D.Z. Shaw: Introduction to “Logic of Colonialism”

Francis Jeanson (1922–2009) is not a well-known figure in the English-speaking world. He was a French philosopher who entered the public eye with the publication of Sartre and the Problem of Morality in 1947.¹ He soon joined the editorial teams of Les Temps Modernes (the existentialist journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others) and the publishing house Editions du Seuil (known for its association with the left-Catholic journal Esprit). From 1947 to 1955, he published numerous books and articles on existentialism, as well as several texts on Algeria and French colonialism, which culminated—during that period—with a book co-authored with Colette Jeanson, L’Algérie hors la loi. In 1956, Jeanson took up the cause of Algerian liberation, working for the Fédération de France of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). The “Jeanson network” of “porteurs de valise” (suitcase carriers) was founded in October 1957. Members of the network smuggled funds collected in France to the FLN and published an underground journal, Vérités Pour. . . . Incidentally, the network was responsible for securing Fanon’s passage from France to Tunisia in 1957.² Jeanson spent several years underground, evading arrest even after the Jeanson network was broken up by French police in February 1960. In October 1960, he was sentenced in absentia to “ten years in prison, a 70,000 franc fine, five years of exile, and a loss of. . . civil rights.”³ He remained underground until he was granted amnesty in 1966.
In 1952, Jeanson published three essays, in quick succession, that deserve wider recognition. In the spring, he published a preface to the first edition of Black Skin, White Masks, by the then little-known author Frantz Fanon.⁴ In May, his scathing review of Albert Camus’s The Rebel, which precipitated a public break between Sartre and Camus, appeared in Les Temps Modernes.⁵ Then, in June, again in Les Temps Modernes, he published the text that appears here in English translation, “Logic of Colonialism.” While they address three seemingly different concerns, in my view, they are theoretically intertwined.
Let us begin by sketching one of the intellectual horizons for Jeanson’s work. During this period, which lasted until 1956, the existentialists associated with Les Temps Modernes (LTM) cast themselves as fellow travelers with the communist movement. Their line—more or less shifting over time and not always clearly articulated—is characterized by: first, opposition to capitalism and American imperialism (as evidenced in Jeanson’s essay); second, a working assumption that the French Communist Party was the legitimate representative of the French proletariat due to its mass base; but also, third, a refusal to cede intellectual independence to party orthodoxy.⁶
Along these lines, in April 1952, Sartre led off a special issue of Les Temps Modernes dedicated to a critique of French media with the essay “Sommes-nous en démocratie?” [“Is This Democracy?”]⁷ There, Sartre announced that Les Temps Modernes would produce a thoroughgoing investigation into the workings of French democracy, concerning the gap that exists “in the essential domains (the press, colonial administration, the justice system, the police, parliamentarian assemblies, etc.),” between principles and actual fact.⁸ There are many ways this discrepancy could be interpreted: as the result of the gap between republican ideals and the imperfections of human nature or as the inevitable historical decline of any government. Given that he criticizes the myth of historical progress—a myth that is tied to the historical rise of the bourgeoisie—at the beginning of the essay, it is worthwhile emphasizing that Sartre rejects the reformist position that the gap between principle and fact, namely, the gap between democratic ideals and imperfect institutions, is the result of external factors interfering in democratic mechanisms that ultimately could be identified and fixed within the parameters of liberal-bourgeois social relations. Instead, Sartre holds that the gap between principle and fact is an irreparable, internal contradiction of bourgeois society produced by its class character; “we will see that the ceaselessly increasing gap in certain domains, between facts and principles, manifests on the contrary the resistance of the real,” that is, the emergence of “an organized and self-conscious working class.”⁹
Jeanson’s “Logic of Colonialism” introduces a special thematic section of the June 1952 issue of Les Temps Modernes—which bears the same title as Sartre’s aforementioned essay—dedicated to criticizing so-called democracy in the French colonies (although it largely focuses on North Africa). Jeanson, too, observes the “gap” in the French colonies. He argues—against the reformist position—that the colony cannot be compared to the metropole; instead, colonial administration is the negation of democracy, not merely the insufficient application of metropolitan institutions and principles to the colony. The so-called “gap” arises, instead, because French colonial institutions are structured to prevent a challenge from the “popular democracy” of the colonized. Just as Sartre concludes that the “gap” between principle and fact can only be surpassed by the destruction of bourgeois democracy, Jeanson contends that “before they may even become conscious of their political importance, the masses, by their mere existence, already pose problems for which there is no possible solution within the framework of the colonial system.”
But Jeanson is no mere acolyte of Sartre. A contemporaneous critic notes that Sartre and the Problem of Morality established Jeanson’s reputation as the first comprehensive “interpreter. . . of Sartrean thought: still the work of a disciple, but of a disciple who uses the instrument to continue his meditations, even to precede the master.”¹⁰ In this case, “Logic of Colonialism” precedes Sartre’s first systematic statement on colonialism by nearly four years.¹¹ Several of his observations are noteworthy, but I will only mention two here. First, Jeanson argues that western anticommunist strategy has come to “overdetermine” the “capitalism-racism complex” of colonialism in ways that reinforce, endanger, and modify its characteristics, appearance, and purpose, while lending a new “higher” justification to the masters of these western colonial outposts. Here, he borrows the concept of overdetermination from Sartre’s analysis (in Antisemite and Jew) of how Jewish people may come to internalize antisemitic stereotypes, and how this internalization may lead them to alter their beliefs and actions. (Sartre’s discussion also influenced Fanon’s analysis of antiblack racism.) In “Logic of Colonialism,” though, Jeanson uses the term in a less precise sense to mean that the characteristics of “classical” colonialism (capitalist exploitation and racism) have been modified by, and can no longer be interpreted without reference to, western anticommunist strategy. Second, he contends that nationalist movements in the colonies cannot merely be harnessed by communist blocs; indeed, these movements have a unique orientation which constitutes “the only real response” to the reality of the colonized. He even notes, in passing, that “popular democracy when it is in the Chinese style” (embodied, he suggests later, in the struggle in Vietnam) “poses more difficult problems for Moscow than in its European forms.”
These observations, in my view, contribute to understanding his other works from his period. For example, his scathing condemnation of Camus’s anticommunism concludes by hinting at his concern, expressed in “Logic of Colonialism,” that anticommunist strategy is being deployed to shore up colonialism.¹² And Jeanson’s approach to nationalist movements has striking parallels to what he describes, in his preface to Black Skin, White Masks, as the “revolutionary attitude” of Fanon, “whose relationship to current [Marxist] orthodoxy seems to imply not a state of rupture and hostility but the most fruitful of tensions.”¹³ As evidence, he cites the following passage from Fanon:

We would not be so naïve as to believe that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can change reality. For the Negro who works on a sugar plantation in Le Robert, there is only one solution: to fight. He will embark on this struggle, and he will pursue it, not as the result of a Marxist or idealistic analysis but quite simply because he cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation, misery, and hunger.¹⁴

Is it not striking that only a few years later both Fanon and Jeanson ended up fighting, in their own respective ways, for Algerian liberation? Jeanson’s writing is sometimes uneven, as he lacks the mastery of literary and philosophical style possessed by Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon. Nevertheless, “Logic of Colonialism” remains a document of remarkable clarity, and sometimes prescience, concerning the struggle against colonialism.

1. This remains the only book by Jeanson to be translated into English, although it appears to be out of print. See Sartre and the Problem of Morality, trans. Robert V. Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
2. Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 97–98.
3. Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Francis Jeanson: A Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 214.
4. My translation of this preface, along with a translation of an extract from his 1965 postface to Black Skin, White Masks, and essays by Jérôme Melançon, A. Shahid Stover, and myself, is forthcoming in Sartre Studies International (2025). Jean Khalifa and Robert J. C. Young date the publication of Black Skin, White Masks to between April and June of 1952. See the chronology of Alienation and Freedom (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 779. Extracts from Jeanson’s preface were published in La République algérienne on April 11, with the far more compelling title, “Opprimés noirs, oppressors blancs” [“Black Oppressed, White Oppressors”]. See David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (London: Verso, 2012), 532, note 28. La République algérienne was the journal of the Union démocratique du Manifeste algérien (Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto).
5. An English translation of this essay and Jeanson’s subsequent response to Camus are included in Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation, edited by David A. Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven (Humanities Press, 2004).
6. The latter two positions are evident, for example, in Sartre’s “Portrait of the Adventurer” (1950). See Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (New York: NYRB, 2013), 198–209.
7. An essay important enough to Sartre that it is included Situations, VI: problèmes du marxisme, 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 69–76.
8. Sartre, “Sommes-nous en démocratie?” 73.
9. Sartre, “Sommes-nous en démocratie?” 75.
10. Jean Lacroix, “Francis Jeanson, Signification Humaine du Rire,” Esprit, 172 (10) (October 1950), 588.
11. See Sartre, “Colonialism is a System,” in Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2006), 36–55.
12. Jeanson, “Albert Camus, or The Soul in Revolt,” in Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation, 101.
13. Jeanson, “Préface à l’édition de 1952,” in Fanon, Oeuvres (Paris: La Découverte, 2011), 53.
14. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 224, translation modified.