Decolonizing 1968

Front matter

DECOLONIZING Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar

Burleigh Hendrickson

DECOLONIZING 1968

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

List of Abbreviations xiii

Prologue: An (In)Tense Reflection

Introduction

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things.

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

In March 1968 at the University of Tunis, students seeking the liberation of incarcerated militant Mohamed Ben Jennet occupied university buildings. Participation was so widespread that administrators announced an early spring break that year to rid the campus of troublemakers. Less than two months later, massive university strikes started in Paris and spread throughout the country. Clashes with police elicited nationwide sympathy for the student movement and brought the French Republic to its knees. Just weeks after events erupted in France, students in Senegal occupied the University of Dakar in protest of financial cuts to student stipends. Material claims transformed into political ones and, as in France, workers supported student demonstrations while making their own demands for higher wages. How is it, then, that disparate campuses across the Francophone world spawned strikingly similar acts of revolt within a span of three months? This book proceeds from the premise that the movements of 1968 were intrinsically linked to the processes of decolonization across the globe. Likewise, the activist revolts examined specifically in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar cannot be disentangled from the web of connections forged during the French colonial period, many of which persisted in its aftermath. In other words, beyond all the transnational exchanges that characterized it, 1968 must also be understood as a postcolonial moment.

The upsurge of radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s shook the globe. Youth activism encompassed the capitalist West and the communist East.’ Equally important, it broke out throughout many of the regions now referred to as the global South. Despite wide variance in local conditions, nearly every 1968 movement was a decolonizing one occurring in postcolonial states of all sorts. Though scholars often view 1960 as the banner year for decolonization, especially in Africa, the transition from colonized state to independent nation does not happen immediately with the pen stroke of a treaty or the election of a new president. It is an ongoing process steeped in imperial residue: economic and military accords, enduring educational institutions, and various forms of violence often orchestrated by either new national authoritarians or old colonial ones (or both). Examples exist in every geopolitical sphere of 1968. The intergenerational activists of the Prague Spring contested Soviet imperialism and authoritarian encroachment on Czechoslovakia’s national sovereignty. The Black Panthers in the United States denounced American involvement in Vietnam and the practice of forced conscription. Meanwhile, their neighbors in Mexico channeled Cuban anticolonialists to decry their own nation’s authoritarian, neoimperial, and clientelist practices? More broadly, movements frequently drew intellectual inspiration from anticolonial and Third World thinkers, in the process decolonizing Western minds and reshaping worldviews as revolutionary ideas traveled the globe.’

Yet while all of these movements were linked to various aspects of decolonization, I focus particular attention on the former French empire, exploring very specific sets of postcolonial interconnectivity. In addition to well-documented cases of student protests like France’s May ‘68, activists from former French colonial territories of the Third World likewise occupied university campuses seeking radical political change. The Third World was not simply a fantasy location for Western radicals enchanted by Mao and Che but a site of activism in its own right.* Decolonization thus played a multifaceted and paradoxical role in the movements of 1968. On the one hand, the messy and complex process of decolonization was impossible to achieve in its entirety owing to ongoing postcolonial relationships and influences; on the other hand, these exchanges facilitated important transnational activist networks of students, intellectuals, and labor organizers, effectively globalizing local movements and causes. In the literal sense, decolonization itself was what people were protesting, by seeking either to accelerate it or to sever neocolonial ties. In the figurative, the idea of decolonization bonded distant and disparate groups and formed global activist sensibilities and communities. Whether Tunisian and Senegalese students and workers lamented authoritarian behavior in their newly minted governments, or French intellectuals appropriated Maoist slogans to mobilize immigrant workers, decolonization permeated their actions. Anticolonial affinities and practices similarly governed relations between Western and Third World radicals, as evidenced in the mobilizing power of transnational opposition to the Vietnam War. At the same time, the historical memory of colonialism continued to shape postcolonial France and its former colonies as they emerged from the ruins of a crumbling empire.’

This book raises three key questions: How might we study the transnational elements of the global 1960s in manageable and concrete ways without essentializing moments like 1968 in universal terms? Under what circumstances did movements travel beyond university campuses and even across national borders, and which forces of civil society propelled their momentum? Finally, how does our understanding of the political geography of the global 1960s shift if we reconsider the imperial remains of the postcolonial world? I explore these questions by investigating the global 1960s in a way that is at once transnational—to determine the intensity of global connections—and comparative, taking into account local contexts with varying student demographics, levels of state repression, and states of postcolonial existence. Examining the colonial histories linking political action in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar, Decolonizing 1968 charts the transformation of activist networks from their colonial-era origins through the 1970s.

