III. FRENCH SOCIOLOGY AND EMPIRE

Sociology was much more densely entangled with empire in France than in Britain and the United States from the outset, and this difference lasted through the 1960s. French sociologists’ interest in imperial phenomena was due initially to the overlap or merger between sociology and cultural anthropology in the Durkheimian school and the importance attached by Durkheim and Mauss to the study of “primitive” societies.” An additional distinguishing feature in the French case was the creation of a vast array of research and teaching institutions focused on and located in the colonies. Sociology was a central discipline in many of these institutions. These French peculiarities led to the emergence of a large group of “ethnologist-sociologists” who carried out research in the overseas colonies and postcolonies and who belonged as much to sociology as to anthropology in disciplinary terms.
The predisciplinary founders of French sociology had also concerned themselves with colonialism. The most important of these field-founding nomothets, Auguste Comte, came of age during the Napoleonic Empire and tutored at least one student who participated in the French expeditionary force to Algeria in 1830.^[1] Starting with his earliest historical essays, Comte described the “advance of civilization” as involving the replacement of “a combination of spiritual and temporal powers,” papal and feudal-military power, by industry and the “positive sciences.” He noted that the discovery of America and the passage to the Indies around the Cape of Good Hope had contributed “a great impulse” to “commerce and manufacture” and that “objects of convenience and luxury [had] also come into use to a proportionate extent.”^[2] In the “Cours de philosophie positive” Comte discussed the early modern colonial system:

“It is an interesting question whether the colonial system on the whole accelerated or retarded the overall development of modern society. On the one hand, it opened new opportunities for the warrior spirit by land and sea, and there was a significant revival of the religious sprit, due to its suitability to the civilization of the backwards populations abroad; and thus the military and theological régime was prolonged, and the time of the final reorganization set further off.”^[3]

Comte had now come to believe that “Catholicism, in its decay, not only sanctioned but even instigated the primitive extermination of entire races” and created a system of colonial slavery, “truly a political monstrosity, existing as it does in the heart of an industrial period.” In countries in which investors became “personally interested in the maintenance of the most oppressive policy” in overseas colonies, there was an increase in “retrograde thought and social immobility.”^[4] Comte was not an outright anti-imperialist like Diderot and some other French Enlightenment thinkers. Like Durkheim and other sociologists later in the nineteenth century, Comte used evidence from contemporaneous nonwestern cultures as proxies for earlier stages of European development. But while this framework positioned Africans and other colonized people as primitives, it was premised on the idea of a universal human nature and assumed that all cultures followed a common evolutionary path. The colonial system not only promoted “the policy, then very common, of systematically destroying the races of men, in despair of assimilating them successfully,” but had simultaneously undermined this policy by demonstrating to Europeans that positive science and industry were “destined to include the whole human race.”^[5]
Alexis de Tocqueville, who has also been canonized as a founding father of French sociology, wrote extensively on colonialism in Algeria, India, and North America. But while some readers of “Democracy in America” have been led to believe that Tocqueville opposed “every system of rule by outsiders no matter how benevolent,”^[6] this was far from the case. In 1833 Tocqueville made the first of two visits to the Algerian colony, after which he wrote a detailed essay and numerous parliamentary reports to the Chamber of Deputies. Tocqueville began his essay by insisting that France could not abandon the colony without signaling its own “decline” and “falling to the second rank.” Writing at a moment when some 70,000 French troops were deployed in the colony, Tocqueville argued that the only way to subjugate the Algerians was to “fight them with the utmost violence and in the Turkish manner, that is to say, by killing everything we meet”: “all means of desolating these tribes must be employed.” He proposed creating an army “of natives in France’s service” in order to cut down on French losses and also to prevent the emergence of a large class of French military heroes returning home and taking on “distorted proportions in the public imagination.”^[7] French domination of the colony would require the creation of a large settler community. He defended an approach that would later be called “associationist,” in which the French would preserve Algerian cultural difference and create a dualistic legal system. Recanting his earlier vision of French and Arab Algerians eventually fusing into “a single people from the two races,” Tocqueville now insisted that “the fusion of these two populations is a chimera that people dream of only when they have not been to these places.”^[8] During the 1840s Tocqueville began studying British methods of conquering and governing India. His resulting “Notes on India” confirmed his unwavering support for European colonialism.^[9]
Other predisciplinary founders of French sociology entered the discussion of empire. Frédéric Le Play, a third nineteenth-century French protosociologist, bemoaned the decline in the French propensity to emigrate and colonize new lands.^[10] Le Play’s ideal “stem-family” system, according to which all but one son were excluded from inheritance, “depended crucially on the possibility of settlement and cultivation, by the remaining sons, of new lands” – that is, of territories “that formerly remained subject to abandonment and barbarism.”^[11] Like Durkheim, Le Play also exploited the French colonial presence in Northern Africa by “procuring family monographs of Arabs, Kabyls, and the fellahs, rural and urban, of Egypt.”^[12] René Worms, founder of the Institut International de Sociologie, presided over the Sociology and Ethnography section of the annual French Colonial Congress starting in 1907. Worms also edited the Revue international de sociologie, which published extensively on imperial topics.^[13] The Revue’s issue for August–September 1907, for example, carried essays on French Indochina by a colonial judge, an administrator of colonial civil services, a member of a commission on delimiting the border between the French colony and Siam, and a colonial missionary.
