Agents of Modernity in Late Imperial France and Africa

The three articles in this issue each problematize, if in different ways, common narratives about French trajectories after World War II. Directly or indirectly, they each call into question the expansive, linear mythology that Jean Fourastié coined as France's Thirty Glorious Years in his 1979 book.1 As part of a growing body of scholarship that questions Fourastié’s periodization, Drew Fedorka, Brooke Durham, and Amelia Lyons expose how his chronology papered over France's decline as an international power during the polarized Cold War, its role in brutal colonial wars, the coup that ended one republic and ushered in another, the long road to economic recovery that thirty-year statistical averages belied, and the social and economic stagnation that the younger generation felt even at the supposed crest of postwar growth.2 All three articles explore questions related to France's effort to rebuild the nation's reputation and influence, particularly through the construction of a new generation trained to look to the future without fixating on the past, or even the shadowy corners of the present. The articles in this special issue highlight that postwar challenges—consumer shortages, the housing crisis, the Fourth Republic's revolving cabinets, the violence on the ground in Algeria, the problems associated with implementing development schemes in newly independent Africa—could not be hidden from view and reminded those who lived through this period of traumas in their nation's past and present. The historians contributing to this issue demonstrate how France's interest in creating a new sense of the nation, innocent of the dark years and all their baggage, as well as its obsession with maintaining its influence on the world stage as its empire crumbled, weighed heavily on the next generation of leaders.