Explore the vast range of titles available.

As a student in the mid-1940s in French schools in Senegal, Marie Louise Potin Gueye had a wildly diverse set of classroom experiences. The daughter of métis parents from royal Serer lineages, Potin Gueye was born into the small francophone elite in Saint Louis and was part of an even smaller subset of African girls pursuing formal education in the middle decades of the twentieth century.¹ In a 2010 interview with the French leftist magazine Libération, Potin Gueye, then seventy-eight, recalled how during the war, she and her classmates were forced to pay homage to Pétain at the start of

Plans for postwar educational reconstruction in metropolitan France, colonial Africa, and transnational Europe converged on the desk of a single Free French official during the war. René Cassin served as national commissioner of justice and public instruction in Charles de Gaulle’s shadow government in London from December 1941 to June 1943. One of Cassin’s primary tasks in that capacity was to reconstitute French education along new lines in the wake of the national traumas of defeat, occupation, and collaboration. That entailed wading into entrenched ideological conflicts over schooling that had bitterly divided French leaders, educators, and the public for decades.