Framing Greater France Between The Wars

This essay analyzes the relationship between France as an imperial nation-state and the discourse of Greater France that intensified during the interwar period. I am interested in the way that the figure of Greater France sought to stage and reconcile – not justify, rationalize, or mystify – structural contradictions between republican and imperial systems of government. I argue that there is an intrinsic relationship between colonial discourse and its corresponding political form. By posing questions about the status we assign to colonial ideology through the analysis of a series of influential colonial texts, this essay pays special attention to the dissociation of nationality and citizenship that characterized a political form composed of a metropolitan parliamentary government articulated with a colonial administrative regime. I hope to reframe the familiar discussion of the proliferating representations of empire that circulated in metropolitan France after World War One. The figure of la plus grande France that developed then allows us to interrogate the French imperial nation-state at a doubly paradoxical historical conjuncture characterized by the consolidation of both the republic and the empire, on the one hand, and by unprecedented crises of the republic and colonial legitimacy, on the other. Interwar imperialism produced qualitative and evaluative distinctions between different French colonies but I will focus on the more general conceptions of the empire as such that circulated through the discourse of Greater France.