Drunken states: temperance and French rule in Cote d'Ivoire, 1908-1916.

The fin-de-siecle French finance minister Maurice Rouvier once stated that France was "not rich enough to fight alcoholism." (1) Alcohol helped to underpin the French economy, while contributing in its own way to the cultural efflorescence of the belle epoque. But it was even more significant in providing a substantial and reliable income to cash-strapped colonial governments struggling to turn recently conquered territories into fully functioning states. In 1911, for example, alcohol was responsible for 46 per cent of the import duties collected in the West African colony of Cote d'Ivoire. (2) Yet in November 1912 the governor of Cote d'Ivoire, Gabriel Angoulvant, addressed a meeting of fellow governors with the aim of persuading them to extend a temperance campaign he had begun in his territory to the rest of the French West African federation--and all in the name of the well-being of a population that he had recently and systematically battered into submission during a violent campaign of "pacification."

Angoulvant's initiative appears especially anomalous in the light of David T. Courtwright's assertion that the taxation of stimulants was "the fiscal cornerstone of the modern state, and the chief financial prop of European colonial regimes." (3) His policy certainly contrasts those of high officials in nascent colonial states elsewhere in Africa, whose inclination at that time was to resist temperance movements. Indeed, Simon Heap has argued for British Nigeria that "the one group ... who never questioned the morality or utility of the liquor trade was the colonial administration." Emmanuel Akyeampong's work on Cote d'Ivoire's eastern neighbor, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), broadly confirms this general point. (4) Given that much of the now copious literature on alcohol in Africa is focused on formerly British-held territory, attention to this state-sanctioned temperance movement in Cote d'Ivoire in the 1910s raises the possibility that it might tell us something about differing European approaches to the "alcohol problem" in colonial Africa. (5)

An additional aim of this article, however, is to make a contribution to the equally large volume of writing on drink and the French in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of this period have explored the social functions of alcohol in France and how alcoholism came to be identified with particular "problem" groups in French society, as well as the way drink's happier associations allowed it a privileged place in French national identity. (6) Few of these historians, however, have included France's overseas empire within their field of vision, and studies of the place of alcohol in individual French colonies also remain uncommon. One exception is Erica Peters' recent article on the alcohol monopoly in French-ruled northern Vietnam. Peters shows that metropolitan and colonial debates on alcohol often interacted; Vietnamese opponents of the monopoly, for example, were well attuned to the arguments used by temperance advocates in France. (7)

By focusing on the temperance campaign launched by Governor Angoulvant in French Cote d'Ivoire in 1912, therefore, I aim in this article to provide a link between colonial and metropolitan histories of drink, and to make a contribution to both. My analysis has been guided by a few basic questions. First, why among all the colonies that made up French West Africa should a temperance campaign have arisen first in Cote d'Ivoire, and why did it surface in 1912? Second, how can we explain the contrast between Angoulvant's desire to combat alcoholism and the reluctance of the government in the neighboring British colony of the Gold Coast to pursue a similar campaign? Finally, was there anything distinctively "French" about temperance as promoted in Cote d'Ivoire, and did France's status as a major producer of alcohol, especially wine, influence Angoulvant's thinking in any way? In addressing these questions I hope to say something about the evolution of the colonial state in French West Africa as the era of conquest came to a close, and to draw attention to the ways in which economic, social, and cultural ideas interacted and shaped French policies on social problems in the colonies.

Alcohol and insubordination 

Gabriel Angoulvant took possession of the post of lieutenant-governor of Cote d'Ivoire in May 1908. By this time, at the age of 36, he had already served fourteen years as a colonial administrator, occupying eleven different posts in four continents. This included two brief stints as a governor, first in the North American islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and then in France's possessions in India. Angoulvant's posting to Cote d'Ivoire, however, was his first chance to govern a substantial territory. He did not waste the opportunity. Reversing the trend of his peripatetic career to that point, Angoulvant held his position in Cote d'Ivoire until 1916. Subsequently he served as governor-general of both French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. (8)

The openly ambitious Angoulvant was not widely liked by fellow members of the colonial service. A stocky man with a bristling black mustache, Angoulvant also had an eye defect that, according to one observer, left one unsure who he was looking at. Even colleagues with reason to dislike Angoulvant conceded that he was intelligent and dynamic, though some often found his manner graceless and unworthy of a holder of high office. Angoulvant's defining trait among fellow administrators, however, was a tendency to miserliness. This personality flaw did not go down well in an environment where everyone was expected to pitch in, and provided the substance for numerous anecdotes that were doubtless retold over the early-evening aperitifs of the French community in Cote d'Ivoire. (9)

Angoulvant's writings about Africans and the best way to develop Cote d'Ivoire readily bear out his characterization as "the arch-paternalist," as the historian Michael Crowder phrased it. (10) Angoulvant's perception was that Ivoiriens lived in a state of nature, "guided almost exclusively by instinct." (11) In a circular he sent to administrators in Cote d'Ivoire soon after his arrival in 1908, Angoulvant wrote: "Our subjects must be led to progress despite themselves, as some children are educated despite their reluctance to work." (12) Such statements were common enough as France began to impose its authority on newly acquired territories in Africa and elsewhere. What particularly distinguished Angoulvant, though, was the muscularity of his paternalism. He was more than prepared to use violence to achieve his vision of progress in Cote d'Ivoire.

Angoulvant's immediate predecessor as governor of Cote d'Ivoire, Francois-Joseph Clozel, had pursued since 1902 a policy of what was described as "pacific penetration" of French interests. (13) Clozel's tenure was marked by a desire to make significant use of local chiefs in the structure of colonial power, along with a general belief that good governance depended on having some ethnographic knowledge of those being governed as well as some linguistic skill. Clozel's friend Maurice Delafosse, who went on to be France's most prominent colonial ethnographer, was the exemplar of this approach to local administration, though Clozel himself also produced a substantial body of ethnographic research. (14) French policy in this period was by no means entirely "pacific," but violence was rarely Clozel's first option and the colony gradually began to realize some of its commercial potential.

Angoulvant's opinion when he took over in 1908, however, was that much of Cote d'Ivoire was still beyond the reach of French influence. In his judgment, incomplete submission to French rule implied incomplete susceptibility to development. He also pointed out that the burden of taxation fell upon those who had submitted to French authority, while others got away without paying. Angoulvant therefore identified his first task as governor as being "to check every sign of insubordination or ill-will." (15) What this meant, in practice, was the violent repression of any remaining resistance to French authority, followed by an attempt to introduce a much more direct and invasive form of rule. Angoulvant was determined, for example, to restrict the role played by African notables in the administration of the colony.

