Ten years after the four “old colonies” were transformed into French Overseas Departments, as established by the 1946 Assimilation Law, their social and political elites began to oppugn the process of departmentalization. In French Guiana, the denunciation by Creole teachers of a departmentalization which they regarded as a “false” decolonization was mostly grounded on an enduring pay gap that pointed to a permanence of the colonial order insofar as the pecking-order between teachers in French Guiana was concerned. The ensuing mobilization of the Creole teachers in the 1950s, which aimed at obtaining the same pay as teachers from metropolitan France, highlights a double divide: on the one hand a social divide between Creoles and Metropolitan French, and on the other a political divide between autonomists and departmentalists. However, the mobilization allowed French Guianese Creole teachers to benefit from policies which could be described as positive discrimination. It also eased their accession to the local political scene, where they became major players from the 1960s onwards. Departmentalization thus accelerated the renewal of the social and political elites in French Guiana. In short, during the transition from colonial status to departmental status in French Guiana, colonial continuity and post-colonial discontinuity were the two faces of a process of social and political recomposition, during which Guianese Creole teachers joined the leading elites of their department.