Law and the Subject of the Citizen in French Colonial West Africa

Napoleon's 1803 Civil Code did not appear to be explicitly about the colonies, although it was promulgated as France was on the verge of losing its most prized colonial possession of Saint-Domingue. The new Civil Code, often referred to as the Napoleonic Code, was revolutionary on many levels, not the least for establishing a uniform set of laws and for influencing the legal system of nations all over the world.Footnote ²¹ It also introduced a separation between civil and political rights that had a profound effect on how colonial populations would be granted citizenship in the twentieth century. During the debates over the Code, Napoleon and other jurists and politicians actually were worried about the status of French people abroad or about other Europeans living in France. Therefore, the Napoleonic Code marked a two-pronged shift that, first, tied “Frenchness” to birth to a French father (jus sanguinis) rather than to birth and residence on French soil (jus soli).Footnote ²² Second, it separated civil status (in terms of inheritance or marriage, for example) from “quality of citizen” (qualité de citoyen), which came to be seen as political rights, such as voting, which were determined by constitutional law. Patrick Weil's foundational study of French nationality highlights the ambiguities of the new concept of nationality during the nineteenth century, as laws shifted from defining “Frenchness” by blood in the 1803 Napoleonic Code, to the 1889 nationality law that reaffirmed citizenship based on birth on French soil. A new nationality law in 1927 appeared to open up the process of naturalization in new ways, but most African colonial subjects were explicitly excluded.Footnote ²³

The hard-fought battle for access to citizenship by colonial subjects was neither a triumphalist story of a “color blind” France, nor a simple confirmation of French fears and racism toward colonial populations.Footnote ²⁴ Lauren Benton's work demonstrates that empires have long operated with plural legal orders that legitimized various legal claims. Africanist scholars of law and empire have also recognized what Richard Roberts has referred to as a “hybrid” judicial system, with multiple layers of courts, authorities, and codes that played out in various and, sometimes, unintentional ways.Footnote ²⁵ That same legal pluralism also revealed the dynamic process of negotiation between colony and metropole, and facilitated debate among subjects and administrators, among women and men, among generations within communities, and across colonial spaces, or “transcolonially.”Footnote ²⁶

Cathérine Coquéry-Vidrovitch and Mamadou Diouf emphasize different consequences shaped by legal pluralism in the Four Communes of Senegal in West Africa, in particular. Gorée and Saint-Louis first sent representatives to the National Assembly in 1848, but both small islands off the Senegalese mainland were only officially recognized as French communes in 1872. The same rights were extended to Rufisque and Dakar in 1887. However, the Four Communes in Senegal were still not quite fully French. Coquéry-Vidrovitch argues that the practice of awarding citizenship (political rights) rather than nationality (political rights and civil status) to Africans in the Four Communes meant that Africans in other colonies also would only have the possibility of obtaining citizenship rights rather than French nationality through naturalization. Mamadou Diouf highlights the social and cultural innovation in the Four Communes. He describes the resulting social landscape as one where “political rights…express[ed] an identity connected with a special status that safeguard[ed] a unique civility.”Footnote ²⁷

During the nineteenth century, Muslim originaires (the term for residents of the Four Communes in Senegal) argued for their unique civil standing by citing the Algerian example in which indigenous Algerians retained their Muslim status. However, the 1865 Sénatus-consulte actually made indigenous Algerians into French nationals without citizenship rights, and indigenous Algerians had to renounce their Muslim status to obtain political rights to vote.Footnote ²⁸ Following protest, petition, and appeals dating from the middle of the nineteenth century through World War I, Muslim residents of the Four Communes managed to retain the status of citizen with local voting rights and reserve the right to resolve civil cases in Muslim courts.Footnote ²⁹ It was only in the era of World War I that a series of laws known as the “Blaise Diagne laws of 1916,” named after the Senegalese deputy who introduced them, reaffirmed the citizenship of all originaires and their descendants. The 1916 declaration of citizenship in the Four Communes was made explicitly in relation to the obligation to military service under French law. The link between citizenship and military service had a long history in France and elsewhere.Footnote ³⁰ Therefore, although the Four Communes were a unique context in French colonial West Africa, they shared the histories of debate, protest, and pluralism with other sites of empire.

In the aftermath of World War I, in the 1920s, as demands for more rights multiplied from West and North Africa, and even Indian Ocean islands, French politicians and jurists were forced to spell out French policies on accession to citizenship for colonial populations.Footnote ³¹ Alice Conklin notes that the French response was cloaked in the language of reactionary, racialized ideologies of difference, pointing out that at the same time the 1927 nationality law was being devised, legal experts in the Superior Council of the Colonies were reporting on the incompatibility of Africans to French culture, civilization, and thereby citizenship.Footnote ³² The 1927 nationality law, often seen as a response to postwar fears of depopulation with its provisions on naturalization, was specifically designed to incorporate European immigrants more quickly into the nation. Such debates over rights among colonial populations in North and West Africa also resonated in Africa's Asian colonies. Emmanuelle Saada's work on the status of mixed-race children in Indochina (Vietnam) reveals a code promulgated in 1928 that first deployed the term “race” to discuss citizenship; it would inspire similar codes across the French empire in subsequent years.Footnote ³³ Despite the rhetoric of universalism, French laws on citizenship did deliberate on and incorporate notions of difference, and even race, across the empire.

At the same time, West African men such as Houénou, who resided outside of the Four Communes, confronted an alternative, narrower path to citizenship for themselves and, sometimes, their families, although it was tied to familiar themes of citizenship such as loyalty, “civilization,” and military service. Most other French colonial subjects in other parts of Africa and in Asia fell under similarly worded statutes.Footnote ³⁴ Although West Africans, like others in most of the rest of the colonial world, had to renounce their civil status, the difference between other West Africans and the originaires of the Four Communes seemed stark, because originaires technically could (although only a fraction did) vote for a representative in the National Assembly. Without something tangible such as voting rights, the privileges of citizenship rights remained less clear. To obtain citizenship brought prestige and potential access to different courts and job opportunities, but it could also invite animus from local colonial authorities.Footnote ³⁵ Even though Houénou argued that he suffered abuse under the rule of law in the colonies, citizenship status was supposed to protect him from arbitrary jailing and fines under a regime of administrative sanctions reserved for “natives” and known as the indigénat.Footnote ³⁶ Above all, the renunciation of civil status still did not mean that Africans were naturalized as French nationals, because the Four Communes and Algeria served as different models for offering some rights while denying full naturalization.Footnote ³⁷

