# Worlding decolonisation: Rediscovering federalist and pluralist geographies of more-than-national liberation

Federico Ferretti

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Federico Ferretti. Worlding decolonisation: Rediscovering federalist and pluralist geographies of more-than-national liberation. Political Geography, 2025, 119, pp.103322. 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103322 hal-05026715

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# Worlding decolonisation: Rediscovering federalist and pluralist geographies of more-than-national liberation

Federico Ferretti

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Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Educazione "G.M. Bertin", Studio 70, Via Filippo Re 6, Bologna, 40126, Italy

## ARTICLE INFO

### Keywords:

- Decolonisation

- Anti-colonialism

- Anarchism

- Federalism

- Worldmaking

## ABSTRACT

This paper argues for rethinking the shortcomings of historical decolonisation, commonly opposed to more ambitious decolonial goals. By addressing significant cases of European radical 'allies' of anticolonial movements in the years of African and Caribbean independences, this work proposes new geographies of decolonisation based on the study of transnational and multilingual circuits of committed intellectuals who proposed socialistic and/or federalistic solutions for decolonisation well beyond national independence. The paper is based on the huge archives of two French intellectuals, Jean Suret-Canale and Daniel Guérin, who represented very different tendencies in the anticolonial Leftist circuits that gathered in Paris. The core of the dying French colonial empire, Paris was also a global hub for refugees and diasporic anticolonial/antiracist activists in the 1950s and 1960s. I make the case for reconsidering ideas that were not listened in difficult historical contexts (namely the Algerian War and the Cold War) but can still inspire current conversations. Drawing on the heterogeneous non-state and federalist proposals of French-speaking radicals, including authors such as Albert Camus and Cheikh Anta Diop, I stress the need of rediscovering non-nationalistic and non-communitarian ideas of decolonisation which allow de-essentialising identities and considering pluralistic 'worlds' as inspirations for inclusive views of decolonisation.

This paper addresses matters of transnational decolonisation, alli-ances, alternative worldmakings and their radical geopolitics in the post-war decades that saw the independence of most Asian and African countries. It contends that new analyses of the transnational networks of radical, anti-racist and internationalist anticolonial movements, including their allies based in imperial centres, allow resuming forgotten federalist ideas and radical practices to delink decolonisation from the nationalisms, localisms and exclusionary views based on race, ethnicity or religion that have characterised some of its historical outcomes. Here, I address French-speaking radical anticolonial circuits through the huge and almost unexplored archives of two nonconformist intellectuals representing quite different political views in the Leftist spectrum: orthodox-communist geographer Jean Suret-Canale (1921–2007) and *communiste libertaire* [an anarchist akin to internationalist communism] historian and pioneer of LGBTQ + rights Daniel Guérin (1904–1988). In addition to these scholars’ transnational networks, I discuss the social-istic and federalist anticolonial proposals of Guérin and other two in-tellectuals connected with these circuits in the years of decolonisation: Senegalese scientist and historian (and future dissident after indepen-dence) Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) and French-Algerian writer

Albert Camus (1913–1960). These authors provided heterogeneous output but shared a significant point in common: that is, the respective voices were hardly heard by the leading politicians of 'constitutional' decolonisation and maintain potentialities for informing current anti-colonial and decolonial strategies.

My main argument is that, despite neglected at the moment of po-litical independences, federalist and non-state anticolonial perspectives can provide more plural understandings of worldmaking, stressing the variety and richness of anticolonial positions and effective engagements that mainstream (colonial and anticolonial) narratives tend to overlook. The French-speaking cases discussed in this paper expose how trans-national allies of anticolonial movements questioned European geo-po-litical models such as the nation-state, which empirically demonstrates how alternative worldings were elaborated by radical circuits in original ways. This work extends recent literature on anticolonial worldmaking, connecting it with debates on geographies of decolonisation/decolo-nising geographies (Craggs & Neate, 2024; Daley and Murrey, 2022; Esson et al., 2017). While the term ‘worlding’ has an ambiguous history, as it was used by Gayatri Spivak (1985) to identify Western universal-ism, different utilisations of this term have been proposed by
geographers such as Martin Müller (2021) and by decolonial scholarship (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2023; Tornel & Lunden, 2022). Here, I understand worlding as a way to think decolonisation as a plural and federalistic worldwide phenomenon, not limited to one place, identity or geographical area, and associated with plural dialogues rather than particularisms.

Authors such as Adom Getachew discuss worldmaking stressing how early anticolonial perspectives went well beyond political independence, towards ‘global projects of decolonisation’ (Getachew, 2019, 1), by focusing on Pan-African and Caribbean leaders. This paper provides new perspectives on these latter’s work by focusing on their allies in the ‘Norths’, including some less ‘elite’ intellectuals and activists whose ideas were mostly neglected and later forgotten. As for Africa, debates on how independences had disappointed the expectations of those who wanted more (politically or epistemically) radical decolonisation have been recently discussed by geographical scholarship. What Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate define ‘constitutional decolonisation [which] brought only independence with a question mark’ (Craggs & Neate, 2024, 4) was generally perceived as an incomplete and disappointing process that produced what Edward Said called ‘little Europes scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas’ (Said, 2021, 136). This meant reproducing both colonial structures such as state and capitalism and colonial ways of though as discussed by decolonial scholarship (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Sousa Santos, 2016).

In the first part, I discuss the relevance of the archives explored here for current debates in (political) geographies of decolonisation. In the second part, I address the African networks of Suret-Canale, which reveal the transnational and socialistic inspiration of little-known anti-colonial experiences taking place between Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. In the third part, I discuss the challenges and responses of French radical (and especially anarchist) Lefts before the 1954–1962 Algerian War, including Guérin’s contributions. In the fourth part, I address the transnational and federalist purposes of Camus, Guérin and Diop.

# 1. Archives of decolonisation geographies

Recent histories and geographies of intellectual dissent stress the importance of ‘maverick’ (Craggs & Neate, 2024, 60) scholars, including from Europe, who participated in endeavours for university decolonisation in Africa (Clayton, 2020; Craggs & Neate, 2020). European geographers such as Keith Buchanan (Power & Sidaway, 2004) and Kenneth Baker variously contributed to new university programmes that often addressed more ambitious political and/or epistemic programmes for ‘Africanisation’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Thiong’o, 1986). It was the case with the so-called ‘Dar School’ at the University of Dar es Salaam, directly supported by President Julius Nyerere (Ferretti, 2020; Sharp, 2019). The Dar case saw the participation of Western scholars such as David Slater, Giovanni Arrighi and Ben Wisner alongside other international scholars such as Walter Rodney and Milton Santos, and Africans such as Claude Ake.

For Yousuf Al-Bulushi, the importance of these peculiar experiences lied in their potentiality to connect ‘Red (Communist/Marxist) forms of internationalism with black (continental & diasporic) traditions of internationalism in the pursuit of a synthesis ... that sought to unite oppressed peoples across the artificially imposed and divisive boundaries of nation-states’ (Al-Bulushi, 2023, 23). Geographers namely argue for rediscovering Pan-Africanism and its diasporic figures in decolonisation histories, whose undermining served to ‘derail defiant scholarship ... or to simply invisibilize it’ (Ouma, 2022, 182). Defiant scholarship (Daley and Murrey, 2022) can arguably benefit from reviving these challenging experiences to open new perspectives overcoming past failures (Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Ndhlovu, 2013).

Scholarship in international relations stresses the potentialities of federalist and internationalist models that characterised initiatives such as the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung and the 1966

Tricontinental in La Habana (Legg et al., 2022; Mahler, 2018; Parrott & Lawrence, 2022; Pham & Shilliam, 2016). In these gatherings, federalist ideas were inspired by a rich tradition of Pan-Africanist transnational networking and conferencing across the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993; Hodder, 2016; Rabaka, 2009). Federalism was concurrently discussed in Asian anticolonial conferences (Legg, 2023) and then resumed by figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. Although their attempts were frustrated by the reproduction of the same Westphalian order based on state territorial sovereignty that was inherited by colonialism, it can be argued that ‘alternatives to the nation-state persisted at the height of decolonisation’ (Getachew, 2019, 107), well beyond mere ‘constitutional’ decolonisation.

