In 1945, the first significant cohort of African, Caribbean, and Malagasy deputies were elected to the French National Assembly, where they participated in special parliamentary commissions tasked with colonial reform. This article traces the contours of postwar conversations about colonial policy, race, and racism that took shape in those commissions, as metropolitan and colonial deputies confronted these issues face-to-face, as ostensible equals, for the first time. Deputies of color tried to force frank discussions about racial inequality in their campaigns to reform political representation, working conditions, education, and compensation for Africans. Their metropolitan counterparts responded, however, by developing new code words and rhetorical strategies that deflected accusations of systemic racial inequality in postwar Greater France. The competing understandings and ways of talking about race and racism produced in this encounter helped consolidate a postwar speech regime of “colorblindness” that obscured the way racial logics were inscribed in the new institutions of the postwar Republic.
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Obscuring Race
Franco-African Conversations about Colonial Reform and Racism after World War II and the Making of Colorblind France, 1945–1950
Emily Marker
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–23
The Joinovici Affair
The Stavisky of the Fourth Republic
Jeffrey Mehlman
This essay follows the strange career in France of the Bessarabian Jew, Joseph Joinovici, before, during, and after the Second World War. A corrupt but exceedingly talented dealer in scrap metal before the war, he was officially branded an “economically worthwhile Jew” by the occupying forces and quickly amassed a considerable fortune. He was also a leading associate of the French Gestapo leaders Henri Lafont and Pierre Bony, but appears to have devoted a considerable portion of his wealth to bribing German officials into releasing a number of potential victims. A credible claim has been made that he was a principal financier of the insurrection that issued in the Liberation of Paris. Particular attention is paid to the claim by the philosopher Pierre Boutang that the eccentric Joinovici was the exemplary citizen of France's Fourth Republic.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 101–110
Suzanne Berger
policy making. In Hoffmann’s cases, the elites under attack were a mix of French Third and Fourth Republic politicians, capitalists, and left-wing intellectuals. Today the term “elite” is understood expansively to include the rich, politicians, well
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 21–31
The Other House
The Secondary Residence in Postwar France
Sarah Farmer
campagnes françaises (Paris: Plon, 1979). 8 Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic (Cambridge: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme and Cambridge University Press, 1987), 181. 9 Ibid., 358. 10 Bertrand Hervieu, Les Champs du futur (Paris
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 104–121
Aro Velmet and Rachel Kantrowitz
(188–197). With the founding of France’s Fourth Republic in 1946, questions about the rights of overseas populations resurfaced. In this eighth and final chapter, Gamble explores how many French officials lobbied for greater alignment between
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2018
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 170–176
The French Empire Goes to San Francisco
The Founding of the United Nations and the Limits of Colonial Reform
Jessica Lynne Pearson
necessary for France to retain its colonies in the postwar period. 10 In 1945 and 1946, delegates from both metropolitan France and from the colonies gathered in Paris to draft a constitution for the new Fourth Republic, putting many of these
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 35–55
Eric Jennings, Hanna Diamond, Constance Pâris de Bollardière, and Jessica Lynne Pearson
foster national pride and loyalty to the Fourth Republic” (52). Doron explains that, in this context, the majority of French Jews, if they wished “to reaffirm their place in France and to create a language for healing between Jews and non-Jews” they had
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2018
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 157–167
A Bridge Across the Mediterranean
Nafissa Sid Cara and the Politics of Emancipation during the Algerian War
Elise Franklin
defining an ideal type of French citizen to which both colonial subjects and citizens could aspire. 13 Integration also grew from the precedent set in the 1946 Constitution of the Fourth Republic and the 1947 loi organique on Algeria, which promised
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 28–52
Eugenia Gay, Philipp Nielsen, Emanuel Richter, and Gregor Feindt
of the Fourth Republic to the semi-presidential one of the Fifth. The conceptual approach pays off, however, in the chapters that are more narrowly conceived and choose one of the four concepts as their focus of investigation. Markku Peltonen
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2018
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 123–142
Objects of Dispute
Planning, Discourse, and State Power in Post-War France
Edward Welch
Fourth Republic. After working with Jean Monnet in Luxembourg on the newly-created European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, forerunner of the European Economic Community and the European Union), Delouvrier was appointed the French government’s delegate
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 103–125