ABSTRACT
Eugene Etienne, the Under-Secretary for the Colonies from 1887 to 1892, was orientating and fixing the principles of French colonial policy, and, although the Deputies were “surprised and alarmed” and public opinion “badly prepared to accept them,” he outlined the empire-schemes that events were tending towards in Africa. “Markets, outlets,” were the bases on which Jules Ferry erected the colonial policy of France. As Ferry said, “The protectionist system is like a steam-boiler without a safety-valve, unless it has a healthy and serious colonial policy as a corrective and auxiliary”; and, in a more famous slogan, “The colonial policy of the Third Republic is the offspring of her industrial policy.” Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the Ferry of the economists, who was at least the most assertive of them, had published the first edition of De la Colonisation chez les Peuples Modernes in 1874,—the first great work of colonial vulgarization in France.
