There came, in the middle of January, a storm so strong that with its northeasterly winds, you would have said it wanted to lift up the whole island and that all its inhabitants were thrown into the air.
First, there was a black swarm of muscular clouds formed on the right. On the left two great curtains of rain headed for each other and would soon join together. Then, farther away, a gathering up of gauzes, foams; white, orange, and yellow bands. The rain always comes in the evening; you would say that it preempts the night with its coating of clouds. Its noise is like the feet of an innumerable crowd—the terrible murmuring of storms. The sky is loaded with compact vapors, the winds howl, and the sea swells: on the waves the men are worried about a worrying sea.
It is the dictatorship of the shadow: something dark unfurls, and everything is erased under the advance of that great dark hand. Before you can even move, all you see around you is the presence of the rains. Suddenly, they have invaded the world, and at that precise moment, it is difficult to imagine that there is any place on earth where it is not raining.
Then there is a great commotion of lightning over the world. All of the laws of time and space are abolished, waves join up with clouds, tornadoes climb to the skies and descend to the abysses; the key to the winds has been lost. The sky passes in black and white, and you hear great rumbles of thunder so loud they could tear the earth apart . . . You hear murders and throats being slit, cries, cracks and groans, great waterfalls crash and rush into the catacombs—monstrous parturitions: you no longer know if these are childbirths or disembowelments. Ivory and gold streaks split the sky.
Sometimes the lightning is so violent that the light seems to be searching for a way into the very bedroom, in successive layers. The odor of the wet earth reveals the multitude of cadavers. In the cemetery crabs slide under the clay and devour the latest bodies. Nuns cross themselves in the little church, in the nearby mosque an imam mumbles his sutras, his hands folded like a book on his face. All of a sudden, the whole town is held in a great white halo. At the same time the candles are blown out, electricity stops, and you don’t know if the world is still there.
Now there is no shadow anywhere. The world is now a great revelator; it is a gigantic white orgasm. Underneath, there is the uninterrupted spluttering of water like an orchestra pit. From time to time roars cut through the air, blazing planes take off in every direction, crossing diagonals of sound and light, the folly of the mad night, the demented sound of the ages, dislocation of the air, sky, and time.
It is the time of beasts and clamor, guerrilla warfare of lusts that are set alight and fears that run wild. Humans become again like any other animal. In my bedroom, at night, I listen, I prick up my ears . . . “It is the time to make love to a Negress, the time to rape a white woman! It is a time for races and dogs!” At the Nouvel Hôtel a client makes this terrifying remark. But maybe that was a dream.
Outside, the air is hot and the rain icy. The slightest drop on your shoulder turns you into an ice statue. The streets are transformed into torrents; the roads become lakes. In the hotel lobby there is water up to your calves. Distressed cars with all their lights on wander through the night, this night that is no longer night and is whiter than the day itself. A white man in a white shirt passes by outside under the white rain, but he no longer has a shirt, his shirt has become his skin itself, it is translucent, he will soon become a phantom. A black man, on the contrary, is more and more black, he falls back into his race, he is the knotty trunk of the tree, the shadow of the stone pillar.
And the unrelenting night lets loose its thunder, a night that is no longer night. And the great battle in the skies and the sound of the seas, as the sky is no longer the sky and the sea has left its boundaries. Man is no longer man, and fear has gripped him. Where does this rain come from? It must have crossed a world of ice, entire worlds devastated to join up with this one—ours—and to bring to us its icy message. Soon the electrical companies’ generators will dare not rumble, and people themselves will fall silent. The storm holds the whole city in a bowl that lets nothing drip out. Filaments of light and the thunder’s arrows mysteriously connect all the inhabitants, without their knowing it.
*
— Did you sleep well?
— You are joking! Did you hear that rain?
— Yes. Strangely, it has given me an idea.
— What idea?
— That I might talk about the Madagascar Project?
— Oh! No, please don’t!
