“They murdered our brothers in the first war in Morocco, the Great War, in the Rif and Syria, in Madagascar and Indonesia.”
-- Lamine Senghor, 1927
The post-World War II era constitutes a privileged moment in the historiography of anti-imperialism, decolonization, Black internationalism, and Third World solidarity. Many of the initial iterations and founding moments of these movements, however, can be traced back to interactions between peoples from the far corners of the empires who came into contact and mobilized against imperialism during the interwar period in various European capitals. In fact, those European capitals offered a hub for anticolonial militantism, as students, workers, conscripted soldiers, and other activists converged in the metropole, before and during the Great War. In the heart of interwar Europe then, a burgeoning anti-imperial (and communist) coalition of various movements and figures was forged, shaking the imperial foundations of the world order.
Using Lamine Senghor (not to be confused with Senegal’s first president Léopold Senghor) as an anchor figure of this period, this article revisits the anti-imperial moment in interwar France, highlighting the transracial and transcontinental junctions and solidarity coalitions amidst France’s racial anxieties and attempts to preserve the prestige of a declining empire. This is a story of transnational and transracial solidarity, foregrounding the linkages between anti-imperial activists from West Africa, North Africa, the Levant, and Indochina with French communist and leftist circles. For these coalitions, the mobilization against the Rif War became one the main themes of the anti-imperial agenda of the time. This article is based on primary sources located in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence and the archives of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam.
The Foundations of an Anti-Imperial World Order in Interwar Europe
The end of the Great War saw a reconfiguration of the world order, with the advent of the League of Nations. Three empires (Ottoman, German, and Austro-Hungarian) disappeared from the world map. It was however clear to the colonized world that the new sets of institutions were not designed for, or capable of delivering emancipation. In fact, self-determination, as Woodrow Wilson envisioned it, was never meant to be all-encompassing.[1] The League of Nations’ Mandate system was a clear example of the restrictive nature of the principle of self-determination and an emerging international order predicated on the perpetuation of global racial hierarchy. In such a context of disappointment regarding the League of Nations in interwar Europe, anti-colonialist movements crystallized around the formation of a new and alternative set of coalitions and institutions, including the League Against Imperialism (hereafter, LAI or the League). The League formed as a solidarity movement and provided a counterpoint to the League of Nations,[2] becoming therefore the first attempt to create a truly anti-imperial and anti-capitalist global coalition.[3]
The League Against Imperialism was founded during a congress in Brussels in February 1927. The meeting convened some 174 delegates from 34 countries and representing 134 organizations.[4] Delegates from around the world gathered in Brussels to found a truly global anti-imperialst organization. The meeting included, for instance, delegates of the ANC from South Africa. From Morocco, Ahmed Hassan Mattar attended, representing Presse de l’Arabie. Messali Hadj, Hadjali Abdelkader, and Chedli Ben Mustapha participated as delegates of Etoile Nord-Africaine, an independentist movement for Algeria. Destour, a Tunisian political party, participated in the 1927 Brussels congress as well. Persia had a number of representatives, including Suleiman Mirza, a member of the parlimanet for Parti republicain, the socialist Mahmoud Aga Riza, and Ahmed Assadoff and Mortesa Alawi from the Parti republicain revolutionaire. Bakri Bey from the Syrian National Committee was there, as well as a delegation from the labor party of Palestine. Jamal al-Husayni represented the Arab National Congress of Palestine.[5] Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta from Indonesia, and Nehru representing the Indian National Congress attended the meeting as well.[6] There were also delegates from the Chinese Kuomintang, the American Civil Liberty Union, as well as labor unions and student organizations across Europe, the Caribbbean, and Latin America.
