CHAPTER 1 Envisioning France in a Postwar World

Education, Republicanism, and the War

As national commissioner for justice and public instruction, Cassin was responsible for preparing for both legal and educational reconstruction in post-Liberation France. This administrative pairing reflected a long French tradition going back to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of linking the general political order and the structure of education. That tradition inspired wartime planners like Cassin and gave meaning and purpose to their work. Cassin is best known today as the driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In the shadow of that historic achievement, Cassin’s biographers have characterized his appointment as head of de Gaulle’s Justice and Education Department as a “second-rate position” and a “painful political setback.”¹ However, we should not discount Cassin’s own reflections, many years later, on the capital importance of his work as Free France’s top education official, which, in keeping with French tradition, he linked to the question of human rights: “My department, more than any other, worked simultaneously to restore France’s moral and intellectual influence in the world and also human rights, so cruelly scorned by Hitlerism.… The honor fell to me to represent my country in the spiritual revolution that would accompany the war’s victorious end.”²

In the French revolutionary-republican tradition, education is regarded as the foundation of personal emancipation, societal transformation, and democratic consolidation. A dyed-in-the-wool republican, Cassin identified deeply with that legacy. On the lecture circuit in wartime Britain, he framed the conflict between totalitarianism and democracy as one of warring educational philosophies. In a talk at the Franco-Scottish Society in Edinburg in October 1942, Cassin declared, “Before he dreamed of forming enslaved races abroad, Hitler devised a totalitarian education for the young people of his own country.” Cassin decried the extension of that assault on young hearts and minds to France, not only at the hands of the Germans but also in Vichy education reforms that abandoned “the French tradition” rooted in the “critical spirit” and “sought to turn French children into little Nazis.”³ For Cassin, educational reconstruction was vital for the restoration of both France’s democracy and its national identity.

The politicization of education in France from the revolutionary era onward made it a central issue for all subsequent regimes, Left and Right. In the 1790s, successive waves of revolutionaries saw the revolution itself as a pedagogical project to mold an active citizenry that would no longer be controlled by the aristocracy, the Catholic Church, and other corporate entities.⁴ Napoleon’s reorganization of French education into a national, centralized system in 1806–1808—known as “the University”—was a cornerstone of his efforts to unify the country and one of his most enduring legacies.⁵ That centralized education system served as a bulwark of the liberal regime of the July Monarchy (1830–1848), which sought to re-found a stable society in the post-corporate world of nineteenth-century France by erecting a new hierarchy based on individual “capacity” and education.⁶ Though primary schooling expanded under that regime, access to secondary education remained limited to a small bourgeois elite, which aligned with the constitutional monarchy’s political culture of limited suffrage and elite politics.⁷

The architects of the Second Republic (1848–1852), the short-lived “republican experiment” between the July Monarchy and the Bonapartist Second Empire (1852–1870), envisioned a dramatic expansion of secular primary education to support a democratic republic based on universal male suffrage. But the idealistic “48ers” quickly lost control of the fledgling republic to the conservative bourgeoisie and Napoleon III. The legislature reinstituted Catholic education with the 1850 Falloux Laws, shortly before rallying behind Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état that dissolved the republic altogether. Maurice Agulhon has argued that the great political lesson of the Second Republic was the necessity of universal public education to sustain a socially inclusive and democratic polity.⁸

That lesson was not lost on the next generation of French republicans. As soon as they consolidated their grip on France’s Third Republic (1871–1940) in the early 1880s, republican leaders elevated the school as the bedrock of the new regime. The Ferry Laws (1881–1886) secularized primary education; abolished fees and tuition in public elementary schools; made primary school attendance compulsory for boys and girls up to age thirteen; mandated the creation of public schools in communes with as few as twenty school-age children; and standardized teacher training programs, school inspections, and other bureaucratic controls. The extension of primary schooling into the French countryside was intended to “civilize” its supposedly backward inhabitants. In his classic study of the modernization of rural France, Eugen Weber highlighted the civilizational discourses associated with these education reforms, in which schools “were credited with the ultimate acculturation process that made the French people French” and “finally civilized them.” Likewise, schoolteachers were cast as “the militia of the new age, harbingers of enlightenment and of the republican message that reconciled the benighted masses with a new world, superior in wellbeing and democracy.”⁹ For republicans of the era, that message was a militantly secular one, duly rejected by the Catholic hierarchy, Catholic educators, and Catholic parents. Thus began France’s decades-long querelle scolaire, which epitomized the ferocious conflict between traditional Catholics and the anticlerical republic that rent France apart from the Dreyfus affair to Vichy.¹⁰

This 150-year political struggle over the structure and spirit of French education shaped how contemporaries interpreted France’s shocking and humiliating defeat in June 1940. Critics on both the Left and Right attributed “the debacle” to the abject failure of the republican school to produce competent leaders and a united citizenry.¹¹ For Vichystes, the defeat directly resulted from school policies that had abandoned religion and traditional values. Pétain himself was heard to have said to the US ambassador that France lost the war because its teachers were not patriotic enough.¹² The Vichy regime set about dismantling the republican school accordingly. By November 1940, the regime had fired all Jewish teachers, abolished the national network of teacher training institutes (écoles normales), and added “duties to God” in the ethics syllabus. In the months that followed, religious instruction was reintroduced in the state curriculum and priests were welcomed back into public classrooms. However, the place of Catholicism in French public education was such a polarizing issue that even Vichy officials were wary of overreach. Worried about worsening public morale, Vichy rescinded some of these measures a few months after implementing them. Catholic officials and educators committed to the principle of “neutrality” were sent in to replace the intransigents, and, in a move that presaged broader patterns in both the reconstituted republic and elsewhere in Western Europe after the war, the study of “Christian values and civilization” was substituted for the study of God in the public-school curriculum.¹³

The anticlerical stance of the Third Republic’s school policies was equally divisive for the ideologically heterodox men and women who took a stand against Vichy, whether in the internal Resistance or Free French circles. To protect their fragile coalitions of Socialists, Communists, republicans, Catholics, and Gaullists, some anti-Vichy education reformers tried to sidestep the thorny issue of laïcité, focusing instead on the rigidity and classism of France’s education system as the root problem.¹⁴ The Third Republic had universalized primary schooling, but like its predecessors, it left secondary education to the preserve of the bourgeois elite. The classist structure of the higher orders of French education was not seriously challenged until the Popular Front came to power in 1936. The Popular Front made democratizing education a key plank of its radical political agenda, and thirty-two-year-old Jean Zay pursued that objective with gusto at the helm of the Ministry of National Education (MEN) until the onset of the war. In his three years as France’s youngest minister, Zay raised the school-leaving age to fourteen; made the curriculum less narrow and elitist by introducing more active pedagogy, practical subjects, and physical education; and began to restructure the ministry itself.

A through line of Zay’s democratic reforms was a more capacious view of young people’s social, cultural, and moral formation beyond formal schooling. Since the late nineteenth century, not just in France but across Europe, the increasing salience of “youth” as a key social category in advanced capitalist societies raised the question of the modern state’s role in organizing activities and programs for young people outside of the classroom.¹⁵ During the early Third Republic, youth movements and cultural associations flourished, but they did so without national support. Beginning in the 1880s, municipal governments helped develop a vast network of colonies de vacances for working-class children. Zay wanted to scale up those kinds of programs to the national level. He established an “Undersecretariat for Youth and Sport” within the MEN in a bid to institutionalize a more expansive role for the national state in youth affairs, but most funding and logistical support for scout troops, youth clubs, and other forms of popular education and organized leisure for young people before the war continued to come from private groups and religious charities.¹⁶

Zay’s overhaul of French youth and education infrastructure was just getting started when the war broke out, and it would ultimately fall to others to pick up where he left off. A Freemason, a Jew, and the face of the reviled republican school, Zay was a particular target of Vichy propagandists. He was captured trying to join the external Resistance in the summer of 1940 and spent the next four years outlining further youth and education reforms from a prison cell in Riom, until his abduction and brutal murder by the milice in June 1944.¹⁷ That Zay was the only government minister of the late Third Republic to lose his life at the hands of Vichy or its agents underscores the extraordinary politicization of education policy in the wartime conjuncture.