Angoulvant saw insolence, insubordination, and disorder among Africans wherever he looked. In his book La Pacification de la Cote d'Ivoire he recalled what had happened in 1903 when the then governor-general of French West Africa, Ernest Roume, visited the town of Dabou in southern Cote d'Ivoire. Angoulvant wrote that local chiefs had received Roume "drunk for the most part, without any sign of deference, hat on head, pipe in mouth, and seated." (16) Angoulvant seems to have regarded alcohol as very much a part of the disorder he set out to "cure" by imposing French authority on Ivoiriens, for the sake of what he described as "the liberty of all." (17)

The image of the drunken African chief became a stereotype in French writing. (18) Nevertheless, the connection this stereotype made between alcohol and authority had some basis in socio-cultural reality in West Africa. In short, powerful men favored powerful drinks. For chiefs in Cote d'Ivoire, as Timothy C. Weiskel has put it, "the consumption of European gin became an attribute, indeed almost a necessity, of office." (19) The chiefly preference for imported liquor over locally produced fermented drinks like palm wine was in effect a symbolic demonstration of their higher status. In the coastal towns of the British Gold Coast, for example, Emmanuel Akyeampong has shown that local chiefs increasingly regarded the consumption of European liquor by migrant workers as a challenge to their authority. Sometimes this challenge was more than symbolic, because the bars where migrant workers drank and socialized often became focal points for political activity. This led some chiefs to collaborate with Christian missionaries in a developing temperance movement in the Gold Coast, although the chiefs continued to defend the use of alcohol for ritual purposes, just as their missionary allies continued to use alcohol in their own rituals. (20)

Until the late 1920s, however, the British colonial government in the Gold Coast consistently resisted arguments in favor of restricting the importation of alcohol. This resistance is most readily explained by the significant contribution made to the colonial economy by duty on alcohol. In 1912, for example, 38 per cent of the total government revenue of the Gold Coast came from imports of alcohol. (21) The total amount of alcohol imported to Cote d'Ivoire was much less than to the Gold Coast. The duty derived from alcohol in French West Africa before World War One was nonetheless considerable, and represented a similar proportion of federal revenues as in the Gold Coast. If alcohol meant money for the French, we need to ask why a government-led temperance campaign was launched in Cote d'Ivoire in 1912.

Governor Angoulvant himself did not abstain from alcohol, but several elements in his background suggest possible origins for an interest in temperance. For example, Angoulvant claimed to draw personal inspiration from the career of General Joseph Gallieni, who in addition to being a key theorist and practitioner of "pacification" in Indochina and Madagascar was a leading temperance advocate. (22) Angoulvant's status as a Freemason may also have exposed him to pro-temperance currents of thought; alcoholism was a frequent topic of discussion in lodges in France around the time he was posted to Cote d'Ivoire. (23) When lobbying to advance his career Angoulvant also came into contact with republican representatives of the colonial pressure group in the French parliament, who sometimes used their influence to try to shape a more combative policy on alcohol in the colonies. (24)

These possible connections do not even take into account the existence of an increasingly active temperance movement in France at the time Angoulvant became governor. The largest temperance group, the Ligue nationale contre l'alcoolisme, founded in 1895, increased its membership from 50,000 in 1906 to 125,000 in 1914 during a period marked by rising French consumption of powerful drinks like absinthe. (25) This organization also had a special "colonial committee," headed by Baron Joseph du Teil, which lobbied both nationally and internationally (alongside similar groups in other countries) for tougher government measures against the liquor trade in Africa. (26)

Angoulvant therefore came from a milieu in which alcohol abuse was often discussed. Mere proximity to such ideas, however, cannot explain the way his interest in alcohol manifested itself, especially with the need for revenue so crucial to a state barely fifteen years old. In fact I will show that a logical economic case could be made for temperance in Cote d'Ivoire in a way it could not in its neighboring British colony, the Gold Coast. Further, I will argue that where Akyeampong can write of the Gold Coast that "temperance politics took a back seat to economic development" under Governor Guggisberg between 1919 and 1927, (27) in Cote d'Ivoire in the 1910s temperance and economic development were effectively synonymous, part of the same process of extension of French rule.

Tax regimes and the alcohol question

In comparing the governments of the Gold Coast and Cote d'Ivoire one has to take into account a basic structural difference. While the Gold Coast was in effect governed independently of other British colonies, Cote d'Ivoire constituted part of a federation, French West Africa, which was headed by a governor-general based in Dakar. By 1912 this federal structure linked the economy of Cote d'Ivoire to the economies of five other very diverse territories. (28) Until 1904 each colony kept its own customs revenues, which could represent up to two-thirds of its annual budget. But from 1904 the governor-general obliged each colony to pass on its customs revenues to the federal government in Dakar. Each colony would then receive back a federal allocation to its annual budget. (29)

The aim of this reform was to redistribute wealth from the richer colonies on the coast to the poorer, landlocked ones. But Cote d'Ivoire was one of the losers from the reform, because it received less money back from the government-general than it had previously received from customs duty. (30) Under the new regime, the government of Cote d'Ivoire had to make up the revenue it had lost by other means. Among the methods it used was an increase in fees paid to the colonial state by small traders, such as bar-owners. (A similar measure had successfully been used to reduce the number of drinking establishments in French cities, beginning in Lyons, whose pro-temperance mayor, Victor Augagneur, later became governor-general of Madagascar. (31)) But more significantly, the government greatly extended its collection of personal taxation from Ivoirien subjects. The impot de capitation or head tax was first introduced in 1901--the Gold Coast, by contrast, did not levy such a tax until 1936 (32)--but it now took on particular importance. The amount of head tax collected in Cote d'Ivoire doubled as a percentage of the colony's budget between 1904 and 1908. (33)

When Angoulvant took over as governor in 1908 he faced another looming problem in the heavy dependence of the Ivoirien economy on the export of wild rubber. Competition from plantations in British Malaya represented a serious threat to the future of this industry. The introduction of cash crops such as cocoa and coffee suggested one possible solution, especially as cocoa was already proving successful in the Gold Coast. The transition to the production of cash crops had in fact already been anticipated by a small number of Ivoirien planters, who began their own experiments with cocoa production. (34) The majority, however, were generally reluctant to embrace these new forms of production, which did not produce a profit for several years, especially when they could fall back on traditionally successful forms of industry such as gold mining or cloth weaving. (35)

Angoulvant disregarded these concerns and instead set out the aims of a new approach to government in Cote d'Ivoire, in which France's will was to be imposed on recalcitrant Ivoiriens and French authority would henceforth be "beyond discussion" (indiscutable). (36) An increase in the head tax, tax in kind in the form of labor service, and the forcible introduction of cash crops were key elements in this more direct form of rule. Administrators such as Maurice Delafosse and Albert Nebout, who had tried to build links with Ivoirien society for over a decade and disapproved of Angoulvant's strong-arm tactics, were either marginalized or effectively hounded out of the colony. (37)

Angoulvant's measures provoked renewed armed resistance to French rule among the Baule people of central Cote d'Ivoire. This resistance was ruthlessly suppressed, and stories of atrocities committed by French troops found their way back to France. Some commentators worried that with these abuses Cote d'Ivoire might be becoming another Congo Free State, and there was widespread condemnation of Angoulvant's tactics in the colonial press in France. Fearing for his life as Ivoirien resistance reached its peak in 1910 Angoulvant went so far as to install an iron door to his bedroom in the capital, Bingerville. Despite intense pressure for him to be removed from his position as governor, however, Angoulvant somehow weathered the storm and held on to his job. He was especially grateful for the support of the governor-general of French West Africa, William Ponty, a fellow Freemason whose tenure in Dakar ran concurrently with Angoulvant's time in Cote d'Ivoire. (38)

By mid-1911 Ivoirien resistance had been crushed. The Baule suffered war fines, widespread resettlement, and head tax increases of as much as sixty per cent. By this time, as Weiskel has pointed out, the indigenous economy had been so comprehensively wrecked by war that Angoulvant could now argue that his policy of "wholesale administrative intervention in the economic affairs of the colony" was a simple necessity. (39)

As brutally as Angoulvant's program of "economic development" was enforced, we nonetheless need to recognize that this policy was inextricably interlinked with a program of what one might call moral reform. The increasing use of direct taxation can, in the case of Cote d'Ivoire, be tied to an increasingly direct and authoritarian approach to colonial government. But taxation was also perceived as capable of having a "civilizing" influence. In 1911, for example, Governor-General Ponty wrote that the "native" saw taxation as "proof that he is beginning to rise on the ladder of humanity, that he has entered upon the path of civilization." (40) Angoulvant more bluntly made the connection between tax, civilization, and economic development:

  It is an established fact that in all colonies tax simultaneously
  plays a productive and a morally developmental role. The native, who,
  before our arrival, had no needs that he could not satisfy almost
  immediately with the resources that nature bestowed upon him, must be
  prompted to produce.... There is no doubt ... that the obligation for
  the native to pay a higher amount of head tax would be extremely
  efficient, the tax being, I repeat, in the present state of native
  mentality, the best stimulant to indigenous energy. (41)

A different kind of stimulant was at issue when Angoulvant considered the question of alcohol use among Africans. Some uses of alcohol were obviously incompatible with Angoulvant's vision of Africans as tax-payers in a cash economy. For example, Europeans had commonly used gin as a form of payment to African migrant workers, such as those involved in railroad construction. In his first year as an administrator in Cote d'Ivoire in 1896, Francois-Joseph Clozel recorded paying off some boatmen with several bottles of "this dreadful gin from Hamburg." (42) Angoulvant resolved to put a stop to this kind of transaction, decreeing that agents of the French administration should no longer use gin as a form of payment. (43)

In 1912 Angoulvant suggested to his fellow governors and the governor-general that alcohol carried a deeper economic threat. First, he pointed to research that he said indicated that alcoholism led to the degeneration of African peoples. Here Angoulvant could expect his audience to be aware of a long tradition of theory in France that connected alcoholism to a decrease in fertility rates and the quality of offspring, ideas that had been popularized in novels like Emile Zola's L'Assommoir. (44) Angoulvant also drew attention to recent research that suggested a link between alcoholism and the spread of tuberculosis. (45)

Above all, Angoulvant argued that alcoholism decreased the value of the indigenous workforce. A drunken worker was not a reliable tax-payer, still less an efficient worker. In this regard his remarks were consistent with a growing understanding both within the colonial administration and among colonial theorists that labor needed to be protected and harnessed effectively, just as any other valuable resource. (46) For good measure Angoulvant cited several alarming cases involving absinthe-crazed soldiers with guns. These examples revealed his basic concern with order and solidified a connection between alcohol abuse and criminality that was well established in metropolitan discourse. (47) They did not, however, fully represent the underlying economic rationality of his belief that more needed to be done to regulate the supply and use of alcohol in West Africa. (48)

The governor-general, William Ponty, was not naturally inclined to pursue a temperance policy. By nature somewhat cautious and pragmatic, Ponty understood the potential financial implications better than anyone: the revenue from duty on alcohol across the federation, after all, flowed into his budget. He pointed out that the federation had lost three million francs as a result of successive tariff increases in 1905 and 1907, following international pressure to combat the spread of alcoholism in Africa. (49) When new tariff increases were proposed in 1910 he told the colonial minister in Paris that while he agreed with a rise in tariffs from a humanitarian standpoint, a new colonial state like French West Africa had special economic needs. Ponty argued that alcohol was helping to pay for the expansion of "our civilizing mission," with all the benefits that in his view this brought Africans. (50)

In this way Ponty separated the "war on alcohol" (la guerre a l'alcool) from the administration's stated objective to improve the general condition of Africans. He was aware, however, that the expansion of trade--as well as new means of communication, like railways--might carry ever greater (and cheaper) quantities of low-grade liquor to people France had sworn to protect from their own "carefree natures and impulses." (51) The alcohol question clearly produced some inner tension between the paternalist instincts of administrators like Ponty and their understanding of how best to "civilize" Africa.

In certain respects, however, the argument that alcohol was paying for French expansion was less persuasive by 1912 than it would have been ten or even five years earlier. By this time French West Africa had effectively reached its geographical limits, and the French had put down the most serious outbreaks of resistance to their rule, not least in Cote d'Ivoire. The largest area in French West Africa that had yet to be "pacified" was the strongly Islamic colony of Mauritania (to which alcohol imports were negligible). (52) By 1912, in other words, it made increasing sense to talk of a temperance campaign, and Ponty no less than the other governors in French West Africa eventually agreed to Angoulvant's arguments in favor of import tariff increases. They also agreed with him that there was a need to outlaw the sale of absinthe to Africans, and to exercise control over the quality of liquor imported into West Africa. Angoulvant clinched this argument by arranging for gin from Rotterdam and Hamburg, which made up the bulk of spirit imports, to be scientifically tested. The results found much of it to be impure and potentially dangerous. The governors also discussed the possibility of promoting less noxious forms of alcohol, particularly French wine, as we shall see later. (53)

Angoulvant's initiative was widely praised for its humanity by the same colonial press that barely three years earlier had condemned his violent tactics in the pacification of Cote d'Ivoire. (54) But in fact the two policies may be seen as continuous, since they were directed toward the same aim of instituting an economically rational form of colonial government in Cote d'Ivoire. Financial trends within the colony, moreover, seemed to favor the governor's approach; in 1913, receipts from the head tax on Ivoiriens surpassed the colony's customs revenues for the very first time. (55)

The link between temperance and the drive to develop the Ivoirien economy is demonstrated in the way local administrators took Angoulvant's message to Ivoiriens. In 1913, for example, administrators in the coastal district of Lahou warned local farmers and fishermen not to drink alcohol to excess at the same time as they gave them cocoa-palm seedlings or told them to increase their catch of fish from the lagoon. (56) Administrators were offered detailed guidance on how to explain the government's policies on alcohol to Ivoiriens in a manual published by Angoulvant and his director of indigenous affairs, Gaston Joseph. In keeping with the heavy-handed paternalism displayed in chapters on taxation and cocoa cultivation, the manual's chapter on alcohol--or rather alcoholism, for the emphasis was placed on drink's addictive properties--instructed administrators to convey the need for self-control and discipline. (57) Ivoiriens were to be told that when they drank they did not think beyond the fact that it made them feel good for the moment; they did not reflect on what alcohol might be doing to their health or their ability to reproduce. (Angoulvant's general view of Africans had evidently changed little since he became governor.) Administrators were encouraged to suggest to Ivoiriens that they "ask the woman who has been a gin-drinker how many children she has." They were also urged to point out that disorder and violence was often the consequence when drinkers of imported liquor lost their self-control. (58)

Ivoiriens were advised instead to spend their money more wisely, on clothes or on furnishing their huts. In addition they were warned not to overproduce palm wine, the drink one French missionary described as "the African Bordeaux." (59) This was another economic concern for the government, because the extraction of too much sap from palm trees in the production of palm wine destroyed trees that could otherwise supply palm oil. Palm oil was an exportable commodity and therefore of value to the French. (It was used as an industrial lubricant and in the manufacture of soap, for example. (60)) Administrators knew that whenever they increased the cost of imported alcohol, Africans in palm-growing regions naturally tended to compensate by increasing their production of palm wine. (61) Ivoiriens were told to manage this resource more carefully. (62) They were also told that people who drank too much palm wine lost their health and their strength. In the new regime, chiefs were to be given the responsibility of combating drunkenness. In this way Angoulvant sought to undermine African views of the connections between drink and power. (63)

The governor and the archangel 

As Angoulvant's administration intensified its program of economic development and its related temperance movement toward the end of 1913, a preacher from Liberia named William Wade Harris entered Cote d'Ivoire. Proclaiming that he had been sent by Christ to convert the fetish-worshipping peoples of West Africa, Harris passed quickly through coastal regions of Cote d'Ivoire into the Gold Coast. In September 1914 he reentered Cote d'Ivoire and his message of spiritual regeneration achieved the goal of widespread Ivoirien conversion to Christianity that until then had eluded the French Catholic missionaries who had been working in the colony since 1895. Perhaps as many as 200,000 Ivoiriens presented themselves to Harris for baptism. (64)

