‘So What Did You Learn from War?’ Violent Decolonization and Paul Mus's Search for Humanity

Abstract

This article examines how and why the French Orientalist, Paul Mus, became one of the leading critics of the Indochina War and an advocate of French decolonization. Most studies of Western Orientalism tend to adopt Saidian approaches to demonstrate the degree to which Western scholars operated from within the confines of the wider colonial project and were influenced by it. Mus does not escape from this critique. However, like Jacques Berque in North Africa, Mus was one of a handful of French Orientalists who not only grew up and pursued their research in the Empire, but also became deeply involved in trying to understand the rising tide of colonial nationalism, the nature of French colonialism and the meaning of decolonization in new ways for the time. This article considers how war, and in particular the experience of violence in the colonial context, shaped Mus's understanding of colonialism, his conception of humanity, and influenced his post-war writings in ways that distinguished him from colonial humanists in charge of the Republican Empire and Orientalists who continued to operate within the colonial power structure. In late 1949, Paul Mus left his position at the head of the French Colonial Academy to renew his pre-war academic career. However, unlike scores of social scientists who had also experienced war, Mus placed that very experience at the centre of his post-war scholarship.