Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris

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Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and

Feminism in Interwar Paris Feminism in Interwar Paris

Jennifer Anne Boittin

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COLONIAL

METRoPOLIS

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France Overseas:

Studies in Empire

and Decolonization

series editors:

Philip Boucher

A. J. B. Johnston

James D. Le Sueur

Tyler Stovall

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COLONIAL

METR



POLIS

JENNIFER ANNE BOITTIN

The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism

and Feminism in Interwar Paris

university of nebraska press | lincoln & london

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United States of America.

Portions of chapters 3 and 4 originally appeared as

“Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race

during the Late Third Republic” in French Politics,

Culture, & Society 27, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 23–46.

Portions of chapter 5 originally appeared as “In Black

and White: Gender, Race Relations, and the Nardal

Sisters in Interwar Paris” in French Colonial History 6

(2005): 119–35.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boittin, Jennifer Anne.

Colonial metropolis : the urban grounds of anti-

imperialism and feminism in interwar Paris /

Jennifer Anne Boittin.

p. cm.

—

(France overseas)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8032-2545-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Paris (France)

—

Race relations

—

History

—

20th

century. 2. Paris (France)

—

Intellectual life

—

20th

century. 3. City and town life

—

France

—

Paris

—

History

—

20th century. 4. Anti-imperialist move-

ments

—

France

—

Paris

—

History

—

20th century.

5. Feminism

—

France

—

Paris

—

History

—

20th century.

6. Africans

—

France

—

Paris

—

History

—

20th century.

7. Antilleans

—

France

—

Paris

—

History

—

20th

century. 8. Women, White

—

France

—

Paris

—

Histo-

—

20th century. 9. France

—

Colonies

—

Africa

—

History

—

20th century. 10. France

—

Colonies

—

America

—

History

—

20th century. I. Title. II. Series.

dc717.b65 2010

305.420944'36109042

—

dc22

2009051697

Set in Fournier MT by Kim Essman.

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A ma famille,

to my family,

On several continents

but always near

And to Jens

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii

Abbreviations xxix

1. Josephine Baker: Colonial Woman 1

2. Dancing Dissidents & Dissident Dancers:

The Urban Topography of Race 37

3. A Black Colony? Race and the Origins of

Anti-Imperialism 77

4. Reverse Exoticism & Masculinity: The Cultural

Politics of Race Relations 111

5. In Black & White: Women, La Dépêche Africaine,

and the Print Culture of the Diaspora 133

6. “These Men’s Minor Transgressions”: White

Frenchwomen on Colonialism and Feminism 171

Conclusion 213

Notes 223

Bibliography 277

Index 305

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1. Prole of Josephine Baker, 1927 16

2. Poster, Gala au prot des sinistrés de la

Guadeloupe, 1929 23

3. “At the Cabane Cubaine, Montmartre,” circa 1932 59

4. “Couple at the Bal Nègre, rue Blomet,” circa 1932 124

5. Sudanese woman, International Colonial Exhibition, 1931 155

6. Nègre writing, watercolor 195

Ta b l e s

1. Distribution of Addresses for 86

ldrn

and

Other Black Colonial Migrants 41

2. Distribution of Addresses for Meeting Places

of 40 Black Associations 42

3. Jobs for Antilleans and Africans in Paris 43

4. Anti-Imperialist Men’s Relationships 64

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every twist and encounter in my journey through archives and librar-

ies has shaped my work in signicant ways. When I rst arrived, Paris

was in the grip of prolonged strikes. Not only was it far more difcult

to navigate public transportation with two large bags, but the Archives

Nationales, where I would have started my research, were closed. Af-

ter the strikes they did not reopen: the asbestos plaguing their locales

forced a temporary relocation and placed limits on document viewing.

I thus spent far more time than expected at the Bibliothèque Nationale

de France and elsewhere; the fortunate result was the juxtaposition

between archives, literature, magazines, newspapers, and images that

denes this book. Thank you to the archivists, librarians, and staffs

at the many institutions I visited in my pursuit of such sources (an,

ans, app, bdic, bhvp, bmd, bnf, caf, and caom).

I could not afford a taxi from the airport when I arrived in Paris

(even if I had been able to nd one, a difcult endeavor during strikes)

because when I started substantive research I had yet to land the nec-

essary grants. My advisors did not allow my resolve to dampen, in-

stead encouraging me to keep applying while researching. For their

intellectual engagement, solidarity, and condence in me, I cannot

thank enough John Merriman, Christopher Miller, and Kevin Repp.

Their creative research, critical thinking, and friendship have been

truly inspirational.