The meeting, according to its agenda, sought to “[build] a permanent international organization in order to link up all forces combatting international imperialism and in order to ensure their effective support for the fight of emancipation conducted by oppressed nations.”[7] In its founding manifesto, the League stated its goal as the achievement of “Complete independence for China, India, Indochina, for the European countries, for Negro Africa, for the Latin-America and other semi-colonial countries, [and] complete right of self-determination for all oppressed nations and national minorities.”[8] As the journal La Voix des Nègres recounted in its March 1927 issue, at the Brussels meeting, “over the course of five days and five nights, delegates of all peoples, nations, and countries, of all races and all classes… came together to denounce imperialism’s harms and exactions on their respective countries and call for its demise.”[9]
Yet, the League was not just anti-imperialist. It was equally anti-capitalist, and in the imperial metropoles where it took root it focused on the interconnectedness of struggles across the far reaches of the empires. As Max Bloncourt, the Guadeloupean lawyer and member of the French Communist Party’s Union Intercontinentale (UIC), stated during his speech at the Brussels conference, “For the past ten years, events have occurred around the world. It is the Russian Revolution that made the Chinese Revolution possible. Because they defeated British imperialism, that will make India achieve its national independence.”[10] The League however lasted only a decade, having disintegrated by 1936, under the weight of internal conflicts, pressure from European governments, and the rise of Nazi Germany.
Lamine Senghor: An Agitateur in the Metropole
Lamine Senghor, the Senegalese tirailleur, communist, and anti-imperialist militant, emerged on the European scene in the mid-1920s as “the most influential black anti-colonial activist of the period.”[11] Unlike Léopold Senghor however, Lamine Senghor has not gained much recognition in the historiography of decolonization or post-colonial Africa. Indeed, Léopold Senghor – the poet, co-founder of the Négritude movement and first president of the Republic of Senegal – is a much more recognized figure in African literary and political scene, due in part also to the fact that he died in 2001 at the respectable age of 95. On the other hand, Lamine Senghor had a very brief and fiery brand of anti-imperialism which was located primarily in France during the interwar period. Although his time on the European anti-imperial stage was brief—barely lasting from his testimony as a witness in the Blaise Diagne–Les Continents trial in 1924 to his untimely death three years later— Lamine Senghor became one of the most prominent figures of the period and a headliner at the 1927 Brussels congress of the League Against Imperialism, where he was elected to the League’s executive committee.
Born in Senegal in 1889, Lamine Senghor was conscripted by French colonial authorities to serve in the 68th Battalion of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais[12] from 1916 to 1919.[13] His contingent suffered a mustard gas attack in Verdun in 1917, which damaged his lungs. He would succumb to tuberculosis a decade later, at the age of 38. Following his injury during the war, the French authorities promoted him to the rank of sergeant. He was also awarded the Croix de Guerre and granted French citizenship for his service.[14] After the war, as a disillusioned and wounded war veteran—a “mutilé de guerre,” as he referred to himself—Senghor joined the French Communist Party (PCF), which connected anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, through the Union Intercontinentale (UIC), an outfit of the PCF’s Colonial Studies Committee. These were the circles in which both the young Nguyen Ai Quoc (later known as Ho Chi Minh) and Lamine Senghor collaborated. The journal Le Paria, where Nguyen Ai Quoc was editor and Senghor a writer, published “the most violent denunciations of empire of the period, [as] communism was the sole metropolitan movement of the mid-1920s to call for the independence of the colonies.”[15]
Yet, Senghor later realized that the French Communist Party did not offer enough space for anti-colonial struggle, as he also became increasingly aware of serving as a faire-valoir (a token figure) for the party.[16] This disillusionment would lead him to create his own organization, the Comité de Defense de la Race Nègre (CDRN) in March 1926. In the January 1927 issue of the CDRN’s journal La Voix des Nègres, Senghor stated that his new organization would fight against “the unique author of universal misery: international imperialism.” He then lists the objectives of the organization as, one, fighting against racial hatred [la haine de race]; two, working towards social emancipation of the Black race; three, fighting against and dismantling the oppressive system against the Black race in the colonies and all other races; and four, networking with organizations truly fighting for the liberation of all oppressed peoples and for world revolution.[17] That the vibrancy of the anti-imperial and communist coaltion in the interwar period found a fertile ground in Paris (despite the repression by the French government) was no coincidence.
An Anti-Colonial and Transracial Coalition
Interwar war Paris was a veritable “anti-imperial metropolis” thanks to the global influx of conscripted soldiers and workers from the various corners of the empire who had come to the rescue of France during the Great War.[18] War veterans such as Lamine Senghor and the Algerian Messali Hadj, Indochinese and Malagasy tirailleurs, workers and students, joined forces with segments of the French Left and communist circles to form an anti-imperial front. During that interwar window, pivotal moments such as the 1919 Paris conference which settled to the post-World War I order, the 1925 Rif War, and the 1935 Italian aggression against Ethiopia provided the impetus for transracial radical solidarity, anti-imperialism, and revolutionary politics.
