Francophone Africa at fifty

Tony Chafer, Alexander Keese, Tony Chafer, Alexander Keese

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719089305
• eBook ISBN: 9781526102942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Explores the complexities of France's role in Africa over the past century

Part I

Zero hour approaches

1

Gaston Defferre’s Loi-Cadre and its application, 1956/57: last chance for a French African ‘empire-state’ or blueprint for decolonisation?

Martin Shipway

Although 1960 is rightly celebrated as the ‘Year of Africa’, the series of independence ceremonies across Francophone sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar which punctuated that climactic year exude the slightly weary air of faits accomplis (Shipway 2008b). If we are looking for the turning point at which France’s African territories south of the Sahara took the first decisive steps towards their independence, then high on the list of possible moments must be the passing of the Law of 23 June 1956, better known as the Loi-Cadre (Framework or Enabling Law) or Loi Defferre, bearing the name of Gaston Defferre, Minister of Overseas France in the Socialist-led government presided over by Guy Mollet. Indeed, 1956 has some considerable claim to our attention as a pivotal year in the dissolution of the European colonial empires. It was the year of independence of Sudan and of Morocco (although both were special cases, one an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, the other a French protectorate). It was the planned year of the independence of Ghana, but this had to be put back to March 1957, as the British sought (and failed) to accommodate a federalist challenge to Kwame Nkrumah’s otherwise inexorable rise to power. Not least, of course, it was the year of the ill-fated Suez expedition, in which Britain, France and Israel colluded in an abortive attempt to overthrow the nationalist Egyptian government of President Gamal Abdul Nasser.

Not even Suez marked the definitive beginning of the end of empire, however, and arguably the will to empire persisted. Certainly, on the British side, though Suez marked a humiliating setback, it did not precipitate a wholesale retreat of British imperial power from the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. More generally, historians have increasingly emphasised the reinvigoration of British imperial enterprise in the mid- to late 1950s (Lynn 2005; Darwin 2005). On the French side, the Suez mission arose from the imperatives of the Algerian campaign, which, earlier in the year, had been hugely escalated by a series of decisions taken by the Mollet government. These included the passing of ‘special powers’, and the despatch of the contingent, that is, France’s conscript army of appelés and reservists (rappelés), which ultimately built up French forces to some 450,000 men, in order to defeat the FLN insurgency. As Martin Evans (2011) has argued, moreover, Mollet’s ‘surge’ must be understood alongside his commitment to an eventual Algerian ‘peace’, prefiguring De Gaulle’s so-called Constantine Plan of October 1958, in which a developed and democratic French Algeria would be fully incorporated into the French Republic.

It would be somewhat strange, therefore, if the intention behind Defferre’s law had been to bring about the rapid end of French rule in the sub-Saharan African territories of a France extending, as his ministerial colleague François Mitterrand would have reminded him, ‘from Flanders to the Congo’.¹ And yet the dominant interpretation of the Loi-Cadre has been, in various ways, as a ‘big step towards decolonisation, if not in so many words’ (Cooper 2002: 78). Indeed, one view of Defferre has been, precisely, as a would-be decoloniser, as for example in Edward Mortimer’s view, derived in part from the testimony of Defferre’s chef de cabinet, Fernand Wibaux:

Defferre was appalled by the bloodshed in Algeria, convinced that it could have been avoided if a more enlightened policy had been applied in time, and determined to avoid a similar catastrophe in Afrique Noire. He may have seen already that independence was the manifest destiny of the African territories. If so, he must also have seen that this destiny could and should be realised without war or even bitterness between France and the Africans, and without real damage to France’s real interests (Mortimer 1969: 233, 234n).

