty they could still (as all Africans) be imprisoned for up to ten years for 'Political offences' by French officials (subject to a signature of the Minister of Colonies).

Courts

In Africa, Sujets fell under two separate court systems. After their creation by Governor-General Ernest Roume and Secretary General Martial Merlin in 1904, most legal matters were officially handled by the so-called customary courts. These were either courts convened by village 'chefs du canton' or some other French recognized native authority, or else by Muslim Sharia

Sharia

Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...

courts. While Muslim courts had some real local relevance behind them, the French history of chief creation was to replace traditional leaders with Africans who would be dependent upon the French. Consequently customary courts often served simply to place more power in the hands of official chiefs. What was deemed customary differed from cercle to cercle, with the Commandant relying upon his native sub-officials to interpret and formalize oral traditions of which the French had no knowledge. Civil cases which came to the attention of the French officials were tried by an administrator-judge in a tribunaux du premier degré, where the administrator-judge was an appointed African notable (other than local Chief).

Matters deemed especially serious by the French officials, or matters in which the colonial power had any interest, were handled by a French administrator-judge. All criminal cases were handled by a tribunaux du premier degré led by the chef du subdivision (the lowest post held by whites) with the assistance of two local notables and two white officials, or (in practice) anyone the administrator-judge chose. These could be appealed to the tribunal criminal where the administrator-judge was the local Commandant du cercle, and was not bound to heed the advice of even his own appointed assistants. beyond this, there was no functioning appeals process, though on paper, the colonies governor had to sign off on all decisions which imposed punishments over those allowed for summary sentences. Historians examining the court records have found governors were asked for approval after the fact, and in all but a minuscule number of cases signed off on whatever their commandants decided.

Those Africans who had obtained the status of French citizens(Évolué

Évolué

Évolué is a French term used in the colonial era to refer to native Africans and Asians who had "evolved", through education or assimilation, and accepted European values and patterns of behavior...

) or those born into the Four Communes

Four Communes

The "Four Communes" of Senegal were the four oldest colonial towns in French controlled west Africa. In 1848, the French Second Republic extended the rights of full French citizenship to the inhabitants of Saint-Louis, Dakar, Goree, and Rufisque...

(originaires) were subject to the small French court system, operating under the Code Napoleon as practiced in France. The lack of an adversarial system

Adversarial system

The adversarial system is a legal system where two advocates represent their parties' positions before an impartial person or group of people, usually a jury or judge, who attempt to determine the truth of the case...

(In French law, the Judge is also the prosecutor) may have worked in France, but was hardly trusted by educated Africans, especially if their accusors or opponents were white colonials. This goes some way to explain why French Africans demand for access (led by Lamine Guèye) to both local and French courts was so strong, and why so few who managed to meet the requirements of citizenship chose to pursue it, abandoning themselves to French justice.

Even originaires were not free from summary law. In 1908, most African voters in Saint-Louis were removed from the rolls, and in the Decree of 1912, the government said that only originaires who complied with the rigorous demands of those seeking French Citizenship from the outside, would be able to exercise French rights. Even them, originaires were subject to customary and arbitrary law if the stepped outside the Four Communes. It was only through a protracted battle by Senegalese Deputy Blaise Diagne

Blaise Diagne

Blaise Diagne was a French political leader, the first black African elected to the French National Assembly, and mayor of Dakar.- Background :...

, and his help in recruiting thousands of Africans to fight in World War I, that legal and voting rights were restored to even the originaires with the Loi Blaise Diagne of 29 September 1916

Resistance

Resistance, while common, was usually indirect. Huge population shifts occurred in France's African colonies, especially when large conscription or forced labor drives were pushed by particularly zealous officials.

Whole villages fled during the roadbuilding push in the 1920s and 30s, and colonial officials gradually relaxed the use of forced labor. Rober Delavignette (a former colonial official) documented the mass movement of some 100,000 Mossi people from Upper Volta

French Upper Volta

Upper Volta was a colony of French West Africaestablished on March 1, 1919, from territories that had been part of the colonies of Upper Senegal and Niger and the Côte d'Ivoire...

to Gold Coast

Gold Coast (British colony)

The Gold Coast was a British colony on the Gulf of Guinea in west Africa that became the independent nation of Ghana in 1957.-Overview:The first Europeans to arrive at the coast were the Portuguese in 1471. They encountered a variety of African kingdoms, some of which controlled substantial...

to escape forced labor, while the investigative journalist Albert Londres

Albert Londres

Albert Londres was a French journalist and writer. One of the inventors of investigative journalism, he criticized abuses of colonialism such as forced labour. Albert Londres gave his name to a journalism prize for Francophone journalists.- Biography :Londres was born in Vichy in 1884...

claims the figures are closer to 600,000 sujets fleeing to Gold Coast and 2 million fleeing to Nigeria

Nigeria

Dissolution of the Indigénat

Some elements of the Indigénat were reformed over time. The formal right of white civilians to exercise summary punishment was removed in the decree of 15 November 1924. This decree cut the headings under which subjects could be summarily punished to 24, and later to 12. Maximum fines dropped from 25 francs to 15, and summary imprisonment was capped at five days. In practice, though, summary punishment continued at the discretion of local authorities. In French-controlled Cameroon, 1935 saw 32,858 prison sentences for these 'administrative' offenses, compared to 3,512 for common law offenses.

Head taxes had been rising well above inflation from the First World War right through to the economic crisis of the 30s

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

, and reached their high point during the Second World War, but it was decolonisation which saw a real drop in taxes paid without representation.