Still, the statutes promulgated on March 25, 1912; May 25, 1915; and January 14, 1918 were not exactly the same, garnering different types and numbers of successful applicants. The numbers were small, and they fluctuated, but in 1923—coincidentally the same year individual citizenship decrees moved from the supplement of Bulletin des Lois to the Journal Officiel de la République Française—a series of strikes rocked Dahomey, and, in general, overall numbers declined in the years that followed. A few men, and sometimes their families, from Dahomey and other parts of West and West Central (Equatorial) Africa did accede to citizenship rights through the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, but never at the annual rate of 1920, when twenty men from West and Equatorial Africa obtained their citizenship, eleven of them from Dahomey. After several years in the low double digits in the early 1920s, in 1924, only five men from West and Equatorial Africa acceded to citizenship rights, and only one of them was from Dahomey.Footnote ³⁸ Then in 1930, a project to create a special statute for elite Africans was abandoned by the Governor General of French West Africa. Its defeat definitively signaled that the French colonial administration formally rejected the idea of codifying a special status for elite Africans, between that of subject and those with “quality of French citizen.” Later laws that revised accession to citizenship in 1932 and 1937 became more stringent, requiring that entire families meet certain standards of “education, lifestyle, and social habits.”Footnote ³⁹ Although the absolute and average numbers for the period between 1936 and 1949 are higher at 257, or approximately seventeen a year, most of those occurred during key moments during the socialist government in the mid-1930s and after World War II.Footnote ⁴⁰

Therefore, in the initial “heyday” of African accession to French citizenship between 1912 and 1923, I found decrees for 120 men, women, and children in a variety of colonies in West and West Central Africa in coastal cities as well as interior posts (Table 1).Footnote ⁴¹ Although only a miniscule fraction of a percent of the population of France's African colonies, the range of successful applicants (the number of applications denied is unknown), suggests that ideas about citizenship already had spread beyond the coast, and also among women, and, potentially, children. Houénou's call for general citizenship for Africans was far too bold for its time, but French politicians and administrators who claimed that the process of awarding French citizenship rights to Africans was becoming too common and widespread overstated the situation. Still, the idea of citizenship and rights was not contained in the ways that the French colonial administration or even other African elites thought.

Table 1. Citizenship Decrees for French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, 1914–23.

Source: Chart based on author review of Bulletin des Lois de la République Française, Partie Supplémentaire (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale), 1914–1923.

^aGiven that a fair number of successful candidates resided or worked in a location that was not their place of birth, I identified applicants by where they were born. On accession decrees, the place of birth for several applicants was listed as “Haut-Sénégal-Niger” even after Haute-Volta (Burkina Faso) was separated out in 1919 and Haut-Sénégal et Niger took the name “Soudan Français (Mali)” officially after January 1, 1921.

Given the limited citizenship rights cases and the inability to know the full number of potentially failed applications, numbers alone cannot tell the full story. What did the statutes and successful applications convey about assumptions and beliefs? For example, more than 60% of the successful applications occurred under the 1912 decree which candidates used for the whole period from 1914 to 1923. The decree based the award of citizenship to colonial subjects, specifically of French West Africa, on tripartite rules of:

1. 1. loyalty and service to the French colonial administration

2. 2. the ability to read and write French

3. 3. financial stability and good character

Colonial intermediaries such as interpreters, telegraph workers, and agents, such men and their families, especially from Dahomey, dominated among successful applicants throughout this period. Although the decree initially only pertained to individuals (unlike the 1918 one) several women and children were listed as “follow[ing] the condition” of the husband or father. The generally broad nature of the statute may explain its popularity until it was revised in 1932. Although most successful applicants were born or resided in coastal cities, a small number were born in or still lived in the interior, suggesting that knowledge of the access to citizenship spread through these networks of mobile Africans linked to the colonial administration.

Although Houénou was well-educated, he failed to obtain citizenship under the 1912 decree because as a student of law and medicine living in Bordeaux, he had not demonstrated loyal service to French colonial interests.Footnote ⁴² He succeeded using the 1915 law that read as though it was written with someone like him in mind, which, in fact, it was. The piece of legislation in 1915 emerged from complaints by the growing number of students and soldiers living in France and elsewhere in the French empire who could not obtain French citizenship because the decrees all assumed that applicants resided in their home country. When Houénou's close friend and associate Ouanilo Behanzin found out that he could not practice law without proof of citizenship, both men found that were ineligible for citizenship under the 1912 decree. Presaging how he would address correspondence in later years, Houénou contacted a senator from Guadeloupe and the Ministers of Colonies and Justice to plead his case. The law passed, because it was timely and supported by colonial authorities in the metropolis who originally also looked favorably on well-educated elite Africans such as Houénou.Footnote ⁴³

The 1915 law, which was employed to obtain citizenship slightly less often that the 1918 decree (twenty versus twenty-five times), differed from both the 1912 and 1918 decrees on several accounts. First, it was a law debated in the Assembly and the Senate rather than a decree issued by the president. Second, unlike the 1912 decree that had been written only for subjects of French West Africa, the 1915 law could be taken advantage of by those who were not originally from Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco who, like Houénou, lived in France or any country that was not their place of origin. Therefore, colonial subjects from Equatorial Africa as well as from East Africa or South East Asia could make use of the statute. One of the most notable differences between the successful applicants using the 1915 law versus the those using the 1912 or 1918 decrees was the dominance of those from other colonial territories in French West Africa outside of Senegal and Dahomey, and especially the presence of West Central (Equatorial) Africans. There were also fewer teachers and interpreters. Given the residence requirement outside one's country of origin, Africans with more mobile positions and careers, such as members of the expeditionary corps, often sought citizenship under this statute. Finally, the law did not explicitly state that applicants had to renounce their personal or civil status and it did not refer to previous statutes requiring such an act. It also included an unusual provision for those who had married a French woman and resided with her for one year. However, up until 1927, French women followed the nationality of their husbands, and racial intermarriage, especially with white French women, was not encouraged in France or the colonies at any time, even though it was occurring more visibly in France by the interwar period.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the end, perhaps the most striking aspect of the 1915 law was that it seemed to extend portable citizenship rights to successful applicants who were not necessarily tied to a specific colony.

If the 1912 decree seemed tailor made for intermediaries and the 1915 law seemed tailor made for expatriates, the 1918 decree explicitly set out to appeal to former World War I soldiers. The 1918 statute began by stating that any former soldier and his family from French West Africa or French Equatorial Africa could never be subjected to administrative sanctions under the indigénat, as if that was the main purpose of the statute. Secondarily, it listed how applicants, but only those who had been highly decorated soldiers, could assemble a file for submission for this “exceptional” consideration. The requirements did appear more rigorous, with more emphasis on morality and evidence of a past without any anticolonial activity. Because only decorated soldiers could use the 1918 statute to obtain citizenship, many former soldiers from Dahomey continued to use the 1912 decree, even after 1918, to accede to citizenship rights. Therefore, taken together, the three different statutes demonstrated how French authorities imagined that urban elites, colonial employees, and soldiers were ideal candidates for citizenship. However, some Africans off the beaten track, in interior locales or in French Equatorial Africa, also sought out these rights for themselves and their families, believing that they, too, had a right to such privileges.

