1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Introduction 9 10 11 It is necessary that the imperialist concept of the nation-state­ give 12 way definitively to the modern concept of the multinational state. 13 —­Mamadou Dia, 1955 14 15 The future of the 110 million men and women who live under our 16 flag is in an organization of federative form. 17 —­, 1946 18 19 Each [territory], in the framework of French sovereignty, should 20 receive its own status, depending on the very variable degree of 21 its development, regulating the ways and means by which the rep- 22 resentatives of its French or indigenous inhabitants debate among 23 themselves internal affairs and take part in their management. 24 —­Charles de Gaulle, 1947 1 25 26 In the decades after II, the colonial in gave 27 way to over forty nation-­states. How can we think about the man- 28 ner in which this transformation took place? The words of Mamadou 29 Dia—­one of the leading political activists of French in the 30 , later ’s first prime minister—should­ make us think be- 31 yond the conventional narrative of nationalist triumph. They should 32 make us rethink as well the standard view of global political history of 33 the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a long and inexorable transi- 34 tion from to nation-­state. Nation and modernity, we are often 35 told, go hand in hand. Dia was saying that the nation-­state was neither 36 modern nor desirable. 37 Dia’s views were widely shared among political leaders in French 38 West Africa. Their politics was firmly anticolonialist, but not national- 39 ist in the ordinary, territorially focused, sense. Almost all agreed that 40 41 42 1 Mamadou Dia, La Condition Humaine, 29 August 1955; Charles de Gaulle, speech at Bayeux, 16 June 1946, reprinted in Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages 1940–­1946 43 (: Berger-­Levraut, 1946), 721–27;­ Charles de Gaulle, speech in , reported 44 in Le Monde, 17 May 1947. 45

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 1 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 the of , eight small states with popula- 2 tions ranging from half a million to four million, were doomed to 3 poverty and subordination if they tried to survive as independent 4 nation-­states. French West African political leaders sought instead to 5 transform into another sort of assemblage of diverse 6 territories and peoples: a federation of African states with each other 7 and with . 8 Charles de Gaulle’s very name evokes the idea of a strong French 9 state. Yet in 1946 and 1947 he was saying that such a state could not be 10 unitary. It would have to acknowledge the diversity of the territories 11 that constituted it. In calling for a federal state, he did not need to tell 12 his listeners that fewer than half of the 110 million he 13 referred to lived in European France. 14 De Gaulle’s federalism was not the same as Dia’s. It put more em- 15 phasis on the federating state—­France—­than on the federated states. 16 Neither federalism was classic, for neither posited a fully equal rela- 17 tionship among the federated components. Dia was more interested 18 than de Gaulle in setting a political process in motion—­as a movement 19 toward the equality of African and European components of the fed- 20 eration. De Gaulle was above all interested in the federation remain- 21 ing French, even if he recognized that not everyone would be French 22 in the same way. 23 Why were such views imaginable in the 1940s and 1950s, 150 years 24 after the creation of the French Republic as the incarnation of the 25 French nation, at a time when Africans and Asians were seemingly 26 striving for the kind of state Europeans supposedly had? If the basic 27 narrative of transition from empire to nation-­state is right, de Gaulle 28 should have been defending a resolutely French France, with colo- 29 nies as wholly subordinate entities, and Dia should have been claim- 30 ing national .2 Yet most political activists in French 31 West Africa—from­ the radical Sékou Touré to the conservative Félix 32 Houphouët-­Boigny—­sought some variant on the federal theme. Our 33 expectations of what their history should have been are a backward 34 projection of an idealized post-­1960 world of sovereign nation-­states.3 35 36 2 37 Great Britain and the Netherlands were also considering different forms of fed- eration as a response to the crisis of empire at the end of World War II, both to make 38 regional development more manageable and to give a new legitimacy to an imperial 39 polity. Michael Collins, “Decolonisation and the ‘Federal Moment,’ ” Diplomacy and State- 40 craft 24 (2013): 21–40;­ Jennifer Foray, “A Unified Empire of Equal Parts: The Dutch 41 Commonwealth Schemes of the –­40s,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42 41 (2013): 259–­84. 3 John Kelly and Martha Kaplan also see the nation-­state as a concept that became 43 salient only after World War II, projected backward to fit a narrative that portrays it 44 as natural and modern. “Nation and : Toward a New Anthropology of 45 Nationalism,” Anthropological Theory 1 (2001): 419–­37.

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PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 2 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM We can easily miss the kinds of approaches that political actors 1 were pursuing. We know some turned into dead ends; the people in- 2 volved did not. This book tells the story of how it happened that in 3 1960 the political actors of France and French West Africa ended up 4 with a form of political organization that neither had wanted during 5 most of the previous fifteen years. 6 In France, the colonial past was for some decades marginalized from 7 even the best historical scholarship. By the 1990s, it was reappearing 8 in some fine research, mostly by younger scholars making use of new 9 archival sources.4 More polemical works were also taking their place in 10 public discourse, turning upside down French self-representations­ as 11 the people of the rights of man. In such a perspective, colonial exploi- 12 tation and oppression were not mere sidelights to French history, but 13 an intrinsic part of French republicanism, its evil twin.5 The critique 14 of France’s colonial past brought out anxieties among French intel- 15 lectuals: about a French population divided between the descendants 16 of “colonizers” and “colonized,” about a society made up of multiple 17 ethnic communities. 18 These debates have raised serious issues and include thoughtful 19 works, but they have become so focused on defending or attacking the 20 concept of “the colonial” or “the postcolonial” that they have moved 21 away from the lived experiences the concept was supposed to eluci- 22 date.6 The best way, to my mind, to move beyond this state of play is to 23 get directly to the point: not the arguments of 2014 but those of 1945 24 to 1960; not what we now think people should have said in a colonial 25 situation, but what they actually said, wrote, and did; not the suppos- 26 edly immanent logics of preidentified types of political regimes, but 27 the give-­and-­take of political actors in a time of profound uncertainty, 28 29 4 See for example Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie 30 1954–1962­ (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) or articles collected in the special dossier “Sujets 31 d’empire,” Genèses 53 (2003/4). Some of the best analyses of focused on 32 the erasure of the subject from historical memory. See for example Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1998). 33 5 Examples include Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, La 34 fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 35 and Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, La République impériale: politique et racisme d’État (Paris: 36 Fayard, 2009). 37 6 This tendency toward abstraction can be found in the contributions to the debate over France and postcolonialism in Public Culture 23, 1 (2011). For a French scholar’s at- 38 tack on postcolonial studies, see Jean-François­ Bayart, Les études postcoloniales. Un carnaval 39 académique (Paris: Karthala, 2010). Useful discussions include Marie-­Claude Smouts, 40 ed., La situation postcoloniale: Les Postcolonial Studies dans le débat français (Paris: Les Presses 41 de Sciences Po, 2007), and Romain Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire: La controverse autour du 42 “fait colonial” (Paris: Éd. du Croquant, 2006). On the connections between colonialism and “immigration” today, see Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, 43 eds., Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Blooming- 44 ton: University Press, 2009). 45

