Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 by Frederick Cooper (review)

This monograph offers a new dimension of analysis with regard to choices and decisions about citizenship in France’s sub-Saharan African territories. These choices, which were essential during the late colonial period, call into question the narrative of African leaders seeking the nation-state as principal model of identification. The result is highly convincing, magisterial, and elegantly written. The analysis also sheds light on the complicated interplay between debates at the political top, conflicts and resolutions on the territorial level, and the practicalities of creating and adapting civil status on the ground.

Cooper’s book is not a manual on French decolonization, although it completes the existing state of analysis by Chafer and others, including Cooper’s own Decolonization and African Society.¹ Notwithstanding the fact that the book discusses “French Africa,” it is mainly concerned with processes in Senegal and Dakar, not with territorial developments in, say, Dahomey, Upper Volta, or Niger (a priority that is fully justified, given the wealth of material already in the book). On the conceptual level, it offers an excellent discussion about France’s policy regarding citizenship as it was defined in Paris and Dakar and convincing evidence that challenges the apparent dichotomy between empire and nation-state (431).

The many impressive elements of Cooper’s narrative include a brief overview of citizenship in the French (and French imperial) context (13–18), a case study about electoral rights for women in Senegal, as part of a discussion of postwar developments (46–50); a masterful analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s arguments at the Constituent National Assembly in 1946 and elsewhere (80–83); and a view about the fundamental uncertainty besetting all of the groups within the assembly (102–103). A particularly important chapter that discusses the definition of citizenship and the status of imperial citizenship follows (126–131, 153–163). In his fourth chapter, Cooper studies African mobilization—for example, through the battle against forced labor and the installation of parallel, grassroots administrative structures in the territories (168–174)—and claims for equality in labor issues (179–185).

The book then presents an insightful discussion of the plans and projects for reform of the French Union, working toward a federal solution of some kind (192–194). Interpreting the loi-cadre of 1956, Cooper revisits the old claim of “territorialization” and the misunderstandings that characterized the reform process (220–226, 239–240). En passant, Cooper submits a useful appreciation of “Eurafrica” as a political idea of the period, and a new explanation for the conflict between Charles de Gaulle and Sékou Touré at the occasion of the Constitutional Referendum of September 28, 1958 (264–270, 311–324). Especially impressive are Cooper’s discussions of the complex conditions under the French Community from 1958, the idea of multinationalism, and the process of creating separate citizenships after the explosion of the Community.

Cooper’s monograph does not present a particular multidisciplinary approach; the book does not need one to interest historians concerned by interdisciplinary questions. Cooper describes legislative processes in ways that illuminate the history of laws about citizenship, and he engages with the concept of the nation-state (pointing out its relative importance for African leaders) in ways that are mindful of the interpretations current in political science. The three case studies that Cooper presents in the final part of the book are also crucial, for political scientists and sociologists, to an understanding of the relevant political processes—the political crisis of 1962 in Senegal, the French immigration policies of 1974, and the politics of ethnonational exclusion in Côte d’Ivoire until 2011. As a historian of citizenship and empire, Cooper sets a standard that is likely to last for a long time.