Amélie Diallo, Red France (Paris: Avenir, 2007)
… The four-year period known as the “PRT era” was not in fact totally dominated by the
Parti radical des travailleurs. That party won just 31 percent of the seats in the lower house in the 1919 election and was weaker still in the senate. It was the dominant partner in a four-party socialist coalition, like the
Rassemblement socialiste et pacifique had been before it, but it lacked the power to enact legislation on its own and many of its parliamentary initiatives failed.
Three things combined to give the PRT much more of an impact than a party in its position might otherwise have had. The 1919-23 coalition, unlike the three preceding ones, contained no non-socialist parties to balance the PRT’s radicalism. The PRT came into power with a popular mandate to rescue France from depression. And, more than any of the other socialist factions, the party’s leaders recognized the power of the administrative state that had grown up during the Red Twenty. What the PRT could not do through legislation, it was often able to do through control of key ministries and use of administrative actions.
Its economic policy proved to be a very qualified success. The predecessor coalition had been unwilling to finance counter-cyclical spending through debt, for fear of losing control of French finances to foreign powers or domestic capitalists. The PRT lacked this fear of debt: it considered currency a fiction that conferred only as much control as the issuer was willing to give, and believed (although it was self-aware enough not to say so openly) that debts owed to capitalist powers need not be honored. The party leadership thus played on the trust that had been earned by previous administrations, which had shown that socialist governments could play by international financial rules, to obtain what it regarded as a free stimulus.
The PRT was unable to obtain legislative consent to issue bonds secured by the full faith and credit of France, but it found a way around this as well. The administrative departments controlled by PRT ministers issued bonds secured by their own agencies’ revenue, and were able to raise billions of francs by encumbering various taxes and fees. And, true to the party’s strong futurist streak, it spent this money not only on industrial development but on grand infrastructure projects. The PRT is the acknowledged pioneer of high-speed rail in France, beginning construction of the Paris-Marseilles electric line that would open in 1928 with a commercial speed of 160 kilometers per hour and a maximum operating speed of 196.
The PRT-controlled Housing Ministry also financed hundreds of planned communities on the outskirts of French cities, which it advertised as “workers’ cities” with full physical and cultural amenities. These were similar in concept to the peri-urban villages of the Russian narodniks, but designed with a futurist aesthetic and featuring large public parks and sports fields rather than family kitchen-gardens. Several, such as the
Cité de la nouvelle ère in the northern Paris suburbs, are still considered masterpieces of design, although their mammoth apartment blocks remain controversial and much of their ground levels have been given over to commercial space.
This infusion of spending created hundreds of thousands of jobs, relieving the burden on firms that had been conscripted as employers of last resort under the 1907 guaranteed-employment law. This, combined with the direct industrial-development funding and a global economy that was beginning to recover, restored economic growth. By 1920, the increased demand had become self-sustaining, and France had followed Germany out of the worldwide depression.
Set against this, however, is not only the dangerous levels of debt that the PRT agencies incurred but a level of authoritarianism not previously seen in Red France. Where the prior governments had been content to marginalize right-wing and centrist organizations but otherwise leave them alone, the PRT moved aggressively against them. The planned communities were deliberately used as means of social control, isolating workers from non-PRT media and putting them under the surveillance of party-appointed block wardens. Dissenting media – including newspapers aligned with the RSP – were targeted for tax investigations, regulatory action and libel suits, as were stores that sold them. Through selective use of corruption investigations, the public prosecutor’s office suspended non-socialist local governments and replaced them with appointed managers. As in the Leclair era, many victims of these policies mounted successful court challenges – the judiciary was a stronghold of the moderate RSP and
Parti de l’avenir socialiste – but by that time the damage had often been done.
The PRT also attempted to go well beyond the prior coalitions’ consensus in nationalizing the economy. Up to 1919, the socialist governments had nationalized sectors that were considered key to French economic and military security, and had encouraged the formation of cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises, but left private firms alone as long as they complied with the labor laws. The PRT government nationalized the banks, which was popular, but also moved against industrial firms and farmers, which was far less so. Due to its inability to pass the necessary legislation, this program was spotty, but in some cases, the party-controlled ministries were able to accomplish their goal through tax-deficiency proceedings or by using the regional planning boards to deny markets to those who refused “voluntary” nationalization.