In the field of political geographies, recent scholarship explicitly questions the very idea of taking the state for granted, as states only represent a part of human histories and cultures (Ince & Barrera de la Torre, 2024). Geographers also stress the ambiguity of the very idea of self-determination, which was used as an argument for constitutional decolonisation but also ‘to legitimize settler colonialism, as well as neo-imperial interventionism in support of seceding states’ (Constantinou et al., 2024, 1). Thus, locating claims for self-determination at their scales and in their contexts is a methodological tool that ‘offers powerful critiques of the state system and the liberal world order’ (Constantinou et al., 2024, 2), including non-statist claims coming from experiences such as Democratic Confederalism in Rojava (Ventura & Custodi, 2024) and more broadly by indigenous communities worldwide. Decolonial geographies further highlight how indigenous peoples’ claims for autonomy are only partially addressed by politics such as the plurinational constitutions of states such as Ecuador and Bolivia, due to ontological diversity and different understandings of territory (Oslender, 2021; Radhuber & Radcliffe, 2023). Parallelly, critical scholarship in island geopolitics discusses how statist frameworks tend to ignore ‘histories of mobile oceanic communities’ (Grydehøj et al., 2021, 4). Thus, non-state territorialities and federalist/confederalist perspectives can be addressed as alternatives in the long and contested bid of decolonising (political) geography (Naylor et al., 2018; Radcliffe & Radhuber, 2020).

For this paper, I used the archives of Suret-Canale and Guérin for several reasons. First, these huge and little-known collections contain an enormous amount of multilingual materials such as journals, pamphlets, circulars and other grey literature produced worldwide by anticolonial, antiracist and anti-imperialist movements from the 1940s to the 1980s—more than 400 folders in Suret-Canale’s archive and more than 800 in Guérin’s. Second, the two men’s lengthy correspondences account for their respective networks with anticolonial activists and intellectuals who were often dissidents in relation to their parties, governments or academic establishments. Third, the fact that people like Guérin and Suret-Canale were white European ‘allies’, not directly subject to racial or colonial oppression (although variously suffering political repression as I detail below) highlights the importance of solidarity, voluntarism, unforeseen alliances and the reconsideration of individual agency beyond general tendencies and trends. While the risk of reenteering white/European perspectives should always be considered in this kind of works, it is relatively reduced in these collections given the ‘non-white’ origin of most materials held there, that were directly produced by anticolonial movements in the Souths.

For this paper, I have selected and analysed these archival materials with reference to networks, which implies a special focus on correspondence, especially with ‘Southern’ counterparts, and to alternative political proposals, for which I paid special attention to materials addressing federalist and/or transnational proposals, organisations and people in the decolonising world. The deep differences existing between the perspectives of libertarian and orthodox communists also render very complementary the materials held in these archives. Indeed, Guérin and Suret-Canale did not always correspond with the same associations, which provides a privileged observatory on the plural anticolonial hub
of postwar Paris. These archives are located in two places that amazingly correspond to two different ‘bastions’ of Leftist histories in the Parisian region. The Suret-Canale archives survive in Bobigny, in the middle of the working-class 93 Department, in the Parisian East, at the *Archives Départementales de Seine-Saint-Denis*. The Guérin collection is located at the opposite side of the Parisian agglomeration, within the University campus of Nanterre that was one of the starting points of the 1968 uprisings, namely at the *Contemporaine* library-archive, containing huge collections on international organisations and social movements.

The aspect of both archives roughly corresponds to the organisation that the authors gave to their own materials, based on thematic folders of grey literature and chronological folders of correspondence, giving an example of the construction of ‘other’ and subversive archives of internationalism discussed by historical geographical literature (Hodder et al., 2021). These activists were also watched by the French police, and their personal folders survive at the *Archives de la Préfecture de Police* in Pré-Saint-Gervais, not far from Bobigny.

## 2. Transnational geographies between Moscow and Conakry

Suret-Canale’s work has been recently addressed in relation to French translations of Radical Geography (Ferretti, 2021a) and Luso-phone Africa’s transnational anticolonialism (Ferretti, 2021b). Very close to another anticolonial geographer, Jean Dresch, Suret-Canale was a correspondent of international radical geographers such as Brazilians José de Castro<fnref n="1" /> and Milton Santos. From the ‘Dar’ laboratory in Tanzania, this latter tried to invite Suret-Canale to supply a paper for the issues on ‘Underdevelopment and Domination/Dependence’<fnref n="2" /> that Santos and Richard Peet co-edited for *Antipode* in 1977. Yet, international scholarship is far from having clarified all the aspects of this controversial figure. For sure, Suret-Canale was the victim of political persecutions and academic injustices on several occasions during his career (Suret-Canale, 2011).

A fighter in the clandestine resistance during the 1940–1944 Nazi occupation of France, in the afterwar Suret-Canale went to Africa to teach History-Geography in the Van Vollenhoven Lycée in Dakar. From there, the geographer was forcibly repatriated in 1949 due to his collaboration with local radical groups displaying anti-colonialist purposes.<fnref n="3" /> In 1959, Suret-Canale emigrated to Guinea to support anticolonial leader Sékou Touré, who had refused the 1958 referendum promoted by De Gaulle for a *Communauté franco-africaine*, so that his country reached independence a couple of years before most of its neighbours. As Getachew notes, Touré joined Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist purposes, inaugurating an ephemeral Union of African States with Ghana and Modibo Keita’s Mali, ‘as the nucleus for a larger continental federation’ (Getachew, 2019, 190). Yet, neocolonial and nationalist logics prevailed, undermining this ambitious anti-colonial project.

According to Angolan intellectual and Suret-Canale’s collaborator for Guinean journal *Recherches Africaines* Mario Pinto de Andrade, the ‘repressive aspect’ of Touré’s regime progressively rendered ‘unfree intellectual life, that one could not conceive outside the already delirious discourse of the future Supreme Guide’ (Pinto de Andrade, 1997, 158). In 1961, Suret-Canale went back to France, officially under the government’s threat to lose his French citizenship if he continued to work for a state that was deemed hostile. As Alain Dalançon notes, this was also due to the increasing ‘difficult’ conditions of life and work in Guinea. The same biographer highlights how some former

Suret-Canale’s Guinean students will be later ‘victims of [Touré’s] repression’ (Dalançon, 2015). Despite that, several documents surviving in Bobigny and related to Suret-Canale’s early African years, temporarily resumed from 1974 to 1978 when he taught in Oran, in then independent Algeria,<fnref n="4" /> reveal the transnational, interracial and non-nationalist inspiration of a relevant part of radical African activism.

They include Suret-Canale’s study and related preparatory documents on the experience of the *Groupes d’Etudes Communistes* (GEC) in Africa in the afterwar. Suret-Canale’s contentions that GECs were instrumental in building transnational anticolonial networks in French-speaking Africa in the years preceding independences were well supported by documentary evidence, including Suret-Canale’s own recollections, given that he had been the animator of one of these groups in Dakar in the 1940s. According to Suret-Canale, these semi-clandestine groups operated in almost all the French empire ‘from 1943 to 1951’, affecting ‘AOF (French Western Africa), AEF (French Equatorial Africa), Cameroon, and marginally other colonial territories (Madagascar, Djibouti, French territories in the Pacific)’ (Suret-Canale, 1994, 5). Their activities mainly focused on cultural production and activists’ theoretical training. In several African countries, local GECs were among the founding groups of the *Rassemblement Démocratique Africain* (RDA), the transnational anticolonial organisation founded in Bamako in 1946—a key actor in later independences (Lisette, 1983).