Introduction r 3

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 3 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 the words and actions of people who were trying to figure out what 2 they wanted and what they might possibly obtain. 3 What lies between the “colonial” and the “post”? Not an event, not 4 a moment, but a process. For some fifteen years, people struggled—­ 5 and sometimes fought—­over alternative visions of how to transform 6 the empire, to make it more durable, to make it more 7 democratic and progressive, or to bring it to an end. Positions changed 8 during this time of interaction and conflict. To see this period in the 9 history of sub-­Saharan Africa as the confrontation of an obdurate 10 French colonialism against a resolute African nationalism would be 11 to focus on the positions that were the least defended at the time. Even 12 in , what the French government was defending with extreme 13 brutality was—in­ the minds of much of the top leadership—France’s­ 14 control of the process of modernizing Algerian society. 15 This book explores concepts that have abstract meanings—­citi­ 16 zenship, nationality, sovereignty. But I examine their specific—­ambi­g- 17 uous and changing—­meanings given them by actors at the time, and 18 I emphasize the stakes people had in them: whether or not an African 19 would be able to claim as a citizen a right to enter and seek work in 20 European France, whether an African postal worker in Bamako could 21 demand the same rights to sick leave and union representation as a 22 worker from Toulouse, how a politician could assert a claim to state 23 resources and use them to mobilize supporters. 24 Citizenship, in most contemporary formulations, is a relationship 25 between a state and individuals. Two of its features make it a particu- 26 larly volatile framework. First, it defines inclusion—in­ a formal sense 27 of membership in a polity and a more subjective sense of belonging—­ 28 and therefore it also defines exclusion. Second, citizenship melds a 29 person’s rights and his or her obligations to a state, so that a state 30 that wishes to enforce obligations—­military service, tax payments, 31 obedience to laws—faces­ the fact that the same set of expectations and 32 rhetorics on which its power is based also underscore the claims of 33 individuals to certain rights. Such a conception leaves open funda- 34 mental questions: On what basis are the boundaries of inclusion and 35 exclusion determined—­and what sort of state includes or excludes cer- 36 tain categories of people from the status of citizen? What rights and 37 obligations are associated with citizenship, and what combinations of 38 state authority, judicial institutions, and actions by citizens—be­ they 39 in the street or the voting booth—­shape what those rights will be? 40 Citizenship is the object of a contemporary critique of liberal or 41 republican governance—not­ least its entwinement with a history of 42 colonial conquest and repression and of national liberation. If citi- 43 zenship marks a liberation from forms of monarchical and autocratic 44 government, if a rights-­bearing citizen chooses his or her leaders, does 45 the very act of individualistic participation separate people from their

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PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 4 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM particular social connections and their particular histories, producing 1 anonymous individuals linked to the anonymous state?7 Does libera- 2 tion from monarchs, oligarchs, aristocrats, and colonialists also sepa- 3 rate politics from community? 4 If at an abstract level citizenship seems like a relationship of in- 5 dividual and state, in practice citizens act as members of communi- 6 ties and participants in networks, and the men and women whose ac- 7 tions constitute “the state” mobilize and organize their followers in 8 the context of such relations. The notion of “belonging” that is intrin- 9 sic to citizenship might crystallize around collectivities that are both 10 smaller—­based on ethnic affinity—­or larger—notably­ the possibility of 11 citizenship in an imperial or multinational political entity that is the 12 principal subject of this book.8 13 There is a specifically French dimension to such debates: French 14 constitutions going back to the late eighteenth century proclaim the 15 Republic to be “one and indivisible.” Interpreting such a pronounce- 16 ment is no easy task. Some argue that the Republic cannot recognize 17 any distinction among citizens without threatening the fundamental 18 principle of equality. One version of this argument is a radical de- 19 fense of the equivalence of all citizens; another is a critique of citizens 20 who seem to willfully refuse to integrate themselves into French soci- 21 ety. Communitarianism appears in the latter argument as the current 22 enemy of republicanism. Muslim “immigrants” are the principal tar- 23 get of such contentions. 24 Whatever the merits and shortcomings of these present-­day argu- 25 ments, the conceptual framework for both the egalitarian and the ex- 26 clusionary versions presumes a singularity of republican thought that 27 flattens French history. In the quite recent times that are the focus of 28 this book, people actively debated the relationship of equality and di- 29 versity. The Constitution of 1946 referred to the “peoples and nations” 30 of the —­in the plural—­and, after much argument in 31 which African deputies played an active role, it recognized that over- 32 seas citizens, within the Republic, could be citizens in different ways. 33 They could vote in elections and have equal rights to education and 34 to positions in the civil service, but unlike the citizens of European 35 36 7 Long before the postcolonial and poststructural critiques of modern governmental- 37 ity, Reinhard Bendix noted that citizenship “involves at many levels an institutionaliza- tion of abstract criteria of equality which give rise both to new inequalities and new 38 measures to deal with these ancillary consequences.” Nation-building­ and Citizenship: Studies 39 of Our Changing Social Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977 [1964]), 126. 40 Recent scholarship on citizenship—and­ its increasing sensitivity to variety and complex- 41 ity in studying different parts of the world—can­ be traced through the journal Citizenship 42 Studies. 8 Useful here is the notion of “meaningful citizenship” focused on the uneasy overlap 43 of ethnic and national affinities in Lahra Smith, Making Citizens in Africa: Ethnicity, Gender 44 and National Identity in Ethiopia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 45

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PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 5 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 France, their civil affairs—­marriage, inheritance, filiation—­did not 2 have to come under the French civil code. 3 To say that a person could be French in one or in many ways is to 4 make an argument.9 I am less interested in attempting to pinpoint, 5 attack, or defend an essence of republican citizenship than to under- 6 stand how such concepts were changed as they were deployed and 7 contested in a specific historical context. One of the great debates of 8 the postwar years among politicians and intellectuals in European 9 and African France was how to reconcile a universalistic, egalitarian 10 conception of citizenship with the particularity of African culture or 11 cultures. This fundamental problem underlay controversies over nu- 12 merous issues facing the French state: how to write a constitution for a 13 France with metropolitan and overseas components, how to organize 14 political participation and allocate legislative authority between met- 15 ropolitan and overseas institutions, how to regulate labor or education 16 within a varied and unequal political entity, and how to record the life-­ 17 course events of citizens who had different conceptions of marriage, 18 family, and inheritance. 19 In 1945, the demand for an inclusive citizenship in empire was rev- 20 olutionary. The overwhelming majority of Africans—like­ Algerians—­ 21 were then considered French nationals and French subjects but not 22 French citizens. They could become French citizens only if they gave 23 up their personal status under Islamic or “customary” law, accepted 24 the rules of the French civil code over marriage and inheritance, and 25 convinced administrators that they had fully accepted French social 26 norms. Few chose to do so; fewer still were accepted. 27 But there was a notable exception. In the Quatre Communes (Four 28 Towns) of Senegal the original inhabitants—­les originaires—­had since 29 1848 at least some of the rights of the citizen, including the right to 30 vote, while keeping their personal and family affairs under the juris- 31 diction of Islamic courts. This situation was referred to as “citoyen- 32 neté dans le statut,” a citizenship that recognized the particular per- 33 sonal status of the originaire. In these colonial enclaves, dating to the 34 seventeenth century, French and local merchants forged ties to each 35 other, often founding mixed families, and they gave shape to a culture 36 of close interaction within a small world connected by sea to France 37 and the and by land and rivers to a large continent that lay 38 beyond European knowledge and control. For French administra- 39 tors, ensuring cooperation within the Quatre Communes was more 40 important than defending the boundaries of Frenchness, and flexible 41 42 9 As Niraja Gopal Jayal emphasizes in another context, “Every single dimension of 43 citizenship is contested in contemporary India. . . . There are countless ways of being a 44 citizen.” Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- 45 versity Press, 2013), 2, 6.

