Regime Change

In June and early July 1940, General de Gaulle was the landless leader of a rebel movement. Professor Denis Saurat, who would soon voyage to Free French Africa, recalls the general's desperation during those long weeks: “‘Give me some land,’ the general kept saying, ‘some land that is France. Anywhere. A French base. Somewhere to start from.’” The tiny Franco- British New-Hebrides islands in the South Pacific answered his call on July 20, but this was hardly the base he had hoped for. Chad, Cameroon, Moyen-Congo, Gabon, and Oubangui-Chari became that fateful starting point in late August 1940.

Free French Africa was conceived in London, but born in Fort-Lamy (current N'Djamena), the capital of Chad, on August 26, 1940. The act of conception – de Gaulle's orders to a handful of trusted emissaries – is by far the best known of the two events. I will focus here on aspects that have been largely ignored: the broad context in which FEA and Cameroon came to join the Gaullist camp and the Free French quest for international legitimacy resting on Africa.

One of the leitmotifs in the telling and retelling of the events of August 1940 in FEA and Cameroon involves an emphasis on these territories as second-rank and counterintuitive starting points for the Free French cause. De Gaulle himself described them as “the poorest of our entire empire.” Colonel Ren'e Boisseau added, “This movement of revolt that prefigured the magnificent political and military revival undertaken by France thereafter, started in FEA, which is to say the most backwards, the weakest colony.” Another recurring trope involves the designation of the events of August 26, 27, and 28 as “the three glorious days.” The reference to the Revolution of July 1830 in France was no accident. To Boisseau, the events in Africa like the nineteenth-century Parisian insurrection “marked the end of the divine monarchy and the coming to power of popular sovereignty.” With hindsight, this seems a tenuous parallel.