Relación Beneficio/ Costo

Throughout the history of the French Caribbean colonies, the Atlantic Ocean served as a kind of final frontier, a border that separated islanders from the significant benefits available in the metropole. As we have seen, in the area’s early history a move to French soil meant instant freedom for the enslaved. Even after that provision was removed, freedom in France still beckoned as a possibility and black and mulatto artisans sent to the continent to receive professional training often deigned not to return.56 Post-emancipation, as former slaves and

their descendants slowly overcame handicaps placed upon them by servitude, France remained, in many tangible ways, a last barrier for full social ascent. This was partly a result of the structure of the francophone world. Just as legislature was exported from Paris, so too was everything else. France, and more so Paris itself, was decidedly the centre of the French universe, especially for education. In like manner to the skilled artisans sent to France for further study of their trade, in the early twentieth-century a new class would emerge who had to voyage to France, specifically Paris, in order to fulfill their educational aspirations.

53 _{Aldrich, Greater France, p. 21.} 54 _{Hintjens, p. 23.}

55 _{Aldrich, Greater France, p. 22.}

56 _{McCloy, pp. 29-30. As with other border transgressions, this crossing prompted new legislature.} Laws passed in the 1770s forbade families from bringing slaves to France and ordered all recently established blacks and mulattoes to leave the country. See McCloy, p. 30.

Before emancipation, access to schooling was limited to whites and freedmen but widespread ‘social prejudice’ – the implicit foundation of the explicit barriers already considered – functioned as a obstacle to the attendance of nonwhites, resulting in ‘few if any’ black and mulatto children taking full advantage of opportunities for study.57 _This

would change. From the early 1800s, new schools began to provide education specifically for mulattoes, followed by schools set up for all, so that, by the estimate of the bishop of Fort-de-France, ‘by the early 1850’s approximately one-third of the children of Martinique were attending school’.58 _{Nonetheless, it took a good deal of time for the black majority to}

take advantage of access to education in numbers on par with their percentage of the populace. This was complicated by a school tax levied from 1853-1871 that essentially barred former slaves from education, as was its intention.59 In addition, most schools were in

towns, rather than in rural areas where most black people lived, and the government was more willing to promote the benefits of education and schooling to mulattoes than to others.60

As should be clear, all of this resulted in a variety of structural advantages for the mulatto and white elite, which remained in place until French colonial policy changed near the turn of the century. Where early provision for the education of former slaves was roughly on par with that of Britain after emancipation, France began to make a more concentrated and overt attempt to integrate its newest citizens into the nation. In line with this, elementary schooling became compulsory in France and its colonies from 28 March 1882 and numbers jumped quickly at the start of the twentieth century.61

The reason for this alteration, this decision to remove another boundary, was again a change in metropolitan philosophy. Britain, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, practiced what Henri Brunschwig has dubbed ‘anti-colonial colonialism’ – government at

arms’ length – that can be seen in the House of Commons’ desire to devolve the governing of its African colonies to native tribes as early as 1865.62 _{France on the other hand was more}

directly involved in the development and management of its overseas possessions. It is important to note that although ‘one single theory, ideology, or practice did not guide French expansion from the beginning to the end of empire’, France’s famous policy/philosophy of an assimilating, ‘civilising mission’ had gained traction by the late-nineteenth century.63 _It

was a plan aimed at replicating French society in colonial outposts by granting colonial residents the same rights and responsibilities as those in mainland France, a policy which sought to create ‘little overseas Frances and perhaps, in the fullness of time, to turn Africans, Asians and islanders into French men and women of a different colour’.64

In line with this objective, lycées were set up in Martinique and Guadeloupe for the purposes of preparing local students for the baccalaureate and providing them with ‘the basic training for later professional study’.65 Those who were to benefit the most from this higher

education were expected by the French to form an intermediate class, one fully separated from local customs and wholly inculcated within the French way of seeing the world. These special, educated natives were trained across French colonial holdings and were taught to be, in line with assimilationist discourse, ‘true Frenchmen’.66 Known as évolués, these educated

elites were indoctrinated by a country that ‘ignored or scorned’ local culture, the simple fact that successful students were dubbed évolués revealing French disdain through its suggestion that these young people had ‘presumably […] “evolved” from a lower to a higher stage of civilization’.67 _{It is these évolués who would go on to form the organic intellectual class with}

the motivation and means to emigrate to Europe and the cultural capital to find a foothold in

62 _{Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism 1871-1914: Myths and Realities, rev. edn (London: Pall} Mall Press, 1966), pp. 12, 13.

63 _{See Aldrich, Greater France, pp. 89, 92. For a brief history of the concept of France’s ‘civilising} mission’ see Sorum, pp. 21-23.

64 _{Aldrich, Greater France, p. 110.} 65 _{McCloy, p. 198.}

66 _{Sorum, p. 211.} 67 _Ibid.

the Parisian literary community. These individuals were, seemingly even more so than their British doubles, separated by their education from their countrymen, victims of ‘a cultural uprooting’, and, by virtue of the structure of the French colonies in relation to the metropole, necessarily emigrants.68

As mentioned, throughout French history mainland France was the centre of the francophone world. Native-born French citizens predominantly remained within its confines, and emigrants to the colonies during the nineteenth century only ever numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands.69 _{Throughout the French Caribbean colonies a desire to}

move closer to the metropole, a desire ‘for greater assimilation’ was substantial.70 This

desire, and the pursuit of higher education, made Paris a centripetal force for colonial students; it necessitated travel to the centre – a further ‘uprooting’ that involved ‘attempting the difficult examinations that characterised France’s elitist schools’.71 As with the

anglophone intellectuals, ‘only the advantaged, persevering and intelligent could aspire to the higher levels of education’, or, only the elite of the elite students could gain access to the best metropolitan education.72 It was to this group, of highly-educated, differentiated,

emigrated, potential members of the professions, who were expected to go home, that all first-wave French Caribbean authors belonged.

It is worthwhile pausing to stress that rather than seeing themselves as somewhat separate from their people by their education, as the British-island-educated cohort of authors, these authors were taught, while in the Caribbean, to see themselves as Frenchmen

– to believe themselves to have crossed the remaining post-emancipation social boundaries to become equal to the educated residents of the metropole. While the intellectuals from the anglophone Caribbean were shocked by ignorance and racism when they arrived in Britain,

68 _{Ibid., p. 212.} 69 _{Brunschwig, p. 18.}

70 _{Richard D. E. Burton, ‘The French West Indies à l’heure de l’Europe: An Overview’, in French}

and West Indian, ed. by Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno, pp. 1-19 (p. 2). 71 _{Aldrich and Connell, France's OverseasFrontier, p. 167.}

they were always dubbed subjects in their upbringing and educationand therefore positioned as somewhat separate from and subordinate to the British. French Caribbean intellectuals were explicitly taught the opposite. They were trained to see themselves as full citizens and their arrival in the ‘mother’ country was to surprise them with the fact that the French people themselves did not instantly see their colonial subjects as equals. The unexpected shock of this experience, and its attendant, radical identity reconfigurations, delimited by a classical French education, is the most influential difference between these intellectuals and those from the anglophone Caribbean. After generations watched borders alter and open and close, the évolués were to find what seemed to be the final border between themselves and the white French permanently barred.