The space of sovereignty, the shape of exile: Territory and movement in French Africa
p. 231-249
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1Images and accounts of modern empires have often tended to emphasise empire as a unification of space: as the expansion of an imperial power’s sovereignty, which was often justified by the imperialists themselves as the extension of the rule of law, across extra-metropolitan geography. When French elementary school pupils, preparing for the certificat d’études primaires at the height of the second colonial empire in the 1940s, were taught about La France d’outre-mer as part of the study of “the geography of France”, they read that “France is represented by her colonies in every part of the world.” Their textbooks specified that “it is to be understood, of course, that the word Empire does not refer to a political regime, as is the case when we speak of the First Empire or the Second Empire, meaning the reigns of the Emperors Napoleon I or Napoleon III. In the colonial sense and in French usage, the word Empire evokes only the idea of a large expanse of territories.” The map of the world presented to pupils on the facing page accordingly placed the ink-hatched, contiguous mass of France’s land empire across northwest Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Congo, at the centre of its image. In keeping with their definition of “empire” as a spatial but not a political regime, the authors’ presentation of the settlement patterns and economic activity of the populations distributed across this space studiously avoided any discussion of their unequal political statuses.1 Critical historians of empire writing much more recently have, of course, insisted on the political dimension of the picture. What all empires as forms of polity have had in common, according to the wide-ranging 2010 account of Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, was their characteristic combination of the unification of sovereign space with the differentiation of political regimes to which ethnically demarcated populations living within that space were made subject.2
2In the French case, particularly in the era of “high” and late imperialism between ca.1870 and 1960, it has often been thought—and was routinely claimed by French imperial theorists—that imperial sovereignty in fact combined geography and politics, space and law, in a more harmonious relation than this. Empire meant above all the extension of the boundaries of the Republic, politically and culturally as well as geographically, into an overseas “Greater France”, a unification of both territory and, in some sense, people “from the Rhine to the Congo” or “from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset”. The latter slogan in particular was used frequently in official as well as popular evocations of the empire, right up to the end of the 1950s. Postcards sent home to France by soldiers serving in Algeria in 1959, to inform family members of recorded personal messages that would be broadcast to the metropole at specified times by radio, were printed with the words “Les soldats d’Algérie vous parlent” and “De Dunkerque à Tamanrasset, tous Français”, the claim in this case being audibly as well as visually realised across the intervening Mediterranean space.3 The same tagline was visualised on posters used around the same time to identify Charles de Gaulle’s nascent Fifth Republic as a single, multi-confessional community: the mapped outlines of France and Algeria, with “Dunkerque” and “Tamanrasset” marked in on opposite corners, were graphically joined by a cross of Lorraine carrying the word “France” down its vertical axis and “55 millions de Français” across its horizontal bars, the whole set against a background photograph of a mixed crowd of Algerians and Europeans.
3De Gaulle himself evoked the slogan “from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset” in the famous televised speech of 16 September 1959, announcing his policy of self-determination for Algeria. The speech enumerated three possible outcomes of the projected referendum that de Gaulle proposed as the political solution to the war once “order” was re-established: integration, secession, or federalism, of which the third was clearly de Gaulle’s preferred option. If complete integration, instead of the murderous chaos of secession or the sensible solution of federalism, were voted for, he said, that would bring about the “complete francisation” of Algeria, and the accession of all the territory’s inhabitants to equal rights and opportunities as fully French citizens. In that case, as the General explained with the air of a slightly irritated headmaster whose dull and unruly pupils had been trying his patience, “the territory of the Republic” and “the French people would from that moment, indeed, extend from Dunkirk to Tamenrasset.”4 Some of those listening to him were themselves more than a little irritated: had not de Gaulle himself, in June 1958, stood on a balcony above a massive crowd in Algiers and reassured his listeners and the world that there was already “in Algeria, only one category of inhabitants, there are only des Français à part entière, with the same rights and the same duties”, members of a single political community in a single, indivisibly sovereign space that spanned the Mediterranean and the Sahara?5 But now he clearly, and bluntly, meant to imply that in fact of course no such unity of the populations of overseas and metropolitan France had ever existed; and, furthermore, it was totally unrealistic to imagine that any such unity could now be brought about. The whole crisis in Algeria, and the more general crisis of late colonialism that was leading to the decolonisation of French Africa more broadly, might indeed be seen, in sum, as the unsustainable attempt to maintain the territorial unity of the space of the empire in the face of the impossibility of really extending the political unity of the Republic’s inhabitants to coincide with it: the impossibility of bringing French Africans fully into the space of citizenship that, especially in the Algerian case, had for so long and so impossibly been promised them. It was a sign of De Gaulle’s lucidity, though not of his mastery of events, that he was, around this time, coming to see the situation in precisely these terms.6
4De Gaulle, in other words, recognised—in his case, because of a fundamentally élitist and racist vision of Frenchness summed up in his famous quip about “Colombey-les-deux-Mosquées”,7 and in direct contrast to the inclusive promises he had made in Algiers fifteen months earlier, but with no less acuity for that—that the idea of the imperial Republic as a trans-continental and cross-community space of single, shared sovereignty was a myth, and a myth whose useful life was over. It has nonetheless maintained a remarkable tenacity in historical accounts of the French empire in Africa. In this respect as in many others, colonial idiom and ideology have often been strong enough to imprint themselves on the language and the perceptions of their historians. The limits of law and citizenship were no less tightly connected to those of geography and space in the empire than they were in the nation-state that claimed it, but it has often been the terms in which the empire was claimed, rather than the characteristics of how it actually worked, that have held historians’ attention. It has thus often been supposed, as the distinguished Australian historian Stephen Roberts wrote in his History of French Colonial Policy published in 1929, still in print in the 1960s and still cited in much more recent works, that “France saw Papeete and Dakar and In Salah only as the distant suburbs of Paris.” In this view, the empire, animated by what late nineteenth century imperial boosters liked to call France’s “assimilatory genius”, really was a spatial, sovereign unity. The départements of Algeria in particular really were “French” in more than just the formal terms of geopolitics—in more than just the recognition of France’s paramountcy by other Powers—but so were Tahiti and Senegal, and many other places besides.
