Late answer, sorry.
The FB post seems to be derived from this longer article. The first part of the article (up to "... throughout the continent") is correct, as it is copied from the Oxford Bibliographies entry about French colonial rule. But the rest of the article (starting with "During the French rule in Africa...") is badly digested history with some bizarre mid-sentence gender-swapping. The "Baggett and French Cheese" sounds like an American stereotype about France rather than like something written by a francophone African (and it is spelled baguette anyway). I guess that it is from the same imaginary place where colonized Africans were forced to watch French TV. For the record television broadcasting started in Africa immediately before (Nigeria) or after independance in the 1960s (Nwulu et al., 2010).
That said, the text makes some bold claims about the "policy of assimilation" and this deserves examination. The idea that French colonizers actually wanted to turn colonized people into Frenchmen has had a long shelf life and still pops up in the popular history of French colonisation (see for instance the Wikipedia page on Assimilation in French colonies). English-language scholars such as Roberts (1929) and Mumford (in Africans learn to be French, 1935) have largely contributed to the notion that French colonization was primarily assimilationist in nature, as well as a number of French and African administrators (including Senghor). And indeed, as late as 1944, former Minister of Colonies Jacques Stern could wax lyrical about "forty million continental Frenchmen and sixty million overseas Frenchmen, white and colored" (cited by Lewis, 1962). But was assimilation actually a goal in the French colonies created in the 19th century?
What is assimilation?
The term "assimilation" is a difficult one. Its meaning was always in flux and it has remained a source of confusion for more than a century. To quote Emmanuelle Saada (2005):
The term has many and changing meanings: in its common usage, the notion refers both to the full application of French laws to the colonies [that I'll call Type #1], to a form of administrative centralisation and, more globally, to a work of social and cultural transformation. The latter is also polysemous: it may be a question of transforming the natives in the image of the colonisers [Type #2] or, on the contrary, of letting them 'evolve in their civilisation', i.e. at their own pace and in their own direction, as long as this does not contradict what is at the heart of (European) 'civilisation' [Type #3].
The Type #2 of assimilation (transforming the natives) came from the universalist principles of the 1789 Revolution: human beings are all equals, so everyone can become French. Condorcet, in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, thought than mankind went through nine steps of progress, from the savage peuplades (tribes) in Step 1, to the the French Republic, that epitome of civilisation, in Step 9 (there's also an utopia in Step 10). Peoples stuck in Step 1 were invited to fast-track to Step 9 with the help of their "European brothers" as they would disappear if they did not. The logical consequence of this was that Step 9 people had the moral duty to rise their less advanced brothers from the tyranny of ignorance: civilizing mission here we come!
This is actually what the French did to themselves in the 19th century, as demonstrated by Eugen Weber in Peasants into Frenchmen (1976): rural French populations who spoke their own languages and sometimes lived in partial autarky became "French" in the second half of the century, a process that was finalized in the crucible of WW1. Another example of successful assimilation in France was that of the Jews. In the French colonies, this cultural assimilation had begun in the 17th century in the "Old Colonies" of the Caribbean where (Lewis, 1962)
the non-white population was made up of former slaves who long since had been torn from their original roots, who spoke French, and who had in fact no other cultural tradition available
In fact, enslaved people did arrive with their cultural traditions and those hybridized with European ones, in Haiti for instance. Likewise, in the Ile de la Réunion, French culture hybridized with the cultures of the various populations that had set foot on the island in the past centuries, African, Asian, Arabic etc. The Old Colonies had been sending culturally French black and mixed-race people to the metropole since the Ancien Régime, including politicians and intellectuals. To this day, French populations of the overseas departments can be considered as "assimilated" from a cultural point of view, though they have developed cultural specificities.
However, throughout the 19th century, monarchist and imperial governments repudiated this assimilationist ideal, and when Republican governments resuscitated it (if only by abolishing slavery in 1848), it was with extreme caution. Type #2 assimilation, in its purest cultural form, was never implemented in Africa (North and subsaharan) and Indochina. French colonizers never had the means, and only a limited willingness, to turn natives into French people. Cultural assimilation would only affect a thin layer of évolués ("evolved natives"), worthy of naturalization. For the rest of the population, the relation to France would be of a legal or administrative nature. Assimilation had a much narrower ambition. To quote historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (2010):
French assimilation is a myth. It is, of course, a theme that is often evoked, but the reality of the colonial situation would be more accurately summed up in the pithy formula: 'a lot of subjection, very little autonomy, a hint of assimilation'. There was no francization of the AOF [French West Africa], simply the elimination of specifically African political structures and the substitution of colonial structures and colonial education. English-speaking Africa, anxious to respect the integrity of traditional values, was opposed by French cultural imperialism, which was based on a denial of assimilation, of which the differences in the legal and social status of the inhabitants of the AOF are the most obvious proof.
The main objective of colonial policies was always to make colonization work for the benefit of the colonizers first. How much "French" colonized people were supposed to become was envisioned only with this goal in mind. Assimilation was thus of Type #1, legal and administrative. The Nation-State became an Imperial Nation-State by trying to impose on the Colonies not so much its culture or way of life, but its governing (and often punitive) structures, without the political rights available to French citizens. The sénatus-consulte (senate act) of 1854 organized the administrative and legal status of new French colonies and made them entirely dependent on decrees of the Ministry of Colonies. At the upper level of the Colonies, all power was vested in a Gouverneur Général (Résidents in Protectorates), and distributed down (in Africa) to the Commandants de Cercles, who ruled over a particular area. The traditional power structures of the native populations were no longer supposed to be active (they still existed in Protectorates, but they were under French authority). To quote Joost Van Vollenhoven, Gouverneur Général of the French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française, AOF) in 1917:
They [the native chiefs] have no power of their own, of any kind, because there are not two authorities in the circle, the French authority and the indigenous authority; there is only one. Only the commander of the circle is in command; only he is responsible. The indigenous chief is only an instrument, an auxiliary.
It can be noted that the Dutch-born Van Vollenhoven, born in Rotterdam and raised in Algeria, was himself a prototypal example of true French Type #2 assimilation. He was naturalized at 22 and rose to the top of colonial administration in less than 10 years: the brilliant Vollenhoven was not yet 40 when he was appointed Gouverneur Général of Indochina and later of AOF. Assimilation had certainly worked for him, even though he denounced it in his writings as a "dangerous utopia"!
But for native populations, assimilation remained an administrative and legal concept, a matter of compliance rather than culture. They had to live within a French framework that regulated much of their daily lives, such as criminal penalties, work, taxes, forced labour, or commerce. Particularly, they were under a "personal status" that made them answerable to a specific and exceptional legal code, the Code de l'Indigénat. Colonized people were not French citizens but French nationals, deprived of political rights. The case of Algeria was even stricter: in a land that was considered to be part of the French territory, the Algerian population was kept for decades in a status of quasi-apartheid where they needed a permit to move in their own country. For native populations, accession to full citizenship, while theoretically possible, was severely restricted, and, in fact, may not have been always looked so desirable: there is still a debate among historians about the reasons for the small numbers - a few thousands - of Algerians petitioning for French citizenship once it became accessible under conditions in 1865 (Blévis, 2003).
-> To be continued
edit: fixed bad link