The complexity of the politics of youth and education policy during the war years was no less extraordinary, for it was Vichy that ultimately realized Zay’s vision of a more activist national state in the youth sector. As soon as it came to power, the Vichy regime brought the leadership of private youth organizations, including confessional ones, into the national bureaucracy. This proved to be the key institutional breakthrough; neither the post-Liberation provisional government nor the young Fourth Republic reversed course.¹⁸ Clearly, then, key aspects of postwar youth and education policy had deep roots in both the late Third Republic and Vichy. This aligns with Philip Nord’s contention that the mix of state-building, cultural and economic reconstruction, and social democracy that he calls “France’s New Deal” was a “transwar” constellation. He stresses that however much the men and women of the Liberation moment thought they were starting anew, they found themselves in a context inherited from the Third Republic and Vichy.¹⁹ Nord’s account is compelling if we consider the metropolitan context in isolation. The real novelty of the postwar conjuncture—at least with regard to youth and education—lies beyond the national-metropolitan story, in the entanglement of education reform agendas across republican France, colonial Africa, and transnational Europe.

The politics of education in the metropole had always reverberated in the empire to varying degrees, but the development of colonial education prior to World War II largely followed its own contingent logics. For Louis Faidherbe, chief architect of French military expansion in West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century, the school was a crucial tool for legitimizing French rule. To that end, Faidherbe and his successors promoted the French school in direct opposition to Qur’anic schooling long before republican secularism took root in France.²⁰ Republican ideology began to shape education policy in sub-Saharan Africa in earnest in the 1880s, when the consolidation of the Third Republic and the colonization of the African interior converged. As Alice Conklin has shown, education was an integral part of the Third Republic’s “civilizing mission” in French Africa, much as education played a key role in “civilizing” the countryside in the metropole.²¹ To be sure, the purpose of colonial education differed from mass schooling in France: colonial education sought to create obedient and useful colonial subjects to sustain French colonial rule, not patriotic citizens of a republican nation-state.²² However, as Harry Gamble has recently observed, the colonial administration had a model of “educational segregation” along class lines back in the metropole. Transplanted to the colonies, the metropolitan precedent for “parallel and unequal educational regimes” merely shifted the organizing principle from class to legal status and race.²³

The contrast in the application of the republican principle of laïcité between metropole and colony was starker. Given the colonial state’s limited financial and human resources, republicans and Catholics forged what J. P. Daughton has called an “informal, if rocky entente” throughout the empire. The early Third Republic did not outlaw mission schools in colonial Africa, and the missions channeled their project of evangelization into the republican civilizing mission.²⁴ The repression of the thousand-year tradition of Qur’an schools in the region, which was official French policy until the early 1900s, suited the objectives of both parties just fine.²⁵

French colonialism shared its civilizing project with other colonial powers, but the Third Republic’s approach to colonial schooling, which prized French as the language of instruction, differed significantly from that in neighboring British Africa.²⁶ The emphasis on French-language instruction initially reflected an “assimilationist” orientation in French colonial policy, in which school programs were based on the metropolitan curriculum. However, the increasing salience of scientific theories of race, the imperatives of economic development, and the emergence of a vocal politicized francophone African elite turned French colonial officials away from assimilation around the turn of the twentieth century, even more so after World War I. Colonial administrators pivoted to more “adapted” forms of education that would mold Africans into productive workers in the colonial economy while keeping them fixed in their place at the bottom of the social order. By the 1920s, the colonial bureaucracy prioritized the creation of rural village schools that would concentrate on agriculture, manual trades, hygiene, and basic writing and arithmetic to avoid “alienating” African youth from their traditional milieus, and the administration softened its hostile stance on Qur’an schools for similar reasons.²⁷

In the mid-1930s, Léopold Sédar Senghor and other African educators and activists tried to channel this new policy orientation in directions that would advance African empowerment instead of subordination. They briefly found high-ranking allies during the “Colonial Popular Front,” but that opening proved fleeting as colonial education reformers were quickly chased from their posts.²⁸ Thus, the dominant conceptions of colonial education between the wars narrowed the “civilizing mission” considerably and proved to be very much in line with Vichy’s openly racist policies in French West Africa (AOF) during its brief rule there (1940–1942). As Ruth Ginio has argued, most colonial officials in AOF experienced the fall of the Third Republic as a “great relief” insofar as they found Vichy’s racial paternalism more in line with their actual practices than the egalitarian logic of republican universalism.²⁹ But the parallels and continuities of colonial education in AOF under the Third Republic and Vichy became embarrassing for French leaders during the war. Facing mounting pressure to dissociate postwar French rule from Vichy’s vision of empire, de Gaulle and his allies pushed the colonial administration to finally commit to meaningful reform at the Brazzaville Conference (1944), which inaugurated a new era of national oversight and incessant conflict between the national government and the colonial bureaucracy over the content, quality, and scope of education in French Africa.

Restoring French international prestige after Vichy also motivated wartime planners to try to reclaim French leadership in European educational cooperation before the war. Much of that work had been conducted through organizations sponsored or supported by the League of Nations (1919–1939). Two of the League’s most significant initiatives to promote European intellectual and cultural exchange were based in Paris: the Cité internationale universitaire, a housing complex for international students that sought to foster a transnational university environment, and the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), which anchored a steady stream of international education programs and scientific and cultural conferences in Europe between the wars.³⁰ The spectacular failure of those initiatives to unify the continent and prevent another internecine European war did not discredit the underlying principle that cultural and educational cooperation was essential for European postwar recovery. On the contrary, as the collective experience of occupation, resistance, and exile invigorated calls for a “United States of Europe,” wartime planning bodies like the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME, 1942–1945) encouraged officials in the European governments-in-exile in London to think about cultural and educational reconstruction in a transnational framework. The CAME launched a series of initiatives to “Europeanize” textbooks, curricula, and intellectual exchange that were picked up and expanded on by the postwar pro-European movements. French figures like René Cassin were determined to secure a leading role for France in those efforts.

Cassin was the senior French delegate to the CAME for the duration of the war. He continued on in that role even after he had stepped down as Free France’s top education official in June 1943, when the bulk of the Free French operations in London relocated to Algiers. At the war’s end, Cassin helped oversee the CAME’s conversion to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and he was instrumental in winning Allied support for UNESCO’s headquarters to be built in Paris. Cassin was well suited to that work. He had served as the representative of French veterans at the League of Nations for almost fifteen years (1924–1938), and his first assignment in Geneva had been to promote the IIIC.³¹ Cassin was therefore especially plugged into inter-Allied networks and international milieus in wartime London, which regrouped many of his former colleagues from the League. Most of the people he recruited to his Education Department shared those connections and sympathies; others developed them through the experience of exile. When Cassin convened a special commission to prepare comprehensive education reform in post-Liberation France, its members were primed to reconsider many of the points of contention in France’s historic querelle scolaire from more comparative and transnational perspectives.

Both the CAME and the Brazzaville Conference involved education officials and planners in the Free French orbit who were grappling with what post-Vichy France and the postwar international order would like, but place mattered in shaping their fields of vision. Though London and Brazzaville shared a national aura as headquarters of Free France, as the seat of most of the continental governments-in-exile, wartime London was a transnational European city, while Brazzaville was a long-neglected African colonial outpost. Education planners’ postwar visions looked different depending on where the planners stood, but as they moved among these locales, they brought their perspectives and priorities with them. Cassin and others like him were connective tissue in an ongoing conversation about education, democracy, and postwar reconstruction that crisscrossed French “national,” transnational European, and colonial African space. By mapping the contours of education planning from London to Brazzaville, another conversation also comes into view, about belonging, community, and what it might mean to be French, African, and European in an unsettled and unsettling postwar world.