In interwar metropolitan France, the communist agenda, and especially its anti-imperialist wing, had the potential to federate a large transracial coalition drawn from across the empire. The Commission Coloniale of the PCF was especially of concern to the French state, which put in place a sophisticated net of surveillance and intelligence gathering by infiltrating the anti-imperial circles. Agent Desiré—an especially prolific informant for the intelligence services of the Ministry of Colonies (the euphemistically named Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance des Indigenes des Colonies en France, CAI)[19]—listed PCF’s Commision Coloniale leaders as the Algerians Mahmoud Ben Lekhal and Hadjali Abdelkader (who co-founded with Messali Hadj in 1926 l’Etoile Nord-Africaine), the Guadeloupean lawyer Max Bloncourt, the Senegalese Lamine Senghor, the Vietnamese Vo Thanh Long, and the future member of the French parliament Henri Lozeray.[20] The diversity of this leadership group is telling. As such, the communist anti-imperialist agenda in the metropole had the potential to facilitate an alliance between Africans (including Maghrebis), West Indians, and Indochinese, alongside French leftists.
On April 14, 1926, at the headquarters of the French Communist Party (PCF), a meeting of the Commission Coloniale brought together Nguyen The Truyen, Vo Thanh Long, Ben Lekhal, Hadjali Abdelkader, and the Guadeloupean Stephane Rosso. During the meeting, Nguyen The Truyen expressed his excitement that the comrade Lagrosillière had just returned from Guadeloupe with “interesting and fresh news” that could be published in Le Paria.[21] During a subsequent meeting two days later (attended by Bloncourt, Saint-Jacques, Ben Lekhal, Sadoun, Rosso, Nguyen The Truen, and Vo Than Long), the members decided that Bloncourt, as secretary general of the Union Intercontinentale, would take charge of Le Paria, assisted by Hadjali and Saint-Jacques.[22]
The communist appeal of the Union Intercontinentale (UIC) did not, however, resonate among all the activists from the colonial world. Some of the members of this group, elsewhere referred to as the indigènes bolchevisants (the Bolshevik-aspiring natives)[23] by the intelligence services of the Ministry of Colonies, would later gradually distance themselves from the UIC and the Communist Party. In a move to maintain the coalition, Bloncourt proposed the creation of sections of the UIC for North Africans, one for West Indians, and one for the Indochinese. He believed such a move made sense especially because about 50 “North African Arabs” had agreed to join UIC.[24]
Still, the transracial and interconnected struggles of the West Africans, North Africans, Levantine, Indochinese, and Antillans, are discernable. For instance, the idea of a fundraiser to help the “Chinese strikers” was proposed at the July 1, 1925 meeting. Funds were collected “for the poor Algerians living in France,” and Nguyen The Truyen and Vo Thanh Long contributed 2 francs each.[25] These examples point to a broad attempt, in the words of the CAI intelligence services, to build a coalition with “all the revolutionary organizations of the Oriental natives.”[26] As the CAI’s Agent Desiré notes, “through the Annamites [Vietnamese] Nguyen-The-Truyen and Tran-Xuan-Ho, [the UIC] is in a close relationship with the Franco-Chinois group of Garenne-Colombes. For some time now, they are collaborating for an active propaganda campaign with the Comité Pro-Hindou.”[27] Nguyen The Truyen was the founder of the Vietnamese Independence Party (Parti Annamite d’Independance, PAI) in 1926 and a former comrade of Nguyen Ai Quoc.[28] Ben Lekhal was the liaison between the Comité Pro-Hindou and the UIC, serving as the first secretary of the former and a member of the bureau of the latter.[29]
Examples of the transracial, transnational, and anti-imperialist nature of the coaltion abound. For example, on 5 December 1926, about a hundred “Indochinese, Blacks, North Africans, and Europeans” gathered at a meeting organized by the “Phuoc-Quoc Commmittee.” During the event, the Indochinese painted a “tableau noir” of the suffering of their people at the hands of the French colonialism, which treated them like a “vile horde” [un vil troupeau]. Speaking on behalf of the CDRN, Lunion Gothon assured the Indochinese that “all the Blacks were with them” and shared a smilar fate as “coloniaux.” Along the same line, the Algerian Hadjali Abdelkader called for a union of all coloniaux.[30]
Following the Brussels conference, the French section of the League Against Imperialism held an event on April 27, 1927 to explain the objectives of the organization. Here also we see clearly the transnational coalition against colonial oppression in display. The meeting, presided over by the French philosopher and anticolonial activist Professor Felicien Challaye, brought together some “600 people, including many Chinese, Indochinese, Negroes, Malagasy, and Algerians.” At the event, a Syrian activist denounced the imperial “dismembering” of Syria into the three states of Irak, Syria, and Palestine. The French Mandate of Syria, he said, is “a monstruous injustice” [une monstrueuse iniquité]. An Indochinese speaker accused France of poisoning Indochina with alcohol and opium, and denounced the forced labor regime and the exportation of laborers to New Caledonia for rubber harvesting.[31] Chedli Ben Mustapha, a member of the Tunisian political party Destour and l’Etoile Nord Africaine, declared: “French imperialism pretended to bring civilization to Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. For that, they first sent their soldiers to massacre thousands of the natives. After the soldier, came the colonizer, who seized all the land from the tribes. Then the tribes were forced to become nomadic…” He also lamented that Tunisians were conscripted to wage war against “their Riffian brothers.” He then called “all North African natives to form a bond of brotherhood with the Riffians” [fraternisez avec les Rifains].[32] Active brotherhood [fraternisation] was also Lamine Senghor’s call in favor of the Indochinese from “all the Blacks that are being conscripted and sent to [Indochina].”[33]
