Introduction

Postwar Empire and United Europe: An Entangled History

The overarching historiographical intervention of this book is simple: that histories of African decolonization and European integration cannot be isolated from one another. The intensity, breadth, and long-term consequences of France’s efforts to reconcile its commitments to its old African empire and the new Europe are obscured in conventional accounts of twentieth-century European history, which present World War II as a watershed when European powers, with the ambiguous exception of Britain, renounced their claims to world domination and abandoned their colonial vocations.¹⁰ In these narratives, the brutality and devastation of the war shattered Europe’s “civilizational confidence” such that continental leaders turned inward to focus on securing peace and prosperity within Europe.¹¹ Though many European powers continued to control vast territories overseas after the war, it was clear to all—so this line of thinking goes—that the age of empire was over in 1945; the only remaining question was how Europe could extract itself from its colonial entanglements as quickly, cheaply, and peaceably as possible. In this telling, then, European leaders felt they had to pursue European union over empire. The only relation posited between the two is sequential: first there was empire, then there was Europe. This narrative effectively detaches the history of colonialism from the history of European integration. The result, as Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson cheekily observe, is a whiggish history of the European Union (EU) in which the European project is spared the taint of associations with colonialism in the past that could add weight to accusations of European neocolonialism in the present.¹²

Contrary to this general European narrative, the French case underscores that postwar leaders were trying to remake the European and colonial worlds simultaneously. It throws into relief the ways in which united Europe and postwar empire were not merely contemporaneous, parallel projects but fundamentally interconnected historical processes, whose points of intersection profoundly shaped the contours of decolonization and the longer trajectory of European integration. More instructive than exceptional, the particularities of France’s wartime experience and postwar reconstruction across Europe and Africa help illuminate this “entangled history.”¹³

After the humiliation of military defeat and the indignity of the collaborationist Vichy regime (1940–1944), France emerged from the war more attached to its empire, not less, in Africa especially. As Eric Jennings has shown, with the metropole under German occupation in the north and the racist Vichy government in the south, for four long years “Free France”—the good, republican France—was French Africa.¹⁴ French African labor sustained the Free French war effort, and French African troops played a vital role in the liberation of European France. Consequently, when African colonial subjects started making demands for more political rights and social equality in the increasingly anticolonial international climate of the postwar conjuncture, French leaders listened. They responded with a massive overhaul of colonial governance in a bid to keep French Africa French, and African political participation became one of the basic premises of France’s postwar democracy.

The contours of that participation were both groundbreaking and severely limited. A small group of French Africans took part in the constituent assemblies (1945–1946) that wrote the postwar republic’s constitution and built the political architecture of the French Union. Many more then served at every level of representative government in African and European France for the duration of the Fourth Republic (1946–1958), from new local assemblies in their home territories and federal councils in Brazzaville and Dakar to the national parliament in Paris. Some even served on French delegations to international organizations, including the earliest European institutions. Léopold Senghor and his Senegalese counterpart in the French Senate, Ousmane Socé Diop, for instance, represented France for more than a decade in the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg, where they fought for the equitable inclusion of French Africa in the new Europe.¹⁵ In all of these local, national, and international bodies, French Africans contested colonial relations of power and confronted their metropolitan and European colleagues on issues of racism and structural inequality—face-to-face, as ostensible equals—for the first time.¹⁶

Such extensive African representation within and beyond the empire was unprecedented in modern colonial history, but it was also discriminatory by design.¹⁷ Separate electoral colleges were established in France’s African territories, one for whites and the few Africans with French civil status and another for everyone else. The collège européen, as it was commonly known, often comprised fewer than two thousand individuals in territories with African populations in the hundreds of thousands. The dual electorate ensured that at least half of the parliamentary delegations from French Africa were made up of white Frenchmen, typically Christian Democrats, who acted on behalf of minuscule settler populations, colonial business interests, and the Christian missions. This foundational inequity was compounded by the disproportionate total number of deputies allocated to the African territories in the National Assembly, the lone chamber of the French parliament with legislative power. The territories had a greater (though still not proportional) stake in the Assembly of the French Union (AUF), a novel third parliamentary chamber that dealt with issues concerning overseas France. But the AUF was an exclusively consultative body whose recommendations were seldom heeded. By the early 1950s, the physical distance between the Versailles-based AUF and the real corridors of power in Paris seemed to symbolize the AUF’s marginal status, and its own members publicly questioned the significance of their work.¹⁸ With these institutions, the relationship between France and French Africa under the Fourth Republic became less colonial but not truly democratic.