The View from London—Transnational Capital of Occupied Europe

Cassin was one of twelve thousand French people who made their way to London after the defeat, only a minority of whom joined the Free French movement.³² The new arrivals and the French on the spot were a heterogenous and ideologically diverse group; the political calculus of whether to support de Gaulle was idiosyncratic. Socialist Henry Hauck was a labor attaché in the French Embassy in London when Pétain signed the armistice. Hauck immediately pledged his allegiance to de Gaulle and became his top labor adviser. A committed leftist who had run a chapter of the secular-republican Ligue de l’Enseignement before the war, Hauck put his political differences with de Gaulle aside and served on the major committees on education reform in London and Algiers. De Gaulle’s ambivalence about democracy, however, alienated other left-leaning potential allies. Denis Saurat, director of the French Cultural Institute in Kensington, offered his support the day after de Gaulle’s famous radio appeal. Another contender to lead the Free French Education Department, Saurat coordinated “intellectual resistance” at the Institute, and de Gaulle sent him on an educational mission to Brazzaville in early 1941. But after losing the top education post to Cassin later that year, Saurat grew disillusioned with de Gaulle’s undemocratic tendencies and became an outspoken anti-Gaullist among the French in London.³³

Cassin and Hauck represented republican continuity in London, but their republicanism left them isolated in Free French circles. Cassin’s Jewishness was an added political liability.³⁴ Anti-Semitism was pervasive among the French in London, Gaullist and anti-Gaullist alike. Saurat, for instance, derisively characterized de Gaulle’s entourage as “mayhem, havoc, factions, parties, Jews.”³⁵ In personal engagements and broadcasts on the BBC, Cassin occasionally spoke out about the plight of French Jews in Occupied and Vichy France, but his was a lonely voice, and he did not force the issue with regard to education policy.³⁶ Education planning during Cassin’s tenure did not take French Jews—their concerns, preferences, or sheer existence—into consideration. Indeed, Jews were not mentioned at all.³⁷

Cassin and Hauck may have been odd men out among the Free French, but they were warmly welcomed in international milieus. Many of Cassin’s friends and former colleagues from Geneva became important players in inter-Allied politics, like Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš and Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, leaders of their respective governments-in-exile.³⁸ As the epicenter of interwar internationalism, the League had served as an incubator of what French scholars refer to as la conscience européenne, the conviction that Europe could secure its future peace and prosperity only through coordination and institutional organization.³⁹ For many continental exiles, the League’s failure to check fascist aggression in the 1930s only deepened their European commitments and resolve. The association of former participants in the League-sponsored Czechoslovak “summer schools” in 1937–1938 is a case in point. Once in London, this association reorganized itself as the “New Europe Circle,” broadening its original mandate from the study of central European problems to promoting European federalism. Its manifesto pointedly considered the League’s shortcomings and emphasized how its approach to European integration would be different. Notably, that included radically expanding on the League’s work in educational cooperation. The New Europe Circle proposed a vast system of student exchanges and subsidized youth travel to anchor their bolder vision of a federal Europe in social reality. Beneš had ties to this group, and Henry Hauck was the guest of honor at its third luncheon (December 1940). In his keynote address, Hauck focused on building a more just social system after the war not just in France but across Europe, an important signal that Socialists as well as Christian Democrats would embrace European unity after the war. “We are determined,” Hauck concluded, “to make the united slaves of Europe rise into the United States of Europe.”⁴⁰ Hauck was one of several French in London who got involved with the New Europe Circle. In early 1943, Cassin was named an honorary vice president.⁴¹

The League of Nations’ “internationalism” had centered on Europe, and its residual organizations and networks in wartime London also had a decidedly Europeanist bent.⁴² Many Free French who had no prior ties to the League latched on to this ambient Europeanism, especially as they came to feel France’s diminished stature among the Allies. Michel Berveiller, for instance, a Borges scholar who spent the early war years in Mexico, did not have a history of promoting European unity before he joined the Free French in London in 1942.⁴³ But there, under a pseudonym, he penned an impassioned plea for the governments-in-exile to lay the groundwork for united Europe. Washington’s steadfast refusal to break diplomatic relations with Vichy and the deepening Anglo-American alliance convinced Berveiller that France and the rest of continental Europe needed to chart their own path, quite literally. He called for a “European Charter” to complement its Atlantic counterpart, so that a “United States of Europe” could secure a place for itself in the postwar world of “giants”—Russia, China, and the Anglo-American bloc—forming before his eyes. Naturally, he concluded that it should fall to the Free French to take the lead in these conversations, for France was still “the most considerable among the continental allied nations.”⁴⁴ Though born of the wartime conjuncture, Berveiller’s Europeanism endured. He publicly promoted European federalism under his own name after the war.⁴⁵

Berveiller’s dream of a “European Charter” did not come to pass, but the Free French in London took solace in their ever-closer collaboration with the other governments-in-exile. Cassin later recalled that while the “Anglo-Saxons” had deliberately kept Free France down and out, “there was no such exclusion on the European level.”⁴⁶ French ties with Paul-Henri Spaak’s Belgian operations were particularly strong. Cassin and Spaak had met in Geneva in 1935 and reconnected at the inaugural inter-Allied meeting at St. James in June 1941, where Winston Churchill first elaborated his own vision for the reorganization of Europe after the war.⁴⁷ Spaak, later known as “Monsieur Europe” for his leading role in postwar integration, explored different configurations of political and economic federation between France and the Benelux countries in his conversations with the Free French. He suggested that past attempts at such cooperation had failed because they had been too modest, “limited to metropolitan territories” even though France, Belgium, and Holland were all “great colonial empires.” If they extended collaboration to their empires, Spaak urged, they could achieve more robust and lasting unity after the war.⁴⁸

Colonialism had been an important part of Europeanism at the League, which had been as concerned with the management of European empires as it was with the preservation of peace and democracy in Europe.⁴⁹ Africa occupied pride of place in that realm of the interwar imagination. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s campaign in the 1920s for a “Pan-European Union” was predicated on coordinated development schemes in Africa. His Paneuropa necessarily entailed “Eurafrica.”⁵⁰ The war gave Coudenhove an opportunity to extend his pan-European advocacy farther afield.⁵¹ In exile in New York, he won new converts among the city’s cosmopolitan elite and frequently traveled to Washington, where he lobbied top government officials, including Harry Truman. These efforts were effective. Coudenhove influenced US ideas about European unity and Eurafrica in ways that significantly affected US involvement in both European reconstruction and French colonial affairs after the war.⁵²

Wartime meditations linking European unity and imperial renewal were not limited to longtime pro-Europe elites like Coudenhove and Spaak. Berveiller proposed joint sovereignty over Europe’s colonies with an “equitable compensation” to colonial powers proportionate to their “civilizing” efforts. In fact, he thought France should take the lead in the European project precisely because France possessed “an empire superior to all the others.”⁵³ Berveiller was not alone. In April 1942, Cassin received a letter from a lieutenant in Brazzaville who, having recently read one of Cassin’s articles on European federalism in a Free French publication, enclosed his own detailed plan for a federal Europe that would perforce also be a “Europe-Africa Federation.”⁵⁴ A common theme in the Eurafrica plans was that possessing an empire was itself a defining European trait. As a transnational European capital, wartime London was necessarily a transimperial one as well.

The View from Free French Africa: Reimagining “Black France”

While Cassin represented republican rectitude in Free French London, Félix Éboué and Henri Laurentie were the “standard-bearers of republican continuity” in Free French Africa.¹¹⁰ In just a few crucial years, these career colonial civil servants reoriented French colonial policy in the region. Together they pursued a moderate reformist agenda that put greater emphasis on African well-being and elite Africans’ participation in local affairs, which culminated in the Brazzaville Conference in January 1944. Most important, they orchestrated a lasting rapprochement between the administration and the missions, reversing a long-standing policy that construed mission interests and the interests of the colonial state as distinct and, at times, fundamentally opposed. Although neither man held important positions in the postwar republic—Éboué died of a stroke shortly after the Brazzaville Conference, and Laurentie, too reformist for the conservative colonial bureaucracy in liberated Paris, was pushed out in early 1947—their wartime leadership shaped postwar debates about colonial reform and the contours of youth and education policy across French Africa for years to come.