Most controversial of all were the proceedings against self-managed factories and farming cooperatives. The PRT was as anti-syndicalist as it was anti-capitalist, and rather than recognizing that corruption and politicized decision-making in the regional boards accounted for many of the worker-owned enterprises’ inefficiencies, it held that such companies were inherently inefficient and that central planning should be expanded into central ownership and management. The party leaders also castigated the more profitable of the workers’ cooperatives as a labor aristocracy that had pitted itself against the remainder of the working class. When the PRT ministries attempted to use the same tactics against the self-managed industries that they deployed against privately-owned enterprises, they set themselves on a collision course with their coalition partners and launched a battle that would be fought in the courts, the parliament and the streets.
And nearly as contentious were the party’s policies in the overseas provinces and colonies…
Pierre Boukoubi, The PRT, Les Evenements and the Transformation of the French Empire (Libreville: Bioko, 1994)
… Colonial policy during the Red Twenty was a study in contradiction, prompted by the governing parties’ conflicting views of the colonized populations. On the one hand, racial equality had been a mainstay of the French left’s platform for more than two generations, and stingy interpretation of the Latin Right had been one of the socialist parties’ main criticisms against the prewar right-wing governments. But on the other hand, outside the coastal cities of Senegal and Gabon, the people of West Africa and Algeria rarely voted for socialist candidates. Many voted for Tijaniyyah or Belloist marabouts whose platforms were practically, albeit not doctrinally, compatible with socialism, but as many or more voted for conservative local notables. The latter tendency was especially pronounced in the parts of West Africa which had not yet been made into integral provinces, where the French citizen population came disproportionately from the traditional elites and usually voted for its own.
The RPS, and most of the PAS, argued that the inherent human right to equality was paramount even if it damaged the socialists’ electoral prospects, and that the preference for elite candidates could be cured through more generous application of the Latin Right. Others in the governing coalition, however, contended that the colonies’ status could only be advanced if their people were cured of “political backwardness,” and that an overhaul of their way of life was necessary before they could be fully integrated as French provinces. This was particularly the view of the PRT, and it enjoyed enough support elsewhere in parliament to ensure that the Minister for the Colonies, which was one of the portfolios that party demanded in the 1919 coalition negotiations, had broad discretion to carry out his program.
Colonial government up to 1919 had functioned on a system of indirect rule. In areas where Latin Right citizens were thick enough on the ground, they were organized into communes, and elsewhere traditional chiefs held office, with both under the supervision of the governor and his council. This form of rule was frequently arbitrary, as the prewar case of Paul Koffi and the Sakassou council showed, but it meant that African living patterns were not molested and the people in the colonies were free to modernize at their own pace.
The PRT ministry changed all that. In 1920, the chiefs were stripped of authority and replaced by village administrators, most of whom were African socialists but many of whom were Europeans. These administrators undertook a complete overhaul of education in the colonies, requiring the schools to follow the French socialist curriculum, and decreed that all land would be held collectively – a power that had been denied in metropolitan France and the overseas provinces but which could be done administratively in areas still under colonial rule. Criteria for Latin Right citizenship were made explicitly political, with the definition of “leading men” interpreted to mean party members and only them.
Religion also came in for interference. The PRT, unlike many of its more moderate partners, did not consider the Tijaniyyah and Belloist movements to be allies, regarding them instead as false substitutes for its own doctrines. Their view of the more orthodox and conservative imamate was even dimmer. And their response was both to open a state-run Islamic academy and to impose licensing on mosques and imams who were not government-affiliated.
The reaction throughout colonial French Africa – not only in Sudan, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire but Obock, the Comores and Réunion – would become known as
les evenements des années 20 et 30, and would influence the empire long after the PRT’s policies were rescinded. Under the leadership of both the marabouts and secular intellectuals – including many who were socialist – the people launched a campaign of civil disobedience, withdrawing recognition from the village administrators and setting up their own parallel educational and judicial institutions. Their movement drew inspiration from Belloist doctrines of withdrawal, the secular anarchism of Friuli, the pre-revolutionary Ottoman Empire and the organizing methods of the Abacarist trade unions, opposing both the traditional elites and the impositions of colonial rule.