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PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 6 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM citizenship provisions made sense. Some French officials considered 1 that the originaires were “électeurs” (voters), not “citoyens,” with only 2 some of the rights of the citizen. At last, in 1916, the French legislature 3 made it explicit that they were citizens. For originaires, citoyenneté dans le 4 statut made sense in a different way: as a means to defend a specific 5 way of life. The established families spoke both French and Wolof; 6 many were literate. Their status as rights-bearing­ individuals in French 7 law was a bulwark in defense of a community that was not culturally 8 French.10 9 By the time their citizenship status was secured, the people of the 10 Quatre Communes had become a tiny minority in a large empire, as 11 France conquered more and more of Western and Equatorial Africa. 12 The large majority of conquered people were incorporated into a French 13 imperial polity as subjects. For them—­like most of the indigenous in- 14 of Algeria and other parts of the French Empire—the­ con- 15 sequences of denial of citizenship were severe: lack of political rights, 16 a separate system of justice known as the indigénat that placed arbi- 17 trary power in the hands of a local administrator, routine use—overt­ or 18 masked—­of forced labor. Throughout the history of the French Third 19 Republic (1871–­1940), some legislators repeatedly argued that a dis- 20 tinction between a citizen and a subject violated republican principles 21 dating to the Revolution. But the distinction was already ingrained in 22 both law and practice before the Third Republic was installed; govern- 23 ing different people differently was what imperial systems did. This 24 book focuses on the last years of what had been an argument over 25 the reach of citizenship—whether­ national or imperial—that­ had been 26 going on for a long time, indeed since the . 27 World War II created an opening in French politics that Africans 28 were able to pry wider. France’s defeat at the hands of Germany in 29 1940, the installation of a collaborationist regime in France itself, its 30 loss of effective control over Indochina to the Japanese, and the de- 31 struction of the war left French politicians with the task of reinvent- 32 ing their country. One part of the empire had refused to participate 33 in the collaborationist regime—­. It was no 34 coincidence that that man who became its General, Félix 35 Éboué, was one of few men of color—­he was from Guyana—­to achieve 36 high rank in the colonial service. His adherence to the government in 37 38 10 Mamadou Diouf, “The French Colonial Policy of Assimilation and the Civility of 39 the Originaires of the (Senegal): A Nineteenth Century Globaliza- 40 tion Project,” Development and Change 29 (1998): 671–­96; Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal: 41 Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 42 The other exceptional citizenship regime was also an enclave —­the French estab- lishments in India. See Damien Deschamps, “Une citoyenneté différée: sens civique et 43 assimilation des indigènes dans les Établissements français de l’Inde,” Revue Française de 44 Science Politique 47 (1997): 49–­69. 45

Introduction r 7

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 7 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 exile of Charles de Gaulle provided a symbolic rallying point: France’s 2 honor was saved by its empire. Troops from North and sub-­Saharan 3 Africa contributed greatly to the reconquest of southern France from 4 the Nazis.11 As an Allied victory appeared within sight in 1944, the 5 leadership of the Free French knew that they had to inaugurate a 6 new—­Fourth—­Republic. Writing a constitution meant that the entire 7 organization of the state was up for debate in a situation where the 8 alignment of political forces was uncertain. There, defenders of the old 9 order and advocates of reform—incremental­ or revolutionary—would­ 10 collide. 11 The ollowingf pages trace the struggle of African political leaders to 12 turn empire into something else, above all to turn a system of invidious 13 distinction into a polity that was inclusive, diverse, and egalitarian. 14 Remarkably, it was the Senegalese system of citizenship that through 15 heated arguments became the basis of French constitutional law. The 16 citizens of 1946, as they became known, obtained the “quality”—and­ 17 the rights—of­ the citizens of 1789, but they did not have to abandon 18 the legal marker of their social and cultural distinctiveness, their per- 19 sonal status. 20 In 1946, France’s African subjects acquired the right to have rights, 21 the right to make claims.12 African leaders whose activism was critical 22 to the process became icons of liberation. The extension of citizenship 23 overseas became known as “the Lamine Guèye law,” the act abolish- 24 ing forced labor as “the Houphouët-­Boigny law.” But to what extent 25 could a young generation of African leaders turn citizenship into an 26 effective basis for making wider claims? 27 The argument was not just over an individual’s relationship to a 28 French state that was trying to portray itself as no longer “colonial.” It 29 was over what kind of community Africans could participate in. Lead- 30 ing African activists argued that each territorial unit within France 31 should be able to express its “personality.” They soon began to insist 32 that territories should become internally self-governing,­ but still be- 33 long to a larger, more inclusive unit that would remain French. Empire 34 would become federation or confederation, and the once-­dominated 35 colonies—­Senegal, , —­would become equal partners 36 with European France. 37 Their arguments ran into practical and subjective objections from 38 metropolitan elites who took their superior mastery of the arts of 39 governance for granted. But these arguments could not easily be dis- 40 missed if France wanted to hold together some form of “grand en- 41 11 42 Eric Jennings’s forthcoming book on Equatorial Africa and the Free French will shed new light on this episode. 43 12 The phrase “right to have rights” originates with Hannah Arendt, who was think- 44 ing about stateless people more than the colonized. Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: 45 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 177. On the right to make claims, see below.

8 q Introduction

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 8 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM semble” at a time when the naturalness and justice of colonial rule was 1 being questioned around the world. Would citizenship push Africans 2 into a homogenizing Frenchness, or could it provide them with politi- 3 cal tools to make good their claims to a status that was equal but dif- 4 ferent? And if Africans were to participate in a politics of citizenship, 5 would they do so through the territorial entities—­Senegal, Dahomey, 6 and so on—­that French had created or as members of a 7 larger collectivity representing what Léopold Sédar Senghor referred 8 to as “Negro-­African civilization”? These questions were debated con- 9 tinuously from 1945 to 1960—and­ beyond. 10 The citizenship that French West Africans were claiming in the 11 postwar years was not that of a nation-­state, but an imperial citizen- 12 ship—­in a composite political entity, built by conquest, governed in a 13 way that had subordinated and denigrated its subjects, but which was, 14 activists asserted, to be transformed into a structure that would ensure 15 the rights and cultural integrity of all citizens.13 Such a conception 16 both assumed the history of colonization and transcended it. 17 African politicians were in part thinking in practical terms, that the 18 territories of French Africa were too small (unlike India or Algeria) 19 and too poor to survive as nation-­states—­one people, one territory, 20 one government. But they also had a deeper conviction of how poli- 21 tics was evolving in their time. They saw themselves as part of an in- 22 terdependent world. Reformed empire offered Africans the chance to 23 associate not just with a rich country but also with each other. They 24 saw the heritage of France as valuable too, especially the tradition of 25 the rights of man and of the citizen. If African peoples were to find 26 their way in the postwar world, these activists insisted, they needed 27 to develop and synthesize the best of the traditions that France and 28 Africa had to offer. 29 The imaginations of political actors in French West Africa were far 30 from imprisoned in a “derivative discourse” or a “modular national- 31 ism” stemming from the world’s prior history of nation making.14 The 32 33 13 What Sukanya Banerjee writes about British India at the end of the nineteenth 34 century applies to French Africa in mid-­twentieth century as well: “it was the empire, 35 rather than a preexisting prototype of nation, that generated a consciousness of the 36 formal equality of citizenship.” Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-­Victorian Empire 37 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 17. See also Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discon- tents, and Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manches- 38 ter: Manchester University Press, 2006). 39 14 My argument differs from that of Benedict Anderson. I see “imagined communi- 40 ties” in the twentieth century taking on a variety of forms—­including ideas of impe- 41 rial or postimperial communities and that of multinational states—­rather than a single 42 modular form originating in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In dis- tinction to Partha Chatterjee’s early critique of nationalism as a discourse derived from 43 European sources and his later attempt to locate a specifically non-­European (in his 44 case Indian) path to the nation, I stress the original, nuanced, and interactive nature 45

