CHAPTER 4 Encountering Diversity in France and “Eurafrica”

African Perspectives: “This Is Truly a White Country”

Subjected to extensive surveillance and stereotyping, young Africans turned the “colonial gaze” back on their surveillants as they took stock of French people, culture, and society during their time in France. They judged their surroundings in light of their own cultural values, social norms, and lifestyle preferences. In student journals, personal correspondence, and literature, African youth in France critiqued stalled colonial reforms, French racism, the lack of material support for them to pursue their studies, and French ways of life more generally.

Responding directly to French caricatures of Africans as “ungrateful,” African students refuted the notion that they were “anti-French.” In a 1956 editorial in the FEANF journal, L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire, R. Mawlawé turned this accusation on its head: “Logic, truth, justice—we have been taught that these are quintessentially French qualities. Why when we avail ourselves of them do you find us anti-French? A surprising truth!” He continued, “As paradoxical as it seems, it is the colonized who are reviving the authentic tradition of France, of the true France whose vocation surely is not to stifle black consciousness, but to arouse their initiative, to help them realize their freedom as men.”⁴⁵ As Laurentie had feared a decade earlier, francophone Africans had indeed become well acquainted with French values, which they mobilized as a powerful rhetorical weapon in their fight for racial equality and social justice.⁴⁶

In the same issue, Isabelle Tévoedjrè, a literature student at the University of Toulouse from Dahomey (contemporary Benin), framed African students’ contacts with their French peers in a charged political and racial context in a piece entitled “ ‘Metropolitan’ Students and Us.” She found that France’s colonial wars, first in Indochina and then Algeria, seemed to have pushed some of their French peers to open themselves up to and learn about African students’ concerns, while others distanced themselves even more. In describing her daily experiences at her provincial university, she detailed a constant stream of what we would recognize today as microaggressions.⁴⁷ In the lecture hall, she wrote, it is easy to read the faces of French students and to slot them in one camp or the other: “By instinct, we can perceive straightaway the hostility that animates their looks, gestures, vocal inflections. That hostility affects us so profoundly that we also suffer when our comrades are nothing more than indifferent, cruelly indifferent.” Even on the streets of Paris, she continued, “that supposedly cosmopolitan city—I could not ignore those stares looking me up and down, those glances that would follow me, inquisitive, ironic, disdainful, distrustful, scared.”⁴⁸

For Isabelle, the most frustrating part of those encounters was how woefully ignorant her French peers were of the full spectrum of racial discrimination she and other African students faced on a daily basis, which took different forms in France and in the territories. She lamented that metropolitan French have no idea that “still now, in certain cities like Brazzaville, for a Black to enter the ‘White’ quarter would be a sacrilege,” just as they also do not know that when African students are sent to organizations that find students housing, they are presented with listings “that carry that atrocious line, unworthy of the French who are supposed to be against racial discrimination: ‘No Blacks, No Arabs!’ ” Given this situation, she found it especially intolerable that African students were, as a group, constantly accused of “ingratitude.” She was unsparing in connecting accusations of disloyalty to old colonial stereotypes of “docile, sycophantic blacks.” Here was further proof that Africans remained inferior in French eyes: Africans were denied the right to protest inequality and discrimination, and when they did, they were perceived as a dangerous threat, as radical anticolonial nationalists or Communist provocateurs, rather than loyal defenders of French values. “They claim to know us,” she concluded, “but could not be more mistaken.”⁴⁹

Isabelle’s husband, Albert Tévoedjrè, also sought to educate his French peers about the realities of Africans’ social experience in his writing, and he too emphasized the different forms racism took in French Africa and the metropole. His 1958 cri de coeur, L’Afrique révoltée, painted a bleak picture of “Black France” and unsparingly catalogued the ways that the “spiritual revolution” so jubilantly announced for French Africa in the postwar conjuncture had not come to pass. Albert used photography to convey this to powerful effect. The book’s insert presents images of racial hierarchy and everyday racism in his home territory of Dahomey alongside others that highlight structural racism throughout AOF. A photograph titled “July 1957: Cotonou (Dahomey), return from the market,” shows a young white mother pushing a baby carriage down the street, followed by a Black man, in a military uniform, carrying her bags (see figure 4.2). The caption reads, “A European woman elegantly walks with her baby. Behind her, her Mamadou, in this case, a tirailleur ‘sénégalais,’ carrying her purchases. The African in military service can live in the barracks, participate in the repression of some Arabs in revolt … or serve as an unpaid domestic in the household of a European.” The indignity of that scenario was then juxtaposed with an image that homes in on the root of structural inequality: a photograph of a dozen scantily clad, primary-school-age children, milling about on the steps of a building in Saint Louis (see figure 4.3). The caption reads, “After three hundred years of French presence in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, one child in six can go to school. And the rest? Well … they hang out in the streets!”⁵⁰ For Albert Tévoedjrè, Africans’ unequal access to education in the territories was the foundation of the larger edifice of racial domination in postwar French Africa.

Albert focused more on racism in France in his writing in student publications. In addition to serving as an editor of L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire, he was also a frequent contributor to the journal of the Association of Catholic Students in Dakar. In a 1955 piece in that publication, he framed his experience of racism in Toulouse in explicitly Christian terms. African Catholic students, he wrote, found their isolation in metropolitan France especially painful. Like so many African students, Albert was stung by the trauma of trying to find lodging: “We have all felt the pathological distrust that certain sons of France harbor towards people of color.” But he was devastated to find that a ready welcome in French congregations could prove equally challenging. He relayed with relief and excitement that the Catholic Institute in Toulouse recently created a special parish for overseas students. If they were not welcome in French churches, they would form their own.⁵¹

Religion could have been a factor of internal division among African students, but they developed their own kind of religious pluralism. As Catholic Senegalese student Thomas Diop wrote in 1957, African youth included Christians, Muslims, Communists, and “traditionalists,” but they all shared a commitment to Africa’s future. Indeed, he emphasized that African Christians and Muslims in particular shared common views and spiritual principles. Diop defended African Muslims who traveled to Cairo to pursue higher Islamic study—students the colonial administration maligned as “Wahhabi” fanatics.⁵² Indeed, intra-African diversity, as well as the very real differences separating Africans from their French counterparts, led Diop to think more expansively about building solidarity in the globalizing postwar world. He urged that “to think globally,” young people should root their identities in goals and objectives rather than religion or ideology. He concluded, “Identity of goals would promote tolerance, not only between diverse groups of young Blacks, but also between black youth and metropolitan youth.”⁵³

The everyday racism that African students detailed in their periodicals was also a recurrent theme in francophone African literature of the period. In his moving fictional memoir Un nègre à Paris (1959), Ivorian writer Bernard Dadié subversively turned the colonial-administrative gaze on its head. Set in 1956, the narrator keenly observes everything around him, at one point declaring forcefully, “This is truly a white man’s country.”⁵⁴ Dadié’s narrator channels the tone and mood of the colonial travelogue as he meticulously scrutinizes France and the French: “What we share with this people makes us more sympathetic towards them. I even found here fairytales just like ours.” He continues, “And when I see a French father take his child by the hand, smiling at him and telling him stories, I say to myself, ‘but they act just like blacks—they are just like us!’ They too love their children.”⁵⁵

Despite those surprising ironic flashes of connection, Dadié’s narrator dwells on the isolation he feels in Paris, the fast pace of city life, and the lax moral behavior of French youth. These observations lead to extended reflections on the prospect of a nonracist multiracial society: “I watch the people come and go. I am aware of my color that distinguishes me at a distance, day and night. And I ask myself: didn’t God create men of different colors so that we would have to study each other? Is color the only barrier that men free themselves from with such difficulty?” He continues, “We speak of different customs, colors, countries, cultures, but aren’t men all the same?” And yet, the book’s take on Franco-African relations is ultimately deeply ambivalent. The narrator not only notes that Africans are exoticized in France but also detects a new, performative aspect to French behavior toward Africans:

These Parisians still have that affection that their ancestors had for us back in the days when everyone had their own little Negro [Négrillon]. It’s truly a pleasure for them to have us. What’s more, those who [in the territories] would never dare invite us to their table, here they are the first to do so. They want to publicly prove their generosity of spirit and dupe everyone.⁵⁶

Significantly, the narrator explicitly frames these reflections about racial diversity in France in the context of European integration. He marvels at the prospect of European unity and admires its universal aspirations. As the narrator recounts his rambling walks through Paris, he pauses for a moment’s reflection at the Place de l’Europe in the eighth arrondissement. He muses, “The Parisian believes that men will be able to unite themselves.… The Place de l’Europe imagines that each nation, with its history and its monuments will let go of its victories which were defeats for others. History will no longer be the history of killing fields, but rather of man tout court.”⁵⁷

Eurafricanism and French Colonial Education Policy

Eurafrica figured prominently in the rhetoric of Louis-Paul Aujoulat, the top education official in the colonial ministry from 1949 to 1953. A missionary doctor and Christian Democrat who represented the white population of Cameroon in the French National Assembly for the first postwar decade, Aujoulat also chaired the coordinating committee for FIDES in 1950 that disbursed French development funds to youth and education initiatives in French Africa. He was instrumental in creating one of the earliest training programs for young Africans, a summer stage at the national teacher training institute at Saint-Cloud. From 1951 on, this program provided pedagogical training for both African and metropolitan schoolteachers assigned to posts in Africa. Aujoulat celebrated the inaugural program at Saint-Cloud as one of the administration’s shining achievements of the year, alongside the ostensibly more significant opening of the Institut des Hautes Études de Dakar and the Maison de la France d’Outre-Mer in Paris.⁶⁰

Aujoulat promoted his Eurafrican vision for Franco-African relations at the second Saint-Cloud stage in 1952. In a long presentation to the stagiaires, he articulated the administration’s goals for colonial education in a new spirit and vocabulary. First, he proudly declared, “it is time for us to listen to what Africa and Madagascar want.”⁶¹ Second, he called on the stagiaires to build “a new Eurafrican civilization.” Aujoulat alluded to Senghor’s well-known support for Eurafrica and stressed that he was not the only Black intellectual to champion Eurafricanism. Aujoulat expressed the challenge of reaching a Eurafrican symbiosis in temporal metaphors: “It concerns the inevitable conflict between two conceptions of life and world, the instability between the old equilibrium of yesterday and the new equilibrium of tomorrow.” Crucially, he insisted Africans could not be forced to choose between “Europe” and “Africa”; rather they must achieve a synthesis:

Even if the African elite demonstrates a remarkable receptivity to Latin culture and European values, they are well aware that they should not renounce their origins nor lose touch with their ancestral patrimony for any price. [The African elite] shares the aspirations of all non-European countries that hope to benefit from the West’s technical secrets without losing their own personalities, to assimilate [those techniques] into their values in pursuit of a human universal.⁶²

Aujoulat then concluded by associating his stance with several prominent Africans in the campaign for robust education reform: “We must reject both the cultural imperialism that presumes Africa is a blank slate and a systematic filtering of the kinds of knowledge and disciplines offered to black children: that seems to me to be the position of African teachers and thinkers like Senghor, Hazouné or Alioune Diop.”⁶³

Aujoulat distilled his “Eurafrican symbiosis” into three action items: (1) develop elite and mass education at the same time and stop treating this as an either-or proposition; (2) stop fearing Africans obtaining advanced degrees; and (3) overcome the false opposition between “l’esprit” and “la technique.” On this last point, he added, “Africans are the first to declare that we are living in a technical age, and that countries cannot thrive or modernize without technicians.” He continued, “If Blacks reject assimilation by force, they are nevertheless eager to participate in the great advances of modern civilizations.”⁶⁴

Aujoulat mobilized the framework of “Eurafrica” as a new way to think about the function and design of education for Africans in a French Union that was deepening its ties to its European neighbors and trying to modernize in the process. Not only was Eurafrica therefore gaining currency as a way of thinking about institutional arrangements between united Europe and European-controlled parts of Africa; Eurafrica was also becoming a new scalar frame for considering the social and cultural work of educating Africans in France’s African territories. Aujoulat’s insistence that Africans must be consulted about their own goals and aspirations also had a European dimension. As we have seen, African leaders had made this consultation the sine qua non for African participation in the European project. But the importance of African consent could also be tied to pro-Europe propaganda of the period—especially in youth and education initiatives—that aggressively proclaimed the new Europe’s liberal, tolerant, and pluralist values. That added pressure for France to make the French Union a genuinely inclusive, democratic entity: a noncolonialist France within a larger nonimperialist Europe.

This was a new register in the cultural repertoire of France’s historic civilizing mission.⁶⁵ In prewar colonial parlance, “Eurafrican” designated mixed-race people (métis).⁶⁶ Eurafrican discourse was not a common feature of either “assimilationist” or “associationist” colonial education policies. But in the 1950s, the geopolitical situation reframed the problem of difference in France and French Africa and sometimes turned conventional identifications on their head. In this era of rapid political change, many French officials were wary of overidentifying with Europe. Just a few months after the stage at Saint-Cloud, as the French parliament began to debate the European Political Community, officials in the French Foreign Affairs Ministry warned: “France is not a European power.… Her interests, her aspirations and her destiny have long extended beyond the continent.” The officials insisted, “A great future may yet await her in Africa.”⁶⁷

At the same time, African politicians who continued to try to leverage their support for the European project to secure more robust reform in the French Union proudly declared themselves committed “Europeans”—not ethnically, but politically. They found a ready welcome in the pro-Europe movements, whose interest in Eurafrica peaked in the second half of the decade. By the mid-1950s, virtually all the European movements had created special committees on Europe-Africa relations. In 1958, Hamani Diori, a former schoolmaster in Niamey, deputy and vice president of the French National Assembly, and later first president of independent Niger, delivered a speech to the European Movement’s Europe-Africa Commission. He affirmed, “We are Europeans, because we are facing the same problems,” but he quickly qualified that support: “I am telling you that we are resolutely Europeans on the strict condition that the juridical and political reform of the Franco-African Community precedes our definitive entry into the construction of Europe. European nations and the French African territories have arrived together at the same idea of a communal association at the appropriate scale for the modern world: Eurafrica.” After a long reflection on the importance of fostering mutual understanding among European and African youth, Hamani Diori concluded, “we are not presenting ourselves to European Nations as beggars, whatever our social needs may be. We come to Europe with France and through France in the hope of becoming what you have taught us to want to be: free citizens.” These remarks resonated with the French leaders of the European Youth Campaign (EYC); they reprinted Hamani Diori’s speech in its entirety in the EYC’s main publication, whose print run was in the tens of thousands.⁶⁸ Thus, as global pressures made linking Africa, through France, to the new Europe-in-the-making more appealing to some French and African leaders, long-standing questions about cultural métissage and cultural pluralism in colonial African youth and education policy took on an added “Eurafrican” valence. “Eurafrica” became an important framework for reimagining African difference in the context of an emergent modern, technical, and interconnected society.

