The Un-European Idea: Vichy and Eurafrica in the Historiography of Europeanism

Abstract

Imperialist and collaborationist conceptions of Europeanisms have generally been excluded from mainstream historiography with reference to their alleged un-Europeanness. However, by discussing the ideas and writings of two French Europeanists—Louis Le Fur’s and René Viard’s—in the years 1940–41, I argue that it is precisely their Vichyite and imperialist conceptions of Europeanness that underpin their political ideas of a united Europe. Their works therefore call into question a prevailing historiographical narrative of Europeanism as a benign counterpoint to a dark European past. Since, as demonstrated in this article, French Europeanist visions have often been bound up with both collaborationist and imperialist interests, I argue for the need to develop a more inclusive and critical historiographical perspective on the history of Europeanism.

Notes

1. Jean-Luc Chabot, Aux origines intellectuelles de l’Union européenne: L’Idée d’Europe unie de 1919 à 1939 (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2005), 249–53.

2. Wolfram Kaiser, “Bringing People and Ideas Back In: Historical Research on the European Union,” in Reflections on European Integration: 50 Years of the Treaty of Rome, ed. David Phinnemore and Alex Warleigh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 34, 36.

3. Examples of critical studies on the history of Europeanism and the use of this history are discussed successively in this article. See notes 4, 6, 20, 22, 76 and 78.

4. Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000), 28–29.

5. Shore, Building Europe, 57–58.

6. There is a rich flora of research on the construction and use of history, memory and historical myth in the European Union political project. A few examples that have been of use in writing this article are Lothar Probst, “Founding Myths in Europe and the Role of the Holocaust,” New German Critique 90 (Autumn 2003): 45–58; Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, eds., A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York: Berghahn, 2010); Bo Stråth, ed., Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community (Brussels: PIE Lang, 2000).

7. Shore, Building Europe, 26–27. Alongside historiography, Shore points to EU institutions such as the Parliament, the Commission, but also its civil servants, the Euro, educational exchange programs and the EU flag and hymn as agents that help us imagine Europe as a political unity and community. To a certain extent they are also what actually constitute the EU.

8. Monica Sassatelli, “Imagined Europe: The Shaping of a European Cultural Identity through EU Cultural Policy,” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002): 440.

9. Élisabeth du Réau, L’idée d’Europe au XXe siècle, 2d ed. (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1996); Heikki Mikkeli, Europe as an Idea and as an Identity (London: Macmillan, 1998); John McCormick, Europeanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). McCormick writes about the war, but doesn’t mention any Europeanist ideas originating from this period.

10. Brent F. Nelsen and Alexander Stubb, eds., The European Union Series: Readings on the Theory and Practice of European Integration, 3d ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3, i, ix. The series is “designed to provide an authoritative library on the European Union” and intends to record “a conversation among political leaders and scholars about the possibility, purpose, and process of unifying Europe.”

11. Bernard Bruneteau, L’Europe nouvelle de Hitler: une illusion des intellectuels de la France de Vichy (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2003), 332.

12. Michael Salewski, “Ideas of the National Socialist Government and Party” in Walter Lipgens, ed., Documents on the History of European Integration. Volume I. Continental Plans for European Union 1939–1945 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 54.

13. Bruneteau, L'Europe nouvelle de Hitler, 17.

14. Walter Lipgens, “General Introduction,” in Lipgens, Documents on the History of European Integration, 11.

15. Phinnemore and Warleigh, Reflections on European Integration, 28.

16. Adekeye Adebajo and Kaye Whiteman, eds., The EU and Africa: from Eurafrique to Afro-Europa (London: Hurst, 2012); Charles-Robert Ageron, “L’idée d’Eurafrique et le débat colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deux-guerres,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1975): 446–75; Désirée Avit, “La question de l’Eurafrique dans la construction de l’Europe de 1950 à 1957,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 77 (2005): 17–23; Marie-Thérèse Bitsch and Gérard Boussuat, eds., L’Europe unie et l’Eurafrique: De l’idée d’Eurafrique à la convention de Lomé I (Brussels: Bruylant, 2005); Liliana Ellena, “Political Imagination, Sexuality and Love in the Eurafrican Debate,” European Review of History 11.2 (2004): 241–72; Jonathan Gosnell, “France, Empire, Europe: Out of Africa?” Comparative Studies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26.2 (2006); Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: An Untold Story (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, “Building Eurafrica: Reviving Colonialism through European Integration, 1920–1960,” paper presented at the EUSA Twelfth Biennial International Conference (2011); Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, ”Bringing Africa as a ‘Dowry to Europe’,” Interventions 13.3 (2011): 443–63; Guy Martin, “Africa and the Ideology of Eurafrica: Neo-Colonialism or Pan-Africanism?” The Journal of Modern African Studies 20.2 (1982): 221–38; Yves Montarsolo, L’Eurafrique: contrepoint de l’idée d’Europe: le cas français de la fin de la deuxième guerre mondiale aux négociations des traités de Rome (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2010); Karis Muller, “‘Concentric Circles’ at the Periphery of the European Union,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 46.3 (2000): 322–35; Karis Muller, “Shadows of Empire in the European Union,” The European Legacy 6.4 (2001): 439–51; Karis Muller, “The Birth and Death of Eurafrica,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 3.1 (2000): 4–17; Wolfgang Schmale, “Before Self-Reflexivity: Imperialism and Colonialism in the Early Discourses of European Integration,” in European Identity and the Second World War, ed. Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 186–201.

17. For an overview of these themes, see Schmale, “Before Self-Reflexivity,” 189–93.

18. John McCormick, Europeanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Veronika Heyde, De l’esprit de la Résistance jusqu’à l’idée de l’Europe (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010).

