The otl Aral Sea issue surely won't be an issue here, given it was of the multi generational mega project school which requires a callous disregard for local politics, life, and capital and perhaps also a keen desire for autarky. Hard to see such projects being attempted in a new large, poor and underpopulated fragmented state with little demonstrated capability to achieve ambitious civil projects.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
True, but I think that the local irrigation works that shall be carried out over time will have some sort of effect on the Sea, however small. I guess if the problem is spotted out early enough, and with some revamping like what Kazakhstan did OTL to their part of the Sea, it could be avoided.
That also reminds me; what about the Eastern Congo ITTL? I'm guessing the coltan and cobalt deposits are going to be untouched until the microchip has been invented, but from what we have heard from the International Era to the Pax Anglo-Omanica I'm guessing it's going to be as bad as it is OTL?
EDIT: Why do I even ask that second question? *facepalm*
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First, by apparent popular demand, Malê Rising now has a TV Tropes page. I started it off with a few entries; the ball's now in your court.
Also, inspired by a discussion in Massa Chief's thread, I've got a few ideas for Buganda Judaism, including an animist interpretation of the Shekhinah and a very literal conception of the Sabbath bride. No matter who you are, the Buganda will mess with your religion.
Point. We don't yet know what kind of governments Turkestan will have during the twentieth century, but its fragmentation should be proof against Stalinist megalomania. As sketchdoodle says, though, population increase and demand for water will still affect the Amu Darya and Syr Darya watersheds, as it has affected the watersheds of the southwestern United States. That kind of demand can be managed; the question is whether they'll recognize the problem in time and have the political will to deal with it.
The signs don't look good, but it's a long way in the future.
Also, inspired by a discussion in Massa Chief's thread, I've got a few ideas for Buganda Judaism, including an animist interpretation of the Shekhinah and a very literal conception of the Sabbath bride. No matter who you are, the Buganda will mess with your religion.
Point. We don't yet know what kind of governments Turkestan will have during the twentieth century, but its fragmentation should be proof against Stalinist megalomania. As sketchdoodle says, though, population increase and demand for water will still affect the Amu Darya and Syr Darya watersheds, as it has affected the watersheds of the southwestern United States. That kind of demand can be managed; the question is whether they'll recognize the problem in time and have the political will to deal with it.
The signs don't look good, but it's a long way in the future.
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Sulemain
Banned
Another thing is how many tropes you play with ITTL. France, Britain and the Ottomans are all Empires, but display many of the characteristics of the Federation. Meanwhile, Tolstoy's Russia subverts the idea of Dirty Commies, the Darkest Africa tropes is totally destroyed, etc.
I just now realized that, at the moment, Imperial Socialist France is now more democratic and liberal than either Hungary or Belgium. Talk about turning the tables!
Also, I've been thinking of adding an image in the page, but I'm stumped as to what would be suitable enough: A logo, a map, an event?
Anyone have any thoughts?
EDIT: Also Jonathan, do you have any plans for Deitmar Kohler's South Kivu? As much as I hate warlords, he seems to have a thing for building somewhat 'peaceful' territories.
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I don't think it's possible to write without using, and playing with, tropes - we all exist in our cultural milieu, and it affects our writing consciously or not. One of the things about TV Tropes, aside from being an excellent time-waster, is that it's made me more aware of what I'm doing, and has (hopefully) enabled me to make more intelligent use of some cliches while subverting or rejecting others. Tropes are tools, as they say.
Darkest Africa, of course, was a very deliberate subversion. Plenty of literature even now portrays Africa as a place without a history and an intellectual cipher; it isn't even close to being those things.
Hmmm. I've never thought about it, but I assume that Abacarism would have a symbol - maybe a crescent on a green field with broken chains? (I've already used broken chains for the Ogeechee Republic flag, but they were Abacarist-influenced, so they might have adopted that symbol; also, it's an intuitive one for a slave revolt.)
I'm certainly willing to listen if anyone has a better idea.
Yes, I've got plans for him. He'll have to make his peace with Tippu Tip and the Portuguese, but he'll survive.
Sulemain
Banned
If I were to dare to identify the central theme of this TL, it's that all human beings strive for freedom, in all it's many forms. Both freedom from, and freedom to.
One particular thing I've liked that you've done is that you first reconstructed the Empire trope (showing how the Raj could have been run) and then reconstructed it (the Raj wasn't ours to run at all). Without demonising anyone. There are no Big Bads ITTL, it's more grey.
One particular thing I've liked that you've done is that you first reconstructed the Empire trope (showing how the Raj could have been run) and then reconstructed it (the Raj wasn't ours to run at all). Without demonising anyone. There are no Big Bads ITTL, it's more grey.
Noémie Boucolon, Futurism and the French World (Paris: Flammarion, 1975)
… The ideology of futurism can sometimes be hard to pin down, both during the formative Verne years and the periods afterward when nearly everyone claimed the futurist mantle. It can perhaps be best defined as a list of general premises – an embrace of industrial modernity; valorization of youth, power and speed; a view of social dynamism and change as a positive good; a permissive attitude toward social and cultural experiments; a belief that human society is perfectible – combined with Verne’s admonition that the future must be constantly reimagined and rebuilt. Futurism is not simply a political movement; it is also an artistic, literary and even athletic one.
