The French Revolution of 1789, the Second Revolution of 1848, and the Third Republic that began in 1871 articulated an ideal of participatory democracy, secular identity and equality which most of the world had never witnessed. Building on the Enlightenment heritage, the French Republican leaders of the 19th century envisioned a nation-state in which religious institutions, and most notably the powerful Catholic Church, would be confined to the private sphere. Catholic leaders, in France and Rome, were not about to accept such restriction and struggled bitterly with the administration in Paris over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Catholics had a strong presence in the educational and political domain. Some commentators would say that France had a kind of civil war throughout the 19th century, between secular-republican and Catholic, often framed as left against right.
The revolutionary and democratic heritage did not translate easily into the imperial settings. Most of the colonial administrators were military men and took their cues from authoritarian figures such as Napoleon. In certain areas, however, they had to deal with republican institutions and citizens - in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean and on the coast of Senegal. Saint-Louis and three other coastal enclaves (the island of Gorée and the towns of Rufisque and Dakar)obtained the rights to elect mayors and city councils, a General Council, and a deputy to the French parliament.
These rights were given in 1848, then taken away and finally given back with the Third Republic in the 1870s. Most of the active citizens were French and métis, and they kept the channels of communication open to the metropole - the Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, the National Assembly, newspapers and friends in high places. They could embarrass the administration and on occasion force a recall of a governor or other official. The administrators usually kept their distance from the Catholic Church, consistent with the republican heritage. They celebrated the secular holidays of France. At times they would accept missionary activity, but only if it would not disrupt life in their dominions nor produce hostility on the part of the Muslim majorities. The people in the interior belonged to different languages, cultures and states that were mostly independent until incorporated into French West Africa at the end of the 19th century.
The administrators and inhabitants of Saint-Louis viewed these people through the lens of a kind of "religious ethnography" which assumed that certain groups were Muslim, others "animist" or "pagan," and still others were in between. A few of the administrators were Freemasons, belonging to lodges in Senegal and the metropole. They had a stronger dose of the republican heritage, and were often hostile to the church. Their secular ideals also affected attitudes towards Islam. In general they were not "Islamophiles," since they considered Islam to be another religious system that interfered with human fulfillment. Authoritarian, secular and somewhat republican - these attitudes of governors and administrators in French Senegal created the framework within which tolerance and pluralism struggled to develop in Saint-Louis in the 19th and 20th centuries.