Envisioning France in a Postwar World

Abstract

This chapter discusses how educational reconstruction in the postwar republic, French Africa, and Western Europe became entangled during the war in new and enduring ways. As Free French planners from London to Brazzaville elaborated new agendas for national, colonial, and transnational education reform, they also mapped new, often overlapping coordinates of belonging that crisscrossed French, African, and European space. The Brazzaville Conference and the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education encapsulate the wartime evolution of ideas and expectations about France's European and African futures. The chapter then locates the origins of two postwar conceptual shifts in what it meant to be French, African, and European in that wartime entanglement. One such shift concerns attitudes about the place of religion in French society and culture. The complex political geography of wartime education planning contributed to the emergence of new rationales for embracing Christianity as an integral part of France's cultural heritage and tamping down the anticlerical edge of French laïcité as the overarching framework for school policy in both metropole and colony. The other shift pertains to the coordinates of racial distinction. Education reformers' wartime visions about the role of education in what would become the French Union and united Europe reified ideas about French, African, and European youth, reconstituting a stark Europe–Africa binary in racialized terms.