The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars

By Gary Wilder

France experienced a period of crisis following World War I when the relationship between the nation and its colonies became a subject of public debate. The French Imperial Nation-State focuses on two intersecting movements that redefined imperial politics—colonial humanism led by administrative reformers in West Africa and the Paris-based Negritude project, comprising African and Caribbean elites.

Gary Wilder develops a sophisticated account of the contradictory character of colonial government and examines the cultural nationalism of Negritude as a multifaceted movement rooted in an alternative black public sphere. He argues that interwar France must be understood as an imperial nation-state—an integrated sociopolitical system that linked a parliamentary republic to an administrative empire. An interdisciplinary study of colonial modernity combining French history, colonial studies, and social theory, The French Imperial Nation-State will compel readers to revise conventional assumptions about the distinctions between republicanism and racism, metropolitan and colonial societies, and national and transnational processes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226773858

Gary Wilder

Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology, History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005). He is co-editor of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter (Duke, 2019).

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Gary Wilder is associate professor of history at Pomona College.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2005 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2005

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN (cloth): 0-226-89772-9

ISBN (paper): 0-226-89768-0

ISBN (ebook): 978-0-226-77385-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilder, Gary.

The French imperial nation-state : negritude and colonial humanism between the two world wars / Gary Wilder.

p.   cm.

ISBN 0-226-89772-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-226-89768-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. France—Colonies—Africa, West—20th century. 2. France—Colonies—Caribbean Area—20th century. 3. Nationalism—Africa, West—History—20th century. 4. Nationalism—Caribbean Area—History—20th century. 5. Africans—France. 6. Blacks—Race identity—Africa, West—History—20th century. 7. Blacks—Race identity—Caribbean Area—History—20th century. 8. France—Ethnic relations. 9. Blacks—France. I. Title.

JV1818.W54    2005

323.1'09171'24409042—dc22

2005008094

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

The French Imperial Nation-State

NEGRITUDE & COLONIAL HUMANISM BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS

Gary Wilder

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

To my parents, Arthur and Marilyn Wilder

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Part 1: The Imperial Nation-State

1. Introduction: Working through the Imperial Nation-State

2. Framing Greater France: A Real Abstraction

Part 2: Colonial Humanism

3. Toward a New Colonial Rationality: Welfare, Science, Administration

4. A Doubled and Contradictory Form of Government

5. Temporality, Nationality, Citizenship

Part 3: African Humanism

6. Negritude I: Practicing Citizenship in Imperial Paris

7. Negritude II: Cultural Nationalism

8. Negritude III: Critique of (Colonial) Reason

Conclusion: Legacies of the Imperial Nation-State

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A major project so long in the making inevitably accumulates more debts of gratitude than can properly be acknowledged in a few sentences.

Research for this book has been supported generously by grants from the University of Chicago, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Pomona College has graciously extended liberal amounts of time and research funding so that I could complete this volume. Pomona has proven to be an exceptionally congenial milieu in which to pursue my scholarship. I owe special thanks to my exemplary colleagues in the history department—Ron Cluett, Sid Lemelle, Victor Silverman, Pamela Smith, Miguel Tinker-Salas, Helena Wall, Ken Wolf, Bob Woods, and Sam Yamashita—for their stimulating conversation and constant support. Many extraordinary students at Pomona have also provoked my scholarship in numerous ways. Laura Ephraim and Emily Klancher in particular provided substantive help with revisions.

I will always be grateful for the unflagging support for my work extended over the years by my dissertation advisors Leora Auslander, Jean Comaroff, and Moishe Postone. Their intelligence, experience, and assistance have helped me to sharpen my vision and navigate a course in this profession. Equally important were the insightful comments and professional endorsements provided generously by those who carefully read the manuscript—Julia Adams, Antoinette Burton, Dan Sherman, George Steinmetz, and Tyler Stovall. I owe a great deal to their open-minded critical engagement with this project. Additionally, I thank my editor at the University of Chicago Press, Susan Bielstein, for her advice, patience, and belief in the project, and my copyeditor, Kathryn Gohl, whose hard work was much appreciated.

This book has also benefited greatly from the critical feedback offered at various stages of its completion. I thank the participants in discussions hosted by the Red Line Working Group, the Social Theory Workshop, the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France, and the African Studies Workshop—all at the University of Chicago, the Scripps College Faculty Research Seminar, the Center for Cultural Studies at University of California at Santa Cruz, the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California at Riverside, the European History and Culture Colloquium at UCLA, the Duke University Press Politics, History, and Culture series editorial board, the Institute of French Studies as well as the Social Theory and Historical Studies Workshop at New York University, and the history departments at the University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, California State University at Long Beach, and Pomona College.

I also offer heartfelt thanks to scholars too numerous to mention or whom I might have forgotten whose encouragement, suggestions, and criticism have helped improve this project. These include my other dissertation readers Arjun Appadurai, Barney Cohn, and Tom Holt as well as Anthony Appiah, Talal Asad, Pascal Blanchard, Peter Bloom, Alice Bullard, Tony Chafer, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Armelle Chatelier, Anna Clark, Mary Coffey, Judith Coffin, John Comaroff, Fernando Coronil, Mamadou Diouf, Stephane Dufoix, Ellen Furlough, Jan Goldstein, Lynn Hunt, Benetta Jules-Rosette, Gene Lebovics, Philippa Levine, Achille Mbembe, Simon Njami, Sue Peabody, Kevin Platt, Emanuelle Saada, Amanda Sackur, David Shafer, Julie Skurski, Bill Sewell, Ann Stoler, Margaret Waller, Francoise Vergès, and Patrick Weil. In France, M. Dion at the colonial archives provided much needed guidance, and Michel Fabre shared invaluable bibliographic resources and scholarly insight with me.

