The gift as colonial ideology? Marcel Mauss and the solidarist colonial policy in the interwar era

Political theory, anthropology, and the “Fin-de-Siècle” return of the gift

It may seem strange to political theorists that anthropologists like Marcel Mauss were the public intellectuals who were involved in rehabilitating the normative model of gift exchanges in modern political thought. But since Harry Lieberson’s (2011: 25) The Return of the Gift, we know that since the end of the eighteenth century, political philosophers, particularly in the British context, heavily denounced the circulation of gifts as the preferred mode of global governance of British colonial administrators. The opprobrium shed on gift exchanges between British rulers and Indian subjects by the British utilitarian thinkers had signaled a major shift in political thought in the early nineteenth century. Indeed,

gift giving as an exchange of favors to create bonds of obligation and loyalty was a pervasive feature of English as well as Indian society [in the late eighteenth century], with patronage between more or less powerful politicians, between authors and aristocrats. (Lieberson, 2011: 25)

But, as Lieberson (2011: 25) writes, “a chasm was opening up between the traditional world of gift exchange and the intellectuals of nineteenth-century Europe,” who agreed with British utilitarian thinkers like James Mill that gift exchanges were “a vestige of the old order” that the French Revolution had failed to abolish, “and a disturbance in a modern democratic society.” In the nineteenth century, British and European political theorists drew sharper distinctions between their own practices of government—enlightened, rational, modern, formal—and the practices of those officials of the chartered companies—personal, unpredictable, premodern, based on the material exchange of gifts—like the East India Company, who administered colonial subjects and who still practiced the exchange of gifts and counter-gifts (thus falling under accusations of corruption and undue personal enrichment). Hence, the model of the gift disappeared from the realm of political theory in most of the nineteenth century, as Harry Lieberson tells us.

Then, it is less surprising that the “return of the gift” into theories of good governance found its way through early twentieth-century anthropology rather than through political theory or sociology. Marcel Mauss in particular, but other anthropologists as well, tried to rehabilitate gift exchanges as a model of good governance for modern nations to follow. In their ethnographies and anthropological essays, they aimed to demonstrate that there was nothing premodern in this form of government and that in fact those “modern” political societies, which denied the legitimacy of obligations formed out of the material circulation of gifts, were not only less reflexive but also more unjust and threatening to individuals than those which had an appreciation for the wisdom of the obligations created through interpersonal exchange. As Mauss (1990 [1925]: 98) wrote in the conclusion of his essay, “the brutish pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends of the peace of all […] and rebounds on the individual himself.” Thus, Mauss saw the remaining presence of gift exchanges in the modern (colonial) societies of his time as a useful and positive safeguard against the “brutish” exploitation of men for purely economic purposes. One could interpret that association between anthropology and a revival of the gift as more evidence of Talal Asad’s (1973) denunciation of anthropology as colonial apology—or an attempt to civilize colonialism to ensure its long-lasting presence.

At the same time, the case of Marcel Mauss’ relation to colonialism in general, and the power of chartered companies in particular, may complicate this assertion. It is worth noticing that in The Nation Mauss condemned various aspects of French colonialism, especially the despicable practices of forced labor implemented by chartered companies without any state sanction and the private exploitation of colonial subjects on behalf of an alleged moral and technical superiority. Indeed, Mauss (2013: 242) saw the “private appropriation, under the authority of the great [European] states, of many basic commodities necessary for the life of other nations (coal, oil)” as a deeply problematic development associated with modern industrial forms of colonialism (2013: 242). What we could call “monopoly colonialism” of chartered private companies—which was otherwise called the “Colonial Pact” whereby the colonial subjects would produce raw materials for concessionary companies and digest industrial products manufactured by the metropolis—kept colonies in a state of economic dependence due to their over-specialization in agriculture or raw material extraction. Rather than opening colonial economies to the opportunities of global markets, the colonial monopolies which flourished in certain colonies under the French state’s authority destroyed the solidarity of colonial subjects among themselves and between themselves and the metropolitan subjects (Mauss, 2013: 188). For Mauss, they produced effects that ran contrary to the “mandates” that the League of Nations endowed to the French and British empires after the Great War: for example, to create the conditions through which colonial subjects could arrive at a developed stage where they could be given the authority to rule themselves in interdependence but also independence from the metropolis.

