He sent an army in China and that created a big scandal in France. He was called the Tankinois because the news of the retreat shook his government and forced him to quit. The French won allowing France to conquer the Gulf of Tonkin in China. Jules Ferry was a proponent of colonization. Why? The inferior race be civilized by the superior class (ethnocentrism). It is not racism by nature. It is a strange imperialism He has a genuine feeling that France had a duty to dominate/ lead the rest the world.
This is why the France and US are always in competition because they both consider that they need to lead the world. Both France and England had the same idea of civilizing Africans. Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden”. The White man has to go to Africa and civilize it. The French ruled in a much more direct way than the English way. The English were in the colonies for money while the French had a bigger idea of civilization. They tried to create an elite in every colony: Ecole Normale in Africa. The elites would then go to France and be sent back to Africa to civilize the rest of Africa.
However, that created an adverse effect since the African elites analyzed the French arguments and used their return to Africa as a way to denounce the French system/ education. Race in 19th century France: group of people not linked by color. Race was a feeling of belonging: the rural race. However, the term race is mostly associated with country: French, German, African race Phrenology: a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind. Therefore, from that theory, you could recognize a criminal, Jew etc.
He talks about arguments that led France to colonize: economic (export markets), humanitarian, civilization and political imperialism (take as much territory as you can to be a better country than England). Colonization was also a way to distract the French from their obsession about Alsace-Lorraine. The nationalists (Maurise Barrès, Rochefort) were against colonization because they saw that it would distract France from its domestic affairs (Alsace-Lorraine). The French population was not really in favor of colonization at the time that Ferry delivered the speech.
This is why Ferry had to give this speech to promote colonization. 1831: Colonization Exposition The French MPs did not want colonization either. Fachoda Crisis: British and French fighting in Soudan After long negotiations, the French surrendered. That was a big blow for the French. Théophile Delcassé, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, surrendered because he wanted to have an alliance with the British. This Fachoda Crisis actually led France to win WWI thanks to the help of the British due to this alliance. What is the middle class?
You can be from the middle class and be worst off than the working class. Manual labor vs. Service ¼ of the French society lived with the money that it already had: reenters The middle class is the officers, teachers, employees of the mail telegraphs etc. For Marx, the shopkeepers and the craft makers are not industrial workers. They are the remains of an old world with little entrepreneurs. For him, these people are a threat to socialism because they are independent and do not try to group themselves with a particular class.
These people work individually and fight for these individual privileges. Marx did not agree with the idea of cooperative where you stay individualist but you benefit from the communist. He wanted the entrepreneurs and the craft makers to disappear. Zola wrote in the 1880s that the big cooperatives led the little entrepreneurs to their death. But was that really true? The big cooperatives were only reserved for the high class (bourgeois). The Grands Magasins were made for the rich and for the ladies so that men would not bother them and so that they could be between themselves.
