Abstract
There has been relatively little historical research on the small number of African veterans who stayed on in France after the First World War and became militants in the radical anti-colonial movements created in the 1920s. From his entry onto the political stage in late 1924 until his early death three years later, the most celebrated and feared of these anti-colonial militants was Lamine Senghor, a decorated war veteran from Senegal. This chapter will chart Senghor’s brief career as an activist, focusing primarily on the ways in which he projected his identity as a veteran in his speeches and writings, as well as exploring, more generally, how France’s “blood debt” to its colonial subjects became a key theme of anti-colonial discourse in the interwar period.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Tyler Stovall, “Love, Labor and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France During the Great War,” in French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, eds. Tyler Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003). See also Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) for an influential analysis of the social significance of France’s use of colonial troops during the war, and David Murphy, “Love, Trauma and War: the tirailleurs sénégalais and sexual-racial politics in 1920s France,” Irish Journal of French Studies 13 (2013).
- 2.
See, for example, Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and David Olusoga, The World’s War (London: Head of Zeus, 2014). The Olusoga volume is a companion to his two-part BBC series of the same name, screened in August 2014.
- 3.
Fogarty, Race and War in France; Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of World War One (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Oxford: James Currey, 1993); Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Stovall, ‘Love, Labor and Race’.
- 4.
Two key early texts on this subject are Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France 1919–39 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985); Olivier Sagna, “Des Pionniers méconnus de l’indépendance: Africains, Antillais et luttes anticolonialistes dan la France de l’entre-deux-guerres (1919–39)” (PhD diss., Université Paris VII, 1986). Important recent scholarship includes Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–39 (London: Hurst, 2008) and Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). Minkah Malakani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) looks at this radicalism in a wider Atlantic context.
- 5.
For a brilliant account of this landmark trial see Alice L. Conklin, “Who Speaks for Africa? The René Maran-Blaise Diagne Trial in 1920s Paris,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, eds. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
- 6.
See René Maran, Batoaula: véritable roman nègre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921).
- 7.
The most comprehensive overview of African participation in the First World War is to be found in Marc Michel’s Les Africains et la grande guerre: l’appel à l’Afrique (1914–1918), 2nd edition (Paris: Karthala, 2003), whose first edition appeared in the early 1980s.
- 8.
The best account of Diagne’s career remains G. Wesley Johnson’s The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the Four Communes, 1900–1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971).
- 9.
“Un procès nègre” [A Negro Trial] in Senghor, La Violation d’un pays et autres écrits anticolonialistes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), 33–34. All translations are mine.
- 10.
Sagna, Des Pionniers méconnus, 311.
- 11.
See Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 79–80.
- 12.
Flyer for UIC meeting, March 1925, Archives Nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), Slotfom 3, Carton 3.
- 13.
“En A.O.F.—Le travail forcé pour les indigènes,” in Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 40.
- 14.
Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 40.
- 15.
For an overview of the campaign against the war, see David H. Slavin, “The French Left and the Rif War, 1924–25: Racism and the Limits of Internationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 26:1 (1991).
- 16.
Gregory Mann has studied the ways in which a shared experience of the battlefield had the potential to bring French and African veterans together. See Mann, Native Sons. The possibility that ARAC played a role in forging bonds between left-wing French and African militants is a topic worthy of further exploration.
- 17.
When Abd el-Krim won a remarkable victory over the Spanish colonial army in September 1924, Doriot and Pierre Semard sent a congratulatory telegram on behalf of the Jeunesses communistes (published on the front page of L’Humanité the following day), which expressed the wish that “after its definitive victory over Spanish imperialism, the people of the Rif will continue, together with the French and European proletariat, the struggle against all imperialists, until Moroccan soil has been fully liberated”. See Doriot and Pierre Semard, “Le Parti Communiste francҫais unanime feҫlicite Abd-el-Krim pour ses succeҫs,” L’Humanité, September 11, 1924, cited in Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 121. Doriot’s notoriety increased when he suggested in parliament on February 4, 1925 that French troops in Morocco desert rather than fight their “proletarian” brothers in the Rif.
- 18.
“Les Riffains ne sont pas seuls—Ils ont avec eux le monde des opprimés,” in Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 35.
- 19.
Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 36.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Given that France had forgotten this gratitude within six years of the decision to build the mosque it is unsurprising that this is a part of the historical record that is rarely dusted off in contemporary debates about secularism in France.
- 22.
See, for example, John D. Hargreaves, “The Comintern and Anti-colonialism: New Research Opportunities,” African Affairs 92 (1993): 261. Dewitte’s Les Mouvements nègres and Sagna’s Des Pionniers méconnus are also very critical of the PCF.
- 23.
Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres, 109.
- 24.
The full title of the Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance aux Indigènes (generally known as the CAI) indicated its twin mission to police (contrôle) and to assist (assistance) the ‘indigenous’ populations from the colonies resident in France; however, the primary, unspoken mission of the CAI was to carry out surveillance on colonial subjects.
- 25.
See Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 92.
- 26.
Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
- 27.
Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 43–46.
- 28.
Ibid., 53.
- 29.
