The State and the Individual: Human Rights in the Era of Decolonization

During the French wars of decolonization, both sides of the colonial divide mobilized the narrative of French resistance to Vichy and the German Occupation. Anti-colonialists likened Vietnamese or Algerian nationalists to French résistants in order to justify taking up arms against the colonial regime, while their opponents deployed the legacy of the French resistance to repress anti-colonial "terrorist" movements. Each side bolstered its claim by evoking that other moral victor of the Second World War, human rights. Yet both camps ultimately used the language of human rights in support of state sovereignty. As anti-colonialists advocated the creation of new states to oppose the French state's violations of rights, the French forces of order justified a state of exception within and beyond France by claiming to defend the rights of man. However, a group of dissident "New Left" French Catholics and Protestants envisioned another legacy of resistance and meaning of human rights: the constraint of state sovereignty in order to protect the individual. This paper explores the stances of the Christian journalists, priests, pastors, politicians, students, and soldiers who denounced the abuse of French state power and accompanying erosion of democracy during the wars of decolonization in Algeria and Indochina. In claiming the right of resistance for themselves and others, these Christian activists also demanded a reorientation of the relationship between citizen and state, granting power to the former to check the latter. The paper argues that this anti-authoritarian shift not only shaped Catholic theology in the years before Vatican II, but also offered a persuasive challenge to the postwar "human rights consensus" that largely subordinated individual rights to state sovereignty.