What did 1968 look like in this triangle of postcolonial relations in the era of decolonization? As former axes of imperial France, Tunis, Paris, and Dakar shared the colonial imprints of French language, culture, and authority. Both newly independent nations, Tunisia and Senegal faced similar challenges with rapidly expanding government bureaucracies, national programs, and development projects. After independence in 1956, Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba's pro-Western economic policies fractured a Tunisian population that was reconstructing a national identity in the wake of French colonialism. In Senegal, President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s efforts at “African Socialism” presented postcolonial challenges related to overdependence on single-crop agriculture, originally established to serve colonial France, and the continued presence of French and Levantine foreigners in economic and educational sectors that nationalists grew to resent. These efforts by Bourguiba and Senghor to forge postindependence states sparked tensions that flamed into full-on protest movements. In each case, leaders’ reluctance to tolerate dissent and the ensuing resistance to authoritarianism were the result of both colonial legacies and the incomplete state of national autonomy. In other words, decolonization was at the forefront of state-society confrontations.

Like Tunisia and Senegal, France was also a postcolonial state, as colonies and metropoles alike navigated the decolonizing process.’ The recent memory of the Algerian War and the live updates of conflict in Vietnam and Palestine inflected 1968 protests in all three sites. France also felt the effects of postcolonial social change as an industrial center that was, by the 1960s, heavily dependent on the labor of immigrants recruited from its former colonies. This influx altered France’s demographics, producing an updated “immigrant question” around which French activists on the left and right staked new political identities. Across the Mediterranean, by 1968, the hangover following celebrations of liberation from France had set in, as empowered youth and a growing intellectual base called into question the new governments formed out of imperial fragmentation. As Tunisia and Senegal turned nationalist independence movements into autocratic one-party states, Paris became a center from which oppositional organizations were launched. Immigrant intellectuals and foreign students often returned to home institutions in the former colonies to participate in political activism and, in some cases, teamed up with national labor unions to demand change. Like the colonial officials and subjects before them, 1960s state leaders and activists continued to complicate and strategically deploy traditional notions of what Antoinette Burton has termed “nation-home” and “empire-away” in an era of transnational activism for anticolonial causes.

Institutions rooted in imperial projects, especially the French university system, shaped postcolonial protest and linked activists across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Universities created opportunities for contact and exchange. On the one hand, these institutions represented lasting imperial ties through French-influenced education; on the other hand, they also functioned as sites of anticolonial resistance by clustering large numbers of informed and disenchanted youth. Likewise, the networks, language, and collective memory of post-1945 anticolonialism provided the base on which new forms of 1960s contestation were built. Past and present melted together in 1968 as colonial legacies shaped the nature of protests in postcolonial states. After 1968, colonial-era activist networks transformed into important immigrant, human rights, and democratic initiatives, as agents for change unfurled anti-imperialist agendas against both French policymakers and authoritarian acts in emerging African nations. State leaders and student activists alike deployed colonial history—accusing each other of imitating French colonial behavior—to make claims on the present and future of postcolonial states well after empire. Furthermore, Third World actors articulated clear positions on global issues, and Third World action could take place in the First World.

The global 1960s should be evaluated, then, not just on some (im)measurable level of “global impact” or reach but on the form of revolutionary practice, on the ideological identification of movements, and on the actual mechanisms of circulation for ideas and the physical bodies that transported them across postcolonial frontiers. To that end, this book situates the most well-known

“1968"—France’s May ’68—as part of a broader complex of events and connections encompassing France’s former colonial possessions. I begin this global history in Tunis in March 1968, during which Paris acted as a central node connecting activists that were not the sole possession of one particular political or historiographic unit. This transnational activism did not come after an original, or French, May ‘68; rather, Tunis, Paris, and Dakar were part and parcel of a global and postcolonial moment of contestation.

Nineteen sixty-eight was not, then, a uniquely Western phenomenon, nor should it be considered as an event sovereign to the history of France. It occurred in a postcolonial paradox where colonial pasts created the objects of protest, while enduring relationships between metropole and postcolony enabled transnational networks of social mobilization. Decolonizing 1968 is in part a political reclamation project that—through comparative, transnational, and postcolonial perspectives—seeks to liberate 1968 from the narratives that have constrained it to France’s national history.” At the same time, it endeavors to release and to decolonize historical actors originating in the Third World from analyses that have left them “‘spatially incarcerated’ in that ‘other place.’”'? A postcolonial framework provides the necessary tools of excavation to bring to the surface previously peripheral histories of France’s ex-colonies, thereby challenging the universal character of the Western experience of 1968."