Mauss, the “Indigenous Committee,” and the question of forced labor in the Congo

Even if expressed in an unpublished manuscript, which Mauss kept revising for more than a decade, Mauss’ interwar criticism of the monopoly colonialism of the chartered companies echoed his prewar political struggles. Indeed, in the political pamphlets and letters to the Minister of the Colonies which Mauss (co)wrote before the Great War, he focused his criticism of colonialism on the exploitative practices of the chartered companies. He noticed that such modern forms of colonialism could only inhibit the ability of exchanges to move colonies up the ladders of economic and political development. That was blatant in the case of the Congo, about which Mauss collected second-hand information since 1900 (Sibeud, 2009: 56), in the context of his participation in a small but influential organization called the “Committee for the Protection and Defense of Indigenous Populations” (hereafter, the Indigenous Committee, founded in 1892). In 1906, this Indigenous Committee (Comité de protection et de défense des indigènes) (1906) addressed a letter (co-signed by Mauss) to the Minister of the Colonies in order to protest the decision made by the General Government in the Congo “to reduce the productive capacity of the indigenous populations to two thirds of the productivity granted by the French State to the concessionary companies.” For Mauss and other members of the Indigenous Committee, the latter decision revealed the complicity of the French administration in the Congo with the repressive policies of chartered companies whose only goal was to force the local population to work for them, whatever the costs for the region.

The Indigenous Committee (Comité de protection et de défense des indigènes) (1906) saw in these laws, which fixed arbitrary limits to the economic development of colonial subjects in the Congo and Gabon, a manifestation of the French officials’ toleration vis-à-vis the worst examples of forced labor and mass killings of colonial subjects that were performed by the chartered companies in these regions. Indeed, the latter routinely organized “hostage camps” of women to force husbands into accepting de-forestation labor, which the men otherwise refused to perform. This horrible practice, which led to the death of thousands of women due to malnutrition in the camps, was so widespread that it triggered an official investigation, led by the delegate of the Minister in the Congo, Savorgnan de Brazza (1850–1905), who documented a wide range of mistreatment of colonial subjects by the chartered companies operating in the Congo. Mauss befriended Brazza’s Secretary, Félicien Challaye (1875–1967), who conducted the inquiry in the Congo with Brazza and used the information Challaye gathered inside the Indigenous Committee (Sibeud, 2009: 56). Although Brazza’s death on his way back from his mission weakened the influence of his report to the government (as the latter also remained classified), the Indigenous Committee relayed his concerns: it denounced the French administration in the Congo for allowing such horrible practices to be part of the tool kits of chartered companies “against the populations who refused to work for the Company” (Indigenous Committee (Comité de protection et de défense des indigènes), 1906).

Thus, even if the association between gift exchanges and the positive development of solidarity seemed to be unambiguously positive in The Gift, Mauss and some of the political thinkers and colonial law specialists with whom he was associated in the Indigenous Committee were deeply aware that the exchange of “prestations” could be negative as well as positive for the exchanging partners, depending on other contextual elements. In fact, that word “prestations,” which Mauss later used as an anthropological concept in his 1925 essay, was used by that very same Indigenous Committee to refer to the labor practices that the chartered companies asked from colonial subjects: in 1901, the Indigenous Committee (Comité de protection et de défense des indigènes) (1901) asked the Minister of the Colonies to “formally prohibit that any corporation in charge of public work in the colonies to pay workers with another currency than the legal money”; that “any in-kind payment (especially in alcohol) would be strictly prohibited”; that the word “forced labor [corvée],” which was reminiscent of so many bad things, be replaced by the word “prestation” (or “requisition”)”; and that “women could no longer be requisitioned for digging and earthwork” so as “to limit the number of abuses that have proliferated in Guadeloupe, New Caledonia, and Indochina.” In contrast to “forced” labor, the exchange of “prestations” should be based on consent, although how that consent was extracted was largely a fiction, since no indigenous could vote on the laws adopted by the metropolis and the local colonial government to fix the number of days that colonial subjects were obliged to give to these chartered companies. For the Indigenous Committee (Comité de protection et de défense des indigènes) (1901), the exchange of “prestations” should not necessarily adopt the exact same contractual form as a “wage,” but its logic should not be purely exploitative—and that some “giving back” should be realized in the broader colonial context. As Mauss later wrote in his academic work, exchanges of “prestations” referred to a reality not without self-contradiction: in The Gift, Mauss wrote that prestations should have a “voluntary character, apparently freely given, yet coercive and interested” (Sigaud, 2002: 336).

French socialists and the “N’Goko Sangha Company” scandal

The same criticisms that the Indigenous Committee addressed privately to the Minister of the Colonies were relayed in public by a coalition of socialist thinkers who had stood against the accusers of Alfred Dreyfus a few years before. Many of these “Dreyfusard intellectuals” had joined Mauss and Durkheim as contributors to L’Année sociologique, the review where Mauss published The Gift (Besnard, 1979; Mallard, 2011). Albert Thomas (1878–1932), whom Mauss had met during the struggle for the rehabilitation of Dreyfus, before becoming Minister of Armament during the Great War and then the first Director of the International Labour Organization (ILO), ³ led the parliamentary fight against chartered companies before the War. Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), the founder of the socialist party in France (in 1905), whom Mauss had met through his uncle Emile Durkheim and with whom Mauss created L’Humanité, the journal of the socialist party, also attacked chartered companies in parliament. Jaurès and Thomas became the two main parliamentary critics of the exploitative practices of the chartered companies in the Congo. For the two socialist intellectuals and parliamentarians, the fight against forced labor was a continuation of their fight in favor of Dreyfus, accused by anti-Semitic nationalists of treason, and in favor of human rights. In fact, in 1906, the League of Human Rights (“Ligue des droits de l’homme”), which they had created during the Dreyfus affair, declared itself to be the “tutor of the rights of the indigenous populations” (Sibeud, 2009: 58) and worked to publicize their campaign against chartered companies.

