Even before the 1920s, people were moving from the Americas to France, via the Atlantic triangle. For instance, during French colonial times, René Maran (1887-1960) born on a ship, going from French Guyana to the French island of Martinique, officially registered at Fort-de-France and finished his studies at Bordeaux in France. He became a civil servant in the former colony of Oubangui, today Central Africa.

     Musicians, writers, and artists -mostly performers dream of coming to Paris and their dreams become reality. The headquarters for African Americans from Harlem, New York were in Montmartre, a district in the North of Paris. Langston Hughes is a perfect example of one of these African Americans in Paris. He traveled on transatlantic freighters to Africa before coming to Europe and his journeys may have inspired him to entitle his first autobiography, The Big Sea.

     René Maran's novel, Batouala, received the Goncourt Prize in 1921. This literary work is the first novel written by a Black writer about a Black man. The preface, in which he criticizes the French government's actions in the name of civilization, scandalized French readers as well as the French government, and he had to resign from his post in Africa. His novel was significant because it presented the inner thoughts of an African village chief, Batouala, about the French colonizers. His thoughts were also the reflection of the way men and women of his village felt about them; it mirrored the way the whole continent of Africa felt about Europeans. In essence this novel carried the seed of a future rebellion which brought about the downfall of the French colonial empire, 40 years later, by 1960: "Ah! Les Blancs. Ils feraient bien mieux de rentrer chez eux, tous./ The Whites, they would do better returning home, all of them!"