Decolonizing and Globalizing the 1960s in the Former French Empire

If historians have reached a fragile consensus that 1968 was somehow global, we still lack a framework to properly study the material and imagined bonds between political activists across north/south geographic, economic, and ethnic divides.'* Given the significant importance of decolonization in the global 1968, surprisingly few scholars of postcolonial and empire studies have focused on this crucial year of contestation. Even fewer historians have incorporated the tools of postcolonial or decolonial studies to understand the global 1960s." This book draws on the rich body of postcolonial theory as well as its emerging counterpart in decolonial studies to “decolonize” the study of 1968.14 To decolonize 1968, as suggested in the book’s title, is to engage in a particular type of theoretical and historical work. Its most notable impact here resides in rethinking our spatial and temporal understandings of 1968 and its aftermath. While there are other possible (and viable) spatial structures around which one could organize a global study of this period—for example, Cold War alliances, transatlantic cultural and political appropriations, or discrete

Third World centrism—the spaces under scrutiny in this book are decidedly postcolonial in nature. The former empire provided the canvas on which Decolonizing 1968 paints a postcolonial picture of transnational activism in and around 1968. It maintains the goal of liberating 1968 from place-bound analyses by both unraveling the legacies of colonialism that inspired movements for change and weaving together a patchwork of postcolonial activism.

And yet, the imagery of a tripartite geospatial oeuvre detailing border-crossing activists participating in—and imagining themselves as part of—a global community does not fully capture the range of possibilities for doing decolonial work. We must also consider the temporal. The gerund decolonizing in the book’s title suggests that this historical work is unfinished, not meant to ever reach foreclosure. Temporally, the book incorporates the colonial past; the 1968 events themselves, which occurred in a postcolonial present for the historical actors living them in real time; and the shifting historical place that 1968 will hold as politicians and historians continue to remake it in the future. Since the late 1990s, new formulations of “the long 1960s,” or “the ‘68 years,” have helped free 1968 studies from the events of that year alone. But there is also another temporal dimension at issue. That is to say, new versions of 1968 will surely arise as historians, armed with the theoretical tools accumulated as we navigate historiographic turns (in the present, the global, the imperial, and postcolonial/decolonial; and surely in the near future, the digital), continue to revisit this series of events. Even in the absence of immediate political regime change in any of the three cases investigated here, the legacies of 1968 continue to wield a major influence on the present-day political landscapes that they have altered.

Whereas postcolonial theory provides a window into the many legacies of colonialism that produced the 1968 moment, decolonial studies explains protesters’ desire for a future devoid of neocolonial exploitation. This approach acknowledges the coupling of colonialism and modernity by Latin Americanists while uncovering what those in decolonial studies have termed “resistance to the colonial matrix of power” and “positionalities that displace Western rationality.” Yet while many scholars in this nascent field argue for a concept that is “always already decolonial, delinking from the good, the bad, and the ugly of modernity and postmodernity,” the case of 1968 in the former French empire does not present such a purely clean break from colonial constructs.'$

For example, imperial institutions shaped the modernization projects of North and West African officials after independence, from modeling African universities after French ones to infrastructure investments in the tourism industry designed to attract Europeans to African shores. And while African students sought to displace European influence, they did so through the modern channels available to them. I prefer to think of decolonial action here along the same lines as radical network theorist Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, where “different groups of actors in the non-Western world felt confident they could assemble their own visions of social and world order, borrowing, adapting, synthesizing, perhaps plundering ideas from ‘the West and the rest’ and melding them with local practices and ideas.” 77

Rather than completely severing (delinking) from modernity and postmodernity, the 1968 activists of this book more often instrumentalized networks and institutions rooted in the colonial project to engage in anticolonial resistance. Decolonizing 1968 is thus about the discovery of the power of postcolonial activists and the global dimensions of protest in interrelated Francophone spaces.