The universally recognized founder of French academic sociology, Émile Durkheim, did not discuss or theorize ancient or contemporary empires, geopolitics, or political questions in general (other than his wartime polemic against German expansionism). Although Durkheim wrote seventeen reviews on African topics in “Année sociologique”,^[14] he completely ignored or bracketed the colonial context of the studies in question. Durkheim’s “Division of Labor” ignored the fact that modernization in nonwestern societies often “took the form colonialism, imperialism, and ‘culture contact’ with societies which had already attained economic, military, and technological superiority.”^[15] Durkheim’s Suicide had nothing to say about the ways in which “the uprooting of ‘primitive’ societies by ‘higher’ types of civilization made the ‘primitive’ man… prone… to anomic suicide,” even though this effect of imperialism had been discussed by French authors since Quatrefages.^[16] Durkheim did comment in his lectures on moral education on the tendency of the European colonizer to be seized by a “veritable intoxication, an excessive exaltation of self, a sort of megalomania,” due to the absence of “moral forces which he respects” and “the inferiority he imputes” to the colonized. “Consequently,” Durkheim continued, “nothing restrains him; he overflows in violence.”^[17] None of these passing comments were ever developed into a systematic analysis of empire. Nonetheless, the study of supposedly primitive societies was integral to Durkheim’s comparative method.^[18] According to Victor Karady some 45 percent of the articles in Durkheim’s journal “L’Année sociologique” before 1914 were on “ethnological and exotic” topics.^[19] The journal’s review section also included the current colonial literature and historical studies of ancient empires.^[20]
An important French peculiarity was that colonizers and academic experts construed their research on colonized subjects as “sociological” in nature. Both of the contending groups in the field of Maghreb studies, for example, “self-consciously presented themselves as sociologists, and asserted their intellectual connections to the Durkheim school.”^[21] This stood in contrast to the dominant tendency in Britain, where research on colonized populations was usually categorized as anthropological.^[22] There was thus a back-and-forth between colonial activities and sociology that was unparalleled in other countries. An influential specialist in Algerian folk Islamic practices at the École des Lettres in Algiers, Edmound Doutté, produced a “sociology [that] was a curious amalgam of Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ and the ‘Année Sociologique’.”^[23] One of the leading Arab specialists from this period, Robert Montagne, was assigned to direct the Sociological Section of the Native Affairs Bureau (Direction des Affaires Indigènes) in the French colonial state in Morocco in 1917 and carried out research in Algeria on Kabyle tribal structure.^[24] Montagne went on to hold a chair at the College de France in “the history of the expansion of the Occident.”^[25] The College de France had another chair in Muslim Sociology and Sociography that was “created in 1902 with funds from the Governor General of Algeria and the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco.” The first person named to this post in 1903 was Alfred le Chatelier, a former colonial official and amateur student of Islam. From 1906 to 1926 Le Chatelier edited the “Revue du Monde musulman”. In contrast to the learned tradition of French Orientalism, which was “resolutely hostile to the study of contemporary topics,” the “Revue du Monde musulman” focused on “contemporary Islamic societies from the Philippines to Morocco.”^[26] Many of the teachers at the Paris École coloniale (Colonial School) were former colonial officials, and during the interwar years faculty from the Ethnological Institute (see below) taught at the École coloniale. Students circulated between the more applied and the more scientific institutions. Durkheim’s “Année sociologique” reviewed texts by colonial explorers, officials, and missionaries.
