This is the companion volume to Schmidt's Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea (reviewed in JAH, 47 (2006)). While the earlier work studied the nationalist movement and the political forces that led to Guinea's ‘No’ vote in the 1958 constitutional referendum, this volume explores the nationalist movement in the context of French politics and the Cold War, and focuses specifically on the Left–Right political divide within the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA).

After the humiliation of defeat and occupation during the Second World War, France was determined to reassert its position as a world power by rebranding the empire as the ‘French Union’ and introducing a programme of colonial reform in an effort to deter more radical solutions. However, these plans were at risk of being derailed by African and particularly Asian nationalist movements, and the onset of the Cold War only served to intensify French concerns.

In 1946, the RDA had chosen to affiliate to the French Communist Party (PCF) in Paris. The PCF was in government and, although it did not support nationalist demands for independence, it did have the most progressive stance of all the metropolitan political parties on the colonial question. However, with the onset of the Cold War and the Communists' departure from government in 1947, the link with the PCF became a liability, as RDA activists were subjected to increasing repression, so in 1950 the RDA's inter-territorial president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, decided to end the alliance with the Communists. According to Schmidt, this led to a rift between party leaders and radical, grassroots militants that reflected generational and class cleavages within the movement. This is significant because it sets the scene for Schmidt's analysis of the evolution of the Guinean RDA during the 1950s that was to lead to that territory's ‘No’ in the 1958 referendum. In her analysis, the colonial administration supported the creation of political parties dominated by chiefs, traditional elites, and regional and ethnic associations, but these parties had no real political base in the population. At the same time, the government ‘undertook a dual strategy of co-optation and repression, attempting to push the [RDA] leadership to the Right while cracking down on local activists’ (p. 6).

From the French perspective, this policy had begun to bear fruit by 1956–57, to the extent that the party leadership was by this time prepared to engage in a policy of constructive collaboration with the colonial government. However, this growing accommodation with the colonial government only served to increase the rift between the party leadership and grassroots militants, who condemned party leaders for accepting local self-government rather than demanding full independence. This is, in Schmidt's analysis, the essential backcloth to understanding the Guinean ‘No’ in the 1958 referendum. Radical activists at the party's grassroots, who in the years of repression had established solid roots in the mass of the population by responding to their concerns, had genuine popular support and were thus in a position to exert enormous pressure on the party leadership to adopt a pro-independence position in 1958. Fearing that they would lose support if they called for a ‘Yes’ vote, party leaders decided ‘at the eleventh hour’ to call for a ‘No’ vote.

By shifting the focus from elite to grassroots politics, Schmidt paints a picture of French decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa that is a welcome corrective to those earlier studies that appeared to view decolonization as the outcome of an essentially linear and orderly process, rather than the product of political struggle. At the same time, Schmidt's analysis raises some questions. Bernard Charles has shown that political violence was, from an early date, central to the Guinean RDA leadership's strategy to win the compliance, if not the support, of the population. It would be interesting to know how this fits with Schmidt's thesis of the grassroots exerting pressure on the party leadership to adopt more radical positions. There is also the question of how appropriate it is to view divisions within the RDA in terms of the Left–Right divide. While this makes sense in a metropolitan context, it is questionable to what extent it is applicable to African anti-colonial politics in the 1950s. In this context, who was more ‘Left’ – those advocating maintaining the link with the anti-imperialist (but not anti-colonial) PCF, or radical nationalists advocating independence and a complete break from France? As Fred Cooper has shown, these were not necessarily the same people. It would therefore be interesting to know if and to what extent such debates impacted on the RDA's politics in Guinea. Finally, although we gain from Schmidt's study a clear sense of the divide between the party leadership and the grassroots, when she uses the latter term she is actually referring to party activists. This is not the same as the mass of the population, which was presumably not so highly politicized. So how was their support gained and sustained, especially in the rural areas? Were appeals made to family, clan, ethnic, or religious solidarities and divisions? And how does this fit with an analysis of political divisions within the nationalist movement in terms of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’?

This is nonetheless an important book. It makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of work that challenges the traditional view of French decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa as a process managed and controlled by French governing elites and African political leaders, from which the broader population is largely absent.