Sui generis French maneuvers like the dual electorate, whose express purpose was to reconstitute white supremacy in the renovated imperial republic, should not obscure how closely the shallow democratization of postwar France-Africa relations tracks with wider European trends. As Martin Conway has shown, the kind of democracy that took hold in postwar Western Europe was formal and indirect, not participatory. Popular democracy and a real pluralist democratic culture, Conway argues, were out of step with the conformist and conservative temper of postwar European societies. The dominant mentality of the era was “restoration, rather than revolution.”¹⁹ Europeans, he writes, “wanted to enter a new world, but without destroying the old,” which lent “an air of revolution without revolution to the political rhetoric of liberation.” Indeed, Conway emphasizes that a return to normalcy was already a top priority in 1945–1946, well before the Cold War partition of the continent shrunk democratic Europe down to size and cemented its defensive stance in both its internal and external affairs.²⁰

Franco-African negotiations over the configuration of the French Union fit squarely in this pattern of a pronounced West European pivot away from liberation politics toward formal democracy and structural continuity in the postwar conjuncture. The first proposal for France’s postwar constitution, which French Africans fought hard for, would have established a more egalitarian democracy with a unicameral legislature elected through direct universal suffrage. That proposal was voted down in a national referendum in May 1946. When new elections were called, a wave of Christian Democrats was swept into office in a major rout of the parties of the Left. The Fourth Republic and French Union were creatures of that second, more conservative constituent assembly. The constitution that was ultimately adopted in October 1946 reined in popular democracy, narrowed the scope of colonial reform, and strengthened the Christian Right in a single stroke. Subsequent measures like the dual electorate reinforced those crosscutting currents; by institutionalizing white minority rule in the territories, the dual electorate further augmented Christian Democratic power across Europe and Africa. For all the give and take between French and African political actors over the next decade and a half, some potentialities were hamstrung, if not completely foreclosed, by this conservative Euro-colonial institutional framework from the start.

Still, it would be a mistake to characterize the political constellation that bound European and African France together in the early postwar era as a “restoration.” Postwar colonial reform may not have produced a robust multiracial democracy, but it did open up new forms of scrutiny, critique, and accountability that had tangible effects on policy and the tenor of Franco-African encounters from the parliament floor to the lecture hall. Throughout the period, French politicians, officials, and youth and education workers continuously found themselves on the back foot precisely because some things had changed and others had not. Most no longer wanted to be associated with racism, religious persecution, or other forms of colonial domination, but they struggled to disrupt those relations of power in practice. That disjuncture was the real nub of Franco-African conflict after 1945. Bringing transnational and colonial perspectives into the same frame helps foreground the complexity of the postwar conjuncture as a moment of both rupture and continuity, and the subsequent decade as a period of both structural impasse and contingent politicking.

The tension between historical contingency and impersonal structural forces is a central interpretative and methodological point of contention in the literature on France’s postwar empire.²¹ This is exemplified in influential works by Frederick Cooper and Gary Wilder, who take contrasting approaches to French, African, and Antillean aspirations for new forms of postnational sovereignty and citizenship after the war. In his Citizenship between Empire and Nation, Cooper offers a narrative political history of French and African efforts from 1945 to 1960 to chart a path out of empire that did not end in national independence.²² Wilder’s Freedom Time is a conceptual and intellectual history of the political thought of Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire on related themes during the same period.²³ The advantages of the two approaches are almost perfectly inverse. Cooper’s meticulously researched empirical account of the tit for tat of Franco-African political negotiations discounts any sort of structural explanation for why French and African leaders could not find a way to make decolonization without independence work, while Wilder’s rich theoretical consideration of Senghor’s and Césaire’s ideas about global decolonization and political temporality is disconnected from everyday politics and social experience.

Building on these important works, my analysis draws on both explanatory strategies to tell a different kind of story, one that shifts the focus away from the formal politics and political forms of postwar empire to the social and cultural policies that accompanied them. I rely heavily on archival material that captures the pragmatic and contested aspects of real-world policymaking, but I read the archival record from the perspective of currents of thought that see certain configurations of power as irreducible to individual policy choices. The postwar play of contingent and structural forces, of ideas and institutions, is especially pronounced with regard to youth and education. In moments of great upheaval, the education sector is caught between the pull of social reproduction and the drive for societal transformation. Moreover, its central preoccupation, “youth,” is never just a neutral demographic slice of the population based on chronological age but is instead a historically gendered, raced, and classed conceptual category (and thus a reflection of the existing power structure) that is itself an object of political contestation.²⁴ In this light, the social world of students, youth leaders, educators, bureaucrats, and academics constitutes a vital part of the political archive of postwar reconstruction and “world-making.”²⁵ This book is not a history of young people and adjacent social groups; rather, it explores the shifting coordinates of postwar belonging through them.²⁶ The educational infrastructure that was put in place after the war offered French, African, and West European young people “multiple and unequal paths to citizenship.”²⁷ Those unequal paths, I argue, reflect a new constellation of exclusionary logics and practices—some that predated the war and others that were unleashed by it—that came together at the interstices of Franco-African and European integration.