The Prophet Harris, as he came to be known, explained the purpose of his mission in the following terms to Father Joseph Hartz, acting superior of the Societe des Missions Africaines de Lyon, the Catholic missionary society that operated in Cote d'Ivoire:

  I am going through this country, driven by inspiration from On High. I
  must bring back the lost nations to Christ, and to do so must threaten
  them with worse punishments, so that they may allow themselves to be
  baptized and instructed by Men of God, both Catholic and Protestant. I
  must bring men to honor the Natural Law and the divine precepts, and
  especially the observance of Sunday, which is so much neglected. I am
  coming to speak for all the peoples of this country, White or Black.
  No abuse of alcohol. Respect for Authority. I tolerate polygamy, but I
  forbid adultery. Thunder will speak, and the Angels will punish the
  World if it does not hear my words, which interpret the Word of
  God. (65)

Two elements of this message were of special interest to the French administration in Cote d'Ivoire. Harris's injunctions to respect authority and not to abuse alcohol fitted in very well with Angoulvant's policies. Angoulvant also approved of Harris's attack on "fetish-worship," or animism, because he noted that opposition to French rule in Cote d'Ivoire had come largely from animist areas rather than the predominantly Muslim (and largely alcohol-free) north of the colony. The two men met at the governor's residence in Bingerville, and Angoulvant openly praised Harris's teachings when he met Ivoiriens on tours of inspection. (66) For Angoulvant, not evidently a religious man, Harris represented a convenient bridge to African society, facilitating the spread of his temperance message and his broader campaign of establishing French authority in Cote d'Ivoire. Harris even found it auspicious that Angoulvant shared a name with the Archangel Gabriel, a visitation from whom he claimed was the inspiration for his mission. Thus Angoulvant's administration briefly and unexpectedly acquired a divine aura. (67)

Several elements in Harris's personal background may have given him extra reason to place his temperance message to the fore. As a young man in Liberia, Harris, ethnically a Glebo, was particularly strongly influenced by his mother's brother, a Methodist minister who preached against alcohol and baptized him William Harris. (68) His working life, however, began on trading vessels that would take him as far south as Gabon. This was a form of labor typical of males from the Glebo and Kru ethnic groups that straddled Liberia's eastern border with Cote d'Ivoire. (69) Collectively known as "Kruboys" these migrant workers developed a reputation as heavy drinkers, and though he did not live the life of a Kruboy for long before returning to Liberia there is evidence to suggest that while he did so Harris participated fully in their way of life. (70)

Within Liberia the Kru identified themselves as a "great labor-supply people." (71) In Cote d'Ivoire under Angoulvant, however, French observers identified the Kru as precisely the group of people among whom alcoholism was most causing degeneration and depopulation; one medical report even described them as alcoholic "by nature." As a result their reputation and value as laborers was suffering, and other ethnic groups were superseding them in their work. (72) The particular circumstances of Harris's ethnic group--he referred to himself as a "Kruman"--may therefore have lent an added sense of urgency to his message of temperance.

This was not how he explained it to Father Peter Harrington, an Irish member of the Societe des Missions Africaines de Lyon whom he met in Liberia in 1916. During this encounter Father Harrington, a hospitable Irishman, offered Harris a glass of wine. Harris piously declined, explaining that "the Archangel Gabriel said to me: 'Harris, you must not touch wine or such things, neither must you follow the frivolities of the world.'" Harris did accept a cup of tea, however, and Harrington wrote a little mischievously that this seemed to prove that "this Archangel Gabriel of his ... must have had a Chinese rather than a French or Spanish or Italian taste--perhaps even commercial interests in the Far East." Whatever the case, he added, Harris "did do justice to the 'cup that cheers but not inebriates.'" (73)

Harris's success in spreading his message in southern Cote d'Ivoire rapidly eclipsed the efforts Catholic missionaries had made to win converts over the preceding two decades. (74) Temperance, in fact, had not been a particular concern of the Societe des Missions Africaines in Cote d'Ivoire. Insofar as the society had a policy on alcohol it was considered primarily a threat to internal discipline, and to the mission's reputation in colonial society. In 1908, for example, responding to accusations that reflected badly on the society, the superior of the Missions Africaines in Cote d'Ivoire issued a circular prohibiting his missionaries from drinking absinthe, or offering it to guests. (75) Wine in moderation remained acceptable. (76) But about excessive drinking among Africans the society's journal was silent. (77) When French Protestant missionaries arrived in Cote d'Ivoire in the mid-1920s, however, their approach was more akin to that of Harris, and they often condemned African drinking habits. (78)

Despite Angoulvant's initial interest in what Harris might do for him, the French administration in Cote d'Ivoire quickly came to mistrust Harris as a threat to order. Their unease was magnified by the outbreak of the First World War, which left France's position in West Africa especially fragile. Angoulvant did not question Harris's motives but his mass movement was giving rise to rumors that displeased the governor, including one which speculated that Harris was going to have the head tax abolished. (79) Harris was therefore expelled from the colony early in 1915, and despite his repeated entreaties he was never allowed readmission.

The French were just as concerned--if not more so--about certain other "prophets" who followed in Harris's wake. Unlike Harris these prophets' motives seemed to French eyes largely self-serving. Many of these prophets stated a view on the correct use of alcohol, albeit views that often contrasted those of Harris. The prophets Do and Yessu, for example, both told their followers to drink only imported liquor, and forbade the consumption of palm wine. (80) These injunctions can be seen to have sprung naturally from their status as outsiders; to attack palm wine was to attack the local notables who controlled its production, while to favor imported spirits, a preferred drink of chiefs, equally undermined the established social hierarchy.

The French took a dim view of this outburst of intemperate messianic activity and quickly sent Do, Yessu, and others like them into exile. One reason for this, claimed Gaston Joseph, the director of indigenous affairs, was that the French discovered temples that appeared to them to be no more than covers for the consumption of alcohol, which, region by region, Angoulvant had progressively been trying to prohibit in Cote d'Ivoire since 1913. (81) Moreover, clandestine gatherings of this kind were especially suspect during the war as anti-French uprisings began to break out in different parts of French West Africa. (82) Angoulvant and Joseph were also no doubt aware of how political activity in France had often arisen in drinking establishments. (83) The governor continued to see alcohol as a potentially dangerous agent of insubordination.

Temperance a la francaise

Governor Angoulvant's temperance campaign can be seen as a rationally conceived element in a fundamental reorientation of the colonial state's approach to the governance of Cote d'Ivoire, in which the state's economic needs were tied to moral justifications for French intervention in Africans' daily lives. Within the federal system established in French West Africa, unlike in British West African colonies, the incentive for governors of individual colonies to maximize import duties was reduced, while direct taxation offered a surer way to fiscal health if one were prepared to deal with the unrest that might arise in response. Angoulvant's considerable appetite for confrontation--or violence, since this was intrinsic to his approach--led him to favor this method of colonization, and his role was clearly key to the first emergence of a state-led temperance movement in Cote d'Ivoire rather than, say, Dahomey, to which alcohol imports were consistently much higher. (84) This temperance movement was about control, and the concerns it articulated regarding African alcohol consumption--which even Governor-General Ponty tentatively suggested was not as damaging as many claimed (85)--arose to a large degree from Angoulvant's own controlling impulses.

