Rule of Experts? Governing Modernisation in Late Colonial French Africa

Abstract

African and Middle Eastern territories and societies were often the testing grounds for European ideas about modernity, progress and rationality; at the same time the proponents of these ideas worked assiduously to deny Asian and African societies any possibility of autonomous agency in the production of modernity itself. This chapter takes up this theme for the post-1940 French imperial state in Algeria and Morocco, where the war years and post-war reinvention and reassertion of empire set the stage for political and strategic calculations that would prove disastrously mistaken as the crises of decolonisation escalated. Looking in particular at the publications and private papers of Robert Montagne (1893–1954), the chapter asks how a leading intellectual close to the centres of the late colonial state organised information and produced ideas about African society and politics, ideas which informed and reflected on late-colonial policymaking. Montagne was a well-known sociologist and Maghribi affairs expert who also served as a naval officer, educator of colonial administrators and political advisor. A professor at the Collège de France from 1948 until his death, throughout his career he remained an assiduous and well-connected student of social change in Africa and the Middle East. This chapter uses his case to show how dramatic processes of change in late-colonial societies could be strikingly misjudged by prominent experts who sought simultaneously to analyse and to govern ‘modernisation’ through avowedly (and self-constitutively) modern forms of knowledge which were much more fragile, and much less powerful, in understanding, let alone directing, social change than has sometimes been supposed.