Both Wilder and Cooper have considered elements of those intersecting integration stories in their attention to Senghor’s support for a “Eurafrican” federation in the 1940s and 1950s.²⁸ For Senghor, postwar integration would proceed simultaneously on multiple scales in concentric circles, like Russian nesting dolls. French Africa would be more thoroughly integrated into France, but on an equal footing; that new Franco-African polity would be integrated into a larger European agglomeration, securing for French Africa more equitable relationships with France’s European partners; and that entity—Eurafrica—would itself be integrated into an increasingly interconnected and interdependent global order. Senghor’s Eurafrica bore little resemblance to its original formulation in the early 1920s as an unabashedly colonial, extractive, and instrumental relationship between Europe and Africa, in which coordinated European development schemes in Africa would be a means to achieve political union and economic recovery in post–World War I Europe.²⁹ Variations on that theme were embraced by startlingly diverse constituencies in the years between the wars, from industrialists in German-speaking Central Europe and colonial officials and politicians with links to the Colonial Lobby in France, to Labour Party leaders in Britain and liberal internationalists in League of Nations circles.³⁰ As this varied following suggests, Eurafrica in the 1920s and 1930s was “more a vague space of dreams and projections than a clear political concept of any meaningful relevance.”³¹ The one through line of the interwar conceptual repertoire of Eurafrica was an underlying belief in Europeans’ superior ability to maximize African resources, which justified European control of Africa’s natural wealth and the privileging of European over African interests.

Senghor’s redeployment of Eurafrica after the war as a genuinely global and democratic project was idiosyncratic, but his scalar vision was not. To many postwar observers, bigger seemed better, or rather bigger seemed necessary for survival in the new superpower age. With Europe and Africa emerging as key battlegrounds in the global Cold War, Africans and Europeans alike sought novel institutional arrangements that would ensure them the maximum amount of political, economic, and cultural autonomy in a bipolar decolonizing world.³² As Todd Shepard, Michael Collins, and others have shown, the postwar era saw many experiments with supranational, federal, or other types of composite polities and extraterritorial economic zones, within and across Europe and Africa both.³³

The reemergence of Eurafrica in the 1940s as a salient geopolitical concept is a particularly evocative instance of this broader postwar trend. Many Eurafrica boosters from the interwar period, like veteran French colonial administrators Robert Delavignette and Albert Sarraut, continued to occupy prominent positions in the new postwar regime; they helped rebrand Eurafrica for the changed times as a more mutually beneficial relationship for Europe and Africa.³⁴ For many Europeans, though, Eurafrica largely remained an African solution to European problems. It regained its earlier transnational appeal as a way to strengthen Europe’s internal unity, institutional integration, and economic independence and assumed newfound resonance as a counterweight to Europe’s declining power base in Asia and waning global influence more broadly. For these reasons, although most closely associated with France in this period, Eurafrica found supporters even in generally hostile Germany and the Netherlands, including Dutch prime minister Willem Drees (1948–1958).³⁵ No longer the stuff of fantasy, Eurafrica became real in the 1950s as European colonies in Africa were included in institutional Europe, most notably in the decade’s major institutional breakthroughs: the 1957 establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) and European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM). Just as postwar colonial reform brought French Africa into the European project, resurgent transnational interest in Eurafrica brought Europe into France’s postwar empire.

In recent years Eurafrica has enjoyed a groundswell of scholarly attention that has begun to shine a much-needed spotlight on the interconnected history of the end of empire and the construction of Europe. Work on Eurafrica, much like the literatures on European integration and late colonialism that it brings together, centers on juridical and economic institutional arrangements and related questions of sovereignty, markets, geostrategy, and diplomacy. Its focal point has been the formal association between colonial African territories and the European Communities, the renegotiation of those terms after independence, and subsequent trade policy and development aid.³⁶ By using youth as its primary lens, this book not only adds a social and cultural dimension to the history of Eurafrica; it also offers a fuller picture of postwar integration more broadly as a set of coordinated attempts to engineer new kinds of pluralist communities made up of socially rooted and enculturated human beings as opposed to abstract political and economic actors.

The literature on European integration, in particular, has struggled to link up the political project of European unity and the history of early European institutions with broader social and cultural processes of Europeanization in the mid-twentieth century.³⁷ “Europeanization” here refers both to large-scale patterns of social change and transnational cultural diffusion in which the lifeworlds of populations in different European contexts became more alike and also more closely identified with “Europe.”³⁸ The world of youth is a natural place to explore such processes. In a recent study of independent youth travel, Richard Ivan Jobs compellingly argues that new forms of youth mobility “helped constitute the social space of Western Europe” from the immediate postwar years through the end of the Cold War. His examination of Europe’s “backpack ambassadors” gives us a less EU-centric and top-down history of European integration, one that emphasizes “horizontal dimensions of integration emerging from social activity, rather than just the vertical dimensions descending from the political activity of diplomats negotiating international treaties.”³⁹

