L'émergence d'une élite politique noire dans la France du premier 20e siècle?

Abstract

Although colonization was widely based on the principle of inferiority of the colonized, the beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of Black political elites at the beginning of the 20th century after an integration process that started in 1794. Those elites, conscious of the weak foundations of their situation in a dangerous world, were the bearers of an assimilationist discourse in which conscription appeared as the first step on the way to a stronger citizenship. Showing solidarity in their grievances, they stirred the universalistic and egalitarian values of an idealized France, whose model was opposed to racist realities that only foreigners could inspire. Those elites, who remained hostile to Garveyism and any kind of racial withdrawal, were generally associated with domesticated savagery. Their antiracism was backed by political power when the diplomatic situation permitted it and when it could promote national and imperial cohesiveness. From the early 1930s, their appointments in several cabinets closely followed the decline of human zoos. © Presses de Sciences Po.