Beyond Ethnic Relations: Racial Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State in Republican France

ABSTRACT

To explain racial fissures in France today, one must revisit the structural and ideological failings in the origin of key Republican institutions. This article analyzes how the symbolic and material significance of labor structures imposed on black French citizens in the Third Republic produced differentiation in the value of labor to the nation. The production of social patterns and belief systems based on racial inequality were integrated into the structure of the French welfare state. The experience of black political actors, Hégésippe Légitimus, Blaise Diange, Lamine Senghor, and the state illustrates how the welfare state, as an engine of assimilation, defined a differential and racialized status for blacks during the process of crucial institution building. Although the majority of blacks in the French Empire were subjects during the Third Republic, the experience of those who were citizens indicates contradictions related to incorporation and race.

Notes

¹ Questions of religion and belonging are argued within the framework of laïcité (secularism) and discourse on immigrant integration (while often racialized in its own right) is often argued in the framework of assimilation.

² Feminist scholars, in particular, have exposed inherent gender inequality in the welfare system (e.g., Susan Pedersen’s [1995] Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945). Pedersen pointed out that the way family relations are constructed and understood influences the structure of the welfare state, ultimately structuring inequalities into a system set up to restructure social as well as monetary relations.

³ “Considering this myth in the context of greater France reveals how people in both metropole and colonies could share a political culture of revolutionary republicanism while inhabiting an imperial structure that in many ways undermined universal egalitarianism even while it trumpeted universalist principles” (Stovall 2007:103).

⁴ Limited economic opportunity for educated Antilleans became available as administrators in African colonies. Thus economic mobility and physical mobility of Guadeloupeans was tied to the perpetuation of state repression.

⁵ Laws imposed in the Revolutionary era reinforced racialized labor oppression in the Caribbean (Dubois 2004a). Légitimus’s political stance raised concerns and called for action to resist the position of Black workers as bound by racial particularisms.

⁶ The French Communist Party hesitated to follow Lenin’s anti-imperial policies until censured by the Comintern four years after Lenin’s anti-imperialism declared in his 21 points of 1920 (Cohen 1972:375).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dena Montague

Dena Montague is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at the Center for Black Studies Research. She previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University and was a Lecturer with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Her current research projects develop cross-comparative analyses of inequality in political economy with particular consideration for black populations in Western democracies. She was a 2015 Bay Area Video Coalition MediaMakers Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the recipient of the Marshall Memorial Fellowship; Coda Robles Fellowship from the Graduate Division of University of California Los Angeles; and the Alice Belkin Memorial Scholarship from the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles.