A presentation and discussion with Benoît Trépied around the question: Does granting full citizenship to the colonized indigenous peoples of an imperial State lead to the end of colonialism?

This question was at the heart of vigorous political debates that took place in post-WWII France, when ‘the Empire’ and ‘the Colonies’ were renamed ‘the French Union’ and ‘Overseas Departments and Territories’, and when France’s former ‘native subjects’ became ‘French citizens’. Trépied's presentation tackles this issue through the elaboration of a complex social and political history linking three levels of analysis, from the global French imperial framework, through to the particular case of New Caledonia (a former settler colony in the South Pacific), right down to the very specific, micro-context of the rural Commune of Koné, on New Caledonia’s northwestern coast. Drawing on political and government archives, as well as extended ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Koné, Trépied analyzes the impact of the acquisition of French citizenship by the formerly colonized Kanaks in 1946 on socio-political practices and representations in New Caledonia, and particularly in Koné. He demonstrates how local political leaders tried to duplicate the renewed imperial ideology of the French Union through the creation of a new political party: the ‘Caledonian Union’ (Union calédonienne, or UC). This party advocated the overthrow of ‘colonialism’ within the French State and greater New Caledonian autonomy (but not independence), in the name of a ‘Caledonian people’, uniting former settlers and ‘natives’. It would only be much later, after the Gaullian reshaping of France within the narrower frontiers of the Nation-State in the mid-1960s, that the term ‘decolonization’ would be mobilized in the name of ‘the Kanak people’ (rather than the ‘Caledonian people’) and their struggle for independence. At the local level of Koné, this shift would mark the end of the UC’s reign over the municipal government, which had relied in practice on complex articulations between diverse social logics of political affiliation, within Kanak communities, amongst ‘small settlers’ (petits colons), merchants and mining workers, within the local ‘white’ population, as well as across colonial and racial frontiers.

Benoît Trépied  is a Research Fellow in anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and a member of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Enjeux Sociaux at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (IRIS-EHESS) in Paris, France. His work focuses on citizenship in colonial and postcolonial situations, including particularly New Caledonia, the Pacific and France’s Overseas Territories. His research considers race relations, local politics, decolonization issues and the construction of knowledge in colonial and postcolonial contexts. He is the author of Une mairie dans la France coloniale. Koné, Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: Karthala, 2010, 391 p., postface by Professor Frederick Cooper).