ABSTRACT
Despite long-standing celebrations of French universalism, the history of discriminatory legal pluralism across the French Empire demonstrates that variations in citizenship status and administrative organization invited vastly different encounters with the state, depending on whether a person was deemed a subject or a citizen. This chapter interrogates the wide range of legal regimes upheld in France’s empire and demonstrates that, often, differences in legal status directly resulted from official delineations based on race or religion. Far from heralding a universal rights regime across the globe, the French state relied on difference and discrimination to govern its empire.