Roland Pré, another Christian Democrat in the upper ranks of the colonial bureaucracy in the mid-1950s, also embraced this conceptual repertoire. Pré’s career perfectly captures how entangled colonial and European concerns had become. A former governor of both Gabon and Guinée, Pré was a founding member of the Union of European Federalists’ study group for “overseas” issues in Paris in 1953. Moreover, the following year, he oversaw the allocation of the second installment of FIDES, which financed youth and education initiatives in Africa. In late 1954, Pré returned to French Africa as chief administrator in Cameroon.⁶⁹ Like the European Movement, the Union of European Federalists was a transnational European political action group with its own youth wing. At the first session of its Europe-Overseas Commission, Pré urged that the group should promote more than narrowly technical and economic cooperation between Europe and Africa. He forcefully argued that they must pursue “political integration” as well if they were going to get Africans to accept the idea of Eurafrica:

African opinion will soon be torn between two poles: Eurafricanism (the integration of Africa into Europe by way of technical arrangements) and Pan-Africanism (the integration of African countries amongst themselves by way of political arrangements). In this way, the victory of Eurafricanism risks being compromised if the issue is solely approached from a technical perspective without consideration of political questions.⁷⁰

This argument did not convince everyone. Cornelius Van Rij, a Dutchman on the commission, rejected Pré’s vision of political integration for Europe and Africa for religious reasons. The Netherlands, he declared, did not envision integrating any overseas territories into united Europe precisely because “religious issues will accentuate the many difficulties” such integration raised.⁷¹

Religion was also deeply important to Pré, but he viewed it as a potential connector rather than a divider. Christianity occupied a central place in the deliberations of Pré and his colleagues in charge of deciding how to allocate FIDES money to expand education in French Africa. Under Pré’s leadership, the FIDES board characterized Eurafrica as a “civilizational choice” in favor of the Christian West over the Islamic world.⁷² Ignoring Aujoulat’s entreaty to stop regarding Africa as a blank slate, Pré and the FIDES planners framed that choice in a vacuum:

Unlike the populations of the Middle East and Asia, our populations in French Africa cannot claim a civilization of their own. Rather, they are looking to fill the void with external elements that they can adapt to their own tendencies. This is a unique opportunity we must seize, for the Eurafrican bloc, the cornerstone of this “great entity Metropole-Outre-Mer” that we are so intently trying to build, can be realized by a solid foundation: a common civilization, which is to say, Western civilization, which is nothing other than French civilization tout court.⁷³

In their view, millions of sub-Saharan Africans were awaiting “an orientation toward new forms of civilization.” Crucially, Pré and the FIDES planners believed that Islam noir had not yet taken on the “totalitarian forms that are incompatible with our civilization”—unlike in the Arab world. Indeed, they considered conditions in Africa favorable to westernization and African Islam as not posing an obstacle to that evolution. As we shall see in chapter 5, this attitude was widespread and had profound implications for colonial education policies in Muslim-majority regions in both AOF and AEF.

Africa and the European Youth Campaign

The European Youth Campaign initially focused on promoting the European Defense Community and the European Political Community. The collapse of those projects in 1954 was not only a devastating blow to more robust European political integration: it also raised doubts about the efficacy of the EYC’s tactics and strategy. In its early years, the EYC organized small-scale educational programming for young people who were already involved in organized youth movements. By 1955, a showier display of young people’s support for European integration seemed urgently needed and would require transforming the EYC from an elite movement of young cadres to a mass movement for all. To reach a wider audience, the EYC concentrated on regional and local activities “to reach out to young people where they live, work, and learn.”⁷⁴

At the same time that the EYC was pivoting to more grassroots organizing, it was also trying to redefine its objectives in light of the rapidly changing international situation. French officials in the EYC felt the upheavals wrought by decolonization in Asia and the failure of the EDC and EPC put European youth in a double bind. EYC officials feared that young people, confronted with a “heritage of failure,” were resigning themselves to withdraw from the international arena. According to Jacques Eugene, one of the French leaders of the EYC, the campaign needed to get young people involved in finding a role for Europe in world affairs, to encourage direct civic participation in the process of European integration, and to clearly outline young Europeans’ responsibilities toward “under-developed countries and the associated territories.”⁷⁵

In pursuit of that latter goal, the French section of the EYC created its own “Overseas Group,” which was presided over by Antoine Lawrence, a Guinean youth leader who was involved with a number of French youth organizations and served as the president of the US-backed World Association of Youth for most of the 1950s.⁷⁶ The founding of the group was a key step in converting the French section of the EYC to the Eurafrican cause. By 1957, the section’s official program identified its core objectives as creating a European representative assembly elected by universal suffrage and formally instituting a “Europe-Africa Community.”⁷⁷ Subsequently, Eurafrica was a recurring theme in the EYC’s journal Young Europe, which published studies on the Loi Cadre and a steady stream of reflections on the political, economic, and “ethnic” issues raised by the prospect of forging closer ties between Europe and Africa.⁷⁸

The EYC’s “Eurafrican” turn was not just rhetorical. The French section fought hard to get African students in France involved in EYC initiatives in neighboring European countries. By the end of the decade, a quarter of state-funded summer stages and exchange programs had added a European dimension to their initiatives for Africans. For example, in 1959, the Confédération Nationale de la Famille Rurale designated five places for African trainees to attend its study sessions in the Netherlands and Germany; the Fédération française des maisons de jeunes et de la culture reserved five spots for Africans in a study mission on rural life in Italy and another ten spaces for Africans to attend a six-month training session for directors of youth clubs in France, Italy, and Germany; the Organisation centrale des camps et activités de jeunesse arranged for several Africans to go to Italy for a cultural enrichment program on “Roman Civilization” and pledged to reserve spots for young Africans upon request in its network of 180 camps and youth centers across Western Europe.⁷⁹

Like the gathering at Brest that opened this book, European youth initiatives in the early 1950s had focused on getting French and European youth to envision French Africa as part of Europe. Political developments like the Loi Cadre refocused EYC officials’ attention on making sure young Africans participated in these efforts directly.⁸⁰ Jacques Eugene admitted,

It is distressing to note that until now these projects [of associating Europe and Africa] have practically only been studied by metropolitan French, or at best, by Africans of the preceding generation who have been thoroughly Frenchified [francisés]. The reactions of the younger generations, of more modest cultural development, remain to be properly studied. If this work is not done, we should fear Eurafrican projects will appear to them as a hypocritical new form of colonization. In that case, it would be a total failure.⁸¹

Henceforth, Eugene concluded, engaging African youth would be a priority.

The French section of the EYC attempted to do just that at a three-day conference in Troyes in November 1957 on the theme, “The Responsibility of Youth Toward Europe.”⁸² In a notable departure from past practice, Africans were invited to participate in the proceedings. Nabi Ibrahima Youla, a Guinean former teacher, past education director for the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (the largest African political party at the time), and member of the Social and Economic Council of the EEC, gave an impassioned speech on the role of youth in building Eurafrica. He declared that for Eurafrica to succeed, African youth must first be truly welcomed in metropolitan France—that is, they must finally achieve brassage. Summer stages and exchange programs were a step in the right direction, but Nabi Youla cautioned that organized programming would go only so far. Brassage required metropolitan French to really get to know young Africans. He exhorted his audience that it was wholly up to them to take on this responsibility: “You can do it,” he urged, “reach out to them, create contacts, overcome the difficulties.” He concluded that if his talk inspired even just one person in the audience to make the effort, it would be a real turning point. “By multiplying contacts,” he concluded, “we will create new horizons.”⁸³

Nabi Youla’s views were folded into the final recommendations of the Overseas Group. Its top two priorities were to dispel the impression that France wanted to substitute a new European “supracolonialism” for the old French model and to develop more contacts with African students in the metropole. The group’s observations and proposals on the latter point reprised many of the French bureaucrats’ tropes and tactics. The main challenge would be what the group referred to as the “psychological difficulties” of working with African youth, which the group identified as the particular African “mentality” and also the “appeal of communism.” The group posited that Africans were instinctually drawn to Communism because it resembled the “structure of the African world, with its hierarchy, taboos, and the disappearance of the individual in the collective,” rather than any reasoned ideological, political, or genuine social commitments. In light of these African qualities, group members concluded they would have to be extremely careful in how they managed their exchanges with African youth.⁸⁴

Over the course of the following year, the group organized regular conferences and “dinner-debates” on Eurafrica across France. According to one of its leaders, Louis Planchais, the group’s priority was to facilitate contacts between young Africans and metropolitan French as well as youth from the other member-states of the new EEC.⁸⁵ Planchais was quite candid about the difficulties they encountered at these events, which included a two-day “Franco-African Colloquium” in Noisy-sur-Oise with more than fifty participants. Planchais reflected at length about the challenges of frank exchanges between “young people who come from the most diverse political and religious backgrounds,” which he published as a “Letter to an African Friend” in one of the EYC’s monthly publications. The conversations at Noisy-sur-Oise, he wrote, were useful and important but quite “painful” for the young Europeans. Their African comrades were wary of Europeans, he wrote, and it was difficult for them to break through that barrier of distrust.⁸⁶