In particular, Jaurès and Thomas took a very public stance against the N’Goko Sangha Company, which had obtained a concession in the French Congo in 1899. The N’Goko Sangha case exposed the reality of French colonial administrative practices in the region where Mauss (1913), in a letter to the Minister of the Colonies, claimed that the colonial subjects needed most a benevolent and enlightened colonial administration: the Congo. The socialists first rebelled by denouncing the commercial and labor policies of that company on the ground. As the French local administrator in the Gabon had written in 1908 to his Governor in a letter transmitted to Albert Thomas, the existing system of exchange between chartered companies and local colonial subjects in the Congo did not benefit at all to the latter, largely because of its reliance on in-kind payments (Leroux, 1908; see also Thomas, 1911a). There were various reasons for that, in particular, the fact that the Company paid its local colonial workers with overpriced “gun powder, which was the main currency used by the Pahouins to pay the bridge’s dowry” and “which was under the exclusive monopoly of the Company” (Leroux, 1908). The situation thus allowed the Company to fix whatever price (calculated in hours worked for the Company) it wanted for that good, whose sale was in fact prohibited by other foreign chartered companies in the Congo region, as it had the obvious disadvantage of arming local populations—even if it allowed them to exchange women and build families. Thus, like members of the Indigenous Committee (Comité de protection et de défense des indigènes) (1901), Thomas (1911b) proposed that the French state should impose the “obligation for companies to pay indigenous populations in cash and money” rather than in kind.

Mauss’ socialist friends in Parliament also criticized the financial montages that the French metropolitan interests organized in order to have the colonial subjects pay for the oppressive practices which were imposed upon them and from which they suffered. Jaurès criticized in Parliament the short-term logics of economic exploitation in the colonies and the financial hypocrisy of the colonial apologists who indebted future generations of colonial subjects by having them pay for these colossal and unwanted projects such as de-forestation and the building of railways. As he said in 1911, France’s financial policy with the colonies “consists in hiding the real costs of France’s colonial policy by multiplying threefold, sometimes fivefold the taxes levied on local populations, and by accumulating local debt, paid at interest rates which are highly profitable” to the French capitalists,

so as to fund large expenses in big public construction works—the construction of roads and railways which serve no apparent function when much more needed irrigation systems are neglected—whose costs are placed on the accounting books of local governments. (Journal Officiel, 1911: 1778)

In so doing, they pre-figured some of Mauss’ (1990 [1925]: 93) distinction between exploitative short-term practices driven by utility-maximizing private agents and the logic of honor found in the exchange of real (as opposed to fake) gifts.

With the N’Goko Sangha Company, the financial scandal took an even more extreme form, as the Company obtained a formidable sum of money (to be paid by future generations of colonial subjects), thanks to an arbitration procedure denounced by Thomas, Jaurès, and others. Indeed, the Company asked the general government of French East Africa to pay reparations for a failure to enforce the monopoly over the exploitation of rubber which had been extended to the Company in the French Congo in 1899. Indeed, the Company lawyers claimed that it had suffered from the exploitation of latex trees by German companies located on the same territory in violation of its rights of exclusivity (Leroux, 1908), as well as from the 1908 decision by the French state to swap large territories granted to the Company in the Congo and Cameroon with the German state (Thomas, 1911c). The Company claimed that after failing to secure the border between the French and German territories in the Congo and South Cameroon, the German factories had been back after 1905, and had proceeded to even greater forest destruction in retaliation to the (not-delivered) threat of legal proceedings by the N’Goko Sangha Company in Germany (Tardieu, 1910)—something that the French state did not deny, but for which it blamed the Company and its lack of investment in the region. In 1910, the Company asked for compensation, but this time it requested formidable sums, and the arbitration tribunal ordered the General Government of French East Africa to pay 2.3 million francs to the Company (Tardieu, 1910). The N’Goko Sangha Company, like the modern-day “vultures funds” which sued Argentina in New York courts after the restructuration of the Argentinian debt (Nelson, 2016), followed a business model in which wealth and profit were extracted from legal action against the State and from the organization of public campaigns in the metropolis, which misrepresented the reality of their distant practices.

