Complicity and resistance: French women's colonial nonfiction

Empire has traditionally been viewed as a masculine endeavor. Only in the past few decades, along with the rise of gender history, have scholars to a meaningful extent taken up the study of women and gender in the context of empire. This thesis examines the complexity of French women's intellectual thought about the colonies during the time period of 1900-1962, which includes both the climax and the breakdown of the French colonial empire. Many other studies of colonial fiction have prevailed in this field, addressing cultural history in particular, but women's nonfiction remains to be examined in detail and in relation to intellectual history. This study thus consists of three chapters, each a case study of a different French woman's nonfictional work. Through the lenses of gender and postcolonial theory, along with the aid of the literary theory of narratology, these women's navigations between complicity and resistance with regard to colonial ideology in their writings can be articulated in a more detailed way.;Grace Corneau, author of La femme aux colonies, published in 1900, is the first writer to be profiled. An American who married a French nobleman, she was a journalist and author who published this work after living in Indochina and Africa. Although Corneau was writing to recruit women to the colonies, she displays strategies of resistance related to her own gender ideology.;Clotilde-Chivas Baron, wife of a colonial administrator who lived en brousse in Indochina, is the second case study. A successful and award-winning fictional author, she also authored a comprehensive history of women in the colonies titled La femme francaise aux colonies. Written in 1929, her work demonstrates a retreat into bourgeois gender roles even as she has a more polemic purpose in writing---to correct misconceptions about the role of women in the colonies.;The third case study centers around Germaine Tillion, by far the most well-known and studied woman referenced in this thesis, who was involved in the French resistance, interned at Ravensbruck concentration camp, and then worked for the French government in Algeria during the Algerian War. A trained ethnologist who completed years of fieldwork in Algeria, she became an intellectual touchstone during the Algerian conflict for precisely this reason. Her works Les ennemis complementaires and L'Afrique bascule vers l'avenir, published in 1960 and 1957 respectively, analyze the situation during the Algerian war and recommend a course of action for the future. Although she takes up the cause of the Algerians out of duty to fight for the oppressed (since she had been a Nazi concentration camp), she nevertheless fails to indict the system of colonialism for causing the Algerian conflict.;The juxtaposition of these three writers helps bring to light the realities of French women who were directly implicated in the colonial enterprise's complicity and/or resistance to colonial ideology, embedding these works into the context of colonial writing.