There were some strains of early futurism that glorified war as the ultimate expression of dynamism, power and creative destruction. This viewpoint, however, was hard to justify after the horrors of the Great War, and it is very much a minority position today. Verne’s pacifism became dominant in the last years of the nineteenth century and never lost that dominance, although futurist parties in some countries have challenged it. Creative destruction, and the breaking down of social and cultural norms into their component parts so that they can be understood and rebuilt, is still very much a part of futurism, but in the majority view, war is seen as a nihilistic rather than a creative form of destruction.
The second Verne administration of 1899-1904 would emphasize all the foundations of futurism. Its first year was dedicated to recovering from the economic and social damage of the civil war, but by late 1900, the postwar boom was in full swing. The government resumed the pre-civil-war investments in education, culture and sports as well as industrial development and research, and started work on ambitious megaprojects such as the trans-Saharan railroad (which would be completed in 1911 under the succeeding administration). It again encouraged experimental schools and workplaces and supported research into commercially viable air travel, which would be realized with the opening of a scheduled Paris-Marseilles-Algiers-Dakar airship route in 1909, and public broadcast radio, which would be inaugurated in Paris in 1907 . There would, once more, be a pervasive spirit of optimism and progress in popular culture and art…
… Futurism was originally conceived as a European ideology, with its roots in Europe’s industrial revolution and the social changes of the late nineteenth century, but the entire French empire would take part in it. Many Africans and Muslims living in France were part of the futurist movement, and it had substantial influence on early twentieth-century Islamic thought in Paris and Marseilles; from there, it spread to Algeria, the West African colonies, the Caribbean and the remaining Indian Ocean possessions.
Islamic and African futurism are often conflated, but they are not the same. The former is a mode of religious thought which permits dynamic reinterpretation of consensus views on tradition and law (albeit not religious law itself) and emphasizes both social and technological progress as tools for achieving justice. The latter is a secular and more generally African movement, not limited to a single religion, which holds to the mainstream futurist view of material progress as a good in itself, and which conceives the future in non-European terms – imagining, for instance, advanced cities and political systems based on African philosophy and aesthetics.
In both movements, politics are closely intertwined with literature, art and music; the leading African and Islamic futurists have taken seriously Verne’s admonition that “to build the future, one must first imagine it,” and since the early twentieth century, have couched many of their political arguments as stories or novels. This would in fact become the dominant literary form in French West Africa in the early twentieth century. In contrast to the literature of the lower Niger, which was heavily based in folk mythology and Malê liberation theology and which often mixed elements of fantasy with realism [1], Senegalese and Gabonais authors began to focus on speculative fiction, set in a future time and exploring the limits of the possible. Their works were both imagined futures and commentary on the society of the day; building on the naturalist novels of Wolof authors like Mamadou Camara, their portrayal of the future (and the process of building it) was often gritty as well as hopeful, and they projected issues of colonialism, racial and religious differences, and political economy onto a future canvas.
A case in point is Gaiaye Diagne’s [2] Sunrise in Dakar (1905), an important futurist work of the first decade of the twentieth century. Diagne, a historian and long-time member of the Dakar city council, flirted with socialism and Abacarist liberalism before joining the Futurist Party. Between 1903 and 1912, he wrote a series of novels which depicted French West Africa in the year 2000, of which Sunrise in Dakar is widely considered the most influential. In addition to the usual technological trappings of futurist works, Sunrise depicted a city that was designed to foster overlapping geographic, spiritual and avocational communities (a concept often neglected in futurism) and a decentralized empire in which all regions were locally controlled and where all citizens had equal rights. The political system of Sunrise is contrasted with the colonial forms that still prevailed in parts of the French world during Diagne’s time, and both African and French characters are explicit in criticizing the faults of the early twentieth-century system.
Art and design during this period was also influenced by the French avant-garde, featuring experiments with shape and color, futuristic urban landscapes (which also featured in early West African cinema) figures in motion, and streamlined lettering. The Dakar Exposition of 1908, in addition to being a exhibition of West African industry and trade, was also a showcase of African and Islamic futurist art, and the exhibitors included many people who would be influential in twentieth-century Senegalese political life. And their works would not go unnoticed by futurists, and others, in Europe and the United States…
Fabienne Callas, Africa and the Liberal Empire (Dakar: Nouvelle Presse Africaine, 1955)
… The civil war would spell the end of radical reform in colonial policy for more than a decade. The fact that the reforms of 1898 had set off a war made the government skittish about further measures, and time was needed to consolidate the new status of Algeria and Gabon and build an administrative infrastructure. Also, some parts of the left became distinctly cool toward reform in the wake of the 1899 election, in which most of the vote in Algeria and Senegal, and about half the Gabonais vote, went to independent imams and traditional leaders rather than to the socialist parties. Anticipating that more of the same would occur if Guinea, French Sudan, Obock or Côte d'Ivoire were incorporated as integral French territories, they argued that the people of those colonies were “politically backward” and in need of guidance before being incorporated into the state, a position only made stronger by the fact that most education in the colonies was conducted by Islamic brotherhoods or by the Church. This was far from a universal view on the left – the largest socialist party, the Rassemblement socialiste et pacifique, condemned it as a disguised form of racial supremacy – but enough deputies subscribed to it to block any more sweeping reforms.
There were some incremental improvements. Paul Koffi, whose criminal conviction for defiance of arbitrary colonial rule had precipitated the socialist withdrawal from government in 1893 [3] and who had led guerrilla resistance against the British occupation of Côte d'Ivoire during the Great War [4], was elected in 1899 as one of the two deputies from the unincorporated territories. In 1900, he introduced a bill to replace the hated labor tax with one that could be paid in labor, cash or kind at the taxpayer’s option. This bill was taken up by the RSP and became law with the support of a broad coalition of deputies, ending de jure forced labor in the French empire. Other measures provided for administrative appeals of colonial officials’ decisions and the formal incorporation of the Rights of Man into colonial law.
