How France secretly owns 14 African countries
- Thread starter Tatvamasi
- Start date
France plans to sell Kerguelen islands ? A joke IMHO ( from a chinese propaganda channel ? )
France to sell Island to China for 60B€ ?
France to sell Island to China for 60B€ ?
Jacques Marseille was a professor at the University of Paris I-Sorbonne. He has published several works devoted to colonialism, including Colonial empire and french capitalism. History of a Divorce, and France and Overseas. A century of monetary and financial relations
I guess his thesis will seem completely counter-intuitive to some.
I guess his thesis will seem completely counter-intuitive to some.
The costly colonies of France
Disturbing thesis of a renowned historian: no, France did not loot the Third World. The colonial enterprise was even a very bad businessDid France exploit its colonies? Has it plundered their resources and permanently hindered their development? To these questions, tradition has long answered yes. Even today, the surging wave of repentance leads us to think that the misfortunes of Africa or Algeria are obviously linked to the bad accounts of colonization. The indignation of André Gide testifying in his Journey to the Congo to the bloody abuses of exploitation, the popularity of Banania [a chocolate powder brand] identifying with the Senegalese rifleman of the First World War, the spoliation of a quarter of the Algerian agricultural space in the profit of the colonists, the trafficking of the Indochinese piastre and the dividends of the rubber producers, so many realities which inspired Le Livre noir du colonialisme (Laffont) and forged the myth of a France living lazily on the rents of its empire, fulfilling its coffers of revenues extorted from the lands of plenty that she had placed under her tutelage.
So many commonplaces that we must constantly question, even if the good feelings, which are commonplace, lead us to multiply the sobs and to ask for absolution for the crimes that we would have committed.
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To do this, it is necessary to try to establish a strict accounting of the "colonial enterprise", to make an inventory of the expenses and the products of the exploitation, to evaluate the losses and the profits, in short, to make litter of the imaginations to answer to a simple but controversial question: were the colonies a good deal for France?
In 1958, at a time when France was first inhaling the smell of Saharan oil and could dream of freeing itself from its energy dependence, a reader of France Observateur coolly made this calculation: "Admitting that de Gaulle succeeded in crushing the Algerian insurrection in blood in two years, and by evaluating the budgetary impact of the war at 600 billion per year (a ridiculously low evaluation), we arrive, for the period 1956-1960 , to a total of 3,000 billion for five years. Assuming that companies with 100% French capital can extract for their own profit 20 million tonnes of oil per year for ten years in complete peace of mind (which seems to be a maximum difficult to reach technically and politically), we arrive at a total of 200 million tons of oil, costing 15,000 francs per ton (without research costs, nor those of exploitation, transport, nor the thousands of billions lost for the economy as a result of its orientation towards unproductive military expenditure, nor the worsening of the balance of accounts due to the very fact of this military expenditure, all chapters to be put in the liabilities of the Algerian operation). However, if I am well informed, the price of a ton of unrefined oil is less than 10,000 francs per ton on the international market. Any comment is useless for who knows how to count. And if the oil does not bring in, there is little chance that the oranges from Oranie or the bananas from Guinea will bring in more than the peels! (France Observer, September 18, 1958).
Two years earlier [1956], François Bloch-Lainé, former director of the Treasury, president of the Caisse centrale de la France d'outre-mer, a man who knew how to count better than any other, had also launched - in his own way and in a language more subdued - a real bombshell when writing in La Zone franc, a work published by Presses Universitaires de France: "The system of the 'colonial pact', so criticized since the war, has almost been reversed to the benefit of overseas. From now on, these import much more coming from the metropolis than they export towards it. The difference between their imports and their exports is compensated by transfers of capital, for the majority public, which are carried out in the mainland -> overseas direction. These transfers are mainly intended to contribute to the investment expenditure of the territories. Everything happens as if the mainland provided the mainland francs which allow its correspondents to have a deeply unbalanced balance; thus takes place, at the expense of the metropolis, the economic development of all the overseas countries without exception. "
Such is, indeed, the only way to establish the accounts of the colonial enterprise and to measure how it could have been advantageous for France. It could have been in only two ways.
Firstly, and this is a difficult idea to understand for all those who think that a positive balance of trade is the sign of power and competitiveness, if our exports to the countries of the empire had been lower than our imports from these same countries. In this case, the colonial system of payments would have enabled France to settle its deficit by simply registering francs to the credit of its colonies, which would thus have been forced to give it credit. A system widely practiced by Great Britain with the Commonwealth countries, or by the United States with the rest of the world.
Second, if the colonies had exported more abroad than they imported. In this case, they would have provided France with currencies which would have been useful to it in balancing its own balance of payments with foreign countries.
In fact, neither of these assumptions was realized. In the long run, on the contrary, the colonies accumulated trade deficits with France, the amount of which measures the volume of credits that the latter had to grant to enable them to simply balance their accounts. From 1900 to 1971, these credits amounted to just over 50 billion 1914 francs, i.e. more than four times the amount of Russian loans, i.e. more than three times the total amount of American aid to France from 1945 to 1955 ! Obsessed with the mystique of investments and with the accounting of capital invested by companies, we had ended up forgetting that trade credit is the preferred form of financing the economy.
In this respect, the magnitude of the credits offered from 1945 to 1962 (32.5 billion gold francs) may be surprising today. Representing, year after year, nearly 10% of France's budget revenue, these credits also measure what the metropolis has failed to rebuild its economy devastated by the war and better house its inhabitants, at a time when the Abbé Pierre began his campaign in favor of the homeless. Better still, as a percentage of GDP, France largely exceeded during the colonial period the 0.7% of development aid desired by international bodies.
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Was it necessary to have confidence in the future - or be totally blind - to gobble up such considerable sums with the sole profit of the harsh criticism of those who denounced and still denounce the looting of the colonies! Thus, in the ten years preceding independence, although Algeria absorbed 20% of French exports and was France's leading customer, the 3,350 billion old francs represented by the Algerian outlet from 1952 to 1962 were less than the 3,528 billion that the metropolitan budget had to transfer to Algeria during the same period to ensure the solvency of its first customer. As Senator Pellenc wrote in 1956, "While it is correct to say that Algeria is the "first" client of the metropolis, we cannot say that it is the "best" client, because it is a very special customer; for a third party, he only pays for his purchases with funds that the seller gives him". In 1961, the year preceding independence, Algeria bought, for example, 421 billion francs worth of goods from France, which paid it 638 to restore the imbalance in its budget and its balance of payments!
Worse: contrary to what a stubborn legend asserts, France has in no way "looted" the raw materials of its colonies. Quite the contrary. This is the surprising observation made possible by calculating the terms of trade between France and its colonies. Still in the case of Algeria, after improving during the crisis of the 1930s, Algeria's terms of trade for goods went from an index of 100 in 1949 to an index of 124 in 1960. Proof the deterioration of the terms of trade for France: from 1948 to 1954, if the tonnages imported into Algeria from France increased by 135%, Algerian exports to mainland France increased by only 32% .5%. In fact, in many cases, France purchased colonial raw materials above world prices. Admittedly, these premiums, which amounted to 25% for Algerian wine, had the usefulness of allowing traditional industries (such as the cotton industry or that of soaps or candles in Marseilles) to easily sell mediocre products on protected markets. But these facilities thereby contributed to making these sectors less suited to international competition, and to weakening the overall competitiveness of the French economy.
So many observations that led the most informed minds and the driest accountants to wish for the early severing of the ties that united France to its colonies. As early as the 1930s, some businessmen were already asking themselves the question. Sent on a mission to black Africa by the Minister for the Colonies, Paul Reynaud, in December 1931, a young finance inspector, Edmond Giscard d'Estaing, father of the former President of the Republic, wrote on his return that he was worth better, "for the very future of the country, do nothing rather than gobble up funds destined to be lost, if they [were] poured into an economy which [was] not made to use them in the right place and productively". This was to take up the arguments of the liberal economists who, half a century earlier, had opposed the conquests. "It is a question of knowing what these new markets are worth and what they cost us, wrote Gustave de Molinari in 1898. What would one say of an industrialist or a merchant who would spend 100,000 francs each year on traveling salesmen, circulars and advertisements to place 100,000 francs worth of goods? It seems that he is not in good health and we would advise his family to have him banned, or at least to force him to give up trade.”
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Such was indeed the case for France. Even if colonization was able to enrich certain adventurers, make honey for specialized companies or business circles, ensure solid prebends to civil servants and soldiers who had a career overseas, we cannot say that in the long term she served France and the French. We can even say that the French Empire, considered above all as a market intended to protect French industry from competition, slowed down its modernization and ultimately did more harm than good to the metropolitan economy as a whole.
Should we therefore regret these billions paid overseas? It would be absurd. In fact, and this is the most insidious of legacies, for a long time, France made overseas countries believe that money was commonplace and that the reduction of imbalances did not require any particular effort. For the formerly colonized countries, the severe learning of constraints is today the price of this laxity that France has practiced for too long years. It's not the usual criticism she gets, but it's probably the only one she deserves. /deepl
(thx 2 the original poster)
Yeah, completely. It'd be difficult to find anything in there that is actually accurate and valid.
It's all fantasy bullshit and conspiracy theories. France owning 14 African countries? LOL. The absurdity of the claim should be self-evident (especially when three so far of those supposedly owned countries have blocked all diffusion of French media and have openly sided with Russia). France having a plan for hegemony? LOL, I wish!