For this and other reasons the rationality of this campaign should not be overstated. Angoulvant's campaign reflected a combination of economic ideas and the moral rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice, but it was also fundamentally about culture; and what made this campaign characteristically "French" ultimately made it self-defeating. Angoulvant's commitment to reducing African consumption of European spirits was genuine. But he argued that Africans should instead develop a taste for French wine. In 1912, when explaining his temperance initiative to his fellow governors, Angoulvant stated that the promotion of wine was especially to be encouraged, because it favored the sale of what he called "an eminently French product." (86)

At the same meeting Ponty wryly pointed out that absinthe, too, was a French product. (87) Yet he understood that Angoulvant's argument contained both an economic and a cultural-imperialist logic. The production and the consumption of wine had grown enormously within late nineteenth-century France. Factors such as railroad construction and higher-yield vines facilitated this development. During Angoulvant's time in Cote d'Ivoire, wine was France's fourth-biggest export. Over one and a half million French people were grape growers, and between seven and ten per cent of the entire population of France were involved in the wine industry in some way. (88)

In addition to its economic significance, by the turn of the twentieth century wine was also widely associated with a distinctively French way of life. It was connected in French minds with what they liked to see as their best features: conviviality, good conversation, good taste, and so on. (89) Wine was also associated with good health. Louis Pasteur described it as "the healthiest and most hygienic of drinks." In 1900 the powerful alcohol lobby in France influenced parliament legally to classify wine as a "hygienic drink." Wine was also believed at this time to lead to a happy and sociable form of drunkenness, in contrast to the solitary misery of the absinthe drunkard. (90) Angoulvant himself made this point in emphasizing wine's virtues. (91) Wine lacked the social stigma that increasingly attached to absinthe and eventually led to its prohibition in France in 1915. (92) Most French people did not regard wine as "alcoholic" at all. (93)

By promoting wine in Cote d'Ivoire, Angoulvant was therefore promoting both French economic interests and a powerful symbol of "Frenchness." This found him further favor in metropolitan France. A parliamentary deputy from the Gironde, a major wine-producing region centered on Bordeaux, wrote an article in the colonial press backing the idea of increasing wine exports to West Africa. (94) The debate became overtly nationalistic during the First World War, as observers noted that Germany had supplied a large proportion of the spirits consumed in French West Africa. (95) Proposing to substitute French wine for gin from Hamburg was at that time like firing a shot in a broader international conflict.

Imports of wine to French West Africa dipped after the war began, as wine itself was mobilized and sent to the troops at the front. (96) In fact, the war in Europe proved to be highly beneficial to the "war on alcohol" in Africa. Spirit imports to French West Africa declined by some 56 per cent between 1914 and 1915 as the German trade was cut off and the quantity arriving from the neutral Netherlands drastically decreased, in large part due to the interruption of its bottle supply from Germany. (97) Affected by the same circumstances, officials in British colonies began to suspect that liquor revenue was not so essential to them after all and they experimented with replacing the money lost with various forms of taxation that fell largely on African shoulders. (98)

Angoulvant might well have felt this vindicated one of his policies as governor of Cote d'Ivoire. But the extent to which his temperance campaign achieved its stated aim to reduce alcohol consumption, while hard to quantify, was probably minimal at best. Through clandestine stills or smuggling, liquor was always available, if not always legally. (99) Anti-alcoholic legislation continued to be passed after the war, governors-general continued to defend the utility of their liquor revenue, and alcohol consumption among Kru boatmen continued to prompt dire warnings about their health. (100) In these respects not much had changed.

Yet in other respects the trends initiated by Angoulvant were significant. The economic and cultural argument that favored French wine ultimately trumped the one that said alcohol was harmful to taxpaying Africans. In time, wine imports to Cote d'Ivoire increased. Wine was placed on a list of foodstuffs exempted from indirect taxation, and ended up becoming the principal cause of alcoholism among Ivoiriens. (101) When imports reached a new peak in 1954 a report stated that "the problem of alcoholism in French West Africa has become the problem of wine." (102)

In 1954 the harvest of cocoa and coffee beans was especially good, and successful indigenous Ivoirien planters like Felix Houphouet-Boigny were able to toast their own belle epoque with French wine. (103) As the movement to loosen and eventually remove French control developed, Houphouet-Boigny advised Ivoirien peasants to cultivate cocoa and coffee and argued that Cote d'Ivoire needed to break free of the federal tax regime that had worked against it ever since 1904. (104) In some ways, indeed, Houphouet-Boigny, who became Cote d'Ivoire's first president at independence and remained in that position for thirty-three years, appears to have been a natural heir to Angoulvant. (105) With his strategy of forcible development, Angoulvant helped to establish a tradition of authoritarian civilian rule in Cote d'Ivoire that went unchecked almost to the end of the century. Only amid the troubles that have followed the military coup of December 1999 has this approach to government proved incapable of concealing the fractured foundations of the state the French created.

Department of History

Newark, DE 19716

ENDNOTES

The author is pleased to acknowledge the funding from the University of Delaware and the British Academy that enabled him to research this article. He is also grateful to conference audiences at the universities of Warwick and Toulouse-Le Mirail for helpful comments on earlier versions, with particular thanks to Simon Heap.

1. Louis Jacquet, L'Alcool, etude generale economique (Paris, 1912), 908.

2. Archives Nationales du Senegal, archives of the federal government of French West Africa (henceforth ANS), 2G11/21, Rapports d'ensemble: Cote d'Ivoire, 1911.

3. David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit. Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 5.

4. Simon Heap, "Living on the Proceeds of a Grog Shop: Liquor Revenue in Nigeria," in Deborah Fahy Bryceson (ed.), Alcohol in Africa: Mixing Business, Pleasure, and Politics (Portsmouth, NH, 2002), 142; Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change. A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, NH, 1996), e.g. 16-17. Other important works on alcohol in Africa include Justin Willis, Potent Brews: A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa 1850-1999 (London, 2002), and Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler (eds.), Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa (Athens, Ohio, 1992).

5. One notable exception to scholars' relative neglect of alcohol in French Africa is Danielle Domergue-Cloarec, La Sante en Cote d'Ivoire 1905-1958 (Toulouse, 1986); also see (as Danielle Domergue) her "Essai sur l'alcoolisme en Cote d'Ivoire, 1900-1958," Annales de l'Universite d' Abidjan 9 (1981): 99-120. Two articles contain material on the French mandate in Cameroon after World War One: Lynn Schler, "Looking Through a Glass of Beer: Alcohol in the Cultural Spaces of Colonial Douala, 1910-1945," International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 2-3 (2002): 315-34; Susan Diduk, "European Alcohol, History, and the State in Cameroon," African Studies Review 36, no. 1 (1993): 1-42.

6. W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Cafe: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914 (Baltimore, 1996); Michael R. Marrus, "Social Drinking in the Belle Epoque," Journal of Social History 7, no. 2 (1974): 115-41; Susanna Barrows, "After the Commune: Alcoholism, Temperance, and Literature in the Early Third Republic," in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. John M. Merriman (New York, 1979), 205-18; Patricia E. Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform: Antialcoholism in France since 1870 (Palo Alto, 1988); Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (Baltimore, 2003).

7. Erica J. Peters, "Taste, Taxes, and Technologies: Industrializing Rice Alcohol in Northern Vietnam, 1902-1913," French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (summer 2004): 596-97.

8. For biographical details see Danielle Domergue, "Gabriel Louis Angoulvant (1872-1932)," in Hommes et Destins 4 (Paris, 1981): 28-32. On the French colonial service the best guide remains William B. Cohen, Rulers of Empire: the French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford, 1971).

9. Albert Nebout, Passions Africaines (Geneva, 1995), 262-72 passim. Nebout was a prominent administrator in Cote d'Ivoire before and during Angoulvant's administration, on which this volume of letters to an old school friend is a valuable source of information. See also Louise Delafosse, Maurice Delafosse: le Berrichon conquis par I'Afrique (Paris, 1976), 254.

