CHAPTER 2 Recalibrating Laïcité from Brazzaville to Bruges

Religious Pluralism, National Renewal, and Youth and Education Policy

During the war, state funding for confessional youth organizations found wide support from across the political spectrum, from Vichy to Free French London, Brazzaville, and Algiers. The different confessional branches of a single youth movement like the scouts seemed to offer an alternative democratic model based on pluralism instead of anticlericalism. For some, that pluralist model might include Jews and Muslims, but it was primarily envisioned for French Christians. The state’s new stance toward confessional youth organizations changed the terms of the heated debate about laïcité and formal schooling. In the liminal years of the French provisional government (1944–1946), education reform commissions in Algiers and post-Liberation Paris failed to broker a compromise and implement lasting policy, but their proceedings reveal important conceptual shifts—even among champions of laïcité—about the relationship between Christianity, secularism, and French identity that had important ramifications from Brazzaville to Bruges.

Christianity and the Civilizational Imaginary beyond the Hexagon

The many traumas of the war engendered acute feelings of temporal rupture in France and its empire and across Europe. Across these spheres, discussions about youth and education pivoted uncomfortably between the celebration of tradition and calls for sociopolitical transformation. Straddling these multiple temporalities, the architects of African and European youth and education initiatives conducted their planning discussions in a pronounced civilizational idiom; “civilization” provided a powerful framework linking past, present, and future in a unitary whole. Moreover, the scalar plane of civilization provided a comforting sense of continuity as postwar planners worked to effect meaningful generational change. The respective objectives of African and European youth and education initiatives were to implant “French civilization” in Africa and to locate France in “European civilization.” The simultaneity of these efforts forced postwar education reformers to think about the substance and the contours of what it meant to be French, European, and African in new and sometimes contradictory ways, and, most important, rendered these identifications more intrinsically relational. Education officials’ insistence that Christianity was a central feature of French civilization in the national debate about school policy and laïcité raised the stakes of how religious identity and secular values figured in the postwar French imaginary beyond the Hexagon.

As we saw in chapter 1, competing formulations of French and European civilization emerged in wartime discussions about youth and education policy in multiple venues from Free French London to Brazzaville. Mapping the continuation of those conversations into the later 1940s introduces important new sites, interlocutors, and points of reference. Contestation over the meaning and the contours of “French civilization” informed discussions about how to implement the Brazzaville Conference’s recommendations on education reform, not just among French officials and educators on the ground in French Africa, but also in the French parliament and the Colonial and Education Ministries in Paris. While no Africans had been invited to participate in the formulation of those recommendations, the conversion of the empire into the French Union in 1946 extended the franchise to unprecedented numbers of Africans, and the dozens of representatives they sent to all three houses of French Parliament made education reform their top priority.⁴⁷ From 1946 on, this first cohort of African deputies in Paris inserted themselves into the metropolitan policymaking process. Hundreds more francophone Africans entered local politics with the expansion of representative territorial and federal assemblies. Their interventions introduced different conceptions of what the expansion of education for Africans should entail and intensified pressure to enact meaningful reforms.

Meanwhile, the boundaries of “European civilization” continued to be debated in the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education. The CAME set for itself the paradoxical task of both affirming to the ministers themselves and to the world that a thing called “European civilization” did indeed exist and bringing that civilization into being through new kinds of transnational pedagogy, research, and cooperation in youth and education policy. That paradox signals the deep existential crisis driving early appeals for European unity. The CAME’s quest to determine the “spiritual and intellectual factors” and the “manner of life” that made Europe a “single civilization”⁴⁸ was taken up by the vast network of transnational European movements that emerged immediately after the war.⁴⁹ In the 1948 Congress of Europe in The Hague, top French officials and European federalists joined more than seven hundred delegates from across Europe to work out the modalities of European cooperation and give the rhetorical figure “United Europe” institutional form. The congress is perhaps best remembered today for leading to the creation of the Council of Europe, but participants were no less concerned with promoting the “European idea” and fostering a European cultural identity, particularly among youth. Convinced that an activist cultural policy was a necessary corollary to political and economic European integration, the congress announced a second summit to deal exclusively with questions of culture and education, to be held in Lausanne the following year.

The Hague Congress ignited an explosion of pro-Europe activity. As Alain Peyrefitte wryly observed from his post in the French occupation authority in Bonn, committees for a united Europe were “sprouting like mushrooms.”⁵⁰ So too did European youth and education initiatives (see figure 2.1). All the major pro-Europe movements created youth sections, which were appreciated by European organized youth. French, Belgian, and Dutch youth leaders assembled at a “European Study Day” in Lille in December 1948 applauded the European movements’ commitment “to give youth a proper role in the construction of Europe.”⁵¹ Indeed, in the years that followed, the pro-Europe movements expanded their youth sections and created specialized transnational cultural institutions that focused on youth and education. Foremost among them was the College of Europe in Bruges, which reprised the CAME’s mission to Europeanize education to mold future generations of pro-Europe elites.⁵²

Abstract meditations on the nature of the relationship between religion and civilization and the place of Christianity in France, Europe, and Africa represent recurring threads that unite this dizzying constellation of actors and institutions charged with devising postwar youth and education initiatives from Brazzaville to Bruges. In chapter 1, we saw how top education officials at the Brazzaville Conference mobilized essentialized portraits of Europeans to justify excluding Africans from metropolitan-style secondary education. The director of secondary education in AOF had declared unequivocally that everything about secondary education was a product of “classical culture” and “Mediterranean civilization” in his assertion that lycée was only suitable for “Europeans.” These allusions conjure a certain vision of a “Latin” Europe that carries strong Christian overtones.⁵³ Those overtones became more explicit in discussions of how to enact Brazzaville’s Education Plan in the late 1940s.

Christianity featured prominently in discussions about the Brazzaville resolution that French should be the exclusive language of instruction in primary schools in French Africa. Associations between language and religion were hardly new in the 1940s; there is a long French intellectual tradition linking language and religion (and race) that stretches back to nineteenth-century Romantic historiography and philology.⁵⁴ However, the intensity of that link in colonial education policy in Africa in the postwar conjuncture deepened the purchase of the culturalist conceptions of Christianity taking shape in metropolitan debates over laïcité.

In May 1944, the CFLN’s Commissariat of Colonies in Algiers officially decreed the prohibition of African languages in primary education. In a missive announcing the new policy to colonial governors, Commissioner of Colonies René Pleven explained that enseignement was not only about learning but also constituted “a veritable ‘socialization’ of the child,” in which children were imprinted with the ensemble of ways of thinking, behavior, and knowledge of their society so that they could become full participants in the community. French colonization, he went on, had already produced and would continue to produce such societal upheavals in “primitive societies that the educative action of the ‘elders’ of these societies is manifestly insufficient to ensure the adaptation of youth to their new modes of life. It is therefore necessary, at least provisionally, to substitute ourselves for those natural educators to promote the progressive integration of colonized peoples into the modern world.” Pleven concluded that indigenous languages were ill-suited for this task; only French could serve as an appropriate vehicle to build “a new intellectual and moral civilization” in French Africa.⁵⁵

When the central colonial authority returned to Paris in late 1944, it began publicizing the new language policy to organizations involved in colonial education. The head of the Colonial Ministry’s education department, Delage, presented the Brazzaville Education Plan to one of the prominent colonial lobbies in France, which had its own “Education Commission.”⁵⁶ He reprised much of Pleven’s language on using French to socialize African children into what Pleven had called the “modern community,” but Delage offered a thicker description of that term. The goal of French colonial education, Delage declared, was to promote the integration of colonized peoples into “the community of modern white nations of western and Christian civilization.” The new policy, he argued, was a strong rejoinder to mounting African critiques, which were now coming from within various levels of representative government, that the colonial administration had strategically not taught Africans French to perpetuate colonial domination. Delage felt the new language policy proved “our generous desire to completely integrate African populations into the French community.”⁵⁷ Thus, according to the director of colonial education policy, the “French community” was part of a broader community of “modern white nations,” and that broader community was defined as fundamentally “Western” and “Christian”—indeed, the two terms appear synonymous. French was the conduit that would integrate Black Africans into the French national community, and by extension, into “modern white and Christian civilization.”