Something does not ring true here, in particular the suggestion that a toughminded politician of Defferre’s calibre would articulate, even privately, an idea of Africa’s ‘manifest destiny’ (though he might have done so in the late 1960s). In any case, Defferre, the Mollet government, and more generally the Fourth and early Fifth Republics, have more usually been charged in this matter with either neo-colonial conspiracy or imperial demission. Thus, in keeping with a critique of French ‘neo-colonialism’ derived from dependency theory, scholars such as Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (1988) and Jean Suret-Canale (1998) pointed to the ‘influence of the great capitalist entrepreneurs with African interests’, although for Alexander Keese these authors ‘have never managed to put forward any convincing source material’ (Keese 2003: 34). Tony Chafer has placed the Loi-Cadre within the wider context of an ‘emerging convergence of interests between French governing élites and African political leaders for the transfer of power to Africans’; these shared interests included the ‘defeat of the nationalist movement’, and the generation of a series of post-colonial collaborating regimes (Chafer 2002b: 206–7). But perhaps the most sophisticated interpretation of the Loi-Cadre is that of Frederick Cooper, who sees it bringing to an end a French tradition of assimilationism. According to this view, the French Republic was starting to count the costs of a decade of African welfare policy, which not least saw African workers gaining the entitlement to be considered the equals of their metropolitan counterparts. By shifting budgetary responsibility to individual territories, the Loi-Cadre thus transferred welfare costs to the new government councils (Cooper 1996: 407–13, 424–5; Cooper 2005: 227–9). In effect it also pushed decentralisation of the French Union to its limits, and beyond.

This chapter does not diverge from these interpretations of the Loi-Cadre as effectively leading to decolonisation in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. However, the interest of the reforms of 1956/57, it may be argued, is precisely that they faced both ways. Looking back from 1956, the Loi-Cadre was clearly the culminating point of a reform process going back to 1946, or even further, to the 1944 Brazzaville conference; this process was designed to rationalise and strengthen the French late colonial state or, following Cooper (2005), ‘empirestate’. But at the same time, the passing of the Loi-Cadre may also be seen as marking the point at which that process started to unravel south of the Sahara, just as it already had in Indochina and North Africa.

In effect, the Loi-Cadre represents the crossover between two opposing but overlapping conceptions of the ‘late colonial state’, and in particular of ‘lateness’, which mirror this dual process of consolidation and dissolution. On the one hand, ‘late’ may be taken to mean ‘advanced’. In this sense, the late colonial state emerged from the profound disruption to the colonial empires caused by the Second World War, which led to a ‘late colonial shift’ in the expectations of both colonisers and colonised (Shipway 2008a: 12–14). According to this view, political and social reforms after 1945 were designed, not simply to appease local or international challenges to colonial rule, much less to head off a decolonisation which could scarcely be imagined in Africa circa 1944 or 1946, but rather to transform colonial rule into something sustainable in a longer term. On the other hand, ‘late’ may be taken straightforwardly in the sense of ‘terminal’: in this view, officials and politicians in the French Fourth Republic (though the argument may be applied mutatis mutandis in the case of the other empires) were simply resisting, for as long as they could, the impending dissolution of the colonial empires. The problem with the first of these conceptions is that, try as we might, we cannot undo the fact that, as Cooper’s oft-quoted dictum has it, ‘we know the end of the story’ (1996: 6). The problem with the second is that it apparently condemns us, as historians of decolonisation, to raking over the ‘details of a single, fundamentally unsound policy of preserving colonial-style hegemony over the dependencies’ (Lewis 1998: 276).

Can these two conceptions of the late colonial state be reconciled? One possible way of doing so is to focus on the intentions of the policy makers, or more generally to seek to reconstruct the perspective of the French ‘official mind’, and to ask, in the case of the Loi-Cadre, what French politicians and officials really thought they could achieve by the reforms. Were they simply plotting the devolution of onerous budgetary responsibilities to territorial level (as Cooper would have it), the ‘balkanisation’ of their late colonial domains, or the establishment of France’s post-1960 (or post-1958) neo-colonial ‘chasse-gardée’? Such Machiavellian prescience seems unlikely. But conversely, to what extent did they believe in the likelihood of consolidating the French Union sustainably after 1956/57, or in their capacity to restrain the political ambitions of an emerging generation of African politicians? Did they really hope to satisfy Africans with anything less than what Britain was apparently offering (or rather, conceding) to Nkrumah in Ghana, in a process felicitously characterised by Le Monde (12–13 November 1956) as ‘creative abdication’ (abdication créatrice)? In what follows, it will rather be suggested that the French ‘official mind’ was in a sense divided against itself. This is meant not simply in the sense that there were, of course, internal arguments between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ officials within the French colonial administration, and differences in outlook (sometimes highly positive and creative ones) between officials and politicians. A distinction has also to be drawn between officials’ public recourse to bureaucratic ‘langue de bois’ and their own more private opinions (see Shipway 2011: 221). Rather, what is proposed here is a kind of official ‘make believe’, according to which officials simultaneously believed and disbelieved that far-reaching reforms could be effective; but that they were carried along by the internal logic of their own discourse, and further propelled by the momentum of a new government, a dynamic minister and the increasingly unstoppable force of African political agency.

