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This thesis examines the intellectual context of the first international congress of comparative law held in Paris, at the occasion of the 1900 World Fair. In particular, it articulates some of the unstated assumptions that made it possible for the conversation of this congress to unfold as it did. Using methods of conceptual history and discursive analysis, the author shows how this constitutive conversation for the discipline of comparative law drew from many discourses including conversations about the prestige of French legal science, claims to disciplinarity and the corresponding search for a scientific method, the desire to master the processes of legal unification arising from international trade, a concern with ensuring the place of France in the hierarchy of nations in a period of national malaise, and a mission befalling France to civilize the rest of the world. In showing how these different conversations shaped the discourse of the first congress of comparative law, the thesis outlines the ways in which they also participated in (re)shaping deeply entrenched conceptions of legal knowledge and legal scholarship. / Graduate

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A l’aube du XXe siècle, les juristes internationalistes français, promoteurs d’une discipline tendant à s’affirmer dans le paysage doctrinal national et international, entendent systématiser le fait colonial. Phénomène emblématique, la colonisation monopolise les relations interétatiques de l’époque et offre autant d’avantages économiques, politiques et humanitaires aux peuples civilisés et colonisés, qu’elle accroît les risques de conflits entre ces derniers. Saisissant l’opportunité de défendre les valeurs et actions de la France sur la scène internationale tout en confortant leur rôle de maîtres à penser de la colonisation, les membres de la jeune École française de droit international public théorisent alors un projet entremêlant intimement les concepts de « droit international », « colonisation » et « civilisation » : la colonisation a vocation à étendre la civilisation sur l’ensemble des territoires garantissant alors le développement du droit international dont la mission est de préserver le bien-être de l’humanité / At the dawn of the XXth century, the French Internationalist jurists, promoters of a discipline aiming at establishing itself in the international and national doctrinal landscape, intend to systematize the colonial phenomenon. Colonization is a symbolic phenomenon which monopolizes interstate relationships of the era. It offers as many economic, politic and humanitarian advantages to civilized and colonized peoples, as it increases the risks of conflicts between them. The members of the new French school of public international law have seized the opportunity to defend the values and actions of France on the international scene while reinforcing their roles of intellectual leaders of colonization. They then have set out a project which deeply mingles “international laws”, “colonization” and “civilization” concepts : colonization has authority to extend civilization on all the territories that guarantee the development of international law, whose mission is to preserve mankind well-being

This thesis analyzes the major theme of ‘postcolonial genealogy’ in portraying the African bending under the weight of colonial history in Le vieux nègre et la médaille, Une vie de boy of Ferdinand Oyono and Le Chercheur d’Afriques of Henri Lopes. Being a product of a colonial Genesis, the African character runs behind the colonizer’s mirror through his Civilizing Mission. René Girard’s ‘double bind’ theory explains how this cultural assimilation is, in Le vieux nègre et la médaille and Une vie de boy, a dead end because the colonizer needs a subordinate and not an equal. The cohabitation of a black housewife with the French Commander in Le Chercheur d’Afriques should be seen as simply an allegory of postcolonial Africa’s dependency on the West. The consequences of the feminization of the African continent are enormous in the post-colonial imaginary. While the colonizer had conquered Africa with his Herculean body, in Oyono’s novels, his Fall is obtained through the aesthetics of Bakhtinian ‘rabaissement’ which degrades his ‘grotesque body’ to that of the colonized. The colonizer and the colonized are neutralized and leveled in their perishable bodies, thus, making futile the Civilizing Mission that operated by ranking races. Power is never total. It is always imperfect, and can never destroy a subjectivity that resists it. In Oyono’s novels, the Fall of the colonial Father is also obtained through the inquisitive gaze that the colonized return back to the colonizer, and through their ‘subversive mimicry’ that parodies his codes. In Une vie de boy and Le Chercheur d’Afriques, the ‘son-Father’ relationship between the hero and the colonial Father, is also symbolic of the ‘Africa-West’ rapports. Living under the specter of the Father, the son has to negotiate his survival between weaning and parricide. The biological miscegenation in Le Chercheur d’Afriques is a metaphor of the ‘rhizome identity’ of the postcolonial African who renounces both the Fathers of Negritude and those of the Civilizing Mission. / Thesis (Ph.D, French) -- Queen's University, 2011-06-24 12:43:30.006