French officials articulated strikingly similar reasoning in transnational European forums on youth and education policy. None other than the Philip Commission’s Jean Bayet pronounced just such a view at the European Movement’s Cultural Conference in Lausanne in 1949. The purpose of the meeting was to reawaken “the sentiment of our common belonging to a civilization to which we owe our grandeur.” It also intended to show that “our cultural forces can contribute to European unification” just as only a “united Europe will preserve our cultures in their precious diversity.” Subcommittees on exchanges, institutions, and education would all study the twinned objectives: “cultures in the service of Europe” and “Europe in the service of our cultures.”⁵⁸ The French delegation comprised a cross section of French political and intellectual elites, including Michel Debré, Raoul Dautry, Raymond Aron, and Alexandre Marc, as well as education officials like Bayet and Jean Sarrailh, rector of the Academy of Paris.

Bayet gave a presentation on “Europeanizing” secondary and postsecondary education through dramatic changes in pedagogy, curricula, language study, and history textbooks.⁵⁹ However, he noted that this proposal would pose particular problems for countries with overseas colonies. “For the future and even the radiance of the European Union,” he insisted, it behooved them to ensure that “that these diverse, faraway peoples have access to a culture that we know is imbued with fundamental values.” Nevertheless, he felt European metropoles should not seek to impose “a superficial equality with cultured Europeans” on those populations. He therefore concluded that Europeanizing pedagogical and curricular reforms should not be implemented in colonial territories. And yet, Bayet, a classicist by training, confidently asserted that those “fundamental values” would be transmitted to colonial peoples in the language of the colonial power. “Happily,” he declared, “the great European languages are carriers by their literatures and their very form, of the essential European values inherited from Greece, Rome, and Christianity.”⁶⁰ In his view, then, overseas populations were essential to the “radiance” of united Europe but should not receive the same Europeanized education as their metropolitan counterparts. If we apply his logic to French Africa, Bayet was effectively suggesting that despite not receiving a proper European-style education, Africans would still learn core “European values”—here defined by classical antiquity and Christianity—by virtue of the fact that their education was in French.

As most of the largest European unity movements had ties to Christian Democratic parties or had their own confessional affiliation, appeals to Christianity as a core element of “European civilization” were common in venues like Lausanne. It may initially be surprising that a representative of ostensibly secular France, who himself had worked in the MEN, would espouse such a view. But the proceedings of the Philip Commission made clear that Bayet found no contradiction between ardently championing laïcité as a policy framework for the metropolitan French education system and characterizing France as culturally Christian.

As new European educational institutions got off the ground in the late 1940s, tensions between rhetorical depictions of Europe as culturally Christian and competing conceptions of such institutions as religiously “neutral” bubbled to the surface. Debates at the founding of the College of Europe in Bruges, an elite postgraduate institution intended to provide “Europeanized” training for political, intellectual, and business leaders, provides a representative example. Before opening in late 1950, the college’s transnational board organized a monthlong preparatory session, and leading members of the European movements, academics, and postgraduate students representing more than a dozen European nationalities were invited to participate. This mix of future administrators, faculty, and students of the college debated the role of Christianity in the political project of Europe as they discussed both the content of the college’s curriculum and more practical matters such as whether or not the college would hold a common religious service. In the subcommittee on historical studies, most agreed that bringing Catholics, Protestants, and “others” together in a single religious service was impractical. The group voted against holding religious services, 6–2, to the consternation of the dissenting minority: an Austrian academic, who forcefully protested on the grounds that he “supported united Europe because of his Christian conscience,” and Jean Bachelot, a French postgraduate student who later worked at the college. Bachelot said that while he recognized European unity as a “social and economic necessity,” he was motivated by “his duty as a Christian” to work toward achieving it.⁶¹

A clearer picture of how this transnational European institution approached religious pluralism in Europe emerges in the preparatory session’s seminar on “general culture.” That seminar was led by a Frenchman, Henri van Effenterre, faculty at the University of Caen who became the college’s first director of studies (1950–1952). The seminar sought to identify the communal European traditions that would be most effective in the formation of a “European spirit,” and it concentrated on classical thought, Christianity, and state formation. In his summation of this work, Effenterre made four points about Christianity. First, he affirmed that Christianity had been one of the most important common factors of what he referred to as “the European tradition,” and second, that the prevalence of Christians among all the European nationalities, “with the exception of Turkey,” constituted an element of unity. His third and fourth points, however, stressed the limitations of Christianity as a unifying force in two senses. He cautioned his colleagues should “not overestimate the current value of this element of unity, given the multiple forms and divisions in Christian thought.” He then added, “Europe today comprises a quite large number of non-Christians, most of whom no longer even feel the historical link between their liberal or Marxist philosophies and any tradition whatsoever.” These last two comments, and their juxtaposition with the passing reference to Turkey, indicate the narrowness of Effenterre’s conception of European religious pluralism. His view of Europe was not as community of Christians and members of other faiths but rather as a collective of multiple Christian denominations and an ideologically diverse group of atheists, the latter of whom he associated historically, despite themselves, with Christian thought. It was with this vision of Europe in mind that Effenterre concluded, “it seems prudent to consider Christianity, as a religion, as an element of diversity in European unification rather than a real factor of unity.”⁶²

That conclusion still left open other modes of rooting European unity in Christianity—not as a religious tradition but explicitly as “culture.” Effenterre thought he and his colleagues should “analyze, beyond the religious domain, the many Christian legacies from which the European idea may develop, such as the domains of the family, morality, social life, art and philosophy.” In so doing, Effenterre proposed a culturalized and secularized conception of Christianity that could be linked to all of Europe’s key sociocultural institutions. Drawing on an increasingly salient postwar discourse of Catholic familialism, Effenterre confidently asserted, “European unity rests on a family structure directly inherited from the Christian tradition.” He added, “The encounter between Christian Revelation and classical antiquity was the source of the spiritual development of Europe”—an encounter that he saw continuing in the present in the “relations between Christian thinkers in the diverse countries of Europe and modern, scientific thought.”⁶³

The college’s transnational board accepted this reasoning, which was duly reflected in the curriculum. All seminars in the college’s inaugural year devoted considerable attention to the role of Christianity in European history, politics, and culture, despite the leadership’s explicit characterization of the institution as “secular.”⁶⁴ The college’s first rector, Hendrik Brugmans, a Dutch professor of French literature, walked a fine line in negotiating these tendencies. Reflecting on the college’s first year of programming, Brugmans noted that he had to turn down “a generous offer” from a Franco-Belgian Christian anti-Communist organization to endow a special chair in “Christian Civilization,” since “that did not align with our conception of the college.”⁶⁵ Nevertheless, Brugmans invited members of the group to deliver three lectures at the college every year, on such topics as “Christianity and Tolerance,” “The Absolute,” and “The Notion of ‘Laïcité.’ ”⁶⁶ Inviting guest lecturers from this deeply conservative Christian organization was not a radical move; it was in lockstep with the college’s regular programming.

The College of Europe, like the Lausanne Conference, was a key venue where French officials and educators continued to develop the culturalist conceptions of Christianity that emerged in the Philip Commission that made explicit identification with Christianity compatible with republican laïcité. Philip himself, a committed European activist and first president of the Socialist postwar movement for European unity, lectured in the College of Europe’s 1951 session.⁶⁷ In both the French and European arenas, laïcité was recalibrated to accommodate diverse Christian denominations and various “nonbelievers,” most of whom, it was implied, came from Christian backgrounds and should still be considered culturally Christian. Furthermore, as Effenterre’s argumentation also makes clear, as a secular morality anchoring “the spiritual development of Europe,” laïcité itself was framed as a key part of the Christian tradition.⁶⁸

Laïcité South of the Sahara

Culturalist conceptions of Christianity informed French colonial policy in postwar Africa, but debates about laïcité in the African federations also dovetailed with other local and international concerns. Ongoing state funding for Catholic and Protestant mission schools dominated conversations about laïcité in AEF, where the missionary presence—both French and foreign—long predated the French colonial state.⁶⁹ The missions operated a vast network of schools in AOF, but missionary education in West Africa often took a back seat to officials’ growing preoccupation with Islam in this region with large, often majority, Muslim populations.⁷⁰ The colonial administration pursued a set of conflicting objectives regarding Muslim African youth: they simultaneously sought to integrate Muslim West Africans into French colonial society through formal schooling and youth programs, to control and limit new conversions to Islam, and to inoculate local Islam from political and theological currents rippling through the wider Muslim world. The situation in French Africa therefore entailed both continuities and contrasts with the civilizational discourses and reappraisals of laïcité in metropolitan French and transnational European forums. It is the particular arrangement of this new configuration of laïcité between metropole and colony that I aim to emphasize here.

The Brazzaville Conference had reaffirmed Christianity as a crucial vector of “French civilization” in Africa alongside the development of mass public schooling. In sessions devoted to “indigenous policy,” Catholic clergy and French officials alike called for a new “Christian civil status” for African Christians in the hope of bringing African social organization—particularly relating to marriage, property, and inheritance—more closely in line with French social practice. Paul Biéchy, a top official in the Catholic hierarchy in the Congo, protested that “fetishist” converts to Islam obtained a “Muslim civil status,” whereas African Christians received no legal recognition. He lamented, “In the current French colonial legislation, Islamism is king, fetishism less so, and Christianity nothing at all.”⁷¹ The AOF delegation responded to this reproach with a resounding endorsement of a special legal status for African Christians. They did so precisely because “our civilization is, in effect, essentially Christian. Consequently, any legal regime that is inspired by Christianity will constitute for the indigène a step towards a civilization closer to ours.” The delegation offered a hypothetical Christian Baga couple living in Conakry (Guinée) as an example: “The household lives, if not à l’européenne, at least, ‘à la chrétienne.’ ” Without Christian legal status, if the husband died, the widow, her children, and their property would be drawn back into “the patriarchal community.”⁷² The emphasis here on the fate of women and children is key. For most Catholic leaders in Africa, it did not much matter whether African communities were Muslim or animist; both, they believed, treated women and children as “slaves” of their male relatives and the larger clan. They therefore considered Christian marriage one of the surest ways for African women to escape a life of “slavery.”⁷³ An official Christian legal status could ensure that that escape would be permanent. The status was not codified, but similar criteria determined voting eligibility and the fate of Africans’ applications for full citizenship for years to come.⁷⁴

The equation of “European” and “Christian” in the discussion about the ideal typical African convert couple at the Brazzaville Conference anticipated transnational European discourses of familialism after the war and the rhetorical moves of a figure like Effenterre who coded European family structures as essentially Christian. The triadic opposition between Christianity, Islam, and “fetishism” in French Africa deepened the purchase of the culturalization of Christianity in metropolitan France and transnational European milieus. The social, political, and religious local landscape also helped shape a set of conflicting institutional approaches to laïcité in the French African federations.

While the specificity of the colonial context may seem to align with a long scholarly tradition of considering the empire as the exception to the rule of republican laïcité, the postwar conjuncture recast what made the colonial context unique. J. P. Daughton has shown that Third Republican colonial policy underwent a profound shift around the turn of the century from a platform of “anticlericalism is not for export” that accommodated state funding for Catholic missions to increasingly restrictive policies on missionary work and mission schools in particular prior to World War I. This change in turn precipitated a shift within the missions from evangelizing to “civilizing” and “colonizing,” which more closely aligned the missions with republican goals and rhetoric. Daughton underscores this history of conflict and rapprochement between secular republicans and Catholics in the empire to argue that French colonial ideology and practice cannot be defined as exclusively republican or Catholic but rather combined the two.⁷⁵

As the discussion about Christian civil status makes clear, this was very much still the case moving into the postwar period, but with a crucial difference: in the late 1940s, this “colonial” blend of republican and Christian civilizational discourses no longer looked so different from conversations about laïcité, civilization, and education reform in either the national-metropolitan or transnational European arenas. Nor did “colonial” accommodations toward confessional private schools. On the contrary, the issue of public versus private schooling in AEF was often posed in exactly the same terms as in the metropole. As the inspector-general for education in AEF put it in 1946, the colonial administration must absolutely avoid “the danger, given the delicate political conjuncture we are experiencing, of letting the schools become once more the field of political battles.”⁷⁶ The postwar imperatives of national unity and reconciliation that had precipitated a turn away from militant laïcité in the metropole reframed policy decisions in AEF as well.

Of course, this was not the only consideration underwriting postwar financial support for mission schools in AEF. Material conditions on the ground and the precedent set by Éboué’s and Laurentie’s “indigenous policy” in the early war years also played important roles. During the transition from provisional government to Fourth Republic (1944–1946), the question of state funding for confessional schooling in AEF, as in the metropole, became a matter of deciding whether to continue subsidies that had been introduced during the war. But unlike in the metropole or AOF, where the practice originated with Vichy, the wartime extension of subsidies to mission schools in AEF had been enacted by Free France. When AEF rallied to de Gaulle, the missions in the federation were cut off from their traditional sources of funding in the metropole and Rome. The administration feared the schools would be forced to close without state aid.⁷⁷ This circumstantial need was quickly transformed into a substantive policy reorientation by Éboué and Laurentie. Éboué’s dictum that as “public schools and Christian schools have similar goals and methods, they both should receive equal support from the government” was often cited in administrative correspondence in the late 1940s.⁷⁸