For Mauss’ socialist friends in Parliament, that arbitration case was indeed a grotesque travesty of the reality of the colonial practices on the ground: the fact that such a Company could receive reparations from the French Government in East Africa meant that the colonial subjects were exploited twice, first by being coerced into almost unpaid forced labor and, second, by having their children reimburse the debt which allowed the local government to pay reparations to the Company. As Marcel Labordère (1911), an economist, trade cycle specialist, and a friend of Thomas, wrote to Thomas, the arbitration of the N’Goko Sangha case was a complete violation of the implicit understanding behind the granting of a concession. Indeed, when the French state gave a first compensation to the Company in 1905 (by giving concessionary rights on millions of hectares in Gabon in exchange for the de facto loss of forests in Congo), “either the Company accepted the gift as it was” and decided to fight the German economic competition there—which the Company knew existed in the new Gabonese territory—by investing economically in the territory or the Company just saw an opportunity to “seek even more profit by means of further legal action against the State” in the granting of new territory where there was a known German presence. By choosing the latter strategy, the Company not only proved to be ungrateful (as it did not consider the economic potential of the million of hectares on which it gained exclusive concessionary rights), but it also—and more importantly—proved to be extremely deceitful, as it systematically planned to use “an arsenal of legal means which, conveniently deployed by a reserve of friendly forces [parliamentarians, journalists, jurists], could help it make profit in the vast field of reparations claims at the expense of the national interest” (Labordère, 1911: 2).

Neither Jaurès, nor Thomas, nor Mauss contested the principle that France had a civilizing mission in the non-European world (Manceron, 2003: 225) and that the exchange of “gifts”—gifts of land, gifts of labor, gifts of investments, and so on—was a priori a useful way to foster the economic development of, and political solidarity between, the metropolises and the colonies. But they denounced the decoupling between this fiction and the reality of colonial practices on the ground. What they feared in particular was the capitalist oppression of the many colonial subjects by a minority of speculators who duped the French people thanks to its control over the French press, which lied about the nature of the gifts granted to companies (Girardet, 1972: 108).

In their pamphlets, addresses, and letters, these words—”gift” or “prestation”—thus functioned as positive markers of the French mission in Africa and of a more humane form of colonialism: what these public intellectuals placed at the pillory was the failure by chartered companies to uphold the ideas of honor, which had justified why they had been granted public monopolies (privileges) in the first place. Reacting to this failure to live up to the ideals of solidarity, in 1911, Thomas (1911c) stated, in the National Assembly, that chartered companies like the N’Goko Sangha Company should lose their concessionary rights when it was blatant that they failed to honor their promise to invest in developing the region. This was the counter-gift that chartered companies had to give back in exchange for their concession, which was the reason “why the French state granted concessions to these companies in 1899” as, indeed, “concessions were meant to encourage chartered companies to effectively administer large territories” (Leroux, 1908) in the absence of sovereign state support and military support. In the case of the N’Goko Sangha Company, Albert Thomas (1911b) who sat at the Budgetary Commission of the French Parliament, asked for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry to annul the whole arbitration procedure. That chartered companies behaved like the worst speculators showed that they did not understand how gift exchanges between solidary societies should be carried out, which may be one reason why Mauss undertook to describe such “ideal” rules of gift exchanges in his 1925 essay.

A skeptic view of imperial solidarity? Mauss’ The Nation

Whereas The Gift formulates an unequivocally optimistic view on the ability of gift exchanges to create solidarity between nations (or other political societies), the work which Marcel Mauss spent most of his time writing in the 1920s—for example, the manuscript of The Nation—was much more careful when assessing the relationship between the two. Indeed, during the 1920s, as Jean Terrier and Marcel Fournier (2013: 18) assert, if “Mauss insisted on the fundamental openness of societies, the porosity of social boundaries, and the circulation of goods and ideas … as exchanges express the ‘constitutive mix [“mélange”] of all things, values, contracts and men’,” Mauss considered that these exchanges of reciprocal “prestations” between societies could have both negative and positive effects (Mauss, 2013: 125). This depended on the types of “borrowings” (emprunts in French) that circulated from society to society (whether the latter concerned civilizations, techniques, aesthetics, religions, and legal forms) and the structural elements present in the context of exchange. In The Nation, Mauss questioned whether colonialism (whether altruistic or not) had created political solidarity and community out of contractual exchanges across and between societies. The answer was unclear to him, or rather not as clear as he had wanted it to be in The Gift.

Rather than turning into an apologist of the French colonial project or the League of Nation’s Mandates system, Mauss remained concerned with whether colonialism had accelerated or blocked the advancement of colonized societies from a tribal stage to a more developed stage—practices characterized by the joint development of a central political authority and a stronger identification of all colonial subjects with that central authority. Before the Great War, Mauss realized the destructive potentialities of the colonial project. As he wrote to the Minister of the Colonies in 1902, “in order to be humane, colonial administration needed to respect and use local beliefs and practices so as to avoid a brutal confrontation” in the colonial encounter, which he believed “should only very gradually change the economic and technological regimes in place” (Mauss, 1902: 1). This is why he believed that the French Republic would fail its colonial subjects if it did not use as many people as possible (“missionaries, doctors, administrators, colonizers and indigenous savants” (Mauss, 1913: 2)) to first know the existing expressions of solidarity existing within the French colonies and to provide ethnographic facts of “immediate relevance to the administration and colonization” (Mauss, 1907: 22).