Éboué and Laurentie initially appear an unlikely pair. The descendant of enslaved people in his native Guyane, Éboué was the first (and only) Black colonial governor in France’s empire, while Laurentie, son of a civil servant, came from an established bourgeois family in the Loire. Éboué was a Socialist and a Freemason, Laurentie a devout Catholic with no partisan ties. But they shared a rare independence of mind with regard to colonial policy (neither had attended the École nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer, where most midcentury colonial bureaucrats developed their acute esprit de corps), and both happened to be in the same remote place at an unusual time. They met in Chad on the eve of the war, where Éboué was serving as governor and Laurentie as a district officer. Éboué was impressed by Laurentie and brought him to Chad’s capital, Fort Lamy, to serve as his chief of staff. From there, they rallied to de Gaulle in August 1940 and helped bring the rest of AEF and Cameroon into the Free French fold. When de Gaulle named Éboué governor-general of AEF, Éboué retained Laurentie as his second-in-command, and the two relocated to Brazzaville that fall. They worked together there for the next three years, until Laurentie was appointed director of political affairs in the CFLN’s Commissariat for Colonies in Algiers. In that post, Laurentie oversaw preparations for the Brazzaville Conference, whose proceedings Éboué helped preside over despite his failing health.¹¹¹

When Éboué and Laurentie arrived, Brazzaville was little more than a large town, with fewer than fifty thousand residents. Like many colonial African cities, it was racially segregated, with an administrative district situated on the best land reserved for a tiny white population of less than fifteen hundred. A rigid racial hierarchy governed every aspect of daily life; the use of forced labor in the city’s environs was widespread, as it was throughout the region, and even Éboué and Laurentie felt they could not suppress the practice in wartime.¹¹² Neither Éboué nor Laurentie had very radical visions of colonial reform, but they both bucked racist norms and everyday practice in Brazzaville as the only Frenchmen in the administration who did not tutoyer African notables and civil servants, according them the respect and dignity expected by all white French adults.¹¹³

Their brief tenure at the helm of the civilian administration of Free French Africa did little to uproot the deeply entrenched racial order in AEF, but Éboué and Laurentie had a lasting impact on the government’s relationship with the missions. As Elizabeth Foster has shown, they both personally reached out to local Catholic leaders who had supported Vichy in 1940 and invited those willing to embrace Free France to help shape policy, particularly in the domain of education. In a momentous November 1941 circular on “indigenous policy,” which was signed by Éboué but which Foster suggests was likely written by Laurentie, they declared the goals of public schools and mission schools to be identical and therefore equally deserving of government support. What is more, the circular explicitly characterized “Christianity” as a vital force for advancing French civilization in Africa more broadly. This was a departure from the dominant interwar administrative stance that was wary of missionary activity, especially schooling. Before the war, occasional subsidies had been granted to mission schools, but only in exceptional cases and on a temporary basis. With the November 1941 circular, mission schools throughout AEF effectively became “subcontractors” of the colonial state, an arrangement that was later extended to AOF and that continued after the war.¹¹⁴

This public-private collaboration in education is exactly what Saurat had hoped for and tried himself to arrange during his tournée of AEF in spring 1941. His position on the matter did not stem from personal piety. “I am not known, even to myself, as a particularly devout Christian,” Saurat mused during his African travels.¹¹⁵ Rather, like so many others, he blamed the French defeat on the Third Republic’s anticlerical approach to youth and education policy. Months before the November circular, Saurat already felt he had found a kindred spirit in Éboué in this regard. On April 4, Saurat praised Éboué’s moral leadership on Radio-Brazzaville in effusive terms. He cited an earlier Éboué circular that identified “unity” and “freedom” as twin pillars of France’s “spiritual renovation,” which Saurat insisted needed to begin with the school:

Our task must be to make all children realize from an early age those common principles of action to which Governor-General Éboué refers. For instance, during those hours in which the aumônier or the pasteur come to teach the children the religion chosen by their parents, let the children whose parents prefer it listen to the headmaster or headmistress on morality or behavior.… Let all children, whether Catholic, Protestant, or anything else, learn in a real way those common principles of practical morality, of true patriotism, of just collaboration between men and nations.¹¹⁶

Saurat’s ecumenism and retreat from anticlericalism were widely shared among French educators and policymakers during the war—in the Cathala Commission; in the internal Resistance; and, of course, within the Vichy regime itself. Éboué and Laurentie had personal, pragmatic, and local reasons for initiating a lasting rapprochement between the colonial administration and the missions, but their November 1941 circular and all the related policies and material investments that followed should be considered within a broader geography of wartime reappraisals of laïcité and the place of Christianity in French society and culture that outlasted the war.

Éboué and Laurentie also helped initiate a new approach to colonial youth and education policy more generally. After the Allied landing in Morocco and Algeria in late 1942, their moderate reformism was extended to the rest of French sub-Saharan Africa as AOF left the Vichy fold. From then on, Éboué and Laurentie’s emphasis on increasing African well-being and participation in local affairs took on added international significance. The year before, the Atlantic Charter (1941) had stoked French anxieties about US views on French colonialism. The predominant role played by the United States in the “liberation” of so much of France’s African empire further heightened those fears. As a result, local education reforms started to be elaborated with a more global audience in mind. Shortly after the African federations were reunited under de Gaulle’s leadership in August 1943, the director of public education in AOF called for massive investment in “indigenous” primary education, emphasizing that such a move would command the respect of foreign observers. The expansion of African education, he argued, “could present itself, externally, as one of the solid elements, as one of the successes of our colonization of these territories.”¹¹⁷ Educating Africans was becoming a crucial part of a nascent international public relations campaign to justify continued French rule on African soil.

Six months later, the official program of the Brazzaville Conference further drove the point home. The preamble to the proceedings affirmed: “The world is watching us. We must respond to these enquiring looks not only with a presentation of our past successes, but also with a program … that will show that France is an active and methodical nation, a worthy steward of the Empire which it has under its care.”¹¹⁸ By highlighting France’s “past successes” alongside calls for reform, the conference organizers blunted critical evaluation of prewar French colonial policy from the outset. Indeed, they avowed that the “indigènes” had always been the raison d’être of the French presence in Africa and insisted that if this was not always evident in practice, it was because colonial administrators had misunderstood the “real interests” of Africans. “Without waiting for the Atlantic Charter,” the organizers proudly declared, “France had already enshrined, if not in words, but more importantly, in deeds and in intentions, the principle ‘Africa for the Africans.’ ”¹¹⁹

Laurentie began preparations for the Brazzaville Conference in late 1943, while he was still overseeing the reorganization of the administrative apparatus in AOF following the Vichy interlude there.¹²⁰ He sent directives to AOF’s new governor-general, Pierre Cournarie, to promote and subsidize youth programs for both metropolitan French and Africans.¹²¹ Laurentie took pains to underscore that the youth and education services were there to serve “the entirety of AOF youth, European and indigenous, ‘evolved’ and ‘non-evolved,’ male and female, school-educated and not, and especially those categories enumerated above that are the most backward.” It was the administration’s responsibility, Laurentie continued, to promote young people’s “moral, spiritual, physical and intellectual development” and prepare young Africans for the ever-greater role they would surely be called on to play in both “imperial and French life.”¹²²

Laurentie’s approach to colonial youth policy combined colonial paternalism with a vision, however limited, of African empowerment. That volatile combination was a recurrent theme of the Brazzaville Conference. In late 1943, Laurentie compiled extensive reports from officials in AOF and AEF on the state of colonial education and youth programming to present at the conference. A profound tension emerges in this material between two key objectives: (1) the expansion of primary education, basic training, and youth activities to reach “the masses”; and (2) the cultivation of a new generation of francophone elites who would be loyal to France. This tension can be seen in Laurentie’s own report on African youth programs in the run-up to the conference. He praised scout movements and sporting clubs for their “beneficial effect, not only to fortify the body of the indigènes, but also to develop a sense of responsibility, loyalty, and team spirit.” At the same time, he called for more local educational circles, which, he argued, promoted the “cultural evolution of the race” and enabled “the évolué elite to develop its intelligence and especially its character and capacity for critical thinking.” Laurentie concluded, “This éducation of the évolués constitutes the lynchpin of our colonial policy.”¹²³