Some officials and educators protested this retreat from a strict interpretation of laïcité, but the subsidies introduced by Éboué remained in full effect until the dissolution of the federation a decade later.⁷⁹ Many considered the policy a sheer necessity: AEF simply did not have the resources or personnel to make schooling available to significant numbers of African children without the missions’ help. In 1946, of the mere thirty thousand aéfiens who had been to primary school—which represented a scandalous 1 percent of the total population—fully half attended mission schools.⁸⁰ Some local officials lamented the situation, but the reason was usually the inferior quality of mission schooling, not a principled commitment to laïcité. Although student enrollment in AEF was split evenly between public and mission schools, 455 of the 657 students who obtained the coveted certificat d’études attended public ones. Still, the administration remained optimistic about the value of mission schooling as a key means of integrating Africans into the French community, noting that seven of the eight aéfiens standing for election to the French Constituent Assembly in Paris had attended mission schools.⁸¹

As subsidies to mission schools became regularized, the administration made its support conditional on the missions’ acceptance of administrative oversight of curricula, pedagogy, exams, teacher certification, and new school construction.⁸² Indeed, the new consensus that “here private education constitutes a significant part of the work of educating the country and supports the work of the public schools” led colonial officials in the late 1940s to explicitly characterize private Christian education as a “public service.”⁸³ With the distinction between public and private formally effaced, colonial officials described the relationship between the two types of schools in terms of “unity” rather than cooperation, affirming “both are French and both provide an education exclusively in French that follows the official curriculum.”⁸⁴

Mission personnel were accordingly brought into the policymaking process and given permanent seats in AEF’s top education policymaking body.⁸⁵ While this would have been inconceivable under the Third Republic—in either metropole or colony—from the Philip Commission onward, this became standard practice in the metropole as well. Moreover, francophone Africans in the new territorial assemblies of AEF, who were disproportionately Christian and mission-educated, did not object. On the contrary, the assembly of Gabon, where the state paid for 80 percent of mission schools’ total costs, made direct, urgent appeals to the administration and the missions in late 1947 to open more schools in six counties where the dearth of schools meant that most children there received no formal education whatsoever.⁸⁶

The changing international landscape of the postwar conjuncture further encouraged the administration in AEF to support mission schools. Africans’ entry into national and local government was a response not only to African demands but also to mounting international pressure to democratize the empire.⁸⁷ As we saw in chapter 1, a “world is watching” attitude was already in full force during the Brazzaville Conference, and colonial education became an even more important barometer of France’s commitment to meaningful colonial reform after the war. As Christian Merlo, head of mission affairs in AEF, argued in favor of the subsidies, if the French did not take advantage of every resource at their disposal, including mission schools, “the African citizen and the international powers will not hesitate to give us grief about the shortcomings of our school policy.”⁸⁸

At the end of the war, French observers looked on with trepidation as the United States stepped up its anticolonial rhetoric in its global competition with the Soviet Union for colonized hearts and minds, and the creation of the United Nations raised the alarming prospect of the “internationalization” of France’s African colonies.⁸⁹ Significantly, many French colonial officials believed growing US interest in French Africa stemmed primarily from US religious congregations. AEF officials obsessively monitored American missionary incursions in the federation and US press coverage of the problem of mass education in French Africa more generally.⁹⁰ On the heels of the 1945 San Francisco Conference and the founding of the United Nations, Minister of Colonies Paul Giacobbi sent a secret missive to the colonial leadership in the African federations to actively support French missionary activity to stave off the “internationalist” and “anticolonial” assault of US missions. He declared that the French would have to harness this “great religious movement” by developing their own “proactive religious policy.”⁹¹ This became a common refrain in AEF for years to come. As the governor general of AEF declared in a 1947 request for more funds for French missions, “in Black Africa where all foreign influences converge (Arab League, North American anticolonialism, Soviet propaganda), each French missionary, by his very presence in the bush and his ministry of education, maintains our prestige.”⁹²

Competition between Anglo-American and French missionaries had always been an important factor in imperial rivalries in sub-Saharan Africa, in AEF especially.⁹³ However, the postwar imperative to democratize France’s African empire assigned a new, urgent role to mission schools: preparing Africans for increased political participation in the Fourth Republic and French Union. As the head of education in AEF proclaimed to a room full of public schoolteachers and missionaries at the opening session of AEF’s education council in 1947: “For two years a prodigious juridical revolution has occurred in the French Union. We are passing from a regime based on authority to a regime of democracy. Democracy is incompatible with illiteracy and superstition.” He continued, “By the massive extension of rights and all the forms of democracy to the overseas territories, [our country] is also undertaking a massive transformation of the nature of those societies, that is, by instruction, which, in truth, if we had had the time, should have come first.” He concluded that the administration and the missions had to work together to accelerate the opening of more schools to “reestablish the harmonious order of things” and “adjust realities to rights.”⁹⁴ This rhetoric featured prominently in subsequent defenses of state support for private Christian education in AEF. “Illiteracy,” Merlo declared the following year, was a “social evil that encourages superstition and fetishism and is incompatible with the exercise of a real democracy and French citizenship extended to all.”⁹⁵

By 1948, state subsidies to mission schools had indeed effectively transformed private Christian schooling in AEF into a “public service,” formalizing the equation of Christianity and “French civilization” in postwar colonial policy. Indeed, it was the very real incorporation of mission schools into public education in AEF that enabled administrators to dismiss the most common criticism of the subsidies policy: that funding mission schools would force the administration to fund Muslim schools as well.⁹⁶ To this charge, defenders of the policy repeatedly insisted that only private institutions that teach “the official curriculum, in French” were subsidized, which excluded Qur’anic schools a priori.⁹⁷ Thus as the opposition between public education and private, Christian education was rendered moot in French Equatorial Africa, only Islamic education would be excluded by the strictures of republican laïcité.

In AOF, with its substantial Muslim populations, discussions about laïcité after the Brazzaville Conference centered squarely on Islam. The cause was a potent combination of international developments, emboldened demands from Muslim Africans for access to Islamic education, and French perceptions of African Islam. Confrontations between Catholics and secularists over subsidies to mission schools in AOF—even seemingly abstract, principled arguments for or against laïcité—were often filtered through one or more of these concerns. As Catholic educators and secularists in the administration sparred publicly in the local press over continuing subsidies to mission schools in 1944–1945, they accused one another of seeking to “incite” local Muslims.⁹⁸ For both camps, state support for Islamic education, either by subsidizing Qur’anic schools or by authorizing Muslim clerics to provide religious instruction in public schools outside of regular school hours—a privilege enjoyed by Catholics—was to be avoided at all costs.