Scholars working on this kind of social and cultural integration are seldom concerned with the actual denouement of Europe’s imperial extensions overseas, but they intuitively recognize that Europeanization encompassed “processes of delimitation and othering” both within Europe and between Europe and the wider world.⁴⁰ Sociologists, for instance, have suggested that the convergence of postwar demographic and sociological trends like rising incomes and aging populations made the distance between Europe and Africa more pronounced.⁴¹ Cultural historians have made similar suggestions. Victoria de Grazia argues that the relentless spread of US consumer culture across twentieth-century Europe helped forge a new transatlantic civilization—which she provocatively calls the “White Atlantic”—that detached Western Europe from the Third World and fostered a new “way of life racism.”⁴² Conway makes a parallel point about the democratic political culture of the “smaller Europe” that emerged from the war and the Cold War division of the continent, which, he argues, reinforced Western Europe’s image as “a homogenously European and white society.”⁴³

Such broad societal trends were constantly shifting the racialized boundaries between a European “us” and a non-European “them,” precisely as institutional Europe—and with it, Eurafrica—was taking shape. Though difficult to see in technical negotiations over customs unions or free trade zones, as the Brest proceedings show, confusion and contestation over those boundaries and their underlying racial logics bubbled to the surface in postwar campaigns for European unity that targeted youth. Those logics contributed to the consolidation of a new racial formation that I call “postwar racial common sense.”⁴⁴ Without having to use the word “race,” the outraged volunteer in Brest enacted “racial Europeanization” with his outburst on the immutable social and cultural difference between Africans and Europeans. As we shall see, that process of self-definition through the Other went hand in hand with a concerted effort to excise the language of race from discussions of intra-European diversity in post-Holocaust Europe. After more than a century and a half of racial discourse on European national, regional, linguistic, and religious difference, postwar Europe was consciously refigured as both white and raceless.⁴⁵ The transnational construction of European racelessness, I argue, dovetailed with specifically French maneuvers to avoid racial language and the appearance of racism in postwar colonial governance in the face of more robust public scrutiny and African critique. Those conceptual and rhetorical shifts strengthened political claims that racism was not (or no longer) a native European problem—that Africans and their demands for racial justice made it one. Transnational European forums, as well as Franco-African ones, were crucial venues where that kind of racial-cultural work took place.

Focusing too narrowly on the technical and bureaucratic aspects of European integration also obscures the importance of religion in European unity and the decisive role Christian Democracy played in setting institutional Europe on its course.⁴⁶ Many of the most ardent early European unity activists were motivated by their Christian faith, seeing supranational European federalism as a way to revive European Christendom and re-center Christianity in European life. It follows that the political and legal idea of Europe at the heart of Christian Democratic Europeanism was unabashedly Christian.⁴⁷ With the onset of the Cold War, the Christian Democrat pro-Europe movements overtook their Socialist counterparts, and significant US aid—both vocal and covert—ensured the predominance of a Christian vision of Europe in federalist circles and early transnational institutions, including the European Youth Campaign.⁴⁸

The ascendancy of Christian Democratic Europe was not due to Cold War geostrategy alone; combining transnational and colonial perspectives offers a more complex portrait of the changing relationship between religion, politics, and European identity in the middle third of the twentieth century. European Christianity underwent epochal transformations midcentury, most significantly the rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants and political Catholicism’s coming to terms with the modern secular state. A growing body of literature has shown that the roots of both of these historic shifts lay in older visions of European unity (including fascist ones) and deep-seated anxieties about Christianity’s fate in the postcolonial world (especially in Africa).⁴⁹ Protestants and Catholics found common cause in making the secular order more hospitable to Christianity in postwar Europe and in dissociating Christianity from the late colonial state to preserve the Christian presence after the end of empire. Those motivations worked in tandem with presenting a united front against godless Communists in the global Cold War. The political discourse of “religious pluralism” and “religious liberty” served all of these purposes. That rhetoric also bolstered Western Europe’s self-image as tolerant and democratic, even though, much like postwar European democracy itself, it was in fact quite narrowly conceived by and for European Christians.⁵⁰ Religious pluralism was embraced in the postwar European mainstream, not only as a core European value but also as a distinctly Christian legacy on Europe’s democratic political culture. Indeed, as Christian ecumenism and Catholic modernism made Christian faith less politically and communally divisive in postwar Europe, Christianity itself became more available as a moral and historical resource to left-leaning and secular European integrationists, who emphasized Christianity’s imprint on “European civilization” beyond theology and religious practice.

