“The Capital of the Men without a Country”: Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris

Abstract

THROUGHOUT ITS HISTORY, PARIS HAS earned many epithets. Walter Benjamin famously labeled it "the capital of the nineteenth century" in 1935; eighty years later, French president Franc ¸ois Hollande tagged it even less modestly "the capital of the world." 1 Earlier, however, in 1927, the Harvard-educated civil rights activist Roger Nash Baldwin had praised the city as "the capital of the men without a country." On a stopover following the Brussels Congress of the League against Imperialism in 1927, Baldwin found in Paris "the headquarters of agitation of the French colonial peoples, where black, brown and yellow men can argue their case for freedom." Noting that "the Chinese Kuomintang makes Paris its European center," he urged readers to "pick up on some big newsstand the scores of little papers published daily or weekly as mouthpieces of the colonies of exiles; search out the cafe ´s where they gather; get around to the meetings of protest." Lumping together exiles of highly diverse origins, Baldwin concluded: "Never in all history have so many of them from so many lands found refuge in one place." This he attributed to the city's revolutionary tradition of "Liberty, equality, fraternity." 2 Interwar Paris indeed hosted numerous anticolonial activists. The environment was highly cosmopolitan, giving rise to myriad political movements that were later catapulted onto the global stage. While the funding and the ideas flowed from transnational contacts, the activists' stature, and in fact their very existence, often derived from the fact that they catered to the everyday needs of a local rank-and-file constituency. Many future political and intellectual leaders of African and Asian countries who spent time in Paris were not there specifically to gain some prestige on a preor-I would like to thank the AHR editors and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable advice and suggestions in finishing this article. I would also like to thank

Zwischen Wissensproduktion und Politik: Das Leben und Werk von Devendra Nath Bannerjea im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland

“…Michael Goebel has recently suggested that scholars engage more seriously with the social history of anticolonial activists, with their mundane concerns and everyday life, in regard to employment, (romantic) relationships and encounters with racial prejudices (Goebel 2016 ). This interjection seems all the more important for transboundary actors like Bannerjea, whose financial circumstances consequently determined his “scope of possibility”.…”

‘The only safe haven of refuge in all the world’: Paris, Indian ‘revolutionaries’ and imperial rivalry,c. 1905–40

“…3 The only comprehensive work (Sareen, 1979) is now somewhat dated. 4 Goebel (2016Goebel ( : 1458 alludes to the development of a 'shadow diplomacy'. 5 The colonised peoples of the French empire had differing legal statuses depending on the territory in which they lived.…”