Unspeakably important has been the deep and abiding engagement with my work by trusted friends whose collegiality, intellect, and integrity inspire me. I have leaned especially hard on and learned more than I can say from Andrew Aisenberg and Laurent Dubois, whose incisive readings helped guide my revisions, and Manu Goswami, my cherished long-term interlocutor. My work has also been well nourished by the insightful comments, conversation, and friendship of my Ithaca cronies, now scholars, Jeff Melnick and Matthew Trachman; my Chicago cohort, Bill Bissell, Neil Brenner, Nick DeGenova, Elisa Camiscioli, Anjali Fedson, Gautam Ghosh, Cecilia Novero, and Josh Price; and my California colleagues, Dan Birkholz, Malek Doulat, David Lloyd, Panivong Norindr, Marina Perez de Mendiola, Paul Saint-Amour, and Victor Silverman. I turn regularly to these compadres for feedback, perspective, guidance, and solidarity. Without them I would be lost.

Profound gratitude is reserved for those who have truly sustained me on so many fronts for the duration of this project: Robin Lippert, Paula Gorlitz, and especially my parents, Arthur and Marilyn Wilder. Thank you also Mark Kaplan and Amy Zimmerman for becoming family in Chicago. Above all, I could not have written the book that I have without the love, wisdom, and careful eye of Rachel Lindheim, my true partner, closest friend, and coconspirator through every twist and turn.

– – –

Extracts from or earlier versions of some chapters have been published previously. Chapter 2 appeared as Framing Greater France, Journal of Historical Sociology 14, no. 2 (June 2001): 198–225. Parts of chapters 3 and 4 appeared in Colonial Ethnology and Political Rationality in French West Africa, History and Anthropology 14, no. 3 (2003): 219–52; and in The Politics of Failure: Historicizing Popular Front Colonial Policy in French West Africa, in French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion, ed. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Part of chapter 6 appeared in Panafricanism and the Republican Political Sphere, in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Tyler Stovall and Sue Peabody (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and in Practicing Citizenship in Imperial Paris, in Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives, ed. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Part of chapter 8 appeared in Race, Reason, Impasse: Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation, Radical History Review 90 (September 2004): 31–58.

PART 1

The Imperial Nation-State

The same laws cannot suit so many various provinces, which have different customs and contrasting climates and cannot all tolerate the same form of government. But differing laws only give rise to disorder and confusion among peoples who live under the same rulers and are in constant communication. They intermingle and intermarry, and forced to accept other customs, they never know if their patrimony is really their own. When a multitude of strangers are brought together by the seat of the supreme administration, talents are buried, virtues are unrecognized, and vices go unpunished. The rulers are so busy that they see nothing for themselves; clerks govern the state. Finally, the measures that must be taken to maintain the general authority, which so many distant officials try to evade or deceive, absorb all governmental concern. Nothing is left for the happiness of the people and barely any for its defense when necessary. It is thus that a body too large for its constitution collapses and perishes, crushed by its own weight.—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

1

Introduction: Working through the Imperial Nation-State

What are we to make of the fact that republican France was never not an imperial nation-state? It is no secret that successive republics were instituted within the framework of a broader and prior colonial empire. Nevertheless, French historiography is typically guided by a national paradigm for which a correspondence between territory, population, and state is considered normal and the existence of colonies is treated as exceptional. There is a frequent tension between the categories that historians use to analyze either the French nation-state or its overseas colonies and the empirewide economic, social, administrative, and publicity circuits that delimited France as an imperial nation-state.

The point here is not only that the metropole and its overseas colonies exercised a reciprocal influence upon one another, but that France’s parliamentary republic was articulated with its administrative empire to compose an expanded and disjointed political formation that must be analyzed in its own right. Once we refigure the nation-state as imperial, disjunctions within and between French territories, populations, and forms of government may be treated as intrinsic features of the national-republican past rather than as obstacles to national-republican ideals. The focus of historiography then shifts away from apparent contradictions between the promises of republican universalism and colonial or racist practices to the antinomy between universality and particularity that existed within both the metropolitan and colonial poles of the imperial nation-state, and which expressed itself in discourses as well as practices.

Working through the Imperial Nation-State

This book explores a period of French history during which metropolitan and overseas publics were remarkably self-conscious about the structural relationship between the continental nation and its overseas colonies. Following World War I, the persistence of the empire served as one of the few sure signs that France itself had survived the war in a recognizable form. Supposedly external and secondary colonial possessions curiously came to signify the durability of the self-contained French nation, especially in the context of disruptive sociopolitical transformations between the wars. Through a new discourse of Greater France, a large sector of public opinion regarded a revitalized empire as the guarantor of international prestige and economic prosperity. Colonies were reconceptualized as integral, if legally ambiguous, parts of the French nation. This emergent national-imperial imaginary consolidated as postwar socioeconomic conditions further integrated metropolitan and colonial societies. Yet the very forces driving imperial interdependence also disrupted many of the empire’s underlying precepts.

Although Greater France was at the apex of its power by World War I, the genesis of a long crisis of colonial authority may be traced back to the interwar decades. This incipient crisis generated public debates—official and nongovernmental, metropolitan and colonial, including citizens and subjects—concerning the relationship between the republic and the empire, the legitimacy of colonial power, and the juridical status of colonized peoples. This book focuses on two intersecting movements to revise the imperial order: one by republican reformers elaborated a new logic of administration in West Africa (colonial humanism), and another by African and Antillean elites in Paris formulated new currents of cultural nationalism. Each developed in relation to France’s disjointed imperial character, which they also exemplified.

Colonial humanism was an extension of metropolitan productivism, statism, and welfarism. Yet the peculiar requirements of colonial politics led administrators in French West Africa to treat local populations as members of distinct sociocultural wholes. Policies were therefore shaped by a dual imperative to transform and to preserve indigenous societies simultaneously. The systemic contradiction between requirements to rationalize and differentiate led to paradoxical dictums that guided French colonial projects: socioeconomic individualism without juridico-political individuality, social development without civil society, citizenship without culture, nationality without citizenship. A new colonial rationality placed subject peoples in a politically effective double-bind that racialized them as minor members of the French nation. But it was also self-undermining and created possibilities for critical political interventions.

Concurrently, expatriate Africans and Antilleans participated in metropolitan French civil society and constituted an alternative black public sphere through which they raised questions about republicanism, nationality, and rights as they intersected with colonialism, culture, and racism. These subject-citizens confronted the emancipatory and oppressive aspects of both the universalizing and particularizing dimensions of French colonial politics. Out of this political field a younger group of student-poets emerged, in the mid-thirties, who would compose the Negritude movement. Their cultural politics challenged the double bind of colonial racism through a series of double gestures. They rejected assimilation while celebrating cultural métissage, claimed political equality while demanding cultural recognition, sought a place within the republican nation as Negro-Africans while identifying with a transnational Panafrican community, collaborated with colonial reformers while envisioning an alternative Greater France as a nonracial supranational federation, engaged in rational-critical debate while formulating a critique of colonial rationality itself.

My starting point is that reformist colonial humanism and black cultural nationalism, as well as their intersections, become intelligible from the perspective of France as an imperial nation-state in crisis. Conversely, these interrelated movements provide a vantage point for grasping France as an imperial nation-state organized around a constitutive contradiction between political universality and particularity.

This study has an imperial scope. It traces interpersonal, institutional, and discursive networks that included republican policymakers in Africa as well as Africans and Antilleans in the republican metropole. These empirewide circuits delimited a common political field whose members belonged to an imperial cohort that transcended clean distinctions between colonizing French citizens and colonized African subjects. The scale and composition of these networks exemplified one way in which France was an imperial nation-state. Additionally, they generated reflections upon and projects addressing the national-imperial order, an issue then forcing itself into political consciousness, some of which I analyze below.

This book thus extends recent scholarship on the intersections between French colonial and metropolitan histories.¹ It does so through an inquiry into political form and political rationality that seeks to displace conventional oppositions between the French colonial empire and national republic, racism and universalism, the national and the transnational. The analysis refuses to fetishize one side of these oppositions as a privileged standpoint from which to critique the other. Apparent contradictions between republicanism and colonialism cannot be transposed into a distinction between universalism and particularism. There were universalist and particularist dimensions of republican and colonial poles of the imperial nation-state, each of which contained emancipatory and oppressive dimensions. We cannot adequately understand the national-imperial order if racism and colonialism are treated as signs of the absence or failure of republicanism understood one-sidedly as universalism. Such a gesture, still common in French colonial historiography, effectively protects an idealized republicanism by pointing to its supposed violation rather than exploring its actual operation.

French colonialism provides a fruitful occasion to raise questions about the limits of a national history paradigm that often affirms republicanism’s universalist self-understanding. There is a risk, however, that by simply applying this paradigm on a broader scale, French historians of colonialism will reenact that which they are supposed to explore: the incorporation of overseas territories into a republican national metanarrative. This tendency appears throughout Alice Conklin’s A Mission to Civilize, a monograph that merits attention here not because it represents a varied body of historiography but because it is so readily cited in writing about Third Republic colonialism.²

Conklin studies the way in which the oppressive policies of the French civilizing mission in West Africa were informed by supposedly emancipatory universalist republican values to which colonial administrators were genuinely committed. This promising starting point might have led to an examination of internal links between republicanism and colonialism. But Conklin’s ability to present an integrated account is undermined by the methodological individualism that guides her analysis. She focuses on the motivations of individual policymakers in order to determine whether their intentions were disinterested (genuine) or self-interested (in the service of political objectives). She then compares administrators’ sincere attempts to help Africans through projects influenced by republican principles to the way in which such efforts were undermined by self-serving political interests. Because she does not explore how government in West Africa was sincerely republican and genuinely colonial, France’s oppressive practices there appear to be anomalous (e.g., ironic or cynical failures). Such an evaluation is only possible because Conklin conflates republicanism with universalism, which is assumed to be inherently opposed to colonial racism (reduced to particularism). She does not recognize the ways in which contradictions between universality and particularity were internal to republican, colonial, and racial discourses and practices.

Instead, Conklin focuses primarily on contradictions between plans and implementation. This analytic leads her to condemn (as tainted) science that serves political interests as well as policies that use science cynically. By criticizing the colonial misuse of ethnography, Conklin implies that disinterested science would objectively inform enlightened policy and reduce oppression. She does not recognize the racializing power of real science. Similarly, by arguing that administrators’ sincere attempts to improve African lives were undermined by cynical interests, she preserves the ideal of disinterested improvement projects. She does not explore how welfare policies were real instruments of colonial government. Ultimately, A Mission to Civilize functions to protect the purity of republican universalism, scientific knowledge, and improving gestures from the contaminating influence of racism, self-interest, and instrumental politics. It thereby folds French colonialism into a canonical narrative of republican universalism that remains as undisturbed as the national paradigm that is its starting point.

Conklin’s affirmative historiography compares the West African administration to a mythically self-identical republic that never existed historically. The French nation-state was always a disjointed political form. Its administrative, liberal, and parliamentary dimensions did not always align with one another. Citizenship, nationality, and the people were at once abstractly human (universalist) and concretely cultural (particularist) categories. Imperialism meant that French territories, populations, and governments did not correspond to one another seamlessly. These obscured structural contradictions became increasingly evident under the Third Republic. By the end of World War I a new state–economy–society diagram meant that French government was organized less around liberal individualism than around statist, productivist, and welfarist forms of corporatism. Interwar colonial administration was a variant of postliberal politics, not simply a violation of parliamentary republicanism, which no longer existed. Likewise, metropolitan state politics shared features of colonial administrative rule. Differences between them, such as the racial divide between rulers and ruled, cannot be translated into distinctions between republicanism and racism, liberalism and authoritarianism. Colonial humanism was simultaneously universalizing and particularizing; the imperial nation-state was at once republican and illiberal.

Like Conklin, colonial reformers and colonized elites also often protected the French national-republican ideal while denouncing its colonial violation without exploring the underlying connections between them that sustained the national-imperial order. Scholars must beware of the tendency to enter into what Dominick LaCapra, adapting Freud, has called a transferential relationship to history, whereby the considerations at issue in the object of study are always repeated with variations—or find their displaced analogues—in one’s account of it.³ Otherwise, LaCapra explains, they risk acting out rather than working through history.⁴ His analysis refers to the ways in which scholars of historical trauma tend to reenact victims’ traumatic experience. But scholarship on historical perpetrators also risks reaffirming their self-understanding.

Instead of acting out republican colonialism, the following chapters attempt to work through the imperial nation-state. Acting out would incorporate colonial societies into an expansionist national historiography that conflates republicanism and universalism. Alternatively, working through entails situating (not mastering or resolving) the sociopolitical dilemmas raised by French colonialism in relation to the nation-state as an imperial political form. An adequate history of imperialism must take the empire itself as its object and starting point. Rather than study how French republicanism might have been played out in the colonies or how colonialism might have affected national identity, it would question received understandings of the national republic as a self-contained entity that can be considered apart from the imperial nation.⁵

Although interwar reformers and nationalists frequently enacted aspects of republican colonialism, they were not condemned endlessly to act out its dilemmas. They also explored the imperial implications of French national history as well as the national implications of French imperial history, recognizing the imperial nation-state as an inescapable reality through which they had to work. Because it was an intrinsically contradictory form whose crises opened possibilities for systemic transformation, immanent critique—identifying within it alternatives that pointed beyond it—was a quintessential type of working through. Insofar as these historical actors self-consciously engaged the national-imperial order that confronted them, historians interested in working through it should follow their lead.

An approach to working through that avoids the binary reasoning criticized above would treat the imperial nation-state as an artifact of colonial modernity. This broad term refers variously to the impact of colonial capitalism on local societies and its articulation with other modes of production, colonized peoples’ novel and often subversive appropriation of Western institutions, and the constitutive role of colonialism, non-Western populations, and their encounter in the making of modern Europe. A common thread links these meanings: imperialism created novel sociopolitical formations that were irreducibly different from those in the West yet were incontestably modern and inseparable from their European counterparts.

Many recognizable aspects of modernity were notably absent from or prohibited in most colonial societies; examples include free labor, private property, abstract individuality, impersonal common law, disenchanted civil society, and representative government. Yet the often extreme economic exploitation, social violence, racial hierarchies, and authoritarian politics endemic to colonialism were neither pre-colonial survivals nor symptoms of European regression. They were effects of modern capitalism, rational bureaucracy, scientific administration, normalizing state practices, technological development, urbanization, and the like. This seemingly simple point may nevertheless generate complex analyses when it guides historical inquiry into the peculiar modernity embodied by and generated through colonialism. Such an optic does not only allow us to specify the internal dynamics of colonial societies more precisely. It also enables a multifaceted and global (in both senses of the term) view of modernity, not as one composed of plural alternative modernities but as a worldwide if heterogeneous dynamic that works through and on Western societies but is neither possessed nor controlled by them.

Thinking in terms of colonial modernity—working through it—allows us to begin to write French history from a properly imperial (not imperialist) standpoint that would resist reducing it to national categories but would generate novel insights into national history. Marx concludes the first volume of Capital by linking primitive accumulation to New World colonization. He writes: "It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield to have discovered, not something new about the colonies, but in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country," namely, that there was nothing normal or natural about a free-labor market.⁶ Studying interwar French West Africa may similarly illuminate French political relations on an imperial scale. It would highlight the fact that the disjointed relationship among culture, nationality, and citizenship has been a feature not a failure of the national-imperial state. It would also underscore that alternative methods for combining these elements were long embedded in French national-imperial history.

Antinomies of the (Imperial) Nation-State

Starting with the specificity of the colonial modern as well as the ways in which colonial dynamics provide crucial insight into metropolitan contradictions may help us to account for a persistent feature of French and British imperialism across the colonial periphery: the tension between coexisting policies to abstract and modernize or to differentiate and primitivize subject populations.⁷ Rather than treat this recurrent contradiction as a sign of state ambivalence or failure, we can explore the way in which it might be a structural feature of colonial modernity on a very general level. One way to do so requires linking this long-term tension to a deeper antinomy between universality and particularity that is expressed on multiple scales (national, colonial, imperial) and at various levels of abstraction (in policies, in political forms, in their underlying rationality). Although this antinomy was central to administrative rationality in West Africa between the wars, it was not restricted to colonial policies. It was a durable legacy of the French Revolution that was inscribed in the very structure of the modern nation-state.

The term antinomy, central to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, refers to a contradiction between two propositions, each of which is obtained by correct reasoning and is equally logical.⁸ Both sides of an antinomic equation are valid; neither element is prior to, realer than, or the cause of the other. No amount of clear thinking can overcome such an opposition. Although Kant’s deployment intimates a useful structural understanding of contraction, he treats antinomy as a philosophical problem. In contrast, Lukács develops a sociohistorical understanding of antinomies, grounded in a critique of Kant’s idealism, that might help us grasp the nation-state as a contradictory form.