Anthropologists Talal Asad and Mayanthi Fernando argue that the contours of European secularism have always cast Christian modes of religiosity within the bounds of secular normativity while excluding all others.⁵¹ This book approaches the postwar conjuncture as a particularly important chapter in that longer story, a time when a transnational European secular order was actively constituted in ways that simultaneously cast itself as an exemplar of religious pluralism and reprivileged Christianity over other faiths. I refer to this as the “culturalization of Christianity” in postwar Europe. Europe was becoming more internally united in a way that set itself against the anti-Christian Soviet Union and the doubly un-Christian, because also “nonsecular,” Islamic world.⁵² Matthew Connelly, in his work on the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), notes that it was precisely this perception of multiaxial civilizational conflict—not only East-West but also North-South—that made the idea of Eurafrica so appealing in the 1950s, not only to Europeans but also to the US foreign policy establishment.⁵³ Connelly focuses on the remaking of the postwar international order, but the same forces also contributed to the remaking of postwar Western Europe as both secular and Christian. That transnational European realignment of religion, (geo)politics, and identity, I suggest, is an often overlooked but crucial counterpart to what some scholars have called the “racialization of Islam” in France.⁵⁴

Racial and religious exclusion in contemporary France is typically considered through a national lens that emphasizes the legacy of revolutionary universalism on France’s distinct secular and color blind republican culture.⁵⁵ Even colonial approaches that locate the production of racial and religious difference in the historical experience of colonialism and decolonization generally stay within the bounds of the French “imperial nation-state.”⁵⁶ Such national-colonial frameworks make it difficult to see how transnational processes like the culturalization of Christianity and racial Europeanization narrowed the horizons of belonging in postwar France and fundamentally recontextualized republican principles of laïcité and colorblindness that continue to frame debates about racial and religious pluralism in France today.

Bringing these sprawling and complex political and geopolitical, sociocultural and institutional, racial and religious dynamics together into a single frame may seem like a hopelessly gargantuan undertaking, but postwar French, African, and European integrationists’ shared preoccupation with youth created a well-defined policy area where all of these concerns collided and converged.⁵⁷ In a rare study of the European Movement’s early interest in youth, Christina Norwig suggests that from the beginning, European unity activists approached European integration as a “generational project,” adapting nationalist discourses about the “young generation” and political rejuvenation to forge Europe’s postnational future.⁵⁸ I argue that the renovation of France’s African empire was also pursued as a generational project, whose success hinged on decolonizing belonging throughout European and African France. French-educated Africans, who were themselves set apart from their societies because of their schooling and the special colonial status it conferred on them, were especially attuned to the way generations are actively made through historical processes, institutions, and social practice. The first African woman to serve in France’s postwar parliament, Jeanne Vialle (who represented Oubangui-Chari in the French Senate from 1947 to 1952), dedicated her political career to making French education widely available to African girls because it was African women, she argued, who would ultimately “knead the dough from which tomorrow’s men would be made.”⁵⁹ (See figure I.2.) For Vialle, decolonization meant the obsolescence of the évolué, the elite French-educated African, through mass education and the uplift of the entire population. As Annette Joseph-Gabriel has argued, Vialle’s political vision was not about “inclusion, moving a token few marginalized people from the periphery to the core of the imperial nation-state,” but rather redefining the very terms on which “collective identities and belonging can be imagined.”⁶⁰

Conceived in this way, the confluence of the generational projects of Franco-African and European integration posed a vital, existential dilemma for France and the rest of Europe: Would future generations of Black Africans, particularly Black African Muslims, be French? Would they then also be European? Could they be Black, African, Muslim, French, and European all at once? Which of those identifications might be mutually exclusive, and why? These were the fundamental questions youth and education initiatives in France, French Africa, and Western Europe in the 1940s and 1950s sought to address and ultimately failed to resolve. Three-quarters of a century later, Black and Muslim youth in France and across Europe, born in Africa or with African roots, still wrestle with these questions, and they are still demanding answers.⁶¹ The unfinished business of decolonizing belonging remains as urgent today as ever.

Rethinking the Postwar

The temporal focus of this book spans the late war years to the end of the 1950s. A lot happened and a lot changed politically in European and African France in that mind-bogglingly eventful decade and half, but decolonizing belonging remained a serious and steady proposition despite the tumult and turmoil of two colonial wars, domestic regime change, Cold War escalation, and transnational institution building. That belonging was not in fact decolonized during those years cannot be fully explained by a series of notable events. I approach the era as an extended “postwar moment,” a distinct period in which older modes of distinction in France and its empire were recalibrated and rearranged in response to a new, evolving set of historical conditions engendered by France’s wartime experience and postwar reconstruction, the global movement for decolonization, and European integration.⁶² The major political turning points of those intersecting historical arcs punctuate my analysis but do not drive the narrative. The competing generational projects of Franco-African and European integration followed their own rhythms.

