The Empire within: The Colonial Popular Front in France, 1934–1938

Abstract

James E. Genova [*] In April 1937, anticolonial activists from throughout France's overseas empire met in Paris to form Rassemblement Colonial, described by one of its founders as Popular for colonies. [1] Unlike Popular coalition then governing France, which was created through an alignment of ideologically distinct parties, Popular Front was forged on a territorial basis, bringing together extraparliamentary groups representing interests of Indochinese, North Africans, Caribbeans, West Africans, Madagascans, and others. According to their statutes, Rassemblement Colonial (RC) was formed to more effectively resist and to force new left-wing government to engage in a substantial overhaul of colonial governance, which included a rethinking of relationship between colonies and metropole. [2] Rassemblement Colonial, however, was not merely an adversarial association. Rather, it shared French Popular Front's antifascist politics and identified with anticapitalist elements of coalition, describing imperialism [as], in effect, direct product of capitalist regime. RC expressed solidarity with French working class, explaining that the same capitalist class that exploits and oppresses metropolitan workers also super-exploits and treats 'colonial' natives as slaves. [3] In other words, elements united in Colonial Popular viewed themselves as participating in struggles unfolding in Europe during late 1930s and presented themselves as natural allies of leftist government in Paris. However, RC insisted that French Popular become their allies in contests that shaped life in colonies, and in so doing they helped to reconfigure new government's colonial policy, pushing it in decisively more radical directions than originally imagined by new administration headed by socialist Leon Blum. Despite paucity of colonial reforms accomplished during Popular Front's brief tenure in government, relationships forged between anticolonialists from colonies and antifascist government, at once contentious and cooperative, contributed to development of a that accelerated decolonization process and circumscribed its nature, for those from colonies as well as French government. [4] This article explores extraparliamentary activity of anticolonialists from colonies contributed to shaping of Popular era in France as well as that context influenced development of anticolonialism among those elements from overseas territories resident in France during 1930s. Lynn Hunt defines political culture as the values, expectations, and implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions in a given period. [5] However, I suggest that those values, expectations, and rules are themselves result of struggle and are even contested by historical agents engaged in a of production. According to Pierre Bourdieu, The field is locus of relations of force--and not only of meaning--and of struggles aimed at transforming it, and therefore of endless change. coherence that may be observed in a given state of field... [is] born of conflict and competition, not some kind of immanent self-development of structure. [6] Consequently, one of tasks of this article, using words of Mahmood Mamdani, is to demonstrate how [elements of] subject population [were] incorporated into--and not excluded from--the arena of colonial power. [7] That incorporation, while it enhanced position of a section of French-educated elite within colonial field, pushed decolonization process in a direction that limited its liberatory capacity and undermined potential for meaningful unity of an ticolonialist forces from throughout empire. …