The Indigénat and France's Empire in New Caledonia: Origins, Practices and Legacies by Isabelle Merle and Adrian Muckle (review)

Reviewed by: The Indigénat and France's Empire in New Caledonia: Origins, Practices and Legacies by Isabelle Merle and Adrian Muckle David Chappell The Indigénat and France's Empire in New Caledonia: Origins, Practices and Legacies, by Isabelle Merle and Adrian Muckle. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. isbn hardcover, 978-3-030-99032-9; e-book, 978-3-030-99033-6; 373 pages, notes, index, tables, figures. Hardcover, us $149.99; e-book, us $109.00. How does a democratic republic legally justify conquering someone else's country and treating the Indigenous people like an inferior race? In The Indigénat and France's Empire in New Caledonia: Origins, Practices and Legacies, two well-respected scholars of the French Pacific, Isabelle Merle of Aix-Marseille University in France and Adrian Muckle of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, have painstakingly documented the creation and practice of the Indigénat, a colonial policy that began in 1887 in Algeria, France's largest settler colony, and spread to New Caledonia. The authors also argue [End Page 353] that the coercive system of inequality, segregation, and exploitation laid the groundwork for ethnopolitics in the present day, especially in New Caledonia. When perpetrators of moral injustice leave recourse to future generations, the wounds of humiliation may never fully heal, as many so-called postcolonial societies continue to demonstrate around the world. Demography was a key issue because whites in both Algeria and New Caledonia were a minority of the population. Yet the settlers alone had civil rights and protection, as well as lands and labor from Indigenous inhabitants. In New Caledonia, Indigenous Kanak (the spelling is now officially invariable) were a numerical majority throughout their colonial history. As the authors show, only after World War II did Kanak finally receive French citizenship and suffrage. They supported a multiethnic political party that promoted reforms and dominated electoral politics. In the late 1950s, however, President Charles de Gaulle's regime began to subvert the country's new autonomy and facilitated a massive wave of new migrants during a profitable nickel mining boom. That regression revived Kanak fears of extinction, which had arisen during a population decline in the late nineteenth century due to epidemics, land losses, and defeat in resistance wars. In anglophone settler countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, those factors, including immigration, reduced Indigenous populations to a small fraction of the inhabitants. After a generation of Kanak had experienced new freedoms, they felt recolonized by the 1970s and demanded independence, but they had become a minority. The authors focus their study first on the Indigénat's origins, for example in the Code Noir on slavery under the Ancien Régime, its legal rationalizations, and spread, and second, on its actual practice and adaptations, mainly in New Caledonia, with reference to a few other French colonies such as Algeria, Indochina, and Tahiti. In the last two cases, its application was limited because preestablished locally written or missionary-introduced penal codes were recognizable and useful to French administrators. What was the policy exactly? It has been called a regime or a code, but the authors suggest that it was initially an exceptional, temporary decree to impose "penalization" on Natives (61). Due to differing racial biases toward aristocratic Polynesians in Tahiti and Melanesian "savage tribes" (74), it formalized a supremacist attitude toward Black people who were ranked lower on the human ladder than Africans, some of whom could be assimilated. The framework was essentially a fluctuating list of specific prohibitions for Natives only, and punishments, such as fines, imprisonment, or exile, which colonial governors or their subalterns could arbitrarily inflict without consulting a judiciary. Metropolitan critics called such "special powers" a "legal monstrosity" (50), and local missionaries and a Committee for the Defense of Natives also raised objections. But in 1886 Governor Louis Nouët argued, "France is a generous country; she was the first to proclaim the emancipation of the blacks; she [End Page 354] will never consent to destroy or enslave men submitted to our domination. There is another way that remains open: to civilise through work and education" (103). As for implementation, metropolitan inspectors blamed...

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