Mixed Race Studies

Emmanuelle Saada. Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies

The American Historical Review
Volume 118, Issue 2
pages 468-470
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/118.2.468

Gary Wilder, Associate Professor of Anthropology
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2012. Pp. xv, 339. Cloth $81.00, paper $27.50, e-book $27.50.

In this carefully researched and sharply argued analysis of disputes over the status of abandoned mixed-race children (métis) in the French Empire, Emmanuelle Saada demonstrates how gendered racial logics came to subtend French republican law. Rather than seek to understand a supposed contradiction between metropolitan republicanism and colonial racism, Saada offers a persuasive account of France as an imperial republic organized partly around a form of republican racism that operated through families on embodied subjects. Drawing masterfully on archival history, legal scholarship, and political theory, she provides a welcome critique of works that treat colonial domination as mere violence as well as those that accept republican states’ own discourses about abstract universal legality being incompatible with racial particularity and concrete communities.

Saada begins with a political dilemma that was created for colonial administrators by the 1889 Nationality Law. It held that all children born on national territory to unknown parents were accorded French citizenship. Authorities feared that if this measure were to be applied automatically in the colonies, children whose filiation was uncertain and whose ways of life were more “native” than “French” would automatically become citizens. Alternatively, they worried that if this measure was ignored, biologically and culturally “French” children would be misclassified as natives and pose a potential threat to the colonial order. She argues that the entire system of colonial domination depended on social distance between “French” and “native” and legal distinction between “citizen” and “subject.” (The book provides an indispensable genealogy of these categories in the French Empire.) Administrators believed that immersion in the native milieu could lead métis to acquire dangerous social pathologies. Even worse was the fear that they could become “declassed”—socioculturally French but legally native subjects. This non-alignment of social identity and legal status risked undermining racial “dignity” and French “prestige” in the …

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Race and Sociological Reason in the Republic: Inquiries on the Métis in the French Empire (1908-37)

International Sociology
Volume 17, Number 3 (September 2002)
361-391
DOI: 10.1177/0268580902017003002

Emmanuelle Saada, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies
Columbia University

This article compares two collective surveys on the métis conducted in 1908 and 1937 in the French colonies. Métis was a category used mostly to describe children born out of wedlock to indigenous mothers and European fathers. The first inquiry was sponsored by anthropologists of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris; the second was an administrative survey that brought together social scientists, administrators and a variety of other experts. The comparison sheds light on the specific trajectory of the ‘métis problem’ in the French Empire, and on the process of construction of a social category. More broadly, it invites a reappraisal of the signification and role of race in both the construction of French citizenship and the history of French social thought in the first half of the 20th century.

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Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté / Children of The Colonies: The Métis of the French Empire: Citizens or Subjects?

Éditions La Découverte
2007
336 pages
Dimensions: 155 * 240 mm
ISBN: 9782707139825

Emmanuelle Saada, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies
Columbia University

The colonial encounter in the French Empire produced tens of thousands of ‘métis’ children. Most were the product of short-term relationships between European men and native women. Many were abandoned by their fathers, and condemned to illegitimacy. Colonial elites considered them a threat because they blurred the sharp distinction between citizens and subjects on which the colonial order rested. Colonial authorities met this challenge with an array of social and legal efforts to resolve this ambiguity—to «reclassify» the « métis problem » out of existence. Education and culture played a key role in this process, as métis children were placed in special orphanages devoted to « straightening out their heredity », turning them into French citizens of « soul and quality ». This book explores the forgotten history of these children of the colonies, and of their central place in larger strategies of imperial domination and the management of colonial sexuality. It pays special attention to Indochina, which served as a laboratory for the “métis question”, but it is also an account of a global Empire marked by the persistent challenge of maintaining boundaries between citizen and subject. In exploring this intersection between sexuality, race and citizenship in the colonial context, this book challenges and revises the ‘republican model’ of nationhood that has dominated histories of France since the 19th century.

Pendant la colonisation française, des dizaines de milliers d’enfants sont nés d’« Européens » et d’« indigènes ». Souvent illégitimes, non reconnus puis abandonnés par leur père, ces métis furent perçus comme un danger parce que leur existence brouillait la frontière entre « citoyens » et « sujets » au fondement de l’ordre colonial. Leur situation a pourtant varié : invisibles en Algérie, ils ont été au centre des préoccupations en Indochine. La « question métisse » a également été posée à Madagascar, en Afrique et en Nouvelle-Calédonie.

Retraçant l’histoire oubliée de ces enfants de la colonie, cet ouvrage révèle une face cachée, mais fondamentale, de l’histoire de l’appartenance nationale en France : il montre comment les tentatives d’assimilation des métis ont culminé, à la fin des années 1920, avec des décrets reconnaissant la citoyenneté à ceux qui pouvaient prouver leur « race française ». Aux colonies, la nation se découvrait sous les traits d’une race.

Cette législation bouleversa le destin de milliers d’individus, passant soudainement de la sujétion à la citoyenneté : ainsi, en Indochine, en 1954, 4 500 enfants furent séparés de leur mère et « rapatriés » en tant que Français. Surtout, elle introduisait la race en droit français, comme critère d’appartenance à la nation. Cela oblige à revoir le « modèle républicain » de la citoyenneté, fondé sur la figure d’un individu abstrait, adhérant volontaire à un projet politique commun et à souligner les liens entre filiation, nationalité et race.

Table of Contents

• Préface, par Gérard Noiriel
• Introduction
• I / Le métissage : une question sociale coloniale
• 1. Une question impériale – Nouvel empire, nouvelle question – Hybrides et bâtards – Géographie de la question métisse – Un problème impérial – Les chiffres du métissage
• 2. Menace pour l’ordre colonial – Légionnaires, filles de peu et parias – Déracinés et déclassés – Le spectacle du désordre – Dignité et prestige en situation coloniale
• 3. « Reclasser » les métis – Produire des métis en leur portant secours ? – De la nécessité d’intervenir – Vers une prise en charge par l’État colonial – Notables vs. prolétaires de la colonisation – Dépister, signaler et secourir – Passer les frontières – Vers une demande de droit
• II / La question métisse saisie par le droit
• 4. Nationalité et citoyenneté en situation coloniale – Les enjeux d’une condition juridique – Les juristes et l’indigène – La citoyenneté française en pratique – Les métis entre sujétion et citoyenneté
• 5. La controverse des « reconnaissances frauduleuses » – Les « reconnaissances frauduleuses », « fraudes » à la citoyenneté – Destin d’une controverse juridique – La production d’un droit impérial – Paternité, citoyenneté et ordre politique
• 6. La recherche de paternité aux colonies – La recherche de paternité en métropole : un texte de compromis – Un débat colonial – Paternité et citoyenneté : nature et volonté – Paternité et race
• 7. Citoyens en vertu de la race – Le droit hors de lui – La « question métisse » saisie par le droit – Le retournement de la jurisprudence – La fabrique du droit colonial – Vérité sociologique/vérité biologique, « droit reflet »/« droit instituant » – Mise en œuvre d’un droit racial
• III / La force du droit
• 8. Le passage du droit : les effets de la citoyenneté sur la catégorie de « métis » – La racialisation des pratiques administratives – Renforcement de la prise en charge des métis – Les métis, des cadres de la colonisation – Une question postcoloniale
• 9. Des identités saisies par le droit – Des Français des colonies – Vers un multiculturalisme impérial ? – Catégorie juridique et sentiment d’identité
• 10. Le statut des métis, miroir de la nationalité et de la citoyenneté françaises ? – La race dans la loi – Métis coloniaux et métis juifs – La question métisse et les « modèles républicains » de la nationalité et de la citoyenneté
• Conclusion – Sources – Bibliographie.

Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté [Book Review]

H-France Review (Society for French Historical Studies)
Volume 8, Number 162 (November 2008)
pages 654-657

Marie-Paule Ha
The University of Hong Kong

Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté. Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2007. 335 pp. Notes and bibliography. 24€. ISBN 978-2-7071-3982-5.

While the question of métissage has in the last two decades generated a significant volume of scholarly works from a diverse range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, Emmanuelle Saada’s monograph, which grew out of her 2001 doctoral dissertation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, is quite unique in that it provides the first systematic and in-depth investigation of the judicial aspects of what was referred to as “la question métisse.”[1] Drawing on a wide array of materials ranging from archival and juridical sources to works from legal studies, history, anthropology and sociology, the author reconstructs the highly complex and tortuous trajectory that transformed the legal status of the empire’s métis from that of native subjects to being French citizens during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Given the book’s focus, the term “métis” in Les Enfants de la colonie is used to refer not to mixed-race children in general, but to the métis non reconnus, that is, those born out of wedlock that had not been legally recognized by their European fathers and were abandoned by them. As a result, this group of métis was given by default the status of native subjects. It was the plight of this particular category of illegitimate and racially mixed progeny of European men that became the object of the interventions of administrators, philanthropists and legal professionals in the colonies.

The starting point of Saada’s investigation of “the métis problem” is the 8 November 1928 decree which made it possible for the métis non reconnus born in Indochina to be granted French citizenship if one of their parents, legally unknown, could be presumed to be of “French race.” According to the decree, this presumption could be established “par tous les moyens,” which include “le nom que porte l’enfant, le fait qu’il a reçu une formation, une éducation et une culture françaises, sa situation dans la société” (p.13). The momentous interest of this legal text was twofold. On the one hand, it constituted the first occurrence of the word “race” in French legislation. On the other hand, the term was deployed not for an exclusive purpose, but rather to justify the integration of certain subjects of the empire in French citizenry…

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