— Why not?
— Because it is past. It is not even history; it is prehistory. It goes back to the Stone Age, the days of the cavemen! Your grandfather was a contemporary of the mammoth and the lakeside villages.
— Yes, it’s a bit old . . . and yet maybe it is we who have aged and not this particular bit of history.
Li-An stretches out, smiles at me. She wants me to give her a massage now. The storm makes her nervous, makes her stiffen up. That is no good for fencing: your body needs to be relaxed, supple, and free.
I see myself more as an acupuncturist: I insert a few needles at specific points . . . the wrong way around . . . Yes, we need to talk about it as nobody speaks about it anymore, go directly to the nerve, touch the most sensitive spot: Taoist energetics . . . a critical antidote . . . close examination of the knots and tangles.
*
As the plague runs riot over Madagascar, another plague is being prepared.
For the majority of historians it begins officially on 3 September 1939, when France and the United Kingdom declare war on Germany following the invasion of Poland. It is the Second World War. Few people concern themselves with the fate of Madagascar in the gigantic tornado engulfing the world; no one really sees how that will help in comprehending anything, right? And yet.
From 1940 the British forces impose a terrible blockade. Madagascar is a site of primary strategic importance in the Indian Ocean: the island is at the confluence of all the maritime flows, it opens or closes the routes to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Burma (all territories of the British Raj) as well as to the Suez Canal and the oilfields of the Middle East. In a few weeks most communications are interrupted, and goods and supplies only trickle through to the territory. The Malagasy people suffer especially from this situation, notably in the countryside. Products, which arrive in lower quantities because of the blockade, no longer leave the big towns. It is strangulation: they try to diversify the points of distribution, but the country is living in slow motion.
There is no more gasoline; there are no more imports and no more textiles. Pauline stops working completely: the tailors are penniless and out of work. In any case nobody thinks any more about dressing well. In the great shortage of everything that is coming to be, people forget about their clothes. The Nuñes workshop closes its doors near the end of 1940, never to open again.
With it disappears the special way of cutting cloth and marrying it with the thread, a certain science of fabric and folding. The old Indian, Malagasy, and Portuguese tailors, who fill the workshop with their diligent humming, are the bearers of a millenarian know-how: Renaissance, Richelieu, Colbert, Venetian, Madeiran . . . they know the secrets of embossing, the detours of the raised satin stitch, they are experts of hemstitched fiction in all its varieties. With a choice of multiple materials—sometimes surprising and practically inexhaustible: wool, silk, sisal, paper, cotton, linen . . . they deploy an assortment of practices originating in India, Europe, and Africa. You find in their catalog a shimmering array of embroidery and stylish techniques: “painting with the needle,” “old-time embroidery,” “golden embroidery” . . . The beginning of the conflict marks the end of their reign: no more damask, gone the mantillas, seams, collars, lace . . . We will no longer see emerge from under their fingers the splendid flowery tablecloths adorned with a multitude of little colorful characters. With them disappears a certain idea of elegance, a sense of chic, a fragile and smart form, almost incomprehensible today, of beauty: when they take down the sign one morning in September 1940, it is a whole art of living that sinks into oblivion.
There is a shortage of rice; stocks of flour and corn drop. The colonists help themselves to the harvest; the natives are even more dispossessed than normal. Taxes rise inexorably, levies flourish: byway taxes, slaughter taxes, cattle taxes, spade taxes . . . To pay them—not to is equivalent to an act of high treason—people are obliged to sell their rice uncut. Mahajanga, the “City of Flowers,” becomes tax city. As if that were not enough, the governors Cayla and Annet use the pretext of the blockade to increase forced-work punishments and reinforce the practice of “services”: these compulsory work punishments included in the native code double between 1939 and 1941. It is the time of the corvées and burdens, tithes, taxes. When the Vichy regime is established, it gets even worse: except for certain very specific products (notably graphite, mica, and raffia, which are of interest to the Reich and are sometimes directly exported to Germany), shortages and scarcities are everywhere. It is a cold and dark time across the land.