Like Laurentie a decade earlier, Planchais acknowledged that that distrust stemmed from legitimate grievances. “We know that French action in Africa has not always been positive,” he admitted. Writing in 1958, Planchais had witnessed thirteen more years of stalled reform, “endlessly postponed and distorted in application.” Nevertheless, he still launched into a vigorous defense of French colonial policy, citing the Loi Cadre and France’s “generous scholarships” as evidence. He insisted, “We believe that your very presence in metropolitan universities and the Grandes Écoles, the scholarships you receive, which are often much higher than those of French students, and the freedom of expression that you enjoy that allows you to openly criticize the action of the metropole, can be considered as so much proof that French actions in the overseas territories are not entirely negative.” Planchais admitted these remarks were tinged with “bitterness,” but he entreated his African audience not to see that as a reproach, but rather as a symptom of the “painful shock” of the encounter. He recognized it was now time for Africans to decide Africa’s fate, but he still hoped they would choose a Franco-African community and eventually a “Eurafrican” one as well.⁸⁷

In this hope, Planchais would be intensely disappointed. African students in France overwhelmingly opposed Eurafrica and passionately denounced their own politicians for entertaining the prospect. Togolese vice president of the FEANF Noé Kutuklui not only rejected the idea of Eurafrica but also incisively juxtaposed French support for European integration and the “balkanization” of Africa with the Loi Cadre. In a 1957 essay, “The Fear of the Truth,” Kutuklui called out this shocking hypocrisy in no uncertain terms: “It is no surprise that [the Loi Cadre] will lead to the formation of 13 Républiquettes. At the very moment that [the French] commit themselves to working toward European unity, they are doing everything in their power to make African unity impossible by cementing artificially imposed divisions. Vigilant youth,” Kutuklui forcefully concluded, “cannot but denounce this new form of colonialism,” whatever their elected representatives may say.⁸⁸

Some of Kutuklui’s comrades, like Samba Ndiaye, whom we met at the beginning of this chapter, focused more on the neocolonial economic relations Eurafrica would surely entail. For Ndiaye, Eurafrica amounted to nothing more than the machinations of “European capitalists.”⁸⁹ Communist militant and FEANF press secretary Joseph van den Reysen, a Congolese student with roots in both the French and Belgian Congo, agreed. His opposition to Eurafrica looked beyond the French sphere to transnational Europe. He attacked “Monsieur Europe” Paul-Henri Spaak, then serving as Belgium’s foreign minister, in the pages of the L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire. Van den Reysen questioned Spaak’s Socialism and called him out for never consulting the Congolese about whether they were interested in Eurafrica. He also compared German chancellor Konrad Adenauer to Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar and highlighted Britain’s tacit support for apartheid in South Africa.⁹⁰ For young pro-Europe activists who saw united Europe as a beacon of democracy and pluralism, such views must have been a “painful shock” indeed.

African and European Youth and Globalization

African student leaders like Ndiaye, Kutuklui, and van den Reysen vociferously denounced Eurafrica as a political and economic project. And yet, by inserting themselves in conversations about youth, development, and global transformation that were unfolding across France, Europe, and Africa, these young Africans were in many ways helping to create an Afro-European public sphere and a shared conceptual repertoire about youth, agency, pluralism, and global change. A central anchor of that repertoire was Daniel Halévy’s widely read 1948 treatise, Essay on the Acceleration of History. Halévy’s Essai was a meditation on modernity and what we would now call globalization—but it was also an aperçu of “Europe” and what distinguished Europe and Europeans from other “peoples” and civilizations. Laden with orientalist tropes about the immobility of Eastern societies, the Essai defined Europe as a fundamentally “youthful” civilization that grows, invents, and innovates: “It was in Europe that the idea to change the world originated.”⁹¹

Halévy’s tone and style are reminiscent of the Romantic historiography of the nineteenth century. In fact, the Essai begins with an extended quotation from Michelet: “The pace of time has totally changed,” Michelet wrote in 1872. “In the average man’s lifespan (typically 72 years), I have witnessed two great revolutions, which in the past, would have likely been separated by a thousand years’ interval.” This reflection, Halévy argues, was worth revisiting in 1948, a time when “the ground has disappeared beneath our feet; in fact there is no more history, just an obscure movement of peoples.”⁹² Halévy’s Essai bridges a very nineteenth-century way of thinking about historical acceleration and late-twentieth-century theories of the shifting terrains of temporality and the diffuse and impersonal “forces” associated with globalization.⁹³ The Essai asks how people could regain the reins of those forces, but Halévy did not propose a clear course of action. Nevertheless, he did provide a new vocabulary that resonated strongly with those concerned with education and the formation of youth, as well as with young people themselves.

The theme of the “acceleration of history” cut across African and European meditations on the role of youth in charting a new future for Europe and Africa in the 1950s. The quickening pace of historical change meant that the young generations would henceforth be the main drivers of history—the generation upon whose shoulders it fell to remake a changing world. In 1950, Catholic African intellectual Alioune Diop organized a conference on this theme in Saint Louis, Senegal. Diop was then representing Senegal in the French Senate, but he remained close to African student and youth milieus in both Paris and AOF. In Paris, where he had founded the influential journal and imprint Présence Africaine in 1947, Diop regularly participated in student mobilizations and, after 1951, the cultural life at the Maison de la France d’Outre-Mer. In his talk in Saint Louis, Diop ruminated on Franco-African relations in the French Union. He framed those relations in racial terms and located the problem of race in the context of a worldwide “acceleration of history,” citing Halévy’s Essai explicitly.⁹⁴

Diop opened his presentation with an extended reflection on what separates “Blacks and Whites.” He asserted, “Whites and Blacks do not understand one another” for two main reasons—one economic, the other psychological. Diop’s characterization of “the European” echoed Halévy’s: “For the European, the universe is an equation of forces endlessly put in play by the militant and constituent will of man.” Diop continued, “the European” seeks a permanent revolution in given institutions and constantly strives to transcend them. Whereas “for the Black,” the purpose of life is to prosper within and through extant institutions, religion, natural laws, and “the heritage of our ancestors.” And so, Diop went on, “our aspirations are not constituted in the same way, or in the same style. What can remedy this incomprehension?”⁹⁵

Diop then exclaimed, “Pluralism, is what they propose to us!” But in that very concept, Diop found yet another layer of “misunderstanding” between whites and Blacks. “In fact, there has never been pluralism without assimilation,” and it was always Africans who were expected to assimilate, not the other way around. Rather than reject genuine pluralism as a pipe dream, Diop insisted it was imperative to find a new balance, precisely considering the seemingly inevitable future of global integration. He declared, “This pluralist association concerns the equilibrium of the world. History, in its turbulent trail, demands and awakens urgent reflection in both groups. For history is moving fast.” Diop’s concluding exhortation was for Africans to confront this reality and liberate themselves from older, colonial ways of thinking about preparing Africans to take control of their own destinies. Africans must be “equipped” (équipé)—rather than “educated” (éduqué)—with the same acuity and frenetic energy as that cultivated in young Europeans. Diop was optimistic that African youth could make this happen, and he ended by cheering on young Africans and their aspirations.⁹⁶

African students in Diop’s orbit in Paris embraced this message. The same theme and vocabulary were picked up by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, a prominent Catholic student leader in France from Dahomey who frequently published in Tam-Tam. In a 1955 piece entitled, “Pioneers or Mandarins?” Ki-Zerbo reflected on the crucial role African students in France would play in building Africa’s future, not only by returning home to contribute to the development of the local economy but also in forging links between Africa and the rest of the world. Ki-Zerbo anchored the recent history of “encounters between Europe and Africa” in the mobilization of African troops in World War II, when “black heroes went to die on the ‘front of liberty’ to defend the world, all of the world, against a Racism elevated to a state religion.” He continued, “Then crowds of young blacks were given access to Universities and Schools in the metropole—a second encounter, and those who find themselves in that position have a special responsibility.”⁹⁷ Ki-Zerbo stressed that since the tax dollars of their compatriots back in Africa sent them to France and subsidized their studies, African students in France owed it to their fellow Africans—not the French—to master a profession that would be “useful” for Africa.

