IV.

French Decolonization

The nature of French colonial rule influenced the process of transferring power. In the 20th century the French had no tradition of preparing their dependencies for self-government. The French preferred to aim at the assimilation of individual colonial subjects into the French Republic by according them the same legal and political status as the citizens of metropolitan France.

After World War II the new constitution of the Fourth Republic created the French Union. Overseas territories would be part of a single indivisible republic, freely consented to, and citizens of the Union would receive greater representation in the French National Assembly in Paris; local assemblies in the colonies would only be advisory bodies. Qualifications for French citizenship were, however, subject to controls and the number of representatives from overseas France was strictly limited. The first challenge to the French Union came in 1946 in Indochina, where Vietnamese nationalists led by the Communist Ho Chi Minh seized power in the north of Vietnam. After a long and bloody war to incorporate the territories of Indochina into the French Union, the French were defeated in 1954.

France was then immediately involved in another large-scale conflict, the Algerian War of Independence. Algeria was an emotive issue for many of the French as it had been regarded as part of France in the same way as metropolitan departments. It had a large settler population, who were determined to remain part of France. As the conflict became more intense, with the use of torture on both sides, the first stage of French decolonization of black Africa took place in 1956. The passing of the loi cadre, an enabling law to permit constitutional change, led to the first moves towards self-government, with the establishing of territorial assemblies with real power. This abandonment of the centralization entailed in the French Union stemmed from the growing African realization that real power could not be obtained in Paris but only in the territorial capitals.

Pressures for change from within Africa were accompanied by the growing belief in France that the French Union could not be maintained without arousing international opposition. These changes in black Africa led in 1958 to the creation of the French Community, the replacement for the French Union under the Fifth Republic. The French Community invested control of defence and foreign policy in France, but gave internal self-government to its other members. All black African territories were offered membership or independence, but any territory choosing the latter would forfeit French assistance. Only Guinea chose independence.

The establishment of the Fifth Republic followed a military coup d’état in Algeria which, with the prospect of an army takeover in Paris, led to the constitutional transfer of power to General Charles de Gaulle. It took de Gaulle nearly four years to bring the fighting in Algeria to an end with the Evian Accords in 1962 that promised Algeria independence. By then the survival of an independent Guinea had led to demands from other black African states for independence outside the French Community. With de Gaulle keen to strengthen France’s role in Europe and the modernization of French industry under way, the economic and political attractions of formal empire were no longer so strong. All French black African possessions became independent in 1960, though the Franc Zone maintained a measure of economic control.