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Abstract
During the Second World War, Martinique and Guadeloupe became strategically important to Great Britain and the United States, who feared that the Nazis might gain valuable refueling ports, as well as French gold and battleships, if the islands fell under German control. The US Navy drew up plans for a possible invasion of Martinique but the crisis was averted with the signing of a “gentleman's agreement” with Admiral Robert, the Vichy authority on the islands. Martinicans and Guadeloupeans suffered during the war because they were subject to a naval blockade and also the racism of French sailors stationed in the Antilles. Despite the difficulties of this time it is often idealized as a golden age of self-sufficiency in contrast to the postwar consumer society overly dependent on metropolitan France. Critics of the vote for departmentalization in 1946 have interpreted this choice as a pathological decision to embrace French identity at the expense of an authentic Antillean identity. A historical re-examination of this period demonstrates that Antilleans were not choosing the material comforts of departmentalization but were making pragmatic choices about the best path to equality in a changing postcolonial order. Although the United States has been largely forgotten in the debates about departmentalization, the US role in the Caribbean was among the complex set of circumstances precipitating the historic vote of 1946.
Notes
1. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 88.
2. See Cilas Kemedjio, “Rape of Bodies, Rape of Souls: From the Surgeon to the Psychiatrist, from the Slave Trade to the Slavery of Comfort in the Work of Edouard Glissant,” 68.
3. See also the case of a Guadeloupean soldier murdered by US troops in the aftermath of WWI; see Dominique Chathuant, “Nantes, 1919: le meurtre du soldat Etilce était-il raciste?” http://www.rue89.com/2008/08/08/nantes-1919-le-meurtre-du-soldat-etilce-etait-il-raciste, (accessed 19 July 2012).
4. Antillean men could vote in elections and send deputies and senators to Paris before 1940. The main institutional change brought about by the “Assimilation Law” of March 1946 was that the new departments would be overseen by a Prefect rather than a Governor reporting to the Minister of Colonies; as in metropolitan France, women could also vote in postwar elections.
5. Most historical studies of French decolonization have focused on Algeria or Indochina; for recent historical analysis of the DOMs, see Robert Aldrich and John Connell, France's Overseas Frontier. Départements et Territoires d'Outre Mer.
6. Laurent Dubois, “History's Quarrel: The Future of the Past in the French Caribbean,” 219.
7. Kamal Salhi writes about the problematic relationship Créolist writers have with the past in “Rethinking Francophone Culture: Africa and the Caribbean between History and Theory,” 9–29.
8. See Jacques Adélaide Merlande, “Va-t-on céder les Antilles françaises aux Etats-Unis?,” 161–65.
9. See Brenda G. Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment; Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940; Frances Maclean, “They Didn't Speak our Language; We Didn't Speak Theirs,” 44–55.
10. Martin Thomas has demonstrated the importance of using State Department records and US Consular files in understanding the postwar period in French West Africa and US involvement with decolonization in the French Empire in his “Innocent Abroad? Decolonisation and US Engagement with French West Africa, 1945–56,” 47–73.
11. Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle. Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade.
12. See Richard D.E. Burton, “‘Nos journées de juin,’: the Historical Significance of the Liberation of Martinique (June 1943),” who argues that Martinicans’ concerns about France were resolved with the banishment of the Vichy regime, 235.
13. See the oral testimonies of dissidents sent to train at Fort Dix in Euzhan Palcy's documentary film, “Parcours de dissidents.”
14. Notable exceptions include Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies and Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution. Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origin of the Post-Cold War Era.
15. See Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution.
16. Harvey R. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees. Trinidad and the United States Occupation, 52.
17. Senegal was an exception to this; Senegal had been under French influence since the 17th century and had representative rights in the National Assembly.
18. They were not alone in this decision; Antilleans’ instinctive mistrust of Vichy's ideology makes it all the more shocking that none of the Deputies or Senators from the Antilles voted against giving Petain full constitutional powers on the 10th of July 1940. See Entretien avec Eric Jennings, “Les Antilles de 1940 à 1944: Vichy vaincu par la pression populaire,” par Axel Gyldén, L'Express, 27 Sept. 2004.
19. There has been much speculation about Sorin's choice to support Vichy in 1940 ; after proclaiming his allegiance to De Gaulle after his broadcast from London on June 18th, by the end of June Sorin had sided with Admiral Robert in Martinique under Vichy's authority. Some have suggested that he was worried about reprisals against his in-laws, who were British Jews living in France, but Sorin never explained himself before his death in 1970. See Eliane Sempaire, La dissidence an tan Sorin (1940–1943), 29. Historian Camille Chauvet reminds us, however, that Admiral Robert was not appointed to his position by Pétain but was an official of the Third Republic, and therefore was not simply symptomatic of an authoritarian interlude in French history. See Chauvet'stestimony in Palcy's film Parcours de dissidents.
20. See Fitzroy André Baptiste, War, Cooperation, and Conflict. The European Possessions in the Caribbean, 1939–1945 and William L. Langer, Our Vichy Gamble.
