Former French colonies are not doing as well as former English colonies. Truth is that France has built nothing positive in its colonies. Yet, officially, French law claims that French colonialism had positive effects.

France not only, unlike Britain, did very little to integrate its colonies populations during colonial times, they also abandoned their colonies after they gained independence. And they supported the independent state dictators. Yet, Article 4 of the February 23, 2005 law states that “school curricula admit the positive role of France overseas, notably in North Africa”.

The law does, of course, not recognize France’s negative role in colonialism. It alienated local populations by not educating them, denying them citizenship, exploiting them and of course torturing them, and sometimes committing massacres, such as the May 8, 1945 massacres in Algeria. It also committed horrors during the Indo-China and Algeria wars of independence.

France also deported populations who opposed colonialism, exploited natural resources, and completely abandoned local populations. Lieutenant-Colonel de Montagnac wrote in a letter to a friend shortly after invading Algeria:

“All populations which do not accept our conditions must be despoiled. Everything must be seized, devastated, without age or sex distinction: grass must not grow any more where the French army has put the foot. Who wants the end wants the means, whatever may say our philanthropists. I personally warn all good militaries which I have the honour to lead that if they happen to bring me a living Arab, they will receive a beating with the flat of the saber... This is how, my dear friend, we must do war against Arabs: kill all men over the age of fifteen, take all their women and children, charged the buildings with them [i.e. probable allusion to military brothels], send them to the Marquesas Islands or elsewhere. In one word, annihilate all that will not crawl beneath our feet like dogs”

Though the February 23, 2005 law was repealed by Jacques Chirac, President Sarkozy issued statements saying that he will not excuse himself regarding France’s colonial past. That, despite the fact that former French generals, openly stated that they had tortured notably during the Indo-China and Algerian wars of independence.

An example of the economic negative effects of French colonialism was the agricultural policies in Vietnam. Thanks to new methods of irrigation, rice production quadrupled between 1880 and 1930, during the French colonial rule. Yet, the consumption of rice among the average Vietnamese peasant’s decreased, without substitution of other food. France then created an elite among the Vietnamese, and gave no land to the landless peasants. That scenario was similar in other former French colonies. The elite created by France is now the ruling elite in independent countries which are still oppressing their populations. And of course, France supports those elites.

France, if it refuses to apologize, should at least condemn dictatorship in its former colonial countries and encourage their democratization and economic development. They should acknowledge that the situation in former colonies is in part due to their colonial regime.