Colonial law in the face of Métis children

The publication, last spring, of the book of Emmanuelle Saada, sociologist and historian at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, illustrates the renewal of a colonial history which, far from please in the description of the horrors of colonialism or in the apology of its benefits, wonders about the way in which law and administration have contributed to the construction of a colonial order based on dominance and separation of domination and separation. exclusion.

A forgotten decree of November 1928 “ determining the status of the Métis born of legally unknown parents in Indochina Is at the origin of his investigation. This text, culmination of several decades of controversies on the legal status of the Métis in Indochinese colonial society, opens the doors of French citizenship to children of native mother and unknown father “ presumed French breed ». Concretely, several thousand individuals born from the carnal meeting between colonizers of passage and Indochinese women, obtained in 1928 the right to leave their status as a subject for that of citizen, provided that they prove, before the courts, their belonging to the “ breed French. Thus, in contrast to the credo of the apostles of republican universalism, French law of nationality referred to the concept of race twelve years before the Vichy regime adopted anti-Semitic legislation with the status of the Jews of 1940-1941. Emmanuelle Saada does not defend the thesis that the race would be “ the unthinkled »From the republican model. Standing the equidistence of the beate analyzes of the philosophers of citizenship and the critical studies of the contemptors of the racial republic, she meets the contributions of the history of nationality (Patrick Weil, Laure Blévis), of the sociology of law and Colonial Studies (Frederick Cooper, Ann Laura Stoler) To understand what were the uses and circulation of the concept of race in imperial law.

The need to take charge of the Métis problem appears in the discourse of lawyers, administrators and philanthropists, in Indochina in the 1890s, then in Madagascar, in New Caledonia and in sub -Saharan Africa. The figure of the Métis indeed arouses the pity and the dread of the colonial elites. Abandoned by their French fathers and raised by their native mothers, Métis children are perceived as downgraded, whose feelings of frustration and revolt against the colonial system are feared. French by the race and the color of the skin, but indigenous by their legal status and their manners, the Métis disrupt the symbolic rankings of the colonial order. The jamming of the biological and legal border between the colonizer and the colonized generates a “ trouble », Anxiety -provoking and potentially subversive. Faced with this risk of racial degeneration, philanthropic associations first endeavor to rescue abandoned children, to collect them to tear them away from the influence deemed corrupter of the indigenous society, and if possible to “ assimilate “By giving them an education” French ». Emmanuelle Saada shows here how much the concept of breed is thought of simultaneously in terms of “ heredity “And” medium », From a neo-Lamarckian perspective. To be considered a French race, the Métis child must not only have French blood in the veins, but also be socialized according to the rules of the “ civility », In a family environment of French culture.

The great originality of Emmanuelle Saada’s work focuses on the way in which the law has gradually grabbed the “ Métis question », In order to clarify it and define its threat. The sociologist of law invites us to a demanding and rigorous exploration of the collections of jurisprudence of the colonial courts, where we discover that the judges had, long before the 1928 decree, to decide on requests in recognition of paternity, deemed fraudulent (already !) By colonial observers. It was indeed feared that French settlers, unscrupulous, agree to recognize the paternity of native children, the sole purpose of transmitting their citizenship to them. The introduction of the race category in the 1928 decree is therefore presented, by those who support it, as a means of fighting fraudulent recognitions, while facilitating the inclusion of Métis children in the “ citizen community ». The promoters of the decree thus claim to make use “ positive “Of the race, since it is a question, according to them, of conferring rights, and not of excluding or stigmatizing. A single lawyer worried at the time of the imprecision of the concept of race, and the difficulties raised by the question of proof of the racial belonging of an individual. In the absence of tests DNAcolonial judges will rely on behalf, education and the situation in the Société des subjects Métis, and especially to “ physical signs of ethnicity », Take advantage of the observation of magistrates or by medical certificates.

The 1928 decree was then taken up and adapted in various points of the Empire. In the absence of a centralized vision of the legal construction of the imperial space, the standards and practices of colonial law of nationality are spread by capillarity. Access to citizenship transforms the social identity of thousands of mestones, called to become the new executives of colonization. Emmanuelle Saada notes, however, that these citizens “ by breed Never shared a real group identity. The search for perfect assimilation, desired by the administrators, led in the 1950s to the transfer of 4,500 Indochinese children to the metropolis. We find practices identical in the early 1960s, when traveling to the metropolitan territory of hundreds of Reunion pupils, as shown in the recent book of Ivan Jablonka, Children in exile (Seuil, 2007).

The work of Emmanuelle Saada, illustration of the fertility of interdisciplinarity and transatlantic dialogue (the historian taught several years in New York University), thus delivers a remarkable analysis of the relationships between nation, race and colonial law. We can emphasize, to conclude, three major lessons. First of all, the author demonstrates precisely that there is no link or inspiration, between the use of the race in colonial law, and the one in anti -Semitic law of Vichy. Demonic genealogy therefore, since specialists in the status of Jews never refer to the colonial world. Thus – this is the second point – colonial law should not be thought of as the negative Metropolitan law, nor as the place where the humanist principles of the Republic would contradict the reality of the practices of colonial power. Emmanuelle Saada rather invites us to consider that “ Colonial situations reveal, in the photographic sense of the word, deep tensions, but largely invisible in the metropolitan context, at the heart of the nation definition practices (P. 18). Finally, she highlights the intimate link that has united since the end of XIX^e century the law of parentage and the law of nationality. The 1928 decree marks a break, in that it substitutes a biological conception of paternity to the principles defined by the Civil Code, which was based on parents’ freedom to choose their children. The interference of the state in parentage relations, for the purposes of control of the national groups of the national group, was only in its infancy. The historical work of Emmanuelle Saada, in addition to her scientific qualities, thus sheds light on the issues underlying the very contemporary debates on the nation, immigration and parentage.