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After the Colonial Past: Ambivalences of Assimilation in French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2023

Edenz Maurice Open the ORCID record for Edenz Maurice [Opens in a new window]
Edenz Maurice*
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Département d’histoire préfectorale et du ministère de l’Intérieur, IMEHI [Institut des hautes études du ministère de l’Intérieur], Paris, France
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Abstract

Focusing on the case of French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s, this article aims to contribute to reflection on the controversial notion of assimilation. The author therefore pays attention to the trajectories of the préfet, i.e. from 1947 the highest civil representative of the state and Creole teachers, the latter providing the largest contingent of indigenous colonial officials. The article argues that, while assimilation is often perceived as a policy that aims to impose an order designed for the mainland through a universalist ideal that erases differences, in reality it did not produce uniformity and its ideal could be – and often was – negotiated under the constraints of a post-slavery society in which the elites were indeed Black.

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Contemporary European History , First View , pp. 1 - 14
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

In late August 1947, the Minister of Public Works and Transport Jules Moch paid his first visit to French Guiana, a South American colony that had been in French possession since the seventeenth century. At a time when cracks in the imperial structure were being felt around the globe, this unprecedented official trip sought to oversee the transfer of powers from Governor Jean Peset to Préfet Robert Vignon.Footnote 1 This was how Minister Moch came to claim in his official speech that, in entering ‘the community of the ninety-four French departments’, French Guiana was not opting for assimilation: the word, he said, ‘dismayed and shocked [him] since assimilation had been a fact here for a long time’.Footnote 2 This concept had been first expressed at the Constituent Assembly by Aimé Césaire, the poet who championed the mid-1930s anti-assimilationist ideal.Footnote 3 On 12 March 1946, now speaking as a communist MP, he defended the soundness of the law which would transform the four ‘old colonies’ into French departments. These included the Caribbean possessions of French Guiana, Guadeloupe and Martinique, on the one hand, and Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean on the other. Césaire thus declared that: ‘the integration that we call for would not be an improvisation. It would represent the expected outcome of a historical process and the logical conclusion of a doctrine.’Footnote 4

Adopted on 19 March 1946, the so-called departmentalisation law consisted of three brief articles that contrasted the seemingly simple and legitimate formality of ending more than three centuries of colonial rule in the oldest French possessionsFootnote 5 with the bloody wars of independence of Indochina, the Asian jewel of the French Empire, or Algeria, where extremely violent wars of decolonisation followed other examples in colonies of settlement.Footnote 6 In the aftermath of the Second World War, along with the federal model, legislative assimilation represented both a possible and credible way of putting an end to the colonial system, and a way of safeguarding the imperial project.Footnote 7 Ten years later, however, in a preface to a book that called for the decolonisation of the French Antilles, now understood as a process of access to independence, Césaire explained his new position as follows: ‘a terrible contradiction was growing within departmentalisation, a contradiction that could only be resolved by the negation of departmentalization.’Footnote 8

This article set out to examine the concrete modalities of the incorporation of overseas departments (DOMs)Footnote 9 into the French nation that led in less than a decade to the rejection of a French decolonisation solution that had been widely approved at its beginning. It outlines how this reversal could be attributed to the different realities of the principle of assimilation. While the old colonies agreed to define it as ‘an instrument of liberation from colonial domination’ in order to obtain equality ‘between the condition of Frenchmen in the colony and that of Frenchmen in [the] mainland’,Footnote 10 the influential legal expert Arthur Girault, who trained generations of colonial administrators, indeed recalled that if assimilation can be considered as ‘the true policy of France . . . among its supporters, no two understand it in the same way’.Footnote 11 How did the legislative assimilation of the DOMs challenge the French republican ideal of universality and force the government to critically re-examine the colonial past? It is this main question that this article intends to answer by focusing on French Guiana.

This South American territory, the only one on the continent to have remained under the direct influence of its former coloniser, is the least known of the DOMs, which have not been the main focus in the renewed examination of the French imperial past.Footnote 12 This relative lack of attention might be the result of the territory's low number of inhabitants that affected perceptions of its significance. With less than 40,000 individuals in 1946, French Guiana had a population almost eight times smaller than Guadeloupe's, seven times smaller than Martinique's and six times smaller than La Réunion's.Footnote 13 Another major peculiarity is that ‘Creoles’, the main socio-cultural group of the DOMs, only include the descendants of both enslaved Africans who were emancipated in 1848 or freed earlier and immigrants who joined this initial group.Footnote 14 Unlike the French Antilles and La Réunion, French Guiana's economy was no longer dominated by a white ‘plantocracy’ after the second abolition of slavery. Following the example of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, the presence of white convicts introduces yet a further nuance to the white–Black dichotomy and its effects of domination.Footnote 15 In fact, French Guiana has never become the white settlement colony that Paris had dreamt it would be since the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Neither did it become a French ‘California’ capable of better exploiting the gold deposits discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, nor a stronghold capable of resisting foreign covetousness, by the United States and Brazil, which was rekindled by the Second World War.Footnote 16