State support for Muslim youth organizations in AOF was likewise deemed inappropriate and potentially dangerous. Though such concerns were most often couched in universalist language that framed all confessional youth groups as a “factor of division” that threatened “national cohesion,” Muslim groups were understood to be more divisive and more threatening than others. In a 1945 policy note on subsidies to confessional scout movements in AOF, Charles Brun, head of the social affairs service, first posed the issue as an opposition between a positive secular morality and “Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Jewish morality” that taught “young French” to identify with their faith more than their patrie. However, when Brun arrived at his actual policy recommendation, the problem was framed differently. He insisted that if they were to fund Catholic and Protestant scout movements in AOF, they would have to authorize Muslim scout troops, lest “we be accused of bias and all the incidents that would cause.” He therefore concluded that since it was absolutely “necessary to restrict Muslim scouting in AOF,” they should adopt a firm policy against funding any confessional scout organizations whatsoever.⁹⁹

Such resolute opposition to Muslim scouting in late 1945 was rooted in political concerns as much as religious ones. We have seen that just a year earlier, Free French Commissioner of Education René Capitant had wanted to provide financial and material support to develop Muslim scouting in the empire.¹⁰⁰ Things changed, however, in May 1945, when the Scouts musulmans algériens participated in nationalist demonstrations in Sétif, Guelma, and elsewhere in Algeria. French officials believed that Salafi ulemas and other foreign provocateurs had turned the organization into a nationalist training ground.¹⁰¹ This was a turning point in official views on the potential benefits of Muslim scouting not just for Algerians but for all Muslims in the empire. The Colonial Ministry urged territorial governors in AEF and AOF to put any Muslim scout organizations in their jurisdictions under surveillance and disband them if they engaged in any political activity.¹⁰² Governors in both federations reported back that happily there were no Muslim scout movements in their territories and that they would not authorize any in future.¹⁰³

A formal ban on Muslim scouting was not put in place, but by withholding state aid to develop local Muslim scouting, the colonial administration all but guaranteed there would be no Muslim scouts in French Africa. After all, secular and Christian scout movements created local troops for Africans only after receiving generous subsidies from Éboué, a policy continued by the postwar administration in AEF. In the end, it proved much easier to be inconsistent in this matter than Brun had feared. The administration in AOF began providing financial support to the Catholic Scouts de France and the Protestant Éclaireurs unionistes in 1946; by the mid-1950s, Christian scout movements in AOF had received tens of millions of francs CFA, whereas no funding was allocated to develop Muslim scouting in the federation.¹⁰⁴ Indeed, officials in AOF not only were hostile to creating Muslim scout troops but feared introducing scouting to young Muslims at all. In 1946, the head of public education in AOF insisted that scouting in Muslim countries was so dangerous that “the only territories in AOF where scouting would have a chance of fulfilling its educative and moral role, are those in which Christianity can take root: Dahomey and Côte d’Ivoire.” Invoking the incidents with Muslim scouts in Algeria, he concluded they must do everything in their power to limit scouting to “Christian territories” and prevent it from “spread[ing] among populations steeped in Islamism.”¹⁰⁵ Clearly, Muslim scouting was officially discouraged insofar as it was Muslim, whether officials’ rationales referred to laïcité or not.

In 1947, the federal administration in AOF funded a delegation of scouts to represent the federation in the sixth annual International Scout Jamboree, which that year happened to be held in Moisson, France. Of the 112 members of the delegation, just under half were secular Éclaireurs de France, a third were Catholic Scouts de France, and the rest were Protestant Éclaireurs unionistes.¹⁰⁶ Some Muslim West African youth did attend the jamboree as part of the secular contingent, but their participation was predicated on the subsumption of their Muslim-ness in an explicitly secular movement, since secular and Christian were the only permissible options. Despite the small Muslim presence in its ranks, the delegation—which was intended to “represent” the youth of AOF, close to 50 percent of whom were Muslim, to metropolitan France and the world—officially comprised only Christians and laïcs. African Christians were recognized and included in the Franco-African community as such, while African Muslims were uniquely denied such recognition.

That said, around this time officials in AOF were beginning, albeit reluctantly, to contemplate a more proactive Muslim youth and education policy. As Muslim West Africans became more involved in the policymaking process, and African elites’ expectations for democratic reform rose, the colonial administration received increasingly aggressive petitions for state support for Qur’anic schools, the inclusion of Islamic instruction in public schooling, and language instruction in Arabic. In March 1947, Ibrahima M’Bodj of the Grande Mosquée of Saint Louis appealed directly to Vincent Auriol, president of the Fourth Republic, demanding Arabic instruction in public schools in Senegal. M’Bodj must have been cruelly disappointed to receive a response from a low-level administrator in Dakar, who replied that he understood Arabic’s importance to the Muslim faithful but nonetheless insisted that Arabic instruction would have to come from the community “in light of the very principles at the heart of the republican regime which interdicts any state intrusion in matters of religion.”¹⁰⁷ Similarly, when the federal assembly of AOF demanded state support for Islamic religious education in Muslim-majority regions, the governor general himself declared: “It is impossible for us given the principles of laïcité … to promote Qur’anic education and notably to introduce it into the curriculum.” He continued that it was crucial “not to consider Islam an official religion, thereby breaking the traditional position of republican and secular France.”¹⁰⁸ Considered alongside state aid to Christian schooling and youth organizations in the African federations and increasing support for similar policies in metropolitan France, such rhetorical depictions of laïcité as a nonnegotiable, bedrock republican value with regard to schooling were clearly no longer in step with actual practice in either French Africa or the metropole. Rather, laïcité was selectively applied to a single faith: Islam.

And yet, the sheer volume of protest, coupled with growing concerns to insulate West African Muslims from broader currents rippling through the Islamic world, led officials in AOF to contemplate their own “Franco-Muslim” school policy in the late 1940s. Subsequent debates on what Franco-Muslim education in Africa should entail hinged on racialized understandings of Islam in West Africa, which most French colonial officials tellingly referred to as Islam noir. Many French officials considered African Muslims more “African” than “Muslim”—a belief that was duly registered in the terminology they used to refer to Muslim-majority regions and populations: islamisé·e·s as opposed to musulman·e·s. In this sense, Muslim Africans were figured as still “in play”—as potentially more receptive and open to French social and cultural practices than Muslim Arabs, perhaps even convertible to Christianity.¹⁰⁹ The framework of Islam noir simultaneously justified the colonial administration assuming responsibility for Muslim religious instruction—if Islam noir was as pliable as administrators and educators thought, they could mold it to suit their own purposes—and aggressively curtailing the opening of new Qur’anic schools and Arabic language instruction, which were often framed as “foreign imports” lacking deep roots in African spiritual, social, or cultural life. As AOF’s governor-general put it in 1949, “The juridical customs of the Islamized populations really do not derive from the precepts of the Qur’an and Arab culture.” Those customs, he continued, have had a “destructive influence on Negro-African civilizations,” which “have become bastardized and even disappeared in certain regions.”¹¹⁰ It was their job, he therefore concluded, to protect Black Africans from Islam.

French education officials moved away from a version of laïcité that dissociated French national identity from Christianity at the very moment that France was trying to build a more democratic Franco-African community. The equation of Christianity, French culture, and “European civilization” turned non-Christian religious difference into a starker boundary between European and African France. That boundary was both conceptual and institutional. As French leaders, educators, and activists considered to what extent France and Europe’s “Christian inheritance” should guide education reform across metropolitan, colonial, and European space, they developed substantively different approaches to youth and education policy depending on the religion, even though they continued to articulate those policies in an undifferentiated rhetorical framework of “republican laïcité.”

That discursive continuity obscures the cleavages created in this period, and belie contemporary constructions of laïcité as a totalizing, unitary principle of French political culture and republican practice since World War II, let alone since 1905, the 1880s, or 1789. While recent work has emphasized the structurally “unsettled” nature of laïcité, the postwar conjuncture was a particularly turbulent time for the concept and the practice.¹¹¹ The novel contours of postwar laïcité emerged at the crossroads of national reconstruction, postwar colonialism, and European integration. The critical interplay between the culturalization of Christianity, racist ideas about African Islam, and institutional arrangements across metropolitan, colonial, and transnational space in the late 1940s located France more firmly in a Europe that was understood to be both secular and Christian, which created new patterns of inequality and exclusion in the French Union.