5This image of France’s empire as constituted by a sovereign, trans-continental geographical unity is obviously strongest in regard to its physical and geostrategic centre of gravity that reached from the Maghrib contiguously across to West and Central Africa, the “enormous, unified African bloc that stretches from Dakar to Chad, from Algiers to Brazzaville”, which pupils were encouraged to admire in their geography lessons.8 If the British empire was naval and maritime, the French, it has been conventional to suppose, was above all a military and “land” empire, more geographically contiguous across overseas space as well as both geographically and politically closer to the metropole than were Britain’s far-flung imperial possessions. L’Afrique française was “French”, legally, socially, constitutionally, and even demographically, in ways that “British” Africa, let alone “British” India, never attempted to be. Of course, the people who in the end believed in this idea most strongly, and who felt themselves to have suffered most as a result of its ceasing to be a sustainable idea, were the Europeans of Algeria, and to a lesser extent those of Morocco and Tunisia, who discovered after 1959 that France began, after all, in Marseille, not in the Sahara, and who as a result arrived in their hundreds of thousands in Marseille between 1960 and 1962, with their suitcases.
6But in a longer historical perspective there was nothing new about this. The empire was a spatial regime, as schoolchildren were taught, but there was something more to this than physical geography. As we can see from the efforts made by textbook authors, as well as by travel writers, advertisers, novelists, political propagandists, commercial lobbyists, exhibition organisers and railway companies to elicit enthusiastic identification with the territories they depicted among an often uninterested metropolitan public, the subjective specificities of how people experienced imperial space, learned about it and moved through it, whether physically or in imagination, were at least as significant as physical geography itself in the constitution of the empire. All the more so was this true for those whose lives were more directly shaped by the experience of the empire on the ground in Africa. Scholarship on the imagery and imaginary of empire has often explored the visual, discursive and ideological aspects of this question. But in more material, everyday terms, too, the empire was constituted by the patterning of physical and symbolic movements of people across space as much as (or more than) by its formal territorial extent. It was not only the political expansion of the Republic to incorporate the empire’s populations that was mythical. The image of the empire as contiguous, evenly encompassed territory was ideological, too.
7As Henri Lefebvre long ago pointed out, spatiality is constituted by the experience of space, by the terms of access to and movement through space, and by the social relations that are materialised in space, rather than simply by the physical materiality of geography itself.9 Imperial history traditionally focused on the central, obvious fact of territorial expansion: on the “clear” definitions of law, sovereignty, and cartography, on the chronology of conquest and the gradual incorporation of new areas into the rose-coloured map. Such empirically-minded historiography has perhaps often found concepts such as spatiality too theoretical, too abstract, for its taste. But as studies in the history of geography and science in colonial territories have shown, the processes of mapping, naming, appropriating, reconfiguring, preserving and dividing up the physical space of the empire itself were often much less coherent and unilateral, and the territoriality they produced much less unified, than imperial imagery and discourse liked to claim. The territoriality of the empire as visualised on maps, as claimed in declarations of sovereignty and as internationally recognised in treaties, was often in fact—except at those very exceptional moments when it was tested in armed confrontations on imperial borderlines—merely theoretical. Indeed, as Hélène Blais and others have shown, it was often largely “mythical”.10 The empire’s territoriality was, in fact, often much more abstract, much less meaningful in everyday experience than the spatiality of the empire as embodied in the lived environments and movements of the people who became its subjects or its citizens, and who experienced the empire very differently as they moved within or across the different social, political and legal terrains that overlaid and intersected with its physical geography. In accounting for the significance of the empire as a trans-continental space, it may then be fruitful to think less about geographical “mass” in itself than about the shape of movements through space. It was in patterns and itineraries of movement through the space of empire, through their direction and redirection, their policing and subversion, the life and death and opportunity and suffering experienced through them, that the empire as a spatial system actually existed. Seen in this light, while the “repatriation”, experienced as the exile, of the pieds noirs was the final act in the undoing of the empire, it was also just one more episode in a very long series of often coerced movements through which the empire had taken simultaneously geographical and political shape. In this regard, the coerced movement of the pieds noirs’ exile out of North Africa was merely giving them, as people caught up in the unmaking of the empire, their own part of an experience that had long been very familiar to other people who had been caught up in the process of its making and sustaining.
8There are, of course, many possible examples through which this might be illustrated, and many of them have given rise to large literatures, though not necessarily from this perspective: patterns of labour migration, both within French Africa and between Africa and the metropole, the colonial emigration of poor, landless Southern Europeans as well as the circulation of administrators, schoolteachers and scientists, the movement of soldiers of all origins around the empire – of West Africans to Algeria, of Moroccans to Vietnam, of légionnaires to the heat of the desert and of tirailleurs to the mud of the trenches... In this essay, I offer only a brief examination of a series of individual cases of a particular, and particularly coerced, kind of movement: exiles and deportees whose travels, between the 1820s and the 1920s, traced out paths around the French empire between West Africa, the Caribbean, metropolitan France and North Africa, with a view to asking what their patterns of movement—the “shape”, in both geography and in individual experience, of their exile—might have to tell us about the empire, the space of the sovereignty of the imperial power’s law.
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9Let us begin, not in Africa, but across the Atlantic, on the plantation island of Martinique. In September 1826, Monsieur Juston, of the parish of les Trois Ilets, did a relatively unusual thing: he gave up ownership of five of his slaves, renounced any claim to indemnification of their value, and pleaded with the governor of the island to deport them because, as the governor reported to his counsellors, “he fears from one moment to the next that they will poison him, himself or another member of his family.” There was no actual evidence of the slaves’ posing a threat to their master aside from his apparent fear of them; there was nothing to present against them in court, and although the governor had them thrown into prison, he admitted to his privy council that a prosecution could not be sustained. The fact that M. Juston was prepared to give up any claim on the value of his human property, however, was proof enough for the members of the council that these five people really must be dangerous. The council duly decided to deport them to Senegal, returning them across the Atlantic whence they, or perhaps their parents or grandparents, had originally come.11
10M. Juston’s request, though unusual, was not exceptional: it was, the council was told “of little interest” except that in this particular case, there were no grounds for bringing the suspects to trial. Provisions for deportation were in fact a regular part of the management of the “peace and tranquillity” of the plantation islands. In 1825, government instructions for the île de Bourbon (Réunion) in the Indian Ocean specified that slaves dangerous to the peace of the colony there should be deported to Sainte-Marie-de-Madagascar, a tiny island lying just off the east coast of Madagascar which had been a notorious pirate republic in the earlier eighteenth century, before its “pacification” by the French navy and settlement by colonists in the 1820s. The same principle, when applied to Martinique, provided that slaves should be deported to Senegal—to Gorée or Saint-Louis, the entrepôts which had been centres of the French Atlantic slave trade since the seventeenth century, and placed there “at the disposition of the authorities.” In outlining this regulation, the Minister of the Navy and Colonies assured the Governor of Senegal that, if the Governor judged that the presence of such deportees might present him with “serious inconvenience”, he was authorised in turn “to remove them from the colony, whether by having them taken inland, or by having them disembarked on whatever point of the coast you might consider appropriate.”12 The colony, after all, covered only a very tiny territory: there was plenty of Africa into which undesirable people might simply be jettisoned like so much unwanted cargo.
11This arrangement could apply to free people of colour as well as to slaves. In 1824, two years before the governor’s privy council considered M. Juston’s case, and following the Bissette affair, more than two hundred free people of colour were sentenced to lifetime deportation from Martinique by the plantocracy’s crackdown against free blacks accused of plotting against the white-creole élite.13 While some—especially the most notable, including Cyrille Bissette himself—were eventually sent to France, a number of others were sent to Senegal. Edouard Nouillé, a 32 year-old tailor and trader, was one of them. Described as “secretive, living in a withdrawn manner”, Nouillé was suspected of having aided runaway slaves and had been in St-Domingue (Haiti), “from where he has brought back ideas dangerous to the colony.” Charlery Desgrotts, aged 27, was accused of having written a letter outlining an insurrectionary conspiracy. Julien Sainte-Marthe, a 35 year-old goldsmith, was judged to be “dishonest”, and had “challenged a white, threatening him with a cutlass.” Joseph Ballon, aged 37 and a shoemaker, had previously been in trouble with the police, and more recently had “grossly insulted a young white lady.” The deportation of 32 year-old habitant Louison Castor was considered necessary simply because he was allegedly a “violent vagabond” who frequented only “people of the same character as himself”. Unlike Cyrille Bissette and his principal co-defendants, whose especially punitive judgment on the island and case at appeal in Paris became a cause célèbre in the history of French-Caribbean abolitionism, none of these men were tried and convicted in court. They were merely sentenced by a repressive special council on suspicion or denunciation of engaging in “machinations and plots tending to revolt, or as dangerous troublemakers”. They were stripped of their property—which for most was negligible, but for some included houses, shops, and even in one case a considerable fortune in “houses, slaves and storehouses”—and placed on board a ship bound for Africa. Most, dependent on whatever trade they could ply, went to work in St-Louis or Gorée. Others, including Nouillé and Castor, were later permitted to move on elsewhere, especially back across the Atlantic to the Leeward island of Saint Thomas (today in the U.S. Virgin Islands).14
12The deportees in the Bissette case, some of whom were simply “undesirables” who had done nothing more than offend the self-esteem of the Martinique élite, and many of whom, at worst, were suspected petty criminals, were accused of fomenting a plot by slaves and free people of colour, inspired by revolutionary ideas of equality for all, to overthrow the Restoration “order” on the island. In addition to writing secret communications, and generally aiding and abetting persons of suspicious character, some of the deportees were accused of distributing arms and ammunition. But the main “evidence” against them, as against Bissette himself, was the alleged distribution of seditious literature, in particular the famous 1823 pamphlet De la situation des gens de couleur libres aux Antilles françaises, whose argument for the extension of political equality to people of colour rested on the assertion that France was ruled by “legislation based on justice and equity.” The pamphlet’s demand was that “in the name of justice and humanity”, “the laws of exception” governing free blacks in the colonies should be abolished and replaced by a rule of law “in harmony with the present state of civilisation”, such as existed in France itself.15 The deportees’ political claim to a French law that should indeed be exercised without “exception” across the whole of French sovereign territory, thus contrasted with, and was outweighed by, the more brutal, material, spatiality of the empire as demonstrated in their deportation.16
13One of those tried with Bissette, condemned in the first instance to five years’ banishment but then, on appeal in Martinique, to branding and forced labour for life, was the trader Jean-Baptiste Volny. The accusation against him was that he had copied, and given to Bissette, a tract with the Ciceronian title Salus publici lex suprema esto (“The public good must be the highest law”), a work which the prosecution saw as having been “composed with the intent to incite hatred, filled with calumnies against the courts and attacks on the law, and infected with [...] subversive principles.”17 Refuting these charges, Volny subsequently wrote a remarkable indictment of the “humiliation, arbitrary judgment and injustice” that had befallen him. Addressed (but perhaps never sent) to the Minister of the Navy, his unsigned memorandum declared:
The decision of the Royal Court of Martinique, corrupted as it is by vices of form and by innumerable irregularities, will undoubtedly be struck down. For when Justice strikes, her punishment is proportionate to the crime; and in this case, nothing can be easier than to show that she has not held the scales in balance... Here we are, on French soil; the torch of liberty will dissipate the mists of calumny. Here we shall find men who trample the passions underfoot and will judge us only according to their convictions. ... Truth will be justified, and our innocence recognised. ... We are subjects of His Majesty; let the truth be told to him once and for all, and we shall see whether our happiness, too, does not have its place in the wisdom of his intentions [for his people].18
14Volny’s faith in French justice against what he judged to be the irrational “rage” of the Martinique colons would eventually be repaid at least in part. His sentence was suspended (and Bissette’s reduced to ten years’ expulsion from France’s colonies) on appeal by a court in Guadaloupe, where the case was retried by order of the cour de cassation in Paris. The other, perhaps less eloquent and certainly more numerous, deportees lacked any such redress. While M. Juston’s slaves, as unfree persons of colour, were even less likely to be afforded the protection of the law, the “free” métis of Martinique too found that colonial space was shaped more by their own forced mobility, and by the limits on the extent to which freedoms of movement, expression, property and person applied to them as “free” people within the jurisdiction of the empire, than by the extension of the idealised French sovereignty to which some of them, at least, appealed.