Given that these extremely low rates of citizenship continued through the 1920s, French officials' concerns that African citizenship had exceeded the intended “limit to an elite access” seem unfounded. French authorities often complained about those presenting themselves as évolués claiming that some of these Africans were not “assimilated” enough, as if some maintained too many “African” ways. However, the term “assimilated” seemed to be a coded word for “loyal” or “submissive.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Throughout the history of empires, when elites cultivated to serve a colonial state demanded too much, authorities responded by withholding privileges, by buttressing opponents to elites, or by enforcing more violent measures.Footnote ⁴⁶

But focusing on elites such as Houénou or his compatriots in Dahomey, or signaling alarm over several hundred citizens among several million subjects, did not capture the real implications behind this very small group of men, women, and children across West and West Central Africa who had come to see themselves as French citizens. Some Africans recognized that one could become French in a variety of ways relating to work, service, marriage, or filiation, even if the laws varied and the process often depended on the personal good will of colonial administrators on the ground. Also how did neighbors, friends, local leaders, and kin recognize the French citizenship status of the few among them? In the end, Africans were learning about the meanings of French citizenship from these new citizens who were perhaps more diverse than the vocal elites whom French administrators saw as so dangerous. Similarly, when Houénou came to focus on citizenship as a theme in his own politics, it was the citizens and subjects of Dahomey who inspired him. His activist path was neither evident from his earliest writings nor sketched out for him through contacts in Paris or black intellectuals from the Americas. It was not the people or the politics of the Latin Quarter in Paris or of Harlem in New York that first moved Houénou; he arrived at his political vision via the colonial capital of Porto Novo in Dahomey.

From Involution to Revolution and the Idea of Black Citizenship

If Houénou is famous for anything, it is for being thrown out of a bar in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in 1923 after an American couple refused to sit near him.Footnote ⁴⁷ His tour of the United States under the auspices of the Marcus Garvey's UNIA a year later also is a well-known feature of his biography. Highlighting these aspects of Houénou's life overemphasizes the influence on him of American politics born of the Harlem Renaissance. His overtly political writings, which all date from the period after his 1921 visit to Dahomey, reveal a primary concern with the idea of citizenship for Africans across the continent. Although there were some African intellectuals, such as Blaise Diagne who fought for rights for the residents of the Four Communes of Senegal, or other activists and journalists in Dahomey who argued for greater access to citizenship for elites, few could have imagined whole communities of Africans across the continent voting for representatives in the National Assembly. Houénou also promoted and celebrated African cultural practices as an integral part of French political and civil rights. He was not only interested in plural legal orders but also in new ways of thinking about who was French. He would have wanted the American couple in that bar in Montmartre in 1923 to recognize that he was not only a black man but also a French man.

It is fitting that Houénou's first, limited foray into the public eye in 1921 occurred through an esoteric linguistic study entitled L'Involution des métamorphoses et des métempsychoses de l'univers [Involution of Metamorphoses and Metempsychosis of the Universe] that says very little about Africa or his ideas about citizenship. Instead, the text, which should be considered in its own intellectual light, shows his thorough engagement with a variety of themes including structural linguistics, humanism, republicanism, religion, and mysticism. Many scholars examine Involution in relation to Houénou's other works, deeming it fairly apolitical or as an “analogy” or “screen” for a more political statement against racial hierarchy in Europe.Footnote ⁴⁸ Taking a middle ground toward Involution can provide the reader with insight into Houénou's politics without dismissing or overextending the meanings behind the text. As a start, Houénou defined his key term “involution” as a process of bringing “the irreducible individualities of the evolutionary system back to homogeneity, to their original identity [sameness]…to God, the infinite source who serves as their original and creative involution.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Literary theorist Christopher Miller views the study as a “convoluted allegory concerned with African participation in the world order.” For Miller, Houénou's notion of “involution” “works toward the elimination of all difference in a final singularity.”Footnote ⁵⁰ But Houénou's own later activism showed that he did not seek to establish an “essential base” or “final singularity” in an effort to deny or eradicate differences. Instead, his politics recognized variation between and among social groups, including people of African descent. The underlying concepts within the linguistic study thereby elucidate some of Houénou's ideas and tactics, operating as an introduction and metaphor for Houénou's broad, eclectic, and creative use of politics and the law.Footnote ⁵¹

With the term “involution” invoking return or regression to an original state, Houénou proposed to investigate language as a shared site of humanity.Footnote ⁵² Rather than view his perspective in terms of an “assimilationist” approach defined by a desire to adopt “Frenchness” wholly, a more appropriate term may be, “universalist,” evoking the underlying ideas of wholeness, inclusion, and equality implied by and promised by the French Enlightenment and Revolutionary tradition.Footnote ⁵³ Houénou also endeavored to reduce differences brought about by change to “homogeneity” or a “primitive identity” found in grammar and phonetics, linking this concept to a metaphysical and spiritual argument. The other important term in the title, “metempsychosis,” referred to transmigration, or the passage of the soul into another body at death.Footnote ⁵⁴

However, buried deep within this phonetic study married with spiritual mysticism, Houénou also subtly engaged with ideas about freedom and hierarchy that could implicate questions of race. In the midst of his study of vowels, he wrote of the challenge of liberty: “Freedom is invincible until it triumphs over itself. . . .it creates it own obstacle: the will. Thus the master, chain, and slave are forged of the same metal: freedom.” He then continued, weaving in and out of his linguistic analysis: “Since the beginning when man could use his muscle, man beautifully articulated, man eloquently translated into a living and harmonious language all joy and sadness. The supposed grunts of the caveman seem to me to be the grunts of my savage Europeans.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Taken together, the two passages reflected on the limits of freedom and universality, juxtaposing master and slave, and casting the European (as opposed to the African) as the primitive savage. The sincere exploration of language and spirituality thus opened possibilities for subtle, almost veiled, social commentary.

