Writing the Legal History of Madness in French Africa (Late 19th Century–1960)
Authors: Falconieri Silvia , McNaughton Kate 
Published: November 2024

For a long time, the legal history of madness was a marginal topic of research within the field of studies into French colonial law and justice in the 19th and 20th centuries. For the past decade, however, studies of madness in a colonial context, on the African continent, have undergone both a thematic and methodological revival, as evidenced by the rise of specific, collective and multidisciplinary research programmes such as AMIAF (Aliéné mental et indigène. Histoire d’une double discrimination de statut en Afrique française—Insane and Native. A Legal History of a Double Discrimination of Status in French Africa) and MADAF (A History of Madness in West Africa: Governing Mental Disorder during Decolonisation [1940s-1970s]). The legal discourse and practices governing the mental alteration of populations colonised by France in Africa are at the heart of the research that has been carried out by the multidisciplinary team of the AMIAF programme since 2019. It appears vital to reflect on the sources that must be be drawn on when engaging in such research. What documents allow us to study the legal treatment of madness in a colonial context? How are we to index them, interrogate them, interpret them and cross-reference them with each other? What does their configuration tell us about the legal and administrative discourse and practices connected to madness (in particular that of the colonised populations)? In light of these concerns, this article examines the methodological challenges posed by the constitution of a corpus allowing us to study the legal and administrative treatment of madness in African territories formerly colonised by France. The sources at the heart of this contribution mainly come from the fonds of the Archives nationales d’outre-mer d’Aix-en-Provence, the Service historique de la défense de Toulon, and certain medical journals from the period under consideration devoted to medicine and colonial psychiatry. These constitute materials that are heterogeneous and dispersed, not just in geographical terms but also within the same archival fonds; they reveal a rupture in the legal treatment of madness in disparate contexts (arrests, internment procedures in accordance with the indigénat regime, complaints, reforms of the legislative framework, management of healthcare sites that existed prior to colonisation, financial issues, legal proceedings), independently of healthcare institutions, which go well beyond sanitary considerations, connecting instead with colonial policies, the maintenance of public order and financial issues.This article analyses these sources through the AMIAF digital library, which was designed and set up within the framework of its homonymous ANR research programme. Far from limiting itself to establishing a corpus of documents, this digital tool allows its users to analyse the documents hosted using new paths that permit them to sort and order these sources in original ways. The search and ordering methods offered by the AMIAF library include the “Index” and the “Tag Cloud.” Using these search tools, in particular the index of “Words of Madness” and the tag “Signs of Madness,” the article dwells on the vocabulary used by the players of colonial law in referring to the mental alteration of African populations, as well as the elements they used to detect it. Far from laying any claim to exhaustiveness or complete analysis in this field, these examples aim to reveal the benefits of carrying out research using this tool where the documents hosted are displayed and sequenced according to an order and criteria that allow the researcher to easily carry out new comparative analyses.