Myth vs reality.
Yerri Urban, L’Indigène dans le droit colonial français 1865-1955
This thesis, which proposes to study the history of nationality law specific to the colonized, who were then called "natives", constitutes a real contribution to the knowledge of the status of the native, a status at the heart of the process of colonial domination. But these are not its only contributions. It also teaches us a great deal, it seems to us, about the degree to which jurists adhered to the racial culture of the Third Republic; it also allows us to better understand the complexity of the relationship between “race” and the Republic, and to better measure the importance of racial logic within the theories and practices of the Third Republic.
The 'indigenous' legal category, which makes colonized populations not French 'citizens' but French 'subjects', falls squarely within the framework of colonial domination: the law does not make the native an equal of the French from mainland France or the French settled in the colonies, but it confers on him an inferior status. Olivier Beaud recalls in the introduction that this “status is amputated from the noblest part of political law: the right to citizenship”. The native, by not enjoying political rights[1], thus saw himself deprived of any participation in the management of the life of his city, that of his territory as well as that of the French Empire, which is well reflected in the very unrepublican denomination of “subject”.
Soil law was above all a means of Frenchifying populations of European origin. There was indeed in the construction of this colonial law a racial logic which opposed Europeans considered as belonging to the “white race” – the term was very present in the remarks of certain jurists – to other races. Of course, the greatly reduced possibility of naturalization for the natives is not synonymous with total exclusion, an hermetic barrier of color and civilization; but if the door was ajar, it was so only for a very small minority.
The study of naturalization decrees carried out by Yerri Urban indeed shows that there was a desire to limit access to French citizenship to a tiny minority of natives, and that this narrow door was above all motivated by the concern to maintain colonial domination. France sparingly granted citizenship status to a thin elite[4]; the colonial authorities had to rally the local elites to the colonial system and avoid turning them into rebels. etc, etc, etc.
https://www.histoire-politique.fr/in...endus&item=508