Linda Lehmil  (Tulane University)
French: a weapon of mass instruction in the postcolonial world?

Many studies have blamed French colonizers for the lack of educational equality, literacy, and language development, citing the absence of a language policy based on indigenous language, yet the complexity of the analysis would preclude such a Manichean judgment. Most often, these studies have shown that the colonial French language policy was uniform and imported directly from France. At the Universal Exposition in 1900, Henri Froidevaux developed the concept of adaptation. In the report "French politics of schooling in the colonies," he summarized the history and the organization of public instruction in the colonies: the accomplishments and progress made by both colonial administration and private initiatives (mainly missionaries) to educate indigenous peoples. He is among the first to pose crucial questions surrounding the nature, role and function of indigenous education: "What will be the goal and shape of the schools? What kind of teaching should be promoted? What form of teaching will take shape? What role will the indigenous teacher play once we train them? Last but not least, what role and function will our national French language have relative to the local and regional languages ?" (Froidevaux 10). These crucial questions on how to adapt educational methods to colonized peoples remained the central issue at each Intercolonial congress until colonial independence.

In this paper I reappraise the logic of the Civilizing Mission's francisation policy and its mirage, which ambiguously promulgated the politics of "l'unique et le même," by contrasting five unique facets of l'école coloniale in Algeria, the Annam province in ex-Indochina, Martinique, Senegal, and Madagascar. It is crucial to find out if there were any differences and/or similarities in the diffusion of the educational and linguistic policies both between France and the colonies and among the colonies themselves. Was the ideology of linguistic imperialism (and ethnocentrism and universalism) as practiced in France exported to the colonies? I argue that French administrators enforced different educational and linguistic ideologies in their different colonial territories, offering a limited and fluctuating policy of francisation in the name of assimilation, association and adaptation.

I first analyze the reasons these administrators did not promote and modernize certain "indigenous" languages - Wolof in Senegal, Creole in Martinique, or Arabic or Berber in Algeria-- and why, instead, they promoted Vietnamese in Indochina and Malagasy in Madagascar. I then focus on pedagogical tools discovered during my archival research, which incorporate textbooks, student notebooks and previously unexamined materials. Many of these pedagogical implements contradict official colonial propaganda about language policy. I argue that it was this discrepancy between language planning and language policy which led to teaching different varieties of French: standard French, simplified French or petit nègre. Finally, I will show why standard French never fully reached the status of a vernacular language in the colonies. In the conclusion, I will show that the current language policies in the Francophone world are the results of both colonial and post-colonial policy decisions. Today, the polemics around a language as a subject and medium of instruction continue to delay the effectiveness of schools.