But, less than ten years after the end of the First World War, thinkers, philosophers and sociologists began to doubt the chances of the great colonial empires lasting. Among them, Lothrop Stoddart, Albert Demangeon, Paul Valéry. The latter evokes the "mortal civilizations" and "the small cape of the Asian continent" that is Europe. Gabriel Hanotaux exclaims:"Who would have said to the creators of the colonial foundation, honor of the Third Republic, that before the last of them had disappeared from the scene the principle and the value of their enterprises would be subject to the judgment and control of the peoples over whom they claimed to extend their protection! And in Grandeur et servitude coloniales, published in 1931, Albert Sarraut himself, a very good former governor general of Indochina, speaks of the “backlash of the West”. Against the wind of demands and freedom blowing over the entire colonial world, whether British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese or French, Sarraut opposes what, in his view, justifies colonization, namely "the right of the strongest to help the weakest”.
These concerns were echoed during the congresses held in Paris on the occasion of the Colonial Exhibition. For Régismanset, former director at the Ministry of Overseas France, the origin of the evil is not
doubtful. “The policy of association,” he said, “if we do not substitute another better and less harmful one, will cause France to lose her colonial empire. He is therefore very clearly in favor of a policy of assimilation. to a tense situation, but not yet worrying in the immediate future.
Obviously, the world war determined a considerable change in the spirits. The Whites, by blithely killing each other and involving the colored people in their civil war, have themselves damaged their prestige. New ideas began to spread. President Wilson's declaration on the right of peoples to self-determination hit home. The Americans, newcomers to the concert of great powers, readily call themselves anti-colonialists, just like the Russian Communists, now in power in Moscow, who intend to undermine the power of the West and break an encirclement of which they are, by atavism, obsessed . So they boldly play the card of colonized and colored countries because at the time we did not yet say underdeveloped countries.