The colonial authorities responded with raids and arrests, which clogged the courts and, increasingly, demoralized the police. The clashes between the security forces and the parallel institutions – some of which ended with the latter having the upper hand – also drew attention and support from metropolitan France and from the neighboring overseas provinces. Senegal and Gabon – which were now run by center-left coalitions due to the PRT’s withdrawal of support from the previous popular-front governments – sheltered fugitives who were sought by the colonial police, maintaining that the warrants for their arrest did not conform to French law and were invalid on integral French soil. The Toucouleur Empire gave refuge to others, particularly the more conservative. Legislators from France proper came to the colonies to show their support; one of them, the noted feminist author and RSP deputy Funmilayo Abacar-Touré, would spend two months in a Ségou jail in early 1921 and would base a popular novel on the protests.
By 1922, the withdrawal had spread to Algeria. The PRT loathed the right-wing
colons, and it made successful inroads against the entrenched municipal and judicial officials who had dragged their feet on reform and maintained their power through gerrymanders, but it equally disliked the conservative Muslim leaders and removed many Muslim Algerians from appointed office. The somewhat paradoxical result was that, while the citizenship rights of individual Algerians were honored more and more, those rights – like those of citizens elsewhere in France – were worth less than they had once been, and more of Algeria’s day-to-day administration was put in the hands of PRT-appointed European socialists. The resistance in Algeria came slower than in the colonies, but it was all the more powerful when it did come, as it had the support of elected mayors and justices of the peace and was carried out by citizens who were immune from arbitrary colonial measures.
The events would have a profound effect on nationalism in the French empire, transforming it from a mainly-intellectual movement centered on local grievances into a mass movement that challenged France’s relationship to its overseas possessions. And its members would form alliances that crossed colonial borders and transcended political and religious boundaries, creating a network that was united as never before…
Fabienne Callas, Africa and the Liberal Empire (Dakar: Nouvelle Presse Africaine, 1955)
… By early 1923, the PRT-dominated government had worn out its welcome. It had a lingering reserve of gratitude for rescuing the economy and its development programs remained popular, but its authoritarianism had alienated even its coalition partners, discontent over colonial policy was rising, and the innate fiscal conservatism of the French electorate recoiled at the levels of debt it had incurred. Throughout 1922, it was clear that a majority of the parliament wanted to topple the government and was restrained only by the “replacement majority” rule which had been formalized under Verne – in other words, by the requirement that the initiator of any no-confidence motion have already agreed on a coalition that could govern in the incumbent administration’s place. The daily business of the
Corps l_gislatif had come to resemble a running battle, with both the opposition and the PRT’s nominal partners supporting bills that restricted administrative agencies’ ability to act independently and calling individual ministers in for questioning and impeachment.
Three things finally broke the impasse. The first was the realization that the PRT intended to make itself the majority party in 1924 by any means necessary. The second was the discovery that only a tour de force in creative accounting had prevented the housing ministry from defaulting on its bonds in 1922. And the third was the “Lille Massacre” of March 1923.
The massacre had its roots in the campaign against the self-managed syndicalist industries. The public prosecutor’s office had ordered several workers’ cooperatives dissolved, and their factories nationalized, on dubious charges of economic mismanagement. The workers challenged the decree in court and also occupied their factories as they might have done against an oppressive industrialist. When the police attempted to clear the plants, the workers fought back, forcing them to retreat. The following day, the Interior Minister moved two army battalions into position, and, ignoring their commander’s recommendation for a siege, ordered them to storm the factories. When the dust cleared, 14 soldiers and 161 workers were dead, and rumors spread that several workers had been summarily executed after trying to surrender.