In the country the testimonies are terrible. People fling themselves on a piece of biscuit the size of two chestnuts, on a piece of cheese the size of a thumbnail. They eat plant roots, burnt bones, dried lupines, and land crabs with furry flesh and a bitter taste.
Little by little Pauline also stops her English classes—speaking English attracts right away the suspicion of the authorities—but continues to give French classes. In 1940, by bravado or perhaps by rancor, she includes on the syllabus “Delfica” by Gérard de Nerval:
They will come back, those Gods that you constantly mourn!
Time will bring back the old ways . . .
A veil passes over her black eyes. She knows well that it is not true, that time never takes a step backward, that the days and night carry it along, like all of us, toward its demise.
The following year she puts on the syllabus “Épître à Marie d’Orléans” by Villon. In times of combat you need restless pupils who know “the sharper and his snare” . . . Pauline insists especially on the expression “the stemming of the false and the miserly.” Encoded messages always circulate.
But if she buys a newspaper to learn the latest or if she leaves the Nouvel Hôtel for a walk, she sees around her only swaggering signs of abjection, decked out in the sinister assurance of triumphant discourses. In the streets and big towns of the island, it is quite simple: Pétain is everywhere!
After the debacle of 1940, the colonial empire is more or less the only thing that remains to save the honor of “Eternal France”: all over they append to that phrase images of the Marshal. In Toamasina, the large island of the east, the Boulevard de la République is renamed Boulevard Pétain. In Antananarivo, in the Mahamasina stadium, members of the legion of French Volunteers swear allegiance before a huge portrait of Pétain, framed right and left by the battle-ax of the “victor of Verdun.” An athlete of the Gymnastics Society lights the flame in the urn of remembrance. “The smoke that rises like incense into the sky symbolizes the rise of hope in the resurrection of the country,” reports the Bulletin of Information and Documentation of the general government of Madagascar of 15 January 1942. At this point, in Europe, other flames are being lit—those of the crematoriums.
In Mahajanga, all over the avenue de Mahabibo, photos and drawings of the new master pile up in the houses along the craggy streets. In all the shacks you find the same punctilious, pale icon: handlebar mustache, oak leaf kepi, and khaki coat.
So that the Marshal’s domination is complete, in space and time, they mix up the Malagasy traditions with the rituals of the new order. Philippe Pétain is thus to be compared to Andrianampoinimerina, the prestigious sovereign who unified the country in the nineteenth century and completed the work on the ten rice fields of Alasora. As the nickname of “Savior of Verdun” is a bit exotic, they find a circumlocution in the local language to describe the new guide of the nation: “Vovonana iadian’ ny lohany,” that is to say: “The apex on which sit the roof’s rafters” . . . According to the newspapers, Pétain is referred to in turns as “the father and the mother,” “our Ray aman-dreny,” or again, in a nice lyrical and patriotic flight, as “the great Ray aman-dreny of all the Ray aman-dreny!” Finally, he is also given the title of “Mpanjaka,” the supreme administrator . . . In its absurd spiral the nationalist fervor transforms the leader of the French into a Merina king, a Malagasy god!
The press, under orders, hangs on to the slightest movement of the new head of state, analyzes his actions and words, and drinks the juice of his words . . . Two stamps are issued in his image, and he is found even on the calendars of the PTT, the post and telecommunications authority. “Pétain is like the plague,” Arthur exclaims. “He reigns over Time!” But you can’t speak too loudly . . . The police are omnipresent; there are spies everywhere . . . the “rumor police” functions . . . attentive ears listen out on the café terraces. Everything you say could be held against you: conversations are monitored, people happily inform on others.