The Rif War
The Rif War (1921–1926) was indeed a rallying cry for anti-colonial activism and transracial solidarity in metropolitan France during the interwar period. Abd el-Krim founded the Republic of Rif. Having defeated the Spanish army on July 22, 1921, he became an anti-imperial icon. Mao and Ho Chi Minh would cite his guerrilla tactics and he was featured in the front cover of Time magazine in 1925.[34] As they defeated the Spanish army, the Riffians posed a threat to the French imperial interests in North Africa. The French thus initially responded with border incursions in the Rif and imposed an economic blockade. By April 1925, the Republic of Rif (with a population of only 750,000 people) was at war against both France and Spain.[35] In the metropole, the war became a nodal point in Frech politics and gave rise a a broad movement against the war, especially within the French leftists, to varying degrees.
The 1924 campaign against the Rif war coincided with the bolshevization turn in French communist circles.[36] Bolshevization refers to, following the 5th congress of the Comintern, the push towards the adoption of the Russian communist party model and the appointment of leaders from the labor movement to the party’s leadership. Between May and October 1925, the French Communist Party led a direct campaign against the Rif war, “organizing hundreds of meetings and demonstrations, instigating mutinies on half a dozen naval vessels and making several attempts to stop shipments of troops and materiel.”[37] They were joined in their condemnation of the Rif war by leaders and anti-imperial activists from various corners of the empire. In the UIC circles, the Comité central d’action coloniale contre la guerre du Maroc, la vie chère et les impôts Caillaux [the anti-colonial central committee against the war in Morocco, the high cost of living and the Caillaux taxes][38] was comprised of Ben Lekhal, Ali, Hadjali, Bloncourt, and Senghor.[39]
On 16 May 1925, the French Communist Party organized a rally at Luna Park in Paris, which brought together thousands of people. The attendees included “a thousand Arabs, about 20 Blacks, including two Senegalese [people], a few Annamites [Vietnamese]…, some Chinese [people], and Indians.”[40] During the rally, the Algerian Ben Lekhal spoke in Arabic and then in French, appealing to “French workers to protest, with utmost energy, against the war in Morocco.”[41] In his speech, Jacques Doriot, the leader of the French communist youth, pointed out the Rif war and the Druze rebellion in Syria as evidence of the bankrupted French colonial colonial rule over Muslim societies.[42]
The protests against the Rif war reached their climax on 12 October 1925, when “several hundred thousand French workers took to the streets in a twenty-four hour general strike.” The strike forced the Minister of Interior to decree a state of siege for Paris on that day.[43] L’Humanité put the number of strikers at 900,000, but most historians estimate that it was probably closer to 400,000 strikers.[44] Following the strike, the repression by the state and the patronat was swift, with hundreds of arrests, including that of Jacques Doriot himself.[45]
It was Jacques Doriot, as a young member of the Parliament and leader of the Federation des Jeunesses Communistes who heralded the campaign against the French war in Rif at the parliament.[46] The communists sought to build a broader anti-Rif war coalition with the socialists (SFIO) and the confederation of workers unions (CGT). In the French parliament, the socialist critique of the Rif war revolved, however, mostly around the failure of the government to keep the public informed of the campaign.[47] Still, the reverberations of the Rif war in French politics were nothing short of institutional instability. The new government of Prime Minister Paul Painlevé survived three votes of no confidence between late May and June 1925 over its conduct of the war. He survived the no confidence votes only because a majority of the SFIO deputies did not join the Communists in opposing the government.[48]
In any case, for the majority of the French workers and society at large, the calls for fraternization with the Riffians and for the French to leave Morocco altogether were far-fetched.[49] As such, the PCF campaign against the Rif war did not achieve the broad support it would require from the French working class. A certain disconnect between the PCF leadership and the wider segments of society was visible. In the colonies also, the PCF had a very limited presence, having established sections only in Indochina, Tunisia, and Algeria, while being banned in Morocco for instance.
