Mission to Moralize PDF Download

Author: Troy Feay
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
"The global expansion of France during the nineteenth century is one of the most significant phenomena in modern French history. It was animated by an official creed, referred to as the "mission civilisatrice " or "mission to civilize," that established boundaries for what the French government would and would not do in the colonies. At the same time that the French empire was expanding, a religious revival was underway. It spawned a Catholic missionary movement that made France the most significant missionary-sending nation of the nineteenth century. Despite the magnitude of this movement, no studies have been made of the specifically Catholic interpretation of and contribution to the French doctrine of colonial expansion--the "mission to civilize." This study attempts to connect the missionary revival with French colonial expansion by focusing upon the issue that first bound together the religious and political conceptions of France's modern mission abroad--slavery--in the places where debate over its abolition was the locus of social and cultural contention: the colonies of Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, Reunion (Bourbon until 1848), and Senegal from 1815 to 1852. ...The Catholic "mission to moralize" among the slaves of the French colonies created an interdependance with the French government so that the national "mission to civilize" ultimately borrowed much of its content from its religious counterpart."--Abstract.