Imperial Brothers: Freemasonry and Fraternity in the French Colonial Empire

Abstract

Freemasonry, a fraternal order dedicated to ritualized friendship, moral discipline, and mutual aid, was a ubiquitous feature of life in France’s colonies by the mid-eighteenth century. This dissertation argues that freemasonry provided French colonists important tools for sustaining—and sometimes challenging—colonial hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality, and class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on colonial and masonic archives and the masonic press, it traces a shift from a proslavery masonry that disciplined through racial exclusion to an antislavery masonry that relied on racial inclusion as a mechanism of gendered social control. Despite its rhetorical embrace of equality among brothers, eighteenth-century freemasons limited membership to elite white men who met strict social and behavioral criteria. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, metropolitan French lodges began admitting free men of color to pursue a project of racial reconciliation and compassionate colonialism, while masons in Algeria—France’s newest colony—attempted (and largely failed) to initiate indigenous Algerian men in hopes of assimilating them to French values. The dissertation argues that this new, putatively inclusive vision of masonic fraternity helped give rise to the ideologies of the so-called “Republican Empire” of the Third Republic (1870-1940), including colorblindness and the “civilizing mission.” In both its racially exclusive and racially inclusive iterations, freemasonry also shaped the behavior and masculinities of the white men whose social authority it sought to uphold. This dissertation contends that Frenchmen perceived life in the colonies as threatening key tenets of their masculinity including honor, credit, self-mastery, and sociability. To combat the threat of colonial emasculation, masonry stepped in as a pedagogical institution, teaching colonists to control their “passions,” collectively safeguard one another’s honor, and help their masonic brothers withstand disasters and contingencies. Transgressing masonic precepts—including a prohibition on interracial sexual relationships—could result in a disgraceful public expulsion from the institution. By imbricating themselves in an imperial politics of reputation, masons policed one another’s behavior to ensure it properly upheld the colonial order. The study of freemasonry therefore offers a window into the machinations of colonial power beyond the purview of the colonial state.