French Colonialism Unmasked: The Vichy Years in French West Africa (review)

Scholarly attention has, in recent years, finally turned to the short period (1940-1943) during which the Vichy regime held sway in parts of the French Empire. Ruth Ginio's fascinating volume — part of a new series, 'France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization' — builds on Eric Jennings' groundbreaking Vichy in the Tropics (2001), which focuses on Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, and extends this field of research to include French West Africa (FWA). After the fall of France, the Empire represented a major opportunity for both Vichy and the Free French. The rallying of French Equatorial Africa to De Gaulle's cause gave the Free French a base from which to operate, and they put great efforts into gaining the support of the population of FWA. For Vichy, the Empire offered a means of illustrating the continued grandeur of France, and the colonies (unoccupied by the Germans) were the sole areas of 'French' territory where Vichy was in absolute control. Ginio skilfully outlines the complexity of this situation for the Vichy authorities, who vaunted the importance of the colonies, while simultaneously retreating from the (largely illusory) promise of assimilation that the despised Republic had offered to its 'natives': indeed, a balancing act between continuity and change in colonial policy marked the entire Vichy period. Transposing the ideology of the National Revolution to West Africa, Vichy lauded the role of 'traditional' African society: traditional chiefs and Islamic leaders were courted at the expense of African 'évolués' who had gained increasing prominence under the Third Republic. However, despite its distaste for educated Africans and what they represented, Vichy needed them to run the colonial administration: consequently, the 'évolués' were not fired en masse from their posts but they were often led to feel less valued by the new regime and, in certain instances, were victims of a more overt form of racism. Ginio convincingly argues that the relative brutality of the Vichy regime caused educated Africans to revise their attitudes towards France, leading them to be more demanding of their colonial masters once the Republic had been reinstated (although I would argue that Ginio occasionally equates the attitudes of an African elite with the position of Africans in general). The weakest aspect of the volume relates to questions of language and style. In particular, Ginio's text is riddled with undergraduate-level errors in French, e.g., 'la France colonial' (p. 16), 'la tragédy' (p. 20), 'la vie français' (p. 38). Furthermore, French quotations are often translated into a very stilted idiom, which is indicative of a more general problem with expression: in idiomatic English, one does not refer to 'the superior chief' nor to 'the purchase power' (p. 65), and a rigorous copy-editing process would surely have identified such problems. A consequence of this poor editing is that the occasionally jarring nature of the prose is allowed to interfere with the reader's understanding of the author's main arguments, which is disappointing in what is a genuinely informative and intelligent contribution to our knowledge of this neglected period of French (colonial) history.