Sociology remained closely linked to ethnology in France until well into the post-1945 period due to the powerful, lasting influence of Durkheim and Mauss. As Lévi-Strauss noted, “in Durkheim’s and Mauss’s work, sociology and anthropology cannot be separated.”^[27] Another strand of the Durkheimian empire–sociology nexus was represented by Georges Davy, a member of Durkheim’s original group who co-authored the book “From Tribe to Empire: Social Organization Among Primitives and in the Ancient East” with the Egyptologist Alexandre Moret. Davy and Moret used Durkheim’s theory of totemism to make sense of the centralization and monopolization of power in ancient Egypt. Henri Berr, the historian closest to the original Durkheim school, wrote the forward to Davy and Moret’s book, which he framed as a study of “imperialism” – a phenomenon that was itself “inspired by the ‘will to growth’ – a brutal will.” Their central argument, according to Berr, was that “the enlargement of societies is accomplished by violence.”^[28]
Marcel Mauss was the most influential teacher of French sociologists and ethnographers during the interwar period. Mauss’s own writing relied heavily on ethnographic material generated in colonial contexts, but he did not analyze the impact of imperialism on the social processes he studied or the evidence he used. Mauss’s activities were enmeshed in colonialism in many other ways. As early as 1906 Mauss provided instructions for the ethnographic study of native populations in French colonies.^[29] At the same time, he helped to create the Institut d´Ethnologie in 1925, together with Paul Rivet and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. At the Ethnological Institute and at the École pratique des hautes etudes, where Mauss had held a chair in the “history of religion and uncivilized peoples” since 1901, he taught most of the leading ethnographer-sociologists who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of Mauss’s students maintained a commitment to the “Année Sociologique” and many accepted his idea that ethnography should be purely descriptive in order “to provide the kind of information useful to a comparative sociology.”^[30]
The Ethnological Institute was dedicated to the memory of Durkheim and was the first French institution to offer certificates in ethnology.^[31] The institute’s express mandate was to study the French colonies.^[32] It overlapped to some extent with the national École coloniale, although it sought to approach colonial problems more scientifically. The Ethnological Institute received its principal funding from the colonies, even if its teachers “remained resolutely detached from the actual work of colonizing” and did not generally seek to place their students in colonial service.^[33] Nonetheless, Mauss tried to convince his government interlocutors that “sociological studies could be the best guides for administrators of the colonies,” writing that “colonial policy may be the area in which the adage ‘knowledge is power’ is best confirmed.”^[34] In a letter to the French Resident General of Morocco in 1925, Mauss noted that the Ethnological Institute “was at the disposal of colonial governments and protectorates for any information concerning expeditions (French or foreign), the study of indigenous races, the conservation and study of monuments and collections, or the study of social facts.”^[35] Half of the Ethnological Institute’s advisory council consisted of “representatives from either the Ministry of Colonies or the colonies themselves.”^[36] In 1938 the Ethnological Institute moved into the newly built Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man), which received about half of its budget from the colonies and was described as a colonial museum by its director.^[37] The majority of the institute’s students worked in colonial contexts.