1. 1. Chappel, Catholic Modern; Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity.

2. 2. Scott, Sex and Secularism; Moyn, “From Communist to Muslim.” Moyn argues that the Cold War discourse of religious freedom and the equation of democracy and Christianity sought to marginalize secularism, whereas Scott, who I think makes the more persuasive case, argues that Christianity, democracy, and secularism became synonymous in Cold War rhetoric against Soviet atheism.

3. 3. Chappel, Catholic Modern, 175–178.

4. 4. In 1951, the Loi Marie provided scholarships to children attending private schools, and the Loi Barangé provided heads of household with a fixed sum for their children’s education that could be used for private schools. In 1959, the Loi Debré formalized a system of state aid to private schools directly.

5. 5. Chappel emphasizes the transnational European context of the Marie and Barangé Laws, which had analogues in both Germany and Austria. Catholic Modern, 215–216.

6. 6. On the articulation of postwar ecumenism with the imperatives of decolonization and European integration, see Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity; Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants.”

7. 7. Lionel Christien, “Une présence chrétienne au risque de la Révolution nationale? Jean Joussellin et le secrétariat général à la Jeunesse en zone occupée,” in Scoutisme entre guerre et paix, ed. Baubérot and Duval, 72.

8. 8. Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

9. 9. Christien, “Une présence chrétienne,” in Scoutisme entre guerre et paix, ed. Baubérot and Duval.

10. 10. Jean-Jacques Gauthé, “La France Libre et le scoutisme,” in Pour une histoire de la France Libre, ed. Patrick Harismendy and Erwin Le Gall (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 49–57.

11. 11. Charles-Édouard Harang, “Les Scouts de France en Afrique équatoriale francaise, 1940–1945,” in Scoutisme entre guerre et paix, ed. Baubérot and Duval, 200.

12. 12. Harang, “Les Scouts de France,” in Scoutisme entre guerre et paix, ed. Baubérot and Duval, 200, 195.

13. 13. See chapter 1.

14. 14. For AEF, see “Scoutisme en AEF,” ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219. For AOF, see “Scouts de France—subventions AOF—1950–1959” and “Éclaireurs Unionistes de France—subventions AOF—1946–1958,” ANS: 18G/214 (160).

15. 15. Les Réalisations coloniales de la France Combattante en AEF, Rapport de la Délégation du Commissariat à l’Intérieur d’Alger à Londres, January 5, 1943, 17–23, AN: F/1a/3731.

16. 16. Letter from Père Bertho to Charles Cros, Dakar, November 7, 1944, ANS: O/11 (31).

17. 17. Les Réalisations coloniales de la France Combattante en AEF, 52, AN: F/1a/3731.

18. 18. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Education Nationale et de la Jeunesse de la séance du 13 mai 1944 (Assemblée consultative provisioire-Alger), AN: C//15266.

19. 19. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Education Nationale et de la Jeunesse de la séance du 13 mai 1944, AN: C//15266.

20. 20. Procès-verbal de la Commission de la réforme de l’enseignement, Séance d’Ouverture, March 8, 1944, AN: F/17/13335.

21. 21. Rapport au sujet du Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur l’Éducation, Alger 1943, AN: F/1a/3802.

22. 22. A law professor at the University of Strasbourg, Capitant was a committed liberal and antifascist who wrote extensively on Nazi jurisprudence in the 1930s. Those writings have been published as René Capitant, Face au Nazisme: Écrits, 1933–1938; Textes réunis par Olivier Beaud (Strasbourg: Presses Universiatires de Strasbourg, 2004). When the University of Strasbourg relocated to Clermont-Ferrand after the defeat, Capitant set up an important Resistance network there. In 1941, he requested and was granted a transfer to the University of Algiers, where he continued his Resistance work and helped prepare for the allied landing in French North Africa in November 1942. Capitant was named the CFLN’s commissioner of public instruction at the end of 1943.

23. 23. René Capitant, Pour une constitution fédérale (Paris: Renaissances, 1946).

24. 24. Marcel Durry, Rapport général des travaux de la Commission pour la reforme de l’enseignement, November 16, 1944, 1. Reprinted in Bulletin officiel du Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale, numéro spécial consacré aux travaux de la Commission … réunie à Alger du mars à septembre 1944 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1944), AN: F/60/427.

25. 25. Programme du Conseil National de la Résistance, adopté dans la clandestinité, March 15, 1944, https://www.les-crises.fr/15-mars-1944-cnr/.

26. 26. Programme du Conseil National de la Résistance, 2ème partie, art. 5b.

27. 27. Programme du Conseil National de la Résistance, 2ème partie, art. 5d.

28. 28. Esquisse d’une politique française de l’enseignment presentée par le PCF aux groupements de la Resistance, September 30, 1943, AN: BB/30/17333.

29. 29. Durry, Rapport général, 14–15, 31, AN: F/60/427.

30. 30. Procès-verbal de la 1ère séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 6 novembre 1944, 1, AN: F/17/17539.

31. 31. Procès-verbal de la 1ère séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 6 novembre 1944, 2–4, AN: F/17/17539. Vichy subsidies, which could amount to as much as 75 percent of schools’ total budget, profoundly shifted the relative material situations of public and private schools. Before the war, most private schools had been in dire financial straits; by war’s end, they were so flush with funding many were able to stop charging fees, whereas public schools, especially in deeply Catholic regions, were struggling. Nationally, between 1939 and 1945, private school attendance rose from 17 to 22.6 percent. Atkin, “Church and Teachers.” Atkins suggests it is quite possible private confessional schooling might have died out if not for the Vichy interlude.

32. 32. Procès-verbal de la séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 25 janvier 1945, 3–4, AN: F/17/17539.

33. 33. Arthur Plaza, “Paix ou guerre scolaire? Les divisions du Mouvement Républicain Populaire 1944–1960,” in Politiques de la laïcité au XXe siècle, ed. Patrick Weil (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), 481–504, 484–485.

34. 34. Isabelle Clavel, “Réformer l’École après 1944: du consensus au dissensus entre la SFIO et le MRP,” Histoire@Politique: Politique, culture, société 3, no. 18 (September–December 2012): 129–143, https://doi.org/10.3917/hp.018.0129.

35. 35. See Claude Allègre, François Dubet, and Philippe Meirieu, eds., Rapport Langevin-Wallon (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002), 112–127; Jeremy Ahearne, Intellectuals, Culture and Public Policy in France: Approaches from the Left (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 128–138. The 1959 Debré Law reinstated state subsidies to confessional schools in the intervening years between the plan and 1968 student uprising. See Bruno Poucet, ed., L’état et l’enseignment privé: L’application de la loi Debré (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019).

36. 36. In fact, this intense desire for reconciliation and consensus had already begun under Vichy. In 1941, fearful of alienating secular teachers, the regime rolled back its own policy of including invocations of God in school curricula, in favor of a curriculum emphasizing “Christian values and civilization.” The regime also encouraged priests and secular teachers to work together in curriculum development. Atkin, “Church and Teachers,” 13–15.

37. 37. Representatives of Catholic and Protestant schools and youth organizations were included as permanent members of official youth and education councils and committees, which served as central advisory and policymaking organs within the MEN. See Centre d’Archives Contemporaines—Fontainebleau, France (CAC): 19880437/24.

