How to Count the Subjects of the Empire

The gathering of population data, in a colonial context, served as a yardstick for the success of the imperial adventure. The act of counting, whatever its technical modalities, was perceived as one of the tools of sovereignty transfer from traditional chieftaincy to the colonial army. When the colonial ideological system was put in place, the relative simplicity of the numbered "images" clouded the ambiguities and complexities, at the local level, of the statistical function in an administration still struggling to impose itself and practice modern states’ activities. The proposed analyses illustrate the subtlety of the often tumultuous dialogue between field administrators, lieutenant-governors and commandants de cercle, and the superior levels of administration, governor-general and minister. Until 1943, there was a complete inadequacy between the requirements of annual censuses planned in the 1909 decree, confirmed in the following directives, and the capacities of an administration more attuned to population accounting then to its management in the demographic sense. Nevertheless, the obligation of censuses encouraged the development of administrators’ visits, constant reminder to populations of the colonial administrative presence. After 1945, planning practices replaced the three year accounting time span with five or ten year time periods. A new generation of statisticians and demographers then rallied in these new attempts to better understand the reality of populations of this colonial France, renamed "over-sea."