During the interwar years, sociologists in France were much more focused on colonialism and empire in France than were sociologists in Britain and the United States during the interwar years. This difference was due in part to the power and prestige of the Durkheimian school and the availability of resources for sociological work in the colonies. In addition to the Parisian institutions already mentioned, the Académie des Sciences Coloniales was founded in 1923 with a separate sociology section. Learned societies such as the Société des Océanistes (founded 1927) and the Société des Africanistes (1931) sponsored lectures and journals on colonial topics. An expanding array of research centers located in the colonies also provided opportunities for sociological work. The largest of these was the University of Algiers, founded in 1909 through the fusion of four Grandes Écoles. The University’s Law School (École de Droit) taught courses in indigenous “customs” and “customary law” as well as Islamic Law, while the École Supérieure des Lettres emphasized historical studies of the Orient. The École française d’Extrème Orient was created in 1898 in Hanoi, modeled on the French schools in Athens and Rome.^[38] Its most famous associate was the Orientalist and sociologist Paul Mus, discussed below. The Académie Malgache, founded in 1902 in French Madagascar, included sociology among its foci.^[39] The Scientific Mission in Morocco (Mission scientifique du Maroc), created in 1904, published a book series called “Archives marocaines” as well as the above-mentioned “Revue du Monde musulman”.^[40] In 1919 the entire Scientific Mission was transformed into a “Sociological Section” inside the colony’s Directorate of Native Affairs.^[41] An Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines was also created in Rabat in 1920, which included a sociological section.
Institutes in sub-Saharan Africa also promoted sociological research. The École française d’Afrique in Dakar received temporary fellows funded by the Paris École Coloniale. A Comité d’études historiques et scientifiques de l’Afrique Orientale Française (A.O.F., French West Africa) had already been created in 1915 “to coordinate and centralize research under the supervision of the Governor-General” in the humanities and the sciences.^[42] This committee was the forerunner of the Institut français d’Afrique noire (French Institute of Black Africa), or IFAN, created in 1936.^[43] IFAN’s purpose was to coordinate and stimulate scholarly research in French West Africa and in Africa as a whole in the service of French colonialism, to publish research results and create museums, libraries, archives, and scientific collections, and to offer courses in France and Africa.^[44] The main disciplines promoted by IFAN were ethnology and sociology, followed by history, geography, and various natural sciences.^[45] Although much of the research on indigenous societies continued to be carried out by colonial officials, IFAN’s resources also benefited scientists, professors, archivists, curators, and holders of advanced degrees, who were eligible for fellowships of two or three years at the École française d’Afrique in Dakar. Several well-known sociologists were associated with IFAN after 1945, including Georges Balandier and Paul Mercier.
The first French sociologist to analyze colonialism as a system was René Maunier, who promoted a field he called “colonistics” (la colonistique). Maunier initially taught criminal law and political economy at the Khedivial law school in Cairo, starting in 1911. Between 1920 and 1926 he lectured on “Algerian sociology” at the University of Algiers. Maunier was then awarded a chair in Colonial Law at the University of Paris Law School (Faculté de droit). His studies of North African gift exchange were located firmly in the tradition of Durkheim and Mauss.^[46] Maunier also made several independent contributions to the sociology of colonialism. He began his three-volume magnum opus, Sociologie coloniale (The Sociology of Colonies), by noting that he would focus on the “human” aspects of colonization, which had hitherto received less attention than the economic dimensions.^[47] For this purpose Maunier conceptualized colonization as a Durkheimian “social fact” involving “contact” between two “hitherto separated” societies. On one side were “the conquerors, governors, and exploiters” from the more developed societies; on the other side were “the dominated, the governed or the colonized,” who were “reduced to a position of legal or actual tutelage.”^[48] Colonization was defined in terms of occupation and government by foreign conquerors.^[49] Although Maunier’s definition of colonialism did not emphasize the centrality of racism or the colonial “rule of difference,” he recognized that colonialism was always also a form of imperialism, which he defined as “the doctrine of domination.” Empires always involved “one administration ruling over a domain which aspires to know no bounds.”^[50] Maunier adumbrated a theory of imperial overstretch, which he attributed partly to Ibn Khaldun, and he noticed that “the colonies of one period become colonizers in the next, and so on.”^[51] He was one of the first social scientists to discuss the rising anticolonial movement between the world wars, writing that “colonization itself organized the space of Algerian nationalism and gave it its main idea.”^[52] During World War II Maunier argued that U.S. hegemony over the western hemisphere was coming to resemble programs of Grossraum in which Germany would dominate Central Europe without directly ruling or colonizing it.^[53]