38. 38. Procès-verbal de la séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 20 novembre 1944, 3–4, AN: F/17/17539.

39. 39. Procès-verbal de la séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 20 novembre 1944, AN: F/17/17539.

40. 40. Procès-verbal de la séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 4 décembre 1944, 3, AN: F/17/17539. On Chéruel, see Alain Lozac’h, Visages de la résistance brétonne: réseau et mouvements de libération en Côtes-d’Armor (Nancy: Coop Breizh, 2003), 300–301.

41. 41. Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

42. 42. Procès-verbal de la séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 20 novembre 1944, 2, AN: F/17/17539.

43. 43. Procès-verbal de la séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 26 février 1945, 14, AN: F/17/17539.

44. 44. Procès-verbal de la séance de la Commission Philip tenue le 26 février 1945, 15–16, AN: F/17/17539.

45. 45. Plaza, “Paix ou guerre scolaire?,” 493, 502–503. Interestingly, this shift in public opinion tracks with shifts in Christian Democratic political strategy. After the failed vote on private school subsidies in 1945, the MRP embraced laïcité as part of its official platform, detaching laïcité from the issue of “freedom of education” or “school choice,” which clearly increasingly resonated with the French public.

46. 46. West Germany and Austria implemented similar laws at this time. Chappel, Catholic Modern, 215–216.

47. 47. For African representatives’ concerns about youth and education, see transcripts of the Commission des territoires d’outre-mer in the National Assembly (AN: C//15293 for 1945–1946, C//15407 for 1947–1949, C//15408 for 1949–1951) and the Commission des affaires culturelles et de la civilisation d’outre-mer of the Assembly of the French Union (AN: C//16135, C//16236, C//16253, C//16274, C//16279).

48. 48. Draft Minutes of the 22nd Meeting … 7 June 1944 at the offices of the British Council. Collected in the manuscript volume CAME, London 1942–1945, vol III: Books and Periodicals Commission—History Committees and Subcommittees, UNESCO Archives.

49. 49. The largest and most significant was the European Movement (established 1946). Other significant players were the Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe (established 1946), which was first presided over by André Philip, and the Christian-Democratic Nouvelles Equipes Internationales (established 1947).

50. 50. Alain Peyrefitte, Note sur la jeunesse allemande et la jeunesse européenne, Ambassade au Haut-Commissariat à Bonn, undated, AHUE: ME-1920.

51. 51. Motion de la Commission de la Jeunesse des Journées d’Études Européennes, Lille December 17–19, 1948, AHUE: ME-1920. French signatories included Maurice René Simonet, leader of the Équipes Jeunes of the Christian-Democratic MRP party, and Jacques Boissieras, vice president of the Union nationale des étudiants français, the largest (secular) student federation in France.

52. 52. Rapport sur la session preparatoire du Collège d’Europe tenue à Bruges du 20 septembre au 10 octobre 1949, par la Commission culturelle de la Section Belge du Mouvement Européen, presented to the Lausanne Conference on December 9, 1949, AHUE: ME-526.

53. 53. Edmond Cabrière, Rapport à M. le Directeur-Général de l’Instruction Publique sur l’Enseignement secondaire et la question indigène, undated (1943), ANS: O/171 (31).

54. 54. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise. Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

55. 55. Circulaire a/s français langue véhiculaire unique de l’enseignement colonial, Alger, May 16, 1944, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2256 dossier 3.

56. 56. This group, the Comité de l’Empire français, had strong ties to the Church, financial institutions, and, during the war, to Vichy. Its Commission de l’Enseignement included a diverse group—from specialists in colonial history at the Collège de France to prominent heads of Franco-African investment banks. After 1946, in keeping with similar terminological changes, the group renamed itself the Comité Central de la France d’Outre-Mer.

57. 57. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Enseignement du CEF du 4 décembre 1944, audition du M. Delage, Chef de Service—Direction Enseignement aux Ministère des Colonies, ANOM: 100/APOM/933.

58. 58. Bureau d’Études pour un Centre européen de la culture: Conférence européenne de la culture à Lausanne 8–12 décembre 1949, undated, AHC: 1/DE/25.

59. 59. His specific proposals included the provision of travel grants for secondary-school teachers to seek additional training at European institutes like the College of Europe in Bruges to infuse their teaching with a “Europeanist” outlook; making the study of a second European language mandatory; history textbook reform; and the equivalence of university diplomas across Europe. Bayet, Rapport à la Conference culturelle de l’Europe Unie sur l’Éducation, December 9, 1949, AHUE: ME-540.

60. 60. Bayet, Rapport à la Conference culturelle, AHUE: ME-540.

61. 61. Report on the History Study Group under the direction of John Bowle, undated, Collège d’Europe—Session préparatoire, Bruges, September 20–October 10, 1949, AHUE: ME-525.

62. 62. Compte-Rendu des sessions du Séminaire “Culture Générale,” sous dir. de M. van Effenterre, undated, AHUE: ME-525.

63. 63. Compte-Rendu des sessions du Séminaire “Culture Générale,” AHUE: ME-525. On familialism in postwar Catholicism, see Chappel, Catholic Modern, 190–191.

64. 64. Brochure du Collège d’Europe (1950), AHUE: ME-801.

65. 65. Annexe par Hendrik Brugmans, Brochure du Collège d’Europe, AHUE: MFE-186. The organization in question was founded by French and Belgians in 1949 and styled itself as a “Christian Komintern.” See Johannes Grossmann, “The Comité International de la Défense de la Civilisation Chrétienne and the Transnationalization of Anticommunist Propaganda in Western Europe after the Second World War,” in Transnational Anticommunism and the Cold War, ed. Stéphanie Roulin, Giles Scott-Smith, and Luc van Dongen (London: Palgrave 2014), 251–62.

66. 66. Letter from Hendrik Brugmans to Paul Lesourd, March 24, 1950, AHUE: ME-801.

67. 67. Léonce Bekemens, Dieter Mahncke, and Robert Picht, The College of Europe: Fifty Years of Service to Europe (Bruge: Europacollege, 1999).

68. 68. Some contemporary scholars continue to argue that secularization is a Christian social process, reifying the “civilizational” boundary between a secular-Christian West and the Islamic world. See René Rémond, Religion and Society in Modern Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Christian Joppke, The Secular State Under Siege: Religion and Politics in Europe and America (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).

69. 69. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, The Emerging States of French Equatorial Africa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960).

70. 70. There were some notable exceptions: Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Haute-Volta had majority Christian populations. Conversely, there were significant Muslim populations in parts of AEF, in Chad and Oubangui-Chari (today the Central African Republic), and in Cameroun (which was not technically part of AEF but tied to it administratively).

71. 71. Mgr Paul Biéchy, Note sur le statut de la famille chrétienne, February 2, 1944, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201. Muslim civil status in French colonial law was part of a wider colonial practice that Saba Mahmood refers to as “suturing” minority/colonial identity to religion, despite state claims of religious neutrality. She argues this should not be read as “colonial hypocrisy” but rather as a “diagnostic of the dual impetus internal to political secularism—the modern state’s disavowal of religion in its political calculus and its simultaneous reliance on religious categories to structure and regulate social life.” Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 25.

72. 72. Opportunité d’un statut chrétien—Rapport de l’administration [AOF], undated, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201.