Nonetheless, French Guiana shared the ills of other DOMs (structural unemployment, limited economic development, degraded healthcare system, insufficient or dilapidated equipment, etc.), which led a ministerial commission that visited the French Caribbean islands in November 1946 to consider the DOMs as ‘proletariat countries’.Footnote 17 This indisputable diagnosis strengthened the militant discourse on colonial domination that, from the mid-1950s onwards, applied Marxist theory to the realities of these new departments, while turning a blind eye to the political domination of the Black Creole bourgeoisie. This discourse became increasingly potent, manifesting itself through the idea that departmentalisation had been a false decolonisation, i.e. that legislative assimilation did not thwart European domination. In the wake of the emergence of historical research about the DOMs, as attested by initiatives such as the 1982 creation of the University of the West Indies–French Guiana, the publication of the first doctoral thesis in history that examined the transformation of French Guiana into a departmentFootnote 18 provided scientific support for this vision. Similarly, anglophone literatureFootnote 19 and postcolonial studiesFootnote 20 refused to acknowledge that the DOMs’ status entailed a break from the past. These disciplines carried on considering these territories as postcolonies that remained dependent on the mainland and whose trajectories revealed the tension between two opposite conceptions of the idea of republican equality: ‘the first founded on the republican universalism which intrinsically connects cultural and political assimilation (the unicity of the French people, the universality of rights and the indifferentiation of the Law), the second associating political autonomy and the respect of cultural diversity’.Footnote 21

This article departs from this historiographical heritage. It builds upon recent work that formulates a different social and political history of each DOM by paying closer attention to the actors and spatial singularities of the territories under scrutiny.Footnote 22 In so doing, it invites us to reconsider both the diversity of decolonisation processes throughout the French EmpireFootnote 23 and the multiple post-colonial trajectories of the Caribbean.Footnote 24

The article combines an examination of parliamentary sources, administrative reports, local press and personal memoires. It thus follows the actors, practices, technical arrangements and words that reflected or hindered the transition from colony to department from the March 1946 law to the mid-1950s, which were marked by the emergence of an autonomist Guianese Creole left. Through its focus on the relationship between state and society on the one hand and the permanent accommodations to which the state is forced on the other,Footnote 25 the article juxtaposes two types of personal trajectories, which are both complementary and competing. On the one hand, the study follows the préfet, a senior civil servant with wide-ranging prerogatives responsible since year VIII (1800) for implementing the action of the state in all the territories of the French Republic.Footnote 26 In the DOMs, the préfet thus represents a figure of authority now decried as much as it was celebrated when he was called upon to embody the change in status by replacing the governor.Footnote 27 On the other hand, the analysis looks at Creole teachers who had become one of the most important categories of civil servants at the end of the colonial regime. Simultaneously, they were regularly pitted against supposed or real European domination, to the point of acting as a kind of professional reserve that produced French Guiana's main political actors since the 1960s.Footnote 28

The article's first section describes the 1947–8 moment, which led to a concrete rupture with the colonial past. The second section explores the administrative measures and prefectural practices that drove the Guianese Creole teachers to quickly denounce the persistent colonial order. However, as the final section demonstrates, other persistent colonial mechanisms reveal the Guianese Creoles’ agency to both thwart the prefects’ desires for authoritarian domination and to reshape their own conception of republican integration. The article therefore argues that, while assimilation is often perceived as a policy that aims to impose an order designed for the mainland through a universalist ideal that erases differences, in reality it did not produce uniformity and its ideal could be – and often was – negotiated under the constraints of a post-slavery society in which the elites were indeed Black. The article further aims to contribute fully to integrating the DOMs in European history, both as a sometimes cumbersome heritage of European hegemony and, like many other territories that are now grouped in the European Union under the category of ‘outermost regions’, as an integral and often unrecognised actor in the process of European construction.

Assimilation to Break with the Colonial Past

The transformation of the colony into a department was part of a moment of imperial renewal that sought to expand the rights attached to French citizenship. This can be observed from 1947 onwards in the enthusiasm that accompanied the extension of the prefectural institution and in the implementation of socio-professional measures aiming to abolish inequalities between teachers.