Laurentie’s vision for formal schooling hinged on the same tension. He proposed a system of public schools at the primary, secondary, and higher levels, but though he used the terminology of the metropolitan educational system, each order of African education meant something radically different. His “secondary schools” would prepare Africans for low-level administrative positions or to become primary school teachers for other Africans and so would be closer to upper primary schools (écoles primaires supérieures) than to metropolitan middle schools (collèges), let alone lycées. Laurentie was unequivocal that African and metropolitan higher education should have “nothing in common.” Colonial “tertiary education” would comprise a few specialized technical institutions in medicine, agriculture, and pedagogy. This three-tiered system would be supplemented by other kinds of state-supported institutions that responded to local conditions: rural schools to give a practical education to the peasantry; “médersas” to provide education to the sons of Islamic chiefs and other Muslim notables in the “Arab” regions of Chad and Mauritania; and now also mission schools, with which Laurentie envisioned “the most fertile collaboration.” Thus although “one of the objects of the Brazzaville Conference [would] be to organize mass schooling,” under Laurentie’s plan only the tiniest fraction of the population would have had access to anything beyond the most basic education.¹²⁴

Nevertheless, even Laurentie’s modest proposal was too radical for top education officials in AOF. Edmond Cabrière, headmaster of the lone lycée in Dakar and director of secondary education for the federation, felt the conference should focus on adapting formal education to the needs and capabilities of the local population, which, in his view, absolutely precluded secondary schooling in the metropolitan sense of the term. He strongly opposed admitting any Africans to lycées. His vision of African education was much more limited: “Before we instruct them, [our project] hopes to educate them: it hopes for the progressive elevation of the whole population, not the artificial culture of a few uprooted plants.” Secondary education in French Africa, Cabrière continued, should offer the same education to “European” youth in the territories as they would receive in the metropole, but precisely for this reason the administration should not recruit African students at the secondary level. For him, the “nature of this schooling” and the “character of the exams which it entails both forbid it.”¹²⁵

Cabrière did not justify the exclusion of Africans from secondary education with rehearsals of racist stereotypes of African intelligence, aptitudes and discipline; he offered a reified portrait of Europeans. Cabrière maintained that secondary education was about “classical culture,” and so he asked, “Who could doubt that young Europeans, conscious or unconscious inheritors of Mediterranean civilization, are more apt than the local population to receive this culture?” He insisted that secondary education could not be “adapted” to local conditions without perverting its very essence; everything about it was “conceived for Europeans.”¹²⁶ For Cabrière, then, young “Europeans” belonged to a common culture and civilization and were inheritors of qualities that made them uniquely fit for a specific kind of education. Contrary to the tenets of republican universalism, Cabrière construed French education as profoundly particular. Its particularity, however, was rooted, not in a narrowly conceived French nation, but rather in a broader “classical culture” and “Mediterranean civilization”—that is, in a certain vision of Europe.

Cabrière’s deployment of the category “European” in this way was part of a long tradition of coded language in French colonial discourse, but it also points to a historically specific crisis of political vocabulary. In the postwar conjuncture, “European” emerged as the racial code word for both “French” and “white,” terms that became politically untenable as Africans attained French citizenship and explicit racial language was tabooed.¹²⁷ Efforts to define what being “European” actually meant—indeed, to imagine what “Europe” would actually be—in discussions about postwar European integration brought educators in French Africa like Cabrière into dialogue with transnational European federalists in wartime London and clandestine pamphleteers like Jean Cassou in Occupied France.

Not all French colonial officials who invoked Europe did so to justify excluding Africans from advanced levels of education. Local administrators in French Soudan (contemporary Mali) suggested in a report for the conference that their task was to find a way to reconcile the two “educative forces” operating on African society, “tradition” and “European civilization.” Ideally, colonial education should strike a balance between cultural preservation and transformation. But colonial educators must acknowledge that education had an inherent emancipatory quality and that their African students “have learned from us that schooling is the key that opens all doors.” The report concluded that the administration should not fear the emancipatory power of the school. Schooling was perfectly suited to AOF, the report’s authors argued; the administration just had to expand its reach.¹²⁸

Yves Aubineau, the top federal education official in AOF, had a more cautious view. In his preparatory report, he summed up his philosophy of African education in two words: “happiness” and “progress.” African education, Aubineau argued, “is essentially about penetrating the masses, teaching them how to live better, to give them a life that is more productive, healthy and comfortable—in a word, a better life.” He cautioned, however, that colonial officials needed to be aware of the specificity of their own conceptions of “happiness.” “Without a doubt,” he wrote, “our European ideas, as seductive, honest and generous as they may be, have a totally different nature in the eyes of the Blacks.” Education may be a “work of social promotion,” but it is also “a lever that can upset, and if we are not careful, totally destroy, the entire edifice of indigenous social and familial organization.” Aubineau then exclaimed, “And so it must be undertaken with infinite precaution! It is the herald of emancipation, a potential disaster.”¹²⁹

Like the Cathala Commission before him, Aubineau thought it impossible to reorganize colonial education on the same basis as metropolitan education reform. Unlike his London predecessors, though, he was bracingly candid about his rationale: if the colonial administration applied metropolitan principles in the territories, it would have to admit “the equality of all children to the right to schooling.” In theory, he conceded, it would not only be just but also in France’s interest to provide all African children with equal access to education. But given the paucity of schools, teachers, and resources, getting all school-age African children into classrooms would be a pipe dream, especially at the secondary level. Aubineau then quickly layered onto this stark material reality a moral justification for not educating more Africans at a higher level, citing at length the passages discussed earlier from Cabrière’s report on secondary education as the unique preserve of Europeans. Aubineau therefore proposed the conference set a modest target: two hundred thousand children enrolled in primary schools in AOF over the next ten years.¹³⁰

Raising the rate of primary school attendance became the central focus of conversations about education during the Brazzaville proceedings. The conference’s resolution on education called on colonial governors to submit fifteen-year plans for the rapid construction of new teacher training institutes, primary schools, and upper primary schools by August 1944.¹³¹ But educational philosophy and school curricula were also discussed, and it was widely accepted that the purpose of colonial education was to reproduce African racial difference, not overcome it. The AOF delegation, which was led by Aubineau, was particularly insistent that their objective should be “the making of the Black,” by which they meant “protecting the race, assuring its harmonious development, in short, making the indigène an indigène of quality.”¹³² And yet, conference participants also rejected schooling in African languages. French-language instruction was deemed essential not only for the formation of a loyal African elite but also for strengthening ties between metropole and colony.¹³³ The Brazzaville resolutions mandated French-language instruction in all African schools.¹³⁴ Arabic instruction would no longer be permitted in Muslim-majority regions, a policy that had significant repercussions after the war.¹³⁵

It remained unclear exactly what kind of African elite conference-goers had in mind. The AOF delegation conceded, “An autochthonous elite, very small at least at the outset, could integrate itself, in the fullest sense of the term, in the universal French community where they will join our Frenchmen of color from our oldest colonies.” However, this integration would be possible only for those who acquired a level of culture and “moral standing” comparable to those of “the most distinguished Frenchmen.” What is more, the AOF delegation hoped that this “incorporation” would occur elsewhere in the empire, not in their home territories.¹³⁶ Colonial officials’ inability to imagine African elites’ integration into local French milieus construes the territories as exceptional spaces unfit to foster a genuine Franco-African community.