Maunier also proposed a precocious analysis of reciprocal imitation between colonizer and colonized, or colonial mimicry. Despite the colonial system’s inherent resistance to cultural “mixing,” Maunier recognized the pervasive cultural movement across the boundary between ruler and ruled. Maunier put the phenomenon of colonial “mixité” at the center of his colonial sociology. In developing this analysis Maunier was articulating a message about colonial métissage and hybridity that was emerging less explicitly in the work of people like Jacques Soustelle, Alfred Métraux, Michel Leiris, and Roger Bastide during the middle third of the twentieth century. For Maunier, cultural mixing included not just the “fusion” or “racial and social blending of the two groups” but also the “conversion of the conqueror by the conquered”: “there has been action and reaction between the natives and the Europeans: ‘race contact’ has left its mark, and institutions have been borrowed in both directions.”^[54] Although European commentators on colonized subjects had long focused on their disturbing ability to switch between European and native codes, the premise of the Durkheimian sociological paradigm was the unity of humanity and the idea that primitive societies represented an earlier stage of modern Europe. Hence Durkheim had been almost constitutionally uninterested in the partly westernized or modernized Other and the varieties of syncretism and acculturation that resulted from imperial contact. Similarly, the expeditions sponsored by the Ethnological Institute between the wars tended to be “blind to everything that did not correspond to the image of a preserved Africa,” and avoided describing actual colonial policy.^[55]
During the interwar years other French sociologists and ethnologists began focusing on cultural mixing and emphasizing the historicity of colonized societies. In “L’Afrique fantôme” (1934) and a famous lecture “The Ethnographer faced with Colonialism,” Michel Leiris attacked “the tendency to attach oneself by preference to peoples one can qualify as relatively intact, either out of a love of a certain ‘primitivism’ or… exoticism.” The most “authentic” Africans, “the most interesting, humanly,” Leiris countered, were the ones that ethnographers usually saw as “mere imitators” of western culture.^[56]
One of the first to move in this direction was Maurice Leenhardt. From 1902 to 1926 Leenhardt worked as a Protestant missionary in New Caledonia. He then returned to France, where he deepened his ties to Mauss and academic social science. In the 1930s Mauss began sharing his teaching position at the École Pratique with Leenhardt, who took over all of Mauss’s teaching in 1940 when the Vichy government’s anti-Semitic laws forced Mauss to resign. After 1945 Leenhardt taught the introductory course in ethnography at the Ethnological Institute and in 1947 he was chosen to head a new national research institute in Oceania.^[57] Leenhardt was described by contemporaries as a sociologist due to his use of a sociological vocabulary, his participation in “L’Année sociologique”, and his emphasis on historicity and cultural change in colonized settings. Despite the Durkheimian precedent, sociology in this period increasingly signaled an approach that described dynamic changes in nonwestern cultures in response to colonialism, cultural mixing rather than a linear evolution toward civilization, and active responses to the west, including anticolonial resistance. Leenhardt’s earliest publication was a bachelor’s thesis concerning the messianic “Ethiopian” church movement in Southern Africa, which he interpreted as an early example of resistance through the creative appropriation of the colonizer’s culture.^[58] Leenhardt encouraged the New Caledonians to craft a “civilization adequate to their mentality” rather than abandoning their culture.^[59] In a new preface to “Gens de la Grande Terre” (1937) in 1953, Leenhardt situated New Caledonians’ culture within a historical narrative of colonialism. Following an earlier period of expropriation, cultural decimation, and racism, the colony had become a syncretic society. Acculturation ran in both directions across the colonial cultural boundary in a process Leenhardt called a “jeu de transferts.”^[60]
Leenhardt’s position within the colonial system ranged from supporter to critic to impartial analyst.^[61] He denounced “government anthropology” used to justify colonial policy, criticized forced labor, and held out hopes for a “small-scale, biracial democracy” in New Caledonia. At the same time, he retained an “ideal vision of France as a great nation extending a great civilization to her colonies.” Leenhardt informed on the leaders of a 1917 rebellion in New Caledonia while protecting a number of the movement’s followers from the colonial government. He helped organize the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition.^[62] After 1945 Leenhardt argued for a reformed colonialism guided by ethnographers who “understand the natives and their country in their totality and not according to the sole standpoint of their economic value.” The overarching framework for this reformed colonialism would be the French Union (see below), which offered “the grand idea of citizenship.”^[63]