*
It is a British filmmaker who, in strange circumstances little known even today, conveyed better than anyone that atmosphere of subterfuge and generalized corruption. The film is called Aventure malgache, Malagasy Adventure: it was filmed in less than four weeks with a very small budget, and its director is . . . Alfred Hitchcock.
The least one can say is that you would not expect to find the name of the “master of suspense” on the credits of this short film commissioned by the British Ministry of Information. Completed in 1944, the film was to be shown in France after the Allied victory, to assert the heroism of Free France persecuted in the colonies by the Vichy authorities. In fact, it will be refused several times and not be shown publicly at all until . . . 1993. It is an invisible, undetectable film that has disappeared and been kept from cinemas to spare, according to a British report from the 1970s, “French sensitivities” . . . It is true: when it is rediscovered, after this purgatory of almost fifty years, written on its sleeve is the instruction: “to be burned.”
This is because the scene presented by Hitchcock is far from the propaganda he was hired to do: on the contrary, in just over thirty minutes, he takes apart all the shrewd mechanisms of disinformation. The film begins with a great idea: a setting in a London stage dressing room, where one of the actors no longer knows how to play his gangster role and asks for advice from his colleague, a former lawyer who worked in Madagascar at the time the Pétainist regime was being set up. There follows a scene full of subtleties, convolutions, and intricacies—you can tell Hitchcock was educated in a Jesuit school—that denounces the Vichy regime but criticizes in passing the French colonial regime.
The spectator gradually sees that everyone plays a double or triple role in this film: books may contain coded messages, telegrams have double meanings, and secret messages are hidden in alarm clocks . . . An amorous woman is revealed, not unexpectedly, as the worst of traitors, while Pétain himself saves the skin of a resistance fighter. Everything has a false bottom, a triple drawer in this multi-triggered script: the acting becomes confused and disorientated, certainties fade, and the apparently good mood is undone. The hero has a chance in a thousand to get away: as always with Hitchcock, he manages to escape!
In the battle Hitchcock has chosen his side: he is evidently against the wretched Vichy regime, but don’t rely on him to sing the praises of the French colonists. With all the irony he has of a big cat, he reserves for them a few swipes of his claws: from the opening images he describes them as “dangerous people who have transformed Madagascar into a fiefdom of exploitation.” To whom can one then turn in the upheaval? The response is simple: to Molière—the troupe of actors is called the “Molière Players”—and to La Fontaine: it is La Fontaine’s Fables (that mysterious unidentified people have distributed across the island to children and natives) that spread the secret messages of the Resistance.
Hitchcock is a laser: he goes through with a fine-toothed comb the ambiguous discourse of the forces who, in order to subjugate the people, claim to liberate them. From the first scene of the film, he gives us the key to this savage charade. The film, in fact, begins with these extraordinarily provocative words: “The story that we are about to show you will not teach you anything. We know that. If we are telling it to you, it is because it is true. And that it shows that in the most distant possessions of the French empire, across the seas people breathe the same air.”
On first sight that could be read as a simple piece of propaganda glorifying the French Resistance. But what “breath” and what “air” is he talking about? Those of the national resistance or, more broadly, of the call for liberty? After a breathtaking half-hour diving into the shadows and half-light, you cannot but reread this introductory declaration as ironic praise in favor of all forms of liberty.
In any case the film would have pleased Pauline, who in 1939, while the war was just beginning, had just included in her evening class syllabus “The Two Pigeons” by La Fontaine and Molière’s Tartuffe . . .
*
But while it waits for Hitchcock and his sarcastic camera, the island enters into a festival of fabricated images and verbosity. Authority! Discipline! Allegiance, hierarchy, tradition . . . all these trumpeted words reappear, throwing the country into an almighty babble.
New slogans appear, and words change their meanings. Everywhere the words “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” are replaced with “Work, Family, Fatherland.” There reigns a perceptible sense of revenge: finally, one can openly denounce “the lie of universal suffrage,” the “electoral swamp.” The Popular Front is transformed into a historical misstep and is no longer part of the History of France; the important thing is to close quickly once again this historical dead end. Jews and Republicans are castigated; Gaullists, Communists, and socialists are denounced . . . Voices become high-pitched and sink into the deepest tones.
Haven’t you noticed that these Malagasy have long been quite insolent? The native no longer salutes! To neither his black chiefs nor his white leaders! There are also the freemasons and that old bitch Marianne whom the Jews love. And that whole clique of the laics, the antireligious, and not to forget the Voltarian dogs. Also held responsible for the nation’s ills are the libertines, those with free morals, Sybarites, good-for-nothings, perverts, pleasure-seekers, Epicureans . . .
With that comes the great switch in people’s ideas and coats being turned. Those who were socialists from the time of Augagneur and radicals from the time of Cayla become Vichyists under Vichy . . . You see all sorts of turncoats! Many key political men carry out spectacular complete turnarounds, draped in the elegance of the grand ideals and the excuse of being in service to the motherland. Their great speeches on liberty are transformed into long petitions in favor of dictatorship. It is the “opening”! They are welcomed, congratulated, praised for their sincerity, compensated with a minor role of some sort or a mission: it is a bonus for sycophancy.
It is, above all, work that becomes the general watchword, the great organizer of people’s lives and thoughts, the universal door opener. Pétain is not only the “savior of France” but also the “father of the workers.” Great labored tirades appear in all the newspapers, against a background of the Eiffel Tower and factories.
“Work has pride of place,” as they say. The island’s schools are transformed into vast workshops for manual labor. Arts and crafts are particularly prized. There is a turn to the rural, to sources and tradition. Old words that praise the hardworking village communities make their reappearance at the instigation of the colonists: asa, fanompoana, fokolonona . . . The Malagasy themselves witness with curiosity the resurgence of all these customs, some of which had fallen out of use and had been described to them before as the final remains of a savage culture.
Right away, let’s get to work! Ah, we’re going to put them back to work, all this rabble! The unruly, the walkers and strollers, had better watch out . . . On 24 April 1941 the first of May (Saint Philip’s Day) becomes the “Day of Work and Social Harmony”: great jubilant events are organized on the island. Suddenly, politics is mixed up with patriotism and the epic: they excoriate social leveling and egalitarianism, which have replaced the taste for work and the culture of results. Work is not sufficiently compensated, valorized, or respected, and they want to put it at the heart of society. The France of the lazy and fractious, the work shy and the shirker, is stigmatized. It is the great requisition of the lazy, the open hunt for the indifferent. As for the well-known indolence of the overseas populations, it will finally find in all this its antidote.
Faithful to his habits, a caustic Maxime quotes the Bible: “They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields” (Exodus 1.14), which immediately earns him some funny looks.
Finally, all across the town, in the form of large posters or little signs you see: “The Marshal has spoken.”
You find them at the post office, the bakery, the rice seller’s and the tobacco vendor’s. Absurd and even shameful questions are on everyone’s lips, without anyone taking offense: “Do you know better than him the problems of the moment?” or “Are you more French than him?” . . . All that is talked about is cleansing the country, getting it back on its feet, lifting it up, revitalizing it. Have faith in us: in regenerating France, we are years ahead . . . “All French people to be proud of France, and France proud of every French person, such is the order we seek to establish.”
Suddenly, the language of Montaigne and Voltaire is freighted only with puffed-up slogans. The politicians’ mouths are filled with the words immigrant and national identity: they are at once the problem and the solution to every problem. There is a certain tone that is synonymous with this discourse: waxy voices, syrupy like a balm, that gutturalize their vowels and rise at the end of sentences, aggressive syllables, and saddening metaphors . . . all of that makes itself heard, in every speech. They speak of “attributing to the naturalization decree a properly sacramental quality!” They go mad for economic comparisons: “The illusion that imagines that you can make one more Frenchman with a decree inserted into a register of laws is related to that which imagines one can become rich by handling the banknote plate . . . Let us guard against inflation of nationality! Let us not make any paper Frenchmen!”
