Prize-winning historian Robert Gildea dissects the legacy of empire for the former colonial powers and their subjects.

Volume 1: What made France into an imperialist nation, ruler of a global empire with millions of dependent subjects overseas? Historians have sought answers to this question in the nation's political situation at home and abroad, its socioeconomic circumstances, and its international ambitions. But all these motivating factors depended on other, less tangible forces, namely, the prevailing attitudes of the day and their influence among those charged with acquiring or administering a colonial empire. The French Colonial Mind explores these mind-sets to illuminate the nature of French imperialism. The first of two linked volumes, this book brings together fifteen leading scholars of French colonial history to investigate the origins and outcomes of imperialist ideas among France's most influential "empire-makers." Considering French colonial experiences in Africa and Southeast Asia, the authors identify the processes that made Frenchmen and women into ardent imperialists. By focusing on attitudes, presumptions, and prejudices, these essays connect the derivation of ideas about empire, colonized peoples, and concepts of civilization with the forms and practices of French imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors to The French Colonial Mind place the formation and the derivation of colonialist thinking at the heart of this history of imperialism. Volume 2: Violence was prominent in France's conquest of a colonial empire, and the use of force was integral to its control and regulation of colonial territories. What, if anything, made such violence distinctly colonial? And how did its practitioners justify or explain it? These are issues at the heart of The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism. The second of two linked volumes, this book brings together prominent scholars of French colonial history to explore the many ways in which brutality and killing became central to the French experience and management of empire. Sometimes concealed or denied, at other times highly publicized and even celebrated, French violence was so widespread that it was in some ways constitutive of colonial identity. Yet such violence was also destructive: destabilizing for its practitioners and lethal or otherwise devastating for its victims. The manifestations of violence in the minds and actions of imperialists are investigated here in essays that move from the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s to the disintegration of France's empire after World War II. The authors engage a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the violence of first colonial encounters to conflicts of decolonization. Each considers not only the forms and extent of colonial violence but also its dire effects on perpetrators and victims. Together, their essays provide the clearest picture yet of the workings of violence in French imperialist thought.

What made France into an imperialist nation, ruler of a global empire with millions of dependent subjects overseas? Historians have sought answers to this question in the nation?s political situation at home and abroad, its socioeconomic circumstances, and its international ambitions. But all these motivating factors depended on other, less tangible forces, namely, the prevailing attitudes of the day and their influence among those charged with acquiring or administering a colonial empire. The French Colonial Mind explores these mindsets to illuminate the nature of French imperialism. ø The first of two linked volumes, Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encountersøbrings together fifteen leading scholars of French colonial history to investigate the origins and outcomes of imperialist ideas among France?s most influential ?empire-makers.? Considering French colonial experiences in Africa and Southeast Asia, the authors identify the processes that made Frenchmen and women into ardent imperialists. By focusing on attitudes, presumptions, and prejudices, these essays connect the derivation of ideas about empire, colonized peoples, and concepts of civilization with the forms and practices of French imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors to The French Colonial Mind place the formation and the derivation of colonialist thinking at the heart of this history of imperialism.

Bridging gaps between intellectual history, biography, and military/colonial history, Barnett Singer and John Langdon provide a challenging, readable interpretation of French imperialism and some of its leading figures from the early modern era through the Fifth Republic. They ask us to rethink and reevaluate, pulling away from the usual shoal of simplistic condemnation. In a series of finely-etched biographical studies, and with much detail on both imperial culture and wars (including World War I and II), they offer a balanced, deep, strong portrait of key makers and defenders of the French Empire, one that will surely stimulate much historical work in the field.

Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

When Anglo-Americans looked west after the Revolution, they hoped to see a blank slate upon which to build their continental republic. However, French settlers had inhabited the territory stretching from Ohio to Oregon for over a century, blending into Native American networks, economies, and communities. Images of these French settlers saturated nearly every American text concerned with the West. Edward Watts argues that these representations of French colonial culture played a significant role in developing the identity of the new nation. In regard to land, labor, gender, family, race, and religion, American interpretations of the French frontier became a means of sorting the empire builders from those with a more moderate and contained nation in mind, says Watts. Romantic nationalists such as George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and Lyman Beecher used the French model to justify the construction of a nascent empire. Alternatively, writers such as Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Hall presented a less aggressive vision of the nation based on the colonial French themselves. By examining how representations of the French shaped these conversations, Watts offers an alternative view of antebellum culture wars.

This landmark collection by an international group of scholars and public intellectuals represents a major reassessment of French colonial culture and how it continues to inform thinking about history, memory, and identity. This reexamination of French colonial culture, provides the basis for a revised understanding of its cultural, political, and social legacy and its lasting impact on postcolonial immigration, the treatment of ethnic minorities, and national identity.