French West Africa with the exception of the Senegalese Communes, the administrative structure of French rule at the lower levels remained constant, based upon the Cercle system. This was the smallest unit of French political administration in French colonial Africa that was headed by a European officer. They might range in size, but French Sudan (modern Mali) consisted of less than a dozen Cercles for most of its existence. Thus, a Cercle Commander might be the absolute authority over hundreds of thousands of Africans. A Cercle consisted of several cantons, each of which in turn consisted of several villages, and was almost universal
French Colonial Union on the proper path to increasing France's colonial possessions' worth. Indeed, the Union Coloniale Francaise (UCF) organized five hundred talks between 1897 and 1906 with the intention of promoting the emigration of bons colons or "good colonists" to French colonial destinations, and in the case of French colonial IndoChina, as noted by historian Marie Paule Ha, among the benefits of including women as colonists was the charge of putting an end to the “highly undesirable practice of concubinage between Frenchmen and native women,” and an unloading of the large “stock” of metropolitan single females. French Colonial Union The French Colonial