‘In the colonies, black lives don’t matter.’ legalism and rights claims across the French empire

Abstract

This article examines convergences and divergences between various expressions of communism, French republicanism, and pan-black solidarity in overseas France and among metropolitan communities of activists from the 1920s to the rise of the Popular Front against fascism in the mid-1930s. From the time of the first administrative reforms arising from France’s official anti-communist colonial policies in 1922, until the formation of the Popular Front in 1936, anticolonial activism and anti-revolutionary policy dialectically produced sites of judicialization, with agitators deliberately harnessing legal processes to contest the policies, practices and politics of imperial France, and French officials variously legislating against protest, including by extra-parliamentary decree. Experiments in anti-revolutionary legislation culminated in 1935, when the French Minister of the Interior collaborated with the Minister of the Colonies and governors of overseas territories to legislate against ‘acts of disorder or demonstrations against French sovereignty’ whether committed by French citizens, subjects, or protected persons, and regardless of their location. By the early to mid-1930s, legalists on the French left - whether Marxist or republican and in large part due to their involvement with anticolonial activist groups in overseas France - viewed extraparliamentary legislation and judicial irregularity in overseas France as a sign of increasingly authoritarian French governance. Many joined forces to mobilize against what some agitators described as fascist tendencies in French governance.