France has been actively involved in the exploitation of goods, services, and labor in tropical Africa since the seventeenth century. Despite the public avowal of universal human rights within its national borders since the establishment of the First Republic in 1792, France's commitment to collective and individual rights in its African territories waxed and waned over the period of formal colonialism and varied by colony. The reestablishment of slavery by Emperor Napoleon I in 1804 was characteristic of this wayward policy and practice. French cultural, political, and development policies in colonial Africa were informed by the French Republican tradition, but shaped by administrative and economic exigencies that contradicted Republican values.

France regained its tiny colonial outposts in Senegal in 1817, following the Napoleonic Wars. This was part of an international agreement that included active participation in efforts to...