The chapters in this book all move forward in time, but they are organized thematically with considerable chronological overlap among them. Chapter 1 sets up the war years (c. 1940–1944) as a transitional phase in the longer histories of French republican, colonial African, and transnational European education and approaches to youth, as France’s European and African futures were reimagined and increasingly considered in explicit relation to one another. The second and third chapters take different thematic lenses—religion and race, respectively—to youth and education policies in the immediate postwar years (c. 1944–1950) that sought to promote pluralism and integration across European and African France. Chapter 2 focuses on policies and institution building that enacted the culturalization of Christianity; chapter 3 focuses on those that helped consolidate postwar racial common sense. The next two chapters pivot from policy to practice, exploring the experience of students, youth leaders, and educators as they navigated the institutional pathways that had been established for them after the war as political winds and global conditions changed over the course of the following decade. Chapter 4 centers on African students in European France in the 1950s; chapter 5 broadens the field of vision to youth exchanges and international mobilizations in the global arena from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. I then take a longer view of Franco-African and European integration as generational projects. The epilogue considers the consequences of the disjuncture between what had seemed possible and desirable to colonial reformers and European unity activists in the mid-to-late 1940s and what actually came to pass in 1950s, and concludes with some reflections on the afterlives of that entangled history up through the present day.

1. 1. Rassemblement européen de jeunes lycéens à Brest à Pâques, undated, Archives Historiques de l’Union Européenne (AHUE): ME-218. Participants included groups of ten to twenty high school students from the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, West Germany, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.

2. 2. As a United Nations “trust territory,” Cameroon was not supposed to be integrated into the French Union, but the architects of the Fourth Republic ignored the formal terms of international trusteeship and included Cameroon (and Togo) anyway.

3. 3. Rapport sur la rencontre internationale des lycéens Brest 2–10 avril 1953, à l’attention de MM. Moreau et Deshormes, April 9, 1953. AHUE, ME-218.

4. 4. Michel Debré, “Proposition invitant le gouvernement à constituer une commission chargée d’étudier les rapports entre l’Union française et une organisation politique de l’Europe,” undated, Archives de l’Histoire Contemporaine (AHC): Fonds Debré, 1/DE/513. Although we typically associate this kind of antisupranationalism with Gaullism, French Socialists also opposed the EDC on colonial grounds. See Brian Shaev, “The Algerian War, European Integration, and the Decolonization of French Socialism,” French Historical Studies 41, no. 1 (February 2018): 63–94, https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-4254619.

5. 5. Cited in Paolo Acanfora, “Christian Democratic Internationalism: NEI and the Geneva Circles between European Unification and Religious Identity, 1947–1954,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 3 (2015): 387n62, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777315000211.

6. 6. Michel Debré, “Sur le transfert de souveraineté,” Bulletin du Comité National de défense de la France et l’Union Française, no. 4, September 1, 1953, Archives Nationales de la France (AN): C//15913, dossier 2.

7. 7. “Éléments de rapport sur le développement de l’Enseignement dans les TOM,” April 7, 1950, Archives Nationales de la France d’Outre-Mer (ANOM): 1AFFPOL/1015.

8. 8. Procès-Verbal de la Commission d’Outre-Mer, séance du 6 décembre 1950. AN C//15408.

9. 9. Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Andrew Smith and Chris Jeppesen, eds., Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? (London: University College London Press, 2017); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Kristen Stromberg Childers, Seeking Imperialism’s Embrace: National Identity, Decolonization, and Assimilation in the French Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

10. 10. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2004); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1997). Mazower has since complicated this line of thinking, without dispensing with it entirely. See his “End of Eurocentrism,” in “Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformation,” ed. Leela Gandhi and Debbie Nelson, special issue, Critical Inquiry 40, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 298–213, https://doi.org/10.1086/676409. Konrad Jarausch’s Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) takes a more nuanced approach that considers how decolonization “crisscrossed” with other postwar developments, but the overarching tale of a Europe ridding itself of its “imperial baggage” remains the same (15).

11. 11. Judt, Postwar, 5. Martin Conway makes a similar claim in his Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020): 143–145.

12. 12. Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: the Untold Story of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

13. 13. Colonial and transnational entanglements are increasingly acknowledged in the subfield of European integration history. Far from considering these entanglements as unique to France, Kiran Klaus Patel characterizes the whole integration project as a “late colonial” undertaking in his Project Europe: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 244. On the methodology of entangled history, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenges of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (February 2006): 30–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00347.x.

14. 14. Eric Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

15. 15. Yves Montarsolo, L’Eurafrique: Contrepoint de l’idée de l’Europe. Le cas français de la deuxième guerre mondiale aux négociations des Traités de Rome (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2010), 73–79.

16. 16. Emily Marker, “Obscuring Race: Franco-African Conversations about Colonial Reform and Racism After World War II and the Making of ‘Colorblind France,’ ” French Politics, Culture & Society 33, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.3167/fpcs.2015.330301.

