A mission to civilize

In the aftermath of the European Enlightenment and the progressive and liberal winds blowing through France and Iberia, the slogan of Liberté, égalité, fraternité got furled in France’s Third Republic of 1870, finally, after the French Revolution of 1789 that was aborted with the backlash of the monarchist and the ascendancy of Napoleon’s empire from Bonaparte to his nephew the III.

History buffs will recall that France was on the wrong side of history when the III sided with the Confederacy in the American Civil War, hoping that the Napoleonic Empire would extend its influence through Maximilian of Mexico.  The collapse of the empire and the ascendancy of the Third Republic ushered a confident and expansionist colonial civilization that lasted until 1940 when the Germans re-enacted the crossing of the Rhine.

Northern Europe took the Darwinian suggestion of evolutionary progress as appropriate for the Aryan race but not applicable to the rest of the world, particularly the natives of the colonies (a belief still propagated by the “Aryan Nation” in some parts of the United States, particularly against those of African descent). It is said that occupying forces of the British Empire, polite and desperately wanting to be liked, nevertheless did not see any hope for the rest of the uncivilized world getting properly cultured. The best of the Brits were well mannered, all right, but thought the natives in the natural selection process were doomed to remain inferior anyway.

Thomas Malthus, the Anglican cleric who saw that agriculture was not keeping pace with population, decreed one of the most devastating and prejudicial economic principles that still bedevils us today: that there is not enough resource to go around and in the natural selection process, the competitive predators triumph over the least aggressive and assertive of the specie.

Not so with the French. Their expansionist policy was characterized as a zealous “mission to civilize” with supposedly self-confident benevolent rule and education as the means of elevating social status from the barbaric to the cultured. With Romanticism replacing the ascendancy of the Enlightenment’s reason in the French Revolution, it righted itself in balancing the passion of the masses’ democratic popular front on the one hand, with the elitist aristocracy of the oligarchic educated and cultured upper class on the other, a dialectic that prevailed in the Third French Republic of 1870-1940.

I was not yet 10 when the battle of Dien Bien Phu gave the final accountability to French military presence in Indochina, followed by the eventual ouster of the French civilian domination of Algeria. Napoleonic expansion had only one way to go without serious opposition: south. After Corsica, Northern Africa was only a conquest away.  But if the Roman Empire brought the Spartan ethos through its Legionnaires, France also employed the diplomatic duplicity of Rome, so French colonial history was both a triumph of the refinements of diplomacy on the one hand, and brutish military occupation on the other.

In return, the cuisine and fragrance of French Indochina and the visual and forceful physicality of French West Africa would elevate Gallic culture into its eminent sensuality in the arts and recognizable relevance in the existential philosophy it embodies today.

July 14 (today in France) marks the country’s national day, historically commemorating the liberation of prisoners from the Bastille in the French Revolution.

Our cursory familiarity with things French began when my Teachers’ College taught me to sing our college anthem to the tune of La Marseillaies. The head honcho returned as one of the ilustrados (learned) who became a pencionado (state scholar), coming back from the U.S. with the stirring tune to rally the devastated Philippines in 1948 and sally forth the college he founded in the river plain of the Cagayan Valley into its preeminent position as one of the nation’s universities in the area.

I did not know the source then but a decade later, a fellow volunteer from France in a community development project in a village outskirt of Lima, Peru, South America, was so impressed by my ability to hum the tune that I became her closest friend in collegiality and affection (the remote isolation of the village aggravated the situation)!  We apprenticed in the art of French kiss, and we do not mean, chocolate candies!

Much later, a daughter in Manila was told by her Vietnamese teacher that she would never speak French like a native, perhaps a negative reinforcement tactic because my daughter later chose for her one-year study-abroad program to live in Avignon, Provence, finessing her Français, while Papa refined his appreciation for vin blanc et rose.

One of my French students at Shenyang Aerospace University exquisitely marched ahead of the foreign contingent during a sports fest in her Qi pao, and I restrained myself from imagining what she might do at the Moulin Rouge. Or Shanghai’s Bund. O la la!

The influence of the thinking and political actions that resulted from the Third French Republic considerably impacted the Americas and the rest of the world. The combination of military presence and extensive diplomacy remain the two-prong weapon, for good or ill, of the American Empire. Dropping words and phrases, on occasion, some people even have the impression I might be a Francophile!

Liberté, égalité, fraternité is nowhere close to being an attained national status, civilized or otherwise, but for the dreamers of France we declare: Vive la France!