The specter of a socialist government firing on members of workers’ cooperatives finally galvanized the latent opposition into action: the three other socialist parties formally withdrew from the government and agreed an emergency coalition with the non-socialist left and even the moderate right. This coalition forced through a no-confidence motion and took power as a caretaker government. The ensuing general election, the first since 1909 in which there were no unofficial restrictions on non-socialist media, saw the PRT decimated and the socialists’ overall share of parliament reduced to 51 percent. An RPS-led coalition, the last government of the Red Twenty, emerged after weeks of chaotic negotiations, but internal differences and a mounting public desire for change brought it down in less than two years.
The election that would define French politics for the next forty years took place in April 1925, two months after the death of Napoleon V. The imperial succession had itself been a matter of controversy, given that the heir apparent was a noted RPT supporter and the emperor’s other son was equally far to the right. One of the 1923-25 government’s first initiatives was to change the succession laws so that the emperor’s oldest child – his daughter Marie-Anne, whose politics leaned toward futurism and social democracy – would succeed ahead of either prince. Upon her father’s death, she took the throne under the male regnal name of Napoleon VI, but she would call herself, and be called, the Empress Marianne, a symbol of her desire to be a democratic and republican monarch.
The wisdom of this choice was proven in the wake of the general election, in which socialists, futurists, Catholic Liberals, centrists and conservatives were all elected in roughly equal measure. Marianne summoned the party leaders to a series of meetings and brokered a grand coalition based on a consensus program. This government would not finish its term – it fell in 1928 and was replaced by a coalition of Catholic Liberals, futurists and independent Africans and Algerians – but by that time it had brought nearly all the parties into a national consensus as Marianne intended it to do.
Through their participation in the coalition, the conservatives gave their assent to social insurance, a broad public sector supported by progressive taxation, the equality of women and the disabled, support of worker-owned industries (which it rationalized as a form of private enterprise) and works councils in private businesses. The socialists, for their part, acquiesced in the protection of private property, non-interference with religion, tolerance of private education, reversal of some nationalizations, and the restraint of their administrative state.
There remained broad policy differences between the parties, and new ones would in fact developed during the 1920s and onward. The conservatives, for instance, would take up the cause of regional language rights and cultural autonomy as a defense against centrally-imposed homogenization. The Futurists and the Catholic Liberals would clash over humane urban design and advances in biotechnology, and the left and right would contend over the role of the regional marketing boards. But this consensus ensured that the gains of the Red Twenty would be consolidated and that certain constitutional principles would remain involate…
… The African colonies and Algeria would occupy much of the grand coalition’s attention, as well as that of the government that succeeded it. The removal of the PRT-appointed governors and a return to indirect rule did not, as many had expected, result in dissolution of the parallel institutions. By this time, the protest movement’s grievances were no longer limited to the PRT’s exactions, but had grown to include the restrictions on local self-government and the lack of progress toward French citizenship. The grand coalition enacted several measures, including elected legislative councils and relaxation of Latin Right qualifications, and also codified the criteria for Latin Right citizenship to curtail the governors’ discretion and remove corruption and bribery from the enfranchisement process. From 1925 onward, anyone who met the criteria could obtain a French passport by going to a government office and presenting proof of his qualification. But all these, ultimately, were considered half-measures by the colonial leaders, and there were continuing clashes over attempts to break up the unofficial schools and courts.
It would again be Marianne who invited the government and the leaders of the protest movement to a round table, effectively granting recognition to the latter over the objections of her ministers. The agreement that emerged from this meeting was a historic one: as of January 1, 1929, there would be no such thing as a French colony. All the remaining colonies would assume the status of overseas departments, and all their people would become French citizens, with the same local political institutions that existed in metropolitan France. In exchange, the people would recognize French law and taxation and give up their shadow governments.
The handover of power was marked by ceremonies and celebrations in all the colonial capitals, but it was not the end of
les evenements. The fight to turn legal equality into real equality was not complete, and nationalism, once awakened, could never be dispelled entirely. Nationalist parties did well in the 1930 local elections in the former colonies and Algeria, and several government miscues in the 1930s would lead to protest in different forms…
Aminatou Salazar, Africa’s Twentieth Century (Univ. of Sokoto Press, 2010).
