Cercle (French colonial) would still fall under the Indigénat. The "Lamine Guèye law" of 7 April 1946 formally extended citizenship across the empire, indigènes included. Third, the law of 20 September 1947 removed the two tier court system and mandated equal access to public employment. Reduced to a political subdivision roughly equivalent to a French department and stripped of the personal power of the Cercle Commander system, the Cercle name retained enough imperial connotations to be changed by most nations upon independence to Departments or Sub-Prefectures. Mali is the only nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to retain the name Cercle for its second level
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