Shaping the Future Elite: A Comparative Analysis of French Policy Relating to Student International Mobility from Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco until Decolonisation

Abstract Since the middle of the nineteenth century French authorities used education as a tool and strategy to maintain and expand their influence in the north of Africa. Though the colonial histories of Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco differ notably, they all contributed to a significant body of international students in France in the first half of the twentieth century. This analysis assesses statistics on student mobility alongside archive material on colonial policy, thereby exploring the relationship between the common narratives and the contesting manifestations of travelling for higher education purposes within each local context. In doing so the study contributes to our understanding of the region’s cultural relationship with French learning. It serves to demonstrate the way in which the French authorities employed and cultivated an image of France as a centre of modern progress and how that narrative was more strongly projected in regions where French influence was most contested. It also reveals a global temporal significance of early twentieth-century student mobility.