Mauss (2013: 184) believed it to be his scientific duty to identify the proper social mechanisms which could lead to one outcome (positive solidarity) or the other (mutual destruction) so as to “warn his contemporaries that there is a missing echelon in the ladder that the League of Nations placed upon the wall of history: that of the “nation, which most societies [had] not yet arrived at.” Even if “the surface of the globe [had] been vascularized” (Mauss, 2013: 158) by an explosion of exchanges, the League of Nations created by the Versailles Treaty was a misnomer, as many different social organizations were characterized with the name of “nation,” while only a few (the United States and France) could be called “nations” in the proper sense. Mauss (2013: 158) believed it was a misguided effort to present the contractual bonds between “nations” as “mandates, protectorates, and all kinds of modern words that pay homage to principles” of sovereign equality between political communities that had reached very different levels of integration. These words, as Mauss noticed, “were, in fact, foreign to the real aspiration of politicians and diplomats” which, in practice, were often “military alliance, suzerainty and colonies, and all kinds of hegemonies.”

With The Nation, Mauss thus proposed a general comparative and historical framework that allowed him to rank societies according to a gradation of neighboring “degrees of integration” (Mauss, 2013: 79). At the highest level of integration, Mauss thus placed the “nation,” which characterized societies where intermediary bodies no longer buffered relations between individuals and where a strong sense of territorial boundaries limited the desire for imperial expansion. Such a conception of the nation conceived as a daily plebiscite, in the words of Ernest Renan (1823–1892), was quite in line with the French Republican definition, and not surprisingly, Mauss found that only two Western countries could claim the title of nations: France and the United States. In these two nations, “the two poles in the continuum of social beings, Individuals and the Society, symbolized by the state, face one another” (Terrier and Fournier, 2013: 25–26), and individuals only recognize the authority of the law of their own nation-state.

At the smallest level of integration (almost zero), Mauss found what he called, after Durkheim, “poly-segmentary societies” (Mauss, 2013: 77). Some of the latter lacked a permanent organization, and, like Melanesian or aboriginal Australian societies, only gathered as a whole during totemic ceremonies to celebrate rituals. Others actually did present a slightly higher level of integration as they benefitted from permanent but not centralized political structures that checked the centrifugal forces of clans and extended families, like in the “tribal societies” of the North American or African continents (Sioux, Iroquois, or Bantu).

To these two poles of social organization, Mauss added an intermediary stage: “empires,” where the force of integration had deepened (compared to tribal societies) under the increased presence of a central political authority, but not to the point of creating a centralized nation of individuals united by a common national consciousness as well as by their willingness to use the state as a means of political and social reform. Under the category of empires, Mauss listed “societies of Muslim law, Chinese law, Hindu law” (Mauss, 2013: 82) as well as Tsarist Russia, ancient Greece, Egypt, Mexico, Germany, and colonial societies.

In so doing, Mauss thus proposed a vision of societies and their levels of development that was completely in line with the interwar version of the colonial ideology, which distinguished colonial societies between different levels of integration, which left them more or less close to autonomy. This was in line with what Mauss (1913) wrote to the Minister of the Colonies in 1913: that self-rule should be postponed to a more or less distant future, depending on the nature of colonial societies, as, for instance, “populations in Algeria and the Tonkin could, to some extent, develop and prosper by themselves,” whereas “those in New Caledonia, the Congo, and elsewhere are completely dependent on our benevolent tutelage.”

But in establishing such a typology of societies ranked by their degree of integration, Mauss also continued his uncle’s scientific exploration of social integration while displacing his uncle’s focus: whereas Durkheim (1893) explored the differences between “mechanical” and “organic” forms of solidarity by looking at the sites of production, ⁴ Mauss focused on the sites of inter-societal exchange of goods and services (the exchanges of “prestations”) and their effects on the creation of a national society. For Mauss, “inter-societal” exchanges (rather than the organization of labor within closed societies) were the main drivers of history, responsible for how societies with varying degrees of integration co-evolved sometimes in tandem, sometimes in a contrapuntal manner. For instance, the potlatch represented the trading practice and the specific understanding of customary contractual obligations by which poly-segmentary tribal societies had moved up to the level of quasi-empires (Mauss, 2013: 178), as in the case of the large Native American empires.

Mauss’ typology of levels of “integration,” then, could help him distinguish between “real” and “fake” models of gift exchanges; between the systems of reciprocal prestations which had positive effects on exchanging partners and which had negative effects. Indeed, the criterion that Mauss used to identify the effects of “gifts” (or systems of reciprocal prestations) was qualitative and historically grounded: one could judge whether the exchange of “prestations” between a metropolis and its colonies had positive or negative effects by observing whether the exchange of prestations moved the colony closer to the model of the “nation,” in which individuals united around the celebration of a centralized authority within their society, or whether it led to a further fragmentation of societies. Trade, financial solidarity, and other forms of economic relations were important for Mauss, but they only mattered to the extent they affected the people’s sense of integration: colonial exchanges, which, at one point, may look “poisonous,” could participate in a positive process of social change, if progressive forces united in society to overcome forces of economic exploitation.