According to Suret-Canale, the earliest GECs grew ‘almost without direct contacts with the French Communist Party [PCF]’ (Suret-Canale, 1994, 10) during World War II, when several French colonies were isolated from the metropolis. The relative autonomy of these groups was also due to the Francocentric rules of PCF, which did not give much importance to the ‘colonial question’ (Suret-Canale, 1994, 22) in those years. Indeed, the Third International did not allow national Communist Parties to have sections in the colonies, and transnational organisations were not admitted. Ironically, this favoured some autonomous and federalistic development of African parties such as RDA, and radical PAI (Parti Africain de l’Indépendance). This latter did not even contemplate the scale of the nation-state in its early organizational geographies, which were based on: ‘The nucleus, for the factory, the office, the street ...; The sector ... for the neighbourhood or village; The section, for the town or group of villages; The region, for an area to define; The territory, for a group of regions to define; The federation, for a group of territories to define’.<fnref n="5" /> For this paper’s arguments, what is significant is that transnational organisations led African anticolonialism in the years that preceded independences, challenging the statism and centralism of European parties.

Another key feature of the GECs was their progressive ‘Africanisation’. While most of their early promoters where white people, often French-born functionaries and teachers who had been sent to the colonies, the GECs’ composition progressively challenged what Suret-Canale denounced as the ‘veritable apartheid’ (Suret-Canale, 1994, 13) and deep racism that characterised these colonies. For Suret-Canale, the worst situations were in AEF, for which he relied on the 1945-46 travel notes of Dresch, who visited Central African countries meeting the members of several GECs. Dresch and Suret-Canale noted that it was the first time that racially mixed political groups appeared in regions in which racial segregation had always been the rule. In Douala (Cameroon), Dresch attended a GEC meeting with ‘twelve Blacks (including four women) and four Whites’<fnref n="6" /> carrying out theoretical discussions on class matters. In Libreville (Gabon), there were three white functionaries with ‘seven Black or Mixed-Race people’.<fnref n="7" /> While Dresch’s notes witnessed the existence of other GECs in Yaoundé (Cameroon), Brazzaville and Pointe Noire (Congo), other sources allowed

<footnote n="1">¹ Bobigny, Archives Départementales de Seine-Saint-Denis, Fonds Suret-Canale - 229 J (hereafter ADSS), Folder 117, Castro to Suret-Canale, 15 October 1971. All citations from texts in languages other than English have been translated by the author.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² ADSS, Folder 122, Santos to Suret-Canale, 1975 [Circular: *Antipode*, a *Radical Journal of Geography* - Special issue].</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ ADSS, Folder 120, Notice biographique.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ ADSS, Folders 122 and 123.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ ADSS, Folder 99, Statuts du Parti Africain de l'Indépendence.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ ADSS Folder 65, Dresch to Suret-Canale, 1 March [1984].</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ ADSS Folder 65, Dresch to Suret-Canale, 1 March [1984].</footnote>
Suret-Canale documenting GEC activities in Chad (Suret-Canale, 1994, 35).

In AOF, where GECs were more numerous and active, Suret-Canale contributed to the Senegal circuit, especially in Dakar. He highlighted how, in 1947, Senegalese GECs were instrumental in creating the *Union Démocratique Senegalaise*, the local RDA section. RDA international leaders such as Gabriel D'Arboussier and future Ivorian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny 'often called' (Suret-Canale, 1994, 45) at GEC meetings in Dakar in the 1940s and recommended GEC attendance to their collaborators in the respective countries for acquiring ideological training. In future Mali, the Bamako GEC was equally 'decisive' (Suret-Canale, 1994, 56) in the foundation of the RDA at the Congress that took place there in 1946 (Kipré, 1989), as the Haute-Volta (future Burkina-Faso) local GEC equally was. Suret-Canale stressed the role of Guinean GECs, which involved future president Touré, and were completely 'Africanised' (Suret-Canale, 1994, 59) since 1949. Also, the GECs in Thies (Senegal) and in Niamey (Niger) were 'completely African' (Suret-Canale, 1994, 54). In Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and Cotonou (Dahomey, now Benin), they were initially founded by white teachers and functionaries, but their progressive 'blackening' accentuated their closeness to anticolonial movements.

This was one of the reasons for the harsh repression that led GECs to disband. Like in Suret-Canale's case, French personnels suspected to side with Africans were revoked and forcibly repatriated, while more violent repression targeted African activists. For Suret-Canale, even the political rupture between RDA and PCF in 1950 was partially motivated by the need for African activist to avoid the forced silencing of everything that was labelled 'communist'. After 1951, there were 'no longer GECs' (Suret-Canale, 1994, 69). However, Suret-Canale claimed that GECs played a key role in training and inspiring several leaders of African independence. Among them, some 'remained faithful to their initial principles, like Ruben Um Nyobè in Cameroon: others, like Félix Houphouët-Boigny or Léon M'Ba quickly took different routes' (Suret-Canale, 1994, 69). Indeed, most of RDA famous leaders such as Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor, followed a line that radical activists considered too moderate and accommodating in relation to colonial authorities. Nevertheless, Suret-Canale stressed the interest of RDA leaders in building some 'specifically African' (Suret-Canale, 1981, 296) politics challenging assimilationism (which finished to prevail) and rejecting the hegemonic attempts of French Leftist parties, that Suret-Canale admitted although he was a PCF member.

Gradually losing or nuancing their initial Marxist inspiration, most RDA sections finally embraced the statism and centralism of their European models. Suret-Canale noted that among the few RDA sections that became mass organisations (like in Senegal or Ivory Coast), some maintained a certain radicalism even after accessing power like in Mali and Guinea. Conversely, in Cameroon, the 'Union des Populations du Cameroun' (UPC), which refused to follow Boigny ... was thrown into clandestinity in 1955 and compelled to armed struggle' (Suret-Canale, 1981, 302). The UPC case (Mbembe, 1996; Takougang, 2019) was representative of the numerous anticolonial groups and individual activists who suffered repression also after independence, at the origin of the unknown stories of which Suret-Canale's and Guérin's archives are replete. To give just few examples, one may be impressed by the letters that Suret-Canale received in 1958 from his former Dakar student, Cameroon radical historian Félix-Roland Moumié, who claimed his continued faith in the ideals that their shared in Senegal in refusing to 'become a robot politician',<fnref n="8" /> knowing that Moumié would be assassinated two years later by French agents in Geneva (Deltombe et al., 2011).

In the following years, Suret-Canale received correspondence from first-hand witnesses of the progressive 'normalisation' of the 'Dar' School, namely Congolese historian Jacques Depelchin, who reported to

Suret-Canale his own disappointment with Tanzanian 'petit bourgeois socialism', whose leaders were firing 'too-Marxist university teachers, many of whom migrated towards Mozambique'.<fnref n="9" /> This migration to more freshly decolonised Mozambique, independent since 1975, can be considered as emblematic of the radicals' tendency to see with more favour decolonisation-in-making than its accomplishments. This included Suret-Canale, who went to Mozambique to give conferences in the new national university in 1977. Significantly, Suret-Canale's unpublished report of that journey resumed the enthusiastic tones of his youth experiences in French-Speaking Africa.<fnref n="10" /> In Mozambique, post-colonial disappointment still had to come (Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Ndhlovu, 2013). Meanwhile, Depelchin related that, in Tanzania, also Rodney was in a difficult position being 'still unemployed, but very active in organising workers'.<fnref n="11" /> After resisting some years to the attempts of Tanzanian academic authorities 'to get rid of the foreigners who are too subversive',<fnref n="12" /> Depelchin likewise went to Mozambique. These stories of dissidences-within-dissidence are typical of the cosmopolitan generations of anti-colonialists who foresaw new possibilities beyond the mere reconstitution of nation-states ruled by local bourgeoisies and taken in the grip of neo-colonialism.