… The trans-Saharan railroad, the Dakar port treaty and distrust of the Malê pushed the Toucouleur Empire into the French political and economic sphere. By the mid-1910s, though, it was clear that alignment with France carried its own social risks. The socialism of the Red Twenty was as inimical to the Tall dynasty’s idea of a scholar-herder commonwealth as the Abacarism of the Malê – and, like the industrial modernity that Ilorin had fostered, it was something that many of the empire’s citizens found attractive. A growing number of Toucouleur industrialists acquired French citizenship through marriage or political favors, and their imagination was stirred by the avant-garde art of Senegal and the Afro-Futurist redesign of the city center that the Dakar council approved in 1916.
All this was offset somewhat by the empire’s growing influence among the Tuareg and Bedouin tribes of the Kingdom of the Arabs, some of whom joined the Toucouleur military or civil service after being educated in Timbuktu’s academies and thus provided a traditionalist counterweight to the industrialists. But rising living standards and economic growth meant that more and more people were employed in urban industry and trade, and even many herder families’ sons sought work in the cities. Aguibou Tall managed to hold back the tide during his long reign, but when his son Suleiman took the throne in 1920, he was greeted with calls for reform and unprecedented demonstrations on the streets of the capital.
Suleiman was at first inclined to ignore the demonstrations, assuming that they would subside once he had established himself as emperor. But they didn’t, and in the tradition of dissidents elsewhere in West Africa and the Ottoman world, the urban leaders talked increasingly of establishing a parallel government. By 1923, Suleiman Tall could feel his capital city beginning to slip out of his hands, and he couldn’t move against the city’s leaders without crippling the country’s economy.
His response to this unpalatable choice was, in effect, to divide the country. He agreed to allow elected municipal governments in the industrial quarters of the cities, and to allow nearly complete self-rule in those quarters. The urban modernists would be free to establish their own schools and courts, set their own mode of dress, and enjoy forbidden literature and cinema in their homes. In exchange – although a formal quid pro quo was never spelled out – there would be no democratization in the kingdom as a whole, the license granted to the industrial quarters would be kept strictly within those quarters, and the industrialists and merchants would not protest at heavy taxation.
At the end of the 1920s, therefore, the Toucouleur Empire was really two countries: an archipelago of modern, democratic city-states amid a vast sea of traditional peasants, herdsmen and religious scholars, with the former taxed near the limit of its capacity to support the latter. It was clear that this state of affairs would be only temporary, but nobody could guess how it would eventually be resolved…
… The Mossi kingdom’s dilemma about its relationship with the British bore a passing resemblance to the Tall dynasty’s conundrum regarding France. The kingdom was a target for French encroachment before the Great War and a battleground during it, and when the postwar settlement confirmed its status as a buffer state, Britain became the effective guarantor of its independence. It never became part of the British Empire, but it was a political and economic client of that empire, as the Toucouleur state was to France.
The Imperial era led many Mossi to question the wisdom of that policy, as they were intimidated into accepting one-sided trade agreements and rescinding their ban against foreign land ownership. The threatening attitude ended with the fall of the Imperial Government, but the treaties remained in place, and a substantial portion of the economy was owned outright by British cotton planters.
It was far from certain what the kingdom could do to correct this imbalance. Unlike the Toucouleur or the Malê, the Mossi had not industrialized, and remained an agricultural nation divided into occupational castes. They were as anti-modernist in their own way as the Tall dynasty; although many were attracted by their neighbors’ wealth, they disliked the social disruption that followed in its wake. But without the strength that a modern economy brought, they were in no position to fend off British demands, and were unwilling to trade their alignment with Britain for an equally risky one with France or the Toucouleur.
By the later 1920s, an emerging faction called for the Mossi to become a hermit kingdom, withdrawing from the twentieth century and becoming a self-sufficient nation of subsistence farmers. An opposing faction, many of them members of the merchant caste who were educated abroad, argued that the kingdom should welcome industrial investment and increasingly questioned the traditional structure of society. And the king, anxious for his own position and fearful of angering his country’s powerful patron, found himself in as uncomfortable a position as Suleiman Tall…