An article in the first issue of La Race Nègre, June 1927, the successor to La Voix des Nègres, “Réponse d’un ancien tirailleur sénégalais à M. Paul Boncour” deploys a different method to give voice to African war veterans. Written in the first person in the ‘petit nègre’ [pidgin French] taught to its tirailleurs by the French army, the article allows a (real or imagined) tirailleur to tell his story in his own terms. See Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 104–105. The emerging anti-colonialism of the period consistently used statistics and other information provided by the colonial system to denounce the injustice of that very system.
- 30.
Christopher L. Miller, Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
- 31.
Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 41. Once again, Senghor links military service for Africans as part of a continuum linked to other forms of colonial exploitation.
- 32.
Ibid., 43.
- 33.
As Senghor believed that only the independence of the colonies and liberation from the white man could bring freedom and equality for ‘les nègres’, this meant that there could be no liberty within the western colonial system. His articles for Le Paria envisaged a colour-blind community bound together by communist ideals, and the revolutionary conclusion to his most sustained piece of writing, the allegorical La Violation d’un pays (1927), might be deemed an attempt to imagine a multiracial future in the post-imperial world. However, as he wrote in the article “Ce qu’est notre Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre” in the first issue of La Voix des Nègres: “Negroes are not of any European nationality and do not wish to serve the interests of one imperialism against another”. Under empire, black people cannot and will not be French. Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 47.
- 34.
Generally known as the LAI, the League’s full title was the League against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression.
- 35.
Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
- 36.
Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 61 and 63.
- 37.
“The Browsing Reader,” The Crisis (July 1927), 160; “A Black Man’s Protest,” The Living Age, 332:4306, May 15, 1927, 866–868.
- 38.
Roger Baldwin, “The Capital of the Men without a Country,” The Survey, August 1, 1927, 460–468.
- 39.
The situation of blacks in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas were brought together within a history of oppression dating back five centuries: “For almost five centuries, the negro peoples of the world have been victimised and cruelly oppressed”. Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 63. The unity of all ‘nègres’ and all colonised would finally bring such oppression to an end. The July 1927 issue of The Crisis, mentioned above, published a long extract from the “General Resolution on the Negro Question” in its “The Far Horizon” section, 165–166.
- 40.
Senghor, La Violation d’un pays, 29–30.
- 41.
Frederick Cooper, “From Imperial Inclusion to Republican Exclusion? France’s Ambiguous Postwar Trajectory,” in Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France, eds. Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 117.
- 42.
See Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 13. For a more in-depth analysis of these issues in relation to Lamine Senghor, see David Murphy, “Success and Failure: Frantz Fanon and Lamine Senghor as (False) Prophets of Decolonization,” Nottingham French Studies 54:1 (2015).
Bibliography
Baldwin, Roger. “The Capital of the Men Without a Country.” The Survey (August 1 1927): 460–468.
Boittin, Jennifer Anne. Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
Conklin, Alice L. “Who Speaks for Africa? The René Maran-Blaise Diagne Trial in 1920s Paris.” In The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, edited by Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, 302–337. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Cooper, Frederick. “From Imperial Inclusion to Republican Exclusion? France’s Ambiguous Postwar Trajectory.” In Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France, edited by Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, 91–119. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
Das, Santanu ed. Race, Empire and First World War Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Derrick, Jonathan. Africa’s ‘Agitators’: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–39. London: Hurst, 2008.
Dewitte, Philippe. Les Mouvements nègres en France 1919–39. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Fogarty, Richard S. Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Hargreaves, John D. “The Comintern and Anti-colonialism: New Research Opportunities.” African Affairs 92 (1993): 255–261.
Lunn, Joe. Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of World War One. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Oxford: James Currey, 1993.
Malakani, Makah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Mann, Gregory. Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Maran, René. Batoaula: véritable roman nègre. Paris: Albin Michel, 1921.
McMeekin, Sean. The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.
Michel, Marc. Les Africains et la grande guerre: l’appel à l’Afrique (1914–1918), 2nd ed. Paris: Karthala, 2003.
Miller, Christopher L. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Murphy, David. “Love. Trauma and War: the tirailleurs sénégalais and Sexual-racial Politics in 1920s France.” Irish Journal of French Studies 13 (2013): 111–128.
Murphy, David. “Success and Failure: Frantz Fanon and Lamine Senghor as (False) Prophets of Decolonization.” Nottingham French Studies 54:1 (2015): 92–106.
Olusoga, David. The World’s War. London: Head of Zeus, 2014.
Sagna, Olivier. “Des Pionniers méconnus de l’indépendance: Africains, Antillais et luttes anticolonialistes dan la France de l’entre-deux-guerres (1919–39).” PhD diss., Université Paris VII, 1986.
Senghor, David. La Violation d’un pays et autres écrits anticolonialistes. edited by David Murphy Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012.
Slavin, David H. “The French Left and the Rif War, 1924–25: Racism and the Limits of Internationalism.” Journal of Contemporary History 26:1 (1991): 5–32.
Stovall, Tyler. “Love, Labor and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France During the Great War.” In French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, edited by Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele, 297–331. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003.
Wesley, Johnson, G. The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the Four Communes, 1900–1920. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971.
Wilder, Gary. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Murphy, D. (2017). Race and the Legacy of the First World War in French Anti-Colonial Politics of the 1920s. In: Ewence, H., Grady, T. (eds) Minorities and the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53975-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53975-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-53974-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53975-5
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)