Despite his belonging to a national (and quite nationalist) communist party like the PCF, Suret-Canale was part of this anticolonial transnationalism through his own voluntaristic life trajectory. His long and celebratory obituary of Nkrumah also revealed his sympathies for Pan-Africanism. Saluting the Ghanese leader as the author of a work that acquired 'universal' (Suret-Canale, 1973, 50) relevance, Suret-Canale noted that, changing the colonial name of his country from Gold Coast to Ghana, Nkrumah did not only express pride for African traditions alongside anticolonial African historians (Diop, 1960; Ki-Zerbo, 1972). He also invented new geographies, as the ancient kingdom of Ghana was located elsewhere, which suggested a Pan-African view. For Suret-Canale, Nkrumah was the most important continuator of North American and Caribbean Black traditions as he wanted to free Africa striving for 'unity and independence at the continental scale' (Suret-Canale, 1973, 52), although independence did not suffice to overthrow capitalism, neocolonialism and imperialism.

These endorsements of Pan-Africanism by an orthodox Communist like Suret-Canale are a further demonstration that anticolonial movements were ridden by plural and heterogeneous tendencies. These included proposals for different decolonised futures based on geographies that were different from those characterised by the centrality of the nation-state, such as federalism, transnationalism, internationalism and Pan-Africanism. In the next section, I discuss the neglected anticolonial endeavours of the socialistic school that most outspokenly represents non-statist perspectives, that is (French-speaking) anarchism.

## 3. Other Lefts and other geographies

Historians recently started to study the support to African decolonisation given by European Communist Parties, of which the most active, although with different ideological nuances, were the French PCF and the Italian PCI (Blum et al., 2021; Ruscio, 2019; Siracusano, 2022). Conversely, the relationship of anarchism and independent Left to historical decolonisation is less studied, with the result that these dissident tendencies appear as less committed to anticolonial struggles, while the evidence exposed below shows quite the opposite. A contextualised study of relevant sources demonstrates that, although anarchists did not generally put centre stage political independence being interested in more ambitious objectives, they were staunch and active opponents of colonialism, racism and militarism even when they resided in the core of

<footnote n="8">⁸ ADSS, Folder 110, Moumié to Suret-Canale, 14 May 1958.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ ADSS, Folder 123, Depelchin to Suret-Canale, 29 November 1975.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ ADSS, Folder 126, Retour au Mozambique, 1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ ADSS, Folder 123, Depelchin to Suret-Canale, 18 January 1976.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² ADSS, Folder 125, Depelchin to Suret-Canale, 5 January 1977.</footnote>
the empires.

Revealed by Guérin's archives and by a survey of the anarchist press of those years, a very telling case is the anarchist opposition to the 1954–1962 Algerian War. That conflict was a hearth-breaking dilemma for the entire French Left, also due to the presence of a numerous population of *colons* (settlers) of European (French, Spanish, Italian, Maltese ...) origin and proletarian condition in North Africa, and its memory is still contentious in France. In 1954, alongside some anarchist groups based in Algeria whose members were soon imprisoned and deported to France during the war (Funès, 2010), there were two main French-speaking anarchist organisations, the ephemeral *Fédération Communiste Libertaire* (FCL), which published weekly *Le Libertaire*, terminated in 1956 due to repression, and the still living *Fédération Anarchiste* (FA), which published monthly *Le Monde libertaire*.

While there is no space here to discuss the divergences between these organisations (basically due to FCL's reliance on a centralised organisation closer to Marxist groups versus FA's more horizontal setup closer to 'classical' anarchism), there is room to claim that both were far from extraneous to anticolonial struggles, to which their activists committed since the years that preceded the Algerian War. France-based anarchists campaigned against the French colonial war in Indochina endorsing 'revolutionary defeatism' (Boulouque, 2020, 45) and denounced colonial crimes in Madagascar and Algeria, especially the 1945 massacre in Guelma and Sétif, episodes that according to the anarchists were 'nothing less' (Boulouque, 2020, 47) monstrous than the Nazi extermination camps. In Algeria, the local anarchist movement first received impulse from French settlers, to later develop in quite autonomous ways (Bouba, 2014; Porter, 2011). Although non-numerous, Algerian anarchists joined the anticolonial movement after the insurrection of 1 November 1954. In the following months, Parisian *Le Libertaire* was abundantly nourished by the correspondences of Fernand Isaac Doukhan (1913–1996), an activist whose story was emblematic of the cosmopolite complexity of Maghreb at that time, and of how poorly North American (and Anglocentric) notions of 'settler colonialism' can apply to other regions of the world, as recently noted by Latin American scholarship (Zaragocin, 2024).

Doukhan was born to a Jewish family of Berber origin and ‘Arab-Berber culture’ (Funès, 2010, 21). Considered as more receptive to politics of assimilation by colonial administrations, the members of the Algerian Jewish community were nevertheless denied French citizenship in the early decades of the conquest, to then enjoy its ‘privileges’ as draftees in the two world wars, as Doukhan did in 1940, being taken prisoner by the Germans and liberated in 1945. One of the founders of the *Mouvement Libertaire Nord-Africain* (MLNA), which included Muslim activists, ‘anticolonial settler’ (Funès, 2010, 118) Doukhan and his Algerian fellows supported FCL’s purposes to collaborate with the *Mouvement National Algérien* (MNA) lead by Messali Hadj. In early 1957, Doukhan was arrested by French paratroopers, tortured and detained in the concentration camp of Lodi, before being expelled from Algeria (Funès, 2010). He later abandoned the anarchist movement, providing an example of how colonial and military repression gave dramatic blows to anticolonial non-aligned movements. Anarchists were among the first activists to be hit and even treated as ‘traitors’ of their own ‘fatherland’.

Support for MNA was a divisive matter in French-speaking anticolonial milieux. The founder of the earliest diasporic working-class Algerian organisations such as left-wing *Étoile Nord-Africaine* in the 1930s, Hadj was sentenced to imprisonment and/or confinement by both the filo-fascist Vichy regime and various ‘democratic’ French governments. During the 1954 insurrection, he was confined in the small town of Angoulême, which limited his capacity of action. Accordingly, the organisation that took the leadership of the Algerian movement was the newly founded *Front de Libération Nationale* (FLN), first animated by people who, according to Guérin, were almost unknown in anticolonial circuits (Guérin, 1973), and supported by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. This latter: ‘Engineered the formation of the FLN from Cairo as a multi-class, nationally representative association with

Pan-Arab ties, supported by the Arab League and funded mainly by the Wahhabist Saudi monarchy' (De Laforcade, 2010, 2).

This departure from the original proletarian and cosmopolitan characteristics of the Algerian movement was an issue for the entire French Left, anarchists included, and even more when a 'fratricide war' (Guérin, 2010, 205) arose between the two organisations, leading to the progressive marginalisation of Hadj. With different nuances and rare exceptions such as journalist Serge Michel who worked for the FLN and later for several African governments (Rupp, 2007), but whose story cannot be representative of the entire movement, anarchists were generally closer to MNA than to FLN. They even foresaw this latter's successive degeneration, summarised by Geoffroy de Laforcade: 'Following a brief socialist interim under ... Ahmad Ben Bella, defence minister Houari Boumédiène took power in a coup in 1965 that institutionalized the domination of the FLN military leadership and postponed, indefinitely, the revolutionary and democratic aspirations that had inspired ... working-class émigrés of the diaspora' (De Laforcade, 2010, 4).

From November 1954 until its forced closure in July 1956, *Le Libertaire* served as a sort of megaphone for Hadj's supporters in France, and published communiqués and correspondences from Algeria.<fnref n="13" /> Algerian anarchists advocated for a connection between anticolonialism and class struggle to avoid being ruled 'by a new bourgeoisie',<fnref n="14" /> while Doukhan's correspondences denounced the behaviour of French servicemen who 'arrest, rape, murder' and gather information 'under torture' in that 'immense concentration camp that Algeria has become'.<fnref n="15" />

Indeed, a survey of the 1954–1962 French-speaking anarchist press shows how unjustified are allegations of the scarce interest of anarchists for decolonisation struggles, as *Le Libertaire* looked like an anticolonial bulletin, displaying weekly a main title dedicated to requests such as withdrawing French troops from Algeria and granting independence to all colonies. This immediately triggered the repression of French authorities, which started to seize *Le Libertaire* for 'national security threat'.<fnref n="16" /> Judicial seizures were soon followed by the arrestation of FCL activists such as Pierre Morain, who was sentenced to one year together with '24 Algerian workers'<fnref n="17" /> for reconstitution of Hadj's organization, officially disbanded. In July 1956, FCL activists stated that it was economically impossible to continue publication as their journal had been seized seven times since the beginning of the Algerian War and they had suffered 200 denunciations as 'the enemy number one of war in Algeria'.<fnref n="18" /> This well exposes how central was the challenge and how hard was to tackle it in the core of the empire.

As noted above, siding with Hadj was not straightforward in the Leftist Parisian milieux that periodically gathered for public assemblies to urge the French government to stop war. FCL leader Georges Fontenis went to Angoulême to meet personally Hadj<fnref n="19" /> and solicit his participation in *Le libertaire*, with the help of Guérin (UCL, 2017). This latter was a lifelong Hadj's friend and likewise managed to visit him, despite being 'closely watched by the police' (Guérin, 1973, 42), to bring his voice to Parisian assemblies.<fnref n="20" /> There, Guérin had to fight to convince the movement to keep some neutrality between MNA and FLN. Beyond the need to avoid dispersing forces, Guérin was aware of the potential dangers of endorsing FLN, given that anarchists and independent Leftists

<footnote n="13">¹³ *Le Libertaire*, 11 November 1954, Déclaration du MLNA.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ *Le Libertaire*, 11 November 1954, Déclaration du MLNA.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ *Le Libertaire*, 11 November 1954, Mauvaise foi et colonialisme éclairé.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ *Le Libertaire*, 18 November 1954, Le Lib saisí.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ *Le Libertaire*, 29 September 1955, Pierre Morain, un an de prison!</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ *Le Libertaire*, 29 September 1955, 5 July 1956, Dire la vérité n’est plus possible.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ *Le Libertaire*, 23 June 1955, Messali Hadj salue notre lutte.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Nanterre, Bibliothèque La Contemporaine, Fonds Daniel Guérin (hereafter DG), F/Δ/0721/91, Guérin to Fontenis, 9 February 1955.</footnote>
wished total liberation through popular participation rather than the rising of new military or political elites. Guérin was criticised by both FLN and Hadj's supporters, but he always claimed his fight to avoid that the *Comité d'action des intellectuels français contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord* sided with just one Algerian faction.<fnref n="21" />

Through *Le Monde libertaire*, FA expressed similar concerns. Likewise in touch with Guérin,<fnref n="22" /> FA activists were equally involved in the opposition to the Algerian War but, compared to FCL, they made sharper critiques of both French and Algerian nationalisms and of organisations like FLN. According to FA activist Maurice Joyeux, FLN was 'a nationalist and bourgeois organisation that will resume the exploitation of Algerian people' (Joyeux, 1988, 181). This does not mean that they did not support complete independence: FA members such as Maurice Lai-sant were inserted in radical pacifist *Forces Libres de la Paix* that promoted conscientious objection and desertion of French draftees in Indochina and Algeria.<fnref n="23" /> They saluted the Algerian insurrection with an opening page to celebrate: 'North Africa joining the oppressed peoples in the universal struggle that they carry out to reach their independence'.<fnref n="24" />

In restating (like Guérin) that they 'condemn[ed] all forms of colonialism' and denounced all colonialist wars as waged by 'criminals', FA activists fumed sarcastically at the nationalism of those who said that Algeria was 'France': 'Considering French land Algeria – where the majority of people do not have any right, any political liberty or any economic equality with the occupiers, under the pretext that artificial Departments have been created there, is an idiocy'.<fnref n="25" /> These arguments were also based on a geographical critique of borders, traditionally denounced by anarchists as 'detestable realities'. FA activists argued that anticolonial struggles should not create new nation-states, armies and boundaries separating people, with all possible consequences in terms of chauvinism, racism and religious fanaticisms. Thus, their appeal to 'North-African peoples' endorsed these latter's reasons for 'insurging against those who exploit you', as 'we are always on the side of the oppressed against their oppressors', but warned them about 'nationalism and religious fanaticism, generating new servitudes'. In this vein, anticolonialism should lead to 'social revolution' and 'internationalism'.<fnref n="26" />

It is worth noting that France-based anarchists were not simple Cassandras telling others what they had to do (as it was often reproached to Northern 'allies' of anticolonial movements), as both FA and FCL acknowledged the autonomy of fighting actors in the field and actively engaged with what was in their capacity, such as supporting objectors and deserters to hinder French military mobilisation. This corresponded to both ethical concerns and political strategies for avoiding an escalation in which 'innocents pa[y] for other innocents' (Guérin, 1973, 98). For these reasons, in 1956, anarchists condemned the decision of Socialists and PCF to vote for granting the 'special powers' (Boulouque, 2010, 57) to the French government for continuing war. On the same occasion, anticolonial intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire broke with the PCF (Césaire, 1956).

While FCL substantially disappeared in 1956 due to repression, FA managed to continue denouncing the Algerian War in the following years, despite some *Le Monde libertaire* judicial seizures and the interdiction of its distribution in Algeria.<fnref n="27" /> In 1962, luckily without any casualties, FA Paris locals were devastated by a plastic bomb placed by fascist paramilitary *Organisation Armée Secrète* (OAS), which terrorised and murdered anticolonial activists.<fnref n="28" /> According to Joyeux, this attack

was made because they had been the first who dared to denounce OAS in 'a public meeting' (Joyeux, 1988, 226). During the years of in dependences in Sub-Saharan Africa, FA supported decolonisation denouncing De Gaulle's nationalist 'grandeur' and the 'impossibility' of his proposal of an African French-led 'community'<fnref n="29" /> that was progres- sively refused by African countries. In 1961, *Le Monde libertaire* denounced the murder of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba as an 'odious crime', stressing the responsibilities of former Belgian co- lonialists.<fnref n="30" /> Both FCL<fnref n="31" /> and FA<fnref n="32" /> published correspondences from Cameroons' UPC in different years. In 1960, Joyeux joined Guérin and the 'New Left' signing the 'Manifesto of the 121', a key document in which 121 intellectuals and activists supported the principle of *insou- mission*, that is the ethical right to refuse to be mobilised for war or to collaborate in any way with the death machine.

This 'pacifism' was once again received as a hostile act by the gov- ernment, as some signatories, including Guérin, were trialled for inci- tation to desertion.<fnref n="33" /> This Manifesto marked a further distinction between 'new' and 'traditional' Lefts as, according to Guérin, the Communists supported the signatories but did 'not approve [the prin- ciple] of insubordination' (Guérin, 1973, 140). Conversely, Joyeux claimed that, talking to young people who were deserting the Algerian War, the Manifesto endorsed the anarchist principle of refusing service in the Army. According to Joyeux, this was both: 'Individual refusal and ... collective refusal that is called general strike against all wars ... Indeed, by its extraordinary echo, the Manifesto of the 121 is sensitizing public opinions ... It quietly argues that *insoumission* is a right. We anarchist did not ever say anything different'.<fnref n="34" /> FA continued criticising the fratricide struggles between Algerian parties and protested publicly against the use of political assassinations by FLN (which did not have exclusivity in these actions however), such as the murder of Algerian trade-union leader Mohammed Nadjji in 1959.<fnref n="35" /> The most famous of these denunciations was an appeal by Camus, a Joyeux's friend, whose federalist proposals are discussed in the next section.

Then, independences came. A staunch protester over the numerous situations in which anticolonial leaders did not fulfil their promises was Guérin, who lamented numerous cases of anticolonial militants whom he personally helped when they were jailed or exiled and then became equally 'oppressive' (Guérin, 1973, 22) once in power. Since 1965, Guérin was one of the most vocal campaigners to reclaim truth for Moroccan radical Mehdi Ben-Barka, who was kidnapped and later murdered in Paris in 1965 by exponents of his 'decolonised' country's government with the complicity of French functionaries. Guérin wrote in *Le Monde libertaire* that this was arguably due to the need of stabilizing the new (monarchist) regime in Morocco, a bitter note for those who had supported decolonisation.<fnref n="36" /> Likewise a UPC supporter,<fnref n="37" /> Guérin personally reproached old anticolonial acquaintances who were later responsible for political repression in their countries such as Senghor, who responded to be puzzled by Guérin's 'vivid disapproval'.<fnref n="38" />

As for Algeria, Guérin travelled to the country after independence trying to support the socialistic experiences of *autogestion* that took place in some cooperative enterprises, which he considered an 'isle of liber- tarian socialism' (Guérin, 2017, 210) needing the implementation of

<footnote n="21">²¹ DG, F/Δ/0721/90, Guérin to FLN, 23 February 1956.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² DG, F/Δ/RES/0688/33, Laisant to Guérin, 14 February 1962.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ *Le Monde libertaire*, October 1954.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ *Le Monde libertaire*, December 1954, Le réveil du monde musulman.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ *Le Monde libertaire*, December 1954, Le réveil du monde musulman.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ *Le Monde libertaire*, December 1954, Le réveil du monde musulman.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ *Le Monde libertaire*, September 1958, En Algérie le ML interdit de séjour.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ *Le Monde libertaire*, January 1962, *Le Monde libertaire* plastique.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ *Le Monde libertaire*, January 1960, L'impossible communauté.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ *Le Monde libertaire*, March 1961, Patrice Lumumba assassin.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ *Le Libertaire*, 1955, Répression colonialiste au Cameroun.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² *Le Monde libertaire*, February 1971, Procès de Yaoundé.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ DG, Δ/0721/81, Jouffa to Guérin, 21 November 1960.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ *Le Monde libertaire*, November 1960, Pourquoi j'ai signé le Manifeste des 121?</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ *Le monde libertaire*, July–August 1959, Quand le FLN cessera-t-il d'assassiner?</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ *Le Monde libertaire*, September–October 1966, L'affaire Ben-Barka.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ DG, F/Δ/0721/98, Guérin to UPC, 14 December 1971.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ DG, F/Δ/RES/0688/24, Senghor to Guérin, 31 December 1964.</footnote>
‘direct democracy’ (Guérin, 2017, 207). Again through *Le Monde liberte*, Guérin claimed that only action from below and internationalist cooperation could save these experiences from the multiple grips of bureaucracy, nationalism, FLN centralism and religious social conservatism.<fnref n="39" /> At the end, these ‘isles’ were progressively suffocated by an increasingly oppressive regime, especially after the 1965 coup by Boumédiène, furthering a degeneration that Guérin compared to the ‘authoritarian Jacobinism’ of 1793, arguing that ‘the Algerian revolution redirected the weapon of terror against its friends and devoured itself’ (Guérin, 1973, 90).

Thus, libertarian socialists did not refrain from anticolonialism. Only, they pretended to push it towards its logical consequences, divorcing it from states, nationalisms and religious or ethnic particularisms. It would be too easy to dismiss these activists as European people who wanted to judge the others, as documents show their worldwide networking and active interventions, which were relevant ethically, as they were disposed to pay in terms of repression and personal risks, and politically, as their critiques to constitutional decolonisation proved to be pertinent and still chime with current decolonial conversations. This section has demonstrated how plural have been the critical voices of transnational ‘allies’ of decolonisation. In the next section, I discuss how federalist and internationalist proposals were among the main options that they proposed. To this end, it is necessary to start from the figure of Guérin and related networks of transnational anticolonial solidarity that his archives allow tracing.

### 4. Three federalist proposals

One of the points that have hitherto attracted the attention of English-speaking scholarship on Guérin's figure has been his 'sexual dissidence', a definition through which Guérin defined his early struggle for gay rights as a declared bisexual and later only homosexual (Guérin, 2016). This topic is not developed in this paper as there are already exhaustive works on that, and on Guérin as early denouncer of fascisms and historian of anarchism, by David Berry (2004a, 2004b, 2007 and 2014). Instead, I focus on the still neglected aspects of Guérin's anti-colonial and antiracist transnational networking and federalist proposals to resolve the colonial problem. It would be impossible to fully describe here all the networks that Guérin kept alive with anticolonial politicians, intellectuals and activists from the 'Norths' and the 'Souths'. Yet, some examples expose the importance of the roles that Guérin played in inspiring the French-speaking committees against the Algerian War and for African independences since the 1940s.<fnref n="40" />

The heir of a rich family, Guérin could look after his intellectual and political interests without excessive material concerns. He was first sensitised to the colonial problem during a long journey in the French Empire, from Syria to Indochina between 1927 and 1930, when witnessing colonial brutalities ‘opened [his] eyes’ (Guérin, 1973, 27). Filed by the French police since 1931 as a ‘subversive’, he started contributing to meetings of anarchist and communist groups in the 1930s, being the ‘manager’<fnref n="41" /> of a journal supporting Indochina anticolonial fighters, and member of a ‘provisional union’ of ‘extremist groups’ in which, interestingly, the Paris Police censed around ‘300 people, of which 50 are woman and 50 North-Africans’.<fnref n="42" /> In 1937, the activism of the last two categories evidently impressed the report’s author.

Guérin was again filed as an anticolonial activist in 1947 for his ‘active role’<fnref n="43" /> in supporting Hadj’s movement. Beyond these synthetic and not necessarily reliable police reports, Guérin’s personal archives

demonstrate how antiracist and anticolonial struggles were his priority between the 1940s and the 1970s. Like Suret-Canale, but with very different priorities, Guérin collected materials and correspondences from worldwide official or clandestine anticolonial movements. He extensively travelled to the Caribbean to elaborate a proposal for a postcolonial confederation. Starting from concerns raised in France by his Martinican friend Césaire, one of Guérin's informants on the area,<fnref n="44" /> Guérin developed collaborations with Caribbean Pan-Africanists such as Eric Williams. This latter gave a speech in Paris in 1955 for whose organisation Guérin put together a list of attendants that included Pinto de Andrade and Haitian poet Réné Depestre. Among the invited who could not attend, Guérin listed Michel Leiris, Frantz Fanon and Richard Wright.<fnref n="45" />

All these intellectuals were Guérin's correspondents, which gives the dimension of his transnational anticolonial networks. These also included George Padmore, who lengthily corresponded with Guérin on matters of African decolonisation,<fnref n="46" /> and C.L.R. James, who translated Guérin's book on class struggle during the French Revolution.<fnref n="47" /> It is worth noting that Williams's and James's Caribbean federalism is considered as a key part of decolonisation's 'worldmaking' by Getachew (2019). While Guérin's exchanges with Padmore, Wright and others mainly referred to Black Power matters that Guérin addressed in his history of Afro-American movements (Guérin, 2010), the class contents of these conversations were well exemplified by Padmore's reply to Guérin's remark that 'Pan-Africanism without economical contents is hollow', as Padmore stressed the 'economic, political and social aspirations' of Pan-African movements beyond any wish to 'impose'<fnref n="48" /> European ideologies.

#### 4.1. Caribbean federalism

The main result of Guérin's Caribbean work was the book *Les Antilles Décolonisées*, published by *Présence africaine* in 1956, which argued for rethinking the geography of the Caribbean, an area that was characterised by a plurality of languages and cultures inherited by colonialism but had a common history of slavery and racist/colonial oppression. This led the author to think the geographical and conceptual shift from a 'dust of islands' (Guérin, 1956, 7) to the 'fundamental unity' (Guérin, 1956, 21) of the Caribbean area, whose islands Guérin imagined 'grouping together like sisters' (Guérin, 1956, 25). Here, Guérin resumed organic metaphors by antecedents such as Elisée Reclus and paralleled Camus's 'critical Mediterraneanism' as I discuss below.

Beyond racial origin, nationality and the specific (post)colonial conditions of the English, French, Spanish and Dutch speaking components of this geographical mosaic, politicians like Williams in Trinidad, who had clearly stated that the alternative was 'between federating and dying' (Guérin, 1956, 179), stressed the need of federalism for building a Caribbean 'brotherhood'. Guérin endorsed these views prefigurating a multilingual and interethnic Confederation of all the Caribbean accompanying the decolonisation process. Yet, he warned that such goal would have been difficult to reach 'in the current capitalist and colonial society' (Guérin, 1956, 179), further exposing the centrality of social liberation in decolonisation debates.

On the one hand, the stances carried out by Guérin and his correspondents radically addressed economic matters with direct or indirect colonialism, after and before the political independences and the abolition of slavery, which had 'left the newly-liberated people equally dependent' (Guérin, 1956, 27). The persistence of the structures of

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Le Monde libertaire, May 1964, Le congrès FLN devant l’option socialiste.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ DG, F/Δ/0721/90.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Dossier Daniel Guérin, 1W 89 48278 (hereafter PP 1W 89 48278), 16 April 1937.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² PP 1W 89 48278, 20 March 1937.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ PP 1W 89 48278, 11 February 1947.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ DG, F/Δ/RES/0688/19, Césaire to Guérin, 9 February 1956.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ DG, F/Δ/0721/91, Noms et adresses des personnes ayant répondu à l'initiation d'entendre Eric Williams.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ DG, F/Δ/RES/0688/19, Padmore to Guérin, several letters 1953-56.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ DG F/Δ/RES/0688/30, Guérin to Bourdet, 28 November 1956.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ DG, F/Δ/RES/0688/19, Padmore to Guérin, 26 September 1956.</footnote>
plantation and exploitation provoked Guérin's 'indignation' (Guérin, 1956, 37) during his visits to all Caribbean islands. On the other, Guérin matched Césaire's critiques of assimilationism, especially carried out by the French state through the 'departmentalisation' (Guérin, 1956, 149), of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which remain French 'overseas departments' still today. For both Césaire and Guérin, there was not only a political and economic problem but also a racial problem (which was not straightforward for the European Left at that moment). They stressed the need to rescue cultures of African and Asian origin for challenging 'White tyranny' (Guérin, 1956, 79) and understanding the relations of oppression, arguing for a Black uprising based on ideas of pride that overtook every 'complex of inferiority' (Guérin, 1956, 104) affecting slaves' descendants. Importantly, atheist, anticlerical and materialist Guérin recognized the importance of African beliefs such as the voodoo in Haiti, which played social roles in inspiring resistance since the slavery times and still survived 'everywhere' (Guérin, 1956, 97) in the archipelago. Significantly, the sympathy for African cultures that Guérin shared with his correspondent, anti-racist anthropologists Roger Bastide,<fnref n="49" /> shows how far antiauthoritarian and anticolonial Lefts were from a narrow universalism.

## 4.2. Federal Africanism

Guérin's federalist proposals paralleled similar elaborations by another of his correspondents,<fnref n="50" /> Senegalese dissident Cheikh Anta Diop, one of the earliest historians who tried to identify an original African civilisation (Fauvelle-Aymar, 1996; Mourre, 2023). Based in Paris from 1946 to 1962, Diop was one of the animators of Negritude journal and publishing house *Présence africaine* (founded by another Diop, Alioune) and a reference for the diasporic communities of African students in Paris. These activists were carefully watched by the French police, which filed Diop as the RDA speaker for a big gathering in 1956, a delicate period for the French empire due to the Algerian War and the requests of autonomy ongoing in Sub-Saharan Africa.<fnref n="51" /> Police informers did not miss a key point, that is Diop's radicality in criticising African leaders who were too condescending in relation to French authorities. After 1960 Senegal's independence, visibly in collaboration with their Senegalese counterparts, the same sources reported that, once back to his country, Diop was arrested and detained extra-judicially for 'anti-governmental propaganda'. He eventually complained about 'the politics of [Senghor's] government which forbids all freedom of expression in Senegal',<fnref n="52" /> just the nth example of postcolonial disappointment with the corrupted and/or authoritarian regimes that took in most cases the place of European invaders.

Diop criticised Senghor on both political and epistemic grounds, reproaching to the new leader his reliance on European models for administrating the state and his condescendence towards romanticized ideas of pre-modern Africanity (Bianchini, 2023; Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2020). Not always considered by English-speaking scholarship (Jennings, 2002), only recently rediscovered by French-speaking historiography (Mourre, 2023) and criticised by orthodox Marxists such as Suret-Canale for his ideologic eclecticism and alleged interest in 'race' rather than 'class',<fnref n="53" /> Diop followed a socialistic inspiration since his pioneering work on early African history. In his books, he argued that 'Black Africa' stood at the origins of the very 'civilisation' through its influences on ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean (Diop, 1960), a scholarly project that laid the grounds for his political purposes (Diagne,

1997).

Indeed, since the 1950s, Diop foresaw the potential shortcomings of constitutional decolonisation and proposed a federalist Pan-African setup for future Africa, which especially questioned the reproduction of nation-states, whose territorial organisation based on boundaries and exclusive sovereignty resulted then 'outdated' (Diop, 1974, 40). Pre-dating some of the geopolitical criticisms to sovereignty and self-determination mentioned above, Diop considered independence as an international rather than merely national matter. His declared goal was to build a 'federal state of Black Africa', which had to adopt indigenous languages, refusing the colonial rhetoric of *Francophonie/Françafrique*, that is the 'impossible community' proposed by De Gaulle and lambasted by French anarchists as discussed above. It is worth noting that Diop's ideas included the rescue of indigenous traditions and the institutional use of African languages, without reproducing any 'disguised chauvinism' (Diop, 1974, 23). Diop also matched Guérin's ideas of a Caribbean 'insular federation' which, 'instead of looking at America or Europe, would keep fraternal ... commercial, cultural and political relationships with Black Africa' (Diop, 1990, 114).

As for the future African federation, Diop recommended to avoid any exclusion on racial or ethnic grounds, clarifying that white people who wished to contribute to decolonisation were welcome in this project, as African anti-colonialists were 'not racist' (Diop, 1974, 43), provided that settlers did not pretend to maintain colonial or racial privileges above the rest of the population. Diop compared his African federalist views with purposes of European federalism that circulated since the nineteenth century with reference to national liberation, such as the Italian Risorgimento. Also in these cases, he warned about the dangers of the resurgence of some 'neo-nationalism at the scale of Western Europe' (Diop, 1974, 34). Amazingly, Diop's federalist purposes on Sub-Saharan Africa could find some ideal geographical continuity with those expressed on Northern Africa and the Mediterranean by another African-born supporter of *Présence africaine*, Albert Camus.

## 4.3. Mediterranean confederalism

Only recently scholarship started to reassess decolonially the legacy of Camus (Pelletier, 2015; Visone, 2023; Blackman, 2020), a life-long antiauthoritarian and antiracist activist, among the early supporters of *Présence africaine* with Césaire and other Negritude leaders (Allouache, 2017). Like Doukhan, Camus was born to a proletarian family settled in Algeria. He noted that around 80 % of the more than one million Europeans living there were landless: 'Not settlers, but waged workers or shop keepers' (Todd, 1997, 594). During the war Camus was considered 'a traitor by both parts' (Todd, 1997, 609) for his nonconformist appeals to stop the war. Concurrently published by *Le Monde libertaire* and by syndicalist journal *La Révolution proletarienne*, his 1957 appeal denounced the assassination of Algerian union leaders 'by an organization [the FLN] that seems to want the totalitarian direction of the Algerian movement through assassination'. Wary of Nasser and of Soviet-backed Pan-Arabism as also Diop was (Diagne, 1997), Camus called anticolonial activists 'to impede that anticolonialism becomes the good faith that justifies everything'.<fnref n="54" />

In touch with both Hadj and future FLN leader Ferhat Abbas, Camus continued to plead for reconciliation among proletarians of the two sides of the Mediterranean, proposing a confederation that granted full autonomy to Algeria without creating new nations and boundaries. This idea costed him accusations of lingering 'colonialism', despite his clear condemnation of 'French repression' (Todd, 1997, 597) and direct commitment in favour of deserters in France and political persecuted in Algeria, anticipating the Manifesto of the 121, which he could not sign as he died in a car clash in early 1960. For the same reason, he could not comment the late years of the Algerian War, which further exposed his

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ DG, F/Δ/RES/0688/19, Bastide to Guérin, 19 February 1957; F/Δ/0721/100, Bastide to Guérin 13 April 1956.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ DG, F/Δ/RES/0688/29, Guérin to Diop, 13 December 1954 and 3 January 1955.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ PP, 77 W 4548 502932, 2 October 1966.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² PP, 77 W 4548 502932, 1 October 1962.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ ADSS, Folder 348.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ *Le Monde libertaire*, December 1957, Un appel d'Albert Camus.</footnote>
views to anachronisms and misunderstandings: yet, from an anarchist standpoint, Camus’s stance appears clear, being based on the classical principle of the consistency between means and ends in liberation struggles (Malatesta, 2014).

As for his federalist proposal, Camus’s idea of a ‘transcontinental’ confederation questioned both French and Algerian nationalisms and, accordingly, was violently dismissed by nationalists of both sides. Scholarship on critical Mediterraneanism is rediscovering Camus’s notion of *Pensée du Midi* (Southern Thought) associating it to decolonial ideas of the Mediterranean as an irreducibly diverse part of pluriversal and non-essentialised ‘Souths’ (Cassano, 2012). This idea can likewise be associated with Guérin’s aforementioned ‘dust of islands’ as a space where the intermingling of liquid and solid spaces historically grounded the survival of both plural dialogues and federalist autonomies, recently associated with Caribbean decolonial literatures (Ferretti, 2023).

In his writings, Camus expressed the dilemma of an individual, who considered to be both French and Algerian, caught between opposed fanaticisms that were expressed by the indiscriminate use of violence against civilians by both FLN and the French state. Thus, it was on ethical grounds that Camus proposed a ‘civil truce’ based on the principle that ‘no ideal justifies the death of even one innocent person’ (Camus, 1994, 174). He recommended negotiations towards ‘an Algeria constituted by peoples federated and connected with France’ (Camus, 1994, 28) in the respect of all existing communities, including the Jews, traditionally ‘caught between French antisemitism and Arab mistrust’ (Camus, 1994, 142) and the destitute people of European origin who were born there and ‘never exploited or oppressed anybody’ (Camus, 1994, 22), then exposed to racial and religious hatred.

Clearly acknowledging that ‘the time of colonialisms is finished’ (Camus, 1994, 23) and that the Arab population of Algeria had the right to receive ‘outstanding reparations’ (Camus, 1994, 143) from France, the ‘regime of free association’ proposed by Camus was inspired by the federalistic principles that allowed ‘different nationalities living peacefully in the Helvetic Confederation’. Yet, in that specific case, Camus argued for ‘imagining an even more original system [fitting] different populations imbricated in the same space ... as confederation first means union of differences’ (Camus, 1994, 207). Although Camus did not have the time to fully develop this point, his ideas prefigurated notions of federalism as something more than administrative decentralisation, associated with self-government at the level of local communities like in Democratic Confederalism (Knapp et al., 2016).

Like Diop, Camus also supported federalistic views of Europe arguing for a ‘revolution’ against the traditional French ‘centralising regime’ (Camus, 1994, 209), which could inspire ‘European institutions that could be established in the future’ (Camus, 1994, 210) predating future EU debates. Although clearly utopian in that situation, Camus’s plan still inspires ideas of non-state and inclusionary models of decolonisation that include the ethical refuse of nationalistic, religious or ethnic/racial hatred, especially among destitute people.

## 5. Conclusion

This paper has first shown that ideas in decolonisation did not come from nowhere, being also the result of activism, life trajectories and long-standing transnational circulations of radical ideas between so-called ‘Norths’ and ‘Souths’. Multilingual archival work allows for situated and contextual readings of historical decolonisation to appreciate the potentialities of radical ideas that circulated in anticolonial milieux, including by dissident and little-known activists whose contributions have been under-considered by ‘mainstream’ actors and later forgotten. Despite their ideological differences, the authors mentioned here first acquired consciousness of the colonial matter through personal experience. In the case of Suret-Canale and Guérin it was thanks to youth

journeys in which they witnessed directly the brutal nature of French colonialism. This happened ‘in Dahomey in 1938 and in Indochina in 1939’<fnref n="55" /> for the former and in Syria and Indochina for the latter. As for Diop, he directly witnessed the colonial situation in his Senegal and later the brutal racism to which African students were subject in Paris (Diagne, 1997). As for Camus, his feeling of being an Algerian by birth inspired his hope to build bridges among proletarians from both sides of the Mediterranean understood as a pluriversal region (Cassano, 2012).

Most importantly, this paper has shown that the potentials for decolonisation’s worldmaking were more plural than what has been claimed so far, exposing how productive proposals came from dissidents of movements based both in Europe and in decolonising countries. This allows stressing the concept of ‘allies’ as subjects of agency, which included criticising ongoing projects with some far-sightedness, as it is increasingly demonstrated by the study of neglected figures’ archives in different places and languages. Key is the idea that, beyond non-state and transnational organisation models of several anticolonial organisations as mentioned above, the socialistic and federalistic projects by Guérin, Camus, Diop and friends did not only (variously) blur the statist geographies that are currently criticised by critical geopolitical scholarship. These activists also associated their stances with the need of international and transnational solidarities on the ground of class consciousness but also of ethics. Camus’ and Guérin’s requests of avoiding terrorist and sectarian practices in anticolonial struggles raise matters with the coherence of means and ends that still talk to current geopolitical and decolonial debates.

Finally, further work will be needed to explain why activists and independent Left did not have the same direct impact on postwar decolonisations as the communist parties associated with the Eastern Bloc, although anarchism was far from absent in Africa (Mba & Igarwey, 1997). One can invoke matters of cultural translation but should not forget that they did not have neither the funds of Washington nor those of Moscow during the Cold War, and that their efforts were partially invisibilised by state repression first and historiography later. Although not the sole reasons, these points cannot be ignored or under-considered by future contributions.

## Declaration of Competing interest

I do not have any conflict of interest as for this paper.

## Acknowledgements

I would like to first thank the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme for their DEA 2023 grant which allowed me spending very productive time in Parisian archives. I greatly acknowledge all French-speaking colleagues with whom I had fruitful conversations on these matters, and especially Philippe Pelletier and Nicolas Verdier. Many thanks also to Bobigny archivist Pierre Boichu for his help, to the three anonymous referees for Political Geography for the precious insights that they provided to improve my paper, and to the Editor, Deirdre Conlon.

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