Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

On the other hand French schoolchildren were insistently presented with the image of ‘France’ itself as a trans-oceanic continuum, a place in which the civic and cultural attributes of Frenchness were open to all; where elementary schools from Saigon to Dakar taught about ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ (‘our ancestors the Gauls’) and proclaimed—if only in principle—the virtues of a seamless cultural assimilation that would have been quite unthinkable to the administrators of British, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish or Portugese colonies.2 Only in France could the metropolitan authorities seriously treat their most valued colonial possessions not as foreign soil but as administrative extensions of France itself. Thus ‘Algeria’ was but a geographical expression; the area it denoted was administered as three departments of France (in which, however, only its European residents enjoyed full civil rights).