Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas

“Beware! Against the poison that is Africa, there is but one antidote: Vichy.” So ran a 1924 advertisement for one of France’s main spas. Throughout the French empire, spas featuring water cures, often combined with “climatic” cures, thrived during the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Water cures and high-altitude resorts were widely believed to serve vital therapeutic and even prophylactic functions against tropical disease and the tropics themselves. The Ministry of the Colonies published bulletins accrediting a host of spas thought to be effective against tropical ailments ranging from malaria to yellow fever; specialized guidebooks dispensed advice on the best spas for “colonial ills.” Administrators were granted regular furloughs to “take the waters” back home in France. In the colonies, spas assuaged homesickness by creating oases of France abroad. Colonizers frequented spas to maintain their strength, preserve their French identity, and cultivate their difference from the colonized.Combining the histories of empire, leisure, tourism, culture, and medicine, Eric T. Jennings sheds new light on the workings of empire by examining the rationale and practice of French colonial hydrotherapy between 1830 and 1962. He traces colonial acclimatization theory and the development of a “science” of hydrotherapy appropriate to colonial spaces, and he chronicles and compares the histories of spas in several French colonies-Guadeloupe, Madagascar, Tunisia, and RÉunion-and in France itself. Throughout Curing the Colonizers, Jennings illuminates the relationship between indigenous and French colonial therapeutic knowledge as well as the ultimate failure of the spas to make colonialism physically or morally safe for the French.

Table of Contents:
Preface and Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1. Acclimatization, Climatology, and the Possibility of Empire 8 2. Colonial Hydrotherapy 40 3. Highland Hydrotherapy in Guadeloupe 64 4. The Spas and RÉunion Island: Antechambers to the Tropics 90 5. Leisure and Power at the Spa of Antsirabe, Madagascar 118 6. Korbous, Tunisia: Negating the Hamman 154 7. Vichy: Taking the Waters Back Home 178 Conclusion 211 Archival Abbreviations 215 Notes 217 Bibliography 247 Index 263

About the Author :
Eric T. Jennings is Associate Professor of History and a member of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Vichy in the Tropics: PÉtain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 and a coeditor, with Jacques Cantier, of L’Empire colonial sous Vichy.

Review :
"Curing the Colonizers is a thoroughly original, fascinating study. It will complement and immediately stand among the very finest studies of colonialism/imperialism in the past decades."--John Merriman, author of Police Stories: Building the French State, 1815-1851 "Eric T. Jennings's ability to give an in-depth understanding of five very different regions, mastering the primary and secondary literature on all of them, is simply breathtaking. To my knowledge, no one else has managed to write this kind of colonial history, examining the imperial framework as a whole while at the same time giving detailed information about individual colonies."--Tyler Stovall, coeditor of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France