These did not, however, end the fundamental problem of the colonies being colonies. Outside Senegal, Gabon and Algeria, French citizenship was by the Latin Right only, and although the futurist and socialist governments applied it more uniformly and generously than had been the case before 1897, only a minority of the colonial population was enfranchised. What’s more, except in the few places where French citizens were thick enough on the ground to organize communes, there were no locally-elected bodies to which the colonial peoples could look for redress. When local officials acted abusively – as they sometimes did – their subjects’ recourse was to the administrative process and the courts, both of which were slow and uncertain. There were several attempts by Koffi and others to institute elected district governments or provincial advisory councils in the colonies, but these were rebuffed by the anti-reform parties.
And even where the colonial peoples were enfranchised, this did not always lead to equality in practice. In Senegal, where French citizenship had been universal for more than twenty years and widespread even before, and which had an effective lobby in the government, legal equality really did mean practical equality. But in Gabon and Algeria, the entrenched elites had a head start and made good use of them in protecting their economic and political dominance.
The Algerian officials in particular drew parliamentary and municipal boundaries to favor the whites. In Algiers and Oran, for instance, the city limits were redrawn so that most of the Muslim population fell outside them, thus denying them a vote in municipal elections or access to city services. They became part of separate communes with Algerian mayors but much poorer physical and educational infrastructure. When the government in Paris attempted to challenge these boundaries, they met with massive resistance from local officials, and the courts – staffed with judges appointed under the old regime who were constitutionally protected from removal – tended to side with the pieds noirs. The government did compensate by replacing some appointed officials and directing development spending to Muslim-majority areas, but there were limits to how far the coalition was willing to go, and some of the funding went astray when it reached the district level.
Today, after the events of the 1920s and 30s and the referenda of 1954, we recognize colonial policy as a blot on a regime that was otherwise progressive on racial and social issues, a regime that insisted upon and enforced full rights for Africans in Paris and Dakar but surrendered to expediency in Ségou and Algiers. Nor did this go unnoticed at the time: Verne, the RSP, many members of the Socialist Union, and the elected deputies from West Africa and Algeria all decried the failure to complete the colonies’ integration into the French state. But they could not yet persuade the majority, and their failure would have consequences…
Antoine Bileka, Gateway to the Congo: The Story of Gabon (Libreville: Bioko, 1998)
… With Gabon’s accession as an integral French territory, the entirety of the French constitution, including its religious freedom clauses, now applied on its soil. The laws against the practice of candomble and Bwiti rites, including the naissance pascale [5], were stricken from the books, and the underground congregations emerged into the open. Within a year of the civil war’s end, there were more than a hundred registered houses of worship belonging to these faiths, as well as publishing houses and fraternal societies. They celebrated their emancipation with public ceremonies and parades, which became annual events and drew interest from Paris and abroad; among other things, they would introduce the metropolitan French public to the use of the iboga drug.
The Catholic elite, however, which had fought the candomble and the indigenous faiths while they were underground, was not about to give up its privileged position now that they were legal. A great majority of elected and appointed offices were held by Catholics, some of them by members of the clergy, and the province’s largest businesses had long-standing connections with both the government and the Church. These gave the established parties a great advantage in elections. Campaigns became violent affairs, with Papal Legion veterans fighting the left and the candomble societies in the streets. The factions correlated only partly with race – most of the Europeans and creoles in Gabon were Catholic – but middle-class African Catholics were as much part of the elite as whites, and those whites who had joined the Afro-Brazilian or indigenous faiths were excluded from it.
Gabon was far enough from Paris that, for the most part, these conflicts were left to play out naturally. Over time, though, several trends combined to erode the power of the elites. As th Catholic Liberal movement grew, fissures began to appear in the Church coalition, especially among the working class in Libreville and the parish priests in the hinterland. And with the loss of the French Congo, the overland routes pioneered by the Gabonais once again became the main conduit for trade between the Congo Basin and France, and these traders were well served by their links to the Luba and the multinational Coasters [6]. Their economic power increased during the first years of the twentieth century, and they put some of their new resources into political organization.
The decisive moment occurred at the municipal elections of 1906, two years after a socialist government took power in Paris. There was fighting in the streets as there had been before, and strikes by opposing labor-religious brotherhoods paralyzed the ports for weeks at a time, but when the votes were counted, a coalition of leftists, Catholic Liberals, mães-de-santo, Bwiti elders and independent traders took control of the Libreville council and a majority of the towns and rural districts in the interior. For the first time, Gabon was ruled by the fusion of all its peoples…
Amélie Diallo, Red France (Paris: Avenir, 2007)
… The election of 1904 marked the end of Verne’s second premiership – he would die only a year later – and the beginning of the “Red Twenty.” Without Verne as a candidate, the Futurist share of the vote declined from 18 to 11 percent, and its representation in the corps législatif declined from 71 to 44 seats. Most of the difference went to the socialist parties, which also picked up votes from other parties on the left; their collective share of the vote increased to 46 percent and they took, for the first time, an absolute majority in the legislature. The new government consisted of the socialists in coalition with allied independents and a couple of small center-left parties, with the prime minister and a large majority of the cabinet coming from the socialist factions. The government of 1904-09 – only the second one since 1877 to finish its term – would set the tone for the next two decades.
