The conference was a pre-emptive strike against the anti-colonial views of Roosevelt, a propaganda exercise to prove that the French were aware of the need for change.78 But one of its organizers, Henri Laurentie, certainly intended it as more than a cosmetic exercise. Laurentie was a colonial civil servant who had been an adviser to Eboué in August 1940 when Chad rallied to de Gaulle. Laurentie, who prided himself on being one of the first Gaullists, was a maverick in the staid world of colonial officialdom. He was a surrealist poet in his spare time and unique among colonial officials in not
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