There is also a certain distrustful and entangled relationship with time. They proclaim: “We should grant only temporary and revocable naturalization status.” They forewarn and threaten: “We are going to dissolve the clusters of foreigners!” Many years later here they are, then, sons and grandsons of immigrants, dissolved under threats, torn to shreds, pulverized. Yes, paper Frenchmen, the term suits me. A Frenchman with little weight, a Frenchman of the borders and margins, an alluvium, branch, or outgrowth of Frenchness. And it is one of those who is writing these words. For the honor and glory of France, obviously.
*
In this context of disintegration outrageously dressed up as a national renaissance, people reveal themselves, as in all of history’s puppet shows. A remarkable store of hatred rises up, and in a few months the island falls into a complete slump.
As soon as a country goes wrong, you see it in its way of treating foreigners. On this island that has for centuries blended cultures and colors, strangers are now like the plague itself. Arthur is one of the first to pay the price. One morning he is taken aside on the boulevard: he is accused of coming to fish for sea cucumbers by boat for six months of the year and leaving again without appearing on any official register! Arthur does not like fish and has never owned a boat, but that doesn’t matter. He is in any case a Chinaman, with his lemon face and grapefruit head—a Barbary ape. Jeers and taunts gush out easily for these rice-eating monkeys. Everywhere their stranglehold—and that of the Indians—on the small businesses of the island is criticized: they are always on the make, use underhand methods, and commit dreadful acts of usury! Arthur escapes with a few punches and two or three acrobatic kicks that throw off his assailants, but he is emotionally affected by the incident. In the evening he is found in low spirits at a table of the terrace of the Nouvel Hôtel: “The plague is over the town,” he says, “the plague is over the town.”
The blacks and the Indians are not spared. Black people are called ‘leather scrapers’ and ‘rubber chewers.’” There are some rotakas—the word crackles like a beating—disturbances in which some Karanes, the town-dwelling Indians, are singled out. For too long there have been massive arrivals of foreigners in the islands’ big ports, people talk about an invasion and how it is time to have the purity of the race respected. Parasites! Vagabonds! Ethnic progress is coming; you just have to stay in line.
Even music is affected by this triumphant blight. In 1940 the Vichy government decrees 14 July as a day of national mourning. No more balls, no more jazzy sounds . . . At the Nouvel Hôtel, with the Nuñes family, people protest. Give us back our 14 July! No, no more parties, just gatherings. It is the new politics: moving from the streets to the stadium. At 13 rue Henri-Palu there is no more swing.
The secretary of state for the Colonies is called Charles-René Platon (Plato in French). “Plato! No surprise that he wants to chase all the artists from the town!” Pauline mutters, in a really sarcastic tone. It is true that the concerts at the Nouvel Hôtel don’t exactly have the color of the musical shows advocated by the unbridled folklorist patriots of the new regime. Armstrong, Fats Waller, the Creole Jazz Band . . . brass, drums, dulcimers, all these guys with their tortuous tom-toms! For the propagandists and musicologists who strive to draw up a racialized theory of music, jazz is a black man’s music. “Darkies and Jews—it’s the same thing.” As if to prove the point, little pictures appear, representing jazz in the figure of a black saxophonist wearing the Star of David.
In any case all that leaps and sparkles is now classed as a seditious element. The new masters want only predictable and ordered movements: the oral contortions of Uncle Pierre on his trumpet and the spinning vocals of Pauline on the piano are dangerous and unseemly. They point to a body state that is not normal, integrated, or regulated. In an Information Bulletin of 15 February 1942, the government of Madagascar gives notice of the principles of the new dance and sporting pedagogy: lots of sport for the boys, ballet and sewing lessons for the girls. It is a matter of “preparing the young girl for her feminine role by encouraging the normal development and functioning of her organs.” In a few lines everything is said: distribution of roles and rules, physical torpor, the body broken down into its organs.
