Cultured Force: Makers and Defenders of the French Colonial Empire

Abstract

Cultured Force: Makers and Defenders of the French Colonial Empire. By Barnett Singer and John Langdon. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 483, 7 b/w illustrations, 5 maps. $45.00. No course in modern French history should be without this book, and it would be an apt new title for the Military Book club. Barnett Singer and John Langdon, both seasoned writers of French social and military history, have produced a lively volume of revisionist history. For decades now Bugeaud, Faidherbe, Gallieni, Joffre, Lyautey, and Bigeard have been getting a bad rap as hard-headed, hard-hearted imperialists. The authors correct that impression in a lively and largely convincing manner. The book is a page turner and is sound in its basic premises, bringing the tools of social and cultural history to what had long been traditional then the column headed inland military history. Additionally, Singer and Langdon make skilled use of psychological insights, Bugeaud's identity issues, Joffre's narcissism, Lyautey as the bed-ridden, doted-upon child of adoring women relatives, etc. Historians can make too much of such possibilities, Singer and Langdon use such psychological constructs sparingly. The narrative sweep of this work begins in Algeria in the 1830s and finishes with a 2001 phone call to the still-living Bigeard, who helped turn the lights out on French colonialism in Indochina and Algeria. The authors state up front their intention to correct the negative appraisals given French colonial figures in much recent writing. Drawing on the political-military and political-cultural insights of Douglas Porch and Alice L. Conklin and a new generation of colonial historians emerging in North America and France, the authors give a fresh new reading to the entire enterprise of French colonial history. It is as if the massive silent portraits on the dark walls of the Musee de l'Armee came alive for a while and let their human side be known. Thus Bugeaud emerges as a major figure in contributing to agriculture in Algeria, Faidherbe the engineer is now recognized as a nuanced (a favorite word of Singer and Langdon) politician and resourceful overseas builder, an innovative enlightened despot, in the author's words, as was Lyautey later in Morocco. The warts remain in their portraits of these colonial figures, the protagonists of empire are given a third dimension generally absent from the literature. We will not paint with one sunny revisionist brash, the authors state, but will at least qualify what comes out in historical pages in one, unrelievedly dark hue (p. …