France's Modernising Mission:

Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of

Empire 1st Edition Ed Naylor (Eds.)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/frances-modernising-mission-citizenship-welfare-and-
the-ends-of-empire-1st-edition-ed-naylor-eds/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/

Projecting Citizenship Photography and Belonging in the

British Empire Gabrielle Moser

https://textbookfull.com/product/projecting-citizenship-
photography-and-belonging-in-the-british-empire-gabrielle-moser/

Islam and Secular Citizenship in the Netherlands,

United Kingdom, and France 1st Edition Carolina
Ivanescu (Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/islam-and-secular-citizenship-
in-the-netherlands-united-kingdom-and-france-1st-edition-
carolina-ivanescu-auth/

States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the

Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic Yanni Kotsonis

https://textbookfull.com/product/states-of-obligation-taxes-and-
citizenship-in-the-russian-empire-and-early-soviet-republic-
yanni-kotsonis/
Children, the Law and the Welfare Principle: Civil Law
Perspectives from France and Germany 1st Edition Kerry
O’Halloran

https://textbookfull.com/product/children-the-law-and-the-
welfare-principle-civil-law-perspectives-from-france-and-
germany-1st-edition-kerry-ohalloran/

Public Welfare Science and Propaganda in 17th Century

France 1st Edition Howard M. Solomon

https://textbookfull.com/product/public-welfare-science-and-
propaganda-in-17th-century-france-1st-edition-howard-m-solomon/

Children the Law and the Welfare Principle Civil Law

Perspectives from France and Germany 1st Edition Kerry
O Halloran

https://textbookfull.com/product/children-the-law-and-the-
welfare-principle-civil-law-perspectives-from-france-and-
germany-1st-edition-kerry-o-halloran/

Jews and the Ends of Theory Shai Ginsburg

https://textbookfull.com/product/jews-and-the-ends-of-theory-
shai-ginsburg/

Arguing about empire imperial rhetoric in Britain and

France, 1882-1956 1st Edition Thomas

https://textbookfull.com/product/arguing-about-empire-imperial-
rhetoric-in-britain-and-france-1882-1956-1st-edition-thomas/
 France’s
Modernising
Mission
Citizenship, Welfare and
the Ends of Empire

EDITED BY Ed Naylor

St Antony’s Series
St Antony’s Series

Series Editors
Halbert Jones
St Antony’s College
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK

Matthew Walton
St Antony’s College
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
The St Antony’s Series publishes studies of international affairs of contem-
porary interest to the scholarly community and a general yet informed
readership. Contributors share a connection with St Antony’s College,
a world-renowned centre at the University of Oxford for research and
teaching on global and regional issues. The series covers all parts of the
world through both single-author monographs and edited volumes,
and its titles come from a range of disciplines, including political sci-
ence, history, and sociology. Over more than thirty years, this partner-
ship between St Antony’s College and Palgrave Macmillan has produced
about 200 publications.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15036
 Ed Naylor
Editor

France’s Modernising
Mission
Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Empire
Editor
Ed Naylor
School of Languages and Area Studies
University of Portsmouth
Portsmouth, UK

St Antony’s Series
ISBN 978-1-137-55132-0 ISBN 978-1-137-55133-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55133-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951541

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: Cover photo courtesy of Florent Pouvreau.

Cover design by Fatima Jamadar.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
For Arnaud Lasne
 Acknowledgements

Plans for this volume emerged from a workshop held in June 2014 in
Oxford entitled ‘Decolonisation and welfare during France’s Trente
glorieuses’. The event was co-hosted by the European Studies Centre of
St Antony’s College and the Maison Française d’Oxford, with gener-
ous support from the John Fell Fund, the Modern European History
Research Centre and the History Faculty. I would like to thank the
staff at both the ESC and MFO for all their time and effort, particu-
larly Anne Simonin, Claire Stevenson, Sarah Moran and Dorian Singh.
In addition to the presenters, many of whom have contributed to
this edited collection, the event was enriched by Robert Gildea, Tom
Buchanan, Rebekka Habermas, Martin Conway, Kalypso Nicolaïdis and
Othon Anastasakis.
Paul Betts encouraged me to develop the book proposal and I am
very grateful for his indispensable guidance and advice. I would also like
to warmly thank the anonymous proposal reviewers and the editors at
Palgrave for their patience and support, particularly Molly Beck and Oliver
Dyer. The success of an edited volume largely depends on the contribu-
tions and here I have been very fortunate to work with such a talented
and committed group of authors. During the editing process I have also
accrued numerous debts of gratitude to colleagues and friends: in particu-
lar Emmanuel Blanchard, Margaret Majumdar, Emmanuel Godin, Julian
Jackson and all those who carried out anonymous peer-review at vari-
ous stages, as well as Laurent Eisler for his work on the illustrations and

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

Florent Pouvreau for the cover photo. Above all, my thanks go to Tony
Chafer and Natalya Vince without whose unflagging assistance and sup-
port it would have been impossible to bring this project to fruition. That
said, any shortcomings, errors or omissions are entirely mine.
 Contents

List of Contributors xi

List of Figures xv

Introduction xvii

Part I Rethinking Education and Citizenship

1 Conflicting Modernities: Battles Over France’s Policy of

Adapted Education in French West Africa 3
Tony Chafer

2 Institutional Terra Non Firma: Representative Democracy

and the Chieftaincy in French West Africa 31
Liz Fink

3 Decolonisation Without Independence? Breaking with the

Colonial in New Caledonia (1946–1975) 59
Benoît Trépied

ix
x    Contents

Part II Mental Maps and the Territory

4 Rule of Experts? Governing Modernisation in Late

Colonial French Africa 87
James McDougall

5 From Tent to Village Regroupement: The Colonial State

and Social Engineering of Rural Space, 1843–1962 109
Neil MacMaster

6 Shantytowns and Rehousing in Late Colonial Algiers

and Casablanca 133
Jim House

Part III Metropolitan Legacies

7 Promoting ‘Harmonious Cohabitation’ in the Metropole:

The Welfare Charity Aide Aux Travailleurs D’Outre Mer
(1950–1975) 167
Ed Naylor

8 Protests Against Shantytowns in the 1950s and 1960s:

Class Logics, Clientelist Relations and ‘Colonial
Redeployments’ 199
Françoise de Barros

9 Colonial Legacies: Housing Policy and Riot Prevention

Strategies in the Minguettes District of Vénissieux 225
Abdellali Hajjat

Index 251
 Editor and Contributors

About the Editor

Ed Naylor is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of

Languages and Area Studies at the University of Portsmouth. He is a
historian of modern and contemporary France, with particular research
interests in decolonisation and the politics of migration, housing and
the welfare state. He has published in the journals French History and
Contemporary European History and is currently working on a mono-
graph about social housing in Marseille between the 1950s and 1980s.

Contributors

Françoise de Barros is Assistant Professor at the Université Paris

8 –Vincennes-Saint-Denis. She is a member of the research laboratory
Centre de Recherches Sociologique et Politique de Paris—Cultures et
sociétés urbaines (CRESPPA-CSU) within the Department of sociol-
ogy and anthropology. Her work centres on the sociology of the state
administration and she has published widely on municipal politics and
the deployment of colonial administrators in the Hexagon. She is cur-
rently completing a monograph about clientelism in France during the
twentieth century.

xi
xii    Editor and Contributors

Tony Chafer is Professor of French and African Studies at the

University of Portsmouth and was director of the Centre for European
and International Studies Research from 2001–2016. His research
focuses on Francophone Africa and French relations with Africa in the
late colonial and postcolonial periods. He is currently working on a new
edition of his book, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s
Successful Decolonization?, and has published widely on French military
policy in Africa. He recently published ‘Françafrique - the state of rela-
tions between France and Africa’ (Europa Regional, 45, 2016) and co-
edited (with Alexander Keese) Francophone Africa at Fifty (Manchester
University Press, 2013).
Liz Fink is a Departmental Lecturer at Hertford College, University of
Oxford. She is a historian of decolonisation in France and West Africa
and her research interests centre on the history of social movements,
democracy, and political contestation. She received her Ph.D. from
New York University in 2015 and is currently completing a monograph
entitled Elections and the Politics of Mobilization: Voting in French West
Africa, 1944–1960.
Abdellali Hajjat is Assistant Professor at the Université Paris-Ouest
Nanterre and a researcher at the Institut des sciences sociales du poli-
tique (UMR 7220). His recent publications include Islamophobie.
Comment les élites françaises fabriquent le ‘problème musulman’ (2013)
with Marwan Mohammed, La Marche pour l’égalité et contre le rac-
isme (2013) and Les frontières de l’“identité nationale”. L’injonction à
l’assimilation en France métropolitaine et coloniale (2012). His research
interests centre on the articulation of citizenship and race in French law,
urban uprisings and political mobilisation by postcolonial immigrants
from May 1968 to the 2000s, and on Islamophobia as a process of racial-
ising Muslims.
Jim House is Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds. His main
research interests lie in the social and political history of late-colonial
Algeria, Morocco, and hexagonal France, with particular emphasis on
migration, urban governance, anti-colonial resistance, colonial repression
and social memory. With Neil MacMaster, he is the author of Paris 1961.
Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (2006). He is currently complet-
ing a book on the history of shantytowns in Algiers and Casablanca for
Oxford University Press.
 Editor and Contributors    xiii

Neil MacMaster is Honorary Reader at the University of East Anglia

in the UK. His research interests lie in twentieth century French colo-
nial history. Among his publications are Colonial Migrants and Racism.
Algerians in France, 1900–62 (1997), with Jim House Paris 1961:
Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (2006) and Burning the Veil.
The Algerian war and the “emancipation” of Muslim women, 1954–62
(2009). He is currently writing a book on peasant society, nationalism
and counter-insurgency in the Ouarsenis mountains of Algeria between
c.1930 and 1958.
James McDougall is Fellow and Tutor in modern history at Trinity
College, University of Oxford. He previously taught at Princeton and
at SOAS, London. His publications include History and the Culture of
Nationalism in Algeria (2006), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in
Northwest Africa (2012) co-edited with Judith Scheele, and A History of
Algeria (2017). He is currently writing a history of the everyday life and
legacies of French colonialism in Africa.
Benoît Trépied is an anthropologist, Chargé de recherche at the CNRS
and a member of the IRIS research group of the EHESS (UMR 8156).
A specialist of New Caledonia, he works on the colonial trajectory of the
archipelago in the French empire and the Pacific region, ethnic relations
and local politics as well as contemporary legacies of decolonisation. His
publications include Une mairie dans la France coloniale. Koné, Nouvelle-
Calédonie (2010), and he has co-edited special issues of the journals
Genèses. Sciences sociales et histoire (‘Outre-mers indigènes’, 91, 2013,
with Stéphanie Guyon) and City and Society (‘Colonialism, Law, and
the City: the Politics of Urban Indigeneity’, 28(1), 2016, with Natacha
Gagné).
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 The Commune mixte of Chélif (c.1946) 111

Fig. 6.1 Shantytowns in Casablanca (1950) 137
Fig. 6.2 Shantytowns in Algiers (1954) 138
Fig. 9.1 Foreign Maghrebi households in Minguettes
(as % of total) in 1974 229

xv
 Introduction

Less than twenty years after the end of the Second World War the major
European empires had all but disappeared. Yet historians of decolonisa-
tion agree that this process was neither linear, pre-ordained nor indeed
planned in the form that it took. Naturalising metaphors like the ‘tide
of history’ and the ‘wind of change’ were retrospective rationalisations
that belied intense, if uneven, efforts to reinvigorate empire after the war.
While the conflict had severely weakened the ideological and structural
foundations of imperial rule, in both London and Paris considerable
hopes were invested in the potential of colonial territories to contrib-
ute to ‘national’ recovery. At the same time, a transformed geopoliti-
cal order, the prevalence of new universalist norms and the challenge of
anti-colonial and nationalist mobilisation all made a return to the pre-war
order unthinkable. Reinventing the terms that bound colonised peoples
and territories to the metropole was therefore a strategic necessity but
also a dynamic which imperial capitals struggled to control.
Comparative and globalising approaches to decolonisation have
increasingly come to the fore in recent years, highlighting the extent to
which European powers confronted similar dilemmas and international
dynamics in the aftermath of the war. Some historians have nonethe-
less noted the paradox that individual nations were reluctant to view
‘their’ decolonisation pressures as part of a wider global trend. The
particular configurations of settler societies, anti-communism and secu-
rity concerns or the hopes invested in blueprints for reform‚ all served
as rationales for strategic choices that in retrospect often look like ‘futile

