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France’s
Modernising
Mission
Citizenship, Welfare and
the Ends of Empire
EDITED BY Ed Naylor
St Antony’s Series
St Antony’s Series
Series Editors
Halbert Jones
St Antony’s College
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Matthew Walton
St Antony’s College
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
The St Antony’s Series publishes studies of international affairs of contem-
porary interest to the scholarly community and a general yet informed
readership. Contributors share a connection with St Antony’s College,
a world-renowned centre at the University of Oxford for research and
teaching on global and regional issues. The series covers all parts of the
world through both single-author monographs and edited volumes,
and its titles come from a range of disciplines, including political sci-
ence, history, and sociology. Over more than thirty years, this partner-
ship between St Antony’s College and Palgrave Macmillan has produced
about 200 publications.
France’s Modernising
Mission
Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Empire
Editor
Ed Naylor
School of Languages and Area Studies
University of Portsmouth
Portsmouth, UK
St Antony’s Series
ISBN 978-1-137-55132-0 ISBN 978-1-137-55133-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55133-7
Plans for this volume emerged from a workshop held in June 2014 in
Oxford entitled ‘Decolonisation and welfare during France’s Trente
glorieuses’. The event was co-hosted by the European Studies Centre of
St Antony’s College and the Maison Française d’Oxford, with gener-
ous support from the John Fell Fund, the Modern European History
Research Centre and the History Faculty. I would like to thank the
staff at both the ESC and MFO for all their time and effort, particu-
larly Anne Simonin, Claire Stevenson, Sarah Moran and Dorian Singh.
In addition to the presenters, many of whom have contributed to
this edited collection, the event was enriched by Robert Gildea, Tom
Buchanan, Rebekka Habermas, Martin Conway, Kalypso Nicolaïdis and
Othon Anastasakis.
Paul Betts encouraged me to develop the book proposal and I am
very grateful for his indispensable guidance and advice. I would also like
to warmly thank the anonymous proposal reviewers and the editors at
Palgrave for their patience and support, particularly Molly Beck and Oliver
Dyer. The success of an edited volume largely depends on the contribu-
tions and here I have been very fortunate to work with such a talented
and committed group of authors. During the editing process I have also
accrued numerous debts of gratitude to colleagues and friends: in particu-
lar Emmanuel Blanchard, Margaret Majumdar, Emmanuel Godin, Julian
Jackson and all those who carried out anonymous peer-review at vari-
ous stages, as well as Laurent Eisler for his work on the illustrations and
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Florent Pouvreau for the cover photo. Above all, my thanks go to Tony
Chafer and Natalya Vince without whose unflagging assistance and sup-
port it would have been impossible to bring this project to fruition. That
said, any shortcomings, errors or omissions are entirely mine.
Contents
List of Contributors xi
List of Figures xv
Introduction xvii
ix
x Contents
Index 251
Editor and Contributors
Contributors
xi
xii Editor and Contributors
xv
Introduction
Less than twenty years after the end of the Second World War the major
European empires had all but disappeared. Yet historians of decolonisa-
tion agree that this process was neither linear, pre-ordained nor indeed
planned in the form that it took. Naturalising metaphors like the ‘tide
of history’ and the ‘wind of change’ were retrospective rationalisations
that belied intense, if uneven, efforts to reinvigorate empire after the war.
While the conflict had severely weakened the ideological and structural
foundations of imperial rule, in both London and Paris considerable
hopes were invested in the potential of colonial territories to contrib-
ute to ‘national’ recovery. At the same time, a transformed geopoliti-
cal order, the prevalence of new universalist norms and the challenge of
anti-colonial and nationalist mobilisation all made a return to the pre-war
order unthinkable. Reinventing the terms that bound colonised peoples
and territories to the metropole was therefore a strategic necessity but
also a dynamic which imperial capitals struggled to control.
Comparative and globalising approaches to decolonisation have
increasingly come to the fore in recent years, highlighting the extent to
which European powers confronted similar dilemmas and international
dynamics in the aftermath of the war. Some historians have nonethe-
less noted the paradox that individual nations were reluctant to view
‘their’ decolonisation pressures as part of a wider global trend. The
particular configurations of settler societies, anti-communism and secu-
rity concerns or the hopes invested in blueprints for reform‚ all served
as rationales for strategic choices that in retrospect often look like ‘futile
xvii
xviii Introduction
A Mission to Modernise?
In November 1959, less than two months after leading his country to
independence, Guinean president Sékou Touré addressed an audience at
Chatham House in London: ‘In my country the officials—all of them,
including judges, including some who wanted to stay—were ordered
to leave and they took everything with them. We were left with noth-
ing, not a document, not even the Legal Code’.8 Guinea had been
the only African territory to vote ‘no’ to de Gaulle’s plan for a federal
Community in 1958, and the abrupt withdrawal of co-operation that fol-
lowed underlines the extent to which preserving control and influence
were central to French reformist visions. However, if this seems to invite
a straightforwardly instrumentalist, top-down reading of the ‘modern-
ising mission’, Touré’s own political career points to a more complex,
evolving picture. As a trade union leader during the 1940s and early
1950s, he had been a key figure in successful campaigns for enhanced
workers’ rights in French West Africa based on ‘assimilationist’ claims of
equivalence with metropolitan France.9 This was just one example of a
wider trend in the decade after the Second World War whereby actors
from within colonised societies co-opted and reshaped the language and
policies of reform as the French Union opened up new space for com-
parisons and claim-making within the empire-state.