15The Bissette affair soon came to be seen as a scandalous abuse of power by a retrograde colonial ruling caste. The nineteenth century, instead, would be shaped by new arguments over new forms of empire that were intended to be markedly different from the slave-based mercantilism of the ancien régime and its Restoration.19 All the gens de couleur had done, after all, was demand the bourgeois civic equality of all free men before the law that the Revolution had promised, and that the Orléanist July monarchy would also espouse. At the same time, however, the tensions and contradictions of race, liberty, and law and order that would continue to shape France’s new empire, despite its declarations about bringing “freedom”, were already visible elsewhere in France’s Black Atlantic.
16In 1846, a number of enslaved Africans who had been traded to Europeans from the Loango kingdom on the central African coast, north of the Congo, were liberated off Gabon by the French navy from the Brazilian slave ship Elizia and taken to St-Louis and Gorée in Senegal. Three years later, in 1849, forty-six of these freed slaves were shipped back south, near to where they had first been taken from the slavers, and resettled as part of the population – and as a much-needed labour force—of the French post at Fort d’Aumale. The village built for them, which subsequently grew to encompass the French post, was named Libreville, “Freetown”. First established in 1843 on the coast at the outlet of the Gabon river, on the Equator north of the Congo, this was then France’s most remote African outpost. Suppressing the slave trade “all along the Gabon river and on its banks, whose inhabitants are entirely subject to French sovereignty”, was explicitly the local commandant’s major duty and a principal justification for the French presence.20 The freedom of Libreville, however, was far from unrestricted, as Jean Parent, the captain of engineers responsible for constructing the village, explained in a report the following year:
... I have had to warn these blacks ... that they were perfectly free, that they could even quit the village if they so wished, whether to trade, or to go live elsewhere; but that they must always remember that while they remained in the village, they were in a French place (dans un lieu français), and in consequence they had to obey the French bosses.21
17The various frustrations detailed in their reports make it clear that the “French bosses” were not always able to make themselves obeyed as unquestioningly as they would have liked. But they certainly tried. The real transition to liberty, as Captain Parent saw it, came some months after the Congolese slaves’ arrival at Libreville, when the post’s officers stopped handing out rations and made the resettled inhabitants dependent, instead, on their own resources for food. Earlier reports had emphasised to superior officers at Gorée and St Louis that “the country barely furnishes enough for the minimal consumption of its own few inhabitants”, and that the post was largely dependent on resupply by sea from Senegal. What food could be obtained locally was available only at the cost of being “held to ransom” by the coastal peoples, who did their best to prevent the French from making trading contact with anyone further inland.22 Libreville’s small lots, planted with bananas, manioc, groundnuts and vegetables, and the small herd of cattle bought locally and distributed to the new free black population, was hence intended as the beginning of a more viable, local agricultural colonisation. Each of the Elizia’s freed captives, men and women, was allocated a residential plot twenty metres square with a hut, sixteen square metres in area, constructed for them at the state’s expense.23 But rather than establishing the freed slaves as independent smallholders, their agricultural lots were allocated temporarily, and they were not to be given property rights to them. (Such property was to be reserved for the future enlargement of the village by more “civilised” settlers to be brought from Senegal.) Cultivation for the Congolese labourers’ own sustenance and to provide supplies to the post was to go alongside the encouragement of wage labour. Their own ideas of what it meant to be free men and women had to give way to their proletarisation as free labourers, dependent on work offered by the military occupiers of the post:
I understood the excitement which for a time took hold of them, because they had previously seen the respect that was, and in their slave country still is, attached to a free man. But this revolution in their notions disappeared the day that they were no longer fed. They did indeed remain for one or two weeks, enjoying their individual freedom, without being ordered about or disabused of their ideas of liberty. But having spent three years in the towns of St Louis and Gorée, they have acquired from us a certain number of needs. And so they were obliged to sell their freedom (d’engager leur liberté) to earn a better living, better food, better clothing, etc. etc., in consequence of which they came to ask me for work. I encouraged them to become apprentice tradesmen, and some listened to me, while others remained as labourers. At the time I left the post, I had an apprentice blacksmith, two apprentice carpenters and one apprentice stonemason among the Loangos. Two of them are employed in the gardens of the fort, ... another washes the laundry....24
18In addition to creating the conditions that might meet the post’s pressing labour needs for construction and maintenance, colonial authority in Libreville also meant keeping proper order in the “French place” of the village. Men and women together were obliged to undertake an hour’s communal labour (corvée), every Sunday morning between six and seven o’clock, to “clean and clear the squares, cut the plants that grow there, remove the piles of detritus accumulated in the streets after brush-clearing, etc.”. Parent emphasised that these corvées des dimanches were required “only in the interest of the cleanliness of their village”, but that did not stop the freed slaves from considering it an imposition. When the officers stopped providing food rations, “they attempted to free themselves from this obligation”; the Captain “was obliged to take firm action (j’ai dû sévir) against one of the leaders, and the riot ended there.” He was nonetheless convinced that the inhabitants remained determined to assert their freedom from any kind of forced labour, and reported that, happily, Captain Martin, the military commander of the post had “no intention of weakening” his position in respect of its enforcement.25