Introduction r 9

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 9 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 possibilities debated between 1945 and 1960 were varied. We need to 2 understand what those possibilities were, what different people felt 3 each had to offer, and why, late in this period, those possibilities were 4 narrowed. If we think from the start that we know what citizenship is 5 and where it is located, we might not even look into such issues. 6 And if we begin with a premise that sovereignty means a division 7 of the world into distinct and equivalent political entities, we will miss 8 the ambiguities and conflicting conceptions that surrounded the con- 9 cept in the mid-­twentieth century. As James Sheehan points out, “As a 10 doctrine, sovereignty is usually regarded as unified and inseparable; as 11 an activity, however, it is plural and divisible.”15 It was this divisibility 12 of sovereignty that gave both African and French leaders the possibil- 13 ity of dismantling colonial empire without having to choose between 14 French colonialism and national independence, between assimilation 15 and separation. 16 In positing federalism as a route out of empire, African and French 17 leaders were trying to invent new political forms that would preserve 18 some kind of assemblage while giving a degree of autonomy to the 19 former colonial territories. How much autonomy and how the assem- 20 blage could be governed were in question.16 In two efforts at constitu- 21 tion writing, in 1946 and 1958, political leaders could not agree on 22 what—­if any—­form of federalism was acceptable in both African and 23 European France. They came up with words—first­ “French Union,” 24 25 26 of the arguments of African intellectuals and politicians. Benedict Anderson, Imagined 27 Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?(London: Zed, 28 1986); Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: 29 Princeton University Press, 1993). For a critique of Anderson emphasizing the multiple 30 forms of anticolonial politics, see Manu Goswami, “Rethinking the Modular Nation 31 Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society 32 and History 44 (2002): 770–99.­ 15 James J. Sheehan, “The Problem of Sovereignty in European History,” American 33 Historical Review 111 (2006): 2. Sheehan (3–­4) conceptualizes sovereignty as a “basket” of 34 different rights, powers, and aspirations, all components of which are subject to claims 35 and counterclaims. As John Agnew notes, there is nothing new about such conceptions: 36 sovereignty has long been a varied notion with an ambiguous relationship to territory. 37 Globalization and Sovereignty (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 98–­99. For stud- ies of sovereignty that look beyond Europe, see Douglas Howland and Luise White, 38 eds., The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations (Bloomington: Indiana University 39 Press, 2009), and Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European 40 Empires 1400–1900­ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 41 16 The entry on “federalism” in the 1937 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 42 [ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1937) 5: 169–­ 72] terms it “a tendency to substitute coordinating for subordinating relationships.” 43 The author of this entry, Max Hildebert Boehm, thought that, in practice, federalism in 44 international politics offered only a “vague outline,” but it was this outline that Senghor 45 and others were trying to fill in a decade and a world war later.

10 q Introduction

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 10 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM then “”—to­ signify overlapping goals while allow- 1 ing arguments over their institutional manifestation to continue. The 2 uncertainty was intrinsic to what political theorists have pointed to as 3 the ambiguity of the federalism concept itself. 4 What forms of political organization can reconcile autonomy and 5 association? Since at least Samuel von Pufendorf in the seventeenth 6 century political theorists have tried to answer such a question, and 7 it was at the heart of debates over how to unite the former colonies 8 that became the United States of America. Some have pointed to two 9 possibilities: federation, in which only the federal unit is recognized 10 internationally and in which the division of powers between federal 11 and federated units is regulated by constitutional law, and confedera- 12 tion, in which the relationship among the units is governed by treaty 13 and each retains a sense of national identification and international 14 recognition. Among the political actors who worked with this distinc- 15 tion was Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal. Long concerned with 16 reconciling equality and difference within an inclusive political sys- 17 tem, he by the mid-1950s­ refined his argument into a plan for a three-­ 18 level political structure: individual African territories (Senegal, Côte 19 d’Ivoire, etc.) with local autonomy, a federation embracing all the 20 French West African territories (or perhaps a wider federation among 21 Africans) with legislative and executive authority, and a French con- 22 federation, in which the West African federation, European France, 23 and whatever other units chose to join would participate as free and 24 equal member states. The middle tier, the “primary” or “African” feder- 25 ation, was for Senghor intended to both express and develop national 26 sentiment among Africans and give Africans a stronger position in 27 relation to European France. Not all African statesmen agreed. Félix 28 Houphouët-­Boigny of the Côte d’Ivoire opposed the middle layer. 29 He wanted each African territory, individually, to join metropolitan 30 France in a federation of equals. The dispute between Senghor and 31 Houphouët-Boigny­ became known in the late 1950s as the battle of 32 federation and confederation. 33 Both federation and confederation assume in principle the equiva- 34 lence of their component parts. But that was not the situation that 35 Senghor and other African leaders faced. Not only had France been a 36 colonial power, but it was rich and large, with a well-­educated popu- 37 lation. And it had the great advantage of actually existing as an in- 38 ternationally recognized state. African states had to be created. The 39 reality of whatever kind of ensemble France and its former colonies 40 created was their inequality in resources and standard of living. Sen­ 41 ghor referred to the need for both “horizontal solidarity”—of­ Africans 42 with each other—­and vertical solidarity—­of Africans with France. And 43 France was no disinterested, benevolent partner; its elites had their 44 interests, prejudices, and anxieties. 45

Introduction r 11

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 11 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 Theorists have been telling us that the distinction between feder- 2 ation and confederation is artificial. If sovereignty is relational, the 3 issue is not whether federated states do or do not have it, but just 4 what the relationship among them is. The point is to recognize that 5 the larger unit should be both “a people” and a plurality of peoples, 6 that rights—­including that of maintaining distinct cultural practices—­ 7 need protection at different levels, that institutions need to balance 8 common and local interests, that sovereignty is itself a bundle that can 9 be allocated and shared in different ways.17 Both the quarrel of federa- 10 tion and confederation and the euphemisms of Union and Commu- 11 nity reflect the importance and the difficulty of imagining and turning 12 into reality a complex political structure emerging out of a history of 13 colonization and the quest for liberation. Senghor, de Gaulle, Dia, 14 and Houphouët-­Boigny were not theorists, but they were working 15 with the intellectual and political tools they had—and­ with their quite 16 different notions of what a Franco-African­ community should mean 17 and whose interests it should serve. 18 In the first earsy after World War II, the question of African fed- 19 eration took a back seat to the immediate aim of virtually all African 20 political actors: to obtain the rights of the citizen. Imperial citizen- 21 ship was neither an oxymoron nor an unequivocal benefit to those 22 who acquired it. For Africans, citizenship implied a claim on vitally 23 needed resources, but what made the claim powerful was also what 24 made attitudes toward it ambivalent—­it was French citizenship.18 And 25 leaders in the French government were ambivalent about the basic 26 characteristics of imperial citizenship—­the equivalence of all citizens 27 and the differences among them. They both welcomed and feared the 28 consequences of the social and economic dimensions of citizenship: 29 that Africans would become increasingly productive, useful, coopera- 30 tive members of a French polity and that they would demand equality 31 with their more affluent metropolitan brethren. They saw that France’s 32 recognition of the diversity of its citizens represented its best chance 33 for survival as a world power, but could not quite accept that the dif- 34 ferent civilizations to which they belonged were on a par. 35 36 37 38 17 Olivier Beaud, Théorie de la fédération (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009); 39 Jean L. Cohen, “Federation,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, www.political 40 concepts.org/2011/federation; Jean L. Cohen, “Whose Sovereignty? Empire Versus In- 41 ternational Law,” Ethics and International Affairs 18 (2004): 1–­24; Radhika Mongia, “Histor- 42 icizing State Sovereignty: Inequality and the Form of Equivalence,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2007): 384–­411. 43 18 As Sheehan puts it, “A claim is neither a request nor a demand. . . . To make a claim 44 is to appeal to some standard of justice, some sort of right, but it is also to assert a will- 45 ingness to back up this appeal with some sort of action.” “Problem of Sovereignty,” 3.

