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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 107 9. Journal officiel de la République française (hereafter JORF), Documents de l’Assemblée nationale constituante, February 26, 1946, 519. 10. In response to critics of his support for the 1946 law, Césaire repeatedly explained that departmentalization corresponded to the longtime wishes of the Antillean people and enjoyed broad public support in the postwar period, especially among Communists, workers, and civil service employees. It was opposed only by a minority of right-wing white békés. Césaire and his colleagues seized a historic opportunity to pass a radical anticolonial law in a brief opening when Martinican and French politics were dominated by Communist legislators. For an overview of Martinique dur- ing the postwar period, see Armand Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique: De 1939 à 1971 (History of Martinique: From 1939 to 1971) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). identified with his cosponsorship of the March 19, 1946, law that established the so-called old colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Réunion as formal departments of France. This act stipulated that all current and future metropoli- tan laws be applied to these French territories. The report to the assembly from the Commission des Territoires d’Outre-Mer presented by Césaire on behalf of Léopold Bissol, Gaston Monnerville, and Raymond Vergès argued that depart- mentalization was simply a matter of legal reclassification, “the normal outcome of a historical process” through which these colonies had already been effectively integrated into the French nation.9 The report explains, however, that private economic interests had obstructed this process of assimilation precisely when, after World War II, new labor leg- islation was passed. This meant that departmentalization, if implemented faith- fully, would have required costly social benefits and investments to be extended to Antilleans, who would become equal partners in the emergent welfare state. Formal legal integration, in other words, would both require and enable a range of socioeconomic initiatives. Not satisfied with the prospect of an empty or qualified liberty, Césaire saw departmentalization as a vehicle for integrated emancipa- tion wherein legal, political, and socioeconomic freedoms would reinforce one another. Rather than evaluate this program for departmentalization in terms of a nation- alist logic of decolonization that presumptively reduces political emancipation to state sovereignty, we should approach it as a historically situated engagement with the refractory problem of freedom. Césaire’s support for departmentaliza- tion was a pragmatic response to a given historical conjuncture.10 He regarded total and immediate integration with France as the surest route to substantive freedom for Antillean peoples, given their poor and weak status within an impe- rial world system. If historical conditions changed or if integration failed, a new arrangement would have to be pursued. He thus imagined departmentalization