Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas

by Eric T. Jennings

“Beware! Against the poison that is Africa, there is but one Vichy.” So ran a 1924 advertisement for one of France’s main spas. Throughout the French empire, spas featuring water cures, often combined with “climatic” cures, thrived during the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Water cures and high-altitude resorts were widely believed to serve vital therapeutic and even prophylactic functions against tropical disease and the tropics themselves. The Ministry of the Colonies published bulletins accrediting a host of spas thought to be effective against tropical ailments ranging from malaria to yellow fever; specialized guidebooks dispensed advice on the best spas for “colonial ills.” Administrators were granted regular furloughs to “take the waters” back home in France. In the colonies, spas assuaged homesickness by creating oases of France abroad. Colonizers frequented spas to maintain their strength, preserve their French identity, and cultivate their difference from the colonized. Combining the histories of empire, leisure, tourism, culture, and medicine, Eric T. Jennings sheds new light on the workings of empire by examining the rationale and practice of French colonial hydrotherapy between 1830 and 1962. He traces colonial acclimatization theory and the development of a “science” of hydrotherapy appropriate to colonial spaces, and he chronicles and compares the histories of spas in several French colonies—Guadeloupe, Madagascar, Tunisia, and Réunion—and in France itself. Throughout Curing the Colonizers , Jennings illuminates the relationship between indigenous and French colonial therapeutic knowledge as well as the ultimate failure of the spas to make colonialism physically or morally safe for the French.

Genres: History

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 2006

About the author

Eric Jennings’ areas of interest include 19th and 20th century France, French colonialism, decolonization, and the francophone world.

In 2001, he published Vichy in the Tropics (Stanford University Press, translated into French with Grasset in 2004 under the title Vichy sous les tropiques), a book derived from his Berkeley thesis that explored the ultra-conservative and authoritarian Vichy regime’s colonial politics in the French Caribbean, Indochina, and Madagascar. Curing the Colonizers (Duke University Press, 2006, translated into French as A la Cure les Coloniaux! PUR, 2011) was situated at the crossroads of the histories of colonialism, medicine, culture, leisure, and tourism. His Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011, translated into French with Payot as La ville de l’éternel printemps, 2013) is a multi-angled study of the major French colonial hill station in Southeast Asia. Its focus lies on place, power, and colonial fault lines. His book on French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon under Free French rule, entitled La France libre fut africaine, appeared with Perrin in 2014, and is being translated into English with Cambridge University Press. It considers the centrality of sub-Saharan Africa for the early Fighting French movement, paying special attention to issues of legitimacy and coercion. His other publications include an edited volume with Jacques Cantier, L’Empire colonial sous Vichy (Odile Jacob, 2004), as well as many articles and chapters straddling the histories of France, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, and the Caribbean.

Jennings has received a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship (2014), SSHRC and CIHR grants, the Alf Heggoy and Jean-François Coste book prizes as well as the Palmes académiques.

Reviews

[Erin]

summer 24 - GSRM