Gradually, the Corvée

Corvée

Corvée is unfree labour, often unpaid, that is required of people of lower social standing and imposed on them by the state or a superior . The corvée was the earliest and most widespread form of taxation, which can be traced back to the beginning of civilization...

system was reformed, both because of international pressure and popular resistance. In the AOF (French West Africa

French West Africa

French West Africa was a federation of eight French colonial territories in Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan , French Guinea , Côte d'Ivoire , Upper Volta , Dahomey and Niger...

), the Corvée had been formalised by the local decree of November 25, 1912. Duration and conditions varied, but as of in 1926, all able-bodied men were required to work for no longer than eight days at a stint in Senegal, ten in Guinea and twelve in Soudan and Mauritania. Workers were supposed to be provided with food if working more than 5 km from home, but this was often ignored. In 1930, the Geneva Convention outlawed the corvée, but France substituted a work tax (Prestation) in the AOF decree of September 12, 1930, whereby able-bodied men were assessed a high monetary tax, which they could pay via forced labor.

Political moves

It was, in fact, political processes which doomed the indigénat system.

The Popular Front

Popular Front (France)

The Popular Front was an alliance of left-wing movements, including the French Communist Party , the French Section of the Workers' International and the Radical and Socialist Party, during the interwar period...

government in the decrees of 11 March and 20 March 1937 created the first labor regulations on work contracts and the creation of trade unions, but these remained largely unenforced until the late 1940s.

The journalism of André Gide

André Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...

and Albert Londres

Albert Londres

, the political pressure of the French left and groups like the League for Human Rights and Popular Aid put pressure on the colonial system, but it was the promises made at Brazzaville in 1944, the crucial role of the colonies for the Free French in the Second World War, and the looming Indochina War and the Malagasy Uprising all made the new Fourth Republic

French Fourth Republic

The French Fourth Republic was the republican government of France between 1946 and 1958, governed by the fourth republican constitution. It was in many ways a revival of the Third Republic, which was in place before World War II, and suffered many of the same problems...

reorient France to decolonization

Decolonization

Decolonization refers to the undoing of colonialism, the unequal relation of polities whereby one people or nation establishes and maintains dependent Territory over another...

. The declaration at Brazzaville, more revolutionary for its discussion of the issue rather than any formal processes, declared the "progressive suppression" of the code de l'indigénat, but only following the end of the war.

The inclusion of some small political representation from the colonies after the war saw ending the indigénat as a primary goal, even though these men were drawn from the Évolué

Évolué

class of full French citizens. The passage of the loi Lamine Guèye was the culmination of this process, and saw the repeal of the courts and labor laws of the Indigénat.

Legally, the Indigénat was dismantled in three steps. The ordinance of 7 May 1944 suppressed the summary punishment statutes, and offered citizenship to those who met certain criteria and would give up their rights to native or Muslim courts. This citizenship was labeled à titre personnel: their (even future) children would still fall under the Indigénat. The loi Lamine Guèye of 7 April 1946 formally extended citizenship across the empire, indigènes included. Third, the law of 20 September 1947 removed the two-tier court system and mandated equal access to public employment.

Applied in fact only very slowly, the abrogation of the code de l'indigénat only became real in 1962. At this date, nearly all of the colonies had become independent and French law adopted the notion of double jus soli

Jus soli

Jus soli , also known as birthright citizenship, is a right by which nationality or citizenship can be recognized to any individual born in the territory of the related state...

. Thus, any children of colonial parents born in French-ruled territory became French citizens. All others were by then full citizens of their respective nations.

Full voting representation and full French legal, labor, and property rights were never offered to the entire sujet class. The Loi Cadre

Loi Cadre

The loi-cadre was a French legal reform passed by the French National Assembly on 23 June 1956. It marked a turning point in relations between France and its overseas empire...

of 1956 extended more rights, including consultative 'legislatures' for the colonies within the French Union

French Union

The French Union was a political entity created by the French Fourth Republic to replace the old French colonial system, the "French Empire" and to abolish its "indigenous" status.-History:...

. Within three years, this was replaced by the referendum on the French Community

French Community

The French Community was an association of states known in French simply as La Communauté. In 1958 it replaced the French Union, which had itself succeeded the French colonial empire in 1946....

, in which colonies could vote for independence The First Indochina War

First Indochina War

The First Indochina War was fought in French Indochina from December 19, 1946, until August 1, 1954, between the French Union's French Far East...

led to independence for the different regions of French Indochina

French Indochina

French Indochina was part of the French colonial empire in southeast Asia. A federation of the three Vietnamese regions, Tonkin , Annam , and Cochinchina , as well as Cambodia, was formed in 1887....

. The Algerian War and the French Fifth Republic

French Fifth Republic

The Fifth Republic is the fifth and current republican constitution of France, introduced on 4 October 1958. The Fifth Republic emerged from the collapse of the French Fourth Republic, replacing the prior parliamentary government with a semi-presidential system...

of 1958 led to independence for most of the rest of empire in the period 1959–1962. The Comoros

Comoros

The Comoros , officially the Union of the Comoros is an archipelago island nation in the Indian Ocean, located off the eastern coast of Africa, on the northern end of the Mozambique Channel, between northeastern Mozambique and northwestern Madagascar...

(except Mayotte

Mayotte

Mayotte is an overseas department and region of France consisting of a main island, Grande-Terre , a smaller island, Petite-Terre , and several islets around these two. The archipelago is located in the northern Mozambique Channel in the Indian Ocean, namely between northwestern Madagascar and...

and Djibouti

Djibouti

Djibouti , officially the Republic of Djibouti , is a country in the Horn of Africa. It is bordered by Eritrea in the north, Ethiopia in the west and south, and Somalia in the southeast. The remainder of the border is formed by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden at the east...

gained independence in the 1970s. Those parts of the empire that remained (Mayotte, New Caledonia