**Governor-General Félix Éboué**

Félix Éboué was an extraordinary colonial administrator, but also an ethnographer and a resistance fighter. A visionary and a humanist, some would say. A look back at the journey that led him from Guyana to the Panthéon.

Félix Éboué was born on December 26, 1884, in Cayenne, French Guiana. His father was a gold prospector before joining his mother to help run the family grocery store. After an outstanding start to his education, Félix Éboué obtained a scholarship in October 1901 that allowed him to continue his studies at the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux. He joined the school’s football team, quickly became its captain, and traveled to Belgium and England for matches. The regional press soon became enthusiastic about the exploits of this young Black player. In 1905, he earned his literary baccalauréat and decided to move to Paris to study law.

Early on, intrigued by his Creole identity and fascinated by African civilizations, he also decided to enroll in the Colonial School, which trained the administrators of the colonial system at the time. In 1908, he obtained both his law degree and his diploma.

In 1909, while serving as a colonial administrator trainee, he requested an appointment in French Equatorial Africa, where colonial penetration remained the most superficial. He arrived in Brazzaville and asked to be sent to Oubangui-Chari (which later became the Central African Republic). He then spent two years near the Cameroonian border as chief colonial administrator. For more than fifteen years, he served in various subdivisions, and his request to join the French Army was denied in 1914.

Éboué took his role as colonial administrator very seriously and actively sought to contribute to the development of the regions under his authority, notably by building roads and schools.

At this time, Félix Éboué’s many travels began. He had not completely severed his ties with Guyana. In 1921, he returned there to marry Eugénie Tell and to be initiated into Freemasonry. In 1932, the Minister of Colonies, Paul Reynaud, appointed him secretary-general attached to the Government of Martinique. In the governor’s absence, he twice served as acting governor. In April 1934, France sent him back to Africa, to French Sudan, where he became acting governor.

Then in 1936, the new Minister of Colonies in Léon Blum’s government offered him the position of acting governor of Guadeloupe. Éboué thus became the first Black man to reach such a post. In October 1936, Éboué arrived in Pointe-à-Pitre to find an island shaken by riots and strikes caused by rising sugar prices. He quickly launched negotiation programs, credit assistance initiatives, vocational training, construction projects, and above all financial restructuring, while implementing the policies of the Popular Front. He also encouraged the emergence of trade unions, appointed new labor inspectors, and punished police abuses. Guadeloupe retained a powerful memory of his time there. Éboué remained the man who fought for a minimum living wage, for the creation of public housing, for better roads, and for technical education. Above all, he saw great potential in Guadeloupe: “Guadeloupe, so rich in natural beauty, can and must become one of the great centers of tourism.”

In July 1938, France recalled him and appointed him second-class governor of Chad, a strategic territory facing Italian expansion. As early as January 1939, Félix Éboué launched the construction of economic infrastructure from Fort-Lamy and prepared Chad for war by recruiting nearly 40,000 soldiers and accelerating wartime production.

Félix Éboué was a colonial administrator with a unique style. In his view, colonization certainly had to modernize Africa economically, but it also had to respect African cultures. He himself produced a significant body of ethnographic work. Éboué understood that to establish colonial authority in Africa, one first had to understand the people being governed. This is why he learned local languages and sought to understand the traditions of the regions under his administration. In 1918, he wrote a work on the Sango, Banda, Baya, and Mandjia languages.

In 1931, he took part in the International Congress of Ethnography in Paris, organized during the Colonial Exhibition. Then in 1933, he wrote an ethnographic and linguistic essay on the peoples of Oubangui-Chari. In the same spirit, as a colonial administrator, he also encouraged local production such as cotton and contributed to maintaining subsistence farming.

This personal vision and his involvement in the Human Rights League in 1928 created tensions with some of his colonial superiors, who could not understand how one could be both a rigorous colonial administrator and a humanist passionate about African traditions.

In June 1940, Paris fell under German domination. Félix Éboué refused the armistice and informed Governor-General Boisson, who had joined Pétain, that he wanted Chad to continue the war. As early as July, Éboué contacted de Gaulle, and on August 24, René Pleven and Commander Colonna d’Ornano arrived in Fort-Lamy. Éboué quickly rallied to the Resistance, and on August 26, Chad officially joined Free France. Congo, Oubangui-Chari, and Cameroon soon followed this example.

In October, de Gaulle personally met Félix Éboué and appointed him a member of the Empire Defense Council, then in November Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa. Chad thus became a rear base for French fighters in Africa. Leclerc launched an offensive there in 1942, and the Free French Forces began their attack against Italian troops from its territory. Meanwhile, the Vichy Government dismissed him from office and sentenced him to death in absentia.

Félix Éboué remains the man who constantly sought to rethink and reform colonization. On November 8, 1941, he issued a circular stating that customary law had to be respected and that African councils should be associated with the administration. This was the first stone laid by a man who envisioned an association of colonies rather than total assimilation. Furthermore, Éboué wanted traditional chiefs to play an important role in colonization. He therefore sought as much as possible to integrate a local bourgeoisie into the management of colonial affairs. In July 1942, de Gaulle signed three decrees that followed the same direction as Éboué’s circular.

In 1945, he published The New Indigenous Policy for French Equatorial Africa, a work in which he explained his vision of colonization. This vision was notably echoed between January and February 1944 during the Brazzaville Conference, in which he participated.

On February 16, exhausted by the conference and disappointed that he had not been able to support the idea of eventual autonomy for the colonies, he left with his wife and daughter on a trip to Egypt. He notably met Nahas Pasha, Prime Minister of the King of Egypt, as well as members of the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN). He also delivered a lecture at the French lycée in Cairo about French Equatorial Africa and its evolution. Struck by illness, he was forced to stop. It was in fact pulmonary congestion. He died on May 17, 1944.

Having been made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1927 on the recommendation of the Minister of Public Instruction, he entered the Panthéon on May 20, 1949. Before that, his remains had been received in Marseille on May 2 and displayed during a funeral vigil beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Félix Éboué entered the Panthéon on the same day as Victor Schoelcher.

General de Gaulle declared on that occasion: “The nation and the entire Empire mourn Félix Éboué. Governor-General of Africa and Companion of the Liberation. Every French citizen knows and will remember that, in wartime, at the darkest moment in our history, the territory of Chad, of which he was Governor, Félix Éboué halted on the edge of the Sahara the spirit of capitulation, the vanguard of the enemy, preserved a refuge for French sovereignty, and secured a launching base for the triumph of honor and loyalty. Félix Éboué, great Frenchman, great African, died from serving too greatly. Yet now he has entered into the very genius of France.”

Date: December 26, 1884 – May 17, 1944