French Madagascar

• 1. Introduction

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  French Madagascar begins with a queen's signature. On the 17th of December 1885, Queen Ranavalona III signed a treaty that turned the island of Madagascar into a French protectorate. She had fought to prevent it. The source describes her as reluctantly passionate about keeping her country free. Yet within a decade, she would be forced to surrender the capital, Tananarive, and then exiled to the French island of Réunion. A colony was born, and it would last more than sixty years.

  This is a story about more than conquest. It is about what happens inside a colonial system. It is about a queen who accepted a ruse dressed as a treaty. It is about freedom fighters killed by the hundreds of thousands. It is about returning soldiers who came home politically changed. And it is about a single uprising on the 29th of March 1947 that left a death toll so disputed it still has no agreed number. French Madagascar raises the questions every colonial history asks. Who gets to resist. Who gets to govern. And what is left when the colonial power finally leaves.

• 2. A Queen and a Ruse

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  Britain was watching when France moved on Madagascar. In May 1862, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell and Britain's foreign secretary, instructed Connolly Pakenham that King Radama II should hold the country apart from foreign powers. For two decades, that restraining British hand kept French ambitions in check. Then in 1882, France began occupying Madagascar's northern and western territories anyway.

  The Franco-Hova Wars between France and the Merina Kingdom broke out in 1883, but neither side achieved a decisive result. France kept pressing. By late 1885, Queen Ranavalona III had few options left. Signing the treaty on the 17th of December preserved the form of her monarchy while surrendering the substance of sovereignty. Madagascar also took on a loan of 10 million francs as part of the agreement. France's interest in the island was not diplomatic. It was territorial.

  The queen's standing with France reached a strange kind of peak in 1888, when she was granted the grand cross of the Legion of Honour, the Légion d'Honneur, the highest French order of merit. The honour did nothing to protect her kingdom. In September 1895 she was compelled to surrender Tananarive to French forces. She accepted this to keep the monarchy alive. But France's appetite for colonial territory in Africa made the protectorate arrangement a temporary one from the start. The queen was removed from power, exiled first to Réunion and then to Algiers. As she left, Madagascar became a colony in name as well as in practice.

• 3. Pacification and Its Cost

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  French rule over Madagascar did not arrive peacefully. Pacification lasted roughly fifteen years, as rural guerrillas fought French authority across the island. By the time the armed resistance was suppressed, the conflicts had killed more than 100,000 Malagasy people.

  Alone among the early colonial reforms, the abolition of slavery in 1896 had an immediate and visible scale. Over 500,000 people were freed. The source notes that many former slaves stayed in their former masters' homes, now as servants rather than property. The category changed. The dependency often did not.

  The social disruption of early colonial rule created the conditions for organised opposition. A group of Merina intellectuals in Antananarivo began forming nationalist sentiment. Their leader was Pastor Ravelojoana, a Malagasy Protestant clergyman who looked not to Europe but to Japan for a model of modernisation. In 1913 this group founded a secret society called Vy Vato Sakelika, which translates as Iron and Stone Ramification, using the abbreviation VVS. The French suppressed the VVS brutally. Yet the society's existence was not entirely without effect. The French eventually gave Malagasy people their first representative voice in government, a concession at least partly attributed to the pressure the VVS had created.

• 4. Veterans and Political Awakening

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  Malagasy soldiers fought in France during the First World War, and the ones who came home changed the nationalist movement. Veterans bolstered the early independence effort and gave it new credibility.

  Throughout the 1920s, the nationalist platform was measured rather than radical. Its demands centred on labour reform and equal civil and political status, stopping well short of independence. The French League for Madagascar, led by Anatole France, called for French citizenship for all Malagasy in recognition of the island's wartime contributions of soldiers and resources. Jean Ralaimongo, a figure who had remained in France long enough to absorb French socialist political thought, returned to Madagascar in 1924. He became deeply involved in the labour disputes that were straining the island's social fabric.

