It marked a change in both the philosophy and tactics of colonial rule in French West Africa, brought on by crises and revolts which preceded him, and completed by post-war Governors General.

The year 1915 was punctuated by a number of revolts in rural French West Africa over forced conscription into the Senegalese Tirailleurs and growing direct taxation of Africans who had no voice in the governing of the colonies.

[1] Van Vollenhoven suspended conscription in the Second zone of West Africa: those area's where the population was governed not by French citizenship law but by the decree system of the Indigénat.

Here he induced African leaders such as the elected representative Blaise Diagne[2] and the Senegalese Marabout Amadou Bamba to recruit for the military, with the promise of an extension of democracy after the war.

[3] In 1916 the originaires (those Africans born in the theoretically free cities of Saint-Louis, Dakar, Gorée, and Rufisque) were granted full voting rights while maintaining legal protections offered by local customary law.

Prior to this, most originaires had feared abandoning their rights to face local courts, and never begun the often arduous process of becoming French citizens.

The protracted battle by Senegalese Deputy Blaise Diagne, and his help to Van Vollenhoven in recruiting thousands of Africans to fight in World War I, won legal and voting rights were to the originaires with the Loi Blaise Diagne of 29 September 1916 [4][5] Economically, Van Vollenhoven used the colonial state system to enter into centralised trade and production agreements with the largest French companies.

France's West African colonies now longer existed as part of a great diplomatic rivalry, or to serve the interests of specific (if influential) firms.

[8] Philosophically, van Vollenhoven was a proponent of the Association: a variant of indirect rule, as opposed to the Assimilationist policy of his predecessors.

This change had both positive and negative aspects for Africans living under French rule, but it was to become the empire's guiding principle until decolonisation.

[10][11] While such arbitrary demands returned under his replacement Gabriel Louis Angoulvant and survived under the Indigénat system until 1944–56, the model under which later Governors General in French Africa worked was changed by van Vollenhoven's reforms.

Blaise Diagne had been appointed to Clemenceau's War Cabinet, and the French government felt that with his help, they could again begin recruiting African Subjects, a move resisted by van Vollenhoven.

It was during this final assault on Parcy that van Vollenhoven was fatally wounded leading his men into the attack at Montgobert, in the Longpont Forest (Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne).

Captain van Vollenhoven was "observing, upright, without helmet, amid the ripe corn," when a bullet struck his skull.