They also made sure that I did not leave for France entirely with-

out backing. Although I am a historian, Yale University’s French De-

partment found a spot for me in its exchange program with the Ecole

Normale Supérieure. A room in Paris is not a small gift, especially

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x Acknowledgments

when located only ve minutes from the police archives. And after

teaching my way through a few months of research, my luck with

grants turned. I appreciate every single one of them all the more for

the time I spent without any. Financial support came from a Berna-

dotte E. Schmitt grant from the American Historical Association; an

Edouard Morot-Sir grant from the Institut Français de Washington;

Smith Richardson grants from International Security Studies at Yale;

a John Perry Miller grant from Yale; and last, but certainly not least,

the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

In France, days spent covered in the bits that crumble from aging

acid paper (no matter how carefully one handles it) were made far

less dry by evenings spent in good company. Sandrine Teixidor and

Cybelle McFadden Wilkens are talented scholars whose companion-

ship and work I marveled at over many a drink and meal. Déborah

and Oscar Wollmann showed me their remarkable Paris. My aunt,

Dominique Boittin, regularly invited me over for Sunday lunches and

always had a kir, a devastating sense of humor, and seless generos-

ity on hand with which to warm my heart. Claire and Jean-Baptiste

Danel shared their home and meals with me on numerous occasions

and supported early research by handing me the keys to a chambre de

bonne. Eliane and Maurice Lenoir created a home away from home in

the 13

ème

for months at a time, and their cooking tips as well as Eliane’s

coq au vin and prodding to just nish the book are much appreciated.

In Aix-en-Provence the famille Darbois shared a room with a pool-

side view, a quirky Renault 5, and endless supplies of tapenade.

Not only has writing given me far more respect for every work that

graces my bibliography than I already had, but one of the most fas-

cinating aspects of transforming this project from a dissertation into

a book has been meeting many of the scholars who wrote these texts.

In particular, the following ones read portions of the manuscript as

commentators for conferences or helped me to work through theo-

retical or source-based quandaries in conversations: Naomi Andrews,

Elisa Camiscioli, Julia Clancy-Smith, Alice Conklin, Brent Hayes Ed-

wards, Laura Frader, Félix Germain, Herman (Gene) Lebovics, Patri-

cia Lorcin, Gregory Mann, Dominic Thomas, Owen White, and Gary

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Acknowledgments xi

Wilder. There is nothing small about such gestures, especially since

you had no way of knowing how I would incorporate them into my

work, and I thank you for your time. Richard Fogarty, Karen Offen,

Mary Louise Roberts, and Tyler Stovall all read substantial portions

or the entire manuscript at various stages: the depth and nuances of

your readings are far more generous than I could have imagined.

I spent my time at Yale with a cohort of dreadfully accomplished

people who somehow always found time to keep me smiling. Denise

Bossy, Kate Cambor, Kat Charron, Catherine Dunlop, Michelle Herd-

er, Faith Hillis, Maya Jasanoff, Edward Kehler, Charles Keith, Charles

Lansing, Adriane Lentz-Smith, Ken Loiselle, Kieko Matteson, John

Monroe (who rst walked me through the Archives Nationales), Sara

Norwick, and George Trumbull have shaped my work with every-

thing from suggested readings to surprisingly relevant offhand re-

marks. Many still nd the time to lend a thought or a shoulder when

I need one, or simply to let me know how they are doing, which is

most cherished of all. Christopher Bishop, Lien-Hang Nguyen, and

Michael Purdy went from being great roommates to better friends.

Rachel Chrastil energizes me with her focus and optimism. Liz Foster

brought Dakar and the art of negotiating with taxi drivers to life for

me. Also in Dakar, the vibrant Emily Musil was thoughtful enough

to introduce me to her research and later to the generous Christina

Firpo. Moreover I was lucky to have mentors early in my academic

life whose minds and work could not possibly leave me indifferent:

Robert Darnton, Nicole Dombrowski-Ritter, Anthony Grafton, and

Eileen Scully. Stephen Vella, we all miss you.

At Penn State, all the faculty and staffs of the Department of French

and Francophone Studies and the Department of History have been

incredibly supportive. My lively graduate students motivate me with

thought-provoking questions. My colleagues, Lila Corwin Berman,

Tom Hale, Tijana Krstic, Joan Landes, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Béné-

dicte Monicat, Willa Silverman, Mrinalini Sinha, and Monique Yaari,

took the time to comment upon portions of the manuscript. Also pre-

cious has been the guidance and friendship of Erica Brindley, Mike

Eracleous, Tolga Esmer, Derek Fox and Carrie Jackson. At the Uni-

versity of Nebraska Press I would like to thank my editor, Heather

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Lundine, for her serene efciency and support, as well as the project

editor, Ann Baker, and copyeditor, Linda Wessels.

I wish to thank my family most especially. My parents, Jean-Fran-

çois and Sarah Leith Paulu Boittin, gave me two languages along with

everything else. To my father I also attribute my delight with jazz. To

my mother I extend particular thanks for imparting her gifts of time,

editing, and translation upon this book. My sisters, Margaret, Nathalie,

and Isabelle, humble and revive me with stories of their travels across

continents and many unstinting passions in life. They also know how

to make me laugh. My grandparents, Jean-Marie Boittin and Anne-

Marie Boittin née Morot-Raquin and Burton and Frances B. Paulu,

have had more to do with our far-ung adventures than they real-

ize. Finally I wish to thank my dearest friend and partner, Jens-Uwe

Güttel. We met just before I started researching, which means that

he has been with me every step of the way and has taken time away

from his own work to read every chapter in this book. Even as I type

these words he is announcing that another dinner is ready. I “owe”

you months of clean dishes and far, far more. Danke. Merci.

xii Acknowledgments

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INTRODUCTION

On May 6, 1931, a black man walked up the steps of a brand new met-

ro station in Paris.

The Métro Dorée station was built as part of the

French government’s bid to lure what would eventually be 8 million

visitors to the event known as the Colonial Exposition. Analogous

to a world’s fair, the Colonial Exposition was a project to showcase

France’s colonial empire both to its own citizens and to other nations.

The policemen who were staking out the métro exit immediately no-

ticed the man as he emerged from underground. After all, very few

people of African descent were attempting to enter the exposition.

Most Africans and Antilleans (people from the French West Indies,

or Caribbean) were already inside its gates, in attendance not to vis-

it but to perform aspects of colonial life for visiting dignitaries and

other spectators.

Agent Joé, as he was known, was at the Colonial Exposition on its

opening day not only to take in the sights. He was also an informer,

there to report on what he heard and saw in the African, Caribbean,

and other colonial milieus of Paris to the French authorities. If he had

made it through the exposition’s gates, his task would have been to lo-

cate other politically militant black men present at the event and take

note of what they said and to whom they said it. Were they speaking

to the performers, who had been sailed in for the exposition and were

to be sent back overseas once it was over, hopefully without the bag-

gage of Parisian anticolonial politics? Were they approaching white

French men and women? However, with only a few hundred meters

to go Joé was waylaid himself and arrested by the police inspectors,

who discreetly took him to a police station nearby. Convinced that

xiii

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xiv Introduction

he was militantly opposed to France’s presence in the colonies, they

detained him until 6:00 p.m., perhaps in the hope that he would not

cross paths with the visiting notables arriving that afternoon. None

of the superiors to whom he usually reported came to his rescue, per-

haps because they were at the Colonial Exposition.

A mere three weeks later, on May 28, Joé was once again con-

fronted by the police. He was on his way to a meeting organized by

the Federal Union of Students and the League Against Imperialism

(lai). A few meters from the door of the auditorium to which he was

headed, he recognized one of the inspectors who had detained him

on the day of the exposition’s inauguration. The man eyed him sus-

piciously. Joé’s words best describe what happened next:

Seeing, once again, that stupid and idiotic gesture of policemen

who seek only to aggravate everyone, and after my wife had

told me that there was no one at the auditorium of the Sociétés

Savantes . . . I made the decision to leave

—

and departed by the

Rue des Grands-Augustins where we sat down at the terrace of

a small café near the Seine. Still, during more than an hour that

we stayed there, we were watched and hounded all the time by

two men who seemed to us to be two policemen.

This outburst has been preserved at the Overseas Archives in Aix-

en-Provence, a hand-written document amidst the many typed sheets

that make up the Service de Liaison avec les Originaires des Terri-

toires Français d’Outre-Mer archival series (Service for Liaising with

People Originating in the French Overseas Territories, slotfom).

Even the thick, dark pencil marks that were intended to censor his

irritation before it was typed into a report remain. Among the cen-

sored items was his criticism of the police as incapable of acting with

dignity or intelligence.

This book argues that interwar Paris was a colonial space, meaning a

space in which the specter of “empire” guided the self-identication

of its residents as well as their social and political interactions. Joé’s

experiences illustrate the complexity of living in such an environ-

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Introduction xv

ment. He and his wife were two of the many black and white men and

women who expressed their politics and culture though the prisms

of race and gender. In the process they shaped Paris into a colonial

metropolis.

Within this city, men and women learned to rearticu-

late their desires and dissents after deliberately or inadvertently in-

troducing one another to their particular manipulations of identity

politics. Thus here the term colonial, as opposed to imperial, reveals

the agency, or autonomy, embedded in the act of occupying and uti-

lizing city spaces

—

white women and colonial migrants all found their

own ways to “colonize” Paris.

As these men and women exchanged culture and politics, they

transformed this cosmopolitan setting into their locus of power. The

possibilities for these men and women to challenge the political and

cultural status quo were multiplied in Paris by their proximity to core

administrative and political institutions and by constant encounters

with empire. Like the port cities of Marseille, Toulon, Le Havre, and

Bordeaux, Paris was a point of transit for colonial populations. Paris

was also the hub of imperial government and a base for many artists

and intellectuals. Black anti-imperial organizations

—

with their litany

of exigencies ranging from equal civil liberties in the colonies to na-

tionhood and independence from France

—

had their headquarters in

the city. So did feminists, in a reection of the centralization that has

often characterized France. In Paris, empire took shape in the colonial

migrants present on its streets, in the white men and women who had

traveled to the colonies but were based in the city, and in the many

images and representations of empire. Those without the vote and

other civil rights discovered that the grounds for their struggles, and

justications they advanced in demanding their rights, were limited

neither to the colonies nor to the metropole. Indeed, the two spaces

were inherently connected and thus colonial and metropolitan men

and women could play urban and overseas connections off of one an-

other as they searched for effective arguments and unied fronts.

This book started with a two-part question: Were there any links

between the French fascination with jazz and other forms of black

culture during the 1920s and 1930s and the men and women of Afri-

can descent who lived in France during that time? Was the cultural

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phenomenon known as, among other things, the tumulte noir (black

tumult) in any way tied to the politics (including anti-imperialism)

and social lives of those it supposedly represented? Answering this

question called for learning about the African, African American, and

Antillean men and women in France. Two ways of tracing the exis-

tences of black men and women soon presented themselves: through

their artistic and literary productions and through their daily lives as

recorded by the French state, notably in police records.

Combined,

these approaches were not only fascinating but in turn structured the

book’s main premise: that Paris during the 1920s and 1930s can be con-

sidered a colonial metropolis. Why? In part because of what these

sources do not explain. For example, what did it mean that African

American actress, dancer, and singer Josephine Baker was mentioned

in a report about the anti-imperialist from the French Sudan (today

Mali) Tiémoko Garan Kouyaté? Why were most African and Carib-

bean intellectuals of the 1930s, such as the future Senegalese president

Léopold Sédar Senghor, largely absent from police records? Why

were their (until recently) less well-known female counterparts, the

Martinican Nardal sisters, referenced comparatively often? Clear-

ly certain organizations and names constituted focal points of black

communities, but others only touched upon in the reports were also

palpable parts of these networks. Moreover, not all those cryptically

alluded to were black. Some were white women whose elusive lives,

activities, and literary productions were relegated to references even

more eeting than those accorded black colonial men.

So how and why were white women, including a number of femi-

nists, in contact with politically active, working-class black men?

And who else was a part of these networks? My initial question had

evolved so that I could no longer study only colonial migrants. With

so many other people a part of the migrants’ communities and ho-

rizons, this book explores what their interactions teach us about in-

terwar Paris, the relationship between colonies and their metropole,

and the manner in which class, gender, and race intersected among

groups legally consigned to the outskirts of citizenship between the

wars. The four overarching groups most often mentioned both in the

texts written by black colonial migrants and feminists and in the po-

xvi Introduction

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lice reports about them

—

black men, black women, white men, and

white women

—

were not just talking about race, or class, or gender.

Rather, through such categories they were also dissecting and com-

ing to terms with France’s relationship to its colonies, the colonies’

relationship to France, and their place within that association.

Colonial Migrants and Feminists

Africans and Antilleans were intriguing members of France’s pre–

World War I past, interwar present, and for that matter twentieth- and

twenty-rst-century future. They had been integrated into the empire

in two waves. During the early colonialism of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, France acquired parts of present-day Senegal in

West Africa, as well as overseas territories in or near the West Indies

including Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana in South America,

and, most famously, St. Domingue (today Haiti), which gained inde-

pendence in 1804. Still France amassed most of its overseas territory

throughout the nineteenth century during what is sometimes termed

a period of new imperialism. North Africa (including Algeria), West

and Equatorial (or central) Africa, the island of Madagascar (off the

East coast of Africa), and Indochina (Vietnam and surrounding ter-

ritories) all became colonies during this century.

Until World War I colonized citizens and subjects remained large-

ly out of sight, far from metropolitan France, and thus were more

representation than person to most French people. However during

the war approximately 134,000 West African and Malagasy soldiers

and several thousand workers, as well as numerous North African,

Chinese, and Indochinese soldiers and workers, fought or labored in

France.

In all, some half million colonial soldiers were deployed in

Europe and in addition, 20,000 made their way to Europe from the

older colonies such as Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Some found ways

to stay on in France after the war and were joined by more colonial

migrants. A denitive count of black colonial migrants during the

interwar years is difcult to establish, in part because the numbers

the police provided at the time often did not take into account An-

tilleans (who were French citizens); these gures conicted with the

police’s own estimates that several hundred black men regularly at-

Introduction xvii

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tended political rallies in Paris alone; and records probably took into

account only those Africans whose immigration status was regular-

ized. Authorities calculated the presence in France of 379 French West

and Equatorial Africans along with 462 Malagasies in September 1924

(out of 9,496 colonial migrants of every origin); of 2,015 Africans and

665 Malagasies in November 1926; and of 894 Africans and 559 Mala-

gasies in June 1932 (out of 3,745 colonial migrants of every origin).

Approximately a third of what has been conservatively estimated as

3,000 to 5,000 African men in the country were believed to be in the

Paris region (in all likelihood only 2 percent of the total African pop-

ulation, including North Africans, was female).

However, still ac-

cording to the police, in 1926 there were as many as 10,000 to 15,000

black men in Paris alone.

The latter numbers probably include those

from the French West Indies, although they still seem high and may

very well take into account North Africans who were often simply

termed African. Whatever the exact numbers, although some black

colonies had been a part of France for far longer than areas such as

Algeria or French Indochina, the latter populations were a more for-

midable presence in France by the 1920s and 1930s.