10. Michael Crowder, West Africa under Colonial Rule (Evanston, Ill., 1968), 110.

11. Gabriel Angoulvant, La Pacification de la Cote d'Ivoire 1908-1915: Methodes et Resultats (Paris, 1916), 63.

12. Ibid, 61.

13. Pierre Kipre and Alain Tirefort, "La Cote d'Ivoire," in L'Afrique occidentale au temps des francais: colonisateurs et colonises, c. 1860-1960, ed. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (Paris, 1992), 293-94. This policy was first marked out by Louis Gustave Binger, the first governor of Cote d'Ivoire between 1893 and 1896.

14. On Clozel as governor see Timothy C. Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples: Resistance and Collaboration 1889-1911 (Oxford, 1980), 142-71; on Clozel as ethnographer see Emmanuelle Sibeud, Une science imperiale pour l'Afrique? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France 1870-1930 (Paris, 2002), 285-86. On Delafosse's approach to colonial government and his work in Cote d'Ivoire see Jean-Loup Amselle and Emmanuelle Sibeud (eds.), Maurice Delafosse: Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: l'itineraire d'un africaniste (1870-1926) (Paris, 1998).

15. Angoulvant, La Pacification de la Cote d'Ivoire, 61.

16. Ibid, 58.

17. Ibid, 60.

18. See Ada Martinkus-Zemp, Le Blanc et le Noir: Essai d'une description de la vision du Noir par le Blanc dans la litterature francaise de l'entre-deux-guerres (Paris, 1975), 150. The connection is made to seem more positive in the Cameroonian novelist Ferdinand Oyono's Houseboy (Portsmouth, NH, 1990 [1956]), 36, 79, 97. Here it is French drinking habits that are presented as harmful and a sign of weakness rather than strength.

19. Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples, 79.

20. Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change, 14-17.

21. Ibid, 16-17, 70, 81. See also A. Olorunfemi, "The Liquor Traffic Dilemma in British West Africa: The Southern Nigerian Example, 1895-1918," International Journal of African Historical Studies 17, no. 2 (1984): 229-41.

22. On Gallieni's temperance activity in France see Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 69, 167, 170-71; Jean-Charles Sournia, A History of Alcoholism (Oxford, 1990), 76. Gallieni contributed a preface to Angoulvant's book La Pacification de la Cote d'Ivoire, though Albert Nebout, for one, believed the comparison between the two men's policies was ill made (Passions Africaines, 270). For a temperance initiative in Madagascar while Gallieni was governor-general there see J. Baudrillard and J. Lapassade, Le Livret d'Enseignement Antialcoolique des Ecoles de Madagascar (Paris, 1904).

23. Maurice Larkin, "Fraternity, Solidarity, Sociability: The Grass Roots of the Grand Orient de France (1900-1926)" in The Jacobin Legacy in Modern France, ed. Sudhir Hazareesingh (Oxford, 2002), 104; on Angoulvant's Freemasonry see Owen White, "Networking: Freemasons and the Colonial State in French West Africa, 1895-1914," French History 19, no. 1 (2005): 96.

24. Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (henceforth CAOM), Affaires Politiques (henceforth AP) 2719, "Note sur le commerce de l'alcool en Afrique Occidentale," 17 September 1906, by the Comite d'action republicaine et laique aux colonies francaises, on which see Charles-Robert Ageron, France Coloniale ou Parti Colonial? (Paris, 1978), 153-54.

25. Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 70-74; Haine, The World of the Paris Cafe, 89-90, 97-98.

26. See e.g. Baron J. du Teil, La prohibition de l'alcool de traite en Afrique. A propos du recent Congres de Londres (Paris, 1909); idem, Mesures accessoires contre l'alcoolisme dans les colonies. XIIIe Congres international contre l'alcoolisme, La Haye-Scheveningue, 11-16 Septembre 1911 (Paris, 1911); idem, La commission coloniale de la Ligue nationale contre l'alcoolisme au XIVe Congres international contre l'alcoolisme, Milan, 24 Septembre 1913 (Paris, 1913).

27. Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change, 89.

28. Namely Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, Haut-Senegal et Niger, and Dahomey.

29. Colin Newbury, "The Formation of the Government General of French West Africa," Journal of African History 1, no. 1 (1960): 125-26; Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples, 172.

30. In 1904 Cote d'Ivoire received 2,484,691 francs in customs revenue; in 1905, after the introduction of the new federal customs regime, it received an allocation of 1,380,000 francs from the federal government, a budgetary shortfall of 1,104,691 francs on the previous year. For figures see Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples, 173.

31. Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 120. On connections between taxation and alcohol in France see Allan Mitchell, "The Unsung Villain: Alcoholism and the Emergence of Public Welfare in France, 1870-1914," Contemporary Drug Problems 15 (1986): 467-68.

32. See A. I. Asiwaju, "Migrations as Revolt: The Example of the Ivory Coast and the Upper Volta before 1945," Journal of African History 17, no. 4 (1976): 583; Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, Conn., 1994), 126.

33. See Rene-Pierre Anouma, "L'Impot de Capitation en Cote d'Ivoire de 1901 a 1908: Modalites et Implications d'un Instrument de Politique et d'Economie Coloniales," Annales de l'Universite d'Abidjan 3 (1975): 138. For a localized study of the tax and its collection see David Huston Groff, "The Development of Capitalism in the Ivory Coast: The Case of Assikasso, 1880-1940" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1980), 254-65. Of all the important changes brought by colonial rule taxation is surely the least studied, but for some broad conclusions see Young, The African Colonial State, 124-33, and on particular territories in French West Africa see Odile Goerg, Commerce et colonisation en Guinee, 1850-1913 (Paris, 1986), 306-36; Helene d'Almeida Topor, Histoire economique du Dahomey (Benin), 1890-1920 (2 vols., Paris, 1995), vol. 1, 302-57; James F. Searing, "God Alone is King": Islam and Emancipation in Senegal. The Wolof Kingdoms of Kajoor and Bawol, 1859-1914 (Portsmouth, NH, 2002), 254-60.

34. David H. Groff, "Carrots, Sticks, and Cocoa Pods: African and Administrative Initiatives in the Spread of Cocoa Cultivation in Assikasso, Ivory Coast, 1908-1920," International Journal of African Historical Studies 20, no. 3 (1987): 401-16. The Assikasso region borders the former Gold Coast.

35. Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples, 186; see also Robert Michael Hecht, "Cocoa and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change in Southern Ivory Coast," (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1982), 51-52.

36. Angoulvant, La Pacification de la Cote d'Ivoire, 57; Gouvernement General de l'Afrique Occidentale Francaise, La Cote d'Ivoire (Bingerville, 1915), 25.

37. Louise Delafosse, Maurice Delafosse, 262; Albert Nebout, Passions Africaines, 269-70. Delafosse moved to Haut-Senegal et Niger, where Clozel was now governor. For an example of coerced cultivation under Angoulvant see Thomas J. Bassett, The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Cote d'Ivoire, 1880-1995 (Cambridge, 2001), 56-62.

38. Nebout, Passions Africaines, 272-75; Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples, 196-99. On Ponty's Freemasonry see White, "Networking," 100. Ponty died in office in 1915.

39. Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples, 203-10; quotation at 209. On the pacification of Dida country in southwest Cote d'Ivoire see Hecht, "Cocoa and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change in Southern Ivory Coast," 47-51.

40. Quoted in Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997), 144.

41. ANS, 10E4, Rapport de presentation au Conseil d'Administration de la Cote d'Ivoire, 25 November 1908. Compare the similar discussion of taxation (and its relationship to alcohol) in Lord Lugard, "Memo. No. 5--Taxation" (1917), in Political Memoranda. Revision of Instructions to Political Officers on Subjects Chiefly Political and Administrative, 1913-1918 (London, 1969).