Ki-Zerbo had a broad view of the significance of growing numbers of African students in France. He declared, “It is up to us to make this influx of African students to Europe a historic phenomenon, that is, a turning point in the development of the black world, rather than a random bit of miscellany.” According to him, that would depend on whether they chose to be “pioneers” or “mandarins,” that is, what they chose to do with their new educations. Ki-Zerbo framed the urgency of that choice specifically in the context of historical acceleration. He wrote, “In an era when airplanes allow the colonizers to streamline their commercial operations and to gain ever more time, can we convince the colonized that this ‘acceleration’ is made for them? Technology is a shortcut that we too can seize.” However, Ki-Zerbo warned that technological prowess also threatened to annihilate “all that remains of black culture.” On this point, he added, “Human progress has accelerated also for moral, ideological and spiritual discoveries that we must also draw inspiration from.… We cannot build Africa if we bring the virus eating away at western civilization back with us.” In a prescient critique of technocracy and overspecialization, Ki-Zerbo continued: “Whoever today proposes a five-year plan for African development will be handicapped tomorrow by the blinkers of his ‘specialty’.… We must be vigilant in opposing the spirit of profit and egotistical individualism that is already infecting Africa.” He concluded with an appeal to Africans of his generation to imagine, invent, and create. The task of his generation, he exhorted, was not to continue “to ruminate in the abstract on theories about Négritude” but rather “to get to work, without delay.”⁹⁸

The sense that there was no time to lose also inspired reflections about youth in pro-Europe circles. Writing in the main publication of the Union of European Federalists’ youth wing in 1954, the leader of the movement, Max Richard, invoked Halévy and the acceleration of history in a meditation on the distinctiveness of European culture and European conceptions of democracy and freedom. For Richard, youth had to steel themselves against not only Soviet Communism and Islamism but also US hegemony. He called on young Europeans to resist the mounting forces of Americanization: “It is out of the question to adopt an American way of life, to become American colonies. We will conserve, we will elaborate our own European way of life if we learn to unite as Europeans.”⁹⁹ The preservation of a “European way of life” in the face of historical acceleration and global integration was an important part of the rationale for creating properly transnational European universities. A year after Richard’s cri d’alarme, Michel Mouskhély, French delegate to the Council of Europe, elaborated on this theme in a special session of the European Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg. Mouskhély suggested that European universities would prepare rising generations of Europeans to tackle new situations as they arose. He declared, “With the acceleration of the rhythm of history, every day we will be confronted with unexpected challenges.” He lamented an “intellectual laziness” that looked to “nineteenth-century solutions” to address twentieth-century problems. That laziness held them hostage to the nation-state, “even though current realities are brutally pushing us toward international and supranational entities.” European universities, Mouskhély concluded, would provide Europe with the “spiritual infrastructure” to forge ahead into an uncertain future.¹⁰⁰

Proposals to create a European university stalled in the mid-1950s. When the project was revived a decade later, the theme of historical acceleration was even more pronounced. In a widely circulated Council of Europe report, French youth specialist Jean Jousselin (who, as it happens, had represented the Protestant scouts in Vichy’s Secretariat of Youth during the war) identified the acceleration of history as the determinant factor that produced “youth” as a distinct social category and turned young people into a new social and political force, both domestically and on the world stage.¹⁰¹ He wrote, “Technical civilization is a civilization of youth and it will be so ever more with each passing day. Henceforth, the young person knows and even understands more … than his elder.” In this sense, “the effect of the acceleration of history is the source of a rupture in the dialogue between adults and young people, and consequently, a radical transformation of youth.” This “new” youth required different institutions and the structural transformation of society. That assessment was borne out just a few years later in the May 1968 student uprisings across Europe and ex-French Africa that led to the massive overhaul of higher education on both continents.¹⁰²

The generational conflict between youth and their elders in Europe ignited by historical acceleration was not quite the same as that between French-educated African youth and the traditional African gerontocracy, but French colonial officials stressed the similarities. In a 1957 article entitled “From the Africa of Yesterday to That of Tomorrow,” veteran colonial official Robert Delavignette pinned Africa’s prospects on an alliance between French and African youth. He wrote, “Eight and a half million children and adolescents are returning to class in European France.… It is banal to say that this youth constitutes France’s great hope.” He continued:

[That youth] is charged with building a less inhuman world.… Who doubts that [that youth] is already interdependent with another youth, which does not always have schools, and yet has its own ways of being and its own aspirations. Who doesn’t dream of that beautiful and necessary common future of which metropolitan youth and the youth of black Africa, both carriers of hope, are the key elements?

Like Ki-Zerbo, Delavignette opposed an obsession with Negritude and the precolonial African past with a more future-oriented outlook. It was important to celebrate Africa’s rich history, but he hoped that would not “lock African youth in an impasse, in which it would lose time, at a moment when there is no time to lose if men of all colors and all races want to learn to live together.”¹⁰³ Delavignette ended his piece with a forceful affirmation that Africans themselves had to deal with Africa’s problems, but he also insisted those problems were also French and European problems. Indeed, he declared, “these are problems of human relations within a universal civilization that is more and more mechanized, these are problems of psychological equilibrium amidst disruptive technologies.” He concluded, “We are all equal before the unknowns [these problems] bring. We all must study them and free ourselves of old superiority and inferiority complexes. Neither Europe nor Africa holds the solutions. But the youth of Europe and the youth of Africa must work together to humanize the atomic age that has descended on us.”¹⁰⁴ With these words, Delavignette acknowledged—albeit obliquely—the need to overcome the ongoing legacies of colonial domination based on racial hierarchies if not just French but also European and African youth were to build a future together under the conditions of historical acceleration.

Over the course of the 1950s, the promise of pluralism and brassage waned, leaving in its wake a toxic stew of disappointed hopes, political resentment, and new patterns of racialization and institutional inequality. This set the stage for a more radical conceptual shift with African independence and deepening European integration in the 1960s. These two world-historical developments became entwined in more ambitious European cultural policy with the launching of the Council of Europe’s European Cultural Fund in 1960. A successor to the EYC, which by then was defunct, the European Cultural Fund homed in on education and youth development as crucial vehicles for further European cooperation. The fund identified the “presentation of Europe to non-Europeans” as one of its key mandates. Its executive board affirmed, “One of our main tasks must be to make quite clear the part Europe must play in a world in which its former supremacy is giving way to cultural pluralism.” This global pluralism was characterized by “the great difficulties that arise from the inevitable conflict between our liberal and technical culture and the traditional cultures of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.” In this formulation, there was a singular “Europe,” and there was the rest of the world: “European civilization should be presented to the outside world as a single unit embodying national variations. There can be no point of contact between French, English or Italian national culture and a completely different civilization such as that of India or Mexico. Europe as a whole must be presented as a single entity to the rest of the world.”¹⁰⁵

Africa was of particular concern because France had locked European institutions into providing technical aid to its former African colonies.¹⁰⁶ The board asserted in no uncertain terms its view that those countries had acquired “premature and perhaps somewhat precarious independence.” Nevertheless, the fund would not renege on its commitments and would continue training European technicians to send to Africa. The fund would also publicize European unity to African students and trainees in Europe:

Although Great Britain and France have long been aware of the problems raised by the presence of temporary residents from distant countries, the general situation has changed considerably in recent years, and responsibility towards these visitors is no longer national but European; they no longer come to France, Germany, or Italy, but to Europe, and they must be given an opportunity to gain a true picture of Europe as a whole.

It was hoped this kind of pan-European education campaign directed at students from former colonies would overcome the legacies of colonialism. Since the “overseas peoples” had obtained independence, “they tend[ed] to hold hostile prejudices to their former masters. Only by encouraging the peoples of the new states to consider Europe as a whole will this uneasiness be dispelled.”¹⁰⁷ Thus already in 1960, the year of African independence, institutions like the European Cultural Fund were actively reframing the issue of receiving African students from France’s former empire in a transnational European perspective.