The official Brazzaville education plan did not resolve these tensions. Primary education would last for six years, and those who completed the cycle would receive a Certificat d’études, a diploma with no equivalent in metropolitan France. Primary schooling would be modeled on the metropolitan system and “adapted” to local life, with parts of the curriculum devoted to manual work, agriculture, household training, and physical education. Instruction would be in French, but the curriculum would be “the least literary possible.” In this way, colonial education would instill “love and respect for France” without disrupting traditional African milieus. This aligned with the “new” colonial doctrine outlined at Brazzaville more broadly: “It is essential that peoples develop according to their own spirit and that Black France, firmly rooted in African soil, be an original, vibrant and fertile creation.”¹³⁷

For all its limitations, the Brazzaville education plan required significant financial investment. After the conference, the CFLN’s Commissariat of Colonies in Algiers requested an additional 675,000 francs for its 1944 budget to create its own education department to carry out the Brazzaville resolutions on expanding African primary education.¹³⁸ Any sum may seem substantial given the penury of wartime conditions, but it is worth comparing it to other funding requests for colonial projects at the time. Consider, for instance, a concurrent request for 800,000 francs to help complete the construction of a Catholic cathedral in Brazzaville, and another for 500,000 francs to renovate a Protestant church in Douala (Cameroon). The completion of the Brazzaville cathedral was characterized as directly in line with French interests, since the curacy in Brazzaville had “fostered national sentiment which contributed profoundly to achieving a climate of national unity in AEF.”¹³⁹ As for the Protestant church, officials noted that the French Protestant mission in Douala represented the beginning of “Christian civilization in Cameroon” and had achieved great works “as much from the point of view of evangelization as the penetration of French influence among indigenous milieus.”¹⁴⁰ Clearly the central colonial authority in Algiers considered Christianity—in its Catholic and Protestant forms—a crucial vector for the spread of French influence and French interests in sub-Saharan Africa. As the central authority requested almost twice as many funds for these projects as it did to create and operate its entire Education Department, we may well wonder whether colonial officials in Algiers considered schooling or churchgoing more effective in nurturing the authority’s vision of “Black France.”

Educational reconstruction in the postwar republic, French Africa, and Western Europe became entangled during the war in new and enduring ways. As Free French planners from London to Brazzaville elaborated new agendas for national, colonial, and transnational education reform, they also mapped new, often overlapping coordinates of belonging—based on religion, race, and “civilization”—that crisscrossed French, African, and European space. The Brazzaville Conference and the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education encapsulate the wartime evolution of ideas and expectations about France’s European and African futures. This chapter has considered these events in their wartime context, but they also serve as points of departure for thinking about ongoing conversations about the role of education and the horizons of belonging in the French Union and united Europe in the early postwar years. The next chapter will revisit the Brazzaville Conference proceedings in relation to postwar ideas about belonging and religion, and chapter 3 will return to both the Brazzaville Conference and the CAME from the perspective of shifting postwar conceptions of race.

1. 1. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135, 150.

2. 2. René Cassin, Les hommes, partis de rien: Le réveil de la France abattue (Paris: Plon, 1974), 408.

3. 3. René Cassin, “L’éducation et l’avenir,” Conférence donnée à la Franco-Scottish Society, le 5 octobre 1942. AN: 382AP/55.

4. 4. R. R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Mona Ozouf, L’école de la France: Essai sur la Révolution, l’utopie de l’enseignement (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations in the Civic Order in France, 1789-1820s (New York: Norton, 1994).

5. 5. Christine Musselin, The Long March of French Universities (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001).

6. 6. Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Alan Kahan, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Political Culture of Limited Suffrage (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

7. 7. André Jardin and A.-J. Tudesq, La France des notables, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). The Guizot Law of 1833 mandated the creation of primary schools in every commune that reached a certain population threshold, which doubled the total number of primary schools under the July Monarchy.

8. 8. Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also Sudir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of French Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

9. 9. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 3–5, 303, 308–309.

10. 10. The literal translation is “school quarrel,” but it is often glossed as “battle over schools.”

11. 11. Jean-François Muracciole, Les enfants de la défaite: La Résistance, l’éducation et la culture (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1998); Jean-Michel Barreau, Vichy contre l’école de la République: Théoriciens et théories scolaires de la “Révolution nationale” (Paris: Flammarion 2000).

12. 12. Nicholas Atkin, “Church and Teachers in Vichy France, 1941–1944,” French History 4, no. 1 (1990): 1, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/4.1.1.

13. 13. The ultra-collaborationist circle around Marcel Déat and the German occupation authorities were also hostile to the complete abrogation of the secular school. Atkin, “Church and Teachers,” 11–13.

14. 14. Muracciole, Les enfants de la défaite.

15. 15. Jobs, Riding the New Wave; Richard Ivan Jobs and David Pomfret, eds., Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave, 2015). Scholars have linked the growing body of public policy and concerted state action directed at youth to processes of national consolidation and the development of the nascent welfare state. Patricia Loncle, L’action publique malgré les jeunes: Les politiques de jeunesse en France de 1870 à 2000 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983).

16. 16. Laura Lee Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Arnaud Baubérot and Nathalie Duval, Le scoutisme entre guerre et paix au XXe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).

17. 17. Antoine Prost and Pascal Ory, Jean Zay, le ministre assassiné (Paris: Taillandier/Canopé, 2015). Pierre Mendès-France, who was captured with Zay but managed to escape, gives a heartbreaking account of Zay’s fate in Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1971).

18. 18. Pierre Giolitto, Histoire de la jeunesse sous Vichy (Paris: Perrin, 1991); Loncle, L’action publique malgré les jeunes.

19. 19. Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 11–15.

20. 20. Rudolph T. Ware III, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 191–192.

21. 21. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 75–106.

22. 22. Kelly Duke Bryant, Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850–1914 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 9.

23. 23. Harry Gamble, Contesting French West Africa: Battles over Schools and the Colonial Order, 1900–1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 7.

24. 24. J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6; Elizabeth Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in Senegal, 1880–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

25. 25. Ware, The Walking Qur’an.

26. 26. Bryant, Education as Politics, 17n30.

27. 27. Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State. On rural schools, see Gamble, Contesting French West Africa, chap. 2. On Qur’anic schools, see Ware, The Walking Qur’an, chap. 4.

28. 28. James Genova, “The Empire Within: The Colonial Popular Front, 1934–1938,” Alternatives 26, no. 2 (2001): 175–209, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40645015. On Senghor’s educational activism in this period, see Gamble, Contesting French West Africa, chap. 5.

29. 29. Ruth Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked: The Vichy Years in French West Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), chap. 4.

30. 30. Though interwar institutions of international intellectual cooperation nurtured global ambitions, in practice their scope was European. See Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), and Frank Séréni, “La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, 1925–1950: De la Société des Nations à la construction de l’Europe,” Relations internationales 72 (Winter 1992): 399–407, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45344479.

31. 31. Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 51–66.

32. 32. Charlotte Faucher and Laure Humbert, “Introduction,” in “Beyond de Gaulle and Beyond London: The French External Resistance and Its International Networks,” special issue, European Review of History 25, no. 2 (2018), 201.

33. 33. Charlotte Faucher, “From Gaullism to Anti-Gaullism: Denis Saurat and the French Cultural Institute in Wartime London,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 1 (2019): 60–81, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009417699866.

34. 34. A Jewish professor in the Paris Law Faculty, Cassin was himself one of the first victims of Vichy’s two-pronged attack on democracy and education. His colleague Georges Ripert, who served as Vichy’s first secretary for youth and education and helped draft the first round of anti-Jewish statutes that removed Jews from all teaching positions, personally revoked Cassin’s Paris appointment in absentia in fall 1940. Pierre Allorant, “Lettre de Jean Cassou à Jean Zay,” Parlement(s): Revue d’histoire politique 11, no. 3 (2016): n11; see also Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 103.

35. 35. Cited in Faucher, “From Gaullism to Anti-Gaullism,” 74.

36. 36. Transcripts of Cassin’s radio addresses are reprinted in the appendix of his memoir, Les hommes, partis de rien. On French Jews, see “Israélites de France” from April 1941, 480–481.

37. 37. Cassin would subsequently become involved with matters of Jewish education in a very different context. Though de Gaulle and Free France generally were deafeningly silent on Vichy anti-Jewish policy in the early war years, de Gaulle took up the issue instrumentally as part of his power struggle with Giraud in the run-up to the creation of the CFLN. In April 1943, de Gaulle appointed Cassin president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a French-Jewish organization with deep roots in North Africa. Giraud had upheld Vichy’s abrogation of the Crémieux Decree (which had made Algerian Jews full French citizens). De Gaulle pledged to reinstate it. The AIU operated a network of French-language schools in the region; by installing a loyal supporter at its helm, de Gaulle sought to present himself as the true incarnation of France in North Africa. Cassin, who had no prior ties to Jewish organizations, would serve as the AIU’s president for the next thirty years. Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 310–315.

38. 38. Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 52.