The character of socialist France is open to much debate. Opinions vary even more as to whether France remained a democracy during the “Red Twenty” than as to whether it was one to begin with during the Decade of Reaction. The issue is still controversial, and in fact, views on it are a reliable marker of political alignment.
Those on the “yes” side point to the fact that the socialist governments never imposed official censorship and never banned any political parties, even on the far right. Non-socialist and even right-wing parties could and did win individual elections; there were never fewer than 240 non-socialist deputies in the corps législatif, and there were always cities and towns with right-wing mayors. After the amnesty of 1908, Paul Leclair returned to France and was elected to the city council of Cannes. Voters could punish ineffective deputies (although many thereafter received government jobs), maintained the right of public dissent, and could speak and organize in favor of non-socialist causes.
Another factor favoring openness was that there were never fewer than three socialist parties in the legislature and sometimes as many as five, ranging from the big-tent Rassemblement socialiste et pacifique to the extreme Parti radical des travailleurs. Coalitions during the Red Twenty would typically include non-socialist parties on the center-left, such as the Futurists or the Catholic Liberals, in order to prevent intra-socialist disputes from destabilizing the government. At times these parties had real influence on policy; for instance, the Catholic Liberals were able to prevent an Italian-style expropriation of the Church, and brokered a compromise under which the Church gave up its remaining influence in public education and secular political life in exchange for undisturbed control of its internal matters.
Set against that, however, is the amount of unofficial control that the socialist governments exercised. Government benefits were often doled out politically; companies with actively right-wing owners were denied government contracts or loans – a major handicap given how much of the economy was in government hands during this period – and rightist newspapers received no legal advertising. Much of the media was owned outright by the government or by the ruling parties, and the private media practiced widespread self-censorship in order to avoid loss of benefits. The public education system was explicitly socialist in emphasis, and competing influences such as the Church were largely absent.
Thus, while dissent was free, it was drowned out through less-than-democratic means, and this showed in the electoral results. Between 1909 and 1926, the socialist parties never held less than 55 percent of the corps législatif and sometimes as much as 64 percent; if their nominally-independent allies are added in, the figures are even higher. This gave them virtually unchallenged political hegemony and free rein, subject to internal divisions, the constitution and the imperial veto, to remake France according to their vision.
For all that, the policies of Red France were generally moderate, at least by the standards of hard-line factions such as the PRT. The socialist governments maintained wartime tax rates on high incomes (as the Verne administration had also done) and encouraged the formation of self-managed factories and workers’ cooperatives through public investment and tax preferences, but engaged in only a limited amount of outright collectivization. Railroads, utilities, hospitals and mines outside Alsace were nationalized, with shareholders paid off at discounted rates over a twenty-year period, but aside from that, private property rights remained intact. Rural areas likewise saw encouragement to form cooperatives, and in many cases the creation of companies to finance and market agriculture in particular districts, but proposals to abolish private land ownership were consistently defeated.
Government control over the economy nevertheless increased over time. The governments of the Red Twenty continued many Futurist priorities, favoring industrial development, investment in infrastructure, and mechanization of agriculture. This, combined with ever-growing rates of public investment, meant that power accreted to central and regional planning boards, with the result that privately-owned and self-managed firms’ choices were limited by the planners’ priorities. The 1907 law guaranteeing a job to every adult who wanted to work also resulted in independent companies being conscripted to provide employment, with preferences for skilled employees being given to firms that produced high-priority goods. In some districts – the ones where the planning boards were a cooperative effort of government, industry and labor – this system retained flexibility; in others, where priorities were set politically, it was a drag on the economy that would grow to serious proportions by the late 1910s.
Cultural policies during the Red Twenty were also moderate. Religious institutions were, as noted above, left alone as long as they abstained from secular politics, and private education was discouraged but allowed. The partial retreat from the Futurists’ emphasis on perfecting the human species meant a relaxation of eugenics laws and greater emphasis on integrating the disabled into society – among other things, they were covered by the 1907 labor act, and were guaranteed access to public education and “dignified employment suitable to their abilities.” And while some on the left argued for a radical transformation of the family, and indeed for the replacement of the family as an economic unit, their proposed legislation repeatedly failed; experimental family structures were permitted but never enforced.
Any tendency to tinker with familial and sexual matters lost impetus after 1908, when the “Congo disease” – a syndrome causing increased susceptibility to wasting diseases among soldiers who had served in the eastern Congo and their sexual partners – was identified. It would be decades before the cause of the Congo disease was isolated, but its discovery, and the long lag time between sexual relations and the onset of opportunistic infections, immediately put a chill on any incipient sexual revolution. Sexual education and condom use were encouraged as public health measures, but norms swung heavily toward premarital abstinence and traditional marriage.
This did not, however, mean an end to feminist progress; women continued to make gains in areas outside family life. Women were made eligible for any kind of work (although in some cases, such as the police and military, their roles were restricted) and were included in the 1907 employment guarantee. In practice, most married women continued to stay home, and relatively few applied for traditionally male industrial jobs, but their representation in the educated professions – especially medicine – increased sharply, and working-class women had many more economic options…
_______
[1] See post 638.
[2] See post 189.
[3] See posts 1133 and 1393.
[4] See post 2497.
[5] See post 411.
[6] See post 629.