17. 17. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

18. 18. Even the AUF’s president, Albert Sarraut, expressed his frustration at the apparent futility of the AUF’s work in a pair of speeches before the chamber as early as 1951: Allocution prononcée le 9 janvier 1951 par M. Albert Sarraut; Allocution prononcée le 12 juillet 1951. AN C//16135.

19. 19. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 8, 26, 50.

20. 20. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 35, 49.

21. 21. Gary Wilder, “From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic Turns,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (June 2012): 723–745, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.117.3.723.

22. 22. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation.

23. 23. Wilder, Freedom Time.

24. 24. David M. Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

25. 25. “Worldmaking” has become an important way of thinking about various levels of historical agency and global transformation in this era. See Wilder, Freedom Time; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Christopher Lee, ed., Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010).

26. 26. Sarah Maza makes this distinction with regard to histories of childhood in “The Kids Aren’t Alright: Historians and the Problem of Childhood,” American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (October 2020): 1261–1285, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa380. There are excellent social histories of these groups and their role in wider processes of integration and decolonization throughout the period. On African teachers and students, see Boubacar Ly, Les instituteurs au Sénégal, 1903–1945, 6 vols. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); Pascale Barthélémy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale (1918–1957) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010). On youth and student movements and decolonization, see Hélène d’Almeida-Topor and Odile Georg, eds., Le Mouvement associatif des jeunes en Afrique noire francophone au XXe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989); Nicolas Bancel, Daniel Denis, and Youssef Fates, De l’Indochine à l’Algérie. La jeunesse en mouvements des deux côtés du miroir colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2003); Amady Aly Dieng, Les grands combats de la Fédération des étudiants de l’Afrique Noire: de Bandung aux indépendances, 1955–1960 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); Burleigh Hendrickson, Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022). On youth and European integration, see Richard Ivan Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Western Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

27. 27. Clif Stratton, Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 1.

28. 28. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, chap. 4, and Gary Wilder, “Eurafrique as the Future Past of ‘Black France’: Sarkozy’s Temporal Confusion and Senghor’s Postwar Vision,” in Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, ed. Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 57–87. For earlier French-language scholarship on Eurafrica, see Montarsolo, L’Eurafrique; Guia Migani, La France et l’Afrique sub-saharienne, 1957–1963: Histoire d’une décolonisation entre idéaux eurafricains et politique de puissance (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008); Marie-Thérèse Bitsch and Gérard Bossuat, eds., L’Europe Unie et l’Afrique: De l’idée d’Eurafrique à la convention de Lomé I (Brussels: Bruylant, 2005); René Girault, “La France entre l’Europe et l’Afrique,” in The Relaunching of Europe and the Treaties of Rome: Actes du Colloque de Rome 25–28 Mars 1987, ed. Enrico Serra (Brussels: Bruylant, 1989).

29. 29. Antoine Fleury, “Paneurope et l’Afrique,” in L’Europe Unie et l’Afrique, ed. Bitsch and Bossuat.

30. 30. Charles-Robert Ageron, “L’idée d’eurafrique et le débat colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deux-guerres,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et contemporaine 22 (1975): 446–475, https://doi.org/10.3406/rhmc.1975.2329; Chantal Metzger, “L’Allemagne et l’Eurafrique,” Yves 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.

31. 31. Patel, Project Europe, 246.

32. 32. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

33. 33. Todd Shepard, “À l’heure des ‘grands ensembles’ et de la guerre d’Algérie. L’ ‘État-nation’ en question,” Monde(s) 1, no. 1 (2012): 113–134; Michael Collins, “Decolonization and the ‘Federal Moment,’ ” Diplomacy & Statecraft 24, no. 1 (2013): 21–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2013.762881; Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

34. 34. Sarraut, for instance, served as the president of the Assembly of the French Union for the entirety of its existence (1947–1958); Delavignette served as a top official in the central colonial authority in Paris from 1947 to 1951 and as a professor at the École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer, the elite training ground for colonial personnel for the next decade.

35. 35. Patel, Project Europe, 246, 249.

36. 36. Hansen and Jonsson, Eurafrica; Martin Rempe, “Decolonization by Europeanization? The Early EEC and the Transformation of French-African Relations,” KFG Working Paper Series 27 (May 2011): 1–21, http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-22834; Giuliano Garavini, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South, 1957–1986 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Muriam Haleh Davis, “North Africa and the Common Agricultural Policy: From Colonial Pact to European Integration,” in North Africa and the Making of Europe, ed. Davis and Thomas Serres (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Megan Brown, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022). See also notes 28 and 30.

37. 37. Histories of the EU ignore the cultural dynamics and politics of European integration before the late 1960s. See Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000).

38. 38. This is what political scientist Kevin Featherstone defines as the “maximalist” conception of Europeanization, as opposed to the “minimalist” understanding that refers to national adaptations to EU policy. See Kevin Featherstone and C. M. Radaelli, eds., The Politics of Europeanization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–7.