12 q Introduction

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 12 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM A Very Brief History of Citizenship 1 2 That citizenship has had shifting meanings over the sweep of history 3 is not surprising; that its parameters were still uncertain in the mid-­ 4 twentieth century is not so obvious.19 Citizenship was associated with 5 the Greek polis and the Roman Republic, with the notion of belong- 6 ing to a unit of political solidarity, in which the people—or­ rather those 7 who were adult, male, and free—­would be ultimately responsible for 8 governing that unit. When Rome expanded, citizenship was extended 9 selectively—­one did not have to be from the original city-­state to be- 10 come Roman. It entailed obligations—military­ above all—and­ rights, 11 including that of being tried, if accused of a crime, in a Roman tribu- 12 nal. Whether citizens could actually govern the empire was very much 13 in question, but Roman emperors did not have to come from Rome. 14 The empire included a diverse body of citizens, but also noncitizens, 15 who had not desired or had not been accepted to a status that had 16 become increasingly desirable as Rome’s power grew. Then, in AD 17 212, the emperor Caracalla declared all free, male inhabitants of the 18 empire’s territories to be Roman citizens. Citizenship did not mean 19 cultural conformity or that Rome was the exclusive focus of people’s 20 sense of belonging. One could be a Gaul and become a Roman.20 21 Citizenship was not the only form of belonging—­it was precisely 22 the specificity of its application that distinguished some Romans from 23 others and distinguished Rome from other polities. It remained an 24 exclusionary concept—excluding­ women and slaves within the empire 25 and the “barbarians” without, although barbarians could become Ro- 26 mans and citizens.21 In the centuries after Rome, citizenship was nei- 27 ther a general characteristic of “Western” polities nor a concept with 28 a fixed meaning.22 In fifteenth- ­and sixteenth-century­ Spain, it was 29 associated with cities. In the France of Louis XIV, it referred to the 30 king’s assertion of power over people resident in its territory, not to 31 their participation in governmental functions or decision making.23 32 The citizenship of the French Revolution was thus a major break, 33 because it entailed a specific codification of rights, including the right 34 35 36 19 Dominique Colas, Citoyenneté et nationalité (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 37 20 Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 38 21 Paul Magnette, Citizenship: The History of an Idea, trans. Katya Long (Colchester: 39 ECPR Press, 2005). 40 22 J. G. A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times,” in Ronald Beiner, 41 ed., Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 29–52.­ 42 23 Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Span- ish America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003); Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally 43 French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 44 2004). 45

Introduction r 13

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 13 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 to elect representatives to an assembly that would represent the will of 2 the people. A republic of citizens implied equality among them, but 3 just who the citizens were and what dimensions of equality it entailed 4 were not so clear.24 Almost immediately after the Declaration of the 5 Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 the question of the domain 6 of application of citizenship was posed. At home, the Revolutionary 7 assemblies distinguished between an “active” citizen—­who had to be 8 male—­and a “passive” citizen, whose person and property were pro- 9 tected by the rights regime but who did not participate in politics. It 10 would take until 1944, when the female half of the population got the 11 vote, for universal citizenship to entail universal suffrage.25 12 To some, the French “nation” was a bounded entity located in Eu- 13 rope. But the boundedness of the revolutionary nation was thrown 14 open by events in the empire. In 1789, the white planters of Saint-­ 15 Domingue—­France’s richest colony, the world’s greatest producer of 16 sugar, and the home to thousands of slaves, mostly African-born,­ liv- 17 ing and working under miserable conditions—­sent representatives to 18 Paris to insist that the rights of the citizen applied to them. Moreover, 19 they should have the right to govern their own colony, since the con- 20 ditions of a slave society were not familiar to metropolitan legislators. 21 Next came a delegation from the “gens de couleur,” property-­owning, 22 slave-­owning people born in most cases of French fathers and moth- 23 ers of African descent; they too claimed that they should have the full 24 rights of citizens. The assemblies in Paris could not make up their 25 mind about these demands. Then, in 1791, a slave revolt erupted in 26 Saint-­Domingue, and among its complex strands was a demand by 27 slaves for freedom and citizenship. The evolutionaryr government 28 was threatened by royalist reaction, by the invasion of rival empires 29 (British and Spanish), and by the slave revolt. It was for pragmatic 30 reasons—­not just revolutionary rigor—­that the Republic decided to 31 grant citizenship rights to free gens de couleur in 1792 and finally, 32 in 1793, to free the slaves and make them citizens. It hoped to cre- 33 ate an army of citizens to defend the revolution. The revolution, like 34 most social movements that advance very far, brought together people 35 across social categories in a complex struggle. Not everyone fought 36 for the same goals, but an important part of the leadership sought to 37 make France into a different sort of polity from what it had been, an 38 39 40 41 24 David Diop, “La question de la citoyenneté dans l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et de 42 d’Alembert: de l’irreductibilité de l’individualisme ‘naturel’ dans la société civile,” in Claude Fiévet, ed., Invention et réinvention de la citoyenneté (Aubertin: Éd. Joëlle Sampy, 43 2000), 137–­53. 44 25 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gal- 45 limard, 1992).

14 q Introduction

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 14 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM empire of free citizens. The great hero of the slave rebellion, Toussaint 1 L’Ouverture, became for a time a Commissioner of the Republic.26 2 Empire citizenship was ended by , who reinstated slav- 3 ery in 1802. At that point the revolution in Saint-Domingue­ turned 4 from remaking France toward exiting from it. Napoleon’s army was 5 defeated by a combination of rebel armies and tropical microbes.27 6 The proclamation of the independent republic of in 1804 was the 7 flip side of Napoleon’s restoration of in other French colonies 8 in the . 9 France itself was ruled by people calling themselves king or emperor 10 for three-­quarters of the postrevolutionary century. Under monarchi- 11 cal or republican government, the line between a national France and 12 an imperial France was frequently blurred. In 1848, the definitive abo- 13 lition of slavery in French colonies turned an entire category of people 14 of African descent into citizens rather than slot them into an interme- 15 diate category. It was in 1848 as well that the originaires of the Quatre 16 Communes of Senegal obtained much of the rights of French citizens 17 without giving up their personal status under Islamic law. 18 But by then, the course of colonization was moving in a different 19 direction. After the conquest of Algeria, beginning in 1830, French 20 officials, initially claiming to respect the arrangements of the previous 21 imperial ruler—­the —­insisted that Muslims could 22 keep their status under Islamic law. But as the conquest of the region 23 proceeded with escalating violence and as the government promoted 24 the settlement of peoples of Christian confession from around the 25 Mediterranean to create the nucleus of a settler society under French 26 control, recognition of difference turned into invidious distinction. 27 The colonization of Algeria was initially the work of the monarchies 28 that ruled France from the fall of Napoleon until 1848. The repub- 29 lic that briefly followed the revolution of that year, while also mak- 30 ing citizens out of the slaves of the Caribbean, declared Algeria to 31 be an integral part of the Republic, without making clear what that 32 meant for its diverse peoples. It was the Second Empire (1852–­70) 33 that brought a kind of clarity to the situation—in­ the terms of a frankly 34 self-­proclaimed empire. Napoleon III famously said, “Algeria is not a 35 36 26 See the classic text of C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage, 1963 37 [1938]), and the more recent books of Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the : The Story of the (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), and A Colony 38 of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804­ (Chapel Hill: 39 University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 40 27 Likewise, both the North and South American revolutions were struggles within 41 the British and Spanish Empires before they became struggles against empire. The 42 Spanish Constitution of 1812, with its attempt to sew together an imperial polity on both sides of the Atlantic, can be compared to the French Constitution of 1946, which 43 will be discussed in this volume. See Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the 44 Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 45