A substantive section of the thin and opaque book features a series of what Houénou called “truisms,” including pithy sayings and passages on a range of historical and cultural subjects including the war, labor, and religion. With his emphasis on emotion, the transcendental, the rawness of terror, and the individual experience, Houénou engaged republicanism, yet critiqued aspects of it that eschewed religion and spirituality. He waxed poetically that, “Moral progress is a painful climb in darkness of night; in the morning, one arrives at a high peak, the whole countryside revealing itself below. Reason is the supreme sensation that organizes the others into a hierarchy. Every sense reveals God to us, by revealing the sensuous pleasure of infinity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This personal and intellectual struggle with faith and the divine in the wake of World War I was not uncommon, and Houénou sometimes returned to these religious themes in his later writings, even as some French authorities accused him of fraternizing with Communists.Footnote ⁵⁷ Through his recourse to linguistics, religion, classics and philosophy, he could paint a vast vision of all humanity, challenging the idea of racial hierarchy that permeated Western philosophy, increasingly by the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ Historian and biographer Luc Zouménou cautions against critiquing Houénou's early text for lacking “recognizable elements of African origin,” praising Houénou instead for bringing together diverse philosophical and scientific elements “in the search of a new definition of man.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Houénou's ability to think broadly beyond, yet within, Western frameworks characterized his political activity and self-fashioning. More importantly, his early attempt to reconcile his spirituality and rationality and secularism ultimately may have helped him to navigate between support of France and critique of French empire in his later work.

Houénou's views on French colonialism only publicly came to light after his visit to Porto-Novo in August 1921 just after the publication of his book; it was his first time back in Dahomey since he had left as an adolescent. Arriving in a cosmopolitan town with diverse ethnic groups and Muslims, a community of Brazilian returnees, and connections to neighboring British-controlled Nigeria, Houénou found a lively political scene. There was an active, local newspaper, Le Guide du Dahomey, founded in 1920 by Dorothée Lima who had obtained his citizenship in 1916. Jean Adjovi, the returned soldier and chef de famille, who lost one of his indigenous titles after obtaining his citizenship in 1918, was also said to be involved with the paper that featured regular critiques of specific French colonial policies. In the months before the spring 1921 tour of Dahomey by the Governor General who oversaw all the colonies of French West Africa, Le Guide du Dahomey ran several articles critiquing colonial policies including the abuses of the indigénat; local “chiefs;” and the need for expanded education, medical facilities, and other resources. Editorials expressed disappointment in Dahomey's Governor Fourn and explored questions of racism in French colonial policies. Therefore, well before Houénou's visit in the late summer of 1921, the situation in Dahomey would have already been politically charged.

In the early 1920s, there was already a tradition of Dahomean journalism, often traced to the influential work of Louis Hunkanrin, who began clandestinely publishing and writing for newspapers as early as 1912. Almost immediately after finishing school in Senegal in 1907, he fell out of favor with the French colonial administration. By 1914, facing various charges, Hunkanrin went into exile in Nigeria for four years, but he would then volunteer and serve in the French military from 1918 to 1920, followed by a brief and notable sojourn in Paris between 1920 and 1921, when he published half a dozen issues of a journal called Le Messager Dahomeen. The dates and timing remain significant, because Hunkanrin and the other African writers for Le Messager consistently argued for citizenship rights for Africans, not unlike the way that Houénou would a few years later. What is interesting, however, is that Houénou did not yet publicly espouse such sentiments while in Paris before 1921, when Hunkanrin was active there. And although Hunkanrin did arrive in Dahomey in December of 1921 during Houénou's visit there, it was to face trial and serve a jail sentence. James Spiegler analyzes Hunkanrin's writings calling for African citizenship and for the end of indigénat as foundational to nationalist thought in newspapers and organizations in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Spiegler traces those same themes in Houénou's writing, although he doubts that Hunkanrin and Houénou met in those early years, if at all.Footnote ⁶⁰ Rather than read Hunkanrin, Houénou, and later activists as a progression toward more radicalism, all of these intellectuals engaged colonial policies specific to France, particularly laws of accession to citizenship. More specifically, during that pivotal period before and during Houénou's (or Hunkanrin's) arrival in Dahomey in 1921, the authors of Le Guide had been publishing their articles, editorials, and open letters critiquing French colonialism for several months. They seem to have influenced Houénou rather than vice versa.Footnote ⁶¹ In this instance, the exchange of ideas was not originating in the Americas or Europe but in Africa itself.

One of the most striking features of the articles from Le Guide and other forms of correspondence and petitions during this time period was how Dahomeans used colonial rhetoric, specific statutes, and even official speeches and publications to argue their positions. In an open letter to the governor general of French West Africa during his visit to Dahomey, the editor(s) of Le Guide began by challenging the colonial administration not to let the “beautiful Republican formulation: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity exist here only as an empty phrase.” In the course of the letter, the editors evoked the indigénat; referred to the three citizenship statutes of 1912, 1915, and 1918 as well as the 1912 decree reorganizing “native law” (justice indigene) in French West Africa; favorably mentioned a French colonial administrator known for his infamous “pacification” campaigns in Indochina (Vietnam) and Madagascar; and quoted one of the Governor General's own speeches. At several junctures, the editors revealed their specific interests in the situation of elites, referring to those without official citizenship as half-free (demi-liberté) and suggesting that the application of the indigénat and customary “native” law should include “procedures matching the degree of actual advancement of residents.” The power of illiterate chiefs and native judges over elites especially offended the directors of Le Guide. But, in the case of hospitals and schools, French administrators and officials appeared to be the problem, denying medical services to Africans or turning away the brightest students. In the end, the letter ostensibly written in the interest the social and economic situation of Dahomey actually was concerned very much with protecting the status of elites. To that end, the writer(s) implored the Governor General to apply pressure on the local administration to undertake reforms; the end of the letter retreated from the demanding tone, ending with a declaration of “filial attachment” to France.Footnote ⁶²

When Houénou began writing more pointed political pieces a few years later, he picked up on and recast the themes and the tone of Le Guide du Dahomey, at once indignant and seeming to feign submission. Upon his return to Paris, Houénou's first article appearing in January of 1923 in a Malagasy publication reiterated much of his thinking in Involution on “diverse civilizations on the surface of the globe: [which] must marry, interpenetrate, and expand in order to become a worldwide and truly human civilization.”Footnote ⁶³ In the same article, the only coded reference to themes featured in Le Guide was the following: “The evolution of European civilization…was a series of sudden and often violent revolutions, the last being in 1789. [France] recognized the rights of man…We carried out the ultimate duty during the war when we recognized the most basic rights of citizens. Without the status of citizen there is only the shameless exploitation of miserable slaves in the colonies.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Houénou evoked the rights to citizenship, but like the editors of Le Guide du Dahomey, emphasized a particular group of deserving candidates, in this case, war veterans. More importantly, the sweeping connections from the 1789 Revolution, to the specter of slavery, to citizenship rights, placed France on a pedestal while making demands at the same time.

