Pierre Boisson

Pierre Boisson was one of the ablest French colonial administrators of his generation: a village schoolteacher from Brittany who lost a leg at the front in the First World War and within twenty years rose to the highest posts in Africa. In June 1940 he hesitated over whether to lead the African colonies into continuing the fight alongside Britain, but chose obedience to Marshal Pétain. As the Vichy government’s High Commissioner in Dakar, in September 1940 he repelled the British and Gaullist expedition against the city, which made him a hero of Vichy and one of the men the Free French hated most. In November 1942 he brought West Africa over to the Allies, but after de Gaulle came to power in Algiers he was removed, arrested and charged with treason. He died in 1948 before he could be brought to trial.

Teacher and soldier

Pierre François Boisson was born on 19 June 1894 in Saint-Launeuc, a small village in the Côtes-du-Nord department of Brittany, into a family of teachers. He followed in his parents’ footsteps and was himself teaching at a school when the First World War broke out. In 1914 he was called up. He served as an infantry officer, fought in Artois, in the Argonne and at Verdun, and was wounded twice. His wounds led to the amputation of a leg and his discharge from the army. From then on his status as a disabled ex-serviceman and a veteran of Verdun was an important part of his authority.

In February 1917 he entered the Colonial School (École coloniale) in Paris, admitted without examination under a special intake for maimed soldiers. He graduated top of his year.

A career in the empire

From 1918 he was an administrator in the colonies, including in Brazzaville, the capital of French Equatorial Africa. In the mid-1920s he passed the demanding examination for the Colonial Inspectorate, the body that oversaw the administration of the entire empire, and carried out missions in French West Africa and Indochina. In the early 1930s he was chief of staff to the Minister of the Colonies, Albert Sarraut, who opened the way for him to the highest posts. In 1933 he became Secretary-General of West Africa in Dakar and joined the corps of governors.

In 1936 he took up the post of High Commissioner of the Republic in Cameroon, a mandated territory whose return the Third Reich was openly demanding. From the autumn of 1938 he was acting Governor-General of West Africa, and in May 1939 he was appointed Governor-General of Equatorial Africa, based in Brazzaville. He was regarded as an efficient, hard-working and authoritarian official, devoted to the idea of France’s mission in Africa and suspicious of the ambitions of other powers, Germany and Britain alike.

June 1940

The fall of France found him in Brazzaville. When Marshal Philippe Pétain asked the Germans for an armistice, many governors in Africa, left without instructions, declared their wish to fight on alongside the British. For several days Boisson considered forming an “African bloc” that would continue the war. The deciding factor was the stance of General Charles Noguès, Resident-General in Morocco and commander of the forces in North Africa, who after some hesitation submitted to the armistice. Boisson followed his lead. His biographers explain this by his deep-rooted sense of obedience and his veneration for the victor of Verdun.

On 25 June 1940 the government appointed him High Commissioner of French Africa, with authority over West Africa, Equatorial Africa and the mandates of Cameroon and Togo. He arrived in Dakar on 23 July, a few weeks after British aircraft had torpedoed the battleship Richelieu in the harbour as part of the operation against the French fleet whose symbol became the attack at Mers-el-Kébir. He left the appeals of General Charles de Gaulle from London unanswered. At the end of August, however, he lost a large part of his territory: Chad, Cameroon, Middle Congo and Ubangi-Shari went over to Free France.

Dakar

On 23 September 1940 a British squadron under Vice-Admiral John Cunningham appeared off Dakar, and with it de Gaulle and his troops. Boisson rejected the calls to rally, and his subordinates fired on de Gaulle’s emissaries. To the British ultimatum he replied with a single sentence: “France has entrusted Dakar to me. I shall defend Dakar to the end.” For three days the coastal batteries, the battleship Richelieu, submarines and fighters defended the city, until on 25 September the expedition withdrew. The clash, known as the Dakar expedition or Operation Menace, cost several hundred lives, civilians among them, and was the first battle of the war in which Frenchmen fought Frenchmen.

For Vichy it was a great success. Pétain sent Boisson his personal congratulations and a signed photograph, writing that under his authority Dakar was “setting an example of courage and loyalty”. On 2 October 1940 Boisson received a citation in the order of the nation (citation à l’ordre de la nation). De Gaulle never forgave him for it.

Vichy’s proconsul

In 1940–1942 Boisson governed West Africa as one of the most loyal executors of Vichy policy. He introduced the programme of the “National Revolution” in the colonies: the cult of the Marshal, youth organisations, the French Legion of Combatants of Black Africa, which he chaired from February 1941, and later the Service d’ordre légionnaire (SOL). The administration was purged of Jews, Freemasons, Gaullists and people of the left, while postal censorship and the political police kept watch on public opinion. Hundreds of people were prosecuted for Gaullist sympathies. Africans were punished with particular severity, and in 1942 death sentences were carried out on African “dissidents”. Boisson also applied Vichy’s antisemitic legislation. Historians, notably Pierre Ramognino, describe him as a “militant” supporter of the regime rather than an official who merely carried out orders.

At the same time Boisson saw himself as the guardian of West Africa against any foreign presence. The Germans did not get bases in Dakar: the so-called Paris Protocols, in which Admiral François Darlan agreed in 1941, among other things, to make them available, never came into force. After the war Boisson stressed in his defence that he had guarded the empire against the Germans just as much as against the British and the Free French.

Going over to the Allies

When the Allies landed in Morocco and Algeria on 8 November 1942, Boisson at first put West Africa on a defensive footing and broke off contact with the American consul in Dakar. But when Darlan came to terms with the Americans in Algiers, Boisson followed him: on 23 November he announced that West Africa was joining the Allies, and on 7 December 1942 he signed an agreement giving the Americans access to the port and airfields of Dakar. West Africa re-entered the war on the Allied side.

Boisson kept his post, and the Americans valued him as an efficient administrator. His position, however, depended on the balance of power in Algiers. When in June 1943 Generals Henri Giraud and de Gaulle set up the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers, the Gaullists demanded the removal of Vichy’s men from office, Boisson among them; after a few weeks he had to resign. At the beginning of July 1943 he was replaced in Dakar by the Gaullist Pierre Cournarie.

Arrest and death

When de Gaulle became the committee’s sole chairman in the autumn of 1943, Boisson was brought before a purge commission in Algiers. He was first placed under house arrest and then, at the end of 1943, arrested after being charged with treason before a military tribunal in Algiers. He was dismissed from the service without the right to a pension, and later expelled from the Legion of Honour. His arrest, like that of other former Vichy dignitaries, provoked protests from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who believed that men who had gone over to the Allies in 1942 deserved protection.

He was later taken to France and held in Fresnes prison, where he awaited trial before the High Court of Justice, which tried Vichy’s ministers and senior officials. The trial was repeatedly postponed. Pierre Boisson died suddenly on 20 July 1948, before he could be tried. Some works state that he was convicted of “national unworthiness”, but according to the French National Overseas Archives, which hold his papers, the case never reached a verdict. In 1957 his widow obtained the annulment of the decree that had stripped him of his pension.

Significance

Boisson belonged to that group of French colonial officials for whom the most important things were keeping the empire intact and obeying the lawful government. In 1940 that meant, for them, Pétain rather than de Gaulle. The defence of Dakar in September 1940 was one of the most painful defeats suffered by Free France and for a long time undermined American confidence in de Gaulle. His rule in West Africa shows, in turn, that Vichy was not merely the regime of occupied metropolitan France: authoritarian and antisemitic measures were also imposed where not a single German soldier stood. Historians today judge him more harshly than his defenders did after the war, but also as a tragic figure whose fate was decided between two Frances.