Down with "Francophonie!" From the French's "mission civilisatrice" in Africa to its postcolonial reformulation

Since French language arrived in West Africa with colonization, it was immediately tied to the "mission civilisatrice" promoted by France. Inscribed within an essentialist discursive regime, this tendency to make French the centre of values has imposed itself into the imaginaries of the new African elites. At the moment of independence, Francophonie crystallized the aspirations of parts of the African intelligentsia. If the critique against French as the symbols of subjugation has developed in the seventies, it has been recently coalesced into postcolonial discourses, imposing culturalist and identitarian positions. Using the example of Mali, this article demonstrates that instead of creating a new discursive paradigm, this position testifies the continuation of essentialising epilinguistic European discourses. In both cases, the intention is to impute imagined values to languages, to grant them qualities in order to categorize them.