Then came a series of strikes in Porto-Novo in 1923 that pushed Houénou to criticize the French colonial regime more directly. In Porto-Novo in February and March 1923, the “incidents,” as French officials described them, involved a complex set of events and interest groups. First, residents in Porto Novo, in Cotonou and surrounding areas, were responding to a sharp decline in export prices and revenue followed by an increase in tax rates imposed by the colonial regime. The financial difficulties, in turn, exacerbated existing tensions and alliances between different African groups and the French colonial administration.Footnote ⁶⁵ Then, a visit by a French representative of the Superior Council of Dahomey, who was supposed to be representing the interests of the African residents of Dahomey, apparently triggered a month-long protest. Illiterate political leaders, educated elites, diverse Muslim factions, market women, and dock workers across the southern part of the colony met clandestinely and refused to pay taxes or go to work or to the market. Some even called for a renegotiation of a nineteenth-century treaty between the Porto-Novo kingdom and the French colonial administration to give more political autonomy to the local African leadership. In response, the French colonial regime put down the strike, forcibly collected taxes, confiscated firearms, gathered men fleeing military recruitment, and destroyed some particularly recalcitrant villages. French colonial reports issued after the events portrayed the strikes as the isolated activities of “dissident” Muslims and members of the local African intelligentsia. However, the sudden coincidence of several groups and causes among the diverse Porto-Novo population suggested a deeper political crisis.Footnote ⁶⁶

Back in Paris, Houénou responded to the events occurring in Porto Novo in March 1923 by sending a letter to the newspaper Les Annales coloniales, which outlined, for the first time, specific critiques of the French colonial administration for “a series of administrative errors.” He denied that the events represented “sedition” or “revolt.” Instead, he emphasized that it was a local strike in response to poor French colonial policies. Each of the “errors,” Houénou outlined, including higher taxation, military conscription that weighed heavily on farming communities, insufficient medical facilities, and the indigénat, had been featured earlier in the Dahomean press as well as in the writings of Louis Hunkanrin, but it is unclear how much attention Houénou's letter on the Porto-Novo strikes initially received.Footnote ⁶⁷

Given the focus on the infamous bar incident that occurred a few months later in August 1923, it is revelatory that Zinsou and Zouménou suggest that Houénou may have orchestrated his own ejection from the Parisian bar for media attention. Houénou had been forced to leave an establishment at the request of white Americans offended by his presence some months earlier. With the second August incident he was able to stir up public outrage toward the behavior of the French bar manager who denied him service. Capitalizing on the moment in the public eye, Houénou published several articles in the left-leaning newspaper L'Action colonial, obtained a university appointment, and embarked on a political career that increasingly critiqued French colonial policy in West Africa. Given this perspective on these pivotal events, it would be simplistic to correlate Houénou's experience of racism in Paris at the hands of Americans to his new radicalism, especially as so much of the focus of Houénou's activist message addressed corruption and violence in France's administration of its West African colonies.Footnote ⁶⁸ If there was any transformative event that reshaped Houénou's political vision, it was his exposure to Porto-Novo politics in person in 1921 and from afar during the 1923 strikes.

Appreciating the centrality of Dahomey and French colonial policy generally in Houénou's political vision after 1924 clarifies the shift in his language and activities from what I have termed a “universalist” message to one that most scholars recognize as more explicitly “Pan-Africanist” and, presumably, influenced by Garvey and others. At some point during this time, he also took to referring to himself as a prince, for which he was mocked in some circles and possibly later rebuked for by some of his own family members.Footnote ⁶⁹ The use of the title added to this “Pan-Africanist” allure and his conference speech on “Le Problème de la race noire” [“The Problem of the Black Race”] at the Interallied School of Higher Social Studies in Paris in February 1924 did forcefully bring together threads of arguments that he had been making in Les Continents, and showed a shift in his rhetoric. The English version of the title of the talk, translated as “The Problem of Blacks in French Colonial Africa,” actually was a more telling and accurate one, which suggests a different reading of the Pan-Africanist “turn” in Houénou's political work. Houénou took France's disastrous colonial policy as a starting point, while viewing the situation in Africa as indicative of the challenges facing black people in general. He insisted on separating the innocent French “Motherland” from “her children” who represented France in the colonies, “inaugurat[ing] in the Colonies an era of veritable savagery and true barbarism which is carried out with science and premeditation, with all the art and all the refinement of civilization.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Ostensibly proposing reform in the colonies, he also laced his speech with violent, suggestive imagery. In reference to the history of African slavery in the Americas, he evoked, “this Africa, with whose unhappy history you are acquainted, but which, some day, one of her sons will outline for you in darts of fire.” As a solution to the corruption in the colonies, he devised an elaborate metaphor about amputating a limb infected with gangrene, warning that without quick action “the disease gains ground, then an ignorant adventurer takes a scalpel and wounds the healthy organ, while attempting to remove the affected member.” Playing on the ideal of the “evolution” of colonial populations—the hypocrisy of the French “civilizing mission” that promised to introduce civilization and progress but did not—Houénou warned of “revolution” if France did not reform its colonial policy: “Now if we are not careful, unfortunate events will occur in the Colonies.”Footnote ⁷¹

Houénou could make such threats because he cast the colonies (and the administrators serving them) as occupying a separate social, cultural, and legal space and reality from the one that the audience (and he, himself) lived in Paris. And, in the process, he could draw similarities between the cruel treatment of black people in other European colonies and in the Americas. The underlying message in this speech was the shared humanity and rights to citizenship, especially as espoused by the French Revolution. Thus, he presented this choice to the French: “Absolute autonomy for the Colonies, with representation in the Metropole on general issues; or otherwise total, complete assimilation without boundaries—without any distinction of race.” However, the language in the passage was more ambivalent than a clear option between “assimilation” and independence. His call for “complete assimilation without boundaries” sounded like what was supposed to happen under the French Union after World War II, when France technically transformed its former colonies into integral parts of the nation, but what he described as “home rule” or “autonomy”—and it was unclear whether or not those concepts were one in the same—actually sounded what occurred as the French Union was put into place. His notion of “autonomy” involved representation in the metropolis by Africans elected by Africans, but he already anticipated concerns about the proportion of representation and suggested a reduction in the number of African deputies.Footnote ⁷² Many scholars have viewed his use of the term “autonomy” as a call for independence that was the result of American Pan-African influence, and as contrary to his true wish for “assimilation.”Footnote ⁷³ There were few calls for immediate African independence before World War II, even among the most ardent Pan-African activists,Footnote ⁷⁴ and Houénou seemed to be presenting “complete assimilation with representation,” “home rule,” and “autonomy,” each as some form of broader access to citizenship for Africans and as versions of the same “solution to the colonial problem.” Therefore, Houénou did not suffer from a lack of vision in proposing what he called “assimilation” or “autonomy;” he had envisioned the future.