That process continued to unfold in a series of colloquia organized by the Council of Europe over the next several years. At a session held in Paris in January 1964, French delegates stressed the need for shifting French thinking about students from France’s former empire into a transnational European frame: “A Senegalese, a Cambodian, a Moroccan, an Algerian—they are all foreigners, even though the French are reluctant to apply that label because they all speak French.” In this formulation, language is singled out as the only reason for this “reluctance,” erasing not just the postwar experiment of Franco-African integration but all of France’s colonial history. The delegates further pressed the issue by noting that Tunisians or Vietnamese might speak French even though they have their own national languages, while French was the national language everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, confusing matters further still. “Despite these nuances,” the delegates insisted, “it is necessary to speak of ‘foreign’ students and trainees for francophone Africans, as for Americans or Latin Americans.”¹⁰⁸

Participants at the colloquium also drew attention to the percentages of foreign students in different European countries. In Britain and France, approximately two-thirds of all “foreign students” came from former colonies. In France, most of those students were North African and sub-Saharan African: 45 percent of all “foreign students” in France were listed as coming from Africa, whereas only 21 percent were listed as coming from Western Europe. These statistics raised concerns that there was a decline in the percentage of European students “in favor of Africans.” Commentary on those students’ attitudes and social milieus noted a latent hostility among former colonial students toward their ex-metropoles. Consequently, participants suggested that countries without colonies like Germany were attracting more students from developing countries precisely because they were not a (recent) colonial power.¹⁰⁹ In their concluding report, participants noted that Africans in France, “despite a certain reluctance,” had been welcomed in France and “only very rarely” showed real hostility toward the French. And yet, the report also acknowledged that racism among host populations was real. This phenomenon was both externalized as a particularly acute problem in Germany and totally naturalized—as if the mere presence of Africans explained hostility or aversion toward them in and of itself. The authors suggested that since there were few students of color in Germany before 1950, the “reserve” but also the “curiosity” that these students inspired in the German population was an “obvious, natural reaction.”¹¹⁰ As Heide Fehrenbach has shown, the naturalization of racial conflict anchored a particular strand of racial liberalism that took root in postwar Germany under US occupation.¹¹¹ Shifting the register of the now decades-long discussion about youth, race, and pluralism from a Franco-African imperial context to the transnational European plane further encouraged the eclipse of brassage and the ascendancy of that “race relations” model in late twentieth-century France. The transformation of African student-citizens of the French Union to “foreign students in Europe” was complete.

1. 1. Tableaux statistiques, Première Partie, Enseignement Outre-Mer: Bulletin de l’Inspection-Générale de l’enseignement et de la jeunesse du Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer (December 1950): 37–41, ANOM: BIB AOM 20505/1950.

2. 2. Foster, African Catholic, 128.

3. 3. For a description of this practice, see “Premier Novembre,” Bulletin Mensuel de l’Association des Étudiants Congolais, no. 7 (December 1954), ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/280.

4. 4. Fabienne Guimont, Les étudiants africains en France, 1950–1965 (L’Harmattan, 1997), chap. 2.

5. 5. Michel Sot, ed., Étudiants africains en France, 1951–2001: Cinquante ans de relations France-Afrique, quel avenir? (Paris: Karthala, 2002); Françoise Blum, “Transfers of Knowledge, Multiple Identities: The Example of Students from the FEANF (Fédération des Étudiants d’Afrique Noire en France),” African Identities 16, no. 2 (2018): 130–145, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2018.1449719; Blum, “L’indépendance sera révolutionnaire ou ne sera pas: Étudiants africains en France contre l’ordre colonial,” Cahiers d’histoire: Revue d’histoire critique 126 (2015): 119–238, https://doi.org/10.4000/chrhc.4165; Louisa Rice, “Between Empire and Nation: Francophone West African Students and Decolonization,” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2013.764106; Amady Aly Dieng, Les premiers pas de la Fédération des Étudiants d’Afrique noire en France (1950–1955): De l’Union française à Bandoung (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); Pierre Nkwengue, L’union nationale des étudiants du Kamerun: Ou la contribution des étudiants africains à l’émancipation de l’Afrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005).

6. 6. I discuss Senghor and Eurafrica in the introduction.

7. 7. Samba Ndiaye, “Nouvelle mesure arbitraire,” L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire, no. 11 (April 1957), reprinted in Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 207.

8. 8. Lena de Faramond, “De Jeunes Africains Parlent,” Pensée française-fédération, special issue, “Jeunesses d’Afrique Noire,” no. 3 (January 15, 1957): 27, ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324.

9. 9. Brassage was a recurrent theme in Houphouët-Boigny’s successful campaign to expand exchange programs for Africans in France during school breaks. See, for instance, his letter to the minister of national education, December 7, 1956, AN: F17/15727.

10. 10. Antoine Yaméogo, “Plaidoyer pour l’Étudiant Africain,” Tam-Tam, deuxième année, no. 4 (April 1953), Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF). Yaméogo’s reflections on Europe and racism in the 1950s may have proved formative later in his career. He represented Upper Volta in the negotiations with the EEC that led to the Yaoundé Accords (1963) and, in the late 1970s, was a key figure in the campaign to get the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to stop lending to apartheid South Africa.

11. 11. Yaméogo, “Plaidoyer pour l’Étudiant Africain,” Tam-Tam, BNF, 10.

12. 12. Présidence du Conseil, Haut Comité de la Jeunesse de France et d’Outre-Mer, Groupe de travail “Contacts entre jeunes de France et d’Outre-Mer,” January 1957, AN: F17/15727.

13. 13. See, for instance, “Les Étudiants d’Outre-Mer en France,” IFOP, November 1960, CAC: 19771275/28.

14. 14. Tableaux Statistiques in the Bulletin de l’Inspection-Générale de l’Enseignement et de la Jeunesse du Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer, ANOM: BIB AOM/20505/1950-1958.

15. 15. See “Le Logement des Étudiants d’Outre-Mer,” in UNEF Informations—Outre-Mer (1958), BNF.

16. 16. Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 191–196. I return to Sadji’s tortuous path to study German in chapter 5.

17. 17. Maurice Voisin, “Si Nous Parlions un peu de la Situation des Étudiants Africains,” Les Échos de l’Afrique Noire, June 29, 1953. Reprinted in Tam-Tam, troisième année, no. 1 (November–December 1953), 15–18, BNF.

18. 18. Letter from Annie Gacon to M. le Chef de Cabinet de M. le ministre de l’Éducation Nationale, May 14, 1952, AN: F/17/17768.

19. 19. Annie Gacon, “La Propagande communiste en Afrique Noire: Choses vues et entendues à un meeting ‘d’étudiants’ à Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal,” Climats (October 30–November 5, 1952), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2199.

20. 20. Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation, 90–91.

21. 21. For the founding documents of the Maison, see ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2265. On local foyers des étudiants africains, see ANS: 18G/211 (160). For heated exchanges between the colonial and education ministries on the creation of the foyers in the early 1950s, see AN: F/17/17768.

22. 22. Akira Iriye links the founding of the Cité U to the League of Nation’s Eurocentric initiatives in interwar international intellectual cooperation. See Iriye, Cultural Internationalism. The vast majority of pavilions from the interwar period were European, though the United States and Latin America were also well represented.

23. 23. On the extensive surveillance of students from AOF, both during their time in France and when they returned home, see multiple dossiers: ANS: 17G/269 (111), 17G/604 (152), O/666, O/668 and O/669 (31), 21G/210 (178); and ANOM: 1/AFFPOL/2265, 1/AFFPOL/2395, 1/AFFPOL/2398.

24. 24. Billères-Defferre correspondence, March 20 and April 5, 1956, AN: F17/15727.

25. 25. For correspondence, administrative reports, and budgets, see the dossier “Maison de la France d’Outre-Mer—subventions AOF—1953–1958,” ANS: 18G/211 (160). For the postcolonial era, see dossiers on the Office de Coopération et d’Accueil Universitaire, successor of the Office des Étudiants d’Outre-Mer, in CAC: 19780596/42. See also Sot, Étudiants africains en France.