Lukács refers to the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism as antinomies of bourgeois thought. His insight is that these seemingly irreconcilable social visions—human beings as free producers of society versus human beings as determined products of society—do not constitute an intellectual dilemma. Rather, they express valid truths about separate aspects of existing capitalist social relations. He argues that under capitalism, autonomous individuals do freely enter into market relations even as reification creates a quasi-objective second nature that determines social behavior.⁹ His sociohistorical framework reconciles subjectivism and objectivism as grasping equally real but one-sided dimensions of a two-dimensional modern society. Here neither subjectivity nor objectivity is more valid than the other; both are real or concrete abstractions.¹⁰

Lukács’s understanding of the determinate relationship between social categories and social consciousness derives from Marx’s understanding of the doubled character of capitalist modernity under which social relations are at once subjective and objective, abstract and concrete, universal and particular. Marx demonstrates that this doubleness is embedded in the elemental commodity form whose dual nature is abstractly universal and concretely particular. As he explains, the relative form of value and the equivalent form are two inseparable moments, which belong to and mutually condition each other. For Marx, this double form is a function of the dual character of labor under modern capitalism as equal and abstract, on the one hand, and concrete and useful, on the other.¹¹

Insofar as Marx’s Capital accounts for the abstracting transformation of incommensurable qualities into equivalent quantities, which also enables social distinctions, it can be read as an inquiry into the antinomy between universality and particularity. Marx explains that in a society of generalized commodity production, every particular kind of useful private labour can be exchanged with, i.e., counts as the equal of, every other kind of useful private labor. He shows that money facilitates this abstraction by mediating the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour. The direct exchangeability of particular commodities requires that they express their values in the same equivalent. But Marx explains that this medium of equivalence must come from within the social formation itself: a particular kind of commodity acquires the form of universal equivalent, because all the other commodities make it the material embodiment of their uniform and universal form of value. At that point a specific kind of commodity . . . becomes the money commodity, or serves as money. Marx characterizes money under capitalism as the particular equivalent form.¹² It is not only simultaneously universal and particular, but its universality is grounded in its very historical particularity.

Although Marx is concerned with the commodity form and social relations, we may adapt his insight about universalism’s self-grounding character to a framework for understanding the nation-state and political relations. Here I bracket the vexing question as to whether the nation-state is essentially a capitalist state derived, at a very abstract level, from the peculiar value form of commodity-mediated social relations.¹³ Others might characterize the nation-state and capitalism as encompassing independent sets of relations that shared common conditions of historical emergence and whose respective developments have been structurally entwined.¹⁴ Either way, there is no disputing that in the modern period, a political order mediated by formally equivalent (and juridically equal) rights-bearing citizens corresponded to a social order mediated by formally equivalent contracting individuals.¹⁵

Whether dual aspects of an overarching capitalism that over time became relatively autonomous from one another or distinct spheres that became historically articulated, modern socioeconomic and political relations became interdependent elements—variously enabling and interrupting one another—of a larger sociopolitical assemblage. Because capitalism and the state, in Bob Jessop’s terms, were structurally coupled and strategically coordinated, they can be neither analytically separated from nor reduced to one another.¹⁶ Even if at an abstract level the state is derivable from the commodity form, we might usefully extend Marxian methodology in order to develop nonreductive accounts of the mature nation-state as a political form. Such work, at once theoretical and historical, would attend to its underlying structure, logic, imperatives, contradictions, and tendencies toward crises.¹⁷ The challenge is to analyze political forms on their own terms without hypostatizing a political sphere as external to capitalist social relations.

Like the commodity, the modern nation-state had to serve as its own transcendent foundation. Like money in capitalist society, citizenship functioned as a particular equivalent within this political order. Both media addressed one of the paradigmatic dilemmas of a disenchanted modernity. Particular social formations no longer grounded in divinity or monarchy had somehow to generate universal precepts to which they would then be subject as if they were external and a priori.¹⁸ This sociohistorical condition has been expressed philosophically in paradoxical formulations such as Kant’s categorical imperative (freedom is duty), Rousseau’s general will (obedience to society is really obedience to self), Adam Smith’s invisible hand (self-interest produces public goods), and Hegel’s cunning of reason (historical contingency produces world-historical destiny).

Politically, this peculiar requirement of modern society presents itself as a problem of sovereignty. Hannah Arendt makes this very connection: "The same essential rights were at once claimed as the inalienable heritage of all human beings and as the specific heritage of specific nations, the same nation was at once declared to be subject to laws, which supposedly would flow from the Rights of Man, and sovereign, that is, bound by no universal law and acknowledging nothing superior to itself. She argues that human beings, by virtue of their abstract humanity, were supposed to be the source as well as [the] ultimate goal" of human rights.¹⁹ Existing prior to national membership, these rights were the condition of possibility for national self-government. However, Arendt emphasizes that the French Revolution also insisted that the nation was sovereign; neither rights nor legal authority could exist before or above it. Both the object and subject of legality, the nation had to serve as its own normative foundation.