Introduction r 15

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 15 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 colony, properly speaking, but an Arab kingdom. The natives like the 2 settlers have an equal right to my protection and I am as much the 3 emperor of the Arabs as the emperor of the French.” Napoleon III had 4 no qualms about defining distinctions among the people he ruled, 5 and the rationale for differentiating among them drew on the notion 6 of personal status.28 7 From the Second Empire onward, Muslim Algerians were consid- 8 ered French nationals and French subjects, but not French citizens.29 9 The idea that personal status could preclude citizenship applied to 10 Jews as well until 1870, when a new decree placed them collectively 11 under the civil code and in the category of citizen. Muslim Algeri- 12 ans would have to apply as individuals—renouncing­ their “Islamic” 13 personal status—if­ they wished to become citizens. The “colons”—­ 14 settlers of European origin—­of Algeria made full use of their own 15 status as citizens to keep Muslim subjects a clearly demarcated—­and 16 denigrated—­population. 17 In the 1880s and during some deputies in the French 18 legislature argued for extending “citoyenneté dans le statut” to Muslim 19 Algerians. They failed.30 More successful during the Great War were 20 the efforts of , the first black African to sit in France’s leg- 21 islative body, the Assemblée Nationale. Promising to foster the recruit- 22 ment of his constituents on the same basis as other French citizens, 23 Diagne convinced the Assemblée to pass a law that made clear that 24 the originaires of the Quatre Communes did not simply have certain 25 rights of the citizen but were French citizens, even though they kept 26 their Islamic personal status.31 This law was not the work of jurists 27 working with abstract notions of citizenship and status, but a political 28 act, overcoming the opposition of politicians who did not think that 29 30 28 The quotation is from Napoleon III’s letter to his Governor General, 1863, http:// 31 musee.sitemestre.fr/6001/html/histoire/texte_lettre_a_pelissier.html. On status and 32 citizenship in Algeria, see Laure Blévis, “Sociologie d’un droit colonial: Citoyenneté et nationalité en Algérie (1865–1947):­ une exception républicaine?” (Doctoral thesis, In- 33 stitut d’Etudes Politiques, Aix-en-­ ­, 2004). A forthcoming dissertation for Uni- 34 versité de Paris I by Noureddine Amara will shed new light on the notions of nationality 35 and citizenship in Algeria in relation to the succession of empires, Ottoman and French. 36 29 That all the inhabitants of French colonies were French nationals is attributed 37 by some jurists to Napoleon. Roger Decottignies and Marc de Biéville, Les nationalités africaines (Paris: Pedone, 1963), 15n1. 38 30 Blévis, “Sociologie d’un droit colonial”; Alix Héricord-­Gorre, “Éléments pour une 39 histoire de l’administration des colonisés de l’Empire français. Le ‘régime de l’indigénat’ 40 et son fonctionnement depuis sa matrice algérienne (1881–­c. 1920)” (Thèse de doctorat, 41 European University Institute, 2008). Emmanuelle Saada, focusing on people of mixed 42 origins, provides an insightful analysis of law, culture, status, and citizenship in the broad sweep of French history. Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French 43 Colonies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 44 31 G. Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the 45 Four Communes, 1900–­1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971).

16 q Introduction

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 16 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM originaires, as a collectivity, were worthy of the title. The reforms did 1 not go beyond the Quatre Communes, an indication that France, like 2 most empires, was engaging in a politics of distinction making, decid- 3 ing which people had which rights. 4 In the 1920s, the politics of imperial citizenship shifted in the direc- 5 tion of exclusion.32 As military veterans of North and sub-­Saharan Af- 6 rican origin asserted that they had paid the “blood tax” and deserved 7 the pensions and other benefits of French citizenship, the govern- 8 ment tried to emphasize that colonial subjects were firmly immersed 9 in their own cultures and that citizenship was not only inappropri- 10 ate but detrimental to their cultural integrity.33 Officials proclaimed 11 France’s genius in recognizing the diverse cultures of its empire as 12 they strove through “traditional” authorities to keep subjects in their 13 place—­socially, politically, and geographically.34 Meanwhile, the gov- 14 ernment rejected proposals to take a more active role in the economic 15 development of the territories, not just because they did not want to 16 face the costs but because they feared disruption of the colonial order. 17 In this imperial context, some African intellectuals—including­ Sen- 18 ghor from Africa and Aimé Césaire from the Caribbean—­argued that 19 people of African descent all over the world should recognize their 20 shared cultural heritage—­their “négritude”—­and the contribution 21 their civilization brought to humanity. They developed such ideas in 22 both poetry and political writing, but they were running up against a 23 widely held view that difference implied a lesser sort of Frenchness.35 24 The Minister of Colonies, in 1931, was explicit about the status of 25 26 32 Mahmood Mamdani’s book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late 27 Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) has much to say about subject- hood but little about citizenship, and its attempt to explain current problems on the 28 basis of “colonialism” leapfrogs over the changes and conflicts of the period discussed 29 here. For critical discussion of Mamdani’s book, see the section “Autour d’un livre,” 30 in Politique Africaine 73 (1999): 193–211,­ with commentaries by Ralph Austen, Frederick 31 Cooper, Jean Copans, and Mariane Ferme and Mamdani’s response. 32 33 Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930­ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 33 34 From the early 1900s through the 1930s, suggestions were made in the Ministry of 34 Colonies and the Assemblée Nationale either to admit more Africans into citizenship 35 or to create new categories intermediate between subject and citizen. Such proposals 36 were rejected on the grounds that Africa was too diverse or that citizens might pose too 37 many challenges to colonial rule. See Ruth Dickens, “Defining French Citizenship Pol- icy in West Africa, 1895–­1956” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2001). 38 35 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-­State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the 39 Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Although I am not per- 40 suaded by Wilder’s characterization of the interwar French colonial state, his interpreta- 41 tion of négritude usefully puts it in the context of the colonial situation and leads into 42 the book he is now completing on the political thought of Senghor and Césaire, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. See also the biography of Janet Vail- 43 lant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 44 University Press, 1990). 45