Mauss thus initiated in The Nation a normative reflection, which was absent from The Gift and which related to his prewar reflections on the monopolies and concessions granted to chartered companies (especially in the exploitation, trade, and administration of raw materials like rubber), whose exploitative practices could lead to rebellion and further fragmentation, and violence if they continued to brutally extract all the social and natural resources of the French empire. For him, the drive toward “monopoly capitalism,” or “monopoly colonialism,” practiced by the chartered companies could be turned into a factor of social progress if it could quickly evolve into the creation of socially and democratically controlled monopolies in charge of the administration of the vast sectors of the economy presently controlled by the chartered companies (Mauss, 2013: 243). In particular, the nationalization of colonial monopolies could pave the way toward harmonious development if it followed certain rules: first, if nationalization was not reduced to state control of capital but if it truly meant the social control of capital—in contrast to the state nationalizations decided by the Bolshevik, which Mauss (2013: 252) condemned—; second, if such nationalizations were decided by “societies having reached the national stage in the life of societies, as only the latter could logically and practically decide to nationalize something”; and third, if the “nationalization was associated with the ideas of organization, justice and legality which are absent from the term of socialism.”

Mauss left the question open of whether such movement of “nationalization,” by which he meant the collective appropriation of different means of production and trade organized by the chartered companies, should precede or follow a movement of political independence. In so doing, his manuscript strictly belonged to the interwar era, during which it was almost inconceivable that such an apparently robust colonial edifice as the French empire of 100 million women and men could be destroyed in the near future. For Mauss, questions, which related to political status (the constitutions and treaties through which sovereignty manifested itself), had less importance than the question of the contractual ties and social obligations that stemmed from the organization of international economic exchanges. In The Nation, Mauss (2013: 55) even regretted that many political scientists and legal theorists, like Max Weber, whom he did not hold in high esteem, confused the two notions of state and nation, thus subsuming the latter under the former. Mauss considered new political and constitutional ideas as quite fragile when they remained centered on purely formal state structures and did not take reciprocal exchanges as “total facts,” which had social, legal, economic, cultural, technical, and indeed political dimensions.

Thus, in The Nation, Mauss’ political thinking came back to the question of what to do with (and how to get rid of) the chartered companies—not with how to get rid of the colonial state administration or the French state and its army. Chartered companies remained his primary target: their exploitative practices could only inhibit the ability of exchanges to move colonies up the ladder of integration. In particular, these companies did not help colonial societies coalesce around a central legitimate authority, to which the local populations (of both European and non-European descent) could identify with. Rather than opening colonial economies to the opportunities of global markets, the colonial monopolies which flourished in certain colonies under the French state’s authority (Mauss, 2013: 242) destroyed the solidarity of colonial subjects among themselves and between themselves and the metropolitan subjects.

When Mauss was writing The Nation, such exploitative practices had not disappeared—far from it. In fact, the same network of solidarists and socialists who had denounced the practices of the N’Goko Sangha Company continued to denounce similar abuses that were perpetrated in the Congo by the Compagnie forestière Sangha-Oubangui, which the novelist André Gide denounced in a famous essay used by Albert Thomas (1926) and the ILO in their effort to prohibit forced labor at the 1930 conference dedicated to this issue. Gide and Mauss were not completely unaware that the most coercive and exploitative practices could be hidden under the name of reciprocal exchanges of gifts and counter-gifts conceived as free “prestations,” but they still believed that such abuse could be marginalized (and denounced when and if it resurfaced) in a renewed colonial project from which both metropolis and colonies could benefit. Although the socialists and solidarists may have disagreed on the question of which economic policy the French metropolis should adopt vis-à-vis its colonies, they both united to condemn forced labor, which was eventually prohibited in France by the law of 17 June 1937, prepared by Blum’s Minister of the Colonies, Marius Moutet (Couturier, 2006: 112).

The solidarists in defense of a French type of “giving colonialism”

The late nineteenth-century reformers of the French empire fought against forced labor and monopoly capitalism because they saw in them deviations and travesties of exchanges of “prestations” practiced by chartered companies. However, they did not object to any form of colonialism. Their criticism of colonialism was grounded on a willingness to provide colonies with true rather than fake gifts: a policy which the philosopher Alexandre Kojève (2001 [1956]: 123) later called a “giving colonialism,” in a lecture delivered at the invitation of Carl Schmitt. In many ways, the program of “giving colonialism” or “altruistic colonialism” was not fully articulated until the interwar period, that is, until academic reformers like Marcel Mauss and politicians like Albert Sarraut, the Minister of the Colonies who reigned over colonial policy in most of the 1920s, re-organized the field of colonial practice. Albert Sarraut (1872–1962) was indeed the highest authority on the colonial issue in the interwar period: he prepared the most important bill introduced into Parliament in 1921, which was rejected but then adopted in piecemeal fashion by successive governments over a 30-year period, as he held the positions of Minister of the Colonies from 1920 to 1924 (and from 1932 to 1933), as well as Minister of Interior from 1926 to 1928 (and from 1936 to 1938), during which period he was in charge of domestic affairs in Algeria (as Algeria fell under the Ministry of the Interior). As such, Sarraut had the ability to pass important elements of his reform despite his initial lack of legislative success (Thomas, 2005).