From another perspective the ‘modernising’ dynamic was not so
much a political concession to be wrested from the French authori-
ties but rather a process of social and economic transformation already
underway in colonised societies. Rapid urbanisation, labour migration
and trade unionism disrupted the stable mediocrity to which the inter-
war colonial state had aspired and could no longer be dismissed as the
anomaly of ‘detribalised elements’.10 The threat such ‘disorder’ posed
to French rule often informed a reactive approach. Seen in this way,
France’s post-1945 reform agenda looks like an attempt to manage, or at
least not be overwhelmed by, tumultuous societal changes taking place in
its overseas territories.
The power to define and impose norms is clearly central to the con-
cept of modernisation, and switching the focus to knowledge produc-
tion points to a further dimension of the ‘modernising mission’. Various
scholars have noted how the ‘development turn’ in both British and
xx Introduction
travail d’Outre Mer (Overseas Labour Code) and the incremental exten-
sion of welfare benefits for families suggested the rudiments of a pan-
imperial social contract. The FIDES (Investment Fund for Social and
Economic Development) set up in 1946, along with the FERDES (Rural
Infrastructure Fund for Social and Economic Development) established
three years later, brought unprecedented capital investment into infra-
structure and social services, breaking with the long-standing princi-
ple that colonies should be self-financing. Significantly, the FIDES was
based in Monnet’s Planning Commission rather than the Ministry for
Overseas France (ex-Ministry of the Colonies). This was part of a process
whereby policy-making in the colonial sphere became more complex: the
involvement of officials from specialist French ministries such as Labour,
Education and Construction ended the virtual monopoly of generalists
whose ‘specialism’ was administering colonies.22
The partial opening up of policy-making also offered opportunities
for elected African representatives to bypass the local colonial adminis-
tration; on particular issues, alliances could emerge that cut across the
coloniser/colonised divide. At the same time, scepticism about the impli-
cations of imperial equivalence were by no means confined to conserva-
tive colonial officials. Pierre Laroque, considered the chief architect of
France’s post-war welfare state, spent many years crafting a compre-
hensive system of social protection and insurance that he hoped would
help French society overcome its profound divisions.23 He had been a
liberal critic of colonial policing methods during the interwar years, but
when he unveiled his plans for a ‘universal’ welfare state at the end of the
Second World War there was no question of incorporating Algerian peas-
ants or Senegalese railway workers.24
Perhaps the best-known opponent of French investment in its colo-
nies was the journalist Raymond Cartier. In the wake of Cartier’s Paris
Match reportage published in August and September 1956 his name
became synonymous with a critique of empire based not on the right of
peoples to self-determination but on the burden their subjugation rep-
resented for the metropolitan tax-payer.25 The Loi-cadre (framework
law) of June 1956, which devolved key powers in taxation and spend-
ing to legislative assemblies in the colonies, is widely seen as working to
close down the open-ended financial implications of equivalence with the
metropole and, more broadly, as foreclosing on the ‘federal moment’.26
Thus if French governments were modernisers before ‘modernisation
theory’ then they were probably also cartieristes before Cartier.
xxiv Introduction
Structure and Contents
The book is divided into three parts each composed of three chapters.
Part One, ‘Rethinking Education and Citizenship’, explores the various
ramifications of extending citizen status to all those formerly ruled as
subjects. The constitutional framework of the French Union privileged
form over content but it also ushered in a more complex phase of colo-
nial policy-making that involved multiple actors: from local representa-
tives elected by newly enfranchised voters to officials from metropolitan
ministries such as agriculture and construction. The egalitarian premises
of post-war reforms simultaneously cast doubt on long-held assumptions
about the means and ends of colonial rule as all parties wrestled with the
implications of a federal ‘Greater France’.
As Tony Chafer observes, education systems are a litmus test for the
kind of social order a colonial power seeks to create. His chapter opens
the volume in French West Africa where he examines developments in
colonial education policy from the interwar period through to the eve
of independence. France’s public school system was a cornerstone of
the Third Republic, its assimilationist conquest of rural France famously
captured in Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen.28 Yet, for all the
rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’, no such transformational project was
envisioned for Africa’s peasantry. Under the label of ‘adapted educa-
tion’ the French presided over a trickle-down approach to learning: by
the mid-1930s school enrolment rates in French West Africa stood at
less than 3%. After analysing this dismal record, Chafer turns to the post-
war period when the future of education was thrown open and became
a major site of contestation. Along with expanding provision, a central
issue was that of equivalence with the metropole in terms of curriculum
and qualifications. Demands for full French-style education co-existed
with proposals for a reformed version of ‘adapted education’ that would
reflect the vocational needs of a predominantly agricultural society.
xxvi Introduction