In 1945 France ruled a vast colonial empire, second only in size—and in brutality—to the British. But whereas Britain disposed of its empire without any serious repercussions for domestic politics, France fought two savage colonial wars, in Indochina and Algeria, before withdrawing defeated in the early 1960s. Between 1946 and 1962, France was permanently at war, apart from a brief interval of a few months. Those conflicts dominated and eventually destroyed the Fourth Republic, and gave France the constitution it retains today. The country still lives in their shadow: the Front National would be quite incomprehensible without the Algerian background. When ignorant demagogues blame ‘immigrants’ for all of France’s ills, they forget that many French Muslims are descended from those who came to the metropolis when Algeria was still part of its national territory. One important aspect of this history, which Michael Goebel’s fascinating study brings to our attention, is that the revolts which finally brought an end to the French empire were to some extent prepared in the very heart of French imperialism, the city of Paris. Goebel, who teaches at Berlin’s Free University, has a background in Latin American history: his first book, Argentina’s Partisan Past (2011), addressed the role of Argentine historiography in the construction of a national identity. Here, he argues that migration to France’s colonial metropolis was the ‘social bedrock’ for the formation of an anti-imperialist consciousness that transformed the world after 1945. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that the very concept of the ‘Third World’—a term coined in the 1950s, which had an enormous influence on political thought in the following decade—actually originated among the migrant activists of the 1920s and 1930s, with the ‘idea of an anti-imperialist solidarity spanning several continents’.

In the early 1920s, Nguyễn Ái Quốc—later known as Hồ Chí Minh, the Vietnamese Communist leader and hero of countless demonstration chants in the 1960s—was the French-based editor of Le Paria, a newspaper aimed at the victims of colonialism, whether migrants in France or those back home. One of those radicalized by a French Communist Party (pcf) election campaign in the same decade was a young Algerian factory worker, Messali Hadj: he became one of the founders of the Étoile Nord-Africaine, from which all subsequent movements for Algerian independence developed—though by the 1950s Messali himself would be embroiled in a tragic and murderous feud with the leaders of the Front de Libération Nationale (fln). If these two men are the best-known, Goebel also presents us with an impressive roll-call of anti-imperialist activists who lived in Paris during the interwar years and acquired much of their political outlook there. From Algeria there was Ferhat Abbas, later a leading figure in the fln. From Vietnam, alongside Hồ, came the Trotskyist militant Tạ Thu Thâu, who had a real following in the 30s and was murdered by the Việt Minh in 1945. Senegal contributed Lamine Senghor, one of the pcf’s most remarkable black organizers and writers until his premature death in 1927. Others came from countries that had not been colonized by the French. Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were among the Chinese ‘worker-students’ in Paris at the time, while Indonesia sent Arnold Mononutu, who later played an important role in organizing the 1955 Bandung conference of newly independent Afro-Asian nations. Latin America supplied the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, not to mention two of his compatriots, the writer César Vallejo and the politician Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. In addition to such prominent figures, Goebel has also identified some important characters who had been largely written out of history, such as the remarkable activist Hadj Ali Abdelkader, a regular contributor to Le Paria, who, as one of the few North African workers to have French citizenship, stood as an election candidate for the pcf and founded the Étoile Nord-Africaine together with Messali Hadj. He remained a practising Muslim while serving on the pcf’s Central Committee.

By the end of the 1920s, there were one hundred thousand non-Europeans living in Paris, more than in any other European city. During the course of World War One around three quarters of a million colonial subjects had been brought to France as soldiers or workers; although an ungrateful nation did its best to repatriate them, some stayed or came back. Many of the others were students, but there were also many North African workers at Renault’s car plant and other large factories: one source claims that by 1930, around a quarter of the workforce at Renault-Billancourt hailed from overseas. The immigrant population included Chinese worker-students like Zhou and Deng who combined their studies with spells of factory work, and thus had direct contact with French and migrant workers. Naturally, immigrants from particular countries formed their own clusters. But there was a great deal of interaction between the various national groups, who learnt from each other as they slowly developed strategies for combatting imperialism.

Goebel paints a vivid and detailed picture of daily life for the various immigrant communities in Paris during the interwar years. There was a rich cultural fabric. Musical performances enabled the migrants to maintain contact with their own native cultures, but also encouraged collaboration across national boundaries. In 1936, a concert to raise funds in support of Ethiopia as it faced Italian aggression brought together West Indian, Creole, Italian and Arab musicians. The author also looks at the way personal relationships developed. Unsurprisingly for the time, the vast majority of migrants were male, students and workers alike. Hence the emergence of brothels specializing in migrant customers, but also, and more significantly, the development of close personal relations between migrants and French women. Entrenched racism meant that, while cohabitation was relatively widespread, marriages were rare. However, a surprising number of those who led anti-colonial movements were married to French women. Lamine Senghor is reported to have said that ‘he felt even more bitterly about the condition of Negroes because he was married to a white woman’.