Reading Sarraut’s essays in parallel with Mauss’ unpublished manuscript, one cannot but be impressed by the complementarity of views between the solidarist policymakers and the socialist thinkers on the colonial issue. Sarraut and Mauss’ interventions in the public debate or through their teaching formed part of a reformist colonial discourse in which the figure of the gift was deployed at great length, as “the gift”—rather than “the taking,” as Carl Schmitt argued (see Heins et al., 2018)—was to become the foundation of the international solidarity between the metropolis and its colonies. The gift, conceived in solidarist terms as an implicit contract, created obligations and duties for both the metropolis and the colonies, and these obligations defined the colonial contract that Sarraut wanted to impose in lieu of the Colonial Pact. For Sarraut (1931: 104), the relationship between the metropolis and the colonies should no longer be characterized by an “act of force,” but it had to become a “fact of law,” almost a “total social fact” in Maussian language. He slayed the idea that the benefits that France should derive from the colonial relations derived exclusively from a right of first occupation—the act of “taking” recognized at the Berlin Congress of 1885 in which the European Great Powers divided colonial possessions in the Congo (Schmitt, 2003 [1950]: 228). He also rejected the idea that the duration during which that right should be exercised only depended upon the commercial benefits that the metropolis could derive from the exploitation of the colony’s riches. According to him, one nation would lose its right to colonize others if those other people already exploited to the fullest extent the resources that nature had endowed its territory with or if it failed to do so in an altruistic fashion, as Albert Thomas (1911b) had claimed was the case of chartered companies. Sarraut, Thomas, and Mauss all developed, to some extent, a similar colonial doctrine of contractual rights (Manceron, 2003), which was “solidarist” in the sense that it recognized that certain acquired rights like property rights or the right of first occupation could be disregarded on behalf of a “higher utility.” (2003: 215). As Sarraut (1931: 89) wrote, “there is a superior right (above all others) which is the total right of the human species to live a better life on this planet, a life fuller of material and spiritual riches, which can be best achieved thanks to the solidary collaboration between races.”

Another striking similarity between the writings of Mauss and Sarraut is the extent to which the two Frenchmen relied on the language of “honor” and “generosity” to refer to France’s experiment in colonialism and to distinguish it from the British colonial project. Using racial hierarchies that abounded under the pen of colonial apologists, Sarraut (1931: 115) wrote the French “honor derived from the fact that” France was the first colonial power to understand the “human value of retarded races and its sacred obligation to respect and develop such human value” so that the “inferior races” could slowly join France in the joint management of all human affairs (not just agricultural specialization but also industrial manufacture) without losing their singularity. For him, French generosity thus distinguished this form of colonialism from the ideology of racist superiority exemplified by the British colonial enterprise, which doomed the “inferior races” (Sarraut, 1931: 113) to an ever-lasting specialization in raw material extraction and agricultural labor. As Sarraut (1931: 104) wrote in two chapters titled “The Colonial Obligation of France” and “The French Colonial Doctrine,” which were based on lectures he gave in the mid-1920s before students of the Colonial School (where Mauss was lecturing on ethnography), the French understood the obligation to give and be given back in return. Sarraut (1931: 79) asserted that

Frenchmen are altruistic; their genius reflects a taste for the universal; their humanity, their sense of right, fairness and beauty foment the altruistic conceptions which they develop well beyond the national confines to expand to humanity as a whole their dreams of justice, solidarity and fraternal goodness.

As he continued, the “Frenchmen feel the obligation to give and to give oneself so that they can bring the lights of civilization to races less fortunate than theirs.”

When he wrote The Nation, Mauss (2013: 187) was a little bit less naïve in his analysis, but he shared the same patriotic apology of French giving colonialism when the latter respected the singular character of colonial societies, their right to keep their cultural difference, as well as the necessity to foster relations of trust through reciprocal exchanges. For Mauss, there was reason to believe that a process of positive integration had taken place under the experience of French colonialism due to the multiplication of exchanges of goods and reciprocal services (or “prestations”) between the metropolis and the colony. Mauss (2013: 189) wrote, “whatever the crimes of imperialist colonization, it pushed away barbarity, war, slavery, and misery in important parts of the globe.” As he added, “it [is] still better for a Moroccan to be governed by Frenchmen than by warlords, for the Arab to be under the British rather than Ottoman tutelage.” Mauss did not challenge the official colonial ideology and history of the French Republic. This view refused to see that the policy of total extermination and scorched earth policy experimented with by the Napoleonic forces in Saint Domingue, and later by those of Charles X and Napoleon the Third in Algeria, had been much more brutal than the administration of Berber populations by Abd El Kader (Manceron, 2003: 180).