From the Governor to the Préfet

The investiture of Préfet Vignon and of his counterparts in Martinique and Guadeloupe – Pierre Trouillé and Gilbert PhilipsonFootnote 29 – gave rise to enthusiastic demonstrations.Footnote 30 On 30 August 1947 at 6 pm, the ministerial delegation was warmly welcomed on the runway of Rochambeau airport. After the Marseillaise and a gun salute, an orchestra played popular dances called ‘Biguines’. Despite the falling darkness, Préfet Vignon and Minister Moch were escorted by a huge crowd while banners and French flags flew high in the streets of Cayenne.Footnote 31 These should be seen in the context in which the 7 June 1947 decrees that established the prefectural system were in fact the first practical application of the extension of mainland legislation introduced by the 1946 law. Black Creole social and political elites had been waiting for this recognition ever since the late nineteenth century and it signalled the end of the governor's centuries-old authority.

Thus, Home Minister Edouard Depreux deliberately chose to recruit his new préfets from the members of the prefectural body, ‘which included not only the sous-préfets but also the advisors working in the prefectures as well as the chiefs of staff’.Footnote 32 ‘I do not wish people to say that I have dressed a governor up in a préfet's clothes’, he declared to Christian Laigret, acting governor of New Caledonia.Footnote 33 Simultaneously, colonial administrators were in fact starting to devise strategies of integration into the prefectural body.Footnote 34

The new ‘overseas préfets’, as P. Trouillé dubbed them when he took stock of their action before the Association of the Prefectural body in 1951, were singularly lacking in experience. With the exception of Paul Demange, an emblematic figure of the ambivalent trajectories of senior officials in the prefectural administration during the Second World War,Footnote 35 who was assigned to La Réunion, their appointment represented indeed either a first (Philipson and Vignon) or a second posting in their careers, on the path towards a permanent position (Trouillé). Their youth was unusual. On average, the préfets of the Fourth Republic (1946–58) were forty-three years old.Footnote 36 The oldest of the overseas préfets, Demange, was appointed at forty-one; the youngest, Vignon, at thirty-seven.Footnote 37 Préfet Vignon did not try to hide this in his inaugural speech: ‘Gentlemen, I stand here before you with the ambitions or illusions my age allows.’Footnote 38

As the representative of an executive branch attentive to rebuilding the welfare state, Vignon wished to appear as the symbol and guardian of the overseas populations’ keen aspirations for the application of social laws, such as the eight-hour working day and the extension of insurance mechanisms protecting individuals against the risks of life:

the execution in this territory of mainland legislation will without doubt create new rights for the inhabitants. It will naturally lead to more social justice. It used to be painful for the Guianese worker when, a voter and a taxpayer just like the mainland labourer, he would find himself helpless and unprotected against the vagaries of ill health and old age.Footnote 39

Another major task was to respond both to growing anti-colonial protests and supposed or real attempts to force France out of the Americas. In April 1948, a motion adopted by the International Conference of American States in Bogota that condemned the ‘occupation of American territories by extra-continental countries’ was a reminder of how the French presence was still perceived as an intolerable external interference.Footnote 40 In this context, as Eric Jennings argues, departmentalisation could be analysed as much as a ‘proof that France keeps its promises of emancipation’, in the words of Martinique's communist deputy Léopold Bissol,Footnote 41 as ‘a measure intended to “cut short all foreign covetousness”’.Footnote 42 Préfet Trouillé thus shared this same conviction with his colleagues in 1951: ‘it was therefore necessary to demonstrate, by a gesture expressing opportunity and justice, the absurdity of foreign criticism, and to truly extend the borders of an indivisible France to its extreme limits overseas.’Footnote 43

The first overseas préfets also shared the same desire for immediate changes that were supposed to mark a break with the inertia of the colonial administration. In La Réunion, P. Demange placed at the top of his list of priorities the fight against the island's poverty, which was accentuated by the devastating cyclone of 26 January 1948 that left 165 people dead and 40,000 in need of help.Footnote 44 During this same month, in Guadeloupe, G. Philipson deemed it necessary to increase the minimum wage of seasonal agricultural workers at the beginning of the ‘sugar campaign’, i.e. the cane harvest.Footnote 45 R. Vignon, for his part, had a more ambitious vision. As early as 1948, he asked his superiors for ‘ten years to make . . . French Guiana one of the richest territories in the French Union’.Footnote 46 As an eloquent example of this unprecedented aspiration for French Guiana, in his memoirs published in 1985, thirty years after leaving office, he emphasised that his goal for the Cayenne high school, which until 1968 offered the highest level of education in French Guiana due to the absence of higher education institutions,Footnote 47 was to forge a reputation throughout South America that would enable it to compete with American universities thanks to an ‘army of elite teachers’.Footnote 48 Strongly perceived as a moment that marked the end of the colonial system, the préfet’s arrival in the French departments of the Americas nurtured hopes in a promising future.

Guianese Creole Teachers: Confident in the Promise of Equal Rights

Like most of the population, Guianese Creole teachers, who made up two-thirds of the ninety-nine members of the teaching body before the Second World War, adhered to this conception of departmentalisation.