Why, then, focus upon black colonial migrants? They had enduring

ties to France and to each other

—

in particular with respect to parts

of Senegal and the West Indies. In order to capitalize upon the goods

provided by the West Indies, France not only had to establish trad-

ing posts and ports, but (more problematically) to nd manpower

—

slavepower

—

to produce these goods. Starting with France’s rst co-

lonial empire, then, Senegal was linked to the Caribbean because

France’s ports in Africa functioned as the points of exit for slaves

crossing the Atlantic. The history of slavery in both regions shaped

how these men and women thought about colonialism and race in the

twentieth century. Moreover, some colonized people in these territo-

ries were French citizens, but others were not. This contrast in civ-

il and suffrage rights, often perceived as arbitrarily imposed by the

French authorities, inuenced considerations of what it meant to be-

long to a French republic legitimized in part by its claim to be founded

on universal rights. The very fact that there were fewer black than

other colonial migrants means that their strategies for coping with

metropolitan life and building communities in the metropole are both

xviii Introduction

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less well understood and well worth exploring. For example, black

colonial migrants in Paris were not only dened by authorities, but

also dened themselves, through a manipulation of the language of

race, thereby claiming transatlantic ties to Africa, North America,

and South America. Finally, the tumulte noir as a phenomenon was

distinctive. There were, of course, cultural manifestations of exoticism

showcasing other colonial groups. However they did not contribute to

the production of a superstar quite as ubiquitous as Josephine Baker,

or a phenomenon such as jazz, both of which remain important parts

of France’s culture to this day. Nor did they rely upon a blending of

cultures that stemmed from three continents and their islands.

Paris was transformed by the arrival of black colonial migrants af-

ter World War I, but it was also marked by a second major develop-

ment: the growing presence of women, including outspoken feminists,

in the public sphere.

Like colonial migrants, these women saw rep-

resentations of themselves abound in popular culture. Following the

war, women and black men renewed similar demands. Both groups

wished to become full-edged citizens with access to civil rights and

perhaps even suffrage, either of France or of lands they hoped would

soon be decolonized and transformed into independent nations. Sev-

eral governments of France’s Third Republic (1870–1940) found vari-

ous excuses for evading these requests. Indeed women did not obtain

the vote, and colonized men and women did not win independence

or negotiate assimilation, until after the next world war. In the mean-

time colonized men and feminist women were in a strategic location

for making themselves heard by both fellow migrants and other dis-

abused metropolitans, since they had converged in Paris and other

urban centers for their wartime jobs and often stayed there following

World War I. The migration intended to fulll the nation’s need for a

wartime workforce soon gave rise to an intellectual and political evolu-

tion that called into question a number of the tenets of Third Republic

France, including the place of empire and of women in modern life.

What do the stories of black colonial migrants and feminists help

us to understand? As a colonial space Paris was signicant both to

the colonized and to the colonizers. The city fostered and was nur-

tured by incredibly vibrant communities intent upon confronting var-

Introduction xix

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ious aspects of France’s empire. Their stories reveal the many ways

in which colonialism became a part of daily lives. This is not to say

that empire was a system taken for granted. Instead, people seeking

to assert themselves, or resist what they interpreted as the inexible

components of the imperial nation-state to which they all belonged,

recognized the presence of colonialism. They tweaked their readings

of it and found ways to integrate it into their struggles. The groups

explored in this book demonstrate some of the ways in which a trans-

national system and local struggles for identity collided. Feminism,

nationalism, and other forms of political militancy are sometimes as-

sumed to be about difference, the construction of one identity in op-

position to another. The story told here suggests that dialogue, open-

mindedness, and the construction of networks across disparate groups

were also an important part of these identity politics.

Colonialism mattered, to put it bluntly, to a lot of people in a lot

of different ways. This book focuses upon voices that murmured in

response, those that spun intricate webs of political and social com-

mentary, and those that roared. Some words have since been garbled

or misplaced and others have simply not been considered, or not been

contemplated in this particular manner. The focus upon black colonial

migrants is not intended to exclude other colonial migrants or anyone

else from the colonial metropolis. To the contrary, this book is also

about North African and Indochinese migrants: not with respect to

the vast majority of its examples, footnotes, or stories, but with re-

spect to its understanding that multiple singular, local experiences

—

whether those of groups or of individuals

—

when contrasted to one

another reveal connections, interactions, and patterns that taken to-

gether can help us to better comprehend the many facets of what made

France an imperial nation-state.

Frameworks: Empire, Immigration,

Diaspora, Race, Gender, and Locality

This book explores empire as it coincides with metropole, immigra-

tion as it overlaps with black and African diaspora, race as it intersects

with gender and class, and the effects of specic locations upon all

these frameworks. Let us then consider these contexts for a moment.

xx Introduction

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Ever since the French Revolution of 1789 rst pronounced France to

be a republic and a democracy based both on universal and on nation-

al rights, one question has lingered: how can an individual’s rights

be guaranteed by his or her humanity while being restricted by legal

denitions of French citizenship and civil rights as put forth by the

nation? Humanity should trump citizenship, and yet has not consis-

tently done so within France’s history. Otherwise, suffrage and civil

rights would have been ubiquitous in every one of its republics, rather

than being limited by gender, income, or geography.