39. 39. French-language scholarship on European integration draws a sharp distinction between this and the ostensibly related idea of “European identity.” The latter connotes “feeling European,” whereas la conscience européenne reflects a commitment to Europe as a political project. See René Girault, ed., Identités et consciences européennes au XXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1994); Jean-Michel Guieu et al., Penser et construire Europe au XXe siècle: Historiographie, bibliographie, enjeux (Paris: Belin, 2006).

40. 40. New Europe Circle brochure, “Statement of Aims,” undated, AN: 382AP/66.

41. 41. Letter from Alexander Kunosi and Robert Auty to René Cassin, February 3, 1943, AN: 382AP/66.

42. 42. On the League’s Eurocentrism, see Iriye, Cultural Internationalism.

43. 43. Jacques Michon, “Les éditeurs de littérature française aux États-Unis et en Amérique latine durant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 33, no. 2 (1995): 165–88, https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v33i2.17964.

44. 44. Gilbert Vélaire, “Les gouvernements en exil doivent jeter les bases de l’Europe-Unie,” manuscript, undated, AN: 382AP/66.

45. 45. Michel Berveiller, “Fédéralisme interne et féderalisme international,” Fédération, August–September 1949; see also his “Letter to the Editors of Le Monde,” in response to an article, “Fédéralisme et neutralité,” by Georges Scelle, August 2, 1950.

46. 46. Cassin, Les hommes, partis de rien, 278.

47. 47. Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 144.

48. 48. Interview between M. Spaak and M. Dejean, March 6, 1942, Archives Diplomatiques—La Courneuve, France (AMAE): Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 172.

49. 49. Susan Pedersen, Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

50. 50. Antoine Fleury, “Paneurope et l’Afrique,” in L’Europe Unie et l’Afrique, ed. Bitsch and Bossuat (Brussels: Bruylant, 2005).

51. 51. Ageron, “L’idée d’eurafrique”; and Metzger, “L’Allemagne et l’Eurafrique,” Montarsolo, “Albert Sarraut et l’idée d’Eurafrique,” and Anne Deighton, “Ernest Bevin and the Idea of Euro-Africa from the Interwar to the Postwar Period,” in L’Europe unie et l’Afrique, ed. Bitsch and Bossuat.

52. 52. On Coudenhove-Kalergi’s political impact in the United States, see Gérard Bossuat, Faire l’Europe sans défaire la France: 60 ans de politique d’unité européenne des gouvernements et des présidents de la République française (1943–2003) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2005), chap. 1; on his impact on US ideas about “Eurafrica,” see Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, chap. 2.

53. 53. Vélaire, “Les gouvernements en exil,” 7, AN: 382AP/66.

54. 54. Letter from Lt. Paul Petit to Cassin, April 4, 1942; Petit, “Étude sur possibilités pratiques d’organisation d’une fédération européenne après la victoire,” Brazzaville, April 1942; AN: 382AP/66.

55. 55. Décret no. 53, December 2, 1941; Télégram à MM. Haussaires Noumea, Brazzaville; DELFRANCE Caire; FRANCOM Beyrouth, January 14, 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 172.

56. 56. Télégram de FRANCOM Beyrouth à CNF-Londres, March 27, 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/ Londres-CNF, 172.

57. 57. Dossier Groupe Colonial—Secrétariat des Commissions d’après-guerre, 1943, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 180.

58. 58. Revue bi-mensuelle des questions d’après-guerre: Les Faits, Les Opinions, Bulletin no. 30, December 1942, 13–27, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 172.

59. 59. “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” Report by William Beveridge, presented to Parliament by command of His Majesty, November 25, 1942. On French reporting on the Butler Act, see André D. Robert, “La commission Cathala et le modèle anglais, Londres, 1942–1943,” Carrefours de l’Education 41, no. 41 (May 2016): 71–76, https://doi.org/10.3917/cdle.041.0065. Vichy officials also followed Beveridge’s work and felt pressure to make similar overtures toward social inclusion. Philippe Jean-Hesse and Jean-Pierre Le Crom, La protection sociale sous le régime de Vichy (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 343.

60. 60. Robert refers to this as a “chaine réformatrice,” 67. The Algiers and Paris commissions are discussed in chapter 2.

61. 61. A convert to Catholicism (his father was Jewish), Schumann served as the MRP’s first president from 1944 to 1949.

62. 62. Compte-rendu de la Section intellectuelle et de l’enseignement de la session du 27 novembre 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

63. 63. Compte-rendu de la Section intellectuelle et de l’enseignement de la session du 16 octobre 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

64. 64. Procès-verbal de la réunion de la Section intellectuelle et de l’enseignement qui a eu lieu le vendredi 30 octobre 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 172.

65. 65. Texte proposé par M. Maisonneuve avec l’approbation de MM. Beuhror et Schaeffer, désignés avec lui pour étudier une modification à l’art, 3 de la note sur les principes fondamentaux, undated, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

66. 66. Procès-verbal de la Section intellectuelle et de l’enseignement de la séance du 13 novembre 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 172.

67. 67. Cassin, “L’éducation et l’avenir.”

68. 68. Robert, “La commission Cathala et le modèle anglais,” 74, 71.

69. 69. Projet de Réforme de l’Enseignement dans la France Métropolitaine, January 21, 1943, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

70. 70. Note sur le rapport intitulé “Les Bases d’un Ministère de la Vie Culturelle,” undated, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

71. 71. Lt. Voisine, Note sur les questions de jeunesse, April 6, 1943, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/ Londres-CNF, 172; Procès-verbal de la Section intellectuelle et de l’enseignement de la séance du 28 mai 1943, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

72. 72. Note de M. Vangrévelinghe, November 1942; Note de M. Vangrévelinghe sur l’enseignement, December 7, 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

73. 73. Procès-verbal de la Section intellectuelle et de l’enseignement de la séance du 11 décembre 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

74. 74. Procès-verbal de la Section intellectuelle et de l’enseignement de la séance du 11 décembre 1942, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

75. 75. Georges Ungar, Remarques sur le Rapport intitulé “Les Bases d’un Ministère de la Vie Culturelle,” April 5, 1943, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 172.

76. 76. Huxley had been a central figure in pro-Europe circles in interwar Britain. See Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999). Although he was a lifelong eugenicist, Huxley coauthored a scientific refutation of Nazi race theory, dismissing racial divisions among Europeans. We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936). His racial ideas about non-Europeans, however, were deeply ambivalent and anticipated wider postwar shifts in racial conception explored in chapter 3.

77. 77. Julian Huxley, “German Education and Re-education,” reprinted from the New Statesman and Nation, February 13, 1943 (emphasis in the original), AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/Londres-CNF, 186.

78. 78. Denis Saurat, Projet de formation d’une Union Culturelle des Pays de l’Europe Occidentale, undated; for reports on Saurat’s lectures, see Note par Steigerhof à M. Gros, October 19, 1942, AN: 382AP/66.

79. 79. Joan Scott argues that the conjoining of democracy and Christianity was always part of discourses of secularism in Protestant countries and was then embraced by Catholic Europe in the context of the Cold War. Sex and Secularism. My analysis here and in subsequent chapters suggests a wider set of factors specific to the French wartime experience and the conjunction of French colonial and European imperatives.

80. 80. Draft Report of a Conference held at the Board of Education on Monday, November 16, 1942, in CAME, London 1942–1945 vol 1: Records of Plenary Meetings, 2–4, UNESCO Archives.

81. 81. Draft Report of the Second Meeting of the Conference of Ministers of Education of the Allied Governments and the French National Committee, January 19, 1943, CAME, London 1942–1945, vol. 1: Records of Plenary Meetings, UNESCO Archives.

82. 82. Olgierd Gorka, “Spirit of History in the Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers of History,” CAME, London 1942–1945, vol. III: Books and Periodicals Commission: History Committees and Subcommittees, UNESCO Archives.

83. 83. Draft Report of the Fifth Meeting of the Conference of Ministers of Education of the Allied Governments and the French National Committee, July 27, 1943, CAME, London 1942–1945, vol. 1: Records of Plenary Meetings, UNESCO Archives.