42. F.-J. Clozel, Dix ans a la Cote d'Ivoire (Paris, 1906), 45.

43. ANS, Q58, "L'alcoolisme a la Cote d'Ivoire," report read by Angoulvant at the Conseil de Gouvernement of French West Africa, 21 November 1912, p. 5. It is worth noting that at this time construction workers in France were still sometimes paid partially with credit for alcohol at company bars, despite a law of 1898 that required wages to be paid in money; see Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 91.

44. See e.g. Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the fin-de-siecle (Oxford, 1989), 55; Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 42-43, 51; Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (Cambridge, 1989), 87.

45. See F. Sorel, "Tuberculose et alcoolisme a la Cote d'Ivoire," in Bulletin de la Societe de pathologie exotique et de ses filiales 5, no. 10 (1912): 855-59; Dr. Kermorgant, Enquete internationale sur l'alcoolisme dans les colonies et les pays tropicaux (Etampes, 1910), 1, 4. For the French context see David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1995), 148-62; Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 44, 67-68.

46. See Nouet, L'Alcool et les peuples primitifs (Paris, 1907), 9; Joseph Chailley-Bert in "Discussion de la question de l'organisation de la lutte contre l'opium et l'alcool dans les diverses colonies," in Institut Colonial International, Compte-Rendu de la Session Tenue a La Haye, le 1, 2 et 3 juin 1909 (Brussels, 1909), 231; also Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 67, which indicates that the government-general showed new interest in labor questions in 1912. The contemporaneous drive to expand the use of Africans in the military may also have fed such concerns; on this see Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960 (Portsmouth, NH, 1991), 25-31, and P. d'Horel, "Alcoolisme et Troupes Noires," La Depeche Coloniale, 28 February 1913.

47. Harris, Murders and Madness, 244-50.

48. ANS, Q58, "L'alcoolisme a la Cote d'Ivoire." The archivist who classified this document placed it in series Q (economic affairs) rather than series H (health and social questions). For similar concerns about the economic costs of alcohol use among the labor force in another part of Africa see Charles van Onselen, "Randlords and Rotgut," History Workshop 2, no.1 (1976): 52-53, 81.

49. On international measures toward restricting the liquor trade before World War One see Lynn Pan, Alcohol in Colonial Africa (Helsinki, 1975), 31-40.

50. CAOM, AP 397, Governor-General Ponty to Minister of Colonies, 16 July 1910; see also ANS, 5E30, Conseil de gouvernement de l'Afrique Occidentale Francaise, 2eme seance, 21 November 1912.

51. CAOM, AP 397, Governor-General Ponty to Minister of Colonies, 16 July 1910; ANS, 5E27, Discours prononce par M. W. Ponty, Conseil de gouvernement, June 1911, pp. 5, 17, and Rapport en conseil de gouvernement (1911): Elevation des droits d'entree sur les boissons spiritueuses, p. 5. On Ponty's paternalism see G. Wesley Johnson, "William Ponty and Republican Paternalism in French West Africa (1866-1915)," in African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa, ed. L. H. Gann and P. Duignan (New York, 1978), 127-56. Simon Heap has shown that in the similar debates that took place in British Nigeria, Frederick Lugard was a rare example of a high administrator who suggested sacrificing liquor revenue on "moral" grounds; see "Living on the Proceeds of a Grog Shop," 141-42, 151-52.

52. Measures to control the supply of alcohol in Mauritania were in fact initiated by local Muslim notables; see ANS, Q58.

53. ANS, Q58, "L'alcoolisme a la Cote d'Ivoire." Shortly before the governors met, in a decree passed on 6 November 1912, Angoulvant had outlawed the sale of absinthe to "indigenes" in Cote d'Ivoire.

54. See cuttings from various colonial newspapers in CAOM, AP 2722, e.g. Les Annales Coloniales, 18 January 1913, La Presse Coloniale, 12 February 1913. Also see Baron Joseph du Teil, Communication sur les recentes mesures antialcooliques prises dans les colonies francaises d'Afrique (Paris, 1914).

55. ANS, 2G13/30, Gouvernement-general de l'AOF, Rapport d'ensemble annuel, 1913: Table des recettes douanieres de l'AOF de 1900 a 1913, and Etat de produit de l'impot personnel de 1904 a 1913.

56. See Gordon MacKay Haliburton, The Prophet Harris. A Study of an African Prophet and his Mass-Movement in the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast 1913-1915 (London, 1971), 48.

57. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 5, highlights the need for self-mastery as a central tenet of the Republican mission civilisatrice.

58. Gouvernement General de l'Afrique Occidentale Francaise: Colonie de la Cote d'Ivoire, Manuel des Palabres (Bingerville, 1915), 26-33. See also P. Lamy and F. Sorel, "La lutte contre l'alcoolisme a la Cote d'Ivoire: Conference aux indigenes sur les dangers de ce fleau," La Presse Coloniale, 11 March 1913.

59. "Lettre du R. Pere Vacheret, missionnaire a Bonoua (Cote d'Ivoire)," L'Echo des Missions Africaines de Lyon 6, no. 6 (1907): 21.

60. On European uses of palm oil see Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1997), 3.

61. See e.g. CAOM, AP 397, Governor-General Ponty to Minister of Colonies, 26 July 1911; also Jean Adam, Le Palmier a l'Huile (Paris, 1910), 8-10, 227.

62. Elsewhere Angoulvant stated that the best way to stimulate palm-oil exports was to increase taxation in the areas that produced it; see ANS, S19, Lt.-Governor Angoulvant to Governor-General, 2 July 1915.

63. Colonie de la Cote d'Ivoire, Manuel des Palabres, 29-30, 67. French-run schools were also to be given a role in spreading the temperance message (74).

64. The best introduction to Harris in Cote d'Ivoire remains Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, though it now needs to be supplemented with David A. Shank, Prophet Harris, the "Black Elijah" of West Africa (Leiden, 1994).

65. From G. van Bulck, "Le Prophete Harris vu par lui-meme," in Devant les sectes nonchretiennes: Rapports et compte rendu (Louvain, 1961), 121-22, translated in John D. Hargreaves (ed.), France and West Africa: An Anthology of Historical Documents (London, 1969), 249-50.

66. Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, 98; also Gaston Joseph, La Cote d'Ivoire. Le Pays--Les Habitants (Paris, 1917), 159.

67. Pere Joseph Gorju, "Un Prophete a la Cote-d'Ivoire," L'Echo des Missions Africaines de Lyon 14, no. 4 (1915): 116; also see Shank, Prophet Harris, 112, and 209, which shows how Harris's insistence on the connection between cleanliness and godliness led him to offer some basic lessons in hygiene; in this respect too Harris's message conformed to an element of Angoulvant's program.

68. Shank, Prophet Harris, 46-49.

69. See Jane Harris, "Krumen 'Down the Coast': Liberian Migrants on the West African Coast in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries," International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, no. 3 (1985): 401-23; George E. Brooks, Jr., The Kru Mariner in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Compendium (Newark, Del., 1972).

70. In Gabon Harris was jailed for two days for singing outside an administrator's residence at night. See Shank, Prophet Harris, 53; Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, 12. On the image of the Kruboy as drinker see Brooks, The Kru Mariner, 55, 57.

71. Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, 33. Kru identity at this time was constructed in opposition to the rule of the Liberian government, which was made up of the descendants of freed slaves from America who had settled there in the early nineteenth century.

72. ANS, 2G14/16, Cote d'Ivoire: Rapport medical annuel, 1914, p. 85; ANS, Q58, "L'Alcoolisme a la Cote d'Ivoire," p. 8; Louis Le Barbier, La Cote d'Ivoire. Agriculture--Commerce--Industrie. Questions Economiques (Paris, 1916), 164.

