Why did the French forget liberté, egalité, fraternité when they went into the tropics? As Césaire noted, Albert Sarraut, the French minister of colonies in the 1920s, had written that France must not turn over the colonies to the nationalists in the name of " an alleged right to possess the land one occupies, and some sort of right to remain in fierce isola­tion, which would leave unutilized resources to lie forever idle in the hands of incompetents. " [...]