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Abstract
From the time Belgium took over the Congo in 1908, the Belgian colonial authorities relied on the ‘rule of law’ and its application to strengthen their position of domination and demonstrate their ability to manage a colony. A new generation of Belgian magistrates participated, alongside the territorial agents and European cadres of the Force publique, in the construction of the 'model colony' advocated by the Belgian government. For more than twenty years, Antoine Sohier was a magistrate in the Belgian Congo. This article focuses specifically on the last four terms during which he headed the Court of Appeal of Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) as public prosecutor (1924-1934). It extends previous studies on the Belgian judiciary in colonial context. My biographical approach intends to dialogue with this existing prosopographical approach started when the database Digithemis was created. Moreover, I draw the first outlines of an analysis of the social networks in which A. Sohier was involved during the interwar period. A corpus of legal journals published in Congo from the 1920s serves as a guide to sketch out the action and thought of A. Sohier which is gradually becoming integrated among the major colonialists.
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Landmeters, R. (2026). “Des revues et des hommes”. Antoine Sohier, Attorney General of Elisabethville (1925-1934). In Xavier Rousseaux, François Muller & Nathalie Tousignant (ed.), Governing the Colonial State: the Belgian Rule in Africa (1885-1962). Palgrave Macmillan. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269606