To top it all off, they learn that Johnny Dodds has just died in Chicago . . . That evening Pauline hums discreetly at the piano: “What did I do to be so (black and blue)?”
*
On 15 March 1941 the Jewish Law of 3 October 1940 is applied in the colonies. As in the metropole, a certain number of activities are forbidden to Jewish people in public administration, business, and industry. In concrete terms it means that there are no more Jewish officers, journalists, directors, teachers . . . More or less spontaneously, the island’s administration receives numerous letters certifying one belongs to “the French race and the Catholic religion.” Administrators, colonists, businessmen . . . all are French and Catholic! Stamped on letterhead, certified to be in conformity.
Conversely, for the first time in her life, Pauline no longer sets foot in church. During this entire period the Nuñes family goes into a form of silent resistance: no more music on a Saturday night, no more Mass on a Sunday morning, a real sacrifice. The churches, however, are full—of people who have never been seen there before! Those who had been strictly nonreligious under the socialist governors Augagneur and Coppet become holy Joes under Cayla and Annet. This new religiosity has to do with power, Pauline says.
Among the letters there are many instances of people informing on others. People write in order to hand others over to the law, to accuse them, to sell them out. In Antananarivo a man named Alexander Dreyfus—whose name attracts attention right away, of course—is denounced by a letter indicating that he is continuing to sell rice a few feet from the Saint-François Xavier Church . . . the profession of grain merchant is no longer one of those open to “Judeans”: he will therefore be arrested and thrown in prison. One can from now be a crook and a good citizen. You can be an everyday racist, so to speak, spontaneously, happily, and conscientiously. There is an ordinary form of racism; you even get well-meaning racists. Guilty jealousies, re-baked hatreds, the dishonest and legalistic pens of the salaried scribes of everyday mediocrity: all the low-level personnel of the vast culture of viciousness.
*
The following summer the tone rises again: the Malagasy newspapers announce that all Jewish persons must declare themselves to the authorities for the census set out in the recent law of 2 June 1941. As in the “real France,” they must declare not only their place of residence but also their profession and the value of their possessions. The only thing is: what is a Jew? The count produces results that are, to say the least, speculative: there are altogether twenty-six Jews on the island (half of whom are French nationals). There are only twenty-six of them? No matter, they will be persecuted like the others.
I wonder a bit why, while there is barely a Jew to be found anywhere, the racial obsessions of the Vichy regime and the Nazis resonated and were applied with such zeal on the Red Island. It seems evident that the specific structures of the colony created the conditions for it: from the beginning of the conquest, Gallieni had put in place a “racial policy” based on the most recent techniques (cartography, anthropological photography), and racial separation certainly existed in the colonies: in the schools, in the markets . . . Could colonization have an insidious link to the persecution of Jews, even if it cannot be reduced or is even homologous to anti-Semitism? Underneath their radically different outward appearances (one charges itself with a civilizing mission, the other seeks to eradicate), there are certain troubling similarities, and colonization often creates a space for anti-Semitism, as is shown in the extraordinary saga of the “Madagascar Project.”
*
The Nazi project to deport European Jews to Madagascar, little known and sometimes treated in an offhand manner even by historians, is called the Madagascar Project. It is the expression of this imaginary, or more precisely chimerical, configuration that has for a long time made Africa in general, and Madagascar in this particular case, a site of relegation, a dumping ground in the mapping of the world.
The first to have expressed this idea is apparently a German Orientalist of the nineteenth century, Paul de Lagarde. Lagarde was violently anti-Semitic. According to him, “You don’t negotiate with bacteria and parasites, you exterminate them.” Or which amounts to the same thing, you send them to Madagascar . . . In anti-Semitic circles the idea will gain ground. For his part Stalin was to try something similar, in sending Soviet Jews to an icy, desolate territory (which apparently still exists): Birobidjan. Argentina, Uganda, and even the Peul territory of Guinea also provide “solutions” to what was to become a real obsession: to expel the Jews from Europe. Jewish people sometimes let themselves, through enthusiasm or lassitude, be seduced by this idea.