Houénou saw the “problem of the black race” in terms of a longue durée, dating to European occupation of the Americas and African enslavement there. But he was speaking from the perspective of Africans in the colonies, with specific experiences of the indigénat and military recruitment, rather than to the different, sometimes related, concerns of other members of the African diaspora. He also imagined himself as part of and as separate from an African reality shaped by the continent's engagement with Europe. He ended his speech with the following imagery harkening back in some ways to his earlier rhetoric from Involution, but with Africa as an explicit player in a human universe. Throughout his closing statement, however, Houénou tellingly shifted his position back and forth from a shared African identity to a French or, perhaps, even a Parisian one, ending with the idea of the fundamental right to citizenship:

With a different perspective on Houénou's political thought through 1924 as deeply embedded in the experience of French colonialism in Africa, it is possible to reconsider his relationship with Garvey, and with a Black Atlantic intellectual tradition more generally. If the incident at the Montmartre bar has been seen, erroneously, as the catalyst for Houénou's shift in political vision toward a Pan-Africanist one, his contact with Marcus Garvey and his tour of the United States in the summer and fall of 1924 is seen as the culmination of his transformation. However, Houénou participated in the creation of the Ligue Universelle pour la Défense de la Race Noire (Universal League for the Defense of the Black Race) (LUDRUN) and laid out his ideas in his speech at the Interallied School in April 1924, several months before the trip to the United States. Some point out that the stated goal of the Ligue, “developing the links of solidarity and universal brotherhood between all members of the black race; bring them together to redevelop their homeland: Africa,” sounded similar to core ideas in Garvey's UNIA and his call for “Africa for the Africans.” Still, Houénou's League also sought to “make it so that they [members of the black race] are treated around the globe as free men enjoying the inalienable rights of citizen,” leaving space for citizenship within empire.Footnote ⁷⁶ Houénou's support of a “universal black struggle,” too, has been interpreted as an explicit nod to Garvey, perhaps even with his League acting as a type of chapter of the UNIA. However, Houénou's writing continued to draw on his critique of French colonial policy, which he referred to in a series of articles as “colonial slavery” [esclavagisme colonial] in his articles on West Africa in Les Continents, during his United States tour.Footnote ⁷⁷Les Continents and the soirées sponsored by the League and advertised in the newspaper were designed to support financially the League and Houénou presented his tour of the United States as a quasi-research trip.Footnote ⁷⁸

Recognizing Houénou's activities as part of a specific agenda shaped by his experiences casts his depiction of Paris as the “heart of the black race” in his controversial speech before the UNIA in New York in a different light. He imagined his organization at the center of a black international cooperative venture as he proclaimed: “[The Universal League] will unite all of our organizations in a federation; it will be in charge of presenting our demands to the League of Nations.” The criticism of Houénou, perhaps then, but certainly in the secondary literature since, has centered on Houénou's praise of France and its “Rights of Man without any distinction of race or nation.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Some assume that Garvey's relationship with Houénou soured because of Houénou's positive depiction of France, Houénou's own aspirations for his own organization, and Houénou's contact with Garvey's rival W.E.B. Du Bois.Footnote ⁸⁰

However, a closer look at a series of letters between Du Bois and Houénou near the time of Houénou's visit to the United States demonstrate that Houénou had a sense of his own activism and of the potential of collaboration; Houénou saw himself as a leader in a transnational movement, not as a follower. Du Bois originally arranged to meet with and sponsor Houénou during his tour of the United States but got cold feet, not only because he heard that Houénou was fraternizing with Garvey, but also when one of Houénou's associates Réné Maran, the famous Antillean writer, informed Du Bois of some of the criminal charges that were circling Houénou. These same issues would lead to Houénou's later legal troubles in Dahomey. But Houénou pushed back when Du Bois withdrew his offer to meet him, and rejected the idea that he had to choose between Du Bois and Garvey, declaring, “I am not looking to sit on the fence and I am not trying to attempt an impossible reconciliation. My attitude is not impartial, it is not neutral. I am for all parties interested in Negroes [noirs], thus I am partial.”Footnote ⁸¹ Then Houénou clarified his own position, undercutting the depictions of him as a docile or naïve dandy, and eschewing any idea that he was simply a disciple of Garvey: “The problem of the black race makes me aggressive and radical [revolutionnaire]. History shows us that all of the social reforms have been obtained by war, external war and internal war. This is called revolution. There is no negotiation, no compromise possible with European and American thieves and crooks. It is a question now of making them return their ill-gotten gains, but how? If we must die, let us do so giving our all for a good cause. Enough of this magnanimity that gets us kicked in the ass or lynched.”Footnote ⁸²

And in the end, Houénou returned to the image of Paris as a “heart of the black race,” not because of French exceptionalism, but because of the intellectual work that Houénou and other Africans and African diaspora blacks could undertake in that central location. He wrote to Du Bois: “In our association The Universal League for the defense of the Black Race, we strive for, instead, unity, the federation of all existing societies. A centralization in Paris allows action in London, Brussels, and Geneva and throughout all of Africa. This concentration, this convergence, this coordination of all Negro forces is possible; history will make it so.”Footnote ⁸³ Therefore, the relationship with France for Houénou and for so many others was multilayered. In his analysis of the relationship between Houénou and Garvey, Brent Edwards also emphasizes that Garvey, too, had an ambiguous relationship with France, and himself imagined a dialogue with the African diaspora in France. When Garvey briefly visited Paris in 1928, his situation resembled Houénou's in New York four years earlier. His speech did not go over well. It was before the diverse Club du Faubourg (1918–1939) where conferences featured lively debates with the audience that included some pro-French supporters of colonialism, Communists, and others who sanctioned the policy of assimilation. Garvey's English had to be translated simultaneously and he was challenged from different sides about his call for Negro self-government and resettlement in Africa. Réné Maran in particular attacked Garvey's “black nationalism” and simultaneous praise of the French. A reporter from the Pittsburgh Courier claimed that most blacks in the audience disagreed with the proposal of self-government in Africa, except for Houénou, who reputedly supported such an idea. Another asked, perhaps sarcastically, why blacks did not just immigrate to the French colonies and “become French,” if the French treated blacks so well. After all, Garvey had begun his speech by echoing Houénou's earlier rhetoric, noting that France alone “offer[ed] to the Negro legal equality and the humane rights of citizenship.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Houénou definitely differed from Garvey, but the nature of their interaction and collaboration, no matter how ephemeral, remains instructive because of the tendency to portray historical actors one dimensionally. Because Houénou consistently tried to work within the French system, he has been characterized as a “reformist” and especially as an “assimilationist.”Footnote ⁸⁵ However, it was his experiences within that French world, his education, and his travel in France and West Africa that helped him develop a political vision that was critical of French colonialism while seeking to be part of its reform. Houénou's anger and disappointment at the French colonial system were as profound and real as his love of what France was or was supposed to be. At the same time, for Houénou and many of his contemporaries (and successors) a central tension emerged from competing “local” concerns—in Houénou's case, Francophone, West African, or Dahomean—and a broader diasporic, black perspective. As an African and as a member of the Francophone elite living in Paris, Houénou wrote and acted with what Robin Kelley has referred to as a (black) “global vision.” Brent Edwards writes of the differences between these “global visions” of blackness and diaspora among the African diaspora as a problem of “translation” or décalage (a gap), which is a fundamental strength and weakness of black diaspora thought and activism. Black people could imagine countless similarities with one another but could not always reconcile the divergences between black communities and individuals.Footnote ⁸⁶ Such rifts could also occur within one person's experiences. In the case of Houénou, he saw connections among his Dahomean, Parisian, West African, and black identities, and tried to occupy all of these spaces before the law. In doing so, he was practicing a type of pluralism and, I would argue, legal posturing, that could not be tolerated. Despite the scholarly image of him as “less radical” and “assimilationist,” French authorities saw him as a threat, leading to his eventual demise.

