Finances publiques et conquête coloniale : le coût budgétaire de l'expansion française entre 1850 et 1913

Abstract

Bien qu'ayant fait l'objet de longues polémiques dans l'opinion, au Parlement, et plus récemment chez les historiens, le problème du financement public de l'expansion coloniale est paradoxalement peu connu. Combien la conquête coloniale a-t-elle coûté au budget français ? Comment furent dépensés les crédits votés ? Questions cent fois posées, auxquelles il n'a jamais été donné, du moins à notre connaissance, de réponses très précises.Il nous a paru utile de combler cette lacune à l'occasion d'une Recherche coopérative du C.N.R.S., afin d'installer sur des bases plus solides le débat traditionnel concernant la « rentabilité » et l'utilité économique des colonies, et celui plus récent sur la place des dépenses publiques dans les processus de développement. Le financement public de l'expansion coloniale, considérée sous tous ses aspects militaires, administratifs, économiques, repose sur trois sources de crédits : le budget de l'État ; les budgets locaux des territoires coloniaux et des collectivités autonomes (ports, chemins de fer, etc.), dans la mesure où ils en sont dotés ; les emprunts publics, garantis ou non par l'État, émis par ces mêmes territoires ou collectivités publiques.

The Black Man's Burden: The Cost of Colonization of French West Africa

“…If in fact AOF was representative of the other colonies, colonization should have absorbed 1.6 percent of French annual expenditure, which is far below the estimates provided by Bobrie (1976) and Marseille (1984Marseille ( , 1996. These results are at odds with much of the leading literature which emphasizes colonization as a financial burden.…”

“…The previous studies do not cover the whole colonial period: Bobrie (1976) covers 1850-1913, Coquery-Vidrovitch (1982) covers 1905-1937, while Marseille (1984, 1996 mainly focuses on the 1950s. The previous studies do not cover the whole colonial period: Bobrie (1976) covers 1850-1913, Coquery-Vidrovitch (1982) covers 1905-1937, while Marseille (1984, 1996 mainly focuses on the 1950s.…”

“…Third, Bobrie (1976) and Marseille (1984Marseille ( , 1996 do not take into account transfers from the colonies to France, resulting in an overestimation of the burden of the colonies for French taxpayers. In this article, I observe transfers from the metropolis to AOF as well as transfers from AOF to the metropolis in order to give an accurate estimate of the effective share of AOF in metropolis expenditures.…”

“…In the absence of a quantitative study like Davis and Huttenback's, there is little hard evidence to support either of these views of French colonization. François Bobrie and Coquery-Vidrovitch published some analysis of the financial transfers between the metropolis and the colonies, but unfortunately the analysis remained incomplete 4 (Bobrie 1976;Coquery-Vidrovitch 1973, 1982. 2 Davis and Huttenbach (1986) argue that British taxes would have been 20 percent less in the absence of empire because the United Kingdom bore most of the defense costs of the British Empire; Marseille (1984) estimates that the investment in public financial assets in the colonies amounted to 7 percent of metropolitan public expenditures in the 1910s, and 4 percent from 1947 to 1958; Marseille (1996) estimates that the trade deficit compensated by France's public subsidies to the colonies represented 8-9 percent of metropolitan expenditure in the 1920s and from 1945 to 1962.…”

“…In the 1970s a team of economic historians supervised by Jean Bouvier and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch 3 started collecting colonial budget data to answer these questions. François Bobrie and Coquery-Vidrovitch published some analysis of the financial transfers between the metropolis and the colonies, but unfortunately the analysis remained incomplete 4 (Bobrie 1976; Coquery-Vidrovitch 1973, 1982). Jacques Marseille has been credited with finally ascertaining the cost of colonization for French taxpayers when he published his dissertation in 1984 (Marseille 1984), but his analysis is based on indirect evidence on colonial trade deficits.…”