Reforming the Republican Empire

The sweeping domestic reforms of the Popular Front (1936-38) are well known, but its reformist agenda for the French empire is much less so. This talk will examine the Popular Front's attempts at creating a 'democratic' colonialism at a time of burgeoning anticolonial activism and its repression. Focused specifically on the activities of the Guernut Commission of Inquiry in French Indochina, it highlights the tensions between the French left's attempts to establish a more humanitarian form of imperialism  and the demands of colonized subjects to civil, social and political rights.

 

 

Katie Edwards is Associate Professor of French History at Tulane University. She is the author of Contesting Indochina: French Remembrance Between Decolonization and Cold War (2016) and the current editor of the journal French Colonial History.