France's colonial imaginary was reconfigured, at least on paper, by the founding of the Union française in October 1946 in the Constitution of the Fourth Republic. This document set out ‘l’égalité des droits et des devoirs, sans distinction de race ni de religion’, promoting a revived sense of solidarity between France and its overseas territories (Préambule, 1946). Against this backdrop, a number of metropolitan publishers created space in their catalogues for voices from the French colonies, now termed départements or territoires d'outre-mer. The restructuring of the literary field following the épuration trials had created space for a burst of new young publishing houses and journals in the late 1940s (Simonin, 1998: 36; Boschetti, 1985: 185–90). Many were born out of the Resistance and differentiated themselves from the major journals and publishers of the inter-war years, such as La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) and Grasset. They provided fresh opportunities for new writing in French, their reputation untainted by the shadow of collaboration. This chapter will consider the relative positions and strategies of selected editors who added literary voices concerning the Union française to their catalogues in the late 1940s: Paul Flamand at Le Seuil, Charles Fasquelle of Éditions Fasquelle, Charles-André Julien at Presses universitaires de France (PUF), and Guy Lévis Mano. Each provides the opportunity to consider how anthologies and edited collections engaged with the politically volatile context of the Union française in a period marked by a sustained sense of both guilt and hope.

The term ‘post-war period’ I have used thus far is of course a misnomer. Diplomatic optimism aimed at preserving the French political ‘grandeur’ through the rebranded ‘Union’ was contested by violent confrontations between French troops and colonial subjects/citizens at Thiaroye, Senegal in 1944; Sétif, Algeria in 1945; in Madagascar in 1947; and Ivory Coast 1949–50; before the full-scale wars of independence in Indochina from 1946 to 1954 and Algeria from 1954 to 1962 (Benot, 1994). Labour disputes and trade union activism in sub-Saharan Africa during the immediate post-war years – notably the railway strikes of 1947–48 in l'Afrique occidentale française (AOF) – also signalled widespread economic and social discontent.