Owen White, J. P. Daughton, eds. In God's Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xi + 324 pp. $74.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-539644-7.
Reviewed by Elise Franklin (Boston College)
Published on H-Empire (January, 2014)
Commissioned by Charles V. Reed (Elizabeth City State University)
A Mission to Moralize? French Missionaries in the Empire and Beyond
In light of the recent election of Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy and Catholicism’s rapid growth in Africa and Latin America, histories of Catholicism as a religious, but also geopolitical and imperial power can enlighten our understanding of the present. While religion and the imperial nation-state have not always had the same goals, they have coexisted, often uncomfortably, in modernity’s drawing room. In God’s Empire, a collection of essays edited by Owen White and J. P. Daughton, provides an excellent foray into the complicated relationship between missionaries, empire, and modernity. The volume engages scholarship on race, colonialism, and gender while adding an important and heretofore understudied element: missions and religion. The authors of the essays draw upon Daughton’s own impressive work, An Empire Divided (2006), in which he explored the tendentious relationship between missionaries and state officials in the colonial setting.[1] Indeed, these authors represent the best of a growing cadre of historians of religion and France.[2]
The central contention of this volume is that missionaries “complemented and complicated French engagement with non-European societies around the globe” and seeks to answer “what was particularly modern, French, and imperial about the experience of religious work” (p. 6). The language of complementarity and complication pushes the boundaries of simple labels of “collaboration” and “resistance,” and posits an un-dogmatic, uneven relationship between missionaries and the French state. Indeed, many of the essays in this volume stress missionaries’ sense of allegiance to the Catholic Church--the transcendent empire--over France’s immanent one. These accounts correct the common misperception that French missionaries were merely tools of the French imperial state. Rather, they often pursued altogether separate evangelizing goals. In revising this claim, the editors and contributors stress how the secular and the religious overlapped in the colonial sphere, even when their projects were at odds. As Talal Asad has argued, the binary differentiation of the religious and the secular in the West was never as stark as believed. By showing how the two terms were mutually constituted historically, Asad--and this volume--problematize the secularization narrative of modernity.[3] This is particularly true for France, as one of the central claims of French republicanism is its own laïcité. This volume thus scrutinizes the “secular myth” of France’s civilizing mission as it follows colonial-cum-religious actors through a geographic and chronological exploration of missions in and beyond the limits of French empire.
France’s civilizing mission was never as secular as it pretended to be. Instead, Phippe Delisle, Troy Feay, Ji Li, and Michael Pasquier all examine a Catholic “mission to moralize” (p. 62). This mission extended beyond republican projects and attempted to convert souls to Catholicism. In each of these contributions, the authors explore the missionary motives in empire and often, how Catholicism was transformed in its reception. Feay, for example, measures social utopian movements against social Catholicism under the July Monarchy. Social Catholicism became a crucial discourse in the colonies for slaves fighting for emancipation. Nonetheless, the exportation of Catholicism enhanced France’s colonial presence through conversion. The moralizing mission often extended beyond France’s formal empire. Ji Li’s chapter on the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) in China uncovers how efforts to evangelize were meticulously measured.[4] Here, the focus is less on the adaptation of Catholicism to local culture. Instead, the success of the mission to moralize was quantified in this case through adherence to rituals and doctrinal understanding among the Chinese people. Nonetheless, the importance of missionaries to spreading French culture alongside Catholicism provided official rationale for their continued presence.
It follows, then, that missionary efforts in the colonies did not always fall in line with the official French nationalist message. The old adage analyzed by Jean-François Zorn--qui dit Français, dit Catholique (whoever says French, says Catholic)--is a central myth deconstructed in these chapters. On the one hand, French Catholic missionaries were tolerated, as in Bernard Taithe’s chapter on missionary militarism, because they enhanced France’s presence in the colonies. Taithe shows, however, that though the French state and Catholic missionaries at times converged, missionaries served a different master. Thus, the nationalism ascribed to Catholic missions is misplaced. Charles Keith further debunks the myth of missionary nationalism in his chapter on the World War I era union sacrée in colonial Vietnam. Traditional metropolitan historiography holds that World War I national sentiment--deemed the “sacred union”--helped heal fissures between church and state and political parties in order to champion the French nation. Keith’s chapter exposes the fragmentary nature of this union in the colonies. Rather, the war contributed to power struggles in the metropole and colonies as French Republicans became suspicious of clergy who avoided military service through their colonial work. This volume therefore insists that nationalism and national identity as such do not serve as sufficient motivating factors to explain French missionary interest in empire.