39. 39. Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors, 57, 3–4.

40. 40. Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors, 6.

41. 41. Göran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000 (London: Sage, 1995).

42. 42. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 11–13, 351.

43. 43. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 86–87.

44. 44. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1994).

45. 45. David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), chap. 5, “Precipitating Evaporation (On Racial Europeanization),” 151–198. On the racial categorization of Europeans in prewar France, see Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

46. 46. Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

47. 47. Acanfora, “Christian Democratic Internationalism”; Rosario Forlenza, “The Politics of Abendland: Christian Democracy and the Idea of Europe after the Second World War,” Contemporary European History 26, no. 2 (2017): 375–391, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777317000091. On Christianity and the establishment of a European human rights regime in this period, see Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

48. 48. Richard J. Aldrich, “OSS, CIA, and European Unity: the American Committee on United Europe, 1948–1960,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 8, no. 1 (March 1997): 184–227, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592299708406035; Brian McKenzie, “The European Youth Campaign in Ireland: Neutrality, Americanization and the Cold War, 1950–1959,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 3 (2016), 421–444, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhv010.

49. 49. Udi Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019): 511–538, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz252, and “Protestants, Decolonization, and European Integration, 1885–1961,” Journal of Modern History 89, no. 2 (2017): 314–354, https://doi.org/10.1086/691531; Elizabeth Foster, African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

50. 50. While some postwar Christians across Europe and Africa advocated for a more robust pluralism that would include Jews and Muslims, Christian ecumenism was the form that ultimately triumphed in the postwar European mainstream. Darcie Fontaine’s analysis of European Christians’ failed efforts to dissociate Christianity from colonial rule in Algeria mirrors James Chappel’s discussion of the failure of the postwar Catholic European Left to push the Church to come to terms with its complicity in the development of modern anti-Semitism. Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity; Chappel, Catholic Modern. The dogged silence on anti-Semitism and Jews in general in all of the sources on religious and racial pluralism in this period is truly stunning. I address this silence at discrete points in this book, but the topic deserves and requires further research in its own right.

51. 51. Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

52. 52. Joan Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Samuel Moyn, “From Communist to Muslim: European Human Rights, the Cold War, and Religious Liberty,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 63–86, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2390428. Moyn argues that the Cold War discourse of religious freedom and the equation of democracy and Christianity sought to marginalize secularism, whereas Scott, who I think makes the more persuasive case, argues that Christianity, democracy, and secularism became synonymous in Cold War rhetoric in opposition to Soviet atheism.

53. 53. Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution.

54. 54. Naomi Davidson, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Fernando, The Republic Unsettled. For a provocative new interpretation of the racialization of Muslims and Islam in France and its empire in this period through the lens of racial capitalism, see Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).

55. 55. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

56. 56. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Emmanuelle Saada, Les enfants de la colonie: les métis de l’empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris: Découverte, 2007); Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization.

57. 57. A growing literature foregrounds the centrality of education in postwar global politics. See Charles Dorn and Kristen Ghodsee, “The Cold War Politicization of Literacy: Communism, UNESCO, and the World Bank,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 2 (2012): 373–398, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01026.x; Damiano Matasci, “Une ‘UNESCO africaine’? Le ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer, la coopération éducative intercoloniale et la défense de l’empire,” Mondes no. 13 (2018): 195–214, https://doi.org/10.3917/mond1.181.0195.

58. 58. Christina Norwig, “A First European Generation? The Myth of Youth and European Integration in the 1950s,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (2014): 256, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhu006. Generational thinking remained a powerful mode of envisioning national reconstruction in postwar Europe as well. See Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families After World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). On generations as both actor and analytical categories, see Emily Marker with Abosede George et al., “AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations,” American Historical Review 123, no. 5 (December 2018): 1505–1546, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy389.

59. 59. Cited in Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Reimaging Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 107.

60. 60. Joseph-Gabriel, Reimaging Liberation, 108, 12.

61. 61. Gurminder Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıolu, eds., Decolonising the University (London: Pluto Press, 2018); Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Trica Danielle Keaton, Muslim Girls and the Other France. Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

62. 62. Isser Woloch specifies a shorter “postwar moment” in France (1944–1947) that he equates with the rise and fall of liberation politics, whereas in Britain and the United States this “moment” lasted until 1951. Isser Woloch, The Postwar Moment: Progressive Forces in Britain, France, and the United States After World War II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). Global and entangled histories often rely on “moments” as an analytic to capture the crystallization of a new set of relations and emphasize the intersections or interconnections of diverse historical phenomena that often have their own logics and trajectories. The concept resonates strongly among historians of anticolonialism and decolonization. See Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Afterlives; Collins, “Decolonization and the ‘Federal Moment’ ”; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).