Principles and Pragmatism

Abstract

Pierre Mille, who was born in 1864, began a career in journalism in 1890. On visiting a nascent French colony, Madagascar, for the first time in 1896, he immediately felt a strong vocation for the colonial cause. Trips to many other recently acquired possessions in Africa and Asia soon followed, and, while continuing to work as a journalist, Mille began publishing short stories inspired by his interest in the colonies. The central importance of the colonial cause throughout the rest of Mille’ s career is indicated by a remark he made ten years before his death, on the occasion of the Colonial Exhibition helt at Vincennes in 1931. After referring to trade figures and other economic statistics on display at the Exhibition, Mille stated: ‘Je crois bien que l’unique raison pour laquelle je voudrais vivre encore vingt ans, est que j’assisterais à une nouvelle Exposition coloniale, où les graphiques inscrits sur les murailles montreraient que les chiffres que je viens de citer ont au moins doublé.’¹ (‘I do believe that the only reason I should like to live for another twenty years is so that I would be able to attend another Colonial Exhibition where the diagrams on the walls would show that the figures I have just quoted had at least doubled.’)