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Public Culture 114 Overcoming Departmentalization Between 1946 and 1956 Césaire evolved from passionately advocating for depart- mentalization to calling for its “negation.”30 In a series of parliamentary interven- tions while occupying Schoelcher’s own former seat as deputy from Martinique, he criticized the French state for failing to apply immediately all metropolitan laws, especially employment and social security provisions, to the new Antillean departments. He repeatedly reminded the National Assembly that the spirit of the 1946 law also required economic investments, new social policies, and demo- cratic reforms. His goal remained consistent: to “abolish [colonial status] through integration” by transforming the formal liberty accorded by departmentalization into full citizenship, social equality, and economic development.31 At first Césaire attacked the unreconstructed colonial attitude toward the Antilles demonstrated by metropolitan policy makers and overseas administra- tors, whom he denounced as duplicitous, corrupt, and incompetent. He warned fellow legislators that shortsighted policies, which had created a “parody of assimilation” and “caricatures of departments,” would inevitably nourish revo- lutionary nationalist sentiments among a heretofore loyal Antillean population.32 Definitive separation from France in the future, he argued, would be more cata- strophic for French national interests than would proper integration in the present. Tacking skillfully between practical and apocalyptic registers, Césaire’s interven- tions identified the grand ethicopolitical principles at stake in seemingly mundane policies as well as the momentous historical consequences that would follow the state’s refusal to accede to legitimate demands for modest social and democratic reforms by relatively powerless but loyal citizens. But by the mid-1950s Césaire had shifted from challenging the French state to implement departmentalization fully to formulating an account of why it could 30. Aimé Césaire, “Pour la transformation de la Martinique en region dans le cadre d’une union française federée” (“For the Transformation of Martinique into the Framework of a French Union Federation”), in Oeuvres complètes, 3:478. 31. Quoted in Ernest Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire: Député à l’Assemblée nationale, 1945 – 1993 (Aimé Césaire: Deputy to the National Assembly, 1945 – 1993) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 54. This volume republishes extensive portions of Césaire’s postwar parliamentary and political discourses. In parliamentary debates Césaire forcefully challenged the delay between political and social assim- ilation. See his interventions in JORF, Assemblée nationale, 1e séance, July 10, 1947, 2895; JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, December 29, 1947, 6445; and JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, July 16, 1948. On the French state’s reluctance to implement social legislation in the overseas departments, see Bertrand François-Lubin, “Les méandres de la politique sociale outre-mer” (“The Meanders of Overseas Social Policy”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 73 – 83. 32. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 40, 54.