Introduction r 17

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 17 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 subjects who did not come under the civil code: “They are French, but 2 ‘diminuto jure’ French,” that is, of diminished juridical status.36 3 Extending citizenship to certain categories of Muslim Algerians 4 was considered again under the (1936–38),­ only to 5 be blocked by lobbying from settler interests and other defenders 6 of the colonial status quo. The Popular Front also considered apply- 7 ing to French West Africa some of the social legislation—including­ 8 the forty-­hour week and the expansion of trade union rights—­it had 9 implemented in the , but local officials and business inter- 10 ests pushed back, insisting that Africans were too backward to benefit 11 from such provisions. Even these limited initiatives disappeared along 12 with the Popular Front in 1938. Forced labor was soon revived, the 13 very idea of applying social legislation to Africans ridiculed.37 Then 14 came the war. French West Africa came under Vichy rule, while French 15 Equatorial Africa, thanks to Félix Éboué, proclaimed its loyalty to the 16 Free French of Charles de Gaulle. 17 18 19 Empire in the 1940s: Governing Different PeopleD ifferently 20 21 Well before the chronological focus of this book, citizenship was a 22 permeable barrier, and the question of who would pass through it was 23 not simply a juridical but a political question—hence­ one that was 24 and would continue to be debated.38 But could Africans have a say in 25 the debate? And could the debate advance far enough to put an end 26 to the invidious status of “sujet” or “indigène” (native)? The terms 27 in which those questions were debated in 1945 and 1946 reflect the 28 uncertain and fungible quality of concepts most French people think 29 they understand—­nationality and sovereignty. 30 Africans’ status as French subjects and potential citizens should be 31 considered in relation to a broader spectrum characteristic of empires. 32 With the establishment of French from the over 33 parts of Indochina, in 1881 over , and in 1912 over , 34 another category became an important part of the imperial frame: 35 the fiction of protection implied the submission of the sovereign (the 36 Prince of , the Bey of Tunis, the Sultan of Morocco, and so 37 38 36 Minister of Colonies, Circular to General and Commissioners, 7 Sep- 39 tember 1931, B/20, SRAD. 40 37 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British 41 Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 3. 38 42 The importance today of different trajectories in constructing citizenship regimes was emphasized in the pioneering work of Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood 43 in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). For a more 44 recent perspective, see Patrick Weil, Qu’est-­ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité française 45 depuis la Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).

18 q Introduction

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 18 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 2

New 3

Caledonia 4 5 6 7 8 9

Indochina 10 11 12 13 14

r 15 16 17

Madagasca 18 19 20 21 22 ench Africa Fr Tunisia 23 Equatorial 24 25

Algeria 26 Africa rocco ench West ench 27 Fr Mo 28 29

he French Empire, ca. 1945. Empire, Map 1. T he French 30 31

Guyana 32 ench

Fr Antilles 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

ench 43 Fr Polynesia 44 45

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 19 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 on) to French control over governmental affairs, but not the renuncia- 2 tion of sovereignty or nationality. An inhabitant of Morocco—­other 3 than a person of metropolitan origin resident in that territory—was­ 4 a Moroccan national. France tended to act like a colonizing power 5 in protectorates—that­ was what its administrators knew how to do—­ 6 but it was constrained by the fact that other European powers had 7 already established binding relations with the sovereign and that the 8 juridical status of protected persons was distinct from that of colonial 9 subjects.39 10 After World War I, the victorious empires added yet another cat- 11 egory to their repertoires of power: the mandate. In Africa, colonies of 12 Germany (Tanganyika, , , Rwanda, Urundi, and South- 13 west Africa) were assigned to Britain, France, Belgium, and South 14 Africa. The international community—­represented by the League of 15 Nations—­was supposed to ensure that certain standards of gover- 16 nance, in the interest of the indigenous population, were maintained.40 17 The day-­to-­day administration of mandates was in most respects assim- 18 ilated to that of colonies, but France neither assumed sovereignty over 19 its mandates nor conferred its nationality on their people. Someone 20 in Togo or Cameroon had a Togolese or Cameroonian nationality-­in- 21 the-­ making.­ 41 22 The existence of multiple forms of imperial governance added 23 flexibility to the French government’s potential strategies, but it also 24 posed the danger that one form might contaminate another. The inter- 25 national statuses of protectorates and mandates might reflect back on 26 colonies. Indeed, during World War II, arguments for international 27 trusteeship over all colonies surfaced, including in the U.S. State De- 28 partment. Such ideas were greeted with consternation in London and 29 Paris. The advocates of this proposition soon pulled their punches—­ 30 fearing uncertainty and disorder—­but the juridical status of mandates 31 gave the idea some plausibility.42 That the “normal” status of colonial 32 33 39 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–­1938 34 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 35 40 Susan Pedersen, “Back to the ,” American Historical Review 112, 4 36 (2007): 1091–­1117. 41 37 and , Ottoman provinces mandated to France after the war, were classified differently by the League and considered closer to self-government.­ By the 38 1930s, its inhabitants were considered Syrian and Lebanese citizens. Elizabeth Thomp- 39 son describes the claims that activists made in the name of citizenship and the tensions 40 between those claims and the paternalist ethos of French administrators and Syrian and 41 Lebanese elites. Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria 42 and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 42 W. R. Louis, at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the , 43 1941–1945­ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted 44 Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton 45 University Press, 2009).

20 q Introduction

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 20 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM empires was beginning to be questioned in international opinion lay 1 in the background as French leaders considered the rewriting of their 2 constitution in 1946. 3 The takeoff point for debates on the status of individuals and terri- 4 tories in after World War II was thus a complex polity 5 in which different territories were governed differently and in which 6 multiple juridical statuses were possible. Multiple statuses for terri- 7 tories and individuals implied the possibility of shifts among them. 8 Could sovereignty be considered an absolute when some people who 9 had it (the Sultan of Morocco) could not exercise it and a power that 10 acted like a sovereign was not (France in Cameroon)? And if some 11 French nationals in overseas territories possessed the rights of the 12 citizen—­consistent with the interests of the French Empire—­could not 13 those rights be extended further, in the interest of reforming and per- 14 petuating the empire? 15 At the end of 1945, the new government repudiated the name 16 “French Empire” in favor of “French Union,” a recognition that the 17 future of a complex and unequal polity depended on reconfiguring 18 the relation of its components. These relations did not easily dichoto- 19 mize into colonizer and colonized, but fell into six categories. 20 21 1. The metropole (European France) 22 2. Algeria, divided into Muslim non-­citizens, and non-Muslim­ 23 citizens 24 3. Old colonies, mainly in the Caribbean, but also the Quatre 25 Communes of Senegal, where citizenship had been extended 26 along with the abolition of slavery in 1848 27 4. New colonies, including most of French Africa, as well as Pacific 28 islands, where most people remained subjects 29 All four of these forms were considered part of the French Republic 30 and their inhabitants were considered “FranÇais.” 31 5. Protectorates—­Morocco, Tunisia, the states of Indochina 32 6. Mandates—­Togo and Cameroon 33 Such a structure is typical of the composite—­and often flexible—­ 34 structure of empires.43 35 French West Africa (AOF) and French Equatorial Africa (AEF) not 36 only occupied a particular place in this composite structure, but were 37 themselves composite. They were often referred to—­misleadingly—­as 38 federations. They were in actf administrative units, established in 1895 39 and 1910 respectively, grouping separate colonies with the aim of 40 coordinating economic policy and facilitating efficient governance. 41 AOF consisted of Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, , , , 42 43 43 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of 44 Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 45