Taken together, postcolonial and decolonial readings of 1968 reorient our thinking about both space (the interconnected former French empire and the spatial imaginary of the global 1960s) and time (the deployment of the colonial past in postcolonial presents and imagined decolonial futures). Spatially, this book looks beyond purely national contexts, calling into question the degree of rupture after empire. Ideas and events taking place in both the metropole and the colonies often created “colonial situations” that were mutually constitutive, and we should thus consider Western nations and their overseas colonies as single entities across transnational spaces.'° After the end of formal empire, France, West Africa, and North Africa likewise produced one particular “postcolonial situation” —1968—through their shared colonial pasts and the transnational activist networks of the time. These formulations allow for what Gary Wilder has termed a deterritorialization of political activism “in which supposedly European categories . . . belong as much to [African] actors who coproduced them as to their continental counterparts.”*° The protests in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar thrust into relief the tensions between the provincial and global elements of 1968. While some 68ers used international platforms to make claims about the autochthonous nature of their movements—often to counter accusations of imitating students in the West—others acted locally in solidarity with causes in distant lands. In making sense of these countervailing forces, the global in this case is not a stand-in for universal experiences; rather, the work of “decolonizing 1968” reveals a constellation of local, interconnected, and overlapping networks of border-crossing agents acting on postcolonial symbols of identification across Francophone spaces.

Though the book is geographically centered on three important sites of decolonization, I also open up discussion on the university as a fixed place where students imagined new landscapes of ideological and discursive space. African and Maghrebi students in Paris collaborated with activist groups at home institutions in Tunis and Dakar to organize multisited strikes. While Paris connected 1968 activists from across the globe, it also reflected its own specific set of understudied postcolonial formations. French students at the University of Nanterre, built in 1964, were brought to action in 1968 in part because of their proximity to immigrant communities on the outskirts of Paris. The physical location of the university next to worker shantytowns (bidonvilles) placed France’s social inequalities in plain sight and opened the spatial imagination of activists to envision new ideals for the French university and French nation.” Many French leftists—frustrated with reformist stances of the French Communist Party (which did not support revolution in Algeria) — turned to immigrant causes as sources of revolutionary inspiration. The relationship between French left-wing activists and non-Western students and workers thus produced a domestic (France-based) ideology of a more globalized and meaningful struggle. Yet 1968 also produced a form of nationalism in postcolonial France on the far right. Evidence of increased racist attacks by French whites against immigrants in and immediately after 1968 reveals a shifting demographic landscape in the workplace, the university, and the streets of France’s industrial cities. These developments threatened notions of a universalist (i.e., white) French culture, otherwise known as white nationalism.”

Walter Benjamin commented that the bourgeois urban space of the nineteenth-century Arcades in Paris was where one experienced the “intoxication of possibility and desire.”” In the 1960s, the Parisian suburb of Nanterre functioned similarly in that it reflected newly imagined possibilities for students who inhabited that particular space. However, rather than producing a desire for bourgeois consumption, Nanterre generated a yearning to revolutionize society. It forced students to confront the failures of France’s postwar welfare state where cultural, social, and economic differences between students and immigrant workers were ever present in daily life. As Henri Lefebvre commented, “Right now [Nanterre] contains misery, shantytowns, excavations for an express subway line, low-income housing projects for workers, industrial enterprises. This is a desolate and strange landscape . . . [that] might be described as a place of damnation.”*4 Improvements in public education, combined with a postwar demographic boom, led to much more socially diverse campuses in France than in past generations. Yet even students from working-class backgrounds who populated university dormitories still held a position of relative privilege over immigrant laborers dwelling next door. Beyond Nanterre, while activists themselves physically crossed borders to engage in radical politics on either side of the Mediterranean, demonstrating against the Vietnam War at home was also a way to imagine themselves as members of a global activist community that was both abstract and real.

Decolonizing 1968 retraces the French colonial influences on African universities that made possible the transnational networks of migrant intellectuals established before national independence. I consider the “postcolonial” not in its chronological sense as the history of the former colonies “after” independence; rather, the “postcolonial” operates as an ongoing state of being in the world and a set of experiences that are “produced by” colonialism.” Particular institutions of the French empire, such as universities, shaped life in the decolonizing societies of 1968. Shining a light on their enduring legacies is an effort to concretely link colonial pasts and postcolonial presents by actually tracking the movement of people, ideas, and political culture both across time and in the unfolding of global protest.

