Anticolonialism and Shifting Racial Sensitivities: A Case Study on a Controversial Lecture at the École Coloniale in Early Twentieth-Century France

While the process by which "things once allowed are now reproved" can be empirically tracked through longitudinal studies of educational materials (Elias, 1939) or declared values (Inglehart & Norris, 2003), the social forces driving these shifts are often more postulated than demonstrated. In particular, more inclusive sensibilities toward subaltern groups are frequently explained through theories of cultural change that sometimes under-examine the role of contingent emancipatory struggles and actions (Linklater, 2016).

Drawing on the investigation of the increasingly contested "French Colonization" class at the École Coloniale from 1890 to 1927, this communication sheds light on how less unequal power dynamics and collective action from outsiders led to a fragile yet existing constraint towards self-constraint when addressing racialized and colonized people from the 1900s onwards. First, I present the contextual elements that led the known racialist Louis Vignon to lecture at the École Coloniale. This higher education institution, aimed at training future colonial administrators (Collier, 2018), welcomed a diverse student body from the Antilles, West Africa, Indochina and Metropolitan France, who recurrently opposed the course content, both for its reliance on racialist theories and its overtly anti-assimilationist stance on the colonial project. Based on the available archives of the "Vignon incident", I then explore how these protests took shape up until 1927, and how both the administration and the professor navigated these critiques.

In sum, I highlight how shifting power dynamics and growing interdependence with colonized elites, even at the heart of the colonial project, exerted ongoing pressure on socially acceptable attitudes and discourse. However, this example of extra-European influences creating new demands for affective regulation reveals more about European cultural mutations than on the brutal reality of the colonial order, which was increasingly masked by a modernized vocabulary.