French Politics, Culture & Society

This article attempts to write pioneering filmmaker Paulin Vieyra and his little-studied first film, Afrique sur Seine (1955), back into the history of French, African, and late colonial/early post-colonial cinema by exploring two interwoven threads. First, a close analysis of the film's technical and aesthetic affinities with the nascent French New Wave, particularly the work of ethnographer Jean Rouch; second, a contextualized reading of the film's anti-colonialist discourse and commentary on the status of Blacks in French society at the end of the colonial period, paying special attention to Vieyra's career arc, his political sensibilities, and the circumstances surrounding the film's production, extended disappearance from view, and reemergence.

The 1930 Centenary of French Algeria celebrated a triumphalist vision of Algerian history that offset France's supposed colonial successes against the long sweep of North African history. Professors of the Faculté des lettres d'Alger played a leading role in elaborating this narrative through a series of historical texts published for the occasion. In them, they drew on prior historical and geographical research to defend the legitimacy of French colonialism across North Africa. Though dominant, their interpretation of North African history was not universally accepted. The following year, it encountered its first substantial critique from within French academia. Viewed together, these competing North African historical narratives reveal French imaginaries of a consolidating African empire—and the possibilities of thinking beyond it—in the interwar period.

During the 1860s and early 1870s, a series of decrees famously redefined the legal identity and rights of Algerian Muslims and Jews. These decrees were part of a broader reappraisal of French colonial rule and the implications of France's founding treaty in Algeria, the Convention of 5 July 1830. This article traces the role of Ismaÿl Urbain and his push to gradually regenerate Algerian Muslims by formalizing a relationship between France and Islam, which echoed efforts to integrate Catholic and Protestant settlers and Algerian Jews within French colonial society. Yet, in his effort to safeguard Islam, and Muslim personal status law more specifically, as necessary tools of Franco-Muslim fusion, Urbain inadvertently helped to ensure the long-term marginalization of Algerian Muslims under French rule.

This article examines the refugee crisis of the 1930s and the internment camp system that France created, focusing on the experiences of Jewish refugees. France, the first European country to emancipate Jews, pursued policies that focused on German-speaking Central Europeans and disproportionately affected Jews. This examination has a dual focus; it considers political narratives and government policies alongside the experiences of Jewish refugees. Working with letters from refugees and government documents, it reveals information that complicates the idea of France as a land of asylum. It highlights the limits of France's commitment to human rights and how the internment camp system, later used to carry out the Holocaust in France, became a tool of the state. While a history of a specific place and time, this study sheds light on contemporary debates about human rights, refugee politics, and the right to asylum.

Before the 1931 Colonial Exposition and throughout its six-month run, Vietnamese militants in metropolitan France led an extensive anti-imperialist campaign with the exposition as their focal point. Political ephemera was their primary weapon in the war that erupted between activists who disseminated anti-imperialist texts, the newly-arrived immigrants they sought to recruit, and colonial administrators. This article investigates the role that gender played in the relationship between these groups of men by asking: How did normative ideas related to masculinity and race shape the strategies for the production and dissemination of activist texts? To answer this question, I analyze tracts and papillons, arguing that when Vietnamese militants protested the exposition, they contested dominant visions of masculinity that lay at the heart of the French imperial project.

Megan Brown, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022).

Natalya Vince, The Algerian War, the Algerian Revolution (Palgrave Macmillian, 2020).

Gwénaëlle Mainsant, Sur le trottoir, l’État : la police face à la prostitution (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2021).