19Unsurprisingly, despite having liberated these people from the traffickers, the post’s French administrators had little imagination for what they might have suffered, or for what it might mean to them to regain some degree of control over their bodies, their movements, or the space they inhabited. The form of the village was as much work camp as municipality, surrounded as it was by a stockade, with gates closed at night, a “rue de France”, a “place de la Liberté”, and streets named after the French West African squadron’s warships, with a flagstaff planted prominently in front of the mayor’s house. For the resettled freed slaves, it was a decidedly strange and no doubt often oppressive place. There was much in it to arouse their own fears and insecurities—or what the post’s French officers considered “their barbarous and savage manners”, which ought, Parent thought, to be softened by the additional settlement of “twenty or twenty-five Jolof households” from Senegal, “the goodness of [whose] race” would have a salutary effect. “They are cowardly, with all the accompanying vices”, he wrote: after a “Loango” woman saw “a man” (whether a flesh-and-blood person or an apparition is unclear) near the village’s western gate, that part of the settlement remained uninhabited. One of the men, Mamady—his Islamised name, like his companions’ mostly French ones, having presumably been affixed to him in Senegal—similarly took fright at seeing an unknown figure at the eastern gate, discharged his rifle and fled to hide in a hut. When Hélène, one of the women, was admitted to the post’s hospital suffering from “a terrible skin disease”, her neighbours apparently plotted “to steal [her] away and take her into the forest nearby, to kill her, saying that she had been marked out by God”. They refused instructions to use cow dung to manure their smallholdings, keeping it outside the village’s enclosure instead “because they are ignorant”—or because French horticultural advice was incompatible with their own categories of space and pollution. They understood enough of white peoples’ ideas to be uneasy at the fact that they had been given no legal documents attesting to their rights to the property they occupied, or to their own free status. “They say they are not free”, Parent complained, “because we have given them no papers.”26
20Alongside labour discipline, the post’s commanders also sought to enforce sexual discipline. The Elizia’s women were married off to the men, and when some of them—the same Hélène, joined by Aura, Midi, and Conse—objected to the obligation that they live with their husbands, the men complained to Parent, who punished the women. Faced with accusations from the post’s missionary priests that the state-sponsored settlement was encouraging “communism”, the officers were especially sensitive to the perception that, being “from a country where polygamy is permitted, and being surrounded by populations where the same custom exists”, the men might “take women other than their legitimate wives”. This was forbidden, of course, and Parent had no qualms about breaking up extra-matrimonial relationships and arranging marriages as well as preventing heathen polygamy, even where the unwed couple was seemingly happy and, in addition, formed a Christian household. Thérèse, who had been baptised and who, in January 1850, was “the only negress from the Elizia remaining to be married” was intended for one of the freed captives who had asked Parent for her hand, but was living as the mistress of Parent’s own servant John William, also a Christian. The Captain expressed his annoyance to one of the priests who had seemingly failed to intercede to put a stop to their affair and force Thérèse into the wedlock assigned to her.27
21So if Gabon was intended as a space of liberation, it was also one of confinement. It was the latter in less ambiguous ways, too. Already in 1844, only a year after the occupation of the Gabon estuary and five years before Libreville was established, it had become a place of deportation for political prisoners when Mokhtar Sidi wuld Sidi Muhammad was interned there. Mokhtar Sidi, the deposed king of the Brakna emirate north of the Senegal river, thus became the first victim of French expansion inland from the West African coast to be subjected to such forced mobility, and as the colonial historian Paul Marty observed, “inaugurated the series of political internments in that colony” that would continue for the next century.28 He would be followed by a long list of deportees. Political leaders from Dahomey were sent to Gabon after the French conquest of their kingdom in 1894, as was Agoli Agbo, the king of Dahomey installed in 1894 by the French and then deposed by them in 1900 when he proved uncooperative. Samory Turé, ruler of the Wasulu empire, was deported to Gabon after his capture in 1898 and died there in 1900; the celebrated Muslim scholar and revivalist Ahmadou Bamba, leader of Mourid movement in Senegal, was exiled to Gabon from 1895 to 1902; and the Moroccan nationalist leader Allal al-Fasi was interned there from 1937 until 1946. Notionally established as a place that proclaimed “French liberty”, Libreville and its hinterland were thus for over one hundred years also, or rather more, a central node in the French empire’s archipelago of exile.
22But probably the most famous exile to trace a path across this French Atlantic space in these years was Gbehanzin, the King of Dahomey who opposed French annexation of his kingdom in the 1890s, who fought two sharp wars and, after the destruction of his capital at Abomey at the end of 1892, a long guerilla struggle to resist his state’s subjugation before his surrender and deportation in 1894. Finally run to ground, his resistance movement exhausted, Gbehanzin (Béhanzin to the French) was exiled to Martinique with a small part of his family and followers, including four wives, three daughters, and one son, Arini Wanilo Gbehanzin (Ouanilo Béhanzin), then only eight years old. Le roi Béhanzin, the war against whom had been followed as a sensational story in the French press, quickly became a prominent figure of popular culture in France. He was pictured on the front pages of illustrated magazines, there were music hall songs, plays and operettas about him. His declarations, from his first exile across the border in Lagos during the final stages of the war, appealing to international law and justice, and to recognised, reciprocal rights of sovereignty agreed by treaty, were published in the international press.29 On Martinique, the Dahomean royal exiles were housed cheaply and provided with meagre rations in the unprepossessing quarters of the previously uninhabited Fort Tartenson, two kilometres outside Fort-de-France. The metropolitan and colonial press alike denounced their conditions as “the harshest material deprivation”, inflicted with “humiliating pettiness.”30 Even the colonial ministry worried that the exiles were treated with “excessively severe parsimony”.31
23In October 1898, Gbehanzin petitioned the President of the Republic, citing the effect of the island’s climate on his already poor health, and requesting that he be sent home.32 But the former king and his family were finally allowed to leave their prison only in 1906, via France. Landing in Bordeaux, they went on to Marseille where the King toured (to what effect we can only imagine) the Colonial Exhibition then being staged there. But on leaving Marseille, the party was destined not for Abomey but for Algiers. Weakened by his two trans-Atlantic voyages and by his incarceration, Gbehanzin, now aged sixty-two, died in December that year at Blida, south of Algiers. His wives and entourage were now at last repatriated to Dahomey, leaving the King, whose express wish had been to die and to be laid to rest in his homeland, buried in Algeria.
