1968: FIFTY YEARS OF GLOBAL FRANCE
In hindsight: 1968 was a year of optimism in the air.
1968 is mostly remembered as a divisive year, represented by images of war, protest, and civil disturbance. But 1968 was also a year marked by evolution in technology and infrastructure, and with them a belief in their abilities to unite the world and create a better future for humanity. One of those technologies was air travel, and an examination of Air France Revue’s 1968 issue offers a window into the optimism of year: how people came together in the air, traveled for work and pleasure more than ever before, and sought to overcome the trauma of two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the legacies of colonial violence and inequality that marred the 20th century.
As people gathered on the ground in 1968 to battle a wide range of social, political, and economic injustices, the year also marked an important anniversary in the history of French air travel. Fifty years earlier, on December 25, 1918, Air France’s predecessor, La compagnie générale aéropostale, operated its first flight leg in what would — in the next year — become its first route connecting continental Europe to South America. This would be the first step in uniting the French colonial empire via the air — an empire, at the time, that included colonies in Africa, the Middle East, South America, southeast Asia, and the Pacific.
Shortly after its initial transatlantic flight, Aéropostale extended its routes to include French North Africa and French West Africa. Over the next 40 years, air travel would play a crucial role in consolidating empire, and in allowing the French people to think of France’s overseas territories as a natural extension of mainland France.
After the Second World War, France’s colonial empire faced a political revolution. In 1946, leaders from France and its empire gathered in Paris to re-configure the relationship between France and its overseas territories. They crafted a new political structure, the French Union, that transformed colonial subjects into citizens and granted them expanded rights to work and travel within the borders of Greater France. In the eyes of French officials — and of some African political leaders — these reforms, and the new investments that accompanied them, constituted a form of decolonization.[1]
According to Air France’s promotional materials, the airline was uniquely positioned to make colonial reform in France and Africa a reality. Air travel, the airline said, would open up new economic opportunities, allowing the French to realize their renewed commitment to colonial development. Even more important, air travel — unlike other forms of transportation — offered French people living in France direct access to people and places they had once only known through books, magazines, newspapers, and films.
Air travel played a crucial role in consolidating empire, and in 1968 as a means to promote good health, culture, and happiness in the new millennium.
In 1951, Air France’s monthly bulletin, Echoes of the Air, explained that thanks to the advent of the airplane, travelers could reach “Algiers by just a morning-long flight, Casablanca after a half day, and Madagascar in 24 hours.” The article continued: these places, “have become for us singularly more familiar than they were in the era where we were separated by thousands and thousands of leagues of ocean travel. More real, more familiar, their faces have become more dear to us.”[2]
If the purpose of air travel, however, was to expand the opportunities for economic and cultural exchange between France and its empire, the promotion of tourism within the French Union was decidedly one-sided. While flights opened up new opportunities for French citizens to explore the furthest reaches of the empire, few citizens living in the overseas territories enjoyed equal access to the luxuries of contemporary air travel.
Despite French attempts to pioneer a new kind of “decolonized” empire, the French Union ultimately failed to achieve a long-lasting unity. In some territories, the transition to independence was relatively seamless. In others — Indochina and Algeria in particular — severing political ties between France and the colonies was a violent process. In both Indochina and Algeria, new aircraft technologies played a crucial role in France’s protracted military efforts to preserve colonial rule.
But the tone adopted by Air France remained hopeful. In 1968 Air France Revue published a special issue entitled “Third Millennium: Immediate Boarding.” The issue offered both a look back on “fifty years of piloted progress” and a look towards the year 2000.
Rather than the “Great Fear” that marked the year 1000, this special issue celebrated the “Great Hope” for the future of mankind. The year 2000, the preface contended, would bring with it not fatalism, but a fundamental belief in the attainability of good health, culture, and happiness. Air travel, including, collaboration with African partners, had a central role to play in this hopeful future. Still thirty-two years away from the millennium, Air France used the anniversary year of 1968 as a moment to issue a boarding pass for the future, with technology and infrastructure an integral part of human flourishing.
Air France in 1968 offered French citizens a vision of a post-colonial France wherein technological prowess had replaced political reach and territorial control.
Air France in 1968 offered French citizens a vision of a post-colonial France wherein technological prowess had replaced political reach and territorial control. It also envisioned a global France that was coming together in new ways. Celebrated alongside French achievements were those of the France’s former African colonies, particularly the creation of Air Afrique, forged from a union of 11 newly independent African states. Looking to the future, the Air France Revue also celebrated the new possibilities for tourism in both Europe and Africa.
1968 should be remembered as a time of protest, upheaval, and deep-seated unhappiness with the limits of postwar and postcolonial reform. But it was also a moment where people reflected on the ways that the world had — at least in certain ways — begun to heal the wounds suffered during Second World War and began the slow process of decolonizing both the infrastructure of the early 20th century, and its mentalities. Postcolonial air travel was, in many ways, still mired in the history of colonial racism. But it offered new possibilities to imagine a different world, and to foster exchanges and dialogues capable of making decolonization a reality.[3]
Jessica Pearson is an Assistant Professor of History at Macalester College
[1] See Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
[2] Air France, Echoes de l’Air, 1951.
[3] On the ongoing racism of postcolonial air travel, see Chandra D. Bhimull, Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the Africa Diaspora (NYU Press, 2017).