The Limits of Legal Posturing in Houénou's “Evolution Revolution”

Houénou's attempt to assume the title of chef de famille marked a turning point in his career, crystallizing his political vision and leading to his downfall. When he entered into the dispute over the chef de famille title upon his father's death, Houénou came into conflict not only with his extended family and with Senegalese mixed-race lawyer Germain Crespin who represented his father's estate, but also with the French colonial administration. Houénou was offended that his own younger brother Georges claimed to be head of the family, and he resented the French colonial administration's intervention in what he saw as a “family matter.” In response to the situation, Houénou decided to place himself in direct contact with the upper echelons of the colonial administration, sending letters and cables directly to the Minister of the Colonies in Paris. He also tried to redefine himself professionally and politically by seeking to be a defense lawyer in Cotonou in 1925 upon his arrival. In 1933, he tried to run for the position of representative on the Superior Council of the Colonies, a position normally held by white French men. In his 1924 speech in Paris, he had complained about the role of Europeans established in the colonies who were appointed to the Superior Council, supposedly to represent the interests of colonial populations.Footnote ⁸⁷ During the title dispute and all of these ill-fated moves to plead his case or change his position in society, he came up against the “dual” status that he occupied as an African man and a French citizen, not so much by navigating around them as occupying them both at once.

During the chef de famille dispute, Houénou regularly wrote letters or dispatched telegrams directly to the Minister of the Colonies in Paris pleading his case, denouncing Governor Fourn of Dahomey, and generally representing himself as a model French citizen. Placing himself in direct contact with higher authorities, Houénou forced the governor of Dahomey and even the Governor General of French West Africa based in Dakar to respond to him. In a letter to the Minister of the Colonies, Houénou declared, “I have lived in France 25 years, I am a citizen, former wounded soldier from the war. I like a fight but the campaign undertaken by the French against me is deplorable. As a result, not only Dahomeans, but any African who isn't a fool will ask himself if France isn't the declared enemy of all of those who are evolved and assimilated to French culture.” But for all of his positioning as an évolué, he repeated a request, that he had made in an earlier telegram to the minister, to allow a ritual funeral procession of princes and priests from the former kingdom of Dahomey to honor his father. Switching tones again, as he wrote his letter from neighboring Lomé, Togo, where he was attempting to practice as a defense attorney, he complained that he had not yet been authorized to practice, and requested that the Minister intervene. He then mentioned how his travels in the United States had deepened his loyalty to France: “as a French citizen, I do not hesitate to battle bad Frenchmen in this honest and loyal struggle but I avoid any offense to the Motherland with great care.”Footnote ⁸⁸ At every turn, Houénou attempted to displace the authority of others as he asserted himself as French citizen, African family representative, defender of African culture, representative of France in the United States, and as keeper of French values in the corrupt colonies. The concept of legal posturing is a useful way of understanding and describing Houénou's actions, not only because of the way he presented himself in multiple ways to authorities but also how he tried to make use of the law and court system, even if he was unsuccessful.Footnote ⁸⁹

As Houénou was attempting to assume the title of chef de famille, he was apprehended on charges stemming from bad checks that he issued in Paris that led to his disbarment. He was arrested for the fraud relating to the checks and for his self-representation as an attorney in Dahomey, especially as he had applied to be a defense lawyer and had begun practicing in Togo. There were also claims that he was not a physician, as he had also represented.Footnote ⁹⁰ Houénou served several months in prison in Dahomey and complained that the legal charges against him had not been officially stated, but when he later traveled to Dakar, it was to attend the appeals hearing of the official division of the family. The appeal focused instead on the earlier fraud charges from France, and accusations that he had slandered the Senegalese lawyer Germain Crespin.Footnote ⁹¹ Whatever the official decision on the title of chef de famille, it appears that part of the family wealth was divided among certain individuals. The French colonial administration preferred personal property ownership to the idea of collective holding, and the Quenum/Houénou family consisted of more than 3,000 people.Footnote ⁹²

In the end, when Governor Fourn disqualified Houénou for the title of chef de famille based on Houénou's citizenship status, he actually quoted the wrong decree, citing the section of the 1912 decree, even though Houénou had obtained his citizenship using the 1915 law.Footnote ⁹³ It is unclear why Houénou, a trained attorney, would not have brought this discrepancy to the attention of authorities. First, Houénou was not, in fact, naturalized, but only had political rights. More pertinent was that the 1915 statute actually had no official provision requiring renunciation of personal/civil status, even though it appears that French officials may have still demanded such a letter, as they assumed that it was pro forma in citizenship applications.Footnote ⁹⁴ Nevertheless, when most Africans and other colonials renounced their personal status, they did not appear to acquire French civil status in some official way. Instead, they seemed to acquire something akin to “non-native” status.Footnote ⁹⁵ Still, Houénou may have wanted things both ways, having French citizenship and flexibility under customary law. Several times in West Africa and in France, Houénou made calls to respect African “traditions,” and the coalition from the members of the extended Houénou family to support his candidacy purposefully included senior women and men, as a nod to “tradition” and the power of elders. He adamantly insisted on ritual funeral rites for his father, against the wishes of some of his family members, and perhaps, even against the wishes of his deceased father.Footnote ⁹⁶ There may have been some romanticism lurking in Houénou's position, sentiments such as those expressed back in 1921 in Involution. But it is significant that he maintained the image of “African-ness” alongside French citizenship, rather than suggesting that people would abandon local practices for “Frenchness,” and what many presumed was modernity.

The height of Houénou's expression of simultaneous “African-ness” and “Frenchness” came during the 1928 electoral campaigns in Senegal after the bruising jail sentence and the appeals hearing in Dakar. After the hearing, Houénou stayed in Senegal to campaign against the candidacy of Blaise Diagne, the Senegalese deputy who had brought libel changes against his journal Les Continents, causing the journal to fold.Footnote ⁹⁷ In speeches that he gave during the campaign that were apparently published, Houénou called forcefully for autonomy of French West Africa and the full application of the French republican constitution. He refused to see France and its empire as separate entities. He wrote, “In this France of 100 million, you have beside your Victor Hugo…a humble Senegalese, Sudanese, or Malagasy soldier ensuring the integrity of the nation, or the peasant in Normandy…whose labor like that the black farmer creates the richness…of one France indivisible.”Footnote ⁹⁸ For Houénou, citizenship in the French empire was a right for Africans as Africans, not only as Africans striving to be French. In the end, could one be modern, African, and European at once?

Houénou tried one last time to do so in the last years of his life after living quietly in Paris from 1928 to 1932 and after announcing his marriage to a black American singer named Roberta Dodds Crawford that year. But many of his problems and his own behavior from the mid-1920s resurfaced again. Within months of his wedding, the Argentine widow of his former associate Ouanilo Behanzin, a prince of the former Dahomey kingdom, successfully sued him for fraud, leading again to his arrest. The trial occurred amidst rumors that Houénou and the woman had had an affair.Footnote ⁹⁹ It was also near that same time that he attempted to campaign for a delegate seat on the Superior Council of Dahomey, against a French official. He apparently requested funds from his extended family members, but unable to obtain the financial support (it was the period of a worldwide economic depression), he abandoned his bid. He returned to Dahomey in 1933, claiming to have arrived to “fight against the authorities and defend the local populations,” and a few months later French colonial officials complained that he was trying to agitate rural populations in the interior of the colony. And before arriving in Dahomey, he engaged in writing letters and cables to claim relationships with metropolitan authorities and displace the power of officials in the colonies over him.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Revisiting all of his old haunts in West Africa, he filed fraud charges against his old nemesis Germain Crespin, and wound up in a courtroom scuffle with him. When Houénou moved to Senegal to try to practice law, he was arrested for his involvement in the altercation with Crespin; he died in July 1936 in prison in Dakar, Senegal, apparently a broken man.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Scholars have presented Houénou with diverse interests, implying that his French, pan-African, or Dahomean identities and alliances were in conflict with one another and the source of his problems. However, Houénou thought of himself as simultaneously French, Dahomean, African, and black. Black British author Caryl Phillips, born in St. Kitts, reared in England, and resident in the United States, has spoken of “inhabit[ing] two cultures or more” rather than being “between two cultures.”Footnote ¹⁰² I prefer this formulation to what Salman Rushdie has referred to as his own “double unbelonging.”Footnote ¹⁰³ At multiple points in his life, Houénou asserted that he “belonged” as a French citizen, as an African, as a writer/activist, and as a lawyer. In 1926, in the midst of his battles with the French colonial regime over his rights to the leading title in this family, Houénou himself wrote in a letter to his arch-rival Crespin: “I am French because of Dahomean [sic] and my loyalty toward my first homeland is the best guarantee of my fidelity to the second.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ And 2 years later in the midst of the Senegalese election campaign, he is reported to have said, “Dahomean I am, I am African, like you, and consequently Negro [black].”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Given his ongoing difficulties leading a few years later to his tragic end, it is possible to question whether he was so avowedly loyal to France and still separating an idealized vision of the metropolis from what he saw as the corrupt colonies.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

It was during Houénou's 1933 visit to Dahomey that Emile Zinsou, future president of Dahomey, then a teenager, recalled a conversation that suggested that Houénou's position had hardened in relation to France. A young Zinsou eagerly proclaimed that France should send Africans to France for education so that Africans could occupy positions held by the French in the colonies. Houénou decried Zinsou's naïveté, declaring that the French would not support such activities, adding bitterly, “You are lambs going to the wolves for help.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ To paint a trajectory of increasing radicalism and disillusionment oversimplifies the complexity of Houénou's intellectual and political activity, working both within and against the law and French colonialist ideologies. It is easy to both underestimate and overestimate the radicalism of his ideas. The consistent portrait of Houénou as an “assimilationist” or “reformist” undervalues the profound intellectual challenge that Houénou mounted to French notions of republicanism and citizenship when he played metropolitan ideals against colonial realities. Houénou was not simply naïve or “duped” by French rhetoric, he was actively exposing a naked truth of French imperialism. Focusing on his interactions with Garvey or the black cultural events he sponsored in Paris overstates a certain type of Pan-Africanism in his activities, without recognizing how Africans living on the continent also engaged in influential forms of critique and activism. Recalling his earliest writings in Involution, Houénou's valorization and sometimes romanticization of African culture was based in universalist ideologies as much as, if not more than, a belief in some racialized essence.

Transcending these core tensions between the specificity and universality of “blackness” and “Frenchness” has been an ongoing struggle for intellectuals, activists, and scholars. Even if Houénou's star was already waning in 1931, it is impossible not to wonder if he met Aimé Césaire, the future Martinican writer and politician, who arrived in Paris as an eighteen-year old student that year. During his much longer and more influential career, Césaire attained French department status, albeit fraught for Martinique, and remained committed to the idea of a blackness that was universal. Césaire remarked in an interview in 1997 that, “The West told us that in order to be universal we had to start by denying that we were Black. I, on the contrary, said to myself that the more we were Black, the more universal we would be.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Like Houénou, Césaire's conceptualization of a universal blackness was shaped by the specificity of his experience in a French Atlantic world.

When Houénou left Paris in 1933 to pursue a declining political and legal career in Dahomey and Senegal, perhaps he believed he had already seen both the possibilities and the limits of fusing blackness, citizenship, and the ideal of the universal in the crucible that was interwar Paris. But what if he could have seen this different world after World War II when the former African colonies became part of a French Union? Would he have supported this vision so close to what he himself had described in the 1920s? One can imagine that Houénou, who was so willing to accept many forms of pluralism and who was able to occupy multiple social and legal spaces at once, would have supported these measures, piecemeal and problematic as they were. And then, like so many others, he would have been vigilant and prepared to struggle for much, much more.