The New Woman and the New Empire:
Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France

If the New Woman threatened the underpinnings of French society during the interwar years, the empire posed a different kind of challenge. In defending herself against Germany during the war, France had relied on her empire to a far greater extent than ever before in her history. In particular, French authorities imported hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects to fight on her battlefields and man her factories and farms during the hostilities. Many Frenchwomen and men saw nonwhites for the first time in their lives during the war years, and in a very real sense World War I constitutes the beginning of the postcolonial era in modern France. This unprecedented presence of the colonized in the métropole both reaffirmed the global greatness of France and called into question some basic assumptions about French identity. ¹

Many saw the new importance of empire as a positive development. One result of the war was the popularization of the idea of France as a land of “100 million Frenchmen.” Conscious of the fact that their nation of 40 million people faced a vengeful and potentially powerful Germany of 70 million, theorists of empire and others argued that by including the inhabitants of her colonies, France really had a population of 100 million and was therefore much stronger than her German rival. ² The most prominent example of this kind of thinking in interwar France was the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris, perhaps the greatest advertisement for imperialism ever staged. Attracting tens of millions of visitors, the exposition showcased the cultures and achievements of France’s empire, most notably by building a full-scale model of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat on the outskirts of the capital. ³ This interest in colonialism also helped fuel the wave of exoticism and fascination with “primitive” cultures central to French avant-garde culture after the war. The fact that Josephine Baker portrayed so many French colonial natives during her career was merely one example of this thirst for far horizons and exotic shores, as was the influence of jazz and African sculpture on modernist music and art. ⁴ Although the average Frenchwoman and man still paid little attention to imperial affairs, for policy makers and members of the avant-garde, the colonies became central to their vision of 20th-century France. ⁵

Yet this vision was not always positive. If the colonies represented opportunity and excitement overseas, they also posed a potential danger to French identity at home. Increasingly, many in France argued that the much-vaunted civilizing mission was a failure, that it was ultimately impossible for black and brown natives to become truly French. The colonial theory of assimilation largely gave way by the 1920s to a new theory, association, which emphasized separate paths to development and the fundamental inequality of different races of men. ⁶ Such fears of native savagery targeted in particular the prospect of colonial subjects coming to France. At the end of the First World War, public authorities decided to expel the colonial workers who had come to France during the war, in spite of the economy’s crying need for healthy young men, judging that the nation was not yet ready for an experiment in multiculturalism. ⁷ Even the exoticism of the postwar era not only reinforced traditional stereotypes of colonial peoples but also, by underscoring the contrast between them and the French, gave a certain racialized idea of French national identity. The empire could indeed be useful, but only if the boundaries between métropole and colony remained firmly in place.

Anxieties over the New Woman and the empire during the interwar years converged around fears for the very future of the nation. This was not only a military but also above all a demographic concern. Not only had France lost over a million young men in the war, but she also had one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, and was in fact experiencing negative population growth by the 1930s. ⁸ The image of France as a nation of old men and empty cradles became widespread in the interwar years and for many signaled their country’s grave peril. One response was pro-natalism, the determination to boost the birthrate by any means possible. These included not only abundant propaganda in favor of motherhood, but also state subsidies for large families and increasingly severe penalties for the dissemination of birth control information. ⁹ In such a context, the garçonne who left home to lead a wild and single life became nothing less than an enemy of society. It is telling that Margueritte’s heroine Monique Lerbier ended up sterile, not only the ultimate punishment for a woman, but also a clear warning of the dangers to women and to France in general posed by female liberation. ¹⁰

1. Marc Michel, L’Appel à l’Afrique: Contributions et Réactions à l’Effort de Guerre en A.O.F. (1914-1919) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982); Joe Harris Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Oxford: James Currey Publisher, 1999); Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Tyler Stovall, “The Color Line Behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France During the Great War,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998).[↑]
2. Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France (Paris: Table Ronde, 1972).[↑]
3. On the Colonial Exposition, see Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L’Exposition coloniale, la mémoire du siècle (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1991); Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).[↑]
4. Ezra, op. cit.; Petrine Archer-Shaw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz Age Paris (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).[↑]
5. Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds. French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion (New York: Palgrave, 1999).[↑]
6. Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).[↑]
7. Tyler Stovall, “National Identity and Shifting Imperial Frontiers: Whiteness and the Exclusion of Colonial Labor after World War I,” Representations 84 (2004).[↑]
8. William Schneider, Quantity and Quality: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Anne Carol, Histoire de l’eugenisme en France: Les médecins et la procreation XIXe-Xxe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1995).[↑]
9. Camiscioli, op. cit.; Schneider, op. cit.[↑]
10. Roberts, Civlization; William Schneider, op. cit[↑]