… The ideology of futurism can sometimes be hard to pin down, both during the formative Verne years and the periods afterward when nearly everyone claimed the futurist mantle. It can perhaps be best defined as a list of general premises – an embrace of industrial modernity; valorization of youth, power and speed; a view of social dynamism and change as a positive good; a permissive attitude toward social and cultural experiments; a belief that human society is perfectible – combined with Verne’s admonition that the future must be constantly reimagined and rebuilt. Futurism is not simply a political movement; it is also an artistic, literary and even athletic one.
There were some strains of early futurism that glorified war as the ultimate expression of dynamism, power and creative destruction. This viewpoint, however, was hard to justify after the horrors of the Great War, and it is very much a minority position today. Verne’s pacifism became dominant in the last years of the nineteenth century and never lost that dominance, although futurist parties in some countries have challenged it. Creative destruction, and the breaking down of social and cultural norms into their component parts so that they can be understood and rebuilt, is still very much a part of futurism, but in the majority view, war is seen as a nihilistic rather than a creative form of destruction.
The second Verne administration of 1899-1904 would emphasize all the foundations of futurism. Its first year was dedicated to recovering from the economic and social damage of the civil war, but by late 1900, the postwar boom was in full swing. The government resumed the pre-civil-war investments in education, culture and sports as well as industrial development and research, and started work on ambitious megaprojects such as the trans-Saharan railroad (which would be completed in 1911 under the succeeding administration). It again encouraged experimental schools and workplaces and supported research into commercially viable air travel, which would be realized with the opening of a scheduled Paris-Marseilles-Algiers-Dakar airship route in 1909, and public broadcast radio, which would be inaugurated in Paris in 1907 . There would, once more, be a pervasive spirit of optimism and progress in popular culture and art…
… Futurism was originally conceived as a European ideology, with its roots in Europe’s industrial revolution and the social changes of the late nineteenth century, but the entire French empire would take part in it. Many Africans and Muslims living in France were part of the futurist movement, and it had substantial influence on early twentieth-century Islamic thought in Paris and Marseilles; from there, it spread to Algeria, the West African colonies, the Caribbean and the remaining Indian Ocean possessions.
Islamic and African futurism are often conflated, but they are not the same. The former is a mode of religious thought which permits dynamic reinterpretation of consensus views on tradition and law (albeit not religious law itself) and emphasizes both social and technological progress as tools for achieving justice. The latter is a secular and more generally African movement, not limited to a single religion, which holds to the mainstream futurist view of material progress as a good in itself, and which conceives the future in non-European terms – imagining, for instance, advanced cities and political systems based on African philosophy and aesthetics.
In both movements, politics are closely intertwined with literature, art and music; the leading African and Islamic futurists have taken seriously Verne’s admonition that “to build the future, one must first imagine it,” and since the early twentieth century, have couched many of their political arguments as stories or novels. This would in fact become the dominant literary form in French West Africa in the early twentieth century. In contrast to the literature of the lower Niger, which was heavily based in folk mythology and Malê liberation theology and which often mixed elements of fantasy with realism [1], Senegalese and Gabonais authors began to focus on speculative fiction, set in a future time and exploring the limits of the possible. Their works were both imagined futures and commentary on the society of the day; building on the naturalist novels of Wolof authors like Mamadou Camara, their portrayal of the future (and the process of building it) was often gritty as well as hopeful, and they projected issues of colonialism, racial and religious differences, and political economy onto a future canvas.
A case in point is Gaiaye Diagne’s [2] Sunrise in Dakar (1905), an important futurist work of the first decade of the twentieth century. Diagne, a historian and long-time member of the Dakar city council, flirted with socialism and Abacarist liberalism before joining the Futurist Party. Between 1903 and 1912, he wrote a series of novels which depicted French West Africa in the year 2000, of which Sunrise in Dakar is widely considered the most influential. In addition to the usual technological trappings of futurist works, Sunrise depicted a city that was designed to foster overlapping geographic, spiritual and avocational communities (a concept often neglected in futurism) and a decentralized empire in which all regions were locally controlled and where all citizens had equal rights. The political system of Sunrise is contrasted with the colonial forms that still prevailed in parts of the French world during Diagne’s time, and both African and French characters are explicit in criticizing the faults of the early twentieth-century system.
Art and design during this period was also influenced by the French avant-garde, featuring experiments with shape and color, futuristic urban landscapes (which also featured in early West African cinema) figures in motion, and streamlined lettering. The Dakar Exposition of 1908, in addition to being a exhibition of West African industry and trade, was also a showcase of African and Islamic futurist art, and the exhibitors included many people who would be influential in twentieth-century Senegalese political life. And their works would not go unnoticed by futurists, and others, in Europe and the United States…
*******
Fabienne Callas, Africa and the Liberal Empire (Dakar: Nouvelle Presse Africaine, 1955)
… The civil war would spell the end of radical reform in colonial policy for more than a decade. The fact that the reforms of 1898 had set off a war made the government skittish about further measures, and time was needed to consolidate the new status of Algeria and Gabon and build an administrative infrastructure. Also, some parts of the left became distinctly cool toward reform in the wake of the 1899 election, in which most of the vote in Algeria and Senegal, and about half the Gabonais vote, went to independent imams and traditional leaders rather than to the socialist parties. Anticipating that more of the same would occur if Guinea, French Sudan, Obock or Côte d'Ivoire were incorporated as integral French territories, they argued that the people of those colonies were “politically backward” and in need of guidance before being incorporated into the state, a position only made stronger by the fact that most education in the colonies was conducted by Islamic brotherhoods or by the Church. This was far from a universal view on the left – the largest socialist party, the Rassemblement socialiste et pacifique, condemned it as a disguised form of racial supremacy – but enough deputies subscribed to it to block any more sweeping reforms.