This popular adherence can be the result of three factors. First, the 1946 law involved the transfer of educational competencies from the Ministry of the Colonies to the Ministry of Education. It provided a legal framework supposed to ensure the disappearance of one of the most egregious divides of the colonial order opposing cadres métropolitains and cadres locaux. The former were often European civil servants from the Ministry of Education on secondment to the Ministry of the Colonies who enjoyed a great many professional advantages that included the conditions of postings, stipend and leave. Since they were few in number, these European transplantees mostly taught at the Cayenne high school. In 1945, there were only three of them among the twenty teachers posted at this school. The others, or the cadres locaux, were mainly Creoles. Trained in the colony, they fervently defended the republican school and the French ‘civilizing mission’,Footnote 49 so much so that they prided themselves on their perfect cultural assimilation to European customs and were convinced that ‘to speak of “colonization” in relation to French Guiana [was] an insult and foolishness’.Footnote 50 By means of endogamous matrimonial alliances and professional promotions, the oldest Creole teachers had become members of the middle class in the 1930s and acquired enviable positions. Nonetheless, many aspects of the career of all the cadres locaux – such as recruitment, promotions, transfers and leave – were contingent on the governor's discretionary power. On 6 October 1947, a circular signalled that, as of 1 January 1948, the integration of the cadres locaux into the cadres métropolitains was to become ‘automatic’ for all those who had passed the competitive examination required in European France.Footnote 51 This date also symbolised rupture with the colonial past, coinciding as it did with the celebration of the centenary of the second abolition of slavery.

Secondly, the administrative integration of local teachers into the national civil service allowed them to claim the same advantages and job security as their mainland colleagues. For example, they could ask for a transfer to European France or another overseas department without losing their seniority. It quickly became routine for Creole Guyanese teachers to exercise this new right. Ms. Plénet, one of the rare female Creole Guyanese secondary school teachers, successfully applied in 1952 to the girls’ grammar school in Vitry-le-François (Marne). The following year, she obtained a new transfer to the girls’ high school in La Réunion.Footnote 52 Specific financial measures also incited local teachers to visit mainland France to improve their mastery of their subject and its pedagogy, their knowledge of official instructions and, for the many contract teachers, to prepare the competitive examinations necessary to join the ranks of the civil service. Among the first to seize this opportunity were primary school teachers on secondment to secondary school.Footnote 53 In other words, Creoles’ careers were no longer restricted by the colony's borders.

Thirdly, the first years of departmentalisation saw local teachers enter politics. Convinced that they were the best suited to the new rules of the political sphere, they applied to the most prominent local and national roles. Women's access to full voting rights and their mobilisation also favoured this new self-perception and the resulting renewal of political personnel.Footnote 54 In November 1948, the elections sent Jules Patient, one of the most senior primary school teachers of the defunct cadre local, to represent French Guiana at the Senate. This was the first time the territory had ever had a senator of its own. The 1953 municipal elections ensured teachers an unprecedented success in Cayenne. Three of them sat in the elected majority, including Justin Catayée, who was to become the first teacher to be elected as an MP five years later.Footnote 55 All of a sudden, with eight elected members, teachers became the most represented socio-professional group on the General Council, the highest local deliberative assembly.Footnote 56

To sum up, the legislative incorporation of an ‘old colony’ to the national body took place with France and French Guiana's consent. This process was the expected outcome of an age-old occupation and a tradition born of 1789 and 1848, as well as a geopolitical imperative. France then delegated a préfet, a government official historically responsible for rallying the population to the regime in place.Footnote 57 The move was considered by the Guianese Creole as an opportunity ‘to consecrate once and for all the equality of [all] before the law!’,Footnote 58 according to Gaston Monnerville, the most eminent Guianese political figure and one of the major crafters of the 1946 law.Footnote 59

Persistence of Colonial Traits

However, Guianese Creole teachers quickly came to associate the departmentalisation process with fraudulent decolonisation, as some of the administrative measures on the ground embodied the perpetuation of a discredited colonial system. The powers attributed to the préfet, as well as his attitudes and practices, reinforced this perception of a misused assimilation.

The Métropolitain, Symbol of the Empty Hopes of Equality

Guianese Creole teachers considered themselves the first to become aware of the empty promises made. In fact, the new decrees that provided the material basis for their integration process into the cadre métropolitain crushed their expectations that inequalities that persisted from the structures of colonial domination would truly come to an end. One such example was the December 1947 decree that offered a series of administrative and financial advantages, such as a six-month leave and a distance indemnity which amounted to 40 per cent of their stipend. Yet it only applied to those civil servants who had resided more than 3,000 kilometres away from French Guiana before their appointment in the department.Footnote 60 In March 1948, a new decree allocated a relocation indemnity to these same civil servants.Footnote 61 The local teachers were even more upset as their administrative integration into the cadre métropolitain, carried out by commissions placed under the authority of the préfet, was not as ‘automatic’ as they had previously assumed. In this vein, they were entitled to neither the same social benefits nor the same family allowances as their mainland colleagues.