Consequently, the relationship between the church and the French state was usually fraught. Indeed, this fact is even more clearly elucidated in informal parts of France’s empire like the mandates in Cameroon and Lebanon and Syria as explored by Kenneth Orosz and Jennifer Dueck. Orosz reveals the tensions within interwar French policy in their mandate, Cameroon. As he points out, mandates were a good-faith measure and could be revoked if proof of mismanagement came to light. Thus, missionary dissent against French colonial rule could have threatened their claim to that holding. The “Catechist War” of 1930-33 is Orosz’s case in point: the Spiritans critiqued French mise en valeur in Cameroon and instead pursued their own agenda. In a similar vein, Jennifer Dueck examines French missionaries in Syria and Lebanon in the interwar period to stress the strategic importance of Catholic missionaries to French rule under the mandate, but also how Catholic missionaries outlasted the French government in the Middle East. Their presence in the mandate territories was not predicated upon French rule, but rather a long history in the Middle East.
In this volume, gender is a crucial, if underemphasized, element of missionary work in the empire. Both Sarah Curtis and Julia Clancy-Smith’s investigations of women religious in the Ottoman Empire and Tunisia, respectively use this lens as a framing mechanism. Both Curtis and Clancy-Smith stress the unique access given to women on the basis of their sex to the local population. In Clancy-Smith’s case, this charity work carried out by the Sisters of Saint-Joseph helped to establish French ties to precolonial Tunisia and acted as an important intermediary for the French government. Because of their direct implantation in Tunisia, the sisters underwent a degree of “Tunisification,” which included respect for local customs and mores and increased their effectiveness (p. 123). The work of women religious has been well covered by Sarah Curtis in Civilizing Habits. Curtis revisits this subject matter in her chapter, and builds upon Clancy-Smith’s conclusions: the inclusion of nuns in missionary work represented a “shift in missionary goals and strategies” that emphasized covert evangelization in the predominantly Muslim Ottoman Empire (p. 90). Nuns, despite their Catholic conservatism, became transgressive agents of evangelization in Clancy-Smith and Curtis’s essays. These case studies not only stress the ways in which missionaries contributed to the acting out of French colonial fantasies, but also contribute a heretofore missed element of gender analysis in the face of religious doctrine (be it Catholicism or Islam).
Though this volume is replete with stories of missionary work under the empire, few essays examine the postcolonial lives of missions, except in passing. In her chapter on Lebanon and Syria, Dueck gestures toward the early liberation of these mandates and the continued presence of missions. Still, only Elizabeth Foster considers the role of missionaries and especially the Catholic Church hierarchy in decolonization, though her chapter does not extend through the end of empire. Her work is especially important for thinking through the church’s relatively early recognition of decolonization and its attempts to “‘decolonize’ the Catholic hierarchy” despite “resistance from the [local] mission” (p. 271). This line of argumentation seems particularly important in thinking about the role of missions over and beyond their importance to the French imperial state. At this juncture, the diverging chains of command that governed missionary involvement in empire became starker and more explicitly at odds. This contribution in particular points to a fruitful vein for further research.
Given the richness of research and depth of analysis covered in this volume, it is hard to generalize about weaknesses. Consideration of religion raises questions about the fabric of associational life over the period considered in these essays. After the 1901 law on associations, the Catholic Church essentially became France’s largest association (even after the 1905 division between church and state). This volume reconsiders a primary presumption of modern political life: that the relationship between individuals and government ought to be unmediated.[5] It questions the extent to which missionary work was an isolated example of French nationals taking part in empire. Were there other associations--other nonaligned group--that had similarly complex relationships to colonial territories and colonial subjects? Further research in this arena, though admittedly outside of the purview of this volume, will help to illustrate what historians of France have already convincingly argued: that there are limits to republican universalism, and moreover, that the ideology exported to the colonies was neither coherent nor entirely secular. Furthermore, the afterword by Norman Etherington provides a tantalizing comparative historical and historiographical essay on religion in the French and British empires. This work prompts further questions about the role of religious life in mpire, writ large.
In sum, this highly original volume provides a valuable examination of the role of missionaries and religion in the French empire. Comparative exploration of French religious and secular policy across the colonies helps to explain the multiple contradictions of the imperial project and its complicated relationship with secularism. The thoughtful contributions span geographical, temporal, and ecclesiastical boundaries and provide fodder for many future conversations. This volume will engage scholars working on the history of empire, religion, and the contradictions of modernity, and is crucial reading for anyone examining these topics.
Notes
[1]. J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[2]. Apart from Daughton, see recently published works by Sarah Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Kenneth Orosz, Religious Conflict and the Evolution of Language Policy in German and French Cameroon, 1885-1939 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
[3]. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
[4]. According to Charles Keith, another contributor to this volume, the MEP was “a lay missionary society whose purpose was to found and develop local churches outside of Europe,” (p. 196).
[5]. Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
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Citation:
Elise Franklin. Review of White, Owen; Daughton, J. P., eds., In God's Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World.
H-Empire, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40838
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