Abstract During the Malagasy Insurrection (1947–48), French authorities launched a repressive campaign that killed tens of thousands. A small network of Free French administrators—imperial reformers committed to overturning the prewar status quo—unwittingly set Madagascar on the path to insurrection and repression. By the time of their departure in late 1945, the leaders of the Gaullist regime had ushered in vast changes; they had prepared the Malagasy to vote in unprecedented numbers and established one of France's earliest experiments in colonial federalism to encourage participation in local politics. Yet these reforms were far from universal in their scope. Colonial administrators elevated an ideology of “ethnic conflict” that shaped the trajectory of counterinsurgent violence in the years that followed. This article traces the imperial administration's shift from reformism to mass violence in Madagascar in three parts: first as a series of federalist institutional reforms starting in 1943, then as an electoral strategy from 1945–46, and finally as a catalyst for state repression in 1947. With particular focus on the evolution of “traditional” village councils (fokon'olona) and the federal Gouvernement du Sud, it reveals that race-making and racial violence were integral to France's postwar project of reform in Madagascar.
Nathan Grau (Sun,) studied this question.