If many of Mauss’s students began to challenge the Durkheimian methodological preference for cultural purity during the interwar years, specialists in indigenous American and African-American cultures in particular found it difficult to ignore the results of colonial transculturation.^[64] Roger Bastide was an agrégé in philosophy whose work integrated psychoanalysis, history, and ethnology and whose primary disciplinary identification was as a sociologist. Bastide specialized in African religions in Latin America. From 1938 to 1957 Bastide held the sociology chair previously occupied by Claude Lévi-Strauss at the University of São Paulo. Bastide contributed to “Année sociologique” starting with its first postwar issue in 1947; in 1962 he became its general editor (Secrétaire Générale). Bastide’s writing focused on what he called “the interpenetration of cultures” or “cultural interfecundation.” Bastide argued that the “gaps” in collective memory resulting from collective traumas such as the uprooting of African slaves from their homeland were selectively filled by homologous or structurally similar materials in the new culture.^[65] He described the Afro-Brasilian candomblé, a mystical trance, as a coherent African religious system.^[66]
Another of Mauss’s students who moved toward a historical sociology of colonized societies during the interwar years is Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle is best known nowadays as a member of the French Constituent Assembly (1945–1946), minister for the colonies (1945), and governor general of French Algeria (1955). In 1960 he joined the paramilitary OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète), which led ultimately to his exile from France between 1961 and 1968.^[67] Before 1945, however, Soustelle was a sociological ethnologist of Mexico.^[68] His first doctoral thesis (1937) focused on the Lacandon Indians, the only Mayan group that had remained relatively “untouched and uninfluenced by the Europeans.”^[69] Lacandon religion “had been preserved, entirely intact”; their cultural borrowings from the outside world, he found, were “negligible.”^[70] Soustelle’s second doctoral thesis focused on a partially Europeanized indigenous culture in Mexico, the Otomi, whose culture he described as a “clash of civilizations.” The Spanish conquest had turned the Otomi language into the site of a “surreptitious war being fought beneath the apparently calm surface, in which the more prestigious language gnaws away on its adversary, penetrating it little by little.”^[71] In some regions the Otomi were so Hispanicized that their clothing did “not present any indigenous character at all.”^[72] In 1933 Soustelle analyzed the performance of a dance called “le torito” which imitated the life of the vaqueros and charros and evoked the ancient Mediterranean theme of the struggle between man and bull. The dancers sang in Spanish, which was the language of the métis, even though they barely understood it.^[73] While this seemed at first glance a clear example of natives simply “taking over a set of themes and images borrowed from nonnatives,” Soustelle argued that the Indians’ culture was in fact “an original synthesis” of the two.^[74] The torito dance was an homage to the “Indian Virgin,” Our Lady of Guadalupe.^[75] Indian converts “were not so much renouncing their old beliefs as incorporating them into a new body of faith and ritual,” forging a “Hispano-Indian and Christiano-pagan syncretism.”^[76] Soustelle provided examples of Amerindian syncretism going back to the sixteenth century, such as Mayan human sacrifices that mingled crucifixion on a cross with the rite of ripping the heart out of the living victim.^[77]
French sociological interest in empire reached an apex in the two decades after 1945. There were several reasons for the intense interest in empire during this period. The study of colonized societies perpetuated the prestigious Durkheimian tradition, helping to boost sociology’s status in the competition among the faculties. Research in the colonies came naturally to the large group of scholars who had been trained by Mauss or by his students. French sociologists’ interest in empire was also linked to recent European events and contemporary geopolitics. Raymond Aron analyzed Nazi Germany as a form of empire.^[78] Alexandre Kojève proposed a Mediterranean, French-led Nomos that would encompass Northern Africa and provide a counterweight to American dominance.^[79] Due to the wartime occupation and resistance and the enhanced prestige of the French Communist Party immediately after the war, many intellectuals moved toward Marxism or joined the Party. Most of the founding members of the Centre d’études sociologiques, the main sociological research center in France in this period, were located on the left either as members of the Communist Party or as associates of far left parties or left Catholic groups.^[80] The United States also positioned itself against European colonialism in response to Soviet efforts to cultivate anticolonial movements and postcolonial governments, which also affected some French intellectuals’ thinking.^[81]