There were some incremental improvements. Paul Koffi, whose criminal conviction for defiance of arbitrary colonial rule had precipitated the socialist withdrawal from government in 1893 [3] and who had led guerrilla resistance against the British occupation of Côte d'Ivoire during the Great War [4], was elected in 1899 as one of the two deputies from the unincorporated territories. In 1900, he introduced a bill to replace the hated labor tax with one that could be paid in labor, cash or kind at the taxpayer’s option. This bill was taken up by the RSP and became law with the support of a broad coalition of deputies, ending de jure forced labor in the French empire. Other measures provided for administrative appeals of colonial officials’ decisions and the formal incorporation of the Rights of Man into colonial law.
These did not, however, end the fundamental problem of the colonies being colonies. Outside Senegal, Gabon and Algeria, French citizenship was by the Latin Right only, and although the futurist and socialist governments applied it more uniformly and generously than had been the case before 1897, only a minority of the colonial population was enfranchised. What’s more, except in the few places where French citizens were thick enough on the ground to organize communes, there were no locally-elected bodies to which the colonial peoples could look for redress. When local officials acted abusively – as they sometimes did – their subjects’ recourse was to the administrative process and the courts, both of which were slow and uncertain. There were several attempts by Koffi and others to institute elected district governments or provincial advisory councils in the colonies, but these were rebuffed by the anti-reform parties.
And even where the colonial peoples were enfranchised, this did not always lead to equality in practice. In Senegal, where French citizenship had been universal for more than twenty years and widespread even before, and which had an effective lobby in the government, legal equality really did mean practical equality. But in Gabon and Algeria, the entrenched elites had a head start and made good use of them in protecting their economic and political dominance.
The Algerian officials in particular drew parliamentary and municipal boundaries to favor the whites. In Algiers and Oran, for instance, the city limits were redrawn so that most of the Muslim population fell outside them, thus denying them a vote in municipal elections or access to city services. They became part of separate communes with Algerian mayors but much poorer physical and educational infrastructure. When the government in Paris attempted to challenge these boundaries, they met with massive resistance from local officials, and the courts – staffed with judges appointed under the old regime who were constitutionally protected from removal – tended to side with the pieds noirs. The government did compensate by replacing some appointed officials and directing development spending to Muslim-majority areas, but there were limits to how far the coalition was willing to go, and some of the funding went astray when it reached the district level.
Today, after the events of the 1920s and 30s and the referenda of 1954, we recognize colonial policy as a blot on a regime that was otherwise progressive on racial and social issues, a regime that insisted upon and enforced full rights for Africans in Paris and Dakar but surrendered to expediency in Ségou and Algiers. Nor did this go unnoticed at the time: Verne, the RSP, many members of the Socialist Union, and the elected deputies from West Africa and Algeria all decried the failure to complete the colonies’ integration into the French state. But they could not yet persuade the majority, and their failure would have consequences…
*******
Antoine Bileka, Gateway to the Congo: The Story of Gabon (Libreville: Bioko, 1998)
… With Gabon’s accession as an integral French territory, the entirety of the French constitution, including its religious freedom clauses, now applied on its soil. The laws against the practice of candomble and Bwiti rites, including the naissance pascale [5], were stricken from the books, and the underground congregations emerged into the open. Within a year of the civil war’s end, there were more than a hundred registered houses of worship belonging to these faiths, as well as publishing houses and fraternal societies. They celebrated their emancipation with public ceremonies and parades, which became annual events and drew interest from Paris and abroad; among other things, they would introduce the metropolitan French public to the use of the iboga drug.
The Catholic elite, however, which had fought the candomble and the indigenous faiths while they were underground, was not about to give up its privileged position now that they were legal. A great majority of elected and appointed offices were held by Catholics, some of them by members of the clergy, and the province’s largest businesses had long-standing connections with both the government and the Church. These gave the established parties a great advantage in elections. Campaigns became violent affairs, with Papal Legion veterans fighting the left and the candomble societies in the streets. The factions correlated only partly with race – most of the Europeans and creoles in Gabon were Catholic – but middle-class African Catholics were as much part of the elite as whites, and those whites who had joined the Afro-Brazilian or indigenous faiths were excluded from it.
Gabon was far enough from Paris that, for the most part, these conflicts were left to play out naturally. Over time, though, several trends combined to erode the power of the elites. As th Catholic Liberal movement grew, fissures began to appear in the Church coalition, especially among the working class in Libreville and the parish priests in the hinterland. And with the loss of the French Congo, the overland routes pioneered by the Gabonais once again became the main conduit for trade between the Congo Basin and France, and these traders were well served by their links to the Luba and the multinational Coasters [6]. Their economic power increased during the first years of the twentieth century, and they put some of their new resources into political organization.
