Customer Reviews

The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gary Wilder's book The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude & Colonial Humanism between Two World Wars is an ambitious attempt to modify the historical view of the French colonial empire. Amidst a dazzling introduction awash with sociopolitical theory from Kant to Arendt, Wilder confronts the literature of French colonial history represented in Alice Conklin's A Mission to Civilize, which yields to the intellectual tendency to incorporate colonized "territories into a republican national metanarrative" (6). Wilder refuses to affirm principles of republicanism as universally virtuous. He likewise does not limit the scope of his study to compartmentalized attributes of social inequalities, such as race or class.

Wilder argues that the founding antimony (equality and citizenship) of French republicanism provided the political system with equally rational starting points that led to contradictory consequences. Therefore, despite the declaration that "all men are born and remain free and equal in rights," when citizenship is a mark of national membership, a likely consequence is unequal humans within a nation-state. Wilder advocates that scholars look less at micro-examinations of symptoms behind republican social unrest and more towards the foundational cause of such political turmoil. "The very logic and instruments of republican universalism worked to particularize segments of the population" (18).

The French Imperial Nation-State is a deftly-written collection of complex argumentation concerning political and social contradictions of France's imperial identity. Wilder designates interwar France as an imperial nation-state because of the interrelatedness of parliamentary republicanism and authoritarian colonialism within a single political system. He proposes that the republican metropole maintained an interdependent relationship with French colonial holdings.

The book discusses the origins and complexities of a Greater France, the French political creation intended to restore a sense of dignity to French nationality in the face of the metropole's post-World War I sense of pessimism and nostalgia. The message of Greater France: despite the devastations of war to the French political, economic, and social systems, la France retains her privileged place in the world because of her imperial holdings. The ideal of Greater France also endeavored to reconcile the nation-state's republican and authoritarian tendencies. Wilder presents the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris as an attempt to "show the true face of colonialism to those who are ignorant about it" (37). The Exhibition--held in the metropole, not the colonies--while showing the benefits of French imperialism for the colonized, also augmented anti-colonial sentiments as increased numbers of the colonized migrated to France.

Part I of The French Imperial Nation-State is an examination of how the French used science, welfare, and administration to create a new colonial rationality. The post-war years helped state officials understand that French racial superiority alone could no longer justify colonial rule and expansion. (Wilder does not propose that French colonial authorities abandoned the idea of racial superiority.) The new colonial rationality incorporated practical science and scientific administration to inform modern methods of colonial rule. The results of the French scientific, welfarist, colonial rationality was a paternalistic system of administration "that combined the recognition of ethnic difference with an ethic of indigenous well-being" (43). Yet, despite the French officials' enlightened, post-war, non-racial rationality, they retained "the right of the strong [metropolitan French] to protect the weak" colonized subjects (51). According to Wilder, under the new colonial rationality, the colonies participated in the political, economic, and social reconfigurations that facilitated increasing interrelatedness between them and the metropole. However, throughout this section's discussion, colonial humanism, for all of its administrative revisions, maintained a Greater France composed of separate but not-so-equal societies.

Part II, which is one of the book's strongest contributions, begins with a pertinent discussion of the origins of French civil society through which Wilder demonstrates the good citizenship of colonial immigrants in the metropole. Despite being semi-citizens, Africans and Antilleans "practiced citizenship" though denied that right. To confront the lack of French citizenship, an informal movement, Negritude, evolved among predominantly educated colonials in France. Unlike the scientific underpinnings and mechanics of colonial humanism, Negritude began as a cultural project of university students who informally sat around cafés and salons discussing the complexities of their life experiences. Wilder interestingly points out that the movement to "articulate citizenship with a distinct Negro-African (national) culture" began in Paris, where the indicators of one's inferior status remained most palpable (161). Also, it is paradoxical that Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas, who had appropriately assimilated (to the point of excelling in colonial French schools), became the cultural leaders in "a rejection of assimilation, an identification with blackness, and a celebration of African civilization" (156).

Negritude neither was a formalized movement nor was it universally embraced by black colonials. Intellectuals and writers propelled Negritude beyond talk. René Maran's prize-winning book Batoula, with its moderate, yet critical tone of French colonial policy and its effects on colonized people cost Maran his colonial administrative post and exemplified Black patriotism. Contributors to the journal La Dépeche Africaine couched their criticisms of contradictions between French republican ideology and colonial practices in terms of the 1789 and 1848 republics. Wilder refers to this as Black republicanism, which exhibits some comparisons with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s understanding of the Civil Rights Movements in terms of 1776 and 1787 republicanism. Eventually, the once-disaffected students of the Latin Quarter presented formidable challenges to colonial humanist rationality. Damas attacked the historical contradictions of French political forms and colonial implications to which he attributed his native Guiana's problems. He invoked the image of Toussaint Louverture to inform his understanding of black independence and connect the Negritude elite with black masses. Senghor, similarly, published work that questioned colonial humanism's appropriation of ethnological studies and he argued for a black emotional epistemology. Wilder's concluding section demonstrates the limitations of Negritude to amend the problems inflicted upon colonized people by the French imperial nation-state.

The analysis of The French Imperial Nation-State is necessarily complex and should indeed expand scholarly thinking about French colonial history. Throughout the book, however, Wilder does not engage the determining authority of French "whiteness" in a similar that way Elizabeth Buettner looks at British "whiteness" in Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. Wilder's thesis of republican-authoritarian contradictions may better illuminate France's racist policies toward her colonies for some readers, but not this one.

The proud slogan of France is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. And France between the World Wars was a republic that had an empire. This empire was largely in Africa. Where white Frenchmen ruled over populations of Negroes and Arabs. How then to reconcile the slogan with the reality of empire?

This central contradiction of the French empire is addressed by Wilder. He shows that indeed, racism was quite common within the empire. He does not make light of it. But there was a countervailing rationalisation. That the French were giving the benefits of their republican, secular civilisation, with its attendant technological parts, to a backward region. Patronising, certainly. But at least within the confines of this rationalisation or worldview, some Africans who adopted "Frenchness" were accepted as equals by some French.

Thus, in Paris, some Africans attained French citizenship and quite high status. With the concomitent rise of a Pan-African community. Centred on Paris, naturally.

The book also describes the tension between those who wanted independence for the African colonies, and those French who wanted to retain them. Using various excuses, like being unready for independence.

Yes, collectively, the French may have been hypocrites. But there were enough decent sorts who actually believed in their nation's motto. And who, in an age of unchallenged European imperialism, were willing to treat Africans as equals. The book shows the better side of the French empire.