26. 26. “Les Étudiants d’Outre-Mer en France,” IFOP, November 1960, CAC: 19771275/28. None of the female African students polled had married French men.

27. 27. Faramond, “De Jeunes Africains Parlent,” 30, ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324.

28. 28. Bernard Dadié, Un nègre à Paris (Paris: Éditions Présence Africaine, 1959), 183.

29. 29. Rapport de M. Lamy Roger sur les stages ruraux, undated (c. 1957), CAC: 19860445/2.

30. 30. Faramond, “De Jeunes Africains Parlent,” 25, ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324.

31. 31. Faramond, “De Jeunes Africains Parlent,” 29, ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324.

32. 32. Jobs, Riding the New Wave, 32–33.

33. 33. Faramond, “De Jeunes Africains Parlent,” 30, ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324.

34. 34. Dossier “Réponses à la circulaire ministérielle du 15 janvier 1960,” CAC: 19770181/6; Letter from Recteur Clermont-Ferrand to HJCS, May 9, 1960, CAC: 19860445/6.

35. 35. Letter from Doyen de la Faculté de Médecine to the Recteur de l’Académie de Bordeaux, February 19, 1960, CAC: 19860445/6. See also the response from the rector at the University of Nancy in the Dossier “Réponses,” CAC: 19860445/6.

36. 36. Letter from Jean Brethe de la Gressaye to Doyen Garrigou-Lagrange, February 27, 1960, CAC: 19860445/6.

37. 37. Letter from Lucien Martin to Doyen Garrigou-Lagrange, February 15, 1960, CAC: 19860445/6.

38. 38. Note à l’attention de M. le HCJS a/s projet d’établissement de contacts entre des étudiants africains et la population de Villefranche de Rouergue (Aveyron), undated; Directeur de l’Office des Étudiants d’Outre-Mer à Délégué Académique, Dir-BUS, May 3, 1960, CAC: 19860445/5.

39. 39. See Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler; Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

40. 40. Présidence du Conseil, Haut Comité de la Jeunesse de France et d’Outre-Mer, Groupe de travail “Contacts entre jeunes de France et d’Outre-Mer,” January 1957, AN: F17/15727.

41. 41. Rapport de M. Lamy Roger sur les stages ruraux, undated (c. 1957), CAC: 19860445/2.

42. 42. Annexe II: Les Stagiaires d’Afrique Noire disent au revoir à leurs Amis Bourguignons, signed Bagouro Noumansana, undated, CAC: 19860445/2. Noumansana became a top agricultural engineer in independent Mali. The exchanges did indeed produce a new African elite.

43. 43. See my “Obscuring Race.”

44. 44. Jobs, Riding the New Wave.

45. 45. R. Mawlawé, “Sommes-nous anti-Français?,” L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire, nouvelle série, no 3 (April 1956), ANS: 21G/209 (178).

46. 46. Laurent Dubois has long observed that it was people in France’s colonies that concretized the promise of French revolutionary values in their most radical and egalitarian forms. See his Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1794–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

47. 47. For a lucid analysis of these dynamics today, see Derald Wing Sue, Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010). I discuss African students’ keen and prescient perceptions of how racism actually worked in France’s postwar empire based on their lived experience in France at greater length elsewhere. See Emily Marker, “African Youth on the Move in Postwar Greater France: Experiential Knowledge and Decolonial Politics at the End of Empire,” Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 3, no. 2 (Fall 2019), 283–303, https://doi.org/10.1086/704620.

48. 48. Isabelle Tévoedjrè, “Les étudiants ‘métropolitains’ et nous,” L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire, nouvelle série, no 3 (April 1956), ANS: 21G/209 (178).

49. 49. Such critiques often proved too much for French officials, who seized multiple editions of L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire that year. African students aggressively protested to their political representatives in Paris and made appeals to international youth organizations, which eventually led to the journal’s reinstatement. Lettre ouverte à Guy Mollet du Bureau exécutif du Bloc Populaire Sénégalais: “Laissez Paraître L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire,” March 18, 1957, ANS: 17G/596 (152). I return to this in chapter 5.

50. 50. Albert Tévoedjrè, L’Afrique révoltée (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958).

51. 51. Albert Tévoedjrè, “Un écho des étudiants africains catholiques de France: Discours adressé à son excellence Mgr. Garronne, Archevêque-Co-Adjuteur de Toulouse au nom des Étudiants d’Outre-Mer,” Jeunesse d’Afrique: Organe mensuel de l’Association des Étudiants catholiques de Dakar, no. 3 (June–July 1955): 8, ANOM: BIB SOM POM/b/275.

52. 52. Thomas Diop, “Problèmes philosophiques et religieux,” Pensée française-fédération no. 3, special issue, “Jeunesses d’Afrique Noire” (January 15, 1957): 20–21, ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324. I discuss this topic at length in chapter 5.

53. 53. Diop, “Problèmes philosophiques et religieux,” 23, ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324.

54. 54. Dadié, Un nègre à Paris, 25.

55. 55. Dadié, Un nègre à Paris, 30. My interpretation draws on an excellent master’s thesis by Nicole Cesare, “An African in Paris … and New York and Rome: Bernard Dadié and the Postcolonial Travel Narrative” (master’s thesis, Villanova University, 2007).

56. 56. Dadié, Un nègre à Paris, 182–183.

57. 57. Dadié, Un nègre à Paris, 206.

58. 58. Ousmane Socé Diop, Intervention faite à Strasbourg par M. Ousmane Socé Diop, Sénateur du Sénégal, Délégué de la France au Conseil de l’Europe a/s le Plan Schuman, August 22, 1950, AMAE: K-Afrique, 1944-1952-Généralités, 53.

59. 59. Cited in Supplément a/s la Communauté politique européenne, unsigned, Perspectives, November 14, 1953, 7, AN: C//15913.

60. 60. Louis-Paul Aujoulat, “Avant-Propos,” Bulletin de l’Inspection-Générale de l’Enseignement et de la Jeunesse du Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer, no. 3 (April 1952), ANOM: BIB AOM/20505/1952.

61. 61. “Conférence donnée le 8 juillet 1952 devant les Stagiaires de Saint Cloud par Dr. Aujoulat,” reprinted in Bulletin de l’Inspection-Générale de l’Enseignement et de la Jeunesse du Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer, no. 4 (December 1952) (emphasis in original), ANOM: BIB AOM/20505/1952.

62. 62. “Conférence donnée le 8 juillet 1952 … par Dr. Aujoulat,” ANOM: BIB AOM/20505/1952.

63. 63. “Conférence donnée le 8 juillet 1952 … par Dr. Aujoulat,” ANOM: BIB AOM/20505/1952.

64. 64. “Conférence donnée le 8 juillet 1952 … par Dr. Aujoulat,” ANOM: BIB AOM/20505/1952.

65. 65. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize; Bryant, Education as Politics; Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State. Wilder emphasizes the newness of Senghor’s postwar vision of Eurafrica in a contribution to the edited volume Black France/France Noire.

66. 66. Saada, Les enfants de la colonie; Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “Miss Eurafrica: Men, Women’s Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (September 2011): 568–593, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41305885.

67. 67. Direction Générale-Affaires Politiques, Direction-Afrique, “Note sur la position des territoires français d’outre-mer dans la question de l’intégration européenne,” October 14, 1952, AMAE: K-Afrique, 1944-1952-Généralités, 53.

68. 68. Hamani Diori, “Le Pari du Siècle: France—Europe—Afrique,” Les Cahiers de Jeune Europe, no. 4 (Supplément à Jeune Europe no. 7, March 1, 1958): 13–16, BNF.

69. 69. In Cameroon, Pré acquired a reputation as a fanatical crusader against African nationalists. The “massacre of May” 1955 in Cameroon occurred during his tenure. See Martin Atangana, The End of French Rule in Cameroon (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010), 53.

70. 70. Procès-verbal des débats de la Commission Europe-Outre-Mer, UEF, Paris, July 3–4, 1953, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2314.