Let us take the case of J. Catayée. As soon as he was appointed in September 1949 to a teaching position at the Cayenne high school, he wrote over and over again to the Ministry of Education in order to obtain his integration into the cadre métropolitain. In one of his letters, dated May 1951, he went so far as to demand ‘special measures’ allowing him to be redeployed, following the example, he said, of one of his colleagues who ‘met fewer conditions’.Footnote 62 Catayée finally obtained his integration on 1 October 1951. The feeling of injustice that ensued, however, was not limited to the Creole teachers or to French Guiana. In Guadeloupe, local police officers had come to see these redeployment difficulties as evidence of the permissibility of ‘racial discrimination’.Footnote 63

Like the United Kingdom, which paid compensations to British officers in order to fill posts in many territories that remained under British control,Footnote 64 the French government's position was that the advantages bestowed on mainland civil servants were aimed at inciting them to ask for their transfer to the DOMs, as tenured staff was scarce. European French civil servants were not attracted to the new department. Those who did come rarely stayed long. In 1955, secondary education was in dire straits in French Guiana, as only two out of twenty-seven tenured posts were filled.Footnote 65 French Guiana's general lack of allure could still be explained by difficult living conditions and isolation. In this context, the term ‘métropolitain’ gradually took over from ‘European’ to refer to whites appointed to French Guiana and considered as civil servants with an enviable social status, inconvenient rivals, or agents of a state that had remained colonial.

The so-called métropolitains not only enjoyed socio-professional advantages but also retained control of the school system, at the top of which was the vice-rector. Because of the small size of the school-aged population and thus also the administrative bodies required to keep the school system afloat, the vice-rector was also, until 1970, the headmaster of Cayenne's secondary school. As in the other three DOMs, the métropolitains remained at the head of almost all departmental services and thwarted the Black Creoles’ hopes for social advancement. ‘No head of department is Guianese and if there were, before 1946, civil servants occupying a high rank in the administrative hierarchy, it was in the colonial administration and, preferably, in service outside of French Guiana’, acknowledged Préfet René Érignac in the early 1960s,Footnote 66 the first in French Guiana with prior experience in this position in the DOMs.Footnote 67

The French authorities did not get the measure of the growing tension between métropolitains and Creoles in French Guiana as in the three other DOMs. In particular, the former conflict between cadres métropolitains and cadres locaux was reappearing ever more acutely under a new guise in the field of education. The demise of the colonial status in March 1946 had fostered heady hopes which swiftly turned to bitter disappointment.

In Practice, a Préfet–Governor

The veiled perpetuation of the colonial order did not, it must be noted, spare the very head of the department. Préfet Vignon's methods testify to this.

Inevitable teething problems of an unprecedented process for some, irrefutable proof of resistance for others, the extension of mainland legislation was adjourned several times, until 1 April 1948. The overseas préfet's duties ‘became, simultaneously and unavoidably, [those] of the Governor’, explained Trouillé in 1951.Footnote 68 The 7 June 1947 decree already bestowed on the overseas préfets powers that had formerly belonged to the governors of the colonies. Like their predecessors, the préfets wielded utter control over civil servants in their departments. Furthermore, they had the powers to temporarily suspend any of them, except judges.

In French Guiana, this troubling juxtaposition of a préfet's republican powers and a governor's colonial attributions was particularly conspicuous: Vignon was the only préfet to also be, until 1951, a governor – of the Inini territory, a colonial entity that accounted for more than 90 per cent of the total area of French Guiana, which had been created in 1930 in order to manage the huge forested hinterland. The Inini became a major instrument of his power. When Préfet Vignon ‘needed to spend without any oversight, he could delve into the budget of the Inini’, according to Jacques Bardon, Inspector General of the administration (IGAME) on extraordinary mission to the DOMs, when he wrote his report on the work accomplished by Vignon after the latter's eight years in office, the longest any overseas préfet ever served. As an example of a looser control of prefectural action in the DOMs, Inspector Bardon added that, if these personal forms of administrative practices ‘had taken place in any department of continental France’, they would be ‘difficult to defend’.Footnote 69

The physical distance from the central corridors of power in Paris had another major consequence. ‘A fighter, a tenacious, stubborn overseas préfet does what he likes’, writes Inspector Bardon:

After several months of all sorts of formalities, Mr. Vignon manages to obtain the credits he was originally denied. His tutelary authorities first refuse, then give in to him generally through sheer weariness, always on the condition – this goes without saying – that it ‘will remain absolutely exceptional’.Footnote 70

In his autobiography, Vignon asserted that he often used that ploy: ‘on your failing to respond before such and such a date, I will consider that my proposal has your agreement and will henceforth carry it out’, his reports invariably concluded.Footnote 71 If these idiosyncratic modes of administrative practice ‘had cropped up in any department whatsoever in mainland France’, they ‘would have been reprehensible’ and ‘difficult to defend’, Bardon deems. Vignon's work, he says, was carried out regardless of ‘any human or political prudence and hopelessly indifferent to legal procedure or financial considerations’.Footnote 72 According to Préfet Trouillé, this remark could apply to all overseas préfets: ‘since the préfets had not obtained the arsenal of legislation they needed to act, they would be empirical and use – always respecting the departmental status – all the texts at their disposal including the gubernatorial decrees, which remained applicable in the absence of new provisions.’Footnote 73

From the government's point of view, an overseas préfet was more than the representative of the state. He was the representative of France. France was perceived and judged in the Caribbean through him.Footnote 74 So, like his counterparts in the Antilles, the Préfet of French Guiana lived in the former governor's palace until the late 1960s. His white uniform, a symbol of authority which he donned for all official events, was very similar to that of the governor's. Besides, the Home Office was no longer averse to recruiting its overseas préfets from its pool of former colonial administrators. Reflecting the low attractiveness of the DOMs, C. Laigret became Préfet of Martinique in 1949, only two years after his first application to an overseas post was rejected. In French Guiana, Pierre Malvy was to succeed Vignon in June 1955. Born in Wahrān (Algeria) in 1909, Malvy had never been a préfet before. It was doubtless his long career with the Préfet of Algiers – which led him in 1954 to become Chief of Staff for the Home Minister François Mitterrand – that explains one of his first questions on his arrival in Cayenne: ‘How come . . . there isn't here, like in Algeria, a European town, and a medina for the natives?’ related Vignon.Footnote 75 It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that less than a decade after its enactment, departmentalisation had more and more critics, among whom were the Guianese Creole teachers involved in politics counted as the most vocal.

Colonial Continuities and Departmental Reconfigurations

Nonetheless, the colonial past cannot be reduced to this binary narrative. Under the colonial system, the Guianese Creole elites had ample resources at their disposal to challenge European domination in the fields of politics, administration and education, which they promptly used to assert their own conception of republican integration.

Dealing with the Local Black Elites

In 1961, Vignon left the prefectural administration and chose to embrace a political career in French Guiana. He was first elected as a Gaullist general councillor, a position in which he remained until 1971. He served as senator between 1962 and 1971, and finally mayor between 1969 and 1976. This trajectory thus led him to reflect in his memoirs: ‘I should have been a préfet when I was a senator, and a senator when I was a préfet. Under General de Gaulle (1958–69), a préfet would never have been transferred on the whim of an MP. And I had one unredeemable flaw: I was white.’Footnote 76

It is true that Préfet Vignon had wielded extensive powers. But he had to acknowledge the place and role of local representatives. As early as 1947, G. Monnerville reminded him of this, informing him that ‘he got along very well with Governor Peset’ and that ‘he was insisting that the latter be appointed a préfet’.Footnote 77 His relationship with Edouard Gaumont, the Gaullist and Guianese Creole MP elected in 1951, was not much more congenial. Inspector Bardon's report was the result of an investigation ordered by the Home Minister on none other than Gaumont's request. In 1954, the latter also attempted to obtain the constitution of a parliamentary commission tasked with examining the good order of the prefectural administration of his department. At this stage, Bardon actually advised Préfet Vignon to leave Cayenne ‘with dignity, not summarily’, in other words ‘not booted out by [his] own MP’.Footnote 78

Contrary to what Vignon concluded in retrospect, the outcome of this confrontation was in no way special to the workings of the Fourth Republic. Throughout the early twentieth century, the colony's politics were marked by near permanent conflict between the representative of state power and the Guianese Creole luminaries, whose power was derived from local elections. Coming from the colonial civil service, the world of merchants or the circle of liberal professionals, the most influential members of these Guianese notabilities could in fact moderate the action of the more autocratic governors and even obtain their transfer. As a result, no fewer than forty-seven governors succeeded each other in French Guiana between 1893 and 1944: on average, one governor a year: something no public authority, indeed, could ever do without contending with the local powers.Footnote 79

The departmental system changed nothing in this respect. Admittedly, Vignon remained in office for eight years, the longest period of overseas service of any prefect to date. But, in June 1956, only one year after his arrival in Cayenne, Vignon's successor Malvy asked his friend Préfet Roger Ricard, then IGAME for the DOMs, to use his influence in order to obtain an Algerian prefecture for him.Footnote 80 Malvy finally left South America the following year . . . to head the Lorraine department of the Meuse. Thereafter, the préfets placed at the head of French Guiana only stayed for an average of twenty-eight months.Footnote 81

However, this reality was not a simple reproduction of the colonial past. As we have said, departmentalisation accelerated the renewal of Guianese Creole elites by encouraging the entry of teachers into the political arena, where they became major players from the mid-1950s onwards. Prominent among these teachers was J. Catayée, whose political involvement explained his active role in the creation of a Guianese federation of the French Section of the Workers’ International (Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière federation) in October 1951. Five years later, proclaiming the ‘incompatibility of defending Guianese interests in a party of French essence’,Footnote 82 he founded the Guianese Socialist Party, which soon became the first and ‘only truly organised party in Guiana’.Footnote 83 He contributed to the emergence of a Guianese left whose watchword was the Creole/Métropolitain opposition, gradually overlapped by the autonomy/department tension. In the midst of the anti-colonial upheaval, he constantly promoted a ‘special status’ which called for the establishment of a Guianese region governed by an elected president with increased powers, including that of coinage. His autonomist project also claimed the guyanisation of middle managers, or a mechanism to promote the access of Guianese Creoles to administrative responsibility.Footnote 84 On this new political playing field, the préfet became autonomist teachers’ ‘favourite scapegoat’, the man suspected of ‘the blackest and most devious designs’,Footnote 85 such as helping the métropolitains to keep control of the department. According to Préfet Érignac, these teachers were ultimately ‘the most aggressive and dangerous elements’ of the political stage.Footnote 86

Creole Teachers Mobilise

Creole teachers had had historical access to various corporative resources. As early as 1925, a Guianese branch of the National Trade Union of Primary School Teachers of France and the Colonies (Syndicat national des Insituteurs et Institutrices de France et des Colonies: SNI), the most powerful union for primary school teachers, was set up. A Circle of the Cayenne Middle School Teachers was founded in 1933. Let us note here that teachers were the initiators of the first and only professional trade union in French Guiana in the 1920s.Footnote 87 They also took advantage of the extended freedom of the press, emblematic of the Third Republic (1870–1940), to violently criticise the governor and his head of staff. By any measure, this was an extraordinary occurrence in a colonial context. Nor did they shy away from using their right to legal recourse, including before the Council of State, the highest French administrative jurisdiction, against any decision they considered an abuse of power.Footnote 88

Confronted with the administrative measures that followed departmentalisation, tending to benefit métropolitain civil servants, the Guianese Creole teachers fought back with all the weapons in their arsenal in order to obtain equality, concerning both treatment and pay. Most tellingly, on 7 February 1950, for the first time in local history, they organised a strike with the rest of the department's civil servants. Together with their Antillais colleagues, they called for better pay, for suppression of the installation indemnity, for the right to a four-month long administrative leave every three years, the same rates for family allowances and the same social security system as in mainland France. Still in ‘solidarity with their Antillais colleagues’, they announced in March the beginning of an open-ended strike.Footnote 89

The mobilisation was all the more massive as it was organised by the General Union of the Civil Service Federations (Union générale des fédérations de fonctionnaires). Affiliated to the General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale des travailleurs), this union had close ties to the French Communist Party and a new Cartel of Public Services (Cartel des services publics), whose secretary-general was a primary school teacher, a member of the SNI. The strike ended a month later, with the 3 April 1950 law. The teachers obtained the suppression of the relocation indemnity, a pay rise of 25 per cent, a residence indemnity to compensate for the high cost of living, and alignment of the social security system and family allowance rates with those on the mainland.Footnote 90

Even though this was not a complete victory for the Creole teachers, it still demonstrated that their unions were efficient. On the one hand, the mobilisation took place before the 7 July 1950 Dehaene Decision by the Council of State. The latter posited that, in accordance with the right to strike enshrined in the 1946 Constitution and for want of a specific law for civil servants, it was up to department heads to regulate the aforementioned right.Footnote 91 On the other hand, the mobilisation borrowed from the workers’ movement and from its most classic repertoire. Initially meant to be short, the strike took on a strong symbolic significance as the action, through its unprecedentedness, ‘acquired the dimension of an “initiatory rupture”’ for the local teaching body, the prefectural authorities and public opinion. In one month, this inaugural gesture became a general strike, a ‘rare animal in the teaching corporation’.Footnote 92