The anticolonial movements that swept through the French colonies, culminating in the Algerian War, also concentrated metropolitan attention on the colonies. The debate around the Algerian war drew in many French intellectuals, including the sociologists Raymond Aron, Edgar Morin, Maxime Rodinson, and Pierre Bourdieu. At the height of the Algerian war, Aron decided abruptly to favor Algerian independence, publishing two books on the topic and becoming embroiled in a fierce debate with Jacques Soustelle.^[82] Morin collaborated with filmmaker Jean Rouch on “Chronique d’un été” (1961), the first example of cinema verité and the “first French feature to debate the Algerian war openly,” posing “prescient questions about decolonization,” and linking the Algerian war to the Nazi genocide.^[83]
The colonial focus in this era also stemmed from the ways in which the French state’s efforts to reform the overseas empire drew deliberately on scientific knowledge. During and after World War II France created an array of new research institutes and funding opportunities for colonial sociology. At the center of much of this activity was the Office de la recherche scientifique coloniale (Office of Colonial Scientific Research, or ORSC), created in 1943 and transformed after the war into the Office de la recherche scientifique et technique outre-mer (Office of Overseas Scientific Research and Technology, or ORSTOM).^[84] Between 1946 and 1952, OSTROM created institutes in the French colonies of New Caledonia, Tahiti, Madagascar, Cameroon, Togo, Guiana, and Congo.^[85] An Institut des Hautes Etudes (Institute of Advanced Studies) was created in Dakar in the 1950s. In 1951 the French Overseas Ministry created the Conseil supérieur des recherches sociologiques d’outre mer (Superior Council of Overseas Sociological Research), which had four research committees: economics, linguistics, sociology, and demography. “Sociology” was thus both the overarching designation for the entire domain of colonial research promoted by this committee and one of its four specialized research committees. In sum, sociology was “an integral part of the [French] disciplines interested in Africa” and the rest of the colonized world and to some extent a master discipline for French colonial social science.^[86] The early research of Balandier (born 1920), Paul Mercier (born 1922), Pierre Bourdieu (born 1930), and a number of others was sponsored by government research agencies.
In addition to these institutions exclusively oriented toward overseas research, other more general social science projects provided opportunities for colonial investigations. The purview of the Centre d’études sociologiques, created in 1946, encompassed “contemporary France, including overseas France,” and the Center’s original directing committee included Louis Gernet, Maurice Leenhardt, Paul Rivet, and Marcel Mauss. During the 1946–1947 academic year Leenhardt and Louis Massignon, who occupied the chair of Muslim Sociology and Sociography at the Collège de France, conducted research in the Centre d’études sociologiques on “different aspects of social life in overseas France.”^[87] Roger Bastide lectured at the Centre on “the interpenetration of civilizations” and André Leroi-Gourhan lectured on the Japanese colonization of the Ainu people of Hokkaido and colonial cultural symbiosis.^[88]
As the French state sought to reform colonialism and ward off decolonization it enrolled liberal social scientists in colonial governance, and colonial administrators moved into academic teaching and research. Robert Delavignette shifted back and forth between colonial administration and teaching. In 1951 he began teaching African sociology and politics at the Paris École colonial (now renamed the École national de la france d’outre Mer), defending a federalist devolution of power to territorial assemblies and local bodies in the colonies.^[89] In other cases, social scientists were pulled directly into colonial activity. In 1954 and 1955 Jacques Soustelle, who was now serving as governor general of French Algeria, asked his ethnographer colleague Germaine Tillion to participate in an official investigation of the civilian population of the Aurès region and to take responsibility for education in the colony.^[90] Tillion created a network of social centers (Centres Sociaux) which provided practical education, job training, medical care, and other forms of welfare to Algerian peasants.^[91] Tillion subsequently published “L’Algérie en 1957”, which detailed the extraordinary rise in poverty that she attributed to French colonialism.^[92] Algeria, she argued, had been forced to change too quickly from an “archaic” society into a modern, urbanized one. One budding sociologist who agreed with Tillion’s widely discussed “economic” analysis of the situation was Pierre Bourdieu, who arrived in Algeria for his military service just after Tillion left.