A cultural history of French colonizers, and their ambitions and anxieties, as reflected through highland spas in th French empire.

“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.

"“Curing the Colonizers is an impressively researched and beautifully written book that takes Jennings’s previous transcolonial work on the Vichy regime overseas in highly original new directions.”" - Journal of Modern History

"“[A] nuanced, insightful examination of the ideological premises and cultural practices that informed French colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. . . . With this fascinating book, Jennings joins a distinguished group of historians. . . . He further enriches our understanding of Europeans’ anxieties about self and security in the alien lands they ruled, casting a fresh eye in turn on the cultural conventions and social practices they marshaled to bolster their sense of confidence and give meaning to their privileged place in the colonial order.”" - Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History

"“[Jennings] manages to bring to life the diverse aspects of these spa resorts, including their role as medical and political centers and tourist destinations. . . . Jennings’s elegant study handles these complex issues deftly and with clarity. It is a significant and welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the history of acclimatization in French imperialism.”" - Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences

"“This is a very well constructed study, with the case studies rounded off by a measured conclusion. The main themes are clearly argued and demonstrated, the text nicely illustrated with postcards, advertisements and other illustrations. It is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on the spas.”" - French History