73. 73. Foster, African Catholic, 240–246.

74. 74. Emily Lord Fransee, “ ‘I May Vote Like All Women’: Protest, Gender, and Suffrage in French Senegal,” French Colonial History 20 (2021): 119–44, https://doi.org/10.14321/frencolohist.20.2021.0119; Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation.

75. 75. Daughton, An Empire Divided, 17–24.

76. 76. Rapport de l’Inspecteur-Général de l’Enseignement au sujet de l’ouverture d’une école des cadres par la Société de Marie, Brazzaville, October 1, 1946, ANOM: GGAEF 5D/219.

77. 77. V. Fournier, Note pour le gouverneur-général, May 3, 1946, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219.

78. 78. Christian Merlo, Note pour le directeur du cabinet au sujet de la subvention à l’enseignement privé, May 9, 1946, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219.

79. 79. The rare protest from metropolitan secular organizations were dismissed by top colonial officials. See, for instance, a letter from Paul Coste-Floret (then Minister of Overseas France) to the Ligue Française pour la Défense des Droits de l’homme et du Citoyen, 10 juin 1948, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/238.

80. 80. Enquête sur les Missions Religieuses en AEF, undated (c. 1946), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3349.

81. 81. Enquête sur les Missions Religieuses, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3349. Two of the aéfiens ultimately elected to the Constituent Assembly, Abbé Barthélémy Boganda (Oubangui-Chari) and J.-H. Aubame (Gabon), had attended mission schools. Both men continued to serve in the National Assembly and pushed for robust colonial reform for the remainder of the Fourth Republic.

82. 82. Compte-Rendu du Conseil Supérieur de l’Enseignement—session 1947, undated, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/217; Letter from Haut Commissaire AEF to Gouverneurs, Chefs de Territoire a/s formalités d’ouverture des etablissements privés d’enseignement, June 22, 1949, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/27.

83. 83. H. Cormary (Inspecteur-Général de l’Enseignement), Note pour M. le directeur AFFPOL, Brazzaville, January 22, 1949, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/27.

84. 84. Christian Merlo, Note a/s la politique scolaire en AEF, March 13, 1948, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219.

85. 85. Compte-Rendu du Conseil Supérieur de l’Enseignement—session 1947, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/217.

86. 86. Voeu no. 15 du Conseil Representatif du Gabon s/d (1947); Christian Merlo, Note pour M. le Chef du Cabinet a/s réponse à Conseiller Durand-Reville, 27 septembre 1947, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219.

87. 87. Gamble also connects the drive to democratize education in postwar Africa to parallel debates in the internal Resistance and links the Brazzaville Conference’s focus on education to contemporaneous metropolitan projects like the Langevin-Wallon plan. Contesting French West Africa, 203–204.

88. 88. Merlo, Note pour M. le Chef du Cabinet, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219.

89. 89. French leaders were particularly disturbed by the creation of the United Nations’ Trusteeship Council in 1945 as an international supervisory body overseeing the administration of France’s African League of Nations mandates, Togo and Cameroun, which France persisted in considering an integral part of the French Union contrary to mandatory agreements.

90. 90. In African Catholic, Foster argues that fears of US Protestant missionary designs on French Africa trumped French anxieties both about Soviet Communism and Islam in the immediate war years (41–46). This may have been true among Catholic missionaries, but this is less clear among officials in the administration.

91. 91. Paul Giacobbi, Circulaire à MM les Gouverneurs Généraux et Gouverneurs des Colonies a/s Missions Religieuses, November 7, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3349.

92. 92. Gougal-AEF à MFOM-AFFPOL a/s voyages des missionaires et “politique religieuse positive,” undated (c. 1947), ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219.

93. 93. See Owen White and J. P. Daughton, eds., In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Concern over US missionaries, and Protestant missionaries generally, reflected French officials’ belief that both would favor the British in sub-Saharan Africa.

94. 94. Compte-Rendu du Conseil Supérieur de l’Enseignement—session 1947, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/217.

95. 95. Merlo, Note a/s la politique scolaire en AEF, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219. Despite his assertion that “French citizenship” had been extended to all in 1946, Africans continued to be deprived of equal civil and political rights.

96. 96. See, for instance, Fournier, Note a/s répartition des subventions à l’enseignement privé pour le 1er sémestre 1948, Brazzaville, March 9, 1948, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219.

97. 97. Fournier, Note a/s répartition, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219. The substance of traditional African Qur’anic schooling is discussed in chapter 5.

98. 98. See the exchanges of Père Bertho, directeur-général des Écoles Catholiques de l’AOF, and Charles Cros, inspecteur des Ecoles du Sénégal in 1944–1945, ANS: O/11 (31); and between Bertho and Lucien Paye, directeur de l’enseignement at the central colonial ministry, ANS: O/9 (31). Significantly, in one letter (November 7, 1944), Bertho compared militant laïcité to Nazism: “French people, those who knew how to die for their Patrie, want Catholic schools. How can you suppress Christian schools if you want France to be a liberal and just Republic, and not a dictatorship along the Nazi model?” This rhetoric strikingly parallels Abbé Chéruel’s “religious freedom” discourse in the deliberations of the Philip Commission, which was convening in the metropole precisely at this time.

99. 99. Charles Brun, Note a/s scoutisme, October 26, 1945, ANS: O/2 (31).

100. 100. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Education Nationale et de la Jeunesse de la séance du 13 mai 1944 (Assemblée consultative provisioire-Alger), AN: C//15266.

101. 101. See Jean-Jacques Gauthé, “Quant le Scoutisme prépare à la guerre … Les Scouts musulmans algériens vus par l’armée française,” in Le scoutisme entre guerre et paix, ed. Baubérot and Duval. Scout movements in British Africa would also be involved in anticolonial resistance after the war. See Timothy H. Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004).

102. 102. See correspondence from 1947–1948 between the MFOM, the AEF governor-general, and territorial governors in Oubangui-Chari, Congo, Chad, and Gabon in dossier on scouts and nationalism, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219.

103. 103. Correspondence in ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/219; Charles F. Brun, Note a/s scoutisme, October 26, 1945, ANS: O/2 (31).

104. 104. See folders, “Scouts de France—subventions AOF—1950–1959” and “Éclaireurs Unionistes de France—subventions AOF—1946–1958,” ANS: 18G/214 (160).

105. 105. Letter from Berlan [DG-APAS] to DG-Instruction Publique, May 14, 1946, ANS: O/2 (31).

106. 106. R. Braem (commissaire de province, Eclaireurs de France en AOF), “Le Jamboree de 1947,” undated, ANS: O/2 (31).

107. 107. Letter from Mérat to Prof. Ibrihima M’Bodj [of the Grande Mosquée de Saint Louis], March 28, 1947, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2131.

108. 108. Letter from the Governor General AOF to the MFOM—Inspection-Générale—Enseignment et Jeunesse, November 25, 1949, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2131.

109. 109. Robert Coquereaux, École Franco-Arabe ou École Franco-Musulmane dans le Nord du Cameroun? Mémoire présenté à M. le Directeur du Centre des Hautes Etudes d’Administration Musulmane, undated (c. 1950), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2256.

110. 110. Letter from the Governor General AOF to the MFOM, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2131.

111. 111. Fernando, The Republic Unsettled, 11–12.