19. McCormick, Europeanism, 29.

20. Konrad H. Jarausch, “Nightmares or Daydreams,” in Pakier and Stråth, A European Memory? 316, 309.

21. <http://europa.eu/about-eu/eu-history/index_en.htm > (8 June 2011).

22. Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, “European Nationalism and European Union,” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 179.

23. Vittore Collina, “La réaction au positivisme juridique après la Première Guerre mondiale. Louis Le Fur et le droit naturel,” in Pour la paix en Europe. Institutions et société civile dans l’entre-deux-guerres, ed. Marta Petricioli and Donatella Cherubibi (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007), 489.

24. Grand Dicitionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1984); Guillaume Sacriste and Antoine Vauchez, “The Force of International Law: Lawyers’ Diplomacy on the International Scene in the 1920s,” Law & Social Inquiry 32.1 (2007): 89, 91; Bruneteau, L’Europe nouvelle de Hitler, 271.

25. Bruneteau, L'Europe nouvelle de Hitler, 273.

26. Josef L. Kunz, “Natural-Law Thinking in the Modern Science of International Law,” The American Journal of International Law 55.4 (October 1961): 954; Sacriste and Vauchez, “The Force of International Law,” 91.

27. Richard Hudson, review of État Féderal et Confédération d’États, by Louis Le Fur, Political Science Quarterly 12.2 (June 1897): 314–16; G. W. Keeton, review of Les grands problèmes du droit, by Louis Le Fur, The Modern Law Review 2.1 (June 1938): 85–86; John B. Whitton, review of Recueil de Textes de Droit International Public, by Louis Le Fur and Georges Chklaver, The American Journal of International Law 22.3 (July 1928): 709–10.

28. Antonin Cohen, “De la révolution nationale à l’Europe fédérale. Les métamorphoses de la troisième voie aux origines du mouvement fédéraliste français: La Fédération (1943–1948),” Le mouvement social 217 (October–December 2006): 58–59.

29. Bruneteau, L'Europe nouvelle de Hitler, 25.

30. Louis Le Fur, Éléments de droit international public (Paris: Daloz, 1941); Louis Le Fur, “Le Linceul de pourpre des régimes déchus,” Je suis partout, 7 March 1941.

31. Pascal Blanchard and Gilles Boëtsch, “La France de Pétain et l’Afrique: Images et propagandes coloniales,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 28.1 (1994): 7.

32. Given the turn the war took, the prospects of this committee were from the start pretty gloomy. Bruneteau, L’Europe nouvelle de Hitler, 98.

33. René Viard, De Charlemagne à Pétain (Mille ans de vocation maritime et coloniale française) (Paris: Larose, 1943); René Viard, La fin de l’empire colonial français (Paris: Larose, 1963).

34. Louis Le Fur, “La France devant l’Europe,” in France 1941. La Révolution nationale constructive. Un bilan et un programme, ed. Raymond Postal (Paris: Alsatia, 1941), 182; hereafter cited in the text.

35. Collina, “La réaction au positivisme juridique après la Première Guerre mondiale,” 489–91.

36. René Viard, L’Eurafrique. Pour une nouvelle économie européenne (Paris: Ferdinand Sorlot, 1942), 124, 75; hereafter cited in the text.

37. Ageron, “L’idée d’Eurafrique et le débat colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deux-guerres,” 446, 457.

38. Tamir Bar-On, “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16.3 (December 2008): 333.

39. Muller, “The Birth and Death of Eurafrica,” 4.

40. Sylvie Lefevre-Dalbin, “L’idée d’Eurafrique dans les années 1950. L’exemple des projets économiques franco-allemands,” in L’Europe communautaire au défi de la hiérarchie, ed. Bernard Bruneteau and Youssef Cassis (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007): 83.

41. Gosnell, “France, Empire, Europe.”

42. Lucia Bonfreschi, “Jean Monnet et le retour au pouvoir du général de Gaulle en 1958,” in The Road to a United Europe: Interpretations of the Process of European Integration, ed. Morten Rasmussen and Ann-Christina L. Knudsen (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009): 58.

43. Avit, “La question de l’Eurafrique dans la construction de l’Europe de 1950 à 1957.”

44. Louis Le Fur, Guerre juste et juste paix (Paris: Pedone, 1920), 6–8, 75–79, quoted in Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 323.

45. Ellena,“Political Imagination, Sexuality and Love in the Eurafrican Debate,” 242.

46. Louis Le Fur, “Les conditions d’existence d’une Union européenne,” Revue de droit international (1930), 81.

47. Bruneteau, L'Europe nouvelle de Hitler, 113–14.

48. Cohen, “De la révolution nationale à l’Europe fédérale,” 53; Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998), xiv; William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 29–30.

49. Bo Stråth, “Europe as a Discourse,” in Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, ed. Bo Stråth (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000), 14, 21.

50. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 29–30.

51. Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, “A European Memory,” in Pakier and Stråth, A European Memory? 1.

52. Bruneteau, L'Europe nouvelle de Hitler, 22–23.

53. Bruneteau, L'Europe nouvelle de Hitler, 22, 334, 15, 11.

54. Bar-On,”Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite,” 327–28, 337, 342.

55. Jarausch,“Nightmares or Daydreams,” 316.

56. See, for example, Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 99.

57. See note 16.

58. Hansen and Jonsson, “Building Eurafrica”; Martin, “Africa and the Ideology of Eurafrica.”

59. Chabot, Aux origines intellectuelles de l’Union européenne, 303; Muller, “Shadows of Empire in the European Union,” 449.

60. Gosnell, “France, Empire, Europe,” 205, 210–11.

61. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 22, 1.

62. Jarausch, “Nightmares or Daydreams,” 319–20.