Two terms that, since the early twentieth century, have been crucial to discussions about racial or ethnic relations – ‘discrimination’ and ‘integration’ – first appeared in official French documents in the years 1954 and 1955, respectively. They quickly became key references in the government’s pioneering efforts to recognize the importance and fight against the effects of French racism. Each was first taken up in texts that analysed the connections between the French Republic and one group of its citizens, so-called Muslims from Algeria. A government-sponsored study of ‘Algerian Muslim’ workers in continental France (the ‘metropole’) introduced the term ‘discrimination’; ‘intégration’ was the title that the Interior Minister François Mitterrand affixed to the new policy direction that France was to take to bring ‘Algerian Muslims’, in both French Algeria and the metropole, into the nation. His announcement on 5 January 1955 was, of course, a direct response to the outbreak of violence on 1 November 1954, which was accompanied by demands for independence in Algeria and which began what its instigators proclaimed the Algerian revolution. Over the next few years, if intermittently, numerous policy innovations developed under the name of ‘integrationism’, many of which explicitly claimed to recognize the existence and counter the effects of racist ‘discrimination’ suffered by ‘Muslim French citizens from Algeria’.

Despite ardent French efforts to pretend otherwise, these policy approaches did not spring wholly formed from the minds of French planners and social scientists (or, for that matter, from the genius of French republicanism). Instead, like the terms used – and the anti-colonial revolt that led to their adoption – they had overseas inspirations; in addition, it was bureaucrats from an international organization who made such policy models available for French adoption. All of this was possible because of transnational networks of social scientists, which included some who helped author them, as well as others who studied and wrote about them. More specifically, it was projects and claims from Mexico that provided the most direct references for French integrationist policies and it was through the efforts of UNESCO that French integrationists gained detailed knowledge about them. There were, as the archives and a very few public statements make clear, other foreign models. What follows, however, details why Mexico and UNESCO were particularly important.Footnote ¹

This article emerges from my ongoing study of the social and economic responses that France, in reaction to the Algerian revolution and under the name of ‘intégration’, proclaimed and pursued in Algeria and the French metropole. Its supporters insisted that this programme was qualitatively distinct from previous approaches that France had pursued in Algeria (notably, so-called ‘assimilation’), and in its other colonial holdings, such as ‘association’. French integrationist programmes – from their goals, organization, and methods to the very titles they gave to employees – drew directly on post-1932 Mexican government approaches to that country’s ‘indigenous’ question; reformers there had brandished the term ‘integración’ to distinguish these approaches from previous variants of so-called ‘indigenismo’, or ‘indigenous policy’, specifically the ‘incorporationist’ approach, itself sometimes referred to as ‘assimilationism’.Footnote ² These are two histories – France and Algeria; Mexico and its ‘indigenous’ peoples – that have garnered an enormous amount of scholarly attention. Yet, in assessing how they intersected, we find that less studied aspects of each become visible: how the French government pursued an expansive array of social, economic, and political reforms to crush Algerian nationalism, in conjunction with the well-known embrace of devastating and brutal violence; how the recognition of racism – French racism endured by Algerians – and the deployment of policies to counter this problem was used to deny that colonialism was at stake, or independence necessary; the worldwide policy impact, seen here on France and Algeria, of Mexican reform projects; and the ways in which Mexican developments contributed to the post-war remapping of Western social science disciplines, notably anthropology and sociology.Footnote ³

While there are solid reasons to define these aspects of both histories (Algeria–France/Mexico) as peripheral to more encompassing stories – notably of violence, colonialism, ethnocentrism, and capitalism – the ex-centric perspective that I deploy here is particularly important to understand the history of UNESCO and race. Alongside efforts to provide basic education and technical assistance, the fight against racism was one of UNESCO’s three founding priorities. Several recent studies explore its role in debates about race after the Second World War (and the Shoah), most notably the making, in 1950, and then rewriting, in 1951, of the organization’s famous ‘Statement on race’. These have drawn on UNESCO archives, particularly correspondence, as well as on research into how the new international organization drew existing transnational networks of scholars into dialogue and action. Rather than focus on UNESCO as an originating point, I explore how the organization inflected a transnational and international exchange between Mexico, France, and Algeria – with contributions, among others, from Brazil, South Africa, the USA, and the Soviet Union. Thus this is a history that complicates the usual binaries – East vs. West; France or Mexico or Brazil vs. the USA; Mexico or Brazil influenced by France. In doing so, it details how the mid twentieth-century swell of anti-colonial activism helped reshape thought and policies about racism – how to assess its effects and to redress them – around the world.

The UNESCO fight against racist discrimination, rather than prejudice

Historians who study UNESCO and the race questions, notably Elazar Barkan and Michelle Brattain, highlight the struggle that cultural anthropologists and others waged to fight what documents at the time castigated as ‘racial prejudice’.Footnote ⁴ Yet UNESCO’s publication activity and internal discussions in the early 1950s foreground a slightly – but significantly – distinct priority. Alfred Métraux, the Swiss/French anthropologist who oversaw scholarly work in UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences from 1947 to 1963, referenced this priority in a letter to a Brazilian colleague, reminding him that the organization’s primary goal was ‘to focus attention on case-studies that add useful elements to our struggle against racial discrimination’.Footnote ⁵ Over the course of the 1950s, UNESCO began to prioritize the mass and multilingual publication of studies of existing government-sponsored projects to counter the effects of ‘discrimination’, veritable ‘how-to’ pamphlets. Scholars gathered information on policies that existed and that the organization judged to be (at least potentially) effective. The Department of Social Sciences then made the pamphlets available to governments and organizations, so as to encourage them to draw from or reproduce these experiments. Other UNESCO divisions also took up what the organization’s newsletter referred to as a ‘clearing house function’. As the article noted, this was not a ‘merely mechanical approach. It is a process of judging what is good … and what it is desirable to help spread’.Footnote ⁶ This role took up more energy than the attention that the organization gave to crafting and publicizing ‘statements’ or manifestos, which targeted international public opinion in order to educate people about ‘prejudice’. The shift became particularly evident in 1953 and 1954 – immediately after the campaign that biologists (mainly Dutch, British, and American) and others successfully waged to qualify the insistence, central to the 1950 ‘Statement on race’, that ‘science’ had demonstrated that ‘For all practical social purposes “race” is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.’Footnote ⁷

In 1949, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations had endorsed the claim that ‘discrimination’ and ‘prejudice’ were distinct, although closely related, phenomena. Within UNESCO, however, it was the arguments of the Chicago-based sociologist Louis Wirth that appear to have pushed the organization to focus on fighting discrimination rather than prejudice. His claims gained support from other US scholars who participated in early 1950s published forums and, more particularly, closed-door meetings. Wirth proposed, as one UNESCO document summarized his ideas, that a ‘gradient’ existed ‘going from [1] prejudice to [2] antipathy to [3] segregation, to [4] discrimination to [5] intergroup tension or conflict’. He defined discrimination as ‘the differential – usually inferior – treatment of persons by virtue of their membership in a particular racial or cultural group’. More importantly, he distinguished between the ‘psychological and social psychological mechanisms’, which ‘are at the base of prejudice and antipathy’, and ‘segregation and discrimination’, which ‘being matters of public policy, are more clearly embodied in institutions’. This led him to posit that ‘groups practicing segregation and discrimination against other groups will, of course, exhibit, to some extent, prejudice and antipathy. The converse, however, may not be always true.’ Wirth made an even stronger argument against the central premise that had led UNESCO and others to invest in projects such as the Race Statements when he claimed that ‘inadequate or false information, a widespread belief to the contrary, are not primary factors in the genesis of prejudice or antipathy’.Footnote ⁸ His work pushed UNESCO to target discrimination more than prejudice. Let me underline that Wirth’s definitional emphasis on ‘differential – usually inferior – treatment’ produced a technical definition of ‘discrimination’ that allowed analysts to focus less on the intentions (prejudicial, discriminatory, or otherwise) of those who designed rules and institutions than on results. The priority was fighting the institutionalization and the effects of racism, which could be measured, rather than the causes, which were too complex, diverse, and too often irrational to be analysed for operational ends. To do so, UNESCO would work with existing states and governments, rather than through public relations campaigns. By 1955, Métraux described UNESCO’s goal as ‘intensifying the struggle against discrimination via legislative action’, and related UN studies aimed to examine ‘legislative measures apt to eliminate discrimination’. Discrimination, here, was neither common sense nor dictionary-defined, but premised in measuring the effects of existing institutions and rules.Footnote ⁹

‘Of great interest to the world’: Mexican post-revolutionary indigenismo and UNESCO anti-racism

It was in this context that UNESCO interest in Mexico took on growing importance. During the 1930s and the Second World War, figures who would play key roles in UNESCO were either deeply involved with Mexican indigenismo – Jaime Torres Bodet, who led the organization between 1948 and 1952, (Spanish-born) Juan Comas, and Alfonso Caso are the most important – or followed its developments closely (as Métraux did). Two US anthropologists of Brazil, Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris, in their UNESCO-inspired book Minorities in the New World spoke for many of the academics who worked with and disseminated their research through UNESCO when they wrote that ‘Mexico assumes special importance for us because of its energetic, humanitarian, and scientifically oriented Indian policy.’ They asserted that ‘many of the programs initiated in Mexico have now been adopted by other governments with large aboriginal minority groups and are used today by international organizations’. In highlighting the conjoined efforts of Mexican bureaucrats, politicians, and an international array of social scientists, they went beyond such empirical claims to insist that ‘the Mexican experiment with the Indian minorities should be of great interest to the world’.Footnote ¹⁰ Like these Brazilianists, UNESCO discussions and publications proclaimed that Mexico merited particular attention and worked to facilitate such interest.

For UNESCO officials, and for many of the scholars who worked with them, Mexican policy innovations, which had begun in the interwar period and continued into the 1950s, provided a usable past, where programmes inspired by anti-racist claims emerged in tandem with social science research. In the 1950s, what made this case particularly useful was, in part, the state’s recognition that racism existed in Mexico, joined with policies and programmes meant to combat this problem. These, in turn, were grounded in studies and analyses produced by sociologists and anthropologists (foreign as well as Mexican) who worked on indigenous communities, Mexican society, and questions of ‘underdevelopment’, education, and technical assistance. Already in the interwar period, Mexico – particularly the Marxist-inspired presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas – drew the attention of left-wing reformers (non-communists, in particular) from Europe and the Americas. The American academics Franz Boas and John Dewey, who both visited Mexico and talked about Mexican policies, were perhaps the most well known, but several New Deal reformers also drew directly from Mexican precedents.Footnote ¹¹ Mexican innovations in the area of so-called indigenous relations, a focus of government action since the mid nineteenth century, qualitatively changed soon after the 1910 Revolution. In 1911, the Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas played an important role in establishing the International School of Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico City; his student Manuel Gamio soon succeeded in placing anti-evolutionist (‘Boasian-style’) anthropologists, notably himself, at the heart of government action. His 1916 book, Forjando patria, incited social scientists and government officials to develop new forms of cooperation to achieve what Gamio saw as a revolutionary mandate, the ‘fusion of the races’. Rather than focus on costly land redistribution or massive social reforms, post-revolutionary governments could embrace overcoming the ‘linguistically and racially heterogeneous’ nature of their country as the measure of their commitment to equality. Gamio named this policy approach ‘incorporationism’.Footnote ¹²

Incorporationism closely resembled the policy of assimilation, which, since the nineteenth century, French colonialists had often presented as their guiding principle.Footnote ¹³ Like assimilationism, it loudly rejected any explicit racism: Indians, like Algerians or Cochinchinois in official French doctrine, were capable of overcoming their backwardness and could become like other members of the national community. Yet, very importantly, incorporationism placed much of the blame for current ‘Indian decadence’ on external factors – rural Catholicism and colonialism (first Spanish, then Mexican) – rather than wholly on indigenous ways or beliefs. It also did not fully accept the assimilationist certainty that the creation of rational individuals necessitated their abandonment of all attachments to the social structures of their home communities; the vast majority of ‘Indian’ ways were ‘backwards’, yet some were valuable. This aspect of Gamio’s arguments took on great rhetorical import, through the concept of ‘fusion’ or ‘synthesis’: what was valuable should become part of the national culture, rather than remain particular to a given group. The politician José Vasconcelos provided the most widely known version of this approach, in his nationalist text La raza cósmica (1925), which emphasized biological fusion. The text highlighted the most clearly racist aspects of this supposedly anti-racist acceptance of Indians (and all ‘racial’ groups) as fully capable of at once becoming equal to other Mexicans in all domains and contributing certain cultural traits to the developing Mexican nation. Vasconcelos emphasized that African and Indian ‘stock’ could each contribute to the biological ‘mix’ (the mestizaje) that formed the Mexican nation-in-formation. Gamio, like other ‘incorporationists’ who worked with him, tended to emphasize the cultural aspects of mestizaje, although affirmations about Indian ‘energy’ and strength also peppered their claims. Even more than physical qualities, however, the incorporationists insisted that Indian arts and music (rather than, say, moral values or intellectual frames) would help form the mestizaje nation that was emerging from the process of Mexican ‘fusion’. What most drew the attention of international observers to these debates were the large-scale field studies of specific ‘Indian’ cultures that the government financed and the even more substantial investment in educational and outreach programmes meant to apply the lessons of such research in pursuit of incorporation.Footnote ¹⁴

Brazil’s ‘racial democracy’, South Africa’s ‘plural society’, and the work of social scientists, 1930s–1950s

Mexico, however, was far from the only country that intrigued interwar-era reformers, who, at a time of growing fascist influence and the concurrent sharpening of racist claims, were eager to rethink questions of ‘race’, ‘colour’, and group or national differences. For example, during the 1930s, the Union of South Africa, as Saul Dubow notes, emerged as a space where new possibilities existed for research into how a ‘plural’ or ‘composite’ society – as some South African anthropologists termed it – worked, and where reform seemed possible.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1939, the Minister of Native Affairs, Education and Social Welfare, Henry Fagan, claimed that ‘the mingling of many races in South Africa and their great variety of physical and economic conditions … provide a wonderful field for those who wish to approach our problems by the method of scientific research’.Footnote ¹⁶ In the most well-known instance, Brazil came to be seen as a promising case study, a society where race and prejudice supposedly mattered little. Gilberto Freyre, another of Franz Boas’ students, crystallized this vision of Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’ through his articulation of the ‘Lusotropicalist’ thesis. His landmark study, The masters and the slaves (1933) argued that, since its colonial beginnings, Brazil had benefited from ‘a Portuguese way of creating a specific hybrid civilization in the tropics through processes of miscegenation’ (in this, his analysis differed starkly from Gamio’s castigation of the Spanish influence on Mexico’s Indian societies). His work catalysed an international revalorization of the country’s African heritage and mixed race society; like Vasconcelo’s ‘cosmic race’, the focus was on so-called racial mixing as a source of national strength. Freyre’s analysis of what Brazil’s African elements had contributed to what he termed the nation’s cultural ‘hybridity’ echoed what Gamio designated as potential Indian contributions to the Mexican nation: Freyre noted ‘the African influence seething beneath the European and giving a sharp relish to sexual life, to alimentation, and to religion’.Footnote ¹⁷

In its first years, UNESCO was interested in and commissioned studies on all three societies. Yet the post-war context, as well as developments in the 1930s, contributed to making Mexico the centre of attention. International disapproval of the Union of South Africa’s unexpected shift to National Party rule in the 1948 elections, which set the stage for a new racist and racially obsessed policy that came to be known as apartheid, resonated within UNESCO. It cemented suspicions, which had arisen among scholars inside and outside the country during the 1930s, that local academics as well as leaders were influenced by racist presuppositions. David Hammond-Tooke recounts how the 1932 South African Native Economic Commission made use of the work of local anthropologists to embrace what was termed an ‘adaptationist’ approach to the so-called ‘Native Question’. In the Commission’s summary, ‘The aim is to take from the Bantu [African] past what is “good”, and, together with what is “good” for the Bantu in the European culture, build up a new distinctive Bantu culture.’Footnote ¹⁸ In addition, South African anthropology after 1948 faced a direct challenge to its domestic authority from new Afrikaans-language institutions that privileged the Volkekunde approach, which embraced difference in ways wholly consonant with the still developing policy programme of apartheid. South African domestic trajectories, in terms of policy as well as academic theory and practice, contrasted sharply with developments in the international community. In 1948, a new pro-National Party organization, the South African Bureau of Racial Affairs (SABRA) identified the wrong approach to race relations as ‘integration’; the pamphlet Separation or integration?, for example, explained the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the latter.Footnote ¹⁹ By the early 1950s, UNESCO-commissioned reports on the ‘colour question’ in South Africa, while officially neutral, clearly foregrounded the limits of South African realities and the dangers of official plans and policies. National Party leaders insisted that their ‘separationist’ approach to racial relations was based in social scientific research and was truly ‘modern’, but neither UNESCO nor the transnational community of social scientists that worked on such topics (and often with UNESCO) agreed.Footnote ²⁰

The role of Brazil in UNESCO’s developing ‘race’ projects was far more complicated. UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences commissioned a series of studies intended to explore the functioning of Brazil’s racial democracy. The goal, as in the department’s other projects, was to provide models and lessons for the international community. Very quickly, however, the scholars involved came to the conclusion that Brazil was not a racial democracy; in Peter Wade’s summary, ‘most researchers reported evidence of racial prejudice and discrimination’.Footnote ²¹ Yet it was not only anthropological research that challenged Brazil’s supposed exemplarity. On the one hand, Brazil’s successive governments showed no interest in addressing such problems as they related to the country’s African heritage and people of African descent; rather, if they deigned to speak of them, it was to deny that they existed in Brazil. (Although Brazil did have a small ‘indigenista’ inspired agency charged with overseeing its Indian peoples, it received little attention from UNESCO, despite the important role that students of Brazil’s Indians played in the organization, notably Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux.) On the other hand, the Salazar regime of Portugal, in a post-Shoah about-face from its interwar disdain for Freyre’s laudatory description of miscegenation, took up Lusotropicalism as an official motto. Freyre himself, after a Lisbon-sponsored tour of Portuguese African colonies in 1950–51, championed Portugal’s now explicitly assimilationist colonial policies as an extension of its ‘plastic’ cultural capacities. Whatever shifts in the legal status of ‘overseas Portuguese’ the Salazar government trumpeted, however, neither UNESCO nor the social scientists who worked with the organization evinced much interest.Footnote ²²

Mexico in UNESCO: the integrationist model

Mexico stood apart. In its first years, UNESCO embraced Mexican precedents in pursuit of its three priorities: basic education, technical assistance, and the fight against racism. No other country received triple billing. With Brazil, Mexico was held out as an especially useful site to study questions of ethnicity and race; these countries, UNESCO experts explained, were making ‘positive contributions to the fight against discrimination’ and ‘offering solutions to the problems’ of ‘antagonism between races and ethnic groups’.Footnote ²³ In one example, UNESCO efforts to focus world attention on ‘successful’ cases where Africans had achieved great success in order to ‘discredit’ racist ideas borrowed from Mexican interwar efforts, such as the Casa del Estudiante Indigena, which brought (in many cases, forced) Indian boys to attend boarding school in Mexico City, so as to demonstrate ‘Indian’ capacities for progress.Footnote ²⁴ In the domain of technical assistance, UNESCO’s first projects were in ‘Mexico, in Haiti and in India’.Footnote ²⁵ When the organization began publishing its Fundamental Education Quarterly Bulletin, John Bowers sent a telegram to Guillermo Bonilla y Segura, the founding director of Mexico’s cultural missions to warn him that the ‘First number … carries leading article on Mexican cultural missions STOP … likely arouse world wide interest and demand for up to date detailed report.’Footnote ²⁶ UNESCO quickly commissioned Lloyd Hughes (‘an American of negro birth’) to research the Mexican cultural missions and write up his findings as the first case study in a series of publications about basic education. Even before Hughes had completed his pamphlet, the directors of other UNESCO-sponsored studies – in Haiti, for example – requested detailed information.Footnote ²⁷

The archives around Hughes’ study make clear that UNESCO officials were aware of many problems with the ways that Mexican officials planned indigenismo policy, as well as with the on-the-ground operations. These problems were sidelined or simply avoided in UNESCO publications, unlike the straightforward criticisms of Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ (not to mention South Africa). The reasons were double: most UNESCO texts on Mexican policies were ‘how-to’ manuals and intended primarily to disseminate existing research, rather than, as in the 1950s studies of Brazil, original scholarly research; more importantly, the Mexicans were focused on the goal of ‘integration’, which they did not pretend already existed, and they were continually trying to improve their policies. These fitted well with UNESCO presumptions.

For UNESCO, then, what made Mexico distinct was not just that Mexican officials and scholars focused intently on questions of ethnic or ‘racial’ distinctions: this was obviously widespread. Nor was it that this interest aimed to devise ways to take advantage of Mexico’s diversity: although few in number, other Latin American states also pursued this path. Rather, it was the country’s early 1930s turn from previous government policies, under the guise of incorporación, to the new formula of integración that distinguished the Mexican approach in the eyes of UNESCO – and, even more so, as we shall see, in the eyes of French policy-makers struggling to hold onto Algeria.

In 1932, after studying earlier projects to ‘incorporate’ indigenous Mexicans into the nation, the educator Moisés Sáenz (who had studied with John Dewey at Columbia University) concluded that this vision was, in US historian Todd Hartch’s terms, ‘simplistic’. Gamio’s incorporación had been ‘blind to the cultural differences of Mexico’s Indians’, Sáenz declared. He argued ‘that viable political reform would occur in revolutionary Mexico only after the implementation of more culturally sensitive programming by the institutions of the state’. He proposed a new project of ‘integrating’ all of Mexico. An integrated Mexico, in Sáenz’s mind, was a nation that ‘respected its indigenous and mestizo campesino roots and institutions, while appropriating the progressive elements of Mexico’s “white” population’. This was most clearly visible in educational policies, with a shift away from earlier assumptions that ‘assimilation’ could take place under paternalistic government educational programmes (thus creating a uniform national citizenry). The government began to pursue a more comprehensive ‘modernization’ effort, in which education programmes would work in conjunction with agricultural programmes and other initiatives for socioeconomic development to ‘integrate’ all Mexicans. For Sáenz and his collaborators, it was necessary to prioritize the recognition of all that ‘Indian’ cultures could contribute to a modern Mexican identity, rather than insist only on their ‘fusion’ into the nation. The most dramatic shift saw the establishment of bilingualism at the centre of all training and education programmes for ‘Indian’ groups.Footnote ²⁸

The adoption of bilingualism revealed one of the central models for the integrationist shift from incorporationist presumptions: Soviet nationalities policy. The connection to Soviet policy more broadly appears to be crucial to understanding the elaboration of Mexican integration, although this has been but little explored by Mexicanists. The Soviet reference also helps explain both the important dose of class-based analysis that the integrationists introduced into indigenismo (for Gamio, the negotiation of ‘Indian’ differences was distinct from broader socioeconomic debates) – the integrationists linked the ‘indigenous’ question to the broader ‘peasant problem’, sometimes invoking an ‘Indo-campesino’ problem – and their ability to convince the marxisant President Cárdenas to tolerate their efforts.Footnote ²⁹ In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union was engaged in a ‘nationalities policy’ that, like Mexican indigenismo, embraced ‘ethnological’ expertise, placed trained ethnologists at the head of government programmes, and was meant to address problems of racism and inequality.Footnote ³⁰ Under Cárdenas, some indigenista programmes looked to these Soviet methods.Footnote ³¹

Soviet and Mexican policies also developed in a shared context. In 1930s Mexico, as in the USSR, not only did the pursuit of ‘nation-building’ aim to overcome domestic impediments but both states explicitly sought to discredit fascist and Nazi arguments on the international stage denigrating ‘plural’ nations, which each state was then working to build. Adolf Hitler, of course, had targeted Latin America as a hopelessly degraded racial pool, proclaiming that ‘the bulk of the immigrants have interbred with the aborigines’.Footnote ³² As the historians Juliette Cadiot and Francine Hirsch detail, the Soviets mobilized their own anthropologists to counter both fascist propaganda and the active engagement of many European and American demographers, anthropologists, and other social scientists in support of German- and Italian-sponsored racial science.Footnote ³³ Mexico also encouraged the work of Mexican experts; yet what distinguished interwar Mexico from the Soviets was the active support that government agencies gave to the research of foreign scholars. One example was the young French doctoral student Jacques Soustelle and his wife, Georgette, who in 1932 were sent to Mexico by their dissertation director, Paul Rivet, to carry out ethnological research. They received direct support from Moisés Sáenz himself. As Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara and other scholars note, the Mexican government had very limited resources; by aiding foreign academics, indigenista officials could obtain valuable research that was largely funded by foreign universities. Unlike the vast majority of Mexican researchers helped by Sáenz, whose monographs went unpublished (owing to insufficient funds or infrastructures), Jacques Soustelle, thanks to his home institution, published his findings quickly.Footnote ³⁴ Mexican officials, faced with demands similar to their Soviet counterparts, sought to make the country a site where much ethnographic work could be done regardless of nationality; in carrying out such work, anthropologists could help Mexico work for progress and against fascism. This anti-fascist heritage mattered greatly for UNESCO; as the French anthropologist Wiktor Stoczkowski shows, the organization’s famed 1950 ‘Statement on race’ tacitly pursued a point-by-point refutation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Unlike the Soviets, however, who impeded UNESCO efforts to obtain information about their ‘nationalities policies’, Mexico facilitated them.Footnote ³⁵

The role of Mexican examples for UNESCO resulted, in significant ways, from Mexican efforts. For example, the fact that many of the social scientists who worked with UNESCO had been associated with or knew of Mexican projects before the war was not just happenstance or the result of insufficient resources. Writing in 1936 about the Americas, the then leader of indigenismo policies, Moisés Sáenz, imagined ‘what one day will be Indo-America under the spiritual direction of Mexico’. This leads Hartch to argue that, ‘in Sáenz’s thinking, indigenismo thus served not only as a policy designed to unify Mexico but also as a means to assert Mexico’s leadership in the international sphere’.Footnote ³⁶ Sáenz argued that ‘by elaborating a Mexican culture that is loyal to its native roots and enriched with white affluence, we can achieve the miracle of producing in our land a pattern of Indo-Latin civilization that can serve as a model for mestizo America’.Footnote ³⁷ Within UNESCO, Mexican scholars and officials – some, such as Alfonso Caso, were both at once – found a way to make this influence echo beyond the New World.

France, Mexico, UNESCO

Gallic ears listened attentively. Numerous factors help explain the particular intensity of French interest in UNESCO descriptions of the Mexican model. From UNESCO’s foundation, both the French government and many French scholars were attentive to the organization’s claims and eager to reinforce its authority. UNESCO was, of course, based in Paris, which facilitated aggressive attempts to use this forum to reinsert French models and experts into the mainstream of post-1945 intellectual exchange. This interest played a visible role in efforts to redefine how French overseas possessions were viewed on the world stage. As Brattain shows, whereas British colonial officers and US State Department officials (like their South African counterparts) worked to keep UNESCO from discussing their ‘cases’, French officials proved eager to have French colonial developments included in UNESCO publications.Footnote ³⁸ In turn, these publications made much of French ‘successes’. The organization’s monthly Courier regularly ran very positive articles on French programmes in their colonies; a UNESCO ‘Experiments in assimilation’ pamphlet on the French West Indies trumpeted how ‘In one century, one of the most remarkable human experiments has succeeded, with the result that the descendants of slaves freed in 1848 have become French citizens, who not only enjoy all the rights attached to that status, but who have made a notable contribution to French culture.’Footnote ³⁹ A UNESCO booklet on youth education captioned a photo of a French-built school in Cameroon with the claim that ‘many children across the world would be happy to attend such a school’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In one remarkable instance, the contribution of a group of French academics to a UNESCO-sponsored attempt to standardize social scientific terminology proposed definitions of ‘imperialism’ that actively excluded French overseas expansion altogether. Marx, they noted, used the term to describe the regime of Napoleon III; ‘current usage’, however, was linked first to the UK (‘In the 19th century, the [French] word imperialism took on a particular, specifically British, meaning, under the influence of the English word “imperialism”’); second to the USSR (‘one speaks of Soviet imperialism’); and third to the USA (‘At present, the word imperialism almost always has a pejorative sense … the book … What Direction for American Imperialism? … is motivated by a barely disguised hostility toward the United States’).Footnote ⁴¹

As part of their efforts to magnify their country’s role, French officials worked to increase Mexican influence within the institutional structures of UNESCO. On the one hand, French representatives actively supported the campaign of ‘Colombia, Egypt, India, and Mexico’ to make the fight against economic and educational inequality a UNESCO priority.Footnote ⁴² On the other, French representatives avidly sought Mexican support in their combat with what Chloé Maurel terms the ‘clan anglo-saxon’.Footnote ⁴³ In an early victory, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain reported that France ‘through several well-thought out gestures had succeeded in lining up a “Latino–European–Arab” bloc in support of its positions’ to outmanoeuvre the ‘Anglo-American group’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This took place on common ground, as Mexican officials themselves attempted to keep other Latin American states from rote support for (North) American positions within UNESCO. Each side, then, had much to offer the other, which could be quite straightforwardly handled in terms of bureaucratic politics: after the French managed to mobilize European support in favour of the Mexican candidate to direct UNESCO, Jaime Torres Bodet ‘recruited notable numbers of Europeans, particularly Francophones, for leadership positions’. Maurel notes that he also ‘systematically employed French, disdaining English’.Footnote ⁴⁵ A few years later, French efforts to keep international organizations, notably the United Nations, from debating ‘events in Algeria’ (which Paris insisted were domestic problems) gained important support from Mexico and Colombia – at least in 1955. Latin America became the target for French propaganda efforts to convince international opinion to support the continuation of French Algeria, with films and publications systematically translated into Spanish.Footnote ⁴⁶

Yet it would be a mistake to reduce the importance of this alliance to office politics, or even state-to-state diplomacy. Both France and Mexico defined their policies vis-à-vis ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ difference in opposition to the US. For France, the American counterpoint had been less central historically: republican rejection of ‘race-thinking’ developed against anti-republican politics and ideology, against a ‘German’ model of the origin-based or jus sanguinis nation, against British attitudes and British imperial practice, and in celebration of republican ‘universalism’. After 1944, however, French descriptions of their country’s rejection of racial categories (notably in the law) and attachment to anti-racist goals accentuated the contrast with the US. This was propelled by US criticisms of their colonial empire, as well as by French press and partisan attention to the urgent campaigns by African American organizations and activists for civil rights. For Mexico, most notably after the 1910 revolution, US racism was the key anti-model in discussions of the country’s ‘mestizaje’ population and in efforts to formulate indigenismo. UNESCO, of course, also targeted US race practices and laws, if tacitly.Footnote ⁴⁷ A greater Mexican presence in UNESCO – the organization and its publications – proved particularly useful to France when it turned to what the organization was publishing and distributing for its own political needs. In conjunction with UNESCO, the French Ministry for Overseas sent at least one person to Mexico to study their ‘basic education’ and cultural missions, with the intention of then posting him ‘to an African territory to apply and develop the knowledge and techniques’ that he acquired. (It is unclear if he ever was sent to Africa or elsewhere.)Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet Mexico in UNESCO had a far greater effect.

The Algerian revolution and the French turn to ‘integration’

It was the beginning of the Algerian revolution that forced France to come up with policies to back up claims that France, more than any other country, had a commitment to anti-racism, which was historical as well as institutionally embedded. This quest, in turn, led them to look more closely at UNESCO and Mexico.Footnote ⁴⁹ Most of the ‘reforms’ that the Interior Minister, François Mitterrand, sketched out when he announced the ‘integrationist’ turn on 5 January 1955 were not particularly novel. In fact, most could be summarized, as they were in a headline from the newspaper Le Monde, as seeking ‘A more complete application of the status of Algeria law’. This legal framework had been on the books since 1947, when it had been presented as a response to Algerians’ heroic efforts to liberate France from occupation; it offered several minor reforms meant to increase the role of Algerians in the government of their ‘departments’ and of the French Republic.Footnote ⁵⁰ What was most novel in Mitterrand’s announcement was the term ‘integration’, introducing into the official lexicon a word that scholars and insiders already employed. References to integration had appeared in early twentieth-century analyses and proposals concerning other colonial empires; the term was often used, for example, in discussions of US policy in the Philippines and Hawai’i.Footnote ⁵¹ As already discussed, it was widely invoked in Latin America, from Brazil in the mid nineteenth century to, most importantly, Mexico in the 1930s. In 1946, an article by the jurist Clotaire Bée introduced the idea of a ‘doctrine of integration’ into the French imperial(ist) discussion. Being just one of numerous efforts to redefine France’s imperial institutions, Bée’s claims were not taken up by other scholars or officials nor did they influence Mitterrand’s word choice.Footnote ⁵²

What did influence the Interior Minister was his desire to pursue reforms in order to keep Algeria French, rather than to rely only on repression. His was one of a number of French voices in the media and in government who sought to prevent any consideration of what they saw as Algeria’s ‘secession’. What distinguished the integrationists was their arguments that what was at stake there was not the worldwide problem termed ‘colonialism’ but a set of overlapping domestic problems. Algerians, they claimed, were not colonial subjects yearning for statehood but French citizens whose exclusion from the nation resulted from racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination (with the latter by far the least important). As Mitterrand argued in early December 1954, the ‘temptation too many Algerians have felt, the temptation to separate and to fight’ resulted, at least in part, from ‘not having the feeling that their hopes as citizens would coincide with the hopes France has for them’. To give Algerians the types of economic and social possibilities available to other French citizens, these people argued – as well as to make Algerians feel they were French – it was necessary to take into account what defined them as different. This, in turn, would mean rethinking what defined France itself: ‘The seven million Algerian Muslims make France the world’s second biggest Muslim nation (after Pakistan) [sic]. We need to understand this’, was Mitterrand’s (quantitatively inaccurate) phrasing. It was this overarching belief that different policies, based on distinct presumptions, could succeed in making Algeria French where earlier French approaches had failed that led the Interior Minister to raise the banner of ‘integration’.Footnote ⁵³

What most distinguished French integrationism was its recognition that Algerians had suffered from French racism. Since the nineteenth century, French republicans and leftists had ardently insisted that any official recognition for categories of French citizens based in fallacious concepts such as ‘races’ or ‘ethnic groups’ was itself racist and could only be part of a reactionary politics. The Algerian revolution catalysed a shift, as French integrationists proved willing to use laws and policies to redress the measurable effects of what was named ‘discrimination’ on one category of French citizens: Algerians. A mid-November 1954 editorial in the centre-left newspaper Combat laid out the stakes. It claimed, in terms similar to articles in newspapers ranging from the New York Herald Tribune, and The Times in London, to most others in France, that ‘the metropole, with a political will that only the Roman Empire has matched, actively erased [in Algeria] all legal forms of discrimination based on race or religion’. Here, of course, the word ‘discrimination’ draws attention only to intent: of how categories based in race and religion work to advance anti-egalitarian goals. While the paper’s pride in republican race-blindness was old hat, what was new was its warning to readers that the ‘exasperation’ of many Algerians was growing, owing to their realization that ‘most of them are excluded from the advantages [of being French], whether economic or cultural’.Footnote ⁵⁴ What made it possible, however, to move from such poetic reminders that France had to do more – to address reality as well as intentions – to claims that France had a problem with racism were the language and arguments of writers and politicians who were wholly opposed to any policy of reforms.

Speaking in the name of ‘European’ Algerians, politicians and self-identified ‘ordinary’ people who wrote to metropolitan periodicals to share their local knowledge rejected government proposals for political reform and insisted that immediate and harsh repression would end violence and upheaval in Algeria. They did so with explicit racism, leading a pro-government newspaper to qualify statements in the Algerian Assembly as ‘sickening’.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the words of one late-December letter-writer to the left-wing weekly France-Observateur: ‘do you really think the Arabs have the intellectual level, the morality, and understanding of politics … that would allow them to manage Algeria by themselves?’Footnote ⁵⁶ Several weeks later, however, a wave of responses to the first letter attacked what the editors soft-pedalled as ‘a certain racism’ on M. Berthet’s part. Most of the published letters described Algerian Muslims as, in the words of Mme. Duchet, a teacher in Algeria, the ‘victims of the most basic and odious form of racism’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In a guest editorial that appeared in a francophone Swiss newspaper, the French author argued that what had led to recent violence was ‘racial segregation’, along with ‘miserable conditions’ and ‘illiteracy’. In this situation ‘eight million natives’ had ‘no legal means to make themselves heard and are pushed to the limit by the feeling that their demands, which in any democracy would be judged legitimate’ were silenced.Footnote ⁵⁸

Jacques Soustelle, integration, and the French recognition of (French) racism

Admitting that racism was a serious issue in republican and ‘race-blind’ France allowed a reconfiguration of the longstanding centre-left certainty that ‘the Algerian problem is, above all, a social problem’, as the Socialist deputy Jean Capdeville put it in December 1954. From this new perspective, Algeria’s problems, while mainly tied to economic injustice, were also defined by the real limits on most Algerians’ formal citizenship. What marked these limits was the role that ‘discrimination’ and racist exclusion played, historically and at the time, in producing dramatic inequalities.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rather than repeating the legal fact that ‘Muslims’ had ‘legal equality’, integrationist measures began, as a 1959 report summarized, from the ‘recognition that equality of rights had had little effect in reality’. Whereas in Mexico integration brought a class analysis to bear on incorporation’s fixation on ‘Indian’ difference, for the French, integration grafted attention to ‘Algerian difference’ onto the economic and social presumptions that had guided assimilation – and had motivated French ‘republican’ rejection of any attempt to work with group differences.Footnote ⁶⁰

It was Jacques Soustelle – the anthropologist who, in 1940, had left his work in Mexico City to join Charles de Gaulle in London and, after 1945, became known as a Gaullist politician – who took up the term ‘integration’ and began to define its policy implications. His influence does much to explain why these policies drew so much from Mexico and UNESCO. Soon after he was nominated to take over as the top French official in Algeria, the government of Pierre Mendès France fell. Critics of its reformist, or ‘integrationist’, tack in Algeria had provoked this crisis. During the late-night parliamentary debate that preceded the no-confidence vote, Abdelmajid Ourabah – a so-called Second College deputy from Algeria (one who had been elected by ‘Muslim’ voters) – referred to one aspect of Soustelle’s public reputation to defend the government and call for further reforms. He quoted from one of Soustelle’s first books, Mexico, an Indian land (1936): ‘“It’s together, as the history of their peoples and their lands have shaped them … that those at the bottom will leave their humiliation behind and win their place in the sun”’, which he interpreted as ‘the role that Mr. Soustelle claimed for the Indian people in the Mexican nation. How, today’, he asked, as Soustelle looked on, ‘could you refuse to admit the Algerian people to the same place in the French nation?’ It was his role as an anthropologist – both as a student of Mexico and as an active participant in transnational networks of social scientists that linked up with UNESCO – that determined how Soustelle defined French integrationism for Algerians.Footnote ⁶¹

The new French government, which did not include Mitterrand, decided to maintain the Soustelle nomination. In his first public speech after he arrived in Algeria, Soustelle began by emphasizing that, from now on, all the French policy choices should be understood as ‘integrationist’, for they would all have a ‘clearly identified goal: that every day Algeria will become more fully a province that, despite its uniqueness, is wholly French’. Until February 1956, when he was replaced, his cabinet elaborated a series of ‘integrationist’ policies. These aimed to identify the foundations and remedy the symptoms of the exclusion of ‘Muslim Algerians’ from the nation.Footnote ⁶²

Their actual exclusion was premised in shared origins and thus could be related to the problem of ‘racism’. Their marginalization resulted not only, as previous ‘assimilationist’ explanations had argued, from their unwillingness to abandon their ‘traditional’ ways or their religious irrationality; rather, French policies claiming universalist inspiration had pushed them away from France. To make changes, and here Soustelle’s initial public declaration was extremely clear, Algeria’s differences needed to be taken into account: ‘it is no longer possible to simply apply to this African land that which was designed and tested elsewhere. Rather, it is necessary to fully take into account the geography, the history, and the ethnology of this region’. With this statement, Soustelle announced the method he would always claim to rely on, the production of anthropological and sociological ‘scientific expertise’ in order to devise remedies appropriate to the Algerian situation. In measures taken in early 1956, it was on the basis of origins – having an ancestor who resided in Algeria at the time of the French conquest (1830) – and explicitly not by religion that the government established a legal definition of ‘Muslim French citizens from Algeria’ (FMAs) and then put in place ‘exceptional promotion’ policies meant to increase quickly the number of FMAs in government posts – a necessary precursor, they argued, for refounding a new ‘Franco-Muslim nation’. In 1958, the ‘events of May’ brought General Charles de Gaulle to power in France and announced the establishment of the Fifth French Republic. Over the next few years, more sweeping and ambitious versions of the reforms developed in 1955 were implemented across all of France, both in Algeria and – in fact, most particularly – in the metropole. These included efforts to identify and combat racism, among them campaigns to inform French people about the challenges faced by their ‘Muslim’ fellow citizens, and efforts dramatically to increase basic education and housing opportunities, as well as to accelerate the process of ‘industrial development’ in Algeria. The most emblematic effort was the transformation of exceptional promotion from the 1956 measures that encouraged the hiring of FMAs to a quota system in 1958, which reserved a fixed percentage of open posts for FMA candidates. A focus on domestic racism and an analysis that attended to redressing the effects of discrimination while privileging the fight against economic misery and social inequality led to policy responses that directed education and training to ‘Muslim’ children and adults, massive investment and development schemes, and increased entry to government jobs and positions of political decision-making. These were supposed to reveal that France recognized and sought to overcome the discrimination and other structural conditions that had denied ‘Muslims’ opportunities.Footnote ⁶³

References, usually implicit, to UNESCO – its charter, its programmes, and its moral and scientific authority – provided valuable legitimation to French authorities trying to explain their actions toward Algerians on the world stage. Aimed at both international and metropolitan audiences, the integrationist argument that domestic racism was the problem, rather than colonialism, worked to shift the frame of comparison. Over the course of the war, French commentators would constantly seek to displace comparisons of French Algeria with other colonies (whether Kenya, the Congo, or Morocco) by presenting French integration as an innovative and progressive model for the many other countries seeking to negotiate ethnic diversity and conflict.Footnote ⁶⁴

More explicitly, it was UNESCO-centred exchanges that provided language and depth to the anti-racist arguments that, confronted with the Algerian revolution, French integrationists used and that, in turn, modelled the social policies that they adopted. At a foundational level, they drew on UNESCO-sponsored discussions about ‘discrimination’ to explain the need to address problems faced by Algerians in France (the metropole as well as Algeria). In his analysis of the first appearance of the term ‘discrimination’ in any official French publication (in a 1954 government-commissioned study that described the miserable conditions faced by Algerian workers in the metropole), Gérard Noiriel suggests that it marked a shift away from the French republican strategy of using the term ‘racism’ only to evoke fascism or Nazism, or, in the 1950s, American segregationism and South African apartheid. What he fails to note is that an earlier effort had been made to insert a rejection of ethnic and racial ‘discrimination’ into the Constitution of the Fourth Republic. The Constituent Assembly, however, rejected an amendment proposed on 14 March 1946 that ordained that ‘the law punishes any action or propaganda destined to provoke or encourage racial or religious discrimination to the detriment of any category of the nation’. The commission that rejected this amendment explained that, while they ‘agreed with the proposal’s foundation’, the representatives ‘did not want to consecrate the racist notion that the Nazis and fascists used as a weapon’ by making any reference in the constitution to the term ‘racial’. The representative who proposed the rejected amendment was Jacques Soustelle: Gaullist politician, ethnologist, and future governor-general of Algeria. In 1955, with their invocation of ‘discrimination’, integrationists such as Soustelle affirmed that even policies that rejected biological or scientific understandings of ‘race’ – as French policies did – could still have racist effects. These could be measured and combated.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Mexican model for French integrationism

The role of Mexican examples in UNESCO discussions and publications (all published in French- as well as English-language versions) rendered them usable for ‘integrationist’ policies targeting Algerians. Soustelle himself had very direct personal knowledge of Mexican indigenismo. His thesis research – ethnographic studies of several ‘indigenous’ peoples in Mexico, among them the Lacandon, the Pame, and the Otami – began in 1932, the year that Moisés Sáenz first theorized the Mexican policy shift from incorporación to integración. The people whom he recruited to pioneer ‘integration’, however, looked to UNESCO for guidance, which in turn increased the importance of Mexican examples. Like Soustelle, the leading members of his civil cabinet (Germaine Tillion and Jean Servier) were trained ethnologists (as was Vincent-Mansûr Monteil, a member of his military cabinet); more specifically, they were all associated with disciplinary approaches pioneered in the 1930s, around Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet, a school that had built ties to other anti-evolutionist and anti-racist (culturalist) anthropologists in the Americas – notably Boas, Gamio, and Sáenz.Footnote ⁶⁶ Furthermore, their professional life in Paris brought them into close contact with UNESCO, through sponsored projects and conferences as well as more informal contacts with the social scientists who came to Paris to work for or with the organization.Footnote ⁶⁷

During the twelve months that he was governor-general, Soustelle and his team oversaw the establishment of several integrationist programmes and failed to implement most. They also developed plans and explanations for further reform. New educational policies were quickly established; those for adults all drew directly from Mexican efforts in the 1930s. The ethnologist Germaine Tillion engineered the extension of an adult educational and vocational programme in Algeria’s cities, the centres sociaux, which closely resembled urban educational programmes and cultural centres that the Lázaro Cárdenas government had established in Mexico in the late 1930s.Footnote ⁶⁸ Under the leadership of the young ethnologist and ‘Arabist’ Vincent-Mansûr Monteil (who resigned in June 1955, in protest at the French army’s systematic use of torture on interned Algerians), the most well-known programme, the Specialized Administrative Services (SAS), oversaw, supplemented, or simply replaced local administrators in rural ‘Muslim’ areas (who were widely seen as either absent, corrupt, or incompetent). The SAS, which was composed of army officers, had a dual genealogy: on the one hand, the model for administrative responsibilities and military staffing were the bureaux arabes that, after disappearing in Algeria under the Third Republic, had reappeared in the Moroccan protectorate in the early twentieth century; on the other hand, the primacy given to health care and education reproduced Mexican policies in the 1930s (in particular the ‘cultural missions’, first developed under the Abelardo L. Rodríguez presidency), down to the tripartite division of responsibilities between teachers, sanitary adjuncts, and rural social assistants (and, indeed, their titles). As in Mexico, this approach was later extended to the cities, with the Urban Administrative Sections (SAU).Footnote ⁶⁹ One of the most remarkable ‘integrationist’ programmes, which emerged in 1958, at the beginning of the second phase of integrationist innovations, the Mouvement de Solidarité Feminine, also directly reproduced Mexico’s Socieded Femenil ‘Accion’ (Feminine Action Society).Footnote ⁷⁰ The proposal that Soustelle himself considered the most important – the codification of ‘Maghrebian [dialectical] Arabic’ as a written and recognized language and its establishment as an official language of France in Algeria – failed to overcome the opposition of local politicians. Still, functionaries would continue to discuss, plan, and (to a limited extent) pursue such efforts, notably in 1958–59. Bilingualism, too, resonated with Mexican approaches to the ‘indigenous’ question, both as witnessed by Soustelle and as analysed by UNESCO. More accurately, as witnessed by the Soustelles: Georgette Soustelle (née Fagot), who began her own fieldwork alongside her husband in 1930s Mexico and then continued her research during the war, made some suggestive and supportive claims about indigenista projects in her 1958 thesis (which she dedicated to the then director of Mexico’s Indigenous Institute, Alfonso Caso). She insisted that ‘It is necessary for a teacher to speak the language of the region in which he teaches.’ Bilingualism was one of the actual shifts in policy that accompanied Sáenz’s theorization of what distinguished integración from incorporation – and one of the aspects that most intrigued outside observers.Footnote ⁷¹

Jacques Soustelle wrote about the importance that he attached to the Mexican turn to bilingualism later, in a book published in 1967. In an interview at that time, he stated explicitly what the book left unstated – and what he had never explained publicly before: that he had used ‘the Mexican model of integration’ to pursue his goal of building ties between Algeria’s ‘Muslims’ and ‘Europeans’. His book characterized this as:

This, he argued, was possible because, ‘so far as I know, Mexico is the only country in the world where the authorities have gone to the trouble of calling on specialists – ethnologists to be exact – to deal with the problems raised by the existence of large masses of native population.’Footnote ⁷³ Soustelle’s description of indigenismo is one that accords far more with the descriptions of its Mexican proponents than with subsequent critics. Indeed, as Georgette Soustelle’s thesis, other comments and writings by Jacques Soustelle, and much internal discussion by UNESCO bureaucrats all make clear, these outside observers were quite cognisant of some of the failures of Mexican indigenismo, even after integración was adopted (they did not, however, share the same concerns that drove Mexican critics in the 1960s and much scholarship still today). The distorted depiction that emerges from Soustelle’s rose-coloured evocation, however, make it particularly informative for thinking about why UNESCO – and subsequently French administrators – embraced Mexican indigenismo.Footnote ⁷⁴

Conclusion: against exceptionalisms

UNESCO and Mexico together provided models that allowed French officials to use policies that resembled what the Soviets were doing in their nationalities policy, while avoiding almost any positive recognition of that precedent. Indeed, government spokesmen, in the UN and elsewhere, constantly compared French sincerity and innovation in fighting racist oppression to Soviet and American hypocrisy and brutality. French brutality – the extreme and systematic forms of violence that French forces employed, alongside ‘reforms’, to crush Algerian nationalism, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and even more destruction – has led most scholars to ignore such claims, and this is understandable. Still, there is much to be gained by studying the policies that the French elaborated to fight anti-Algerian racism, for it opens up many new research possibilities.

The most obvious concerns US reformism in the early 1960s, notably the elaboration of affirmative action. The historian Nancy MacLean, for example, details the support measures that US proponents of this policy insisted were necessary for its success – strict quotas, legal enforceability, training schemes and support mechanisms, and speedy high-profile nominations, joined with a focus on redistributionism that would target the neediest candidates – and how they failed to be incorporated in actual policies; my work shows that these exact policies were all actually adopted by the French.Footnote ⁷⁵ For France, many of the policies and programmes remained in place after Algerian independence in 1962. More importantly, the approach upon which they relied, targeting a defined ‘group in need’ for national solidarity rather than a (class-based) definition of social and economic rights, became the basis for many Fifth Republic social programmes. What was erased, after France’s defeat, was any reference to racism and, linked to that, any historical analysis of why specific groups were ‘in need’. What also emerges from this history is a clearer picture of how much mid-twentieth-century anti-colonial activism was joined with the fight against racism and for ‘justice’ – in the US black freedom movement, the struggle against apartheid, the indigenous rights movements across Latin America, and elsewhere – and how strikingly it shaped claims, decisions, and policies in so-called First World countries and drew from the experience of Latin American models.

Indeed, among the silences that scholars confront as we explore these histories is the insistent denial of such connections. Over the course of the Algerian revolution, Soustelle and other French officials never admitted that they looked abroad for models. Instead, they worked intently to domesticate both the conflict – Algeria is France – and the solutions that they proposed – fighting French racism, rather than colonialism. This is typical of efforts by politicians and bureaucrats to produce exceptionalism. US proponents of affirmative action appear to have done the same, obscuring links to UNESCO, to Latin American developments, and perhaps to French antecedents. Historians, however, must challenge these claims. Instead, as the enormous scholarly literature on problems of racism and exclusion that compare French ‘colour-blind’ policies with US ‘colour-conscious’ approaches (with the concomitant celebration of one ‘exception’ or the other) suggests, most researchers remain too ready to presume that exceptionalist claims accurately reflect nationally circumscribed contexts.Footnote ⁷⁶