Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The French Empire, like the British, had benefited from the re-distribution after 1919 of Asian and African holdings seized from the defeated Central Powers. Thus in 1945 liberated France ruled once again over Syria and Lebanon, as well as substantial swaths of sub-Saharan Africa and some island holdings in the Caribbean and the Pacific. But the ‘jewels’ in France’s imperial crown were her territories in Indo-China and, especially, the old-established French settlements along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa: Tunisia, Morocco and most of all Algeria. In French history texts, however, the place of colonies was perhaps more ambiguous than across the English Channel—in part because France was a Republic in which imperial dominion had no natural place, in part because so many of France’s early conquests had long since been taken over by English-speaking rulers. In 1950 there were still millions of French