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Elizabeth Schmidt, Gary Wilder. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 404. Cloth $75.00, paper $25.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 112, Issue 1, February 2007, Page 289, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.1.289
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Gary Wilder's ambitious book is a provocative challenge to those who claim that the French nation-state between the two world wars was essentially republican in nature, and who dismiss French imperial practices as an awkward aberration. Wilder argues, rather, that the French nation-state of the Third Republic was essentially imperial, one in which Africans and other colonized peoples were “racialized and disenfranchised … within a republican framework” (p. 118). In other words, republican universalism and the particularism of a racist, exploitative, and authoritarian empire were simply diametric poles of the imperial nation-state. Defined by its internal contradictions, the imperial nation-state was simultaneously “modern and illiberal, republican and racist, welfarist and mercantilist” (p. 22).
To illustrate his point, Wilder focuses on two intellectual movements that strove to reform the empire between the two world wars. The first, colonial humanism, was promoted by French reformers who attempted to implement a more rational method of colonial administration, bolstered by a new concern for economic development. The second, Négritude, was a cultural nationalist movement led by African and Caribbean elites in Paris who challenged the assimilationist ideology that characterized the imperial nation-state, promoting in its place a transnational black aesthetic.