The decisive moment occurred at the municipal elections of 1906, two years after a socialist government took power in Paris. There was fighting in the streets as there had been before, and strikes by opposing labor-religious brotherhoods paralyzed the ports for weeks at a time, but when the votes were counted, a coalition of leftists, Catholic Liberals, mães-de-santo, Bwiti elders and independent traders took control of the Libreville council and a majority of the towns and rural districts in the interior. For the first time, Gabon was ruled by the fusion of all its peoples…
*******
Amélie Diallo, Red France (Paris: Avenir, 2007)
… The election of 1904 marked the end of Verne’s second premiership – he would die only a year later – and the beginning of the “Red Twenty.” Without Verne as a candidate, the Futurist share of the vote declined from 18 to 11 percent, and its representation in the corps législatif declined from 71 to 44 seats. Most of the difference went to the socialist parties, which also picked up votes from other parties on the left; their collective share of the vote increased to 46 percent and they took, for the first time, an absolute majority in the legislature. The new government consisted of the socialists in coalition with allied independents and a couple of small center-left parties, with the prime minister and a large majority of the cabinet coming from the socialist factions. The government of 1904-09 – only the second one since 1877 to finish its term – would set the tone for the next two decades.
The character of socialist France is open to much debate. Opinions vary even more as to whether France remained a democracy during the “Red Twenty” than as to whether it was one to begin with during the Decade of Reaction. The issue is still controversial, and in fact, views on it are a reliable marker of political alignment.
Those on the “yes” side point to the fact that the socialist governments never imposed official censorship and never banned any political parties, even on the far right. Non-socialist and even right-wing parties could and did win individual elections; there were never fewer than 240 non-socialist deputies in the corps législatif, and there were always cities and towns with right-wing mayors. After the amnesty of 1908, Paul Leclair returned to France and was elected to the city council of Cannes. Voters could punish ineffective deputies (although many thereafter received government jobs), maintained the right of public dissent, and could speak and organize in favor of non-socialist causes.
Another factor favoring openness was that there were never fewer than three socialist parties in the legislature and sometimes as many as five, ranging from the big-tent Rassemblement socialiste et pacifique to the extreme Parti radical des travailleurs. Coalitions during the Red Twenty would typically include non-socialist parties on the center-left, such as the Futurists or the Catholic Liberals, in order to prevent intra-socialist disputes from destabilizing the government. At times these parties had real influence on policy; for instance, the Catholic Liberals were able to prevent an Italian-style expropriation of the Church, and brokered a compromise under which the Church gave up its remaining influence in public education and secular political life in exchange for undisturbed control of its internal matters.
Set against that, however, is the amount of unofficial control that the socialist governments exercised. Government benefits were often doled out politically; companies with actively right-wing owners were denied government contracts or loans – a major handicap given how much of the economy was in government hands during this period – and rightist newspapers received no legal advertising. Much of the media was owned outright by the government or by the ruling parties, and the private media practiced widespread self-censorship in order to avoid loss of benefits. The public education system was explicitly socialist in emphasis, and competing influences such as the Church were largely absent.
Thus, while dissent was free, it was drowned out through less-than-democratic means, and this showed in the electoral results. Between 1909 and 1926, the socialist parties never held less than 55 percent of the corps législatif and sometimes as much as 64 percent; if their nominally-independent allies are added in, the figures are even higher. This gave them virtually unchallenged political hegemony and free rein, subject to internal divisions, the constitution and the imperial veto, to remake France according to their vision.
For all that, the policies of Red France were generally moderate, at least by the standards of hard-line factions such as the PRT. The socialist governments maintained wartime tax rates on high incomes (as the Verne administration had also done) and encouraged the formation of self-managed factories and workers’ cooperatives through public investment and tax preferences, but engaged in only a limited amount of outright collectivization. Railroads, utilities, hospitals and mines outside Alsace were nationalized, with shareholders paid off at discounted rates over a twenty-year period, but aside from that, private property rights remained intact. Rural areas likewise saw encouragement to form cooperatives, and in many cases the creation of companies to finance and market agriculture in particular districts, but proposals to abolish private land ownership were consistently defeated.
Government control over the economy nevertheless increased over time. The governments of the Red Twenty continued many Futurist priorities, favoring industrial development, investment in infrastructure, and mechanization of agriculture. This, combined with ever-growing rates of public investment, meant that power accreted to central and regional planning boards, with the result that privately-owned and self-managed firms’ choices were limited by the planners’ priorities. The 1907 law guaranteeing a job to every adult who wanted to work also resulted in independent companies being conscripted to provide employment, with preferences for skilled employees being given to firms that produced high-priority goods. In some districts – the ones where the planning boards were a cooperative effort of government, industry and labor – this system retained flexibility; in others, where priorities were set politically, it was a drag on the economy that would grow to serious proportions by the late 1910s.
Cultural policies during the Red Twenty were also moderate. Religious institutions were, as noted above, left alone as long as they abstained from secular politics, and private education was discouraged but allowed. The partial retreat from the Futurists’ emphasis on perfecting the human species meant a relaxation of eugenics laws and greater emphasis on integrating the disabled into society – among other things, they were covered by the 1907 labor act, and were guaranteed access to public education and “dignified employment suitable to their abilities.” And while some on the left argued for a radical transformation of the family, and indeed for the replacement of the family as an economic unit, their proposed legislation repeatedly failed; experimental family structures were permitted but never enforced.
Any tendency to tinker with familial and sexual matters lost impetus after 1908, when the “Congo disease” – a syndrome causing increased susceptibility to wasting diseases among soldiers who had served in the eastern Congo and their sexual partners – was identified. It would be decades before the cause of the Congo disease was isolated, but its discovery, and the long lag time between sexual relations and the onset of opportunistic infections, immediately put a chill on any incipient sexual revolution. Sexual education and condom use were encouraged as public health measures, but norms swung heavily toward premarital abstinence and traditional marriage.
This did not, however, mean an end to feminist progress; women continued to make gains in areas outside family life. Women were made eligible for any kind of work (although in some cases, such as the police and military, their roles were restricted) and were included in the 1907 employment guarantee. In practice, most married women continued to stay home, and relatively few applied for traditionally male industrial jobs, but their representation in the educated professions – especially medicine – increased sharply, and working-class women had many more economic options…
_______
[1] See post 638.
[2] See post 189.
[3] See posts 1133 and 1393.
[4] See post 2497.
[5] See post 411.
[6] See post 629.
Not in Hungary or India...
But generally, yes.
Great update, Jonathan! It was nice to see some little hints of cultural/social changes in the first section of the update as well.
Cheers,
Ganesha
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Futurism as a serious ideology- I like it. It's a pity that the sexual revolution failed to take on, but that happened with Socialism IOTL. Socialists tended to view sex scientifically from a practical standpoint rather than as something to be opened up and celebrated- an approach more likely to result in a Ministry of Sex rather than a real liberalism in values.
Deleted member 67076
Oh shit. AIDS....
Great update as always. Just how much will the Trans-Saharan railroad impact France and her colonies?
Great update as always. Just how much will the Trans-Saharan railroad impact France and her colonies?
Question. Will Verne be interred in the Pantheon for his achievements after his death?
A Futurist France.. what a strange world you have created, Jonathan. I hope this means we can see some crazy building designs being proposed during this time.
I know this is way off topic to the timeline, but I was wondering just what is going on in Siam during this time. Islamic Reformism has largely passed on there due to it being mostly Buddhist, and with the country under British control I wonder if it could have ever modernized as per OTL . Would King Mongkut and Chulalongkorn be able to modernize the country, even though they are now under British rule? I don't know much about Thai history to figure this out.
A Futurist France.. what a strange world you have created, Jonathan. I hope this means we can see some crazy building designs being proposed during this time.
I know this is way off topic to the timeline, but I was wondering just what is going on in Siam during this time. Islamic Reformism has largely passed on there due to it being mostly Buddhist, and with the country under British control I wonder if it could have ever modernized as per OTL . Would King Mongkut and Chulalongkorn be able to modernize the country, even though they are now under British rule? I don't know much about Thai history to figure this out.
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It's a shame that France's socialists seem to be semi-authoritarian in nature, though it's not too bad when you compare it to the post-war world in OTL. Shame to hear about AIDs making its impact felt too, though futurism being a serious ideology kind of offsets these two. Another brilliant update!
It all seems pretty naturally continuous with Saint-Simonianism OTL, which I presume was a thing in the Second Empire here as well as OTL.
It's rather like Progressivism OTL being a top-down, elitist nanny-state alternative to and prophylactic against bottom-up neo-revolutionism as foreshadowed by the OTL Populists and underscored by Wobblies and the Socialists in the USA. Sure, a deep and sweeping social revolution that, its proponents claim anyway, is the only real way forward for true democracy has been diverted. OTOH, a mainstream society that is protected from sweeping revision is revised piecemeal, retains continuity, and seems on the whole definitely better off for it--having both more potential for future development and yet on the whole more humane. If not compared to the utopian dreams of the hard-core revolutionaries, at least compared to projected business-as-usual.
I guess I'd obviously be one of the "of course it was democratic!" Reds; the darkest sign I saw being that things were going moribund in some places. But those seemed precisely to be the places where the reactionaries were hanging on tooth and nail--I'd say it is a pity but serves them right for not getting with the program.
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This relates to my personal summary of the timeline from the new Wiki page which I didn't mention because I think I'm just echoing Jonathan's own self-summary--"A World Half Full." Again and again the timeline seems to focus on taking what is and making it better, not damning it for not being optimum.
I'd assume no, given that if they're under the British, there's no need to modernise; so they're sort of confirmed in their power.
I'm wondering about alternate language development ITTL. This splits into a few different questions.
1. Is TTL seeing the development of new literary standards which weren't seen IOTL? With a more developed Africa, I could surely see a push to standardize various dialects into something cohesive. I could also see some knock-off effects in Europe - for example, given the Dalmatian dialects of Serbo-Croatian are quite divergent from those spoken in most of Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia, the creation of a distinct "Dalmatian" language.
2. The other side of the same coin is language revival. I wonder if we might see it in a few places we did not IOTL. For example, the Ottomans might actually find it worthwhile to support the revival of the nearly moribund Central and Western Aramaic dialects among Christians in the Levant, in order to put a brake on pan-Arabism.
1. Is TTL seeing the development of new literary standards which weren't seen IOTL? With a more developed Africa, I could surely see a push to standardize various dialects into something cohesive. I could also see some knock-off effects in Europe - for example, given the Dalmatian dialects of Serbo-Croatian are quite divergent from those spoken in most of Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia, the creation of a distinct "Dalmatian" language.
2. The other side of the same coin is language revival. I wonder if we might see it in a few places we did not IOTL. For example, the Ottomans might actually find it worthwhile to support the revival of the nearly moribund Central and Western Aramaic dialects among Christians in the Levant, in order to put a brake on pan-Arabism.
While it might be the case for some, the differences between dialects of many West Africans are so great that they may as well be seperate languages, even today their's ALOT of confusion, debate and disagreement over what is a dialect and what's a language among linguists in many places there and in some cases whether languague or dialect groups are even related to each other (for example their are about a dozen languages with between 50,000-1 million+ speakers that have major disputes between what language groups they're part of).