24His son, Arini Wanilo, however, now began an itinerary of his own, one that would be an early instance of the kinds of intellectual and political mobility that would shape both the empire and anti-colonialism over the following decades. After his father’s death, Wanilo stayed on in Algiers, where he continued the studies begun on Martinique, passed the baccalauréat, then travelled to Bordeaux. There, between 1909 and 1912, in the city that had already been a staging point in his family’s long exile, he studied law and met his future wife, Maria-Valentina Ducaud, whom he married in 1916. The daughter of a consular official, Maria-Valentina had also led a transatlantic life, having been born in 1884 at Santiago de Chile. Wanilo was called to the Paris bar in 1915, becoming the first black African francophone lawyer, and according to some sources, volunteered for the army that same year before returning to Bordeaux to work in commercial law. In May 1924, Wanilo was involved in the creation of a short-lived Ligue universelle pour la défense de la race noire alongside his fellow-Dahomean (and royal cousin) Kojo Tovalou-Houénou, who visited North America and gained the recognition of the NAACP and of W.E.B. du Bois as a fellow-member of the emerging transatlantic black movement: although his Ligue universelle was wound up within a year, Tovalou-Houénou was for a time considered a “French [Marcus] Garvey.”33
25In 1928, twenty-two years after his father’s death and thirty-four years after his deportation, Wanilo was finally permitted by the French authorities to disinter his father’s remains from Blida and to carry them, accompanied by his wife, by ship to Porto Novo in what was now the French colony of Dahomey. Gbehanzin’s remains were reburied in March at the site of the former royal capital of Abomey. But in a turn of fate worthy of the romanticisation of Gbehanzin’s exile, Wanilo himself then died, only two months later, on 19 May, at Dakar during the return voyage. It fell to Maria-Valentina to continue the voyage, travelling with Wanilo’s body to Bordeaux, where he was buried. Maria-Valentina moved to Paris, where she apparently for a time had a relationship with Tovalou-Houénou, but then lived alone into the 1950s, in what she hoped would be a distinguished retirement befitting the widow of an imperial dignitary. Eventually, in 2006, just as Wanilo had ensured his father’s belated return home, the return of Wanilo’s remains to Abomey, now in the Republic of Benin, was organised by one of the royal family. In reports on the inhumation, there was some media speculation about the possible “repatriation” of Maria-Valentina’s remains too, as those of a princess of the royal house, from their resting place in Paris, if it could be found.34 Long after her death, she was thus at least in principle accorded the respect she thought she had been due in life. In the meantime, though, her later life had not been so fortunate.
26As if touched by a family curse—and more prosaically because, as far as the government was concerned, she was merely the widow of the heir of a deposed “native chief”, and not the esteemed princess she had hoped her marriage would make her—her life too turned into a kind of late colonial exile, an exile from the future she must have imagined she would have with her husband, handsome, distinguished and successful, as well as a little exotic, a little famous, and more than a little tragic-heroic as he and his story were. Allowed temporary financial support, and then a pension at the same rate as the widow of a colonial Governor, from the budget of the colony of Dahomey when she arrived in Bordeaux after Wanilo’s death, she continued, apparently unable otherwise to live independently, to claim the colonial government’s support for her upkeep until the empire’s and her own last days. She had to fight even for what they, mostly grudgingly, allowed her: “As the widow neither of a civil servant nor of a person having rendered exceptional service to the colony,” wrote an obviously irritated Governor of Dahomey in 1947, she had “benefitted from an exceptional favour for twenty years, during which time she seems to have done nothing on her own account to improve her situation” and she should “be content with the existing, purely gracious, arrangement.”35 But her allowance, periodically re-evaluated by reluctant administrators in Dakar and Porto Novo, never kept pace with Parisian prices despite her increasingly frugal life.
27In the 1930s, Maria-Valentina lived at a hotel in the rue Bréa, in the elegant sixth arrondissement off Boulevard Raspail. She later moved into an apartment in a modest but smart townhouse nearby at 25 rue Vavin. In 1948, she wrote to Dakar to point out that “I have already written several requests in view of obtaining an increase [in my pension], requests which have remained unanswered, but I cannot prevent myself from drawing your attention to the fact that ... an allowance that permitted me to live in 1928 is quite insufficient today.”36 By November 1958, aged seventy-seven, on crutches and having suffered two hip operations, she complained that she was “completely powerless, unable to walk, nor do anything without the help of another person, whom I am without the means of paying.” Living on 500 francs per month, she had been obliged to move in with a relation, another widow, in the still respectable but decidedly less upscale Maison Blanche district out in the thirteenth arrondissement.37 Not replying, but passing on the request in January 1959, the High Commissioner (formerly the Governor General) in Dakar wrote to the head of the social services department of the Ministry of Overseas France (formerly the Colonial Ministry), advising that, since it was impossible to provide any more substantial aid to Mme Béhanzin, “you might have a social worker (assistante sociale) look into this lady’s situation, with a view to directing her to an old people’s home less expensive than that which she proposes to choose for herself.”38
***
28The trajectory of Gbehanzin and his family, in both life and death, from the 1890s to the 1950s and beyond, was especially extensive, looping across the French Atlantic from West Africa, to metropolitan France, to North Africa, back to West Africa, finally to Bordeaux, to Paris, and, long after all their lives and the empire too had ended, back to Abomey, echoing across a century and more the many other journeys made around the same space over these same decades by slaves, freed slaves, other political internees, conscript soldiers, migrant labourers, or emigrant families. Here, as in the stories of the Elizia’s captives, or those of the slaves and free people of colour who, seventy years before Gbehanzin’s exile, crossed the ocean in the other direction, what is most significant is not the unified territory, the formal territoriality of the empire as a single space of imperial jurisdiction within which these itineraries were traced. Nor, even, is it the disjuncture, the contrast, between geographical unification and political differentiation within a single, transcontinental and mostly terrestrial imperial geography that ought to hold our attention. It was not the unification of territory itself, and the systematic practice of a “politics of difference” within that territory, that really made imperial space what it was. Territorial as well as political unification was always more theoretical than real. The meanings of French sovereignty and law were not simply encoded in a binary system of rights and exclusions, but were always very ambiguous and contested; the meanings of “French” space were no simpler.