xvii
xviii    Introduction

intransigence’.1 There were also significant differences, both between

and within empires, in the amount of blood, treasure and political capi-
tal expended in attempts to prolong European control. While the ‘myths
of the contrasts’ between French and British colonialism in Africa are
increasingly seen to extend from the nature of day-to-day rule to the
manner in which that rule unravelled, there remain national dynamics
which justify empire-specific and more localised analysis.2 The weakness
of France’s international standing, the desire to break with the Vichy
era and the attachment of large swathes of the French political class to a
Republican imperialism are often cited as particularities.3 Certainly, the
peculiarly intense, almost febrile, quality of the ‘French colonial mind’
continues to attract the attention of historians.4 Variously described as
‘schizophrenic’, ‘quixotic’ and a ‘reconquest’, France’s efforts to rein-
vent its empire in the post-war period are the subject of a growing histo-
riography.5
Central to this reinvention was an attempt to counter the anachronis-
tic connotations of colonialism by seeking to align the French imperial
project with contemporary notions of progress and modernity. Frederick
Cooper was one of the first to identify the importance of this ‘reconfig-
uring of hegemonic claims’.6 For all its legitimising potential, he argued,
the shift to a modernising agenda also opened up new spaces for contes-
tation and provided a yardstick by which colonial rule could be meas-
ured in a way that civilizational tutelage could not. Connelly too has
proposed that ‘the “civilizing mission” was recast as a “modernizing mis-
sion”’ after the Second World War.7 But as the metaphor of ‘recasting’
suggests, there is some ambivalence about the nature of this shift. Was
the ‘modernising mission’ a radical departure from previous policy or
mere rebranding? Whilst the idea of a modernising post-war turn is often
employed as a shorthand for a new phase of colonial reformism, there
is no clear consensus as to its substance or significance. One reason for
this may be the very malleability of the concept, which was arguably part
of its attraction for French politicians and administrators as well as for
political leaders and movements challenging colonial rule. Equally, the
context-specific nature of discourse and policy-making meant that ‘mod-
ernising’ had very different connotations at particular moments and in
particular locations within France’s empire.
 Introduction    xix

A Mission to Modernise?
In November 1959, less than two months after leading his country to
independence, Guinean president Sékou Touré addressed an audience at
Chatham House in London: ‘In my country the officials—all of them,
including judges, including some who wanted to stay—were ordered
to leave and they took everything with them. We were left with noth-
ing, not a document, not even the Legal Code’.8 Guinea had been
the only African territory to vote ‘no’ to de Gaulle’s plan for a federal
Community in 1958, and the abrupt withdrawal of co-operation that fol-
lowed underlines the extent to which preserving control and influence
were central to French reformist visions. However, if this seems to invite
a straightforwardly instrumentalist, top-down reading of the ‘modern-
ising mission’, Touré’s own political career points to a more complex,
evolving picture. As a trade union leader during the 1940s and early
1950s, he had been a key figure in successful campaigns for enhanced
workers’ rights in French West Africa based on ‘assimilationist’ claims of
equivalence with metropolitan France.9 This was just one example of a
wider trend in the decade after the Second World War whereby actors
from within colonised societies co-opted and reshaped the language and
policies of reform as the French Union opened up new space for com-
parisons and claim-making within the empire-state.
From another perspective the ‘modernising’ dynamic was not so
much a political concession to be wrested from the French authori-
ties but rather a process of social and economic transformation already
underway in colonised societies. Rapid urbanisation, labour migration
and trade unionism disrupted the stable mediocrity to which the inter-
war colonial state had aspired and could no longer be dismissed as the
anomaly of ‘detribalised elements’.10 The threat such ‘disorder’ posed
to French rule often informed a reactive approach. Seen in this way,
France’s post-1945 reform agenda looks like an attempt to manage, or at
least not be overwhelmed by, tumultuous societal changes taking place in
its overseas territories.
The power to define and impose norms is clearly central to the con-
cept of modernisation, and switching the focus to knowledge produc-
tion points to a further dimension of the ‘modernising mission’. Various
scholars have noted how the ‘development turn’ in both British and
xx    Introduction

French colonial policy predated the international ascendency of ‘mod-

ernisation theory’ in the social sciences by several years. The 1940s saw
new forms of technocratic expertise being put to work within France’s
empire: whether labour inspectors dispatched from Paris to resolve
industrial disputes in Dakar or architects’ plans for urban development in
Casablanca, templates were increasingly shared between metropole and
colony. From the mid-1950s the late ‘late colonial state’ in French Africa
also drew on American academic output in new fields such as social psy-
chology and development economics at a time when propaganda and
policy were becoming increasingly indistinguishable.11 Nonetheless,
some historians have rightly cautioned against a caricatural view of the
social sciences as straightforwardly complicit in forms of colonial dom-
ination, noting how many individuals also shared in the optimism and
questioning of established orders during the global high-point of decolo-
nisation.12
Across much of Western Europe, post-war social democracy saw the
emergence of newly comprehensive welfare state systems along with
unprecedented levels of public spending on housing and social services.
With French colonial rule simultaneously reframed in egalitarian terms,
this raised the question: what new social rights might citizenship of the
French Union imply for millions of people on the African continent
and beyond? As Cooper again has observed, one major attraction of the
‘modernisation’ concept was the implicit promise that ‘economic and
social standards could be made to converge at the level of the most afflu-
ent societies’.13 Expectations of material improvement unleashed in the
post-war period, and France’s attempts to both respond to and deflect
them, form part of the wider story of this modernising moment.
However, the promise of modernisation was not just about roads,
schools and wage packets. Perhaps the most spectacular change of the
late colonial period was the rise of the voting citizen within the French
empire. Having for so long insisted that backwardness and ignorance
precluded the political participation of all but a small elite among the
colonised, the French government found itself obliged to make con-
cessions that ultimately paved the way for universal suffrage. Elections
and plebiscites, both rigged and relatively free, became a key conduit for
claims on the state and calls for self-determination. At the same time they
could also serve as a powerful legitimising tool for colonial rule, whilst
for anti-colonial movements they accentuated the dilemma of whether to
work within—and thus recognise—the French legal order.
 Introduction    xxi

The relationship between electoral democracy and other aspects

of the ‘modernising mission’ was no less ambivalent. In the metropole
itself, the technocratic planiste elite embodied by Jean Monnet saw itself
as charting a course of state-led modernisation which transcended the
vagaries of partisan politics.14 As for colonial territories, if modernisation
was thought of as a package—with urbanisation and industrial capital-
ism paving the way to a ‘normal’, i.e. Western, democratic system—then
holding elections in an agrarian society of peasant farmers looked like
putting the cart before the horse.15 So whilst in principle citizenship
rights were inseparable from modernising visions for France’s empire,
in practice the exercise of those rights threw up dilemmas for all par-
ties. The risks were most obvious for French sovereignty, and a range of
strategies were employed to counter them, from selective repression and
outright election rigging to the institutionalised under-representation
of colonial territories. But nationalists too could find that electoral pro-
cesses checked their momentum, exposing divisions between competing
interests and territorial or ethno-cultural identifications that compro-
mised independence objectives.
Looming over all of this was the spectre of violence and coer-
cion. The willingness of governments emerging from the killing fields
of Europe to deploy extraordinary levels of violence in the global
South has been widely remarked.16 From brutal military repression in
Sétif and Madagascar to full-scale wars in Indochina and Algeria, the
French state’s recourse to force over an extended period was virtually
unmatched. Reformist initiatives in the domain of citizenship and wel-
fare are inseparable from this wider context and many of the contribu-
tions to this volume draw attention to the coercive underpinnings of
colonial modernising visions. It is surely no coincidence that the most
ambitious and expensive investment programmes of the British and
French empires, the Synnerton Plan in Kenya and the Constantine Plan
in Algeria, were rolled out amid brutal counter-insurgency campaigns.17
In fact, these examples both underscore the limits of juxtaposing welfare
and warfare as the ‘carrot and stick’ of late colonial policy. The British
portrayal of the Mau Mau uprising as an anti-modern, primitivist revolt
and the developmentalist zeal behind France’s ‘Thousand villages’ policy
for displaced civilians in Algeria illustrate how inextricable modernising
schemes and military force often were.
Just as the emergent global human rights order after 1945 did little
to prevent violence being employed against civilians by colonial armies,
xxii    Introduction

so the universalist implications of modernisation failed to dispel rac-

ist distinctions.18 While biological racism was widely discredited by
Nazism, Western-centric ‘pathways to development’ often worked to
reinforce cultural racism.19 Amidst the objective, rational language of
colonial planning and modernisation projects, ethno-cultural differences
remained a convenient alibi for failure.20 In other words, France’s ‘mod-
ernising mission’ could reinforce distinctions between colony and metro-
pole as much as it worked to reduce them.
This returns us to the question of national specificity. The shift away
from the cultural connotations of the ‘civilizing mission’ to the more
blandly universalist premises of a ‘modernising mission’ may have
undermined French claims of a unique ‘vocation to rule’ but in real-
ity the distinction was never so clear cut. Post-war elites in France and
Africa retained a faith in the mystique and prestige of French cultural
and civilizational leadership even as they sought to reframe colonial rule
as a more equal partnership. At the same time, the wider international
context of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union’s Third Worldist tilt
under Krushchev, the growing influence of the non-aligned movement
and the projection of American power both hard and soft, meant that
France’s was just one among a host of competing visions for the future.
The global circulation of alternative blueprints—from the Atlantic
Charter to pan-Arabism—ensured that French initiatives often looked
like attempts to wrest back the initiative.21 That reforms were frequently
driven, reshaped and appropriated by individuals and movements within
colonised societies further complicates the issue of ownership. Were laws
tabled by African politicians to abolish forced labour and introduce uni-
versal citizenship part of France’s modernising agenda? If so, it under-
scores the open-endedness of what constituted the French empire-state
in this period.

Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Empire

Despite major asymmetries, the founding of the Fourth Republic, the
refounding of the French welfare state and the technocratic planning
of France’s own post-war economic reconstruction all saw correspond-
ing initiatives in French overseas territories. The creation of the French
Union and the acquisition of federal citizenship by those hitherto classed
as subjects held out the prospect of political emancipation within the
empire-state. Though controversially diluted, both the 1952 Code du
 Introduction    xxiii

travail d’Outre Mer (Overseas Labour Code) and the incremental exten-
sion of welfare benefits for families suggested the rudiments of a pan-
imperial social contract. The FIDES (Investment Fund for Social and
Economic Development) set up in 1946, along with the FERDES (Rural
Infrastructure Fund for Social and Economic Development) established
three years later, brought unprecedented capital investment into infra-
structure and social services, breaking with the long-standing princi-
ple that colonies should be self-financing. Significantly, the FIDES was
based in Monnet’s Planning Commission rather than the Ministry for
Overseas France (ex-Ministry of the Colonies). This was part of a process
whereby policy-making in the colonial sphere became more complex: the
involvement of officials from specialist French ministries such as Labour,
Education and Construction ended the virtual monopoly of generalists
whose ‘specialism’ was administering colonies.22
The partial opening up of policy-making also offered opportunities
for elected African representatives to bypass the local colonial adminis-
tration; on particular issues, alliances could emerge that cut across the
coloniser/colonised divide. At the same time, scepticism about the impli-
cations of imperial equivalence were by no means confined to conserva-
tive colonial officials. Pierre Laroque, considered the chief architect of
France’s post-war welfare state, spent many years crafting a compre-
hensive system of social protection and insurance that he hoped would
help French society overcome its profound divisions.23 He had been a
liberal critic of colonial policing methods during the interwar years, but
when he unveiled his plans for a ‘universal’ welfare state at the end of the
Second World War there was no question of incorporating Algerian peas-
ants or Senegalese railway workers.24
Perhaps the best-known opponent of French investment in its colo-
nies was the journalist Raymond Cartier. In the wake of Cartier’s Paris
Match reportage published in August and September 1956 his name
became synonymous with a critique of empire based not on the right of
peoples to self-determination but on the burden their subjugation rep-
resented for the metropolitan tax-payer.25 The Loi-cadre (framework
law) of June 1956, which devolved key powers in taxation and spend-
ing to legislative assemblies in the colonies, is widely seen as working to
close down the open-ended financial implications of equivalence with the
metropole and, more broadly, as foreclosing on the ‘federal moment’.26
Thus if French governments were modernisers before ‘modernisation
theory’ then they were probably also cartieristes before Cartier.
xxiv    Introduction

This underlines what in retrospect may seem obvious: nowhere were

the political and material aspirations of colonised societies aligned with
France’s commitment to reform and redistribution. Why then do late
colonial reformist visions continue to attract so much scholarly inter-
est? In recent years a number of historians have attempted to rethink the
‘paths not taken’ during the post-war period and in so doing have tried
to push back against the telos of ‘national’ independence.27 The inter-
est of this work lies less in counterfactuals (could federalism or intégra-
tion have worked out differently? what might that have looked like?)
than in what it reveals about French strategic calculations and the pro-
cesses through which decolonisation unfolded in various locations: the
ends of empire. The modernising turn during the 1940s and 1950s was
a dynamic which impacted profoundly on the political, social, economic
and cultural relationship between coloniser and colonised. Citizenship
and welfare, broadly defined, were at the heart of this: redrawing the
boundaries of political communities and devising projects that promised
material improvement. In its rhetoric and fragmented implementation,
the ‘modernising mission’ thus opened up multiple sites of nego-
tiation and contestation throughout the French empire-state. Many of
the debates and dynamics it produced also continued to play out after
decolonisation. The late colonial modernising paradigm often cast a long
shadow over the nation-building projects of newly independent states
and their relations with the former metropole. And the continuities are
perhaps most apparent where there was no independence ‘watershed’—
inside metropolitan France itself and the dependent island territories that
remained under French sovereignty.
The chapters in this volume approach these issues from various angles
and disciplinary perspectives: historical, anthropological and sociologi-
cal. Consistent throughout is an insistence on how local, site-specific
examples can shine light on the wider forces at work within the French
empire-state. The case-studies explored here span from Sub-Saharan
Africa and the Maghreb to metropolitan France and the Pacific, with
subjects ranging from electoral politics, education and colonial knowl-
edge production to housing programmes, social services and rural devel-
opment. Notwithstanding this broad geographical and thematic coverage
there are inevitably significant omissions. For reasons of space and coher-
ence, the discussion is confined to analysing situations of formal French
sovereignty and administration rather than attempting to trace mod-
ernising legacies across the diverse post-independence trajectories of
 Introduction    xxv

former colonies. Within those parameters, Indo-China remains a nota-

ble absence and the many lines of enquiry suggested by the ‘modernis-
ing mission’ but not pursued here include labour relations, health policy
and communication technologies. Nonetheless, through the range and
depth of research it draws together, this volume offers new and valuable
insights into a crucial dynamic in the history of post-war French empire
and the era of decolonisation.

Structure and Contents
The book is divided into three parts each composed of three chapters.
Part One, ‘Rethinking Education and Citizenship’, explores the various
ramifications of extending citizen status to all those formerly ruled as
subjects. The constitutional framework of the French Union privileged
form over content but it also ushered in a more complex phase of colo-
nial policy-making that involved multiple actors: from local representa-
tives elected by newly enfranchised voters to officials from metropolitan
ministries such as agriculture and construction. The egalitarian premises
of post-war reforms simultaneously cast doubt on long-held assumptions
about the means and ends of colonial rule as all parties wrestled with the
implications of a federal ‘Greater France’.
As Tony Chafer observes, education systems are a litmus test for the
kind of social order a colonial power seeks to create. His chapter opens
the volume in French West Africa where he examines developments in
colonial education policy from the interwar period through to the eve
of independence. France’s public school system was a cornerstone of
the Third Republic, its assimilationist conquest of rural France famously
captured in Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen.28 Yet, for all the
rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’, no such transformational project was
envisioned for Africa’s peasantry. Under the label of ‘adapted educa-
tion’ the French presided over a trickle-down approach to learning: by
the mid-1930s school enrolment rates in French West Africa stood at
less than 3%. After analysing this dismal record, Chafer turns to the post-
war period when the future of education was thrown open and became
a major site of contestation. Along with expanding provision, a central
issue was that of equivalence with the metropole in terms of curriculum
and qualifications. Demands for full French-style education co-existed
with proposals for a reformed version of ‘adapted education’ that would
reflect the vocational needs of a predominantly agricultural society.
xxvi    Introduction

Both were framed as ‘modernising’ visions, and in charting how these

reform debates unfolded Chafer stresses the central role played by newly
empowered actors. First and foremost were elected African politicians
in the National Assembly and local legislative bodies who campaigned
extensively for change, along with trade unions and emerging mass par-
ties whose leading cadres were themselves often school-teachers. A fur-
ther dimension was the involvement of the French Ministry of Education
which ended the monopoly of the colonial administration in Dakar and
the Ministry of Overseas France (ex-Ministry of the Colonies) in Paris.
The appointment of Jean Capelle, a Gaullist education expert with no
colonial experience, was particularly significant. His advocacy of a met-
ropolitan-style school system placed him in the same camp as Senegalese
politician and intellectual Léopold Senghor and at odds with conserva-
tives in the colonial administration.
Chafer teases out how, underlying these education debates, deeper
issues loomed concerning the relationship—cultural, economic and
political—between France and Africa, many of which would continue to
play out after decolonisation. For the small African elite who had passed
through the system, French education carried great symbolic weight but
was also a positional good. He concludes by noting the irony that the
seemingly ‘progressive’ choice to opt for an elitist baccalauréat system
over more vocational programmes did little to alter the entrenchment of
power and opportunity among a small stratum of West African society.
The second chapter also centres on West Africa, where Liz Fink exam-
ines another touchstone reform issue which carried wider implications
for French rule in the post-war period. Even more starkly than debates
surrounding education policy, the future of the chieftaincy exposed the
limits and contradictions of the ‘modernising mission’. Co-opted fig-
ures and sometimes outright French inventions, chiefs were an integral
part of colonial governance across swathes of rural Africa. Reporting
to French administrators, they played an intermediary role between
the colonial state and African society as tax-collectors, conscriptors
of labour and day-to-day administrative agents. In a delicate relation-
ship of interdependence, chiefs provided a legitimising grounding in
‘African tradition’ whilst their authority was itself ultimately backed by
the colonial state’s thin steel line. Fink analyses how this arrangement
faced unprecedented scrutiny and challenge during the 1940s. Popular
discontent with instances of corruption and abuse of office created a
crisis of legitimacy that was compounded by the growing anachronism
 Introduction    xxvii

of appointed ‘representatives’ amid a broader shift towards elections.

Legislative assemblies again provided the focal point for African politi-
cians to push for major reform. Through close analysis of their delibera-
tions, Fink shows how the notions of modern governance, legal norms
and democratic principle were wielded by African legislators against the
objections of colonial officials who were reduced to half-hearted evo-
cations of respecting local ‘traditions’. Yet she also demonstrates that
there was much more at stake than just the future of the chiefs them-
selves. Through their dogged insistence on respect for procedure and
legal protocol, the assemblies proved adept at using the reform ques-
tion to extend and formalise their new—and as yet ill-defined—powers.
Furthermore, assembly debates over chieftaincy reform were the occa-
sion for a far more wide-ranging discussion among local representatives
about the future of African democracy. In the context of emerging mass
parties and the rapidly expanding franchise, assembly members wrestled
with the limits and pitfalls of the electoral process as the basis for legiti-
mate representation and the promotion of social justice in rural West
Africa. Both Chafer and Fink thus remind us that the Fourth Republic
was a fertile period for thought experiments about the future of empire
within colonised societies as much as among French politicians and offi-
cials.
Attempts to define a viable political and economic relationship with
the metropole took different forms and followed different chronologies
across the empire. Whereas in Indo-China and the Maghreb questions
of reform were rapidly subsumed within relatively coherent national-
ist visions of independence, in French West and Equatorial Africa many
political leaders remained committed to a vision of decolonisation within
the framework of the French state until the late 1950s. And in a small
number of overseas territories decolonisation would be pursued with-
out ever breaking away from France. Benoît Trépied examines one such
case: the Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia. However, as his chapter
shows, the absence of political independence for this settler colony did
not imply a straightforward or static relationship to the metropole. On
the contrary, New Caledonia was buffeted by post-war changes to the
institutional framework of empire, from the 1946 French Union which
enfranchised the indigenous Kanak population for the first time to the
1956 Loi-cadre which offered a new basis for devolving powers to the
archipelago.
xxviii    Introduction