84. 84. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India began sending delegates in July 1943.

85. 85. Introduction, CAME, London 1942–1945, vol. 1: Records of plenary meetings, UNESCO Archives.

86. 86. Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 231–232.

87. 87. Communication du Ministre de l’Education Nationale a/s d’un projet de création d’une organisation internationale de l’Education et de la Culture, élaborée par la CMAE à Londres, undated, AN: F60/427.

88. 88. Denis Mylonas, La genèse de l’Unesco: La Conférence des Ministres Alliés de l’Education (1942–1945) (Brussels: Bruylant, 1976). Cassin tried and failed, however, to secure the first presidency of the new organization for a Frenchman. That post went to Julian Huxley.

89. 89. Telegram Vienot (London) to CFLN-Algiers, October 26, 1943, AMAE: Guerre, 1939–1945/ Alger, CFLN-GPRF, 657; Letter from D. Cooper to Georges Bidault, November 11, 1944, AMAE: Y-Internationale, 1944–1949, 133.

90. 90. Jean Cassou, Pour une Union Latine, undated, AMAE: Z-Europe, Generalités 1944–1949, 40. The treatise was circulated among the CFLN in Algiers and the London Commission for the Study of Postwar Problems.

91. 91. Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race; Patricia Lorcin, “Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria’s Latin Past,” French Historical Studies 25:2 (Spring 2002): 295–329, muse.jhu.edu/article/11923.

92. 92. Chad, Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, and Oubangui-Chari (present-day Central African Republic).

93. 93. Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 151–157.

94. 94. Jennings, Free French Africa, 93–94.

95. 95. For the first two years of the war, Cassin and his wife were given lodgings at the French Institute, but Saurat, who resented Free French demands on Institute space, evicted them while Cassin was on his tournée of the empire. Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 151.

96. 96. This position alienated them both from de Gaulle, though perhaps more intensely for Saurat. Indeed, Saurat delivered a very pro-British address on Radio-Brazzaville during his mission. This was very poorly received by the Free French in London, who hindered his media appearances and blocked a series on postwar order he had proposed to the BBC. Faucher, “From Gaullism to Anti-Gaullism,” 74.

97. 97. Denis Saurat, Watch over Africa (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1941), 164. Cited from the original French, reprinted as appendix II: Larminat, “Position des Français libres vis-à-vis des problèmes nationaux,” February 18, 1941, Brazzaville. The speech appears in translation in English in chapter 4.

98. 98. Saurat, Watch over Africa, 46.

99. 99. Saurat, Watch over Africa, 37. Saurat always referred to Africans as “negroes” or “blacks”; he used Bantu only in certain circumstance (typically, in the formula “Bantu races”) and “Africans” not at all. I use “Africans” in my discussion of Saurat’s thoughts and impressions except when citing him directly.

100. 100. Saurat, Watch over Africa, 59–61.

101. 101. Saurat, Watch over Africa, 65.

102. 102. Saurat, Watch over Africa, 95–96. As we shall see, soon after Saurat’s departure, Governor-General Éboué would make encouraging this kind of collaboration official policy for all of AEF.

103. 103. Saurat, Watch over Africa, 102.

104. 104. Bilan de l’activité du Service de l’Instruction Publique, Note Préliminaire, undated, AN: 382AP/55.

105. 105. Cassin, “La France en Proche-orient et en Afrique,” Conférence de M. le Prof. René Cassin, Faite au Hyde Park Hotel, May 5, 1942, 17, AN: 382/AP/59.

106. 106. Cassin, “La France en Proche-orient et en Afrique,” 22.

107. 107. Letter from Prince Félix Rapontchombo to René Cassin, Libreville, March 4, 1942, AN: 382AP/59.

108. 108. Cassin lamented his limited contact with Africans during his trip. “La France en Proche-orient et en Afrique,” 21.

109. 109. Jennings, Free French Africa, 224–228.

110. 110. Jennings, Free French Africa, 93–94.

111. 111. Philippe Oulmont, “Félix Éboué: Un jaurasien inattendu,” Cahiers Jaurès 200, no. 2 (2011): 147–161, https://doi.org/10.3917/cj.200.0147; Martin Shipway, “Thinking Like an Empire: Governor Henri Laurentie and Postwar Plans for the Late Colonial Empire-State,” in The French Colonial Mind, vol. 1, Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encounters, ed. Martin Thomas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 219–250.

112. 112. Éboué’s stance on forced labor caused a major row with Cassin and Henry Hauck back in London, both of whom found Éboué’s proposal to codify a new “evolved native status” to exempt African elites ridiculous. However, as Eric Jennings has noted, Éboué saw that status as a way to “avoid infantilizing a tiny slice of African society” and elaborated the rationale for it in the language of rights. Jennings, Free French Africa, 50–55, 95, 224–228.

113. 113. Oulmont and Shipway both highlight this practice, citing Brian Weinstein’s Éboué (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

114. 114. Foster, African Catholic, 34–41. The full text of the circular was republished after the war: Félix Éboué, La nouvelle politique indigène pour l’AEF (Paris: Office Français d’Edition, 1945).

115. 115. Saurat, Watch over Africa, 69.

116. 116. Saurat, appendix I, “A Broadcast Given from Brazzaville on April 4, 1941, at 9:45 p.m.,” Watch over Africa, 143–149.

117. 117. Rapport au sujet des activités du Service de l’Enseignement AOF, préparé par M. Mus, Direction-Générale de l’Instruction Publique en AOF, August 9, 1943, Archives Nationales du Sénégal—Dakar, Senegal (ANS): O/1 (31).

118. 118. Programme général, Conférence de Brazzaville (January 1944), 2, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 5.

119. 119. Programme général, Conférence de Brazzaville, 3, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 5.

120. 120. Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked.

121. 121. Letter from the Commissariat aux Colonies (signed Laurentie) to the Gouverneur-Général Pierre Cournarie, December 16, 1943, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/872.

122. 122. Note pour la Direction-Générale—Instruction Publique-AOF, January 9, 1944, ANS: O/87 (31).

123. 123. Note sur l’enseignement des Indigènes et les oeuvres de jeunesse indigène dans les colonies françaises préparée par Henri Laurentie, December 12, 1943, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/874, dossier 3.

124. 124. Note sur l’enseignement des Indigènes et les oeuvres de jeunesse indigène dans les colonies françaises préparée par Henri Laurentie, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/874, dossier 3.

125. 125. 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).

126. 126. Cabrière, Rapport, ANS: O/171 (31). Harry Gamble discusses this document in his Contesting French West Africa, 204–205.

127. 127. On race and the crisis of political terminology in the late 1940s, see Marker, “Obscuring Race.”

128. 128. Rapport sur l’Education pour la Conférence de Brazzaville (Soudan), undated, ANS: O/171 (31).

129. 129. Rapport a/s de la Conférence de Brazzaville, signed Yves Aubineau, Directeur-Général de l’Instruction Publique (AOF), January 10, 1944, ANS: O/171 (31).

130. 130. Rapport a/s de la Conférence de Brazzaville, signed Yves Aubineau, ANS: O/171 (31).

131. 131. Exécution des Recommandations: Enseignement, Brazzaville Conference, January 1944, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 5. The plans would be reviewed by a special education committee within the Commissariat of Colonies in Algiers, which would also study the creation of new professional and secondary schools in the territories.

132. 132. Rapport no. 1 sur la politique indigène en AOF, Brazzaville, undated, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 5.

133. 133. Rapport relations metropole-colonies, January 1944, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 5.

134. 134. Exécution des Recommandations, enseignement, 1944, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 5.

135. 135. I return to this issue in chapter 5.

136. 136. Rapport no. 1 sur la politique indigène en AOF, 51–52, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 5.

137. 137. Plan d’Enseignement-Conférence Africaine Française de Brazzaville, undated, ANS: O/171 (31).

138. 138. CFLN: Budget 1944, AN C//15268, dossier 2.

139. 139. Observations sur la subvention pour l’achèvement de la cathédrale de Brazzaville, undated, AN: C//15268, dossier 2.

140. 140. Observations sur l’église protestante du centenaire à Douala, undated, AN: C//15268, dossier 2.