29What we see in these stories is the knitting together of widely dispersed individual locations in a maritime archipelago across Africa, the Atlantic and Europe, an archipelago that even within Africa, and even by the 1920s—between Algiers, Dakar, Porto Novo and Libreville—was connected by the ocean, by shipping lanes, couriers and submarine telegraph wires, much more than by the notional contiguity of their hinterlands, even when this was, eventually, established at least on paper. More importantly for the real meaning of the empire as a spatial system, over these years from the 1820s to the 1920s and beyond, these locations were much more densely and physically connected by the movements of people who were subjected to the sovereignty of the empire than they were by the inclusion of inert blocks of space on imperial maps. That sovereignty, even when it saw itself as liberating and improving as well as when it was consciously repressing and confining, often meant the opposite of the rule of law it ostensibly proclaimed. It was the shape of exile, across geography and biography, and the movements of the exiles themselves—their long journeys, their long separations, their longed-for and long-delayed homecomings—that traced out the real, human shape, and that thus constituted the real, embodied experience, of France’s imperial space.
Notes de bas de page
1 Marcel Larnaude, Albert Charton, La France d’outre-mer. Révision de la géographie de la France (Les principaux aspects économiques) (Paris, Nathan, 1939), 2, 3, 10.
2 Frederick Cooper, Jane Burbank, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2010).
3 Examples of these postcards can be seen at http://www.histoire-et-philatelie.fr/pages/009_algerie/15_l_association_1959-1960_p2.html (7 July 2017).
4 Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages (Paris, Plon, 5 vols, 1970-71), vol. 3, 117-23, quote at 121. De Gaulle was by this time using television very deliberately, and nothing about his delivery should be thought insignificant. An extract of the TV footage of the speech, in which his manner at this point (at 05.52) sends some very clear signals to the audience, can be seen at http://fresques.ina.fr/jalons/fiche-media/InaEdu00088/allocution-du-general-de-gaulle-du-16-septembre-1959-en-faveur-de-l-autodetermination.html (accessed 6 July 2017).
5 De Gaulle, Discours et messages vol. 3, 15-16.
6 For emphasis on the possibilities that seemed to be offered by the politics of inclusive republican citizenship and federalism after 1944, see Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Rethinking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014), Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 2006); for critiques, James McDougall, “The impossible Republic: The reconquest of Algeria and the decolonisation of France, 1945-1962”, Journal of Modern History forthcoming (Dec. 2017), Richard Drayton, “Federal utopias and the realities of imperial power”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (forthcoming 2017), and (somewhat differently) Samuel Moyne, “Fantasies of federalism”, Dissent (Winter 2015), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/fantasies-of-federalism, (7 July 2017).
7 In March 1959, according to Alain Peyrefitte’s much repeated quotation, De Gaulle dismissed the idea of “integration”: “Have you gone and seen them, the Muslims? You’ve looked at them, with their turbans and their djellabas, you can see they’re not French. [...] If we have integration, if all the Arabs and Berbers of Algeria were considered to be French, how would we stop them all coming to live in the metropole...? My village wouldn’t be called Colombey-les-deux-Eglises any more, it’d be Colombey-les-deux-Mosquées!” Peyrefitte, C’était De Gaulle (Paris, 2002), 66.
8 Larnaude, Charton, La France d’outre-mer (n.1.), 24.
9 Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (Paris, Anthropos, 1974).
10 Hélène Blais, Mirages de la carte : L’invention de l’Algérie coloniale (Paris, Fayard, 2014), Hélène Blais, Florence Deprest, Pierre Singaravélou (eds), Territoires impériaux : Une histoire spatiale du fait colonial (Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011).
11 “Copie d’une délibération du Conseil privé de la Martinique du 6 septembre 1826”, attached to instructions from the Minister of Navy and the Colonies, Paris, to the King’s Commandant and Administrator in Senegal, 12 Dec. 1826. Archives nationales du Sénégal, Dakar (hereafter ANS), fonds du Gouvernement Général de l’Afrique occidentale Française (GGAOF), Fonds ancien (pre-1920) K 3.
12 Minister of Navy and the Colonies, Paris, to the King’s Commandant and Administrator in Senegal, 12 Dec. 1826. ANS GGAOF FA K 3.
13 On the Bissette affair, see Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), Éric Mesnard, “Resistance movements in the French colonies: The Bissette affair, 1823-1827”, ch. 22 in Marcel Dorigny (ed.), The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848 (Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2003), and Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Philadelphia PA, Pennsylvania University Press, 2009). On such deportations within the larger history of the French penal regime in this period, see Allyson J. Delnore, “Political Convictions: French Deportation Projects in the Age of Revolutions”, PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2004.
14 “État nominatif des individus de couleur libres, qui ont été jugés par le Conseil Spécial de Gouvernement...”, Governor, Martinique (Donzelot), 8 March 1824; “Cijourd’hui... ont comparus à la mairie les dénommés ci-après à l’effet de déclarer leurs noms...”, Mayor, St-Louis, 14 Aug. 1824; “État nominatif”, St-Louis, 23 April 1825. ANS GGAOF FA K 3.