73. Peter Harrington, S.M.A., "An Interview with the 'Black Prophet'," The African Missionary, no. 17 (March-April 1917): 15. The phrase "the cup that cheers but not inebriates" originated in the late nineteenth-century British temperance movement; see e.g. John Burnett, Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain (London, 1999), 63

74. On the early years of the mission to Cote d'Ivoire see Pierre Trichet, Cote d'Ivoire: Les Premiers Pas d'une Eglise, tome 1: 1895-1914 (Abidjan, 1994). Trichet shows (p. 162) that eighteen of the twenty-four members of the Societe des Missions Africaines in Cote d'Ivoire were mobilized for war in 1914, leaving the society ill-equipped to capitalize on Harris's movement.

75. Archives de la Societe des Missions Africaines de Lyon, Rome (henceforth SMA), 2D39, Pere Hamard, circular no. 20 prohibiting the use of absinthe, 17 March 1908. In other parts of West Africa Catholic missionaries often displayed considerable ingenuity in distilling liquor from local produce. Missionaries in Timbuktu, for example, used the fruit of the jujube tree to make an eau-de-vie that they thought tasted like kirsch; see Archives des Peres Blancs, Rome, Diaire de Tombouctou, entry from 15 December 1898.

76. SMA, 2G19, R. P. Vacheret, "Notes d'un vieux broussard sur l'Afrique occidentale, pour les jeunes missionnaires et pour les freres-coadjuteurs," 10 April 1922.

77. I base this assertion on a reading of the society's journal, L'Echo des Missions Africaines de Lyon, from 1902 to 1925. Catholic missionaries in Gabon did take part in a campaign against alcohol in 1914; see CAOM, AP 397, Petition des europeens habitant le Gabon demandant au parlement la prohibition de l'alcool dans la colonie (Paris, 1914).

78. See E. de Billy, En Cote d'Ivoire. Mission Protestante d'A.O.F. (Paris, 1931), 66, 99, 118, 171, and J. Decorvet, Les Matins de Dieu (Nogent-sur-Marne, 1972), 81-83, dealing respectively with the activities of the Societe des Missions Evangeliques and the Mission Biblique en Cote d'Ivoire.

79. ANS, 5G62, Lt.-Governor Angoulvant to various commandants de cercle, 16 December 1914; also Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, 138-41.

80. ANS, 5G62, Report by Inspecteur des Affaires Administratives Bourgine, 28 May 1920, pp. 11, 12, 15.

81. Gaston Joseph, La Cote d'Ivoire, 160.

82. See Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 147-49, and on the biggest of these uprisings Mahir Saul and Patrick Royer, West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War (Athens, OH, 2001).

83. See e.g. Susanna Barrows, "'Parliaments of the People': The Political Culture of Cafes in the Early Third Republic," in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History, ed. Barrows and Robin Room, (Berkeley, 1991), 87-97; also Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 88-89.

84. See e.g. Governement-General de l'Afrique Occidentale Francaise, Note sur l'alcoolisme en AOF et sur les mesures propres a restreindre la consommation des spiritueux (Goree, 1914), 6

85. ANS, 5E28, Governor-General to Minister of Colonies, 27 July 1911; for a similar view see CAOM, AP 397, untitled report by Governor-General Merlin of French Equatorial Africa, 19 August 1911, pp. 16-18. The silence of Catholic missionaries on alcohol abuse might also be taken as an indication that it was not a major problem in Cote d'Ivoire at that time.

86. CAOM, AP 2722, Proces-Verbal du Conseil de Gouvernement de l'A.O.F., 21 November 1912. On French wine in Indochina see Peters, "Taste, Taxes, and Technologies," 584-85.

87. Ibid. In Rene Maran's Batouala (Paris, 1921), set in Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic), the father of the chief who is the novel's eponymous hero jokes that Pernod is the white man's "only important invention" (79).

88. Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 7-10.

89. Ibid, 19-20; Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Taste and Corruption (Oxford, 1980), 407.

90. Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform, 20; Harry W. Paul, Science, Vine, and Wine in Modern France (Cambridge, 1996), 170-71; Michael R. Marrus, "Social Drinking in the Belle Epoque," 120.

91. ANS, Q58, "L'alcoolisme a la Cote d'Ivoire," pp. 5, 7.

92. On the campaign to outlaw absinthe see Catherine J. Kudlick, "Fighting the Internal and External Enemies: Alcoholism in World War I France," Contemporary Drug Problems 14 (1985), 129-58; also see Haine, The World of the Paris Cafe, 97. Rule by decree of course bypassed the need for parliamentary debate; for this reason French West Africa was able to outlaw absinthe before metropolitan France did, and indeed before any other part of the empire. See J. Le Cesne, La lutte contre l'alcool en Afrique Occidentale Francaise (Paris, 1917), 8-9.

93. On a renewed movement in France to define wine as a food, just as Pasteur had wished, see Elaine Sciolino, "A Campaign to Drink Another Glass of Wine for France," New York Times, 23 July 2004.

94. G. Combrouze, "L'Alcool en Afrique Occidentale," Les Annales Coloniales, 5 June 1913.

95. Le Cesne, La lutte contre l'alcool en Afrique Occidentale Francaise, 17-18; Le Barbier, La Cote d'Ivoire, 162.

96. ANS, 2G14/23, Afrique Occidentale Francaise: Rapport annuel economique, 1914; 2G15/19, Afrique Occidentale Francaise: Situation economique, 1915. Also see Leo A. Loubere, The Wine Revolution in France: The Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1990), 17-18.

97. ANS, 2G15/19, Afrique Occidentale Francaise: Situation economique, 1915. See also Marion C. Siney, The Allied Blockade of Germany 1914-1916 (Westport, Conn., 1973), 243.

98. Olorunfemi, "The Liquor Traffic Dilemma in British West Africa," 241; Heap, "Living on the Proceeds of a Grog Shop," 151; Diduk, "European Alcohol, History, and the State in Cameroon," 5.

99. Jean Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa 1900-1945 (London, 1971), 402.

100. Domergue-Cloarec, La Sante en Cote d'Ivoire 1905-1958, 281-82, 445-47, 467-68; Dr. Spire, Pour Vivre Vieux en Afrique: Conseils d'Hygiene aux Indigenes (Paris, 1922), 47.

101. ANS, Fonds Moderne (henceforth FM), 17G550, Comite d'Action Anti-Alcoolique en Cote d'Ivoire to High Commissioner of French West Africa, 25 July 1954; Domergue-Cloarec, La Sante en Cote d'Ivoire 1905-1958, 1039-58.

102. ANS, FM, 3G1/68, "La lutte contre l'alcoolisme en A.O.F."

103. H. Bismuth and C. Menage, Aspects de l'Alcoolisme en Cote d'Ivoire (Marseille, 1958), 4. Over half the imports of wine to French West Africa in that year went to Cote d'Ivoire. For an overview of the emergence of a planter class of local origin in colonial Cote d'Ivoire see John Rapley, Ivoirien Capitalism: African Entrepreneurs in Cote d'Ivoire (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 22-35.

104. Aristide R. Zolberg, One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast (Princeton, 1969), 151, 160-62.

105. Timothy C. Weiskel also argues for a long-term perspective on lvoirien political development in "Independence and the Longue Duree: The Ivory Coast 'Miracle' Reconsidered," in Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfers of Power, 1960-1980, ed. Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis (New Haven, Conn., 1988), 347-80. When serving as an auxiliary doctor in Abengourou in eastern Cote d'Ivoire between 1929 and 1934 Houphouet-Boigny was himself strongly critical of local consumption of imported spirits; see Frederic Grah Mel, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, vol. 1: Le fulgurant destin d'une jeune proie (?-1960) (Paris, 2003), 125-27.

By Owen White

University of Delaware