Discourse on Colonialism

Césaire remarks that Europe’s colonial violence has advanced from the methods and logic of oppression used by Hitler and the SS. It now includes “Christian virtues” (47), which Césaire argues is a false moral reasoning for colonial violence. This moral reasoning consists of “fine phrases” and “conventional words” (48) used to disguise the brutality of colonial violence, a quality that Césaire identifies with the bourgeoisie.

Césaire gives examples of different bourgeois thinkers who have used moral reasoning to justify colonial violence. Joseph de Maistre, a French philosopher and thinker, has written that Christopher Columbus was right in assessing that European contact with the indigenous people of the Americas cast an “anathema” (49) or curse upon the onlooker’s soul and body. Another French anthropologist and theoretician of eugenics and racialism, Georges Vacher de Lapouge has stated that colonization is the goal of producing “a superior race, leveled out by selection” (50). Ernest Psichari, a French religious thinker and soldier writes similarly that “[w]hen a superior race ceases to believe itself a chosen race, it actually ceases to be a chosen race” (50). This argument for maintaining social distance between colonizers and colonized people is further expanded upon by Auguste Émile Faguet, who argues that colonization prevents “regression, a new period of darkness and confusion, that is, another Middle Ages” (50).