71. 71. Procès-verbal des débats de la Commission Europe-Outre-Mer, UEF, Paris, July 3–4, 1953, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2314.

72. 72. James Chappel argues that by 1950, the more open, pluralist strand of social Catholicism associated with Jacques Maritain and his associates had been thoroughly eclipsed by the “Defenders of the West” in Catholic federalist circles, including the Union of European Federalists. Chappel, Catholic Modern, chap. 4.

73. 73. Commission Roland Pré, “L’Afrique à la recherche d’une civilisation: Orient ou occident?,” February 1954, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2260.

74. 74. “Note sur les objectifs et méthodes des ‘États-Généraux de la Jeunesse d’Europe’ 1957,” January 19, 1955, 1, AHUE: ME-1458.

75. 75. Jacques Eugene, “Déclaration-Programme,” January 19, 1955, AHUE: ME-1458.

76. 76. Lawrence was sharply criticized by more radical African youth leaders as a lackey of the colonial regime and the Americans. It is surely not a coincidence that he was involved with the WAY and the EYC, which were both sponsored by the United States. On the eve of independence, Kane Ali Bokar, president of the Federal Council of Youth of AOF, described Lawrence’s position as president of the WAY as “pure demagoguery.… It was just necessary to hire a nègre to prove that the WAY was not racist.” Extraits du Rapport moral de Kane Ali Bokar concernant le Conseil de Jeunesse de l’Union Française, UNEF Informations—Outre-Mer 1958, Annexe II, 73, BNF.

77. 77. Jacques Eugene, “Rapport Général,” Comité National d’Action Jeune du Mouvement Européen, Secrétariat Français de la Campagne Européenne de la Jeunesse, June 28, 1957, 60, AHUE: EN-2703.

78. 78. Eugene, “Rapport Général,” 55–56, AHUE: EN-2703.

79. 79. See the folder “Dossier Échanges France Outre-Mer, 1959,” CAC: 19860445/2.

80. 80. The EEC created its own “Bureau Liaison France-Afrique-Europe,” which was also headquartered in Paris. See AHUE: BAC003/1965-28. Some of the faculty mentors discussed earlier in the chapter got funding from the bureau to take their African mentees on educational trips to EEC countries. For instance, one of the Bordelais law professors received support to take students to Berlin. Letter from Lucien Martin to the HCJS, May 31, 1960, CAC: 19860445/6.

81. 81. Eugene, “Rapport Général,” 26 (emphasis in original), AHUE: EN-2703.

82. 82. Rapport d’orientation, “Éléments pour une nouvelle étape,” Les cahiers de Jeune Europe, no. 1 (supplément au Jeune Europe, no. 1, nouvelle série, December 1957), BNF.

83. 83. Nabi Ibrahima Youla, “L’Eurafrique, une communauté librement consentie,” Les cahiers de Jeune Europe, no. 1 (December 1957): 13, BNF.

84. 84. “Rapport de la commission ‘outre-mer,’ ” Les cahiers de Jeune Europe, no. 1 (December 1957): 14, BNF.

85. 85. Louis Planchais, “Bilan des activités de la CEJ,” undated, AHUE: ME-185.

86. 86. Louis Planchais, “Lettre à un ami africain,” Les Cahiers de Jeune Europe, no. 3, “L’espace Europe-Afrique” (supplément au Jeune Europe, no. 5, nouvelle série, February 1, 1958): 13–14, BNF.

87. 87. Planchais, “Lettre à un ami africain,” 13–14.

88. 88. Noé Kutuklui, “La peur de la vérité,” L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire, nouvelle série, no. 10 (March 1957), partially reprinted in Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 203–204.

89. 89. Ndiaye, “Nouvelle mesure arbitraire,” reprinted in Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière.

90. 90. Joseph van den Reysen, “L’Eurafrique, le Marché Commun et quelques autres projets,” L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire, nouvelle série, no. 8 (January 1957), reprinted in Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 211.

91. 91. Daniel Halévy, Essai sur l’accélération de l’histoire (Paris: Editions Self, 1948), 45, 60.

92. 92. Halévy, Essai, 1, 12.

93. 93. “The acceleration of history” is the opening line of Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520. François Hartog acknowledges the provenance of the phrase in his Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 123–124. Reinhardt Koselleck also took up this issue in a 1976 essay translated and republished in High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity, ed. Harmut Rosa and William E. Sheuerman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

94. 94. Alioune Diop, “Pour que Noirs et Blancs se comprennent,” résumé d’une conférence organisée à Saint-Louis par la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, December 23, 1950, ANS: 21G/172 (144). On Diop’s politics and activities in this period, see Foster, African Catholic, chap. 2.

95. 95. Diop, “Pour que Noirs et Blancs se comprennent,” ANS: 21G/172 (144).

96. 96. Diop, “Pour que Noirs et Blancs se comprennent,” ANS: 21G/172 (144).

97. 97. Joseph Ki-Zerbo, “Pionniers ou Mandarins?,” Tam-Tam, deuxième année, no. 5 (May 1955): 5, BNF. Ki-Zerbo also features prominently in Foster’s work. See African Catholic, chap. 4.

98. 98. Ki-Zerbo, “Pionniers ou Mandarins?,” Tam-Tam, BNF. This piece was widely read among African students in France and the territories. It was cited at length in a similar reflection by Senegalese student Pape Soulaye Ndiaye, “L’étudiant africain et la notion d’élite,” which was published in Dakar-Étudiant shortly thereafter and reprinted in full in Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnère, 186–188.

99. 99. Max Richard, “Justice et réconciliation dans la transformation de la société,” Jeunesses européennes fédéralistes (September 15, 1954), AHUE: UEF-176.

100. 100. Michel Mouskhély, “Les Universités et la communauté spirituelle de l’Europe,” Rapport présenté à la 2ème réunion spéciale a/s universités européennes, Assemblée consultative du Conseil de l’Europe, Commission des Questions Culturelles et Scientifiques, June 11–13, 1955, AN: 70/AJ/27.

101. 101. Jean Jousselin, Comité de l’Education Extrascolaire, Conseil de l’Europe, “L’Organisation de la Jeunesse en Europe,” Tome 1, Strasbourg, January 12, 1965, CAC: 19780596/66.

102. 102. For a transnational Franco-African perspective on May 1968, see Hendrickson, Decolonizing 1968. The “acceleration of history” became a common refrain in the Association of European Teacher’s meeting to draft a “Charter of European Education,” which was held in Brussels just weeks before the May 1968 uprisings. AHUE: AEDE-23.

103. 103. Robert Delavignette, “De l’Afrique d’hier à celle de demain,” Pensée française-fédération, special issue: “Jeunesses d’Afrique Noire,” no. 3 (January 15, 1957): 4–8 (emphasis added), ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324.

104. 104. Robert Delavignette, “De l’Afrique d’hier,” 8, ANOM: BIB SOM C/BR/3324.

105. 105. Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, 12th Ordinary Session, Resolution 186 (1960) in reply to the First Report of the Administrative Board of the Cultural Fund, CAC: 19770181/1.

106. 106. Véronique Dimier, “Bringing the Neo-patrimonial State Back to Europe: French Decolonization and the Making of European Development Aid Policy,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 48 (2008): 433–457, https://www.fes.de/index.php?eID=dumpFile&t=f&f=46875&token=b7cbf72149fd16efd967b632d62d31d4914fb944.

107. 107. First Report of the Administrative Board of the Cultural Fund, CAC: 19770181/1.

108. 108. Accueil et Séjour en Europe des Étudiants et Stagiaires Étrangers: Étude comparative sur leur accueil et leur orientation du point de vue social, linguistique, pédagogique et technique dans les pays membres du Conseil de l’Europe,” undated, CAC: 19771275/28.

109. 109. On ex-colonial students in Germany, see Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham and Oxford: Duke University Press, 2012).

110. 110. Accueil et Séjour en Europe des Étudiants et Stagiaires Étrangers: Étude comparative sur leur accueil et leur orientation du point de vue social, linguistique, pédagogique et technique dans les pays membres du Conseil de l’Europe,” undated, CAC: 19771275/28.

111. 111. Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler.