Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age 9780822386117

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BRINGING THE EMPIRE BACK HOME

RADICAL PERSPECTIVES

A series edited by Barbara Weinstein and Daniel Walkowitz

BRINGING THE EMPIRE BACK HOME

France in the Global Age duke university press

herman lebovics

Durham & London 2004

∫ 2004 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Rebecca Giménez Typeset in Adobe Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

for ethan and rachel, jesse and melissa

CONTENTS

Illustrations

ix

About the Series Preface

xi

xiii

Introduction

1

1

Gardarem lo Larzac!

2

‘‘What You Did in Africa, Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’ 58

3

Combating Guerilla Ethnology

4

The E√ect Le Pen: Pluralism or Republicanism?

5

The Dance of the Museums Conclusion Notes

179

191

Acknowledgments Index

13

223

219

143

83 115

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. José Bové speaking from the bed of a construction truck during

the deconstruction of the Millau McDonald’s, 2 2. Bové shaking hands with well wishers, 3 3. Poster announcing the harvest festival for the Third World in the Larzac, 14 4. In behalf of the Kanak people, Jean-Marie Tjibaou prepares to sign the documents that transfer a piece of the Larzac to the New Caledonians’ Kanaky, 1988, 16 5. Cartoon from the Larzac militants’ newspaper showing the oppressed regions of France, 19 6. A later visit of Kanak representatives to Larzac, 40 7. Cheyenne representatives of the American Indian Movement arrive to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Larzac victory, 1991, 40 8. Delegates of the Japanese farmers’ movement, whose land was being condemned to build Tokyo’s big new airport, visit the Larzac, 41 9. Woman passing out Gardarem lo Larzac newspaper to military recruits, 44 10. The militant activist Pierre Burguière confronts a military o≈cer about the camp’s extension, 44 11. Local sheep do their bit to deny the country roads to the military, 46 12. Poster for the united regionalists’ mobilization of summer 1975, 46 13. Larzac tractors in convoy on a highway adjoining the base, 47 14. Poster calling for support of the occupation of the Champs de Mars by the Peasants of Larzac, 47 15. The Larzac sheep on the Champs de Mars with the Ei√el Tower above them, 1972, 48 16. Poster announcing production of a play by the Groupe de la Cartoucherie on the historical resistance of the peasants of Occitanie against various incarnations of the Beast, 53

17. American demonstrators picket the o≈ces of Air France on Fifth Avenue in New York, 54 18. Orientalist doorway of Colonial School, 62 19. Still from l’Homme du Niger (1940), colonial film by Jacques de Baroncelli, 65 20. Festival of Immigration held in Rennes soon after the Socialists gained power in 1981, 130 21. French spectators watching the soccer World Cup match on tv, 1998, 138 22. French World Cup champions embrace, wrapping themselves in their flag, 138 23. A computer-generated aerial view, as if from the Ei√el Tower, of the projected Musée du Quai Branly, 146 24. A computer-generated elevation of the Musée du Quai Branly, 150 25. Northwest Coast totem pole at the entrance of the Musée de l’Homme, 156 26. Totem pole inside the Musée de l’Homme, cut in two to fit space, 156 27. Musée Guimet, specializing in Asian art, 157 28. Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, 165 29. The former Musée des Arts d’Afrique et Océanie, 175

x

Illustrations

ABOUT THE SERIES

H

istory, as radical historians have long observed, cannot be severed from authorial subjectivity, indeed from politics. Political concerns animate the questions we ask, the subjects on which we write. For over thirty years the Radical History Review has led in nurturing and advancing politically engaged historical research. Radical Perspectives seeks to further the journal’s mission: any author wishing to be in the series makes a selfconscious decision to associate her or his work with a radical perspective. To be sure, many of us are currently struggling with what it means to be a radical historian in the early twenty-first century, and this series is intended to provide some signposts for what we would judge to be radical history. It will o√er innovative ways of telling stories from multiple perspectives; comparative, transnational, and global histories that transcend conventional boundaries of region and nation; works that elaborate on the implications of the postcolonial move to ‘‘provincialize Europe’’; studies of the public in and of the past, including those that consider the commodification of the past; histories that explore the intersection of identities such as gender, race, class, and sexuality with an eye to their political implications and complications. Above all, this book series seeks to create an important intellectual space and discursive community to explore the very issue of what constitutes radical history. Within this context, some of the books published in the series may privilege alternative and oppositional political cultures, but all will be concerned with the way power is constituted, contested, used, and abused. We are pleased to inaugurate the series with Herman Lebovics’s intriguing and challenging study of postcolonial France and the roots of contemporary anti-globalization movements. Bringing the Empire Back Home demonstrates how the colonial heritage—both that of overseas colonies and of exploited regions within the colonizing nations—is still alive in the practice of the great powers. Focusing on the sharp political and cultural struggles during the last fifty years over what was, or should be, the French national heritage, Lebovics traces how postcolonial globalization continued (and continues) the drive

for empire in other forms. Among the di√erent episodes of postcolonial struggle highlighted in the text, Lebovics writes about the Peasants of Larzac, the movement in southwestern France that defeated a conservative government’s e√ort to expropriate farmers’ land for a military base on which to train a new postcolonial strike force. The Larzacians owed their victory in large part to a heterogeneous coalition of supporters, including left regionalists in other parts of France, post-’68 radical groups, members of the American Indian Movement, New Caledonian freedom fighters, and José Bové, now a prominent figure in the international movement against neoliberalism. Lebovics also considers the debates about the place of immigrants from the former colonies in French society, the rise of organized racist politics under Jean Marie Le Pen, and the impact on popular attitudes about French heritage and identity of the victory in the World Cup in 1998 by an ethnically diverse French national team. Yet this (rare) national moment of multicultural celebration and anti-racist a≈rmation, however inspiring, is hardly a ‘‘happy end’’ to Lebovics’s story. New museums of immigration, popular culture, and the art of the once-colonized are going up, but historians—including radical historians—continue to struggle with the meanings of the past for the present and the challenge that an increasingly diverse French population poses for any unified vision of a national or (increasingly) international heritage.

xii

About the Series

PREFACE

T

his book is about the struggles in the last third-century of the millennium about what is the true heritage, so the right future, for France. In these years left and right held perhaps the most fundamental debate since the Dreyfus a√air on the contents of the French patrimoine, as it is called in French. There have been many other such struggles. I wrote about some of them in both True France and Mona Lisa’s Escort. In one sense, the present book is a continuation of that history of conflict. But in another sense, the past thirty years were the unique moment when France transcended its historic sense of nationhood to reassess how its regions and its former colonies had entered into the nation’s cultural heritage. In this period France accepted its decline as a world power, and became the birthplace for the new attitudes and politics that today we call anti-globalization. So, this is a book, too, about how peasants, people of and from the colonies as well as old colonial hands, gauchistes, left Christians, ecologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, soccer players, their teenage fans, and, yes, the governors of France— locked in overlapping struggles—made, are still making, contemporary France. Let me be up front with you. I want this book to contribute to an international project of liberation. But it is at the same time what my French colleagues call ‘‘a scientific investigation.’’ I do not like abusive words like ‘‘objective,’’ ‘‘value-free,’’ and ‘‘factual’’ in historical writing. I have not read many works which wrap their claims in these packages that were worth thinking about later. Not even a dictionary. I have read studies that do not give the reader enough information to judge for herself, that claim to be based on evidence and are nothing of the sort, or ones that take a rhetorical position ‘‘above the combat’’—so better to push a tendentious line. If in fact we wish to write better histories we have to write more inclusive ones. And that is not primarily a theoretical question. It is a social one. To the degree that all participants in a history can tell their own stories—are in a social position to be able to tell their stories—the regionalist and the cultural administrator, the colonialist and the colo-

nized, the social scientist and those she studies, the museum administrator and the peoples whose cultures are on display, to that degree we have richer, truer, fairer, and more passionate histories. My political hopes have driven my research on the French cultural heritage of the future. I follow Jürgen Habermas’s vision of the past as ‘‘future-oriented memories.’’∞ So, I have learned, do the major actors in this book. I write about the struggles in contemporary France over the meaning of nation, of region, of the empire both at home and abroad, and, finally, over its situation in an American-dominated globalization. In writing about France’s future-oriented heritage I hope to make clearer what is at stake and what good, progressive, humane, outcomes are possible in the world. So, essential to my argument—if not always foregrounded—is that this French debate is not unique. In many other parts of the world— Britain, Germany, eastern Europe, Latin America, and my own America—such issues have been, are, and will continue to be fought over. And in some places like Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, exYugoslavia, and Africa, they have been fought out in horrible violence. Because of its local, national, and international dimensions, and because historical evidence of high quality is available, the French story is good to think with. Although I appreciate complexity—of motives, of situations, of moments, of outcomes—as much as the next academic historian, the reader will always know where, or more precisely, with whom, I stand in any place in the book. It will be against the deadness of the past. It will be with the forces trying to constitute a better future for humanity. That’s my parti pris. I love my participation in the scholarly world of France. There, like the other social scientists I am a ‘‘scientifique.’’ I have friends who are attached to ‘‘laboratoires.’’ And I have taught in the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociale, which is located in the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. This science-discourse is of course a heritage of French academic positivism. But it is also an ongoing challenge to any absolute truth claims that contemporary science ideologues like social biologists, neoliberal economists, or government policy wonks may advance. Yet I refuse certain defeatist responses to such scientistic imperialisms. I think there are better ways to turn back an overweening science discourse than, for the sake of shutting out a cruel world, raising an invincible fortress of ‘‘texts’’ to protect the human heart and mind. What my French colleagues are claiming, and I with them, is xiv

Preface

that we (historians) work with methods that systematically analyze human situations. Our arguments are both verifiable and—in a reasonably accessible language—communicable. The work must withstand criticism both honest and, even, dishonest. Others looking over my arguments and the evidence I o√er should find what I write persuasive, or—if they do not agree with me—at least plausible because done in a workmanlike manner. Otherwise, I have not done my job well. I use the words ‘‘arguments and evidence’’ in the sense of theoryembedded data. I mean more than just having a hypothesis. To do history we need both information and the frames to make sense of what we have dug out. The use of ‘‘facts,’’ as a word equivalent to ‘‘truth,’’ has reconfirmed Orwell’s prescient critique. I leave it to those in academia who believe that the stick we lower into the water is really bent, and to our president’s and his allies’ press agents. Bad Old History explained the world as radiating out from national centers of political, military, or economic power. The New Social, Cultural, and Linguistically turned Histories resolutely studied the marginal and the excluded to redress this myopia of the powerful. Paradoxically, both kinds of history writing assumed the framework of the nation state, even if social and cultural historians did not always thematize it. In one of his last pieces of writing before his death in 1994, Robert Lafont, Occitan intellectual and one-time candidate for the presidency of France, wrote, ‘‘We have entered a phase in which the Nation-State necessarily appears archaic, for the new spaces under construction today are transnational and cultural. Occitanie and Catalonia are, in certain ways, an old cultural unity, remaking itself in the frame of today’s modernity.’’ The cultural anthropologist Claude Liauzu puts his own sense that cultural spaces need redefinition this way: ‘‘To understand our society as it is today, is to return to the colonial.’’≤ I think Lafont and Liauzu have each grasped a piece of that new France. We need to connect these still pictures, and to put them in motion. I do not share the view that with globalization, the state is no longer a useful category, nor a powerful institution, in contemporary history. But I do think we have to frame our discussions of its place di√erently from past e√orts. In the spirit of Lafont and Liauzu, I propose that the apparent thingness of the contemporary state needs to be deconstructed. A new epistemology of our historical knowledge is necessary and Preface

xv

overdue. I will imbed my account in the emergent global episteme. That is to say, I wish to write so as to aid the reader to keep in mind at any important moment (1) the local, the national, and the global, as well as (2) the e√ects of their mutual reflexivity.≥ The French actors in my account did. I will show, for example, how the economic and cultural griefs of a hundred sheep farmers in a distant corner of France impacted on France’s place in the larger world of international power politics. The farmers, their activist allies, and the politicians understood this. Their nastiest enemy, Minister of Defense Michel Debré, understood it very well. Often complex, seemingly unrelated local events turn out to have large causal consequences. This is why, I think, taking down a few of the modular pieces of the new McDonald’s under construction in the little Larzac town of Millau—a first in the nonliterary application of deconstruction—became so important in the world debates for and against current trends in globalization. The magistrate who sentenced José Bové to a harsh three months in prison—for trespassing and vandalism—clearly understood, too, how lines of force link the local, the national, and the global. Perhaps we might begin with a visit to that ‘‘McDo.’’

xvi

Preface

INTRODUCTION

D

espite the season —it was the 12th of August—the dawn morning in the little town of Millau in the Larzac was still chilly. This high plateau in the Southwest could have terrible weather. At the town’s edge, just where the road descended from the hills, stood an almost completed new McDonald’s, done in the company’s vivid kiddy-toy colors. It had taken until the summer of 1999 for this omnipresent chain, finally, to reach here. Local farmers began arriving in the parking lot on their tractors, the favored means of travel in the poorer parts of the French countryside. They gathered in clusters at the construction site. They were mostly sheepherders, veterans of the successful struggle of the 1970s to block the planned expansion of the local military base. In their epicenter moved a fellow farmer, José Bové, pulling meditatively on his habitual pipe. The police, who had been alerted by the activists themselves, stood around waiting for a law to be broken. It was a moment of trade war between the United States and France. The United States was trying to force open the French market for its hormone-fed beef. To bring pressure on its unwilling trade partner it was increasing to prohibitive levels the import duties on selected French products. Now Roquefort cheese, the Larzac farmers’ principal market product, had been targeted. Most of the Roquefort is made by a few big companies. But the sheep milk for its making is purchased from the many small farmers in the area. Splendid production values: roughclad peasants on tractors, a Provençal language, old stone houses, scant urbanism, pastured sheep, cheeses organically cultured in caves in use since the middle ages, a produit du terroir which was an integral part of a nation’s grand cuisine. Can one imagine a more perfect set of symbols for a threatened French regional identity, which is to say, for an endangered French heritage? What might be the equivalent symbol for the American culinary heritage? A number of the men entered the ‘‘McDo.’’ They began ceremonially taking it apart, literally de-constructing it. To speed its Big Macs to new customers, McDonald’s employs modular construction methods.

1. José Bové speaking from the bed of a construction truck during the deconstruction of the Millau McDonald’s. The grafitto on the roof reads, in the local Provençal, ‘‘MacDo Get Out.’’ Photo Gilles Gesson.

It was easy to dismantle [démonter] sections already in place without much trouble or even great damage. The morning sun began to warm the air. In shirtsleeves, Bové picked up the prepared microphone and climbed on one of the construction trucks to explain to the small crowd why they were taking this action. Now the police stepped in and arrested the men in the building, José Bové with them. Overnight, Bové became the most popular man in France, the new Astérix—he has the scrunched-up face and the perfect mustache—defying the Empire. Neither Bové nor his fellow farmers are hicks. He is the son of research scientists. He attended courses at the University of Bordeaux given by the philosopher Jacques Ellul, the Cassandra of technological 2

Introduction

Bové shaking hands with well wishers from the (folkloric) condemned person’s oxcart in which his friends were taking him to court to appeal his sentence for the McDonald’s action, 30 June 2000. Photo Alexander Alland.

2.

society. And his good command of English comes from the years of his childhood spent in Berkeley, where his parents were for a time doing laboratory research. McDonald’s defended itself in its publicity by pointing out that everything—building materials, beef, plastic forks—was made in France by French workers. The firm provided jobs and a desired product.∞ But the issue is clearly not whether Bové is a real peasant, nor whether McDonald’s is a good guest in France. It is about what French people understand as their cultural heritage in this age of Americandriven globalization, and in what historical manner that imaginaire came to be. I will o√er a history of the intense struggles in the last halfcentury over the meanings of new, clashing, heritages in France. The past, where heritages are supposed to come from, is so rich and so contested that we must edit it. Which bygone activity, or event, or personage we wish to see today as related to us, and, more important, precisely how we relate to that past depends entirely on who we think we are now and especially on who we want to be. Enthusiasts of a certain idea of the genuine sometimes judge that once we speak of an activity in the past as part of ‘‘a’’ or ‘‘the’’ heritage, we are speaking of something fixed, a thing perfected in the past. I suppose they have in Introduction

3

mind something like what appears in American Heritage and Figaro Magazine, or in ads for period furniture. But I think this is to miss the utopian aspect of heritage-talk, the hope it carries of a better, a more humane time and place. Ernst Bloch understood the dream of community, his special sense of Heimat, not as going home again—an impossible itinerary in any case—but rather as a passage to a future better place. Such utopias made from the past can be, in our own personal lives, metaphors of childhood retrojected into history. The hope of community and a time of happiness, perhaps that is why heritage-talk is so fraught with passion. To see heritages as invented things is too instrumentalist a view of utopic historicity. We find hopes for the future formed from elements selected from the past in every culture in the world. To insist that this way of thinking is simply manipulations of the powerful or the nostalgia industries— which it can be—also obscures the plain truth that cultures always o√er a wide spectrum of possible heritage points about which their members may fight, but which they find are good to think with as they make their futures. ‘‘Heritage,’’ or in French the patrimoine, is a fighting word, and the most commonly used weapon—for all sides—in such historical struggles has been to naturalize their certain idea of the past. Heritage is national identity claims read back into history. Jean-Pierre Chevènement has proposed, in e√ect, a return to the values that were alive in the Third Republic as a solution to today’s ‘‘immigrant problem.’’ Chevènement, the unsuccessful presidential candidate of republican renewal in the elections of 2002, was himself brought up in the principal’s apartment of a schoolhouse. His campaign speeches exhorted his fellow citizens to act responsibly, morally, honestly. He sounded to many in France, as a friend characterized it to me, ‘‘like my preachy junior high school teacher.’’ Chevènement wishes to return to the old republican values of discipline, leveling, and complete cultural assimilation to the culture of France. He wants the African and Maghrébin immigrants—and the Corsicans for that matter—to accept being melted down and recast by the French state-school as real French. It happened with the earlier waves of immigration; it is a tried and true entry into Frenchness. Why not again? Le Pen wants the immigrants to disappear too. He loves a France that he dreams existed before becoming the major country of immigration in Europe. In ideal and in language, he consciously roots 4

Introduction

himself in the racism and xenophobia of the right-radical nationalism of the early Third Republic. A parachutist (‘‘para’’) in Indochina, the Suez intervention, and Algeria, Le Pen had spent much of his adult life fighting, and torturing, rebellious colonials, only to see ‘‘them’’ come to France. Descendents of former native peoples of the colonial empire, the current immigrants are incapable of becoming French, in his judgment. So if he had been elected president of the Republic, his slogan ‘‘France for the French’’ would have translated into massive deportations. Each man cherished a certain idea of the heritage of the last third of the nineteenth century. Neither would admit that republican government without enhanced democracy was unjust, a soft authoritarianism. Neither wanted to understand that French republican universalism has only worked when it took the form of a negotiated participation. Most important, neither was willing to confront two key linked legacies of France. One was that historically, republics— especially the paradigmatic French Revolutionary one—defined themselves against their enemies: the monarchy, the aristocracy, the church, and—the place where these were often strongest in much of the history of the country’s five republics—against the provinces. Second, the colonial empire was mostly made and completely consolidated by the leaders of France’s Third Republic as a continuation at home of this drive for unity-against-enemies. The praxis both of the centralizing republic and of making the colonial empire produced a systematic and entirely false sense of the cultural homogeneity of the French people. Today, some ideologues and a changing fraction of the French population see the immigrants from that former empire as a ‘‘problem.’’ That is a prime symptom of the continuing workings of a certain imperialrepublican syndrome.≤ Each man’s movement temporarily enjoyed a spurt of popularity in polls and early electoral rounds in 2002. But when real choices had to be made, the voters stopped using their votes as protests against exhausted Socialist policies, and, for safety’s sake, chose mainstream conservatives. Le Pen’s and Chevènement’s thorough rejection by the voters in both the presidential and the legislative elections made clear that the overwhelming majority of the nation wanted to move beyond their respective antique utopias of complete assimilation or racist exclusion. At the end of three decades of toasting the new modernized France, Introduction

5

some of the more thoughtful began to feel the morning-after hangover. After the massive economic development begun in the 1950s, the decolonizations in the 1960s, the Great Refusal of the young in 1968, and finally the beginning of economic depression in 1974, the fete came to an end. It was time for the French to assess what their society had become. In those years of growth the United States and the various cultural horrors collectively labeled ‘‘Americanization’’ served as the prime negative standard by which both intellectuals and policy makers measured the damage being done to the historic identity of the nation. But then, as Richard Kuisel demonstrated in his Seducing the French, the American menace receded into the background. The new identity crisis of the 1970s was literally historic. French leaders, rebels, and their intellectuals looked back to the past for the materials with which to construct present-day France.≥ Specifically, from the rise of new regionalist movements in the early 1970s to the 1981 electoral sweep of the left, various new voices in France began to dispute what should be understood as the regional, national, industrial, and colonial heritages. In the last decades of the twentieth century, a new usage of the word Patrimoine—now meaning a national heritage made up of people and their customs, rather than of inherited family wealth or the state’s treasures—came into common use, and with the word, a new contested imaginary of what was France began to take shape. In the aftermath of more than ten years of intense social contention of the decade before, the self-searching made the 1980s the great era of what-is-France books. The most authoritative of these was Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire. In 1984 Nora felt that it was time to sum up the common places and events of national memory. He thought it could be done in a one-volume collection of essays. It might be equally accurate to say that after the decades of France’s Second Revolution, he thought he could fix a certain idea of France in print. He wanted to document his vision of a modern, secular, and tolerant republic. But after publication, while praising the work, critics reproached him for his omissions. What about the Catholic heritage? The immigrants? And, oh yes, what about the colonies? Weren’t they worth remembering too? With good will, Nora responded to his critics by adding to his original still life of France more and more places of memory. Volume followed volume, until by the mid-1990s three volumes bound in seven fat books had come out, filled with essays by over 120 historians reminding readers not to forget this or that legacy or heritage of 6

Introduction

France. Intending to sum up, Nora was obliged, finally, to perform multiplicity. My work can neither aspire to the totalizing e√ort of Nora’s first book nor employ the additive approach of the six that followed. Rather, I’m interested in two questions that seem to me fundamental: (1) Why in the late 1960s and 1970s did certain stories told about the French past became especially bitterly fought-over battlefields in contemporary society; and (2) Why and how did certain of these histories become enmeshed when in the past they had made up separate chapters, as it were, in the tale of national memory? To try to answer these questions, I will trace how new understandings of French regionalism became intertwined with a new history of French colonialism, how Paris became intertwined with the provinces, industrial workers with regionalism, decolonization with refounding the social sciences, new ideas about republican solidarity with a multicultural population; how a new museum of civilizations was created which is at the same time about France, Europe, and North Africa; finally, how the European treasures in the Louvre relate to the art of African peoples. Together, this new web of historical meaning has profoundly changed, is still changing, the dominant common sense of what France is and will be.∂ What holds these apparently separate story lines together? Each of the chapters that follow describes a di√erent aspect of the nuanced and complex cultural-power relationship between, and among, Paris, the provinces, and the colonies. Thus the handful of farmers who refused eviction so that a military base could expand in the Larzac in the Southwest sparked a movement in the 1970s that allied regionalists, anti-colonialists, socialist utopians, left Catholics, trade unionists, French Gandhians, and ecologists, creating what, in hindsight, we can see as the beginnings of the anti-globalization movement. The alert conservative leaders of French governments quickly sensed the development of a dangerous situation and tried to co-opt local discontents by sending the recently downsized colonial administrators into the provinces on domestic civilizing missions. Then when the work of pacifying the backcountry seemed not to have worked, the state started on a di√erent tack. Paris created a new o≈ce and new agents to manage the regional heritages on the ground, and to protect them from what some people in the Ministry of Culture termed ‘‘ethnologie sauvage.’’ I will render this term ‘‘guerilla ethnolIntroduction

7

ogy,’’ in the sense of uncontrolled or insurgent. Decolonization had closed terrains of study to many social science projects and their French researchers. Why not shift scholarly interest to France, proposed the archaeologist Jacques Soustelle, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the ethnologist Isac Chiva. Good idea, responded President Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, who had been harassed by Larzac militants and their sympathizers when he tried to dine quietly with friends in Rodez, in what he considered his own petite patrie. French social sciences were refounded in the 1970s in the wake of the angry new regionalist movements, such as those of Brittany, Occitanie, Corsica, and the Larzac, and as a direct consequence of decolonization. In 1980 Giscard d’Estaing capped the state’s o√ensive against guerilla ethnology by sponsoring elaborate o≈cial celebrations of the Year of the Heritage everywhere in France. It didn’t work, or at least, not well enough. Elected President in 1981, François Mitterrand killed the plan to expand the region’s military base after nearly eleven years of locally organized resistance. He told the activists that their causes were now safe with the new Socialist government. They could go home. And in carrying out its promise to honor regional longings, for example in a law empowering real decentralization in 1982, the just-elected regime did quiet these troubles. The new government began then to turn its attention to the culturally ignored new immigrants—to that point groups with no heritages, at least no o≈cially recognized ones. But when, at the same moment, the movement of Jean-Marie Le Pen grew to be a force in politics, the pluralist opening of the society stopped. After all, Le Pen was in his own way a multiculturalist. He just thought that only one culture truly belonged to France and the rest should leave. In 1985 pluralists and republicans in the majority Socialist party fought out which would be the best riposte to the large following that Le Pen was attracting by his attacks on the immigrant population from the ex-colonies. Outside the government, in 1985 Harlem Désir founded the civil rights organization sos Racisme with some friends. Désir was metropolitan France’s first national ethnic charismatic leader. His own mixed Alsatian and Caribbean ancestry united in his person the margins of the nation. The movement’s message of fraternité and tolerance quickly drew wide support, especially among the young. But the specifically multiculturalist content of its message was not heard by France’s new governors. 8

Introduction

Rather, after 1985 the almost instinctual response of the left to the Republic-in-danger recurred. Georges Clemenceau at a moment of danger to the Third Republic had proclaimed that the Revolution was a bloc. Now many anti-racist republicans declared that the society of the Fifth Republic was a bloc. The republican left closed ranks in a Jacobin-Chevènementist unitary front. No more talk about regions, colonies, or French minorities. So things remained, at least on the surface. The growing split within the Front National in the late 90s debilitated these ferocious enemies of the immigrant minorities. The French national soccer team—a rainbow of ethnicities—defeated Brazil to win the World Cup on the eve of the fete of the Revolution in July 1998. While the team was training for the match, Le Pen had jeered at its diversity; this mixed bunch of foreigners could not win for France. But they did, embarrassing LePenism more than a hundred civil rights speeches could have done. Then the next year, Le Pen’s son-in-law and rival, Bruno Mégret, and some of his supporters finally broke with the fn to found their own organization. The split immobilized the radical right. The embers of popular multiculturalism suddenly burst into flame. The very mixity of the team, both the coach and the progressive Paris press declared, had brought sports victory to the nation. The immigrants and their children were a source of strength not of weakness. Everyone had witnessed the demonstration of this truth on the football field. But the persistent if relatively low-level depression that France suffered in the decade of the 1980s and 1990s did not a√ord the means for the schools or other institutions of society dependent on the state’s fiscal health to do much to help the new French live well in the land of their descendents. The outcome of that part of the story of French heritage(s) lies farther in the future than this work can go. To vary a word of Charles Péguy, I found that the recent history of the state discourse of heritage started in politics and finished in aesthetics. I devote the last chapter to the projects of President Jacques Chirac and his conservative allies to end—or at least upstage—all the divisive debates about what properly belongs to French culture by locking a new definition of the French heritage within new aesthetic monuments. The new meaning that conservatives intend for what is France and what belongs to its patrimoine in the new millennium will Introduction

9

be elaborated in a huge and unprecedented exhibitionary transvaluation now in process. In the near future France will create, reposition, or close eight major national museums. Against the wishes of its director and many of the curators, the Louvre has newly added a permanent hall dedicated to African, Oceanic, and New World art. President Jacques Chirac made it happen. Two grand museums of the French cultural heritage—writ large—are under construction. When completed on its site adjoining the Ei√el Tower, the Musée du Quai Branly will display the art of the former colonial empire. In Marseilles, France’s gateway to the South, a Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée will show the regional, European, and North African heritages of France. To make these changes, three existing museums will close, or take on—from the point of view of the heritage muddle—new roles. The Musée de l’Homme closed its doors in 2003. The natural history museum is refitting it to reopen as a museum of physical anthropology. The Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie near the Bois de Vincennes, which in 1931 had originally been built as France’s first colonial museum, will be dedicated to the departments and territories of overseas France (dom-tom). The Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, dedicated now to the history of French regions and their popular cultures, will surrender its collection to Marseilles and close. The future of the building next to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a colonial legacy itself, in the Bois de Boulogne has not yet been decided. Finally, the Chirac government plans to revive an idea that the Socialist Ministry of Culture had turned down, a new museum dedicated to immigration. When these changes have been accomplished, France’s new o≈cial definition of the national heritage will henceforth incorporate something of its ex-colonial empire (as well as those of other imperial nations) in the Musée du Quai Branly. That ‘‘something’’ remains to be determined. The heritages of French provincials, immigrants, and close neighbors in a new Europe and from the fringes of Europe, and of North Africa will be on display in Marseilles, and perhaps in the museum of immigration. And finally, there is the strange decision to make a museum solely dedicated to the French who do not live in Western Europe. One more time, in this vast museum transformation, invoking at the same time France’s cultural universalism (as the protector now of the art of both the West and the developing world) and 10

Introduction

its cultural specialness (the centrality of culture in the life of the nation), the nation’s leaders are preparing their cultural challenge to the United States in the globalized world. A culture is not a prison-house, with its rules engraved in the souls of its participants. The notion that it is one is the prime assumption, and error, of conservative cultural determinists of whom currently Samuel Huntington—with his clash of civilizations—is perhaps the best known.∑ Nor, as some cultural nationalists seem to want, is it a cocoon. I think, rather, that Ernst Cassirer’s insight is still right: certainly, we frame our understanding of our worlds with the symbolic forms that our cultures supply to us. But—long before today’s clashof-civilizations syndrome—this refugee from Nazi essentialism responded to conservatives who ontologize cultures and make symbols and relationships into things. ‘‘The various forms of human culture, are not held together by an identity in their nature but by conformity in their fundamental task [of providing us the means of understanding our world]. If there is an equipoise in human culture it can only be described as a dynamic, not as a static equilibrium; it is the result of struggle between opposing forces.’’ Contrary to Huntington’s reheated cold war Manichaeism, these are conflicting forces within cultures, not between them.∏ Cultures are about freedom, options, and learning new ways of living. Make no mistake: this judgment is not a statement of political advocacy. It is based on a great deal of study on why people in modern societies expend so much time and energy in both cultural commerce and conflict with their fellows. Cultures make available to participants strategies of changing material life, social connections, feelings, and thinking for new situations. The strategies for social change or social conservatism chosen from this treasury depend on history, circumstance, and desire. The evidence that a culture is still living is not its classicisms, but that it changes.π But all this is very abstract. We need an interesting place to test our ideas of cultural vision and cultural antagonism. Let’s leave the McDo at the edge of this little mill town. The Larzac countryside, although the Michelin Guide doesn’t much recommend it, is worth a visit, especially at harvest time.

Introduction

11

CHAPTER ONE

O

Gardarem lo Larzac!

n this saturday in August 1974, the sun of the South cast its magical luminosity over the high plateau of Larzac. A few hundred local farmers of this nowhere part of France—specifically, in the Auvergne, at the southern edge of the Massif Central—had organized a two-day celebration of the annual harvest. But the fete that weekend was unlike any other in France that season. First of all, the poster inviting all to participate didn’t feature the usual animal judging, carnival rides, and shooting matches, or even the promise of good eats. It announced instead a Festival for the Third World. In big letters one could read ‘‘no’’ four times and ‘‘yes’’ twice: no to French arms sales abroad, no to nuclear tests, no to the extension of military bases, no, to the pillage of the Third World. But yes to real solidarity with the people of the Third World, and yes to a real policy for peace. Then, equally unusual in this corner of France, 103,000 invited guests from all over the country had come to take part. The local organizers, who styled themselves unfashionably as ‘‘Les Paysans de Larzac,’’ rather than the more modern-sounding ‘‘Agriculteurs,’’ had dedicated the year’s harvest to the Third World. As the visitors arrived at the site of the fete, they saw a scene which could have come out of an Eisenstein film: lines of staggered harvesting tractors making their last passes through the golden sea of grain. In their full-page announcements of the festival placed in big-city newspapers—this was the most media-savvy harvest festival the urban French had ever known—the Peasants invited people to bring either a sack of wheat or its money equivalent to go to fellow peasants in the recently decolonized lands. Les Paysans de Larzac collected some sixty thousand francs that weekend.∞ Since December 1970, local farmers and their allies, come from all over France, had been conducting a struggle to stop the government’s planned extension of the large military training base on the plateau.≤ As the progressive self-definition of the resisters developed over the next eleven years, the Movement of Larzac became more and more the microcosm of the new social movements, the new-style anti-

3. Poster announcing the Harvest Festival for the Third World in the Larzac. Collection Alexander Alland.

establishment politics, of the decades after the cultural explosions of May 1968. Their a≈nity with the peasants of the Third World, their acts of solidarity with them, and their liaisons with the new post-1968 metropolitan social movements made of the French regionalist of the 1970s a privileged creator of activist stratagems and social experimentation. The government of Vichy had yoked regionalism to its reactionary vision of France. There had even been—as in the case of the Brittany and Alsace during World War II—collaborationist, or even fascist, local movements. The postcolonial and post-1968 movements were something new.≥ The struggles of the new regionalism of the 1970s transformed the meaning in France of the word ‘‘region,’’ certainly, but also that of ‘‘colonialism,’’ ‘‘anti-imperialism,’’ and ‘‘nation.’’ As a result of the changes in meaning of the first three words, the last—the nation— 14

Bringing the Empire Back Home

would begin to include new arrivals to the metropole from the old colonial empire. I will go into these changes in the language of regionalism and in the scope of the public sphere in France of the 1970s in a later chapter. And, in the course of the story, even ‘‘Paris’’ will acquire new meanings. But it will be worthwhile to spend some time first with the Peasants of Larzac and their allies. Why should we take this theater, and regional theater at that, seriously? Every pressure group tries to present its cause as the main hope for humankind, or the oppressed, or the children, or some other worthy group. To begin to understand the specialness of the moment and the actors we have to look ahead nearly fifteen years, after the Peasants of Larzac had successfully blocked the expansion of the military camp, and the time of daily struggle had passed. Larzac, Africa, Corsica, New Caledonia— même combat

Once again it is summer, now June 1988—the climate of Larzac is not very hospitable to outdoor celebrations in most other seasons—a group of the same Larzac farmers and a delegation of Kanak nationalists just arrived from New Caledonia were gathered together for an unusual ceremony on a sheep farm. They stood on land that fifteen years before, squatters—one of whom was José Bové, of later antiglobalization actions—had occupied, renewed, and defended against its owner, the French army. As an act of solidarity, the one-time peasant militants of the 1970s struggle over the extension of the military base had o√ered the Kanak people a piece of this hard-won land to remain forever part of the ‘‘territoire Kanak.’’ During the 1970s there had been warm exchanges between the fighters in the two struggles.∂ At various times, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a leader of the major independence organization, the Front de la Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, other Kanak militants, as well as young Kanaks studying at the nearby university of Montpellier, had come to Larzac to express their solidarity with the local struggle against Paris, and perhaps to learn some strategies for their own liberation struggle. New Caledonia had—still has—two regional peculiarities, which have caused the island much grief. First, the original population, although fallen into the minority, supports a strong independence Gardarem lo Larzac! 15

4. In behalf of the Kanak people, Jean-Marie Tjibaou prepares to sign the documents that transfer a piece of the Larzac to the New Caledonians’ Kanaky, 1988. Photo Alexander Alland.

movement. Second, the island is rich in nickel ore, perhaps as much as 40 percent of the world’s deposits, which has both led to its ecological spoliation and greatly upped the stakes in the fight about its political status. Despite Michel Rocard’s crafting of a potentially viable political truce in New Caledonia soon after the Socialists came to power in 1981, the return of a conservative government in 1986 once more ignited the militant struggle for political independence by the indigenous Polynesians. The island continued its bloody history. There had been the murders in 1984 by whites of a number of Kanak personalities. Then just a few weeks before Tjibaou came to Larzac, on 22 April 1988, the mutually stimulating recklessness of both the extreme nationalists and the police had led to a bloodbath on the island of Ouvéa, in which a total of four police o≈cers, two soldiers, and nineteen militants were killed.∑ That June a peace agreement brilliantly brokered by Michel Rocard was reached. That was probably the reason why Tjibaou was in France that month. Nevertheless, that same peace would lead to his murder by a Kanak extremist in the following year. That summer day in 1988 16

Bringing the Empire Back Home

at Larzac, surrounded by sympathetic comrades, he spoke for the Kanaks. As he cut the ceremonial ribbon marking the boundary of the new Kanak land, he declared, ‘‘I hereby take possession of France!’’∏ More spectacle? And yet, we have come to realize how much of politics is, and has always been, theater. The Peasants of Larzac certainly understood this. Politics is specifically the theater of power, but— because rulers never have enough soldiers, police, or guns—states must habituate obedience through engaging fictions.π The refusers have always responded in kind. The ceremonies in Larzac those two summers—and many others which we will later see—staged powerful rites of resistance and rebellion. The Harvest dedicated to the Third World staged the drama of colonial oppression, the solidarity of colonized peoples—in France as in the Third World—and the travails of decolonization. Some years later, the Kanak ceremony told an even more nuanced story: the actors for two oppressed peoples, both living under ecological risk, performing on a stage where a great victory had been won against the military; the ritual giving over of a piece of native land in an act of solidarity; and the ironic transvaluation by which the colonized, in their turn, claim the metropole. The celebrants at Kanaky-Larzac enacted the most important contestatory movements of the last third of the twentieth century: anti-colonialism, antimilitarism, the struggles for local power against a central domination, a new internationalized regional consciousness, ecology as a political force, and new media-savvy strategies of resistance. In the early 1960s, at the high tide of French overseas decolonization, Serge Mallet had begun to write about the radical potential of suppressed regionalism in France, especially the whole of the Midi which he saw as extending from Spain to Italy. He called this greater Provence ‘‘Occitanie,’’ to avoid association with the older, largely cultural movement of the late nineteenth century. Mallet died in an automobile accident in 1973 while returning to Paris after having led summer seminars (université d’été) dedicated to Occitanie. But his initiative had already been taken up by Robert Lafont, professor of literature at the University of Montpellier. In a series of books as well as in new regionalist political groups, Lafont continued the project for the emancipation of the ‘‘colonized’’ South.∫ The new-style regionalisms of the 1970s in Larzac, as well as that of greater Occitania, the Bretons, and the Basques challenged both the inherited centralizing and centralized definition of the republic as well Gardarem lo Larzac! 17

as the definition of the cultural heritage which underwrote the polity.Ω And then there was, and is, the Corsican insurgency. The modern Corsican movement for autonomy began in 1973, when an Italian-owned tanker shipwrecked o√ the cap of Corsica began leaking toxic chemicals which were flowing toward the island. To the jubilation of the island’s inhabitants, a secret group of militants dynamited the vessel and sent it and its cargo to the bottom. Next, on the island, these same men demonstrated against the ecologically destructive wine-growing practices used by white settlers come home—if that means anything after so many generations—from decolonized Algeria. In 1975 some of these demonstrators, among them the autonomist leader Edmond Simeoni, shot it out with the police, killing two o≈cers. The National Front for the Liberation of Corsica, the flnc, took both its name and its example from the recently victorious national liberation movement, the fln of Algeria. On 5 May 1976, deliberately emulating the Sétif massacre of 1954 that had sparked the Algerian uprising, they carried out sixteen killings in one night. ‘‘We thought of ourselves as the new sons of Toussaint [L’Ouverture],’’ recalled Matthieu Filidori in an interview for the powerful documentary aired in 2003 on Canal+, ‘‘Génération flnc.’’ The autonomists avidly studied the Marxist-Leninist movements for national liberation all over the world. In 1977 they produced their own ‘‘little green book’’ modeled after the famous little red book of Chairman Mao. Alain Orsoni remembered that it was ‘‘indigestible’’ and that no one read it. But also, as hooded, cold-blooded killers, ultra-nationalists, racist toward Africans and Arabs, macho, they had also learned much from the movements of the extreme right.∞≠