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PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 21 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 2 3 4 5 TUNISIA MOROCCO 6 7 8 ALGERIA 9 10 11 12 Mauritania Sudan FRENCH WEST AFRICA Niger 13 Saint-Louis 14 Senegal Bamako Upper Niamey 15 Volta Guinea Dahomey FRENCH 16 Conakry Côte EQUATORIAL 17 d’Ivoire Cotonou AFRICA 18 Abidjan Ubangui Chari TOGO CAMEROON 19 20 21 22 Congo 23 24 MAURITANIA 0 100 mi 25 0 100 km 26 Saint-Louis 27 28 Dakar Ru sque SENEGAL 29 Gorée 0 800 mi ad Dakar- ilro 30 Niger Ra 0 800 km 31 SUDAN GAMBIA 32 33 34 PORTUGUESE GUINEA 35 GUINEA 36 37 Map 2. French Africa. 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 22 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM Upper Volta, Niger, and Dahomey, while AEF incorporated Gabon, 1 Congo-­Brazzaville, Chad, and Ubangui-­Chari. Each “federation” was 2 headed by a Governor General, a powerful figure in the French colo- 3 nial hierarchy, while each colony was administered by a senior official 4 termed at different times Lieutenant Governor, Governor, and Chef 5 de Territoire. African elites were affected by the experience of working 6 within these two units. Some of the people who appear in the story 7 told here—­including Mamadou Dia of Senegal and Modibo Keita of 8 Sudan—­had attended the school, the École William Ponty, aimed at 9 educating a small coterie of Africans who would bring French ways 10 and their own esprit de corps to the different regions of AOF. Civil 11 servants and teachers were often posted to different territories within 12 AOF or AEF. And some had spent time in Paris. 13 AOF provided a model for Africans who were thinking beyond the 14 level of the individual territory—if­ only an administrative unit could 15 be turned into a political one, governed democratically, pooling re- 16 sources, and expressing Africans’ “horizontal” solidarity with each 17 other. But not all West Africans experienced life in AOF in the same 18 way. Its headquarters was in Dakar, in Senegal, but the territory with 19 the best agricultural resources was Côte d’Ivoire. Landlocked territo- 20 ries like Niger and Sudan were poorer than their coastal neighbors 21 and dependent on transportation links through them. Political activ- 22 ists would thus have to confront not only the differentiated nature 23 of imperial governance, but the different levels of connection within 24 French Africa. 25 Not just the best educated elites circulated around AOF or the em- 26 pire. There were major streams of migrant agricultural labor—­from 27 Sudan to Senegal, from Upper Volta to Côte d’Ivoire—­and dockers, 28 seamen, clerical workers, and others moved about too. Military service 29 imparted a wider experience of empire, for Africans served in other 30 parts of the empire and on different fronts during two world wars. 31 And while educated Africans had for some time been meeting up with 32 people from across the empire in Paris, labor migration was picking 33 up in the years after the war. Mobility defined a set of connections to 34 something larger than the individual territory.44 35 Algeria, the North African protectorates, the Indochinese states, 36 and the sub-Saharan­ colonies would all follow different paths through 37 the transformation of empire and eventually out of it. France’s lack of 38 sovereignty over Morocco and Tunisia turned out to be an obstacle to 39 its attempt to include them in a new order, but rendered less painful 40 their eventual exit from empire. That Algerian territory and some of its 41 42 44 This point is consistent with Anderson’s contention (Imagined Communities) that the 43 “circuits” of people shape the way they imagine communities, but those circuits were 44 not specifically “national.” 45

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PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 23 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 people were fully integrated into the French Republic made Algeria’s 2 path especially violent and traumatic. Sub-Saharan­ Africa was part of 3 the Republic, but not an equal part. African political leaders were con- 4 scious of the weaknesses—especially­ poverty and territorial divisions—­ 5 with which colonization had left them, and they understood that they 6 had something to gain if they obtained the quality of citizen and made 7 good on claims to equality with their fellow citizens. They did not face 8 such a determined veto group as did their fellow ex-subjects in Alge- 9 ria, but their own assertion of citizenship would mean no more than 10 what their political actions could make of it. 11 We trace in the following pages the attempts of political and so- 12 cial activists in AOF to insist on the social and economic—as­ well 13 as political—­equivalence of all citizens and at the same time to seek 14 recognition of cultural distinctiveness and the right to political au- 15 tonomy within a wider French community. European France was an 16 essential reference point for such claims: for what full political partici- 17 pation should mean and what a decent standard of living included. 18 Africans, Senghor said in 1952, had a “mystique of equality.” By the 19 late 1950s, African leaders were also referring to a “mystique of unity” 20 among themselves and a “mystique of independence,” and the rela- 21 tionship among these objectives was far from clear. For French lead- 22 ers, the question was whether they could reconfigure the multiple 23 components of the French Union—­including changing their juridi- 24 cal status and adjusting rights regimes—to­ give overseas citizens in- 25 centives to stay within the system, while retaining enough control in 26 Paris to make the Union’s preservation worthwhile. By the mid-­1950s, 27 they were caught in a dilemma: too much resistance to demands from 28 sub-­Saharan colonies risked opening a second anticolonial movement 29 alongside the war in Algeria, but too full a response to demands for 30 equality would lead to enormous expenses, as the people of impover- 31 ished former colonies sought equality with other French citizens in the 32 era of the welfare state in Europe. 33 For Africans, the question of changing their relationship with 34 France was made more complex by the uncertainties of their relation- 35 ships with each other. In trying, in Senghor’s terms, to conjugate “hor- 36 izontal” and “vertical” solidarities, African leaders recognized that 37 their mutual connections were based not only on a perceived com- 38 mon experience as Africans, but on relationships that passed through 39 Paris and experience in French institutions, from schools to the As- 40 semblée Nationale to the administrative structures of AOF. And they 41 were acutely aware how much all these institutions—­not just the for- 42 mal structures of rule—­had to be transformed if Africans were to have 43 meaningful political voice in France in their territories, to achieve so- 44 cial and economic progress, and to ensure Africa’s place among world 45 civilizations.

24 q Introduction

PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 24 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM That the power of the French state—and­ of the other western Eu- 1 ropean powers—­was badly shaken after World War II led African 2 political leaders to believe that they could alter the power relations 3 of empire. Before the war, some French Africans—­relatively well edu- 4 cated and well traveled—­had participated in networks of activists from 5 around the world who challenged colonialism. On the ideological 6 level, they had raised doubts about the seemingly ordinary nature of 7 colonial empires, but their visions of a more just world ran up against 8 the hard realities of imperial power. At war’s end, the broad scope 9 of internationalist anti-­imperialism was becoming less salient, for the 10 basic reason that political movements in different regions were achiev- 11 ing a degree of success, place by place. The colonial state was a mov- 12 ing target, deploying new strategies in response to pressures put on 13 it and leading political movements to focus on goals that seemed in- 14 creasingly attainable. 15 To understand how the ending of colonial domination was experi- 16 enced we begin with the places where different people and territories 17 stood in the complex and composite structure of French Empire at 18 the end of World War II. We explore a dynamic of claims and coun- 19 terclaims and of attempts to mobilize followers and shape the terms 20 of debates—from­ the streets of Dakar to the legislative chambers of 21 Paris. We need to set aside our assumptions of what a story of national 22 liberation should be in order to understand the openings, closures, 23 and new possibilities as people perceived them and in terms of which 24 they sought to act. We explore what different people meant by citi- 25 zenship, nationality, sovereignty, and state, and what they meant by 26 France, Africa, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and other categories of politi- 27 cal belonging. 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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