After and Beyond Empire

Moving beyond event-centered histories of the year 1968 to understand its colonial heritage and the transforming of the political currents of the 1970s, this book falls in line with what French scholars like Michelle Zancarini-Fournel have termed les années 68 (the 1968 years), or “the long 1960s,” that look beyond the year itself. Colonial pasts set the stage for the events themselves, whose characterizations were rewritten, erased, or reconfigured by activists, state actors, and counterrevolutionaries.? While campuses in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar erupted in 1968, each movement had its own specific chronologies, trajectories, and reference points that, in instances that this book explores, became imbricated with each other. And while nationalist historiographies have subverted cross-cultural analyses, postcolonial state leaders like Léopold Sédar Senghor and Habib Bourguiba erroneously depicted student activism on their national university campuses as an imitation of French students. Beyond merely rebalancing the historical scales, this book is about the myriad ways that colonialism and decolonization were key determinants in the activism of 1968.

Colonial education in service of the French empire transformed into postcolonial universities in Tunisia and Senegal. Though designed to train the next generations of Tunisians and Senegalese to usher in a new era of African prosperity, these institutions emulated French models of higher education. Just as French universities became sites from which anti-imperialist articulations emanated before independence, postcolonial campuses were also sites of conflict in the 1960s between activist youth and the state over the future of the nation. African universities were both state-building institutions and institutions of the state that took on extremely important roles as new governments implemented ambitious modernization schemes across all sectors of society. The university was at once a product and a producer of modernity. It was a national symbol of progress and a source of pride for developing nations. It would train its doctors, engineers, teachers, and politicians. Thus, both the state and the youth of the nation had a great stake in the university and its implications for determining the future.

University campuses provided the building blocks for newly independent societies. They also became postcolonial battlegrounds where states and educated youth expressed and debated conflicting notions of modernity, national identity, and democracy. Moreover, students leveraged increased political power as part of the process of decolonization. By 1960, those under twenty-five in both Tunisia and Senegal made up approximately 60 percent of the total population, compared with approximately 30 percent for France. Concerned about shifting demographics, governments in Tunisia and Senegal carried out large-scale education projects to accommodate rising numbers of youth, increasing literacy rates and elevating social status for young people lucky enough to have access to higher education. Societal transformations in education coincided with the consolidation of state power into single nationalist parties and student and labor unions in Tunisia and Senegal. Extralegal student organizations with links to banned political parties found refuge on campuses. As the Senegalese historian Mamadou Fall has pointed out, “Each time the opposition is muzzled and forced underground, the university becomes the natural site of expression for political currents.”# The former colonizer/ colonized antagonisms from the days of struggle for independence were replaced by stark divisions between disillusioned youth and heavy-handed postcolonial state leaders.

Using campus lecterns, students articulated alternative nationalisms that resisted neoimperial projects and rejected authoritarian state leadership. Bourguiba frequently referenced the importance of national solidarity when arguing for a united one-party state that delivered independence in 1956 and that would best carry out future nation-building. Senghor likewise condemned and banned the African Independence Party in 1960 to secure unchallenged power within his Senegalese Progressive Union. Though France experienced a comparatively greater degree of political pluralism in the postwar period, Charles de Gaulle had just concentrated executive power with the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958 under the guise of resolving the Algerian War.

In short, the university was in many ways a microcosm of the tensions between nationalism and independence, on the one hand, and persistent colonial and neoimperial ties, on the other. By 1968, the revolutionary moment and climax of most studies of the global 1960s, the university had become the mouthpiece for many societal claims against state power in the three overlapping case studies presented here. The French university, developed in the metropole and exported to colonial centers of power like Tunis and Dakar to meet the needs of the empire, became an important and enduring remnant of the colonial system after independence. If Tunisian and Senegalese universities were inspired by the French model, so too were student and activist organizations. Created in Paris during the colonial era, African student organizations came home to roost after the collapse of the empire. Senegalese students who called for the replacement of French faculty and curricula with African alternatives were actively seeking to decolonize these remains of French imperial education. When regimes in Tunisia and Senegal repressed political dissent, Paris continued to act as a nexus in international networks of information dissemination and antigovernment protests. In addition to calling for education reforms, student activists used the university as a platform to resist the state and to articulate their own versions of what I term “postcolonial nationalism.” A new postcolonial nationalism emerged in which Tunisian and Senegalese activists defined and deployed anti-imperialist claims that had once been designated for the French state, converting and redirecting them toward their own new university and state leaders.