The ideology of “altruistic” colonialism thus distinguished its promoters from the German and British colonial thinkers. But calls for generosity could be translated in different economic policies: for instance, the promoters of what Kojève (2001 [1956]: 121) calls the “colonial Fordist model” saw in the colonies an opportunity to protect dying metropolitan industries thanks to the generous extension of metropolitan labor laws to some of France’s colonial territories. The “colonial Fordists” sought to transform agricultural laborers in the colonies into consumers of French-made products which they could not previously afford. Their main advocate was the socialist party leader, Léon Blum, who refused to challenge the trade specialization between the “industrial” metropolis and the “colonial garden.” Instead, Blum insisted that the metropolis should demonstrate “generosity” (Marseille, 1984: 195) toward its colonial subjects by raising their salaries and facilitating their civic and economic integration in metropolitan markets of consumption goods (rather than by encouraging a shift from an agricultural to an industrial society in the colonies). Thanks to a rise in wages earned by agricultural laborers, France would thus find in the colonial markets—50 million non-metropolitan French, which included 10 million subjects in Algerian territory—the market opportunities that its exporting industries (like the cotton and garment industries) needed in order for them to continue generating profits. Blum’s policy meant, in the words of Marius Moutet (1876–1968), the adoption of an “altruistic policy” (cited in Marseille, 1984: 337) of legal “assimilation,” whereby the laws voted on in the metropolis (for instance, laws imposing social rights and minimum wages) would also be applied to the colonies (in particular Algeria).

Alternatively, translated in practical (economic) terms, the French colonial philosophy of generosity could also mean that the metropolitan forces had to justify their occupation of the colonies by massive investments in the revitalization of the colonial productive forces. Such a policy of massive investment, which had been the basis of the giving of concessions before the war, was not yet realized in 1919. For instance, in 1902, French colonies received less than one-tenth of the total of France’s total capital exports (between 2 and 3 billion francs), and the situation was not much better after the war (Marseille, 1984: 330). This is why Sarraut’s 1921 bill proposed that the colonies could raise billions of francs through borrowing on private markets (by continuing to appeal to the generosity of French bond holders manifested during the war) so that French capital could find the most productive opportunities thanks to much smaller labor costs in the colonies than in the metropolis. Together with other intellectuals, Sarraut thus led the fight to change the expectations of French capitalists toward the colonies. For Sarraut, as well as for some economists, the primacy of “giving” should manifest itself in the colony with the massive export of capitals from the metropolis to the colony. As Sarraut (1931: 89) wrote,

the distant possession should no longer be a simple enclave [comptoir], a reserve of riches, a market opportunity for the conquering nation, which comes to grab spices and sell its merchandises by pressuring the local populace which it exploits without limitation.

Instead, they should become industrialized thanks to the import of capital in the colonies.

Solidarists like Sarraut, socialists like Mauss (who favored the creation of large national conglomerates in the colonies), and liberal economists like Edmont Giscard d’Estaing (1894–1982), thus argued that the preferential treatment between France and its colonies weighed on the colonies’ ability to produce and export not only raw materials but also industrial products (should they produce any) outside of France, and thus on their ability to accumulate foreign currencies. For them, by privileging trade complementarities within the French franc zone only, Blum’s Fordist colonial model risked giving a fake gift to the colonial subjects, whereas a true gift would have meant trusting them with the ability to turn capital investment raised on international private markets into profitable joint ventures (Marseille, 1984: 222). Sacrificing French dying industries, which were kept alive thanks to hidden subventions placed on the budget of colonial governments, which sponsored the import of French industrial goods, represented a hard but necessary “altruistic” decision. Indeed, as Giscard d’Estaing claimed, “the Metropolis had to accept immediate sacrifices without guarantees [sans contreparties] to the benefit of the Colonies, where, one could hope, but with all the assumed risks, that one day in the distant future, prosperity and industry will blossom” (cited in Marseille, 1984: 223) in the various territories (metropolitan and colonial) of the Greater France.

That both “Fordist” and “giving” forms of colonialisms were justified on behalf of France’s sacred obligation to give back to the colonies was a manifestation of the hegemony of the discourse on gift exchanges in proposals to reform France’s experience with colonialism. Mauss’ political reflections on the gift, and his reference to the figure of the gift to think about (international) economic relations, should not be read as particularly original in that context. Rather, his originality lay in his ability to give new meaning to the notion of gift exchange and to relate it to a theory of societal integration through inter-social trade and commerce, which distinguished his position from that of his contemporaries, like Blum, Sarraut or Giscard d’Estaing.