Empire of Illusion: The Rise and Fall of Hashish in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

By exploring the history of cannabis in the French Empire, this dissertation builds on recent scholarly efforts to investigate the intersections of France’s national and imperial pasts. As scholar Gary Wilder argued in his seminal work, The French Imperial Nation-State (2005), “French historiography is traditionally guided by a national paradigm for which a correspondence between territory, population, and state is considered normal and the existence of colonies is treated as exceptional.” This fabricated barrier between France’s national and imperial pasts, he argues, conceals the reality that “the metropole and its overseas colonies exercised a reciprocal influence upon one another” and that both should be studied as one political and cultural unit, as what he terms the “imperial nation-state.” As this dissertation demonstrates, the history of drug use and prohibition in France is in large part a story of movement between colony and metropole. From the nation’s first imperial encounter with hashish during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 through the subsequent spread of cannabis use and cannabis-based medications in the French metropole during the middle 19th century to the creation of anti-cannabis laws in France and its North African colonies during the fin de siècle, the circulation of cannabis and ideas about cannabis use between colony and metropole drove the development of prohibition policies in France from the birth of the republic through the early 20th century