The Brazzaville Conference

On 30 January 1944 in Brazzaville, the capital of French Equatorial Africa, General Charles de Gaulle opened a conference on the future of France’s African possessions. Convened by the French Committee of National Liberation, the proceedings lasted until 8 February. Their recommendations heralded far-reaching social and administrative reforms: the abolition of forced labour, the end of the separate and repressive legal regime for “natives”, local representative assemblies and the participation of the colonies in a future constituent assembly. At the same time, however, the conference explicitly rejected “any idea of autonomy” and any prospect, “even a distant one”, of self-government for the colonies. The common claim that the Committee “agreed” to sweeping imperial reforms at Brazzaville therefore needs qualifying: the conference was advisory, it adopted recommendations rather than legislation, and its programme was a reform of the empire, not a prelude to its end.

The empire that saved Free France

The choice of venue was no accident. In the summer of 1940, when metropolitan France capitulated, the first colony to declare for de Gaulle was Chad. Its governor, Félix Éboué, a descendant of slaves born in French Guiana, announced on 26 August 1940 that the colony was joining Free France, and Cameroon, the Congo and Ubangi-Shari followed suit. After the capture of Gabon in the autumn of 1940, the whole of French Equatorial Africa became Free French territory, and Brazzaville their first capital on French soil. Éboué became governor-general of the federation. It was from the African colonies that Leclerc’s columns set out for the Fezzan and Tripolitania, and it was from them that the rubber, timber and gold flowed with which Free France paid for its part in the war.

This effort came at a high price for the inhabitants. The war meant conscription into the units of African tirailleurs, requisitions, compulsory deliveries and the extension of forced labour – especially for gathering wild rubber, which Equatorial Africa supplied to the Allies after the loss of the plantations in Asia. Éboué, the first black governor-general in the French empire, had already issued a circular on a “new native policy” in November 1941, calling for respect for traditional African institutions, support for local elites and a curb on administrative abuses.

By the autumn of 1943 the whole empire had rallied to de Gaulle except Indochina, still governed on behalf of Vichy by Admiral Jean Decoux. After de Gaulle became sole chairman of the Committee in November 1943, the question of the colonies’ future became pressing. National aspirations were growing in North Africa, especially in Algeria and Tunisia; on 12 December 1943, in Constantine, de Gaulle announced that full citizenship would be granted to tens of thousands of Algerian Muslims. In Madagascar, France’s authority had been undermined by the British occupation of the island in 1942. Above all, however, the French had to reckon with the United States. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made no secret of his dislike of colonialism, invoked the principle of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter and openly considered placing Indochina under international trusteeship after the war. The Committee’s Commissioner for the Colonies, René Pleven, wanted to pre-empt this pressure: France would announce a reform programme of its own before anyone else sought to decide the fate of its empire in an international forum.

Governors around one table

The conference programme was prepared by Henri Laurentie, director of political affairs at the Colonial Commissariat and an advocate of turning the empire into a federation of “associated peoples”. His draft rejected the so-called colonial pact – the principle that colonies existed solely as markets and sources of raw materials for the mother country – and proposed state development planning, an investment fund financed from the French budget, the expansion of schooling and health care, and the gradual admission of elected representatives to the administration of the territories. The original intention was to invite the governors of all the free territories, but owing to communication difficulties the conference was limited to Africa. Chaired by Pleven, the proceedings were attended by 21 governors, 9 members of the Provisional Consultative Assembly from Algiers and 6 observers from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.

Not a single African sat at the table. A few representatives of the local elites, mainly from the circle of the so-called évolués in Brazzaville, merely submitted written opinions, which were read out during the session on customary law and the family. Historians point out that these too proposed a narrow path to citizenship through assimilation rather than self-rule.

In his opening address de Gaulle spoke of the “road to new times” on to which France should lead Africa. His most frequently quoted sentence held that in French Africa, “as in all the other territories where men live under our flag, there would be no progress that is progress if men, on their native soil, did not benefit from it morally and materially, if they could not rise little by little to the level at which they will be capable of taking part at home in the management of their own affairs”. The formula was deliberately ambiguous – it did not say when that level would be reached or who would decide.

The recommendations: reform yes, independence no

The recommendations adopted over the following nine days were boldest on social questions. They proposed the gradual abolition of forced labour over five years; the abolition of the “indigénat” – a system of administrative penalties that officials could impose on “subjects” without trial; wider access for Africans to posts in the administration (with senior posts reserved for French citizens); equal pay for equal work; the development of schooling and health care; freedom of marriage for women; and support for industrialisation. Politically, they recommended the creation of local councils and assemblies, representation of the colonies in the future constituent assembly and the establishment of a federal assembly that was to “affirm and guarantee the inviolable political unity of the French world”.

The limit of reform was set by a sentence that became the most famous passage of the document: “The aims of the civilising work accomplished by France in the colonies exclude any idea of autonomy, any possibility of evolution outside the French bloc of the Empire; the eventual establishment, even in the distant future, of self-government in the colonies is to be rejected.” It was also recommended that teaching be conducted exclusively in French. The historian Xavier Yacono wrote that the ideal remained for “the French African to become an African Frenchman”; Camille Lefebvre judges that the conference promised the empire’s inhabitants economic, social and political progress without deciding on any concrete measure.

From Brazzaville to the French Union

For de Gaulle the conference was above all a political act in wartime. It showed the Allies that the Committee in Algiers exercised real authority over the empire and had its own plan for its future, and it showed Africans that their part in the fighting would be rewarded. Éboué, the host of the proceedings and the inspiration behind many of the recommendations, did not live to see them put into practice: he died in Cairo on 17 May 1944, and in 1949 his ashes were laid in the Panthéon in Paris.

Some of the promises were fulfilled within two years. After the liberation of France, Africans for the first time elected their own deputies to the constituent assembly; among them were Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast. In 1945–1946 the indigénat was abolished; the law named after Houphouët-Boigny, of 11 April 1946, prohibited forced labour, and the Lamine Guèye law of 7 May 1946 granted citizenship to the inhabitants of the colonies. The constitution of the Fourth Republic of 27 October 1946 replaced the empire with the French Union. Voting rights, however, remained unequal, and Paris retained the decisive powers.

At the same time, the line drawn at Brazzaville – reform yes, leaving the “French bloc” no – proved impossible to hold. As early as 1 December 1944, at the Thiaroye camp near Dakar, French gendarmes and soldiers opened fire on African tirailleurs demanding back pay; the number killed is disputed. In May 1945 protests by the Muslim population at Sétif and Guelma in Algeria were bloodily suppressed, in 1946 the war in Indochina began, and in 1947 an uprising broke out in Madagascar. In 1958 the French Community replaced the Union, and in 1960 most of the colonies of French West and Equatorial Africa gained independence – in the process of the decolonisation of Africa that the conference had hoped to forestall.

Place in the war

The Brazzaville Conference belongs to the same family of wartime declarations on the post-war order as the Atlantic Charter: it was a promise made at a time when the empires needed the men and raw materials of their colonies. The war accelerated changes that nobody at Brazzaville was willing to concede – in return for mobilisation, forced labour and the blood of African soldiers, the colonies began to demand not only reform but also the right to decide their own future. In French memory Brazzaville has remained a symbol of a new policy towards Africa; in African memory it is also proof that in 1944 Paris was not yet prepared to contemplate their independence.