This then was the genesis of what Arendt identifies as the secret conflict between state and nation that came to light at the very birth of the modern nation-state, when the French Revolution combined the declaration of the Rights of Man with the demand for national sovereignty. She implies that the nation-state is a doubled political form founded upon both universality and particularity: abstract human rights and concrete national rights enable and entail each other. Arendt outlines the historical process that gradually identified citizenship with national membership, which she denounces as a perversion of the state into an instrument of the nation.²⁰ This reduction of human rights to national rights, for example, meant that Jewish emancipation would be paired with sociocultural anti-Semitism.²¹ Arendt’s structural analysis of the nation-state thus helps us to account for the matrix linking race, nationality, and rights in modern political formations organized around abstract universality. She explicitly questions the identity between territory, nation, and state presumed by Western political theory but disrupted by phenomena such as imperialism, pan-ethnic movements, and the proliferation of stateless peoples after World War I.²²

Arendt pays special attention to democratic nation-states that pursue colonial projects beyond their territorial frontiers and thereby undermine their own political principles. This is because the genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely. . . . The nation . . . conceived of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance which was not valid beyond its own people and the boundaries of its own territory. An expanded nation-state would by definition have to fully integrate conquered territories juridico-politically. But the imperial disjuncture between territory, state, and nation, as well as the racism that distinguishes between nationals and natives, prohibits such integration. A colonizing nation-state therefore faces the paradoxical challenge of having to enforce consent from conquered peoples, and overseas government would inevitably degenerate into tyranny. Arendt’s prediction of colonial tyranny (hardly groundbreaking in itself) assumes its full analytic purchase when she adds, and though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.²³ She explains that in colonial societies, race replaces the nation as a principle of the body politic and bureaucracy replaces parliament as a principle of government. Insisting that these colonial perversions have metropolitan implications, she traces connections between nineteenth-century imperialism and twentieth-century fascism.

Whether or not we find her specific historical argument persuasive, we can learn from her attempt to identify systemic continuities between metropolitan and colonial politics, to situate race at the center of modern European nationality, citizenship, and human rights, and to link both to the nation-state as grounded in a constitutive contradiction between universality and particularity.²⁴ She does not simply criticize colonialism on humanitarian grounds; she develops (implicitly but powerfully) an immanent critique of the (imperial) nation-state as a political form. Unfortunately, Arendt’s insistence on a reified distinction between the social and the political prevents her from exploring the dynamic relationship between political economy and the state. She cannot acknowledge that the debased socioeconomic practices she often condemns are inextricably entangled with the idealized republican tradition she wants to revitalize. Nor does she adequately work out the relationship between her structural analysis of the nation-state and her historical examinations of its manifestations at lower levels of abstraction.

However, Michel Foucault’s conception of political rationalities as socially embedded, historically specific, and irreducible (see chap. 3) provides a useful bridge between Marx’s arguments about the nonidentical crisis-prone character of a self-grounding capitalist modernity and Marxian arguments about the interpenetration of political economy and the state, on the one hand, and Arendt’s insights into the contradictory structure of the nation-state and its imperial dilemmas, on the other. Combining elements from each of these thinkers points toward a framework for analyzing the (imperial) nation-state as a political form founded upon the antinomy of universality and particularity that must nevertheless be analyzed in relation to political economy and in historically specific contexts.

We can then explore how immanent contradictions within the nation-state between universality and particularity, the civil and the political, democracy and rationality, parliament and administration, have shaped modern history. Just as scholars discuss phases of capitalism, we can trace conjunctural crises and transformations of political rationality. Liberalism, welfarism, and neoliberalism are rooted in a the nation-state form. But each order has its own governmental strategies, technologies, knowledge, and targets that must be studied in their own right. Poststructuralist theory has long implored us to reinterpret capitalism through non-Marxist categories such as discourse, culture, and desire. In contrast, I am suggesting that we fold lessons from Arendt and Foucault into a modified Marxian framework for understanding the noneconomic dimensions of our political modernity through an imperial optic.

This framework would allow us to resituate seeming contradictions between French republican universalism and its supposed (internal and external) enemies as contradictions within the nation-state itself. We could then avoid having to explain racism, nationalism, and other particularisms one-sidedly as antithetical to republicanism. Such gestures often criticize either a false universalism that is designed to mask or justify real particularizing practices or a limited universalism that has not been sufficiently extended to all social groups.²⁵ By focusing on the absence of republicanism, or its failure to be realized, such gestures often do not examine the way existing republicanism worked politically. A more integrated treatment of universality and particularity as interrelated dimensions of republican, national, and colonial politics would address the way universalizing practices have had particularizing effects and particularizing practices have served republican objectives over the long-term history of modern France.²⁶

People, Nation, Empire

It is possible to interpret the post-Revolution French nation-state in terms of successive crises of universalism that were provisionally stabilized and then displaced into other domains. Schematically, this dynamic was played out over membership struggles whose arena shifted from the people (1789–1848), to the nation (1870–1914), and then the empire (after World War I). These historical developments corresponded to the three distinct universalizing processes that Pierre Rosanvallon identifies, within the French Revolution, whose historically specific convergence shaped the modern nation-state: the liberalization of civil society, the democratization of political society, and the rationalization of government.²⁷

The eighteenth-century French republic was founded upon the interrelated principles of autonomous individuality, citizen self-government, and an impersonal rule of law. Abstract universal individuals acting as citizens would constitute an objective legal order to which they would be also be subject. They composed the people—a disembodied sovereign in whose name the republic was created and in whose legal authority the constitution was grounded. But this was an underspecified category defined in terms of abstract humanity (whether conceived of as a natural property of all persons or as a product of political association) and concrete nationality (ascribed to a pre-political community).²⁸ French peoples’ rights were derived at once from their humanity and their nationality. The founding Declaration insisted that men are born and remain free and equal in rights, even as it also announced that the principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation.²⁹ Here then was the founding antinomy between universality and particularity: equally valid starting points would lead to contradictory consequences.

The dual universal–particular character of the nation-state was embodied in the citizen, its elemental category. Insofar as citizenship was a function of one’s abstract human rights, it expressed universality, and insofar as it was secured by membership within a concrete national entity, it expressed particularity. This republican institution thus functioned as a particular equivalent—a universalizing or abstracting category that depended on and produced historical particularity (a historically specific designation that depended on and produced abstract human and legal universality).

As a medium of universal equivalence within a particular territory, citizenship marked the fundamental distinction between national and foreigner. Within the nation, citizenship institutionalized a distinction between the mass of people who were granted civil rights and the fraction of the population who were vested with full political rights. Given that all human beings were supposed to be free and equal members of a self-governing nation-state, political exclusion was henceforth only legitimate for those groups whose members did not meet the new criteria of individuality, rationality, and autonomy. The republican order thus created categories of persons such as minors, domestic servants, the indigent and propertyless, women, and (former) slaves, all of whom were not acknowledged as properly independent human subjects.³⁰ The point is that new forms of inequality were enabled by and entwined with republican principles; they expressed rather than violated the new political universalism. Furthermore, republican universalism was defined as much by rational government and a liberal social order as it was by popular sovereignty and political equality.³¹

In the early years of the republic, the very ambiguity of categories such as the people, the nation, and the citizen stabilized the constitutive tension upon which the nation-state was founded.³² They did so by conflating universal humans and particular nationals and by condensing liberal, democratic, and rational modes of universalism. Through the concept of popular sovereignty deployed against monarchial privilege, revolutionary republicans constructed their own universal norms, which appeared to be grounded in nature and reason rather than in a historically specific social order.³³ However, after several decades this provisional solution generated new problems that intensified following the first international crisis of capitalism in the 1840s.

As William Sewell has demonstrated, French workers insisted that they were the sovereign people who should be self-governing. They argued that they should be citizens because labor, by creating society, was the source of property, and property was the requirement for citizenship. They also expanded the scope of republican liberties by demanding that the state guarantee their right to work.³⁴ Jacques Donzelot interprets the 1848 revolution in terms of a growing confrontation between two equally legitimate and irreconcilable versions of republican rights: bourgeois property rights and working people’s right to work and to reject an unjust social order. He argues that republican universalism had shifted from being a source of social integration to a source of social conflict.³⁵

In other words, workers responded to their sociopolitical disenfranchisement by attempting to disarticulate the previously conjoined liberal capitalist and democratic parliamentary legacies of 1789. They used one dimension of republican universalism against another to challenge unjust social hierarchies and political exclusions. In the wake of the 1848 revolution a reconfigured universalism founded upon associations and social equality began to emerge.

Once the Second Republic recognized social rights as legitimate, the very rationality of republican politics began to shift. The state became more responsible for promoting social cohesion and protecting social welfare. Rights discourse shifted from the political sphere of individuality and legality to the social sphere of working and living conditions. Under the Third Republic new discourses of solidarity conceptualized society as an interdependent collectivity maintained through relations of social debt rather than a social contract among autonomous individuals.³⁶ After a second global economic crisis in the 1870s, the scale of capitalist production increased, the boundaries between economy, society, and government were redrawn, and the nascent welfare state expanded. A postliberal sociopolitical order was emerging. Simultaneously, the state undertook projects to nationalize French society through programs of economic, institutional, and cultural integration.³⁷

When the republican state took responsibility for social rights, the material stakes of national membership increased. Political tensions surrounding the universalism and particularism of the sovereign people–nation then shifted to conflicts over French nationality in relation to foreigners. By the 1880s the nationality question became further charged after a new round of massive immigration of eastern and southern Europeans. Although xenophobia at this time is often rightly associated with the far right, Gérard Noiriel reports that national and municipal republican assemblies passed a series of anti-immigrant measures. He refers to immigration as a republican invention and demonstrates that the French state created the contemporary conception of nationality through legal and administrative reforms. The 1889 nationality law sought to abolish autonomous communities within a supposedly unified France. Social legislation began restricting social benefits to French nationals. Government agencies charged with the identification, surveillance, and expulsion of foreigners were created.³⁸

Foreigners, in short, became a newly marked social category. Instruments designed to erase them also publicized them. Disputes about visibility, nationality, and foreignness also revolved around Jews. Following their emancipation during the Revolution, most French Jews identified with the nation, pursued cultural assimilation, and supported republican universalism.³⁹ But precisely when Jews lost their formal corporate identity and were interpellated into the modern republican nation-state as abstract universal individuals, they were racialized. Paradoxically, the increasing invisibility of Jews in public life during the nineteenth century served to confirm the anti-Semitic suspicion that Jews were hidden internal enemies of the nation. Emancipated Jews exemplified both abstract universal citizens and unassimilable outsiders fixed to their concrete particularity.⁴⁰

The Dreyfus affair may have crystallized the legendary confrontation between varieties of integral nationalism and defenders of republican universalism.⁴¹ But we need to remember that the Third Republic’s national homogenization project paradoxically required foreigners and Jews to be publicly visible, distinct within and from the broader population. The very logic and instruments of republican uniersalism—a rational(izing) administration, social scientific knowledge, and assimilating techniques—worked to particularize segments of the population. During the Belle Époque, societal rationalization detached itself from and began to eclipse liberalization and democratization, those other universalizing modes of republicanism.

