A Path not Taken? British Perspectives on French Colonial Violence after 1945

Abstract

After 1945 the French Empire, in some ways, charted a similar course, blown by the same socio-political winds, as its British counterpart. A renewed focus on imperial consolidation in the immediate post-war years was quickly overshadowed by the outbreak of rebellions and insurgencies in some places, stronger pressure for more substantial reforms in others. Extraneous pressures, some of them international and inflected with Cold War rivalries, some of them transnational and shaped by mounting global hostility to colonialism, increasingly intruded into French colonial policy-making as into British. To be sure, the contrasts between violent and non-violent alternatives seemed more sharply drawn in the French colonial case; not least to the British onlookers whose observations are the subject of this chapter. At one extreme, the rapidity of colonial breakdowns in Algeria, Indochina and Madagascar was matched by their ultra-violent escalatory dynamics.1 At the other, most French African territories south of the Sahara witnessed profound, but largely non-violent changes in territorial organisation, labour relations and citizenship rights. In some territories, notably French Guinea, popular pressure for reform was decisive.2 Viewed more widely, throughout the French West African federation arguments over rights and rewards, encompassing everything from welfare entitlements and workplace conditions to the relative merits of continued federation versus heightened state autonomy, rested on what Fred Cooper terms ‘a claims-making construct’.