Noting the ongoing tension between universal rights and how par-

ticular groups or individuals have been treated throughout modern

French history, historian Gary Wilder proposes that we read France

between the wars as an imperial nation-state. Understanding colonial-

ism as merely some kind of blight on France, in need of condemnation

or arduous justication, threatens to limit our reading of its history.

As an intricate, albeit muddled part of France from the moment the

country rst became a republic, colonialism needs to be understood

as part of what denes the nation, not something accidental, excep-

tional, or external to it. Once the nation-state is understood to be im-

perial, then our focus can turn to the many ways in which its people

dealt with the paradoxes they daily experienced or witnessed. Or as

historian Frederick Cooper suggests, we can consider how both the

leaders of empire-states and those involved in political insubordina-

tion from within those systems were “thinking like an empire.”

Although France’s imperial nature had more distant roots, it was

after World War I that the French truly shifted from considering

only “individual autonomy or national identity” to considering race

and empire, a fact that helps to explain why the daily struggles of

city dwellers in Paris commingled with empire during the interwar

years.

The idea of a colonial metropolis based in mainland France

makes sense from this perspective.

But how does recognizing Paris

as a colonial metropolis help us to understand France as an imperial

nation-state? Ever since scholars rst started putting more emphasis

on the central role of immigration in France, many studies have fo-

cused on migrants’ relationships to the state and French perceptions

of migrants (including xenophobia and racism).

These immigration

Introduction xxi

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studies intersect in intriguing ways with the rich and growing body

of literature on how Africans, Antilleans, and African Americans

in France were part of a diaspora with roots in Africa and slavery.

In approaching these elds I focus on migrants’ agency, meaning

how they functioned as a community that also dened itself inter-

nally, rather than solely in relationship to the republic. Moreover,

I do not consider primarily the relationships that migrants entered

into with colonial administrators and settlers. Instead, I delve into

exchanges between men and women who although not its ofcial

representatives, were also not unconscious inhabitants of an empire.

There is still much to be learned about such personal, cultural, and

social interactions in France by careful readings of sources such as the

slotfom series. They invite us to explore not just how black workers

and intellectuals differed amongst themselves in their Parisian politics

and lives, but also and just as intriguingly how black and white men

and women interacted within the capital of an imperial nation-state.

Studying the interplay among empire-minded Parisians contributes

to our awareness of how anti-imperialists and feminists were affected

by one another, police informants, and the city itself.

Thus, this book further adds to existing literature with a system-

atic gendered analysis of intellectual, political, and social relations

among the colonizers and colonized evolving in an urban setting. The

importance of gender as a category of analysis for probing metropol-

itan-colonial dynamics has been well established, as has the impor-

tance of evaluating gender with race.

That being said, masculinity

in particular remains underexplored within the francophone context,

even though it was a crucial component of how early black, anti-

imperial, working-class circles, as well as intellectual ones, func-

tioned.

Likewise, the links among feminism, colonialism, race, and

anti-imperialism are still far less well understood in the francophone

setting than they are in the anglophone one.

Albeit not always in

agreement with respect to what constituted feminism or its goals,

many women in interwar France were conscious that both Paris and

the imperial context could help them to elaborate their politics.

The last major theme upon which this book focuses is the impor-

tance of locality in our understanding of transnational imperial his-

xxii Introduction

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tory. This study of the intricate links between metropole and colo-

ny substantiates the claim that social changes are reections of both

worldwide patterns and local contestations and therefore that scholars

should consider “metropole and colony in a single analytic eld.”

Within this premise, I also consider the places in which struggles

developed. Colonial histories warrant local analysis because this ap-

proach sheds light on the particularities of specic social and politi-

cal systems.

Paris lends itself well to such local analysis because in

this city the center and peripheries of empire coincided.

The Jazz Age, Colonial Politics, and Parisian Spaces

The cultural phenomenon known variously as the jazz age, negro-

philia, the tumulte noir, and the vogue nègre affected those considering

colonialism.

Such people included African and Antillean students,

workers, and intellectuals who created black nationalistic movements

that permanently transformed the relationship between French colo-

nies and the metropole. They not only generated the vogue nègre, in

the case of performers, but also had their perspectives fundamental-

ly altered through negrophilia’s often explicit focus on exoticism and

sexuality, an intersection that brought gender to the fore of race re-

lations. In “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” the German

philosopher, essayist, and critic Walter Benjamin argues that during

world exhibitions the entertainment industry elevated “people to the

level of commodities.”

His analysis relates to the interwar years.

In the twentieth century, Parisians ocked to the Colonial Expo-

sition because they felt as though the world was coming to them,

and black performers became a commodity, partially enthroned as

“merchandise.”

Yet not only black migrants who rejoiced in the limelight but also

those who were just walking down the street to buy their groceries

risked being viewed as specimens in a Paris that sought out the muse-

ums, ethnography, and collections to which exotic memorabilia were

imported.

The tension between everyday life, politics, and the cul-

tural production of blackness is explored from several angles in this

book. Josephine Baker, for example, chose the role of performer; the

black, Martinican Nardal sisters had it forced upon them; African

Introduction xxiii

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and Antillean anti-imperialists used their status as permanent spec-

tacle to gain a foothold in the political and social circles of Paris, ef-

fectively reversing the exoticism imposed upon them; white men and

women, in reaction to the vogue nègre, felt challenged to expand their

circle of consciousness to include the outer reaches of the empire.

Some white women formulated astute readings of the links between

their own representations within popular culture and those of colonial

individuals.

While the dissection of representations of blackness has previously

led to some fascinating studies, this book steps away from the realm

of the French social imaginary (“the cultural elements from which we

construct our understanding of the social world”) and into an analy-

sis of how representations overlapped with, and inuenced, interac-

tions.

Supercial contacts, whether physical or intellectual, were

often initiated in settings such as the Colonial Exposition or night-

clubs. These were rather obvious places for Parisian constructions of

colonial otherness. At times, exchanges were subsequently pursued

into more complex and enduring relationships that were political,

emotional, intellectual, physical, or social and moved through other

Parisian spaces.

The mediums in which these interactions emerged

comprised novels, newspapers, streets, political organizations, po-

lice reports, spies’ minutes, lms, graphic art, and more. Some spaces

were tangible urban constructions such as streets or rooms shelter-

ing political meetings. Others, such as newspapers, novels, and lms,

were elusive forums of a creative or intellectual type. Each chapter of

this work is structured around such modes of expression, or sources,

available to and favored by its urban characters. The chapters thus ap-

proach the same events, time period, and themes from different per-

spectives, thereby creating a series of snapshots of the many ways in

which men and women fashioned Paris into a colonial metropolis.

Agent Joé in the Colonial Metropolis

Agent Joé was one such person. We met him at the beginning of this

chapter, complaining to his superiors about being trailed and arrest-

ed. Joé’s case illustrates how informants can be considered “partici-

pant observers.”

They were heavily implicated in the revolution-

xxiv Introduction

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ary milieus upon which they spied. Reports such as those Joé wrote

are repositories of details that illuminate otherwise obscure exchang-

es among Parisians. Their authors’ identities were veiled by pseud-

onyms and their real names reserved for oral communication.

Yet

much, including many Indochinese informants’ identities, has been

uncovered about their choices and lives that illuminates the signi-

cance of this source group as a whole.

Joé and other agents bring

to light how unambiguous distinctions rapidly dissolved within the

colonial metropolis.

In 1923 the Ministry of Colonies centralized surveillance of colo-

nial migrants within the Centre des Affaires Indigènes (Center for

Native Affairs, cai). It later became the slotfom, which is why the

archival series has this acronym. Helping colonial migrants in the

metropole was part of the justication for its existence, but the cai’s

focus was spying upon and regulating urban associations.

The cai

worked closely with the Ministry of the Interior, and in particular

with the French Sûreté Générale, or secret police, to recruit spies,

translators, and so forth. The cai also coordinated locally with the

Prefecture of Police, another division of the Ministry of the Interior,

and in particular with the prefecture’s political branch (Renseigne-

ments Généraux), which had a section devoted to watching over mi-

grants and detecting revolutionary colonial propaganda. In addition,

the cai exchanged information with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

and, overseas, with the Governors General of various French colo-

nies and their local sûretés.

Distinctions such as skin color and language made African, Carib-

bean, and Malagasy men stand out on the streets of Paris, but behind

closed doors these attributes instilled a protective barrier. Informants

could only be easily integrated when they originated from within the

ranks of those upon whom they reported. Once recruited, their ex-

istence was normalized; for example they held routine jobs as cover

for their role as informant. But why did they become agents? Pro-

French sentiment may have persuaded some. Money was certainly

a motivation, and so was coercion

—

perhaps release from prison in

exchange for cooperation.

Neither of the latter factors was reliably

effectual; in July 1927 Marseille-based agents, incensed by their near

Introduction xxv

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poverty, slurred the cai and threatened to reserve bullets for each of

their bosses.

However, authorities held two motivational trumps in

hand: at any moment, they could force spies to return to the empire’s

periphery or they could blow their cover.

In November 1937 Agent

Coco, knowing that he had been privy to details to which very few

people had access, begged readers, “Please keep secret, for now, this

information.”

Angry as it made him, being arrested and later shadowed in May

1931 protected Agent Joé. On that same day other members of the

anti-imperialist organization known as the Ligue de Défense de la

Race Nègre (League for the Defense of the Nègre Race, ldrn) were

followed by policemen. One, the anti-imperialist leader Tiémoko

Garan Kouyaté, confronted his tail only to hear “we have orders to

follow you, don’t complain or we’ll arrest you pronto

—

plus when we

leave around 6 p.m., two others will relieve us.”