The fin-de-siècle nationality conflicts were settled provisionally by World War I, when a public consensus around the idea of France as a singular and indivisible nation was reaffirmed across the political spectrum. But wartime violence and its destabilizing postwar consequences fueled another crisis of republican universalism.⁴² The pervasive social transformations accompanying postwar reconstruction, another round of immigration in the twenties, and the unprecedented worldwide economic crisis of the thirties provoked radical (labor, socialist, and fascist) movements that began to undermine parliamentary republicanism.⁴³ Revitalized regionalisms also challenged national homogenization.⁴⁴

During and after World War I this crisis of republican universalism was partly stabilized through renewed attention to the colonial empire as a source of national unity as well as economic prosperity. However, the growing size and spreading awareness of visibly different colonial populations stabilized Third Republican nationality conflicts by allowing the nation-state to be reconfigured as white and European. It is telling that by the end of World War I, working-class disaffection with national unity ideology was partly expressed through race riots directed against colonial workers in the metropole.⁴⁵ Yet the war also accelerated socioeconomic interdependence between metropolitan and overseas France, which in turn stimulated colonial migration, population mixture, and new currents of anti-imperialism. Interwar movements to reconceptualize the imperial order developed among republican reformers and colonial critics. Membership struggles gradually shifted away from either individual autonomy or national identity and revolved increasingly around axes of race and the question of empire.

France’s colonial empire had long been a site where republican universality was entwined with particularizing practices. The contours of post-Revolution republican politics were partly determined by colonial struggles over slavery, emancipation, and self-determination in the French Antilles.⁴⁶ After the first abolition in 1794, as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, a new republican racism in Guadeloupe enabled a regime of labor coercion as the price of liberty.⁴⁷ The lesson to be drawn from Dubois’s work is not that the republican government failed to institutionalize the emancipation it promised but that the new exclusionary logic was strictly republican: because centuries of slavery had so degraded slaves’ moral and intellectual aptitudes, they would not be capable of the rational thought and independent will necessary to exercise their natural human freedom. A revolutionary idea of liberty thus worked to racialize free blacks.⁴⁸

Similar examples could be drawn from the entire history of French colonialism. The point is not that republican universalism was restricted in the colonies but that intersecting national and colonial politics were shaped by an underlying antinomy between universality and particularity. In the following chapters, I explore the way this antinomy played out during the interwar years on an imperial scale through a series of crises, transformations, and debates concerning the national-imperial state.

Risking Interdisciplinarity

Moishe Postone argues that because universality and particularity are both internal features of capitalist society, it is inadequate to critique particularism from the standpoint of a normative universality or vice versa.⁴⁹ Nor, he maintains, should we become preoccupied with the contradiction between (universal) ideals and (particularist) reality because both belong to modern society. Instead, according to Postone, we must critique the socially constituted antinomy itself in order to reconfigure its elements by identifying immanent possibilities within the existent order that point beyond it.⁵⁰

When extended to doubled political formations such as the French imperial nation-state, Postone’s perspective allows us to analyze the political antinomy between universality and particularity at various levels of generality without simply affirming one side of the opposition at the expense of the other. Critical understanding that does not merely mimic the antinomic operation of national-imperial politics forces us to assume an analytic standpoint that is internal to this system. We need to work through rather than act out the antinomy between universality and particularity. This means remaining attentive to multiple modes of universality (e.g., economic abstraction and legal equivalence or liberalizing, democratizing, and rationalizing dimensions of republicanism) and the ways existent aspects of universality and particularity might be radically reconfigured in transformative ways by historical actors (e.g., associational or ethnographic universalism, African humanism).

To argue that a constitutive antinomy recurred over time at various levels and in multiple expressions (depending on local conditions) does not mean that French national-imperial history was determined by it mechanically. But linking the antinomy between universality and particularity to France as an imperial nation-state allows us to account for the internal connections between historical eras, between different colonial empires, and between different levels of a given imperial order (such as everyday struggles, conjunctural crises, political form, and underlying categories). Doing so allows us to explore historically specific political rationalities without having to treat history as pure contingency. Explaining his attempt to ground the modern bourgeois state in capitalist social forms and class relations, Joachim Hirsch writes, this is not a question of the logical deduction of abstract laws but of the conceptually informed understanding of an historical process, in which . . . objective tendencies . . . assert themselves through the mediation of concrete political movements and processes . . . and conflicts.⁵¹ This elegant formulation may similarly describe my approach to studying political forms on their own terms though in relation to political economy.

Methodologically, this inquiry into imperial crisis, political form, and categorical antinomy must combine concrete empirical and abstract theoretical modes of analysis. Accordingly, this is an interdisciplinary study located at the intersection of French political history, the historical anthropology of colonialism, and social theories of modernity.⁵² Neither conventionally defined social or intellectual history, this is a historical analysis of rationalities, categories, and forms as mediated through crises, struggles, and debates. It is at once empirical and theoretical. Such an approach risks frustrating empiricist historians as well as political philosophers. But my hope is that working on the frontiers of these fields will allow for insights not readily available to studies located exclusively within a single discipline.

If throughout the work I attend to what Edward Said has called the worldliness of texts, this does not mean that I mistake them for the whole world.⁵³ But neither do I oppose texts with that which really happened historically. To do so would presuppose a reflectionist theory of knowledge that locates texts and discourses above or outside of society. This stance would imagine that scholars could discover an unmediated reality from which they could observe society and write history. Instead, I treat the production of texts and circulation of discourses as specific types of social practice that merit historical analysis. The methodological challenge is to avoid either fetishizing texts (reading them only in relation to themselves or to other texts) or sociologizing them (reading them reductively as effects of their conditions of production).⁵⁴ I analyze texts in order to elaborate the political and discursive fields that made interwar colonial and anticolonial politics intelligible.⁵⁵

This historical inquiry is concerned with more than social meanings, however. It seeks to identify links between interwar conceptions of the world and the refractory categories, or concrete abstractions, around which the empire was organized. Drawing insight from Marxian theory, we can recognize that categories such as nation and citizen, or even universality and particularity, are at once conceptual and sociohistorically constituted.⁵⁶ In the following chapters, I repeatedly challenge ideological dichotomies between discourse and practices or plans and implementation by analyzing concrete abstractions that were at once imaginary and real, discursive