15 Gabriel Jacques Laisné de Villevêque, De la situation des gens de couleur libres aux Antilles françaises (Paris, Impr. J. MacCarthy, 1823), 5, 7.
16 For an arresting exploration of the themes of space, movement, and confinement in another part of the empire, see Miranda Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2012).
17 “Arrêt de la Cour royale de la Martinique qui condamne aux galères perpétuelles, à la déportation et au bannissement plusieurs hommes de couleur libres, pour colportage et lecture de brochures” (Fort-Royal, 12 Jan. 1824), repr. in Anon., Affaire des déportés de la Martinique, 1823-1824: Mémoires, consultations, et pièces justificatives (Paris, Constantin, 1824), 76-79, quote at 78.
18 Anon. [Jean-Baptiste Volny], “Le mal que le méchant a fait retournera contre lui, et son injustice retombera sur sa tête”, n.d. [ca.1825], ms 13p., ff. 1, 11-12. ANS GGAOF FA K 3. Volny was not deported to Senegal, and it is unclear how this manuscript, which is in two different hands, found its way into the St-Louis, and then the Dakar, archives, where it was catalogued among papers concerning the Martinique deportees simply as “un mémoire très curieux concernant le Sieur Bissette”. Its attribution is clear from the writer’s reference to his having copied the text referred to as Salus publici..., of which only Volny was accused. Did Volny entrust the text to a co-accused who was deported to St-Louis? Or did the text circulate after the scandal broke in France? This text does not appear among the many letters and other documents collected and published in September 1826 by Isambert, the lawyer for Bissette and his co-accused. (Anon., Mémoire justificatif des hommes de couleur de la Martinique condamnés par arrêt de la Cour Royale de cette colonie, contenant l’Histoire des hommes de couleur dans les colonies françaises (Paris, Impr. E. Duverger, 1826).
19 On arguments in France about “colonialism in the age of abolition” that significantly influenced debates over the conquest and settlement of Algeria up to 1848, see Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 2011), ch. 4.
20 Cpt. Martin, commandant du comptoir, Gabon, to commandant, Gorée, 20 May 1850. ANS GGAOF FA 6G 7.
21 “Rapport sur le village de Libreville et sur ses habitants”, Cpt. Parent, aboard the Acheron, 21 April 1850, ms 8p. ANS GGAOF FA 6G 7.
22 Captain of the Mésange, Commandant par interim (for Voisin, ill), Gabon, to Commandant, Gorée, 1 (?) Jan. 1844; Sgt. Grandjon (for Voisin, ill), to Commandant, Gorée, 4 Nov. 1843. Grandjon reported food prices inland (costed in tobacco leaves) six times lower than those at the coast. ANS GGAOF FA 6G 1.
23 “Concessions de terrain faites à quarante six noirs et négresses de Loango provenant du négrier L’Elizia”, signed by Cpt. Martin, Gabon, 10 July 1850. ANS GGAOF FA 6G 7.
24 Parent, “Rapport sur le village...” (n. 20).
25 Idem.
26 Idem.
27 Idem; Parent to Monseigneur [Bessieux?], Libreville, 4 Jan. 1850. ANS GGAOF FA 6G 7.
28 Paul Marty, Études sur l’Islam et les tribus maures: Les Brackna (Paris, Ernest Leroux, 1921), 54.
29 Press clips and correspondence (March 1893) in Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence (ANOM), FR ANOM SG DAHO V 8.
30 “Lésinerie”, Le Réveil, journal républicain (Fort-de-France), 4 Aug. 1894; “Prisonnier de guerre”, La République française (Paris), 2 Sept. 1894. Copies in FR ANOM SG DAHO IV 5.
31 Chef de cabinet, Under-Secretariat of State for the Colonies (p. the Minister), Paris, to Governor, Martinique, 5 Sept. 1894; Governor, Fort-de-France, Martinique, to Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, Paris, 21 March 1894. FR ANOM SG DAHO IV 5. The decision to use the “currently unoccupied” fort as the exiles’ quarters was baldly stated by the governor of Martinique: in addition to considerations of security (which, given the proximity of British territories, were serious), it would cost only 1500 francs to fit up the fort for habitation, whereas renting a suitable residence in town would amount to 4500 francs.
32 Governor, Fort-de-France, Martinique, to Minister of the Colonies, Paris, 22 Oct. 1898. FR ANOM SG DAHO IV 5.
33 Robert A. Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association papers (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983-), vol. 10, Africa for the Africans, 1923-1945, 163-4.
34 “Bénin: Ouanilo de retour à Abomey”, RFI 27 Sept. 2006, http://www1.rfi.fr/actufr/articles/081/article_46428.asp, (16 May 2017).
35 Telegram, Governor, Porto Novo, Dahomey, to [Government General], Dakar, 20 Aug. 1947. ANS GGAOF FM 17G 637.
36 Letters, Mme veuve Ouanilo Béhanzin, to Governor General, Dakar, 12 Dec. 1946 (rue Vavin), to Minister of the Colonies, Vichy, 11 April 1942, and to Minister of the Colonies, Paris, 13 May 1936 (rue Bréa), and fiches de renseignements, 17 Nov. 1937 and n.d.; Veuve Ouanilo Béhanzin to Governor General, Dakar, 24 March 1948. ANS GGAOF FM 17G 637; correspondence also in FR ANOM FM 1Aff Pol 575 6.
37 Veuve Ouanilo Béhanzin to Vice-President, Government Council, Porto Novo, 29 Nov. 1957, and to Governor General, Dakar, 12 Nov. 1958 (chez Mme veuve Legrand-Ducaud, rue Wurtz), (emphasis in original). ANS GGAOF FM 17G 637.
38 High Commissioner-General for AOF, Dakar, to Head of Social Services, 27 rue Oudinot, Paris, 17 Jan. 1959. ANS GGAOF FM 17G 637.
Auteur
-
James McDougall
Laithwaite Fellow et Tutor in Modern History à l’université d’Oxford (Trinity College)
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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