21. Armand Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 16.
22. Centre des Archives d'Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence (hereafter CAOM), FM 2285/2, “La ‘Question des Antilles’ de Juin 1940 à Mai 1942. Accords Franco-Americains y Relatifs.”
23. V. Harwood Blocker, American Vice Consul, July 30, 1940, Letter to the Secretary of State, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA) RG 59, Box 5192, 851.92/1.
24. On the Vichy Navy, see Martin Thomas, “After Mers-el-Kebir: The Armed Neutrality of the Vichy French Navy, 1940–43,” 643–70.
25. Harwood Blocker to Sumner Welles, September 26, 1940 NARA RG 59, Box 5192, 851B.00/22.
26. See Dominique Chathuant, “La Guadeloupe dans l'obédience de Vichy, 1940–1943,” 3–40.
27. Harwood Blocker to Sumner Welles, November 13, 1940, NARA RG 59 851B.00/29.
28. “On the political and economic situation of Guadeloupe since the France-German Armistice,” For the American Press, NARA, Record Group 59, 851b.00/18, September 3, 1940. For a discussion of this episode, see also Eric T. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics. Petain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 121–2.
29. V. Harwood Blocker to Sumner Welles, September 3, 1940,NARA, Record Group 59, 851b.00/18.
30. For more on the culture of Vichy functionaries, see Marc Olivier Baruch, Servir L’État français. L'administration en France de 1940 à 1944, Paris: Fayard, 1997.
31. Marcel Malige, American Consul, to Sumner Welles, April 12, 1943. NARA RG 59, 851B.20/254.
32. Eric Jennings has written a fine study of the Vichy regime in Guadeloupe, chronicling the ways in which the “National Revolution” was implanted in Guadeloupe and how ordinary men and women resisted its oppression.
33. The American Vice-Consul noticed this as early as August 1940, and indicated that only those “negroes” who would toe the Vichy line were able to remain in their posts.
34. Jean Massip, “La Résistance aux Antilles,” p. 67. See also Eliane Sempaire's testimony in “Parcours de Dissidents” and Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944, especially chapters 4 and 5.
35. Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 30.
36. Pierre Aliker is the younger brother of André Aliker, a famous journalist murdered in 1934, and the co-founder along with Aimé Césaire of the Parti progressiste martiniquais (PPM) in 1958. See Palcy, “Parcours de dissidents.”
37. Joby Fanon, De la Martinique à l'Algérie et à l'Afrique, 57.
38. Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 22–3.
39. Joby Fanon, De la Martinique, 55.
40. Eric Jennings, “La Dissidence aux Antilles (1940–1943),” 55–71.
41. Eliane Sempaire, “Parcours de dissidents.”
42. Joby Fanon, De la Martinique, 60.
43. Lucien Abenon, Les Dissidents des Antilles dans les Forces Françaises Libres Combattantes, 1940–1945, 89.
44. Abenon, Les Dissidents, 62.
45. “Parcours de dissidents.”
46. Abenon, Les Dissidents, 104.
47. Abenon, Les Dissidents, 101.
48. Jean Cazenave de la Roche, “Tension in the French West Indies,” 565.
49. Message de Chef du gouvernement, 20 Mai 1943, Télégramme à Amiral, Béarn, signé Pierre LAVAL, CAOM Fonds Ministériels, 2285/4
50. Télégramme pour CHEF du GOUVERNEMENT, signé Amiral Robert, CAOM Fonds Ministériels 2285/4, 12 juillet 1943.
51. Jennings, “Dissidence aux Antilles,” 63.
52. Richard D.E. Burton, “‘Nos journées de juin’: the Historical Significance of the Liberation of Martinique (June 1943),” 231.
53. Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 76–83.
54. Richard D.E. Burton, “Nos journées de juin,” 233.
55. Burton, “Nos journées de juin,” 235.
56. Manville, Antilles sans fard, 43.
57. Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, 69.
58. Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, 67.
59. Lucien Abenon, Dissidents des Antilles, 167.
60. Lettre anonyme, 4/11/45, Nantes. CAOM, Fonds Ministériels, 2293/11.
61. Maeve McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau : Recovering Memory, 21.
62. H. Adlai Murdoch, “The Language(s) of Martinican Identity : Resistance to Vichy in the Novels of Raphaël Confiant,”L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 47, No. 1 (2007), 75.
63. See Kemedjio, “Rape of Bodies, Rape of Souls: From the Surgeon to the Psychiatrist, from the Slave Trade to the Slavery of Comfort in the Work of Edouard Glissant,” 51.
64. This is a choice that Richard D.E. Burton seems not to have considered when he writes: “small wonder that, malnourished and emerging from three years of victimization by the “bad white man” in the double guise of béké and Vichyiste, they should have clamored more urgently than ever before the the “good mother” France and the “good white man” Schoelcher-de Gaulle to take them forthwith to his/her bosom and receive them totally into the transcontinental family of Greater France,” in “‘Maman-France Doudou’: Family Images in French West Indian Colonial Discourse,” 86.
65. William Boelhower, “The Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” 97.