That is because, from the start, the movement extended beyond the educational field. Supported by the press and those local representatives who came from the teaching profession, the conflict took on a political and ‘overseas’ dimension, as the prolonged strike unfolded simultaneously in all the DOMs. In so doing, the teachers’ struggle became a fight for the application of their historical conception of the principle of assimilation.Footnote 93 To quote from the works of William Gamson, the perception of a feeling of injustice drove the Guianese Creole teachers to identify with a Guianese and Creole ‘us’ in opposition to a Métropolitain and white ‘them’, who were felt to be the only group to have profited from the 1946 statutory change.Footnote 94 Ironically, these Guianese Creole ‘us’, generated by specific socio-professional claims to reassess the status of Guianese Creole teachers along the same lines as their mainland counterparts, pressured the government to create an ‘overseas teaching body’ within the civil service that was favoured with a salary supplemented by specific allowances and a special leave system. In other words, in the name of ‘equality for the overseas’,Footnote 95 these local teachers gained special career treatment inspired by the apparatus of the colonial handling of difference.

After a second mobilisation in the mid-1950s, supported by the Sixteenth Congress of General Council Presidents and the Association of French Mayors, they obtained a 40 per cent pay rise, a six-month administrative leave every five years and a privileged system of family allowances. The protest once again mobilised all the indigenous civil servants behind the teachers and was extended to other DOMs.Footnote 96 Concerning the similar case of teachers from Martinique, the former Vice-Rector of Martinique declared: ‘Who could blame them for having defended their cause so well?’Footnote 97 In French Guiana, as in the three other DOMs, the local teachers successfully imposed on the state their own perception of the terms and conditions of their integration within the Republic, founded on the right to enjoy all the material and symbolic advantages of the former cadres métropolitains.

This article produces three series of conclusions. First, embodied in the extension of the prefectoral institution from the summer of 1947, the transition of one of the oldest French possessions from colony to department was experienced by most of the contemporaneous actors as a process of decolonisation. The legacy of more than three centuries of colonisation, ‘the past of a country which has been, if I may say so, moulded, formed in the crucible of French culture’, as G. Monnerville said in 1946,Footnote 98 contributed to this path, so radically different to those taken in Algeria and Indochina during the same period. This element should prompt, on the one hand, a re-examination of studies that underestimate the scope of this original exit from colonial domination which was only taken by France in the aftermath of the Second World War.Footnote 99 On the other hand, it necessitates going beyond a still dominant vision of decolonisation as a period clearly delimited by the creation of a sovereign nation-state.

Secondly, the DOMs provide an example for the creation of an opaque colonial civil service status system conferring on the highest state representatives, such as the préfet or the vice-rector, powers vastly superior to those of their mainland counterparts. However, thanks to the agency to challenge colonial bureaucratic domination that the Creoles had long exercised and their ability to produce political and social mobilisations that could reconfigure state intervention, this overseas civil service benefited every agent posted to the new departments. For example, stipends became the same for all civil servants from 1957, as they all earned 40 per cent more than their mainland counterparts. Similarly, civil servants inherited from the colonial period a privileged leave system that remained in force until the late 1970s. It is through observation of individual trajectories and concrete technical arrangements that one may best understand the transition from the colonial past to a departmental present and avoid reducing the post-colonial trajectories of the DOMs to an historical anomaly.

Thirdly, the ideal of assimilation has indeed been a doctrine for these colonies to obtain the application of the same republican law. But it always went hand in hand with a project of integration through differentiation, or a ‘differentiated assimilation’.Footnote 100 In other words, in a territory such as French Guiana that had experienced all the vicissitudes of national history for more than three centuries, attachment to legislative identity and claims legitimising the exceptional nature of the overseas situation are but two faces of the same coin. Black Creole elites have always expected that reform would satisfy egalitarian and differentiated aspirations, and have never seen these two expectations as contradictory. In educational terms, this has meant improving the access of Guianese Creoles to positions of responsibility. Differentiated assimilation also included promoting the teaching of a Guianese Creole history, geography and language. The example of specific legislation for the departments of Alsace and Moselle recovered after the First World War was often used in the 1920s and 1930s to defend the republican character of this form of integration. In the minds of its promoters, Guiana's particularism was never seen as a challenge to national unity.

The highest representatives of the state have recently come to support this different conception of equality. In 2018, presenting the adaptation of laws as a ‘cornerstone of Overseas law’, Préfet Emmanuel Berthier, Overseas Ministry Director General, explained: ‘to adapt laws and regulations is . . . not only a faculty, it also is . . . an imperative as long as the Republic acknowledges, within the French people, the Overseas populations in a common ideal of liberty, equality, and fraternity’.Footnote 101 It is undeniable that this post-imperial moment contributed to the legal consecration of a greater diversity within the French nation and to securing a space for an overseas component in the national psyche.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Simone Montin for her crucial help in translating this article into English and to Itay Lotem for his insightful comments and suggestions. I also warmly thank Michael Collins and Sarah Stockwell for their valuable advice.

References

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