In 1937 it is the Poles’ turn to become interested in Madagascar: a delegation is sent to the island, discussions open with the France of the Popular Front. Sixty thousand, forty thousand, or twenty thousand? It is a big island, as big as France, Belgium, and Holland put together: how many people can it take? Between 1938 and 1941 the Nazis lean seriously toward this option. Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reich Bank, looks for a financial arrangement, the German navy casts a covetous eye on the islands of the Indian Ocean (the Bay of Antsiranana is the second largest in the world, after Rio), the company IG Farben envisages setting up markets there: feasibility studies—strange vocabulary, still very close to our own—are carried out, and Hitler himself brings the subject up several times, on 20 June 1940, for example, during a speech with the leading admiral Raeder and then, a few days later, in front of Mussolini. In this affair there is constant manipulation: the point is also to divert the Duce’s attention while not informing him of the attack against the USSR and to sow uncertainty around the intentions of the Nazis. To the east or the west? Africa or Russia? Make others believe in this or that, sow confusion in the various administrations in order to control them better, strategically avoid the doubts of some and reinforce the hopes of others . . . External manipulations, internal scheming: it is a good example of how the Nazi machine worked.
Soon the Madagascar Project will see the light of day. It is drafted by Franz Rademacher, the advisor on Jewish affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and will pass successively through the hands of the advisor Luther, the minister Ribbentrop, and the Führer himself. In his journal Eichmann—who will himself draw up in August 1940 a dossier titled “Madagaskar Projekt”—presents this plan as a “humanist” solution to the Jewish problem. More recently, the same argument has been used by Robert Faurisson, who claims that the “Final Solution” was in truth a “territorial final solution,” that is, not an attempt to exterminate but a plan (of almost Zionist inspiration) to finally give a country to the Jews.
A close reading of the proposal signed by Rademacher on 3 July 1940 shows that it is nothing of the kind. Indeed, the final sentence says the opposite, indicating, with the usual modesty of the men of the Reich, that the Germanic sense of responsibility prevents the Germans from giving the Jews a sovereign state. According to this plan, the Jews were to have a part of the territory under their control, notably administration of roads and communications, but the island was to be placed under German mandate, crisscrossed with German naval and air bases, under the control of a German military governor (the Polizeigouverneur). A European bank was to be created to ensure the financing of the population movements, funded by Jewish money and, if that did not cover it, by loans. The aim is clear: to make the Jewish indebted to a Europe of which they would no longer be citizens and to make them a stateless people under mandate. A reservation, in effect: the word is apt, a site for animals.
As for the Malagasy people, they are not even mentioned: all that is stated is the fate of the twenty-five thousand French people and the compensation that will need to be paid to them. Jews and natives, in the same bag. “Disposable people,” you could say: people who can be transported, hawked around, and deported. And also detained, ordered, lined up. People you can get rid of.
The man who applies for the role of governor of the island is far from unknown: it is Philipp Bouhler, the head of the Chancellery and the man responsible for the program to eliminate handicapped people, Aktion T-4. So, the Madagascar Project was an alternative to extermination? It would be very naive to think so. A temporary hypothesis in the presumption of a rapid victory against the British? No doubt. It is revealing nonetheless, in its very urgency: in its absurd, crazy way, it played a role in normalizing the idea of Jewish deportation, in disseminating the possibility of their physical disappearance, of their dismemberment (Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland, spoke of “sending them by ship, bit by bit, one by one, man and woman at a time, every little girl”), thereby habituating people’s minds to the unnameable, getting them accustomed to the unacceptable.