While the major clashes between students and the state often ignited on campuses, and their catalytic nature is undeniable, students frequently engaged with other important stakeholders. Beyond student activism, 1968 witnessed a resurgence in the grassroots activism of teachers and industrial workers, as well as immigrant intellectuals and laborers. In Paris and Dakar, worker activism arguably eclipsed what students had set in motion. In Tunisia, worker participation in 1968 was less prevalent owing to close ties between worker unions and the state, yet workers challenged the state more effectively than did students in the late 1970s. Though campuses were of fundamental importance as launching sites for protest, these often spilled into popular urban quarters or to factories whose spaces striking workers reclaimed.

The notion of “beyond” thus operates on two levels, as the book traces activism beyond the campus and beyond the moment its student protagonists were enrolled. For example, Tunisian activist Ahmed Ben Othmani was radicalized as a college student in the 1960s, incarcerated for protesting in 1968, and continued to advocate for human and political rights issues well after terminating university studies. Likewise, the unfolding of 1968 in France inspired the creation of the French group Cahiers de mai, whose primary function was to engage with and advocate for France’s immigrant workers in the 1970s, and who ultimately led their own autonomous, post-1968 antiracist movement.

The activists of 1968 and beyond who highlight the pages of this book drew on the colonial past to imagine new and alternative futures for their decolonizing societies. These were often based on racial and religious tolerance, participatory democracy, increased wages and protections for workers, and human rights, if not tolerance of the political Right or the soft middle. Though it is unsurprising that many of the institutions of colonialism persisted after independence, the very education systems that the French hoped would make colonial subjects useful to the state ultimately functioned as the crucible of postcolonial revolt. Rather than terminating the colonial era, to decolonize 1968 is to interrogate the multiple ways that decolonization determined and connected the protests in three important postcolonial states and beyond the borders of France.

CHAPTER 1 Colonialism, Intellectual Migration, and the New African University

Postcolonial studies considers the manner in which traces of a colonial past become, in the present moment, the object

of symbolic and pragmatic work, as well as the conditions under which these practices give rise to unprecedented hybrid or cosmopolitan forms of life, politics, culture, and modernities.

—Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?” Public Culture

Though French presence in Senegal dates to at least the seventeenth century, when Gorée Island acted as an important hub in the French slave trade, it was not until 1895 that the French established the Government General of French West Africa (Afrique-Occidentale Française [AOF]). From 1895 to 1956, the Government General oversaw an area nine times the size of France, consisting of present-day Mauritania, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Benin.' Saint-Louis was named the seat of the colonial government in the AOF until 1902, when the outpost was transferred to Dakar. Senegal had long held a special place in the French colonial hierarchy, where designated coastal regions were the only places in AOF in which French citizenship was possible, at least nominally, as early as 1848.” Native residents were considered colonial subjects in all other regions of the AOE Yet in Senegal, originaires from one of four communes (Saint-Louis, Dakar, Rufisque, Gorée) were able to elect their own deputies in the French National Assembly, paving the way for the first Black African deputy from Senegal, Blaise Diagne, in 1914. Diagne obtained recognition of citizenship for originaires and their descendants with 1916 legislation and led massive efforts to successfully recruit some sixty thousand tirailleurs sénégalais into the colonial army to fight in World War I.’ This privileged status for Senegalese was measured, however. Nominal citizenship was not without its complexities, as legal categories differentiated citizenship based on ethno-racial lines and even divided single African social groups from the same families or ethnic origins.‘

Additional rights were extended to subjects from France’s African colonies during the “imperial civil war” between de Gaulle’s Free French and Maréchal Pétain’s Vichy.” To help defeat the Nazis and regain France’s territories, de Gaulle curried favor with leading African politicians by offering representation in France’s Constituent Assembly at the Brazzaville conference in 1944.° Ina parallel effort to quell rising anticolonialism in the aftermath of World War IL, French administrators later hung their hopes on the 1946 French Union, which granted a new form of imperial citizenship to colonial subjects in Africa. Two years into the Algerian War (1954-1962), France renewed legislative efforts to avoid the spread of conflict beyond Algeria’s borders with the passing of the 1956 loi-cadre in French West Africa. Demands for local autonomy in the AOF increased with Indigenous leaders empowered to exercise administrative authority while colonial subjects gained voting rights. By 1958, as the French military was entrenched in a costly and bloody war in Algeria, it became clear to observers and colonial administrators alike that France did not have the resources to maintain control over its African colonies. When Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 in a sweeping referendum to solve the “Algerian Question,” he brought with him the new Constitution of the Fifth Republic, which increased executive power and established the French Community, a federation of African member states.