  The first formal political concession came in 1924, with the creation of two economic and financial delegations. One represented French settlers. The other was composed of twenty-four Malagasy representatives, elected by the Council of Notables across twenty-four districts. The two delegations never met together. Neither held real decision-making power. Huge concessions in mining and forestry went to large companies. Indigenous leaders loyal to France received portions of land. Forced labour was imposed in favour of French enterprises.

  By the 1930s, underground Malagasy trade unionism was forming and the Communist Party of the Region of Madagascar had been established. In 1939, the colonial administration dissolved all organisations and aligned itself with the Vichy regime. Madagascar's political momentum was put on hold, but the Second World War was already pulling the island into a wider conflict.

• 5. War, Revolt, and Repression

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  Madagascar's strategic harbours made it a flashpoint during the Second World War. After France fell in 1940, the island became a contest between the Free French movement and Vichy France, with Allied and Vichy French forces fighting there in 1942. Malagasy troops also contributed to the wider war effort.

  When the war ended, France signalled a new willingness to allow Malagasy self-rule under French oversight. In the autumn of 1945, electoral colleges voted to send representatives to the Constituent Assembly of the Fourth Republic in Paris. The two Malagasy delegates, Joseph Raseta and Joseph Ravoahangy, campaigned for self-determination, invoking both the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the Brazzaville Conference of 1944. Together with Jacques Rabemananjara, a writer long based in Paris, they founded the Democratic Movement for Malagasy Restoration, known by its French initials as the MDRM. By early 1946, the MDRM had around 300,000 members, drawn from across ethnic and social lines throughout the island.

  On the 29th of March 1947, Malagasy nationalists launched an uprising against French rule. It eventually spread across one-third of the island before French reinforcements restored order. Casualties among the Malagasy were estimated in a range from 11,000 to 80,000, with one source placing the death toll at 90,000. The repression that followed included summary executions, torture, the burning of villages, and forced resettlement. In a documented practice of psychological warfare, suspects were thrown alive from aircraft to terrorise the surrounding population.

  French military courts tried the revolt's military leaders and executed twenty of them. Other proceedings produced between 5,000 and 6,000 convictions, with penalties ranging from brief imprisonment to death. The MDRM maintained throughout that its leadership had not organised the uprising. France outlawed the party regardless.

• 6. Toward Independence

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  In 1956, France's socialist government passed the Loi Cadre, also called the Enabling Law, which extended universal suffrage and set the framework for parliamentary government in each colony. In Madagascar the law dissolved the separate electoral colleges and established executive councils alongside the existing provincial and national assemblies. Universal suffrage carried particular weight on the island, because the Merina ethnic group had long dominated the small political class to whom voting rights had been limited. The côtiers, who outnumbered the Merina, would now form a majority of the electorate.

  Two major parties competed to define Madagascar's future. The Democratic Social Party of Madagascar, the PSD, favoured self-rule within a continued French orbit. Its leader was Philibert Tsiranana, a Tsimihety from the northern coastal region who was one of three Malagasy deputies elected to the French National Assembly in Paris in 1956. The PSD built from Tsiranana's base in the Mahajanga region in northwest Madagascar and extended its reach by absorbing most of the smaller côtier parties.

  Opposing the PSD was the Congress Party for the Independence of Madagascar, the AKFM, centred in Antananarivo and Antsiranana and supported primarily by the Merina. Its leader was Richard Andriamanjato, a Merina and a Protestant clergyman. The AKFM platform called for nationalisation of foreign-owned industries, collectivisation of land, the reduction of French cultural influence including the use of the French language, international nonalignment, and withdrawal from the Franc Zone.

  In 1958, the colonial administration was formally abolished. Madagascar became the Malagasy Republic, an autonomous territory within the French Community. That status lasted until 1975. The territorial table in the source shows that Madagascar's 587,040 square kilometres passed from the Malagasy Protectorate on the 28th of February 1897 to the Malagasy Republic on the 26th of June 1960, a journey of more than six decades that began with a queen's reluctant signature and ended with the rival visions of Tsiranana and Andriamanjato still unresolved.