The loi-cadre and the colonial mind: reform between discourse, myth and history

This thesis is an examination of the loi-cadre of 1956 and its role in the process of decolonisation in the French Union. It uses the loi-cadre as lens through which the colonial past, and ideas about the colonial future, are studied. Its aim in doing this is to further understand the law as an expression of late colonial reform, the colonial discourse, and the colonial mind. Through this examination this thesis continues the reevaluation of the end of the French colonial experience that is underway within scholarship. This newer scholarship attempts to avoid the problem of ‘knowing the end of the story’ by looking closely at ideas and policies in place in what became the latter years of the French Union. I continue this trend by examing how the loi-cadre can be used to show the development of historical narratives. I use a methodology that employs concepts from Critical Discourse Analysis to show the role discourse played in shaping ideas about reform and the loi-cadre. In the first three chapters I use this methodology to show how officials conceptualised ideas about reform and made attempts to implement these ideas. Within the last chapter of the thesis I show the changes and continuities in the use of the colonial discourse that followed the superseding of the loi-cadre and the end of the French Union. From its assessment of the loi-cadre this thesis shows that closer attention to discourse reveals the provenance and evolution of ideas about reform. It also challenges the positioning of the law as part of a narrative of inevitable decolonisation. In doing this it presents a method of approaching and interrogating events that is designed to overcome problems of positionality that are encountered in studying decolonsation and the end of empire.