Later that day an-

other black member of the ldrn slipped into the exposition. Rather

than viewing his freedom of movement as a success, members of the

ldrn became wary. If this man had not been detained, did that mean

he was an informant?

At the next ldrn meeting, all those who had been trailed recounted

their frustration. Agent Joé was present

—

he wrote one of the reports

about the meeting

—

and he grumbled about his arrest to fellow mem-

bers.

He was, in fact, the only person detained on the opening day

of the exposition. The others were merely warned away. The details

Agent Joé consigned in his note to superiors explaining why he never

made it into the Colonial Exposition were exactly the same as those

given in three other reports

—

but in the latter three documents his

true name was used.

Overlap, in particular with respect to elements

such as the police station to which he was taken, makes it reasonable

to conclude that Agent Joé was Edmond Thomas Ramananjato.

Ramananjato was an extremely outspoken, intelligent and incisive

member of the black community. He came to France from Madagascar

in order to ght in World War I and then worked under exploitative

conditions for a horticulturalist named Carriat. He was naturalized

French in 1924. After arriving in Paris, Ramananjato became an ac-

countant and lived in an apartment near the Moulin Rouge, which

xxvi Introduction

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was at the heart of the heated Montmartre nightlife in which blacks

were so exoticized. He was rst noticed as being connected with the

anti-imperial community in 1929, just as Agent Joé started signing his

notes on the black community.

His central role in militant organi-

zations was reected in his multiple elections as treasurer and secre-

tary of the ldrn and other anti-imperial organizations. He was also

politically engaged in the Malagasy community. And as an informant

with the proper linguistic skills, he wrote prolically about Malagasy

performers at the Colonial Exposition.

Joé certainly had a stake in the cai’s game of cat and mouse. Even

his arrest may not have been straightforward. Occasionally arrests

were planned by the cai to bolster the credibility of its informants, and

his May 6, 1931, arrest may have been one such set-up.

Yet this pos-

sibility is hard to determine in Joé’s case because while he explained

in a quick postscript to superiors that the two policemen “m’ont fait

passer” for a known militant, the phrase has two contradictory mean-

ings: they “passed me off as” a political militant or they “made me out

to be” a political militant.

On one hand, soon thereafter Ramanan-

jato was listed as one of only two people whom the leading anti-

imperialist of the moment, Kouyaté, trusted.

On the other hand, so

much of the cai’s system depended upon no one knowing who the

informants actually were, that if this was a set-up it seems most likely

the policemen were tipped off to the presence of an anti-imperialist

by Joé’s handler. In other words, the policemen never learned that

he was an informant.

While the arrest may have been routine, there was nothing feigned

about Joé’s privately expressed outrage when he was tailed just a few

weeks later. Agents’ handlers were often highly suspicious of produc-

tive informants like Joé, prolic ones who were at the center of revo-

lutionary milieus.

His spying did not preclude genuine anti-imperi-

alist sentiment or that he would invest in maintaining a black colony

in interwar Paris. After all, Ramananjato was convincing enough in

his politics for several other informants to write reports about him.

And he certainly openly rejected limits being placed on his freedom.

When Agent Joé seethed, “I made the decision to leave,” (emphasis

mine) after noticing his tails, he attempted to regain control over the

Introduction xxvii

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situation by asserting his authority. This language gains added mean-

ing when one considers that his wife had just witnessed the humilia-

tion of his second encounter with the police. Although political activ-

ists knew that they were being watched, they rarely meekly accepted

this challenge from the authorities.

This book explores many examples similar to Joé’s of how black

men colonized and moved through Parisian spaces, at times aggres-

sively. They, and others, constructed their identity in part through the

conception of autonomous spaces. The multiplication of such spaces

and manipulation of their environment, then, allowed black and white,

men and women, to gure out how to dene themselves, their politics,

their communities, and their identities. While investing themselves

in the shaping of traditional as well as nontraditional urban locali-

ties, black and white Parisians used their relationship to colonialism

as both a way of coming to terms with their own identity, and an ac-

tive process by which to ground themselves in, or even to “colonize,”

Paris.

A Brief Note on Terminology

Racial terms such as noir (black), nègre (loosely Negro), métis (mixed

race), and mulâtre (mulatto), as well as their feminine equivalents

négresse, mulâtresse, and métisse, cannot be translated precisely into

English, and indeed in the French language have a very rich linguistic

and historical background that will be explored throughout this work.

Malagasies, West Africans, Antilleans, and the French constructed

communities for themselves or were perceived in Paris in part through

such language, but the categories of race, gender, and class are nei-

ther binary nor immutable. (For more on the problem of translating

these terms see Brent Hayes Edwards, Practice of Diaspora.) Hence

they will be left in French throughout, as well as the terms indigène,

which here refers to a native of the French colonies, and tirailleurs

(infantry troops made up of indigènes). “Colonial migrants” refers to

colonized men and women living either permanently or temporarily

in France (see MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism). All trans-

lations are my own unless otherwise noted.

xxviii Introduction

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