In the end, the PCF leadership – unlike the Federation des Jeunesses Communistes lead by Doriot – emphasized anti-militarism rather than anti-imperialism.[50] For his part, Doriot sought to strengthen the anti-imperialst dimension of the campaign against the Rif war by sending a telegram of support to Abd el-Krim on September 11, 1924. In the message, Doriot expressed that Riffians would continue their fight until “Moroccan soil was completely liberated” from both Spanish and French colonial domination.[51] As Doriot argued, the Rif Republic, “[while] not socialist,…was anti-imperialist, opposed French capitalism, and was therefore the natural ally of the French working class.”[52]
Meanwhile, Lamine Senghor “denounced…the sending of Senegalese troops to Morocco…where [France] obligates [them] to dirty their hands with the blood of their Riffian brothers.” Indeed, France made an extensive use of conscripted soldiers from the empire in their colonial wars. In the interwar period and following World War II, the tirailleurs senegalais became for instance permanent occupying forces and guardians of empire not only in North Africa and the Levant, but also Indochina, and Madagascar.[53] Those conscripted soldiers were not only pivotal in the defense and liberation of France during the world wars, but also in colonial wars in the far flung corners of the empire. As a former tirailleur (in the Great War) himself, Senghor spoke adamamntly against the use of the soldiers of empire to quell anti-colonial rebellions and wars of liberation. As such, at the rally in Luna Park discussed above, Senghor also condemned French imperialism “that makes the Muslims and Arabs believe that the Riffians are their enemies, just like in 1914 when it made French workers believe that the German workers were their enemies.”[54] In an appeal for transracial solidarity, Senghor expressed “to his Arab brothers and his brothers from the Metropole the brotherhood of all peoples without any racial or color distinction.”[55]
Two years later, during his speech at the Brussels conference, Senghor referenced the connected struggles against colonial domination. “They murdered our brothers” he said, “in the first war in Morocco, the Great War, in the Rif and Syria, in Madagascar and Indonesia.”[56] During his years of anticolonial activism and through the organizations that he led, Senghor also denounced French duplicity in the treatment of the African mutilés de guerre compared to their French counterparts. His organization, the CDRN, pleaded for equal treatment of African, Malagasy, and Indochinese tirailleurs and mutilés de guerre and their French counterparts regarding the amount of their pensions.[57] Senghor also attended a ceremony organized by the local sections of the CDRN at the Gallieni cemetery in Fréjus[58] to pay homage to fellow Senegalese, Malagasy, and Vietnamese soldiers.
Conclusion
In revisiting the interwar period in the imperial metropoles, we clearly see episodes of transnational and transracial coalition building and the merging of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist agendas. This was made possible in no small part by the convergence of workers, students, and conscripted soldiers from the far reaches of the empire in European capitals and by their experience of working together with communist and leftist circles. The interconnected struggles of all these activists and anti-imperial leaders from the many corners of the empire resonated in part due to the ongoing rebellions and wars of liberation at the time, including the Rif war. For the French colonial state, such transracial and transnational coalitions posed a significant threat to the future of a waning empire, since governing races, honor, and prestige became central to preserving and restoring the nation’s grandeur, especially after the world wars.