Constructing the French African ‘empire-state’

When Gaston Defferre presented the Loi-Cadre to the National Assembly for its first reading, in the debate on 21 March 1956, it was perhaps to be expected that he would quote the key passage from Charles De Gaulle’s speech at the opening of the Brazzaville conference twelve years before, on 30 January 1944: ‘In French Africa, as in all territories where men live beneath our flag, there would be no progress worthy of the name if men living in their native land did not profit morally and materially from that progress, if they could not improve themselves little by little to a level where they were able to take part in the management of their own affairs’.² One reason for this almost obligatory rhetorical gesture was to present the proposed reforms in a light that would meet the approval of potentially hostile Gaullist députés in the newly elected chamber (Messmer 1998: 139–40). But aside from this political point-making, the perspective was a not unreasonable one, and though De Gaulle’s somewhat paternalist rhetoric at Brazzaville may have resonated strangely in the 1956 chamber, Defferre could look back upon a substantial measure of progress since Brazzaville on which to build his own African reforms. Although that progress had been driven in large measure by the energetic and largely unanticipated engagement in the political process of an emerging African political elite, it was incontestable.

It is easy enough to highlight the insufficiencies, setbacks and longueurs of the reform process over the intervening twelve years. The Brazzaville conference itself had been largely a failure, downgraded to a French African conference (rather than the grand imperial conference originally planned), its recommendations watered down by cautious officials, its propaganda message reduced to a faintly absurd ‘spirit of Brazzaville’ (Shipway 2008a: 127). A ground-breaking recommendation which did emerge from Brazzaville was to include elected colonial députés in an eventual Constituent Assembly, but the proposals on this by the 1945 Monnerville Commission were diluted by the Provisional Government, in consultation with senior colonial officials (Shipway 2011: 229–31). The constitution-making process of 1945/46 too was compromised in respect of the French Union. The first constitutional draft was rejected in the April 1946 referendum for reasons that had nothing to do with its strikingly bold provisions on the French Union; however, a backlash over the summer of 1946, triggered by De Gaulle’s Bayeux speech on 16 July, led to a more coherent but also more restrictive constitutional framework for the French Union, and to the suspension of provisions for properly representative territorial assemblies in the African territories (ibid.: 242–4).

The Fourth Republic when it came ushered in a period of ‘policy sclerosis’ in sub-Saharan Africa (Chafer 2002b: 83–4), with a stalled reform agenda further impeded by the working out of France’s domestic Cold War, and by a perpetual cycle of political crises and turnover of governments. Even before the inauguration of the new constitution, French forces entered definitively into an unwinnable war with the Viet Minh in Indochina. Three months later, at the end of March 1947, the insurrection in Madagascar further demonstrated the limits of French liberalism; quite apart from the swift brutality with which the insurgency was crushed, the National Assembly lifted the parliamentary immunity of the three Malagasy députés, following which they were summarily tried, condemned and incarcerated (and pardoned only by the Mollet government). For a while in 1948/49, it looked very much as if Côte d’Ivoire would be next, and that Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s entirely pragmatic relationship with the French Communist Party (PCF) would see him outlawed as a rebel. Meanwhile, in Algeria, a Socialist Governor-General, Marcel-Edmond Naegelen, presided over massive electoral fraud in the 1948 Algerian Assembly elections, neutralising the nationalist opposition, and in effect heading off any possible reformist impact of the 1947 Algerian Statute.

The underlying trend in Africa was nonetheless one in which a distinctive French-African politics was progressively normalised, and the participation of African and other overseas députés in French political life was increasingly accepted. Even with a restricted franchise, discriminatory citizens’ and noncitizens’ electoral colleges, and with each député representing two distinct territories, some twenty overseas députés in the first C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Tony Chafer and Alexander Keese
• Part I: Zero hour approaches
• Part II: Military transitions
• Part III: Continuities and connections
• Part IV: Anglo-French relations
• Part V: Nationalist trajectories, border issues and conflicted memories
• Bibliography
• Index