Chapter 7 discusses the scope conditions of the theory proposed in Chapter 2. It describes the specific characteristics of the Habsburg military frontier that make it a unique case. To illustrate the ways in which other states managed their peripheries, I examine the contemporaneous case of the Russian colonies which were created to defend the Russian empire against attacks by Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empires. The oldest colonies are the Cossacks who lived in their self-governing lands. They had well-defined rights and duties and were known for their loyalty to the tsar and their brutality in battle. The Habsburgs and the Russians constituted a model that the French Empire tried to emulate in their territories in Africa in the early nineteenth century. Similar to the European colonies, the French also forced military colonists to live in designated areas, recruited additional indigenous forces, and created specific laws defining their obligations, their property, and the types of activities they could be involved in. The French military colonies consisted of both French and indigenous people and represented the main way of ensuring the security of their civilian settlements.

In his path-breaking 1954 monograph, Nations nègres et culture, the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop denounced Western histories for providing false justification for European imperialism and perpetuating notions of the inferiority of Black peoples. Diop called instead for histories that revalorized the African past and demonstrated Black contributions to world history. By contextualizing Diop’s historiographical interventions in terms of his anticolonial politics and the work of other anticolonial and anti-racist thinkers, this chapter shows how, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, the terrain of history was a key battleground of anti-racist and anticolonial activism. The multiple sites in which anticolonial and anti-racist histories were developed – from museums like the Musée de l’Homme through journals such as Présence Africaine, and organizational initiatives funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiatives – are central to this story.

David Galula’s (1964) Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice likely shaped current American counterinsurgency doctrine more than any other historical text. A French national of North African birth, he wrote his core works in English, for American military readers. While sharing many strategies and tactics with Anglophone theorists from the period, his manual adopted a strikingly unified process narrative for the step-by-step defeat of insurgency. His work was informed by decolonization in East Asia and North Africa as well as a deep anticommunism. More than anything else—and largely to the exclusion of past French doctrine—he was informed by reading Mao and by field observation of Maoist guerrillas in China. Galula’s strategy was to run Maoist guerrilla warfare backward. In adopting this process story, he tacitly internalized the logic of Mao’s politics as such. He produced an apparently hyper-coherent doctrine that was in practice divided against itself in multiple ways. This account acquired enormous influence, intermittently shaping Anglo-American counterinsurgency for decades.

Chapter 12 reassesses the peace conceptions and reordering and security policies of Clemenceau and the other authors of the French programme for the Paris Peace Conference. It argues that while their key aim undoubtedly was to secure France against what they saw as the critical threat of renewed German aggression they came to pursue new, essentially transatlantic strategies to this end, which came to concentrate on efforts to establish, in cooperation with Britain and the United States, a new Atlantic alliance and security community. It illuminates the underlying assumptions and rationales of the ambitious French agenda, showing that it too was significantly reorientated between the armistice and Versailles. Finally, it explores how far Clemenceau, his main adviser André Tardieu and other French policymakers had drawn constructive lessons and consequences from the catastrophe of the war – and how far their aims and strategies, which focused on containing and initially isolating postwar Germany, indeed opened up realistic perspectives of securing peace and creating a durable Atlantic and global order.

By 1958, Charles de Gaulle was back on the scene, President of a brand-new Republic, France’s Fifth. He meant to make the Resistance, with the deportation story wrapped up in it, a rallying point for the nation, and he had a monument of his own constructed, the Mémorial de la France Combattante, located at the fort of Mont-Valérien (where the Germans had taken résistants and hostages for execution) in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes. The monument and the commemorative activities associated with it told the story of France’s thirty-year war against Germany. This was a story with de Gaulle and the Resistance cast in the starring role and with the Left, communist and non-communist alike, shunted to the margins. What is remarkable is how powerful this narrative turned out to be, organizations of deportees like UNADIF (but not FNDIRP) lining up under the Gaullist standard.

This chapter examines how Jewish internationalists briefly flirted with constitutional reform and imperial oversight before deploying human rights to encourage Jewish departure from Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia during postcolonial transitions. They showed a profound distrust of the future disposition of Muslim rulers and called for pledges to allow North African Jews the right to leave, a claim that highlighted Jewish liminality in the postcolonial order. To argue that the future rulers of these new states had to pledge in advance to allow Jewish emigration rendered the integration of Jews into new North African states more difficult. Jewish activists ultimately wielded human rights in the service of Zionist aims, a marked contrast from other concurrent human rights activity that seeks to check the excesses of state sovereignty.

This contribution distinguishes between two forms of rights discourse in the writings and practice of René Cassin. The first position was that of an advocate of humanitarian rights, understood as falling within the laws of war. His work on behalf of disabled WWI veterans was the origin of this commitment. Overlapping with humanitarian rights were human rights, as adumbrated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights he helped to draft and to persuade the UN to adopt in December 1948. Human rights set down a supranational standard against which all nations had to measure their actions in peacetime as well as in wartime. The problem was that when Cassin dealt with the Jewish population of Palestine, he saw their cause in terms of human rights, the right to form their own state, whereas when he approached the question of Palestinian rights, he framed them in terms of humanitarian rights. The same was true for Muslims in Algeria. He failed to speak out on human rights violations both in Israel and in Algeria during the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict and during the Algerian War of Independence. His universalism fractured when it came to violent conflicts between Europeans and non-Europeans in decolonization after 1945.

This chapter revisits the relationship between the nascent UN human rights system and decolonization in the French empire after World War II. French officials went to great lengths to ensure that anti-colonialism would not be viewed as a global human rights movement. At the same time, faced with pressure to implement UN human rights standards in African colonies, they found themselves unable to reconcile their own constitutional doctrine of assimilationism, premised on a universalist conception of “the rights of man,” with the existence of unequal colonial rights regimes based on cultural difference. Private petitions sent to the UN from individuals and NGOs around the world drew attention to the French state’s abuse of colonial subjects, above all in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. These anti-colonial activists, whether residing in colonial territories or abroad, conceived of the defense of civil liberties as inseparable from the struggle for independence. While citations of UN human rights standards declined over the course of the 1950s, petitioners left no doubt that guarantees of individual freedoms and trade union rights were a prerequisite for national self-determination.

Violence was intrinsic to chattel slavery in the New World, and within slave societies in particular. This chapter analyses the level and forms taken by physical violence, especially corporal punishments meted out to enslaved men and women of African descent in early English and French North American and the Caribbean colonies. Violence was a daily reality within every economic unit relying on slave labour, although the intensity of it varied in time and space. The main reason why slaveholders used physical violence was to constrain their enslaved labourers to work and to accept their conditions. Violence against slaves involved masters as well as non-slaveholders and the public authorities. The pervasive and extreme character of violence in slave societies fuelled a debate on the need to regulate it. All social actors acknowledged its prevalence while describing contrasted regimes of violence and ascribing different meanings to the various forms taken by chastisements. Descriptions of violence create two opposite impressions: violence against slaves remained arbitrary, but at the same time it tended to become normalised. The slave system also sparked violent reactions from enslaved men and women.