From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial Itinerary of an Imperial Agent - Archive ouverte HAL
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial Itinerary of an Imperial Agent

Résumé

This paper focuses on the genesis and the transformations of the colonial idea from an individual perspective. The life of Jean-Joseph Schmit (1788-1869) provides a perspective on this problematic. Pupil of the republican and Empire school-system, Schmit served for many years as a civil officer in the newly attached French territories. After receiving police missions in Bruxelles, Jemmapes or Anvers, he ended up, in 1813, as secretary general of the Hamburg prefecture. There, he deals there with riots and conspiracies against the imperial power of Napoleon, while trying to promote the French civilizing project. Once the Monarchy was reestablished in 1815, Schmit reemployed his skills within Parisian networks mostly comprised of former civil officers of the attached territories. He subsisted and socialized among theses, trying to avoid relegation in the new Regime. For this reason, he is a collective individual, a representative of a “status group” (Weber): the imperials. This paper exploires the mechanisms employed by these men to redeploy their civilizing ideas after the Empire’s collapse. Much later, in 1844, Schmit bought a 300,000 acres land in Kentucky and founded from Paris a “colonization company”. His socio-historical trajectory sheds light on the genesis of an idea, that of the French colonial mission. It is the central hypothesis of this article, which also supports the expectations of case studies. In short, it is about drawing a meaningful portrait in default of being representative. Without getting into the "biographical illusion" (Bourdieu), this anatomy of a colonial commitment offers a ground for observing ways of converting imperial knowledge.

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Jean-Hugo Ihl. From New Départements to the New World: The Colonial Itinerary of an Imperial Agent. From the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire, Springer International Publishing; Palgrave Macmillan, pp.185-204, 2023, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, 978-3-031-15995-4. ⟨10.1007/978-3-031-15996-1_10⟩. ⟨hal-04128730⟩
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