Making Indo-China French: Promoting the Empire through Education

Abstract

France’s Third Republic had set great store by education as a means of propagating and diffusing state-created notions of national identity within the hexagone [mainland France]. By the turn of the century, once France had accumulated its vast overseas empire, it became necessary to extend national identity in order to incorporate its new possessions into that very sense of nationhood. The notion of la plus grande France [Greater France], stretching out the hexagone’s limits to envelop the overseas territories, required a significant shift in the composition of the Third Republic’s sense of nationhood. The reworked sense of national identity which the Third Republic now sought to popularize meant not simply an inward-looking sense of what it was to belong to metropolitan France; it involved an understanding and appreciation of the implications of France’s role and status as an imperial nation. National identity, in other words, had now to encompass and complement a conscience impériale [imperial mentality].¹