A Micro-History of French Colonial Expansion in the Late 19th Century: The Jeandet Affair and Its Ramifications

The end of the 19th century saw the often brutal and chaotic European expansion into the African continent, known as the Scramble for Africa. The French used their territory on the coast of Senegal, which they had controlled since the 17th century, as a base for their conquest of their emerging African empire. This was also a time of political instability in France where one scandal followed another. My study proposes to shed light on the early stages of French colonization of sub-Saharan Africa by examining in detail one such scandal that began in Podor, in Northern Senegal in 1890 and became known as the Jeandet Affair. 

Following the murder of the French local administrator, Abel Jeandet, and the investigation of his killer, a soldier by the name of Baidi Kacce, the French decided to execute Kacce and two other local African dignitaries whom he had accused of planning the assassination. Even under the colonial norms of the time, this act was illegal because the territory in which it took place was under French direct administrative control. A Métis political leader from the capital of Senegal, Saint Louis, Gaspard Devès, who objected to the French expansion into the continent, offered legal support to the widow of one of the executed dignitaries, so that she could sue the French administrators for murdering her husband. The widow accepted and filed a lawsuit in Saint Louis. The French acted fiercely to end this affair that highlighted the gap between the idea of the Civilizing Mission and the immorality and illegality of the French colonial conquest. After failing in Saint Louis, the case reached a Parisian court and stirred public debate in the French press about the validity of the colonial project. Finally, the French succeeded, through dubious legal means, to revoke the lawsuit before it reached trial in Paris. Nevertheless, as several studies on early colonization in the region demonstrate, the Jeandet affair was crucial in the formulation of later French colonial policy. 

In spite of this recognition of the affair's importance, to date no study has examined it in depth. 

By using the method of micro-history, and relying on the varied documents the affair produced, such as transcripts of interrogations, administrative reports and correspondence, press articles, and parliamentary debates, as well as on oral interviews with members of the Ba and Devès families, I propose to analyze this complex affair and examine the role of the different colonial and African actors in it. My study will contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of several major facets of early French expansion into Western Africa: Motives, characteristics and weaknesses of French colonizers; French debate about the colonial project; the Métis complex political struggles in this period; the varied responses of African leaders to French conquest; and finally, the agency of African women in a colonial reality controlled by French, Métis and African Men.