Crucially, Trépied explains, colonial Caledonia was riven by a ‘dou-

ble tension’—on the one hand the relationship of the archipelago to
France and on the other hand the relationship between indigenous and
settler populations. If this suggests parallels with Algeria, the fact that
Europeans made up a third of the population and enjoyed a virtual
monopoly over educational and political capital points more to the set-
tler societies of Australia and New Zealand. Indeed, it is tempting to
conclude that the very weakness of the indigenous population’s position
and the security of the settlers served to mitigate the violent zero-sum
game of white minority rule seen elsewhere. Instead, Trépied shows,
what emerged in New Caledonia was a novel attempt to overcome the
settler/indigenous binary through the creation of a political party, the
Union Calédonienne (UC). Between the 1950s and 1970s the UC
forged a successful electoral alliance between Kanaks and ‘petit colons’—
lower and middle-income settlers—by fusing the language of class (sol-
idarity against ‘big business’ interests) and indigenous rights (full legal
and political equality). Drawing on a wide range of writings, speeches
and oral history, Trépied is particularly attentive to how the colonial
question was successively reformulated in New Caledonia as a result of
both local and imperial developments. The advent of the French Union
initially cast the metropole as a guarantor of indigenous equality against
the colonial governor and settler racism. Later, in the context of the
1956 Loi-cadre, the UC promoted a more decentralising vision whereby
a ‘Caledonian people’ encompassing Kanaks and Europeans would enjoy
a federal relationship with the metropole. By the late 1960s, however, de
Gaulle’s repatriation of powers to Paris and the emergence of a new gen-
eration of university-educated Kanak militants saw decolonisation refor-
mulated once again: as a demand for political independence made in the
name of the indigenous population.
Part Two, ‘Mental Maps and the Territory’, examines the interven-
tionist colonial state. France’s ‘modernising mission’ reposed on particu-
lar readings, and mis-readings, of colonised societies which in turn set
the parameters for policy and practice. James McDougall takes us to the
heart of these issues in his discussion of the relationship between knowl-
edge production and the ends of empire. He does so through the career
and ideas of Robert Montagne (1893–1954), who combined anthropo-
logical research with service as an administrator, instructor and political
advisor on colonial affairs. From 1948 until his death he held a profes-
sorship at the Collège de France, and his work on Africa and the Middle
 Introduction    xxix

East would later influence the renowned sociologist Ernest Gellner. One
of the questions McDougall asks is whether, as some including Gellner
have suggested, the insights of Montagne’s research can stand apart from
the colonial context that produced them. The response provided in this
chapter draws on a careful confrontation of his published and private
papers, but also extends the discussion much further to consider how
an over-riding commitment to maintaining France’s empire fundamen-
tally shaped his understanding of modernity. Martin Shipway has dem-
onstrated how biographical approaches to individuals from the higher
echelons of the colonial administration can offer a window onto imperial
strategic calculations, and McDougall shows Montagne to be a particu-
larly rich source of insights.29
Vaunting ‘the cold reason of specialists’ against partisan politi-
cians, prejudiced settlers and wrong-headed nationalists, Montagne
made a familiar plea that experts were best placed to govern. His analy-
sis of change in colonial societies, particularly Morocco and the wider
Maghreb, was nonetheless grounded in serious research. At the same
time, McDougall shows how his understanding of post-war African soci-
ety was inseparable from his concern with practical, ‘useful’ knowledge
about how to manage modernisation in the service of empire. Quite how
distorting this lens was is shown by the political proposals which he for-
mulated in private, featuring authoritarian fantasies of social engineer-
ing that oscillated wildly between radical assimilationism and the revival
of Second Empire plans for an ‘Arab Kingdom’ in Algeria. Although
Montagne’s ideas looked dated by the 1950s, his influence on the intel-
lectual horizons of post-war colonial policy-making was tangible, not
least in denying any agency to African societies in the unfolding of mod-
ernising processes. Interestingly, though, McDougall observes how, in
contrast to the fundamental optimism of later ‘modernisation theorists’,
Montagne’s view of change in the global South was distinctly pessimis-
tic. The disruptive potential of modernisation in ‘immature’ societies dic-
tated ‘robust’ state responses to avert chaos and shore up French rule.
Indeed, his outlook underlines how, for all the modernising rhetoric, the
late colonial state was often anxious, brittle and defensive as it contem-
plated a rapidly changing world.
The next two chapters both examine case studies of the implemen-
tation of modernising visions, in rural and urban contexts respectively.
If French governments endeavoured to display a new solicitude for the
material welfare of colonial populations after the Second World War, the
xxx    Introduction

mental maps which guided their interventions were forged over dec-
ades of colonial rule. And as Neil MacMaster demonstrates in his anal-
ysis of French policy in Algeria’s Chélif region, modernisation schemes
expressed in the technocratic language of post-war planning were some-
times reiterations of colonialist ambitions dating back as far as the mid-
nineteenth century.
Across European empires rural hinterlands frequently experienced a
form of malign neglect. Dramatic, disruptive interventions—conquest,
violent repression and land spoliation—punctuated extended periods
during which the colonial state was a distant presence, conspicuous
only in levying taxation and transferring the costs of the reproduction
of labour onto peasant societies. In 1940s Algeria, French officials char-
acterised this situation as ‘under-administration’. But MacMaster shows
that the schemes they developed to address this ‘absence’ need to be
placed in a longer line of colonial thought on how to forcibly reconfig-
ure rural society. Examining successive phases of French policy from the
1840s to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), he draws
attention to what he calls the ‘ideology of settlement’. As the seasonal
transhumance of agro-pastoralists was undercut by land expropriation
in favour of settlers, the local population in the Chélif region repeat-
edly defied French attempts to achieve a form of ‘villagisation’ mod-
elled on metropolitan village communes. Instead, sedentarised families
adopted isolated farmhouses—a pattern of dispersed settlement per-
ceived as archaic and incompatible with the civilizational ‘progress
in stages’ preconised by colonial administrators. The issue of disper-
sal became all the more acute after the Second World War when plans
were drawn up for metropolitan-style aménagement du territoire (state-
directed development) because the extension of modern infrastructure
and basic welfare services to rural areas could only be viable above a cer-
tain population density. This revived interest in inducing village-dwelling
against the wishes of the population was ultimately made possible by the
French army’s brutal counter-insurgency operations during the War of
Independence. Whilst the particular configurations and contexts shifted,
MacMaster demonstrates how attempts to assert control over, and
impose modernising visions upon, a recalcitrant population were con-
stants across more than a century of French rule in Algeria.
The cumulative effects of rapid population growth, land confisca-
tion and social disaggregation under colonial rule placed rural societies
under massive strain. One result was an exodus towards towns and cities,
 Introduction    xxxi

a trend already apparent during the interwar period and which acceler-
ated rapidly after the Second World War. Migration from rural to urban
areas fed into the sense of crisis confronting French rule and which
underpinned much of Montagne’s analysis—despite the fact that urbani-
sation was a key marker on the ‘journey to modernity’ along which
France claimed to be chaperoning its colonies. Nowhere was this sense
of anarchic social change more apparent than in the sprawling bidon-
villes (shantytowns) of the Maghreb’s major cities. New arrivals from the
countryside faced un- and under-employment, demographic and spatial
disruption accentuated tensions with the European settler population
and an unpredictable social climate coupled with concerted nationalist
mobilisation represented a grave challenge for the French authorities.
Jim House analyses this complex situation and official attempts to
grapple with it through an illuminating comparison of shantytown devel-
opment in the cities of Casablanca and Algiers. His chapter draws on
extensive archival sources and interviews with former residents to chart
the theory and practice of slum clearance and rehousing between the
1940s and independence. In both cities, he shows how a range of objec-
tives underpinned the authorities’ belated focus on shantytowns: from
public health concerns and ambitions to acculturate the Muslim majority
population to French norms via the built habitat, to security considera-
tions and outright repression in the context of escalating political ten-
sions in the 1950s. House also develops the useful concept of ‘welfare
arenas’ to underline how the visually striking aspect of shantytowns made
them a key symbol for anti-colonial critics and the French government
alike. Nationalists of the Istiqlal party in Morocco, and the MTLD and
later FLN in Algeria, decried slums as damning testaments to the failure
of French rule; for their part, the French authorities sought to mediatise
clearance operations and new housing programmes as tangible proof of a
successful ‘modernising mission’.
Using neighbourhood-level case studies in each city, House is able
to draw out the interplay of various dynamics: the differing responses of
nationalists to the dilemma posed by colonial welfare initiatives; the role
of reformist municipalities in providing housing alongside the centrally-
directed Constantine Plan; the effect of entrenched income inequalities
in maintaining spatial segregation between the European and Muslim
populations. Ultimately late colonial initiatives in both cities proved
wholly inadequate in meeting local housing needs, not least because
shantytowns continued to absorb new arrivals from the countryside.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Coffee Grinder Repaired with Rubber Faucet Plug
A rubber piece that held the glass container on a wall coffee
grinder wore out, so that the glass would not stay in, putting the
grinder out of commission. The piece worn out was a thick rubber
washer, tapered at one end to form a hollow in the other, when in
place. I cut a section from the thick end of a standard rubber faucet
plug, and shaped it to the form of the desired washer. By removing
the old rivet carefully, I was able to use it in fixing the new washer
into place, and the mill was soon grinding merrily, as of old.—M. T.
C., Chicago, Ill.
 Coal Hod Made from Iron Pipe

When my coal hod became worn out, I made one of a length of 8-

in. galvanized-iron pipe, and found it to be handier and stronger than
the kind I had used. I fitted the pipe with an iron handle and with a
bail of strong wire, set in metal eyes riveted to the pipe. The upper
end was cut to the curved shape shown, and the lower end square,
and holes were punched along the edge for fastening it with nails to
the double bottom of wood. Three wooden pads were set under the
bottom, so that the hod stands easily on a spot that is not quite level.
—T. E. Roberts, Toronto, Canada.
 Frayed Shoe Laces Repaired with Pitch or Wax
When the tag or end fastening comes off of a shoe lace, take a
little black sealing wax, and press it carefully around the end of the
lace and shape it to a point. This will last a long time, and does away
with the annoyance of frayed lace ends.
 An Enameled Armchair Made of Wooden Strips
An armchair suitable for a dressing table was made by a handy
woman from pine strips. The photograph shows the simple and
pleasing lines of the construction. Aside from the board seat, only
three sizes of wood are used, 2 by 2 in., 1 by 2 in., and ¹⁄₂ by 2 in.
The pieces are fastened with screws, round-head brass ones being
used at exposed points. The seat is wider from side to side than from
front to back. Two coats of white paint and one of white enamel give
a good finish.
The Simple Construction of This Neat Armchair Makes It an Attractive Job
for the Amateur Craftsman
 The dimensions may be varied to suit individual needs. Sizes
suggested are: back, 32 in. high and 24 in. wide; side, 26 in. to top of
arm and 19 in. wide; seat, 17 in. from floor, 18 in. from front to back,
and 20 in. wide between the front supports. The stock is all planed
up square to dimensions, and sandpapered smooth. The ends
should be cut squarely in a miter box, with a fine-toothed saw, and
then sandpapered smooth, taking care not to round the ends.—A.
May Holaday, Chico, Calif.
 A Curling-Iron Heater

This Efficient Electric Heater for Curling Irons can be Made Quickly and Is
Safer to Use than an Open Flame

Heating of curling irons is a not uncommon source of fires, and to

minimize this danger, an electrical heating device is valuable. In the
arrangement shown, a long candle-shaped incandescent lamp is
mounted in a suitable can, or metal tube, to form the body of the
heater. This should be bright, both inside and out, and preferably
nickeled. Two irons can be heated by setting them in the holes in the
top. Four small brackets, soldered, as shown, around the edge of the
can, hold it to the base. A porcelain lamp receptacle is used,
mounted on a base block. Stain, fill, and finish the wood as desired.
In assembling the parts, screw the receptacle to the base, and
connect the flexible cord through a suitable hole. Screw in the lamp,
and fasten down the body.—John D. Adams, Phoenix, Arizona.
 A Stepmother for Incubator Chicks
The best imitation mother hen for incubator chicks that we have
found, is built by attaching rag strings to the bottom of an inverted
cracker, or similar, box, which accommodates 2 doz. chicks. The rag
pieces are torn 1 in. wide, from coarse cloth or gunny sacking, and
their loose ends just touch the floor. They are placed close together.
An inlet to the mother box is cut in the edge of it. The chicks huddle
in among the string rags, keeping safe and warm, whereas without
such an arrangement, they may crowd together too closely, and
some of them be smothered.—J. Cecil Alter, Salt Lake City, Utah.
 A Cardboard Writing and Drawing Pad

Manuscripts with Drawings may be Prepared Neatly and Quickly by the Use
of This Homemade Writing Pad

Where neatness is desired in the writing of themes, manuscripts,

etc., especially if sketches are set into the copy, a homemade writing
and drawing pad is useful. The one shown in the sketch can be
made easily, and is a handy device for school children as well as
older persons. The paper is placed under the guide strips, as shown,
and is moved along under the sliding straightedge as desired.
Drawing instruments can be used handily along the straightedge, as
indicated. The pad is built up as detailed in the sectional views. The
general dimensions can be varied. The bottom piece is ¹⁄₈-in. cloth
board. The second layer is ¹⁄₃₂ in. thick and of cardboard; the next is
¹⁄₁₆-in. cardboard, and the upper layer is ¹⁄₈-in. cloth board, similar to
the straightedge. The latter rests on the projecting guides for the
paper, and is set between the shaded sidepieces.—R. S. Edwards,
Walla Walla, Wash.
 Homemade Shoulder-Pack Tent
By J. D. BOYLAN

Afterfinding
sleeping under various kinds of canvas coverings and not
any of them entirely to my liking, I made the tent shown in
the illustration, which proved quite satisfactory. It is of light weight,
easily set up or taken down, and when buttoned closely is practically
rain, wind, and bug-proof. The cost of materials necessary for
making it is comparatively slight. I use it not only as a sleeping tent
but also as a carry-all in packing camping equipment. The canvas is
supported by frames made of pliable branches cut in the woods.
 Stakes, Rope Braces, and Supporting Poles are Not Required for This
Shoulder-Pack Tent, the Supports being Cut at the Camp

The layout for the canvas is shown in the detailed drawings. The
sections for the ends are made of three pieces, one for the ground
and two, divided vertically, for the end covering. The ground section
of the main portion of the tent and the covering are made in one
piece, 6 ft. wide, joined at the middle, as shown. The adjoining edges
A are sewed together and the edges B, which are set at the ridge of
the tent, are sewed, after the other pieces are joined. Brass
grommets are fitted in the canvas, as indicated, and the points of the
supporting frames pass through them in driving the supports into the
ground. The shoulder straps C are placed so that they are in position
when the tent is folded, and rolled into a pack. Other equipment may
be placed inside of it. The tent supports D are pointed at the ends E,
and are twisted together at the top. The ridge pole F steadies them
and holds the canvas at the middle.
To set up the tent, lay the canvas flat on the ground and place the
supports, twisted together, through the grommets. Spring them into
the ends of the canvas, and insert the ridge pole by springing it
between the supports. The canvas is 8-oz. duck, and the fastenings
used are snap buttons; buttonholes, buckles, or harness snaps may
also be used.
 Kitchen for Hikers
By PRESTON HELLER

W ith a view to provide all the needs of a commissary department for

36 boys for a period of four days, either on a hike or in a
permanent camp, the kitchen illustrated was constructed. As it is
placed on two wheels, which are removed when the kitchen is in
use, it can be moved from one day’s camp to another by attaching it
to the rear of a horse-drawn wagon by means of a shaft. When the
wheels are removed the entire outfit rests on legs, which are swung
down from the bottom. The sides and one end are opened by
swinging one half up and resting it on the top, while the other half
swings down to a horizontal position where it is used as a work
board, making all parts easily accessible.
The outside dimensions of the kitchen, when closed and in the
form of a large box on wheels, are 5 ft. 3 in. long, 3 ft. wide, and 2¹⁄₂
ft. high. The main feature of this entire kitchen is its compactness. At
the front, and extending about 1 ft. back, is a kitchen cabinet where
the plates, sugar, salt, flour, etc., are kept in separate compartments.
Here also are found the necessary cooking utensils, such as bread
knives, butcher knives, cleaver, cooking spoons, pancake turner,
sieves, large forks, lemon squeezer, etc.; and on the shelves of
galvanized iron small boxes and packages of baking powder, cocoa,
etc., are placed. This entire compartment, as well as all others where
food is handled and prepared, is lined with No. 28 gauge galvanized
iron which makes sanitation a feature also.
Upon passing around to one side there can be seen a large three-
shelved oven, 21 in. wide, which is heated by a gasoline burner.
Between the burner and the bottom of the oven are located coils of
pipe for heating water, and these coils are connected with a tank of
7-gal. capacity, located just above the oven. An air valve and glass
gauge are attached to the tank.
The next compartment to the rear is a large storage space,
extending all the way through the kitchen, and a 2¹⁄₂-gal. forged-
copper gasoline tank occupies a shelf in the upper portion of this
space. At the rear end along this side are located nickelplated
faucets which are connected with the hot-water tank mentioned; a 7-
gal., white enameled milk tank above; an 18-gal. cold-water tank,
and an ice-water tank, used when distilled-water ice can be secured.
These faucets all drain into a small sink, which, in turn, drains off
through an ordinary sink drain to a hole dug in the ground beneath it.
Practically the entire rear end of the kitchen is occupied by the large
water tanks, ice box, and milk tanks, with the exception of a small
space at the bottom where the silverware is kept in a drawer.
On the other side, and to the rear, two compartments above and
below the large water tank form excellent storage space for ham,
bacon, sausage, preserves, butter, etc., which need to be kept in a
cool place. Next in line is the other end of the large storage place
which extends through from the other side. Pans, pails, canned
goods, larger packages, etc., are kept in this space.
Immediately to the rear of the kitchen cabinet, on this side, are
located compartment shelves where the tin cups are kept, and
adjoining this is found a three-compartment steam cooker. By having
the cups and plates near this steam cooker, which is also heated by
a gas burner, there is less danger from rust, as they are kept
thoroughly dried. Wherever there is a gasoline burner the
compartment in which it is located is not only lined with galvanized
iron, but asbestos in sheets is placed on the inner side, so that the
heat will not ignite the interior packing or the woodwork. The tanks
are accessible from the top of the kitchen for filling and cleaning, and
are packed with ground cork.
The kitchen has shown its efficiency by giving satisfactory service
in camps of many members.
 Hungry Campers
Quickly Provided For
from the Compact,
Easily Transported
Kitchen, Shown with
Supply Cabinets on
Left and Utensil
Cupboards on Right
The Kitchen Outfit
Compacted into Its
 Cabinet, Mounted on
Wheels and under
Transport

The Portable Kitchen Outfit Opened, Exposing the Various

Compartments Arranged So as to Be Convenient: Above, Stove and
Cooking Compartments; Below, Pantry Compartment and Space for
Utensils
 Bird House Made of Kegs

Two ordinary nail kegs, or other small kegs, will make a good bird
house. They should be mounted on a square post with braces of
light wood, as shown. The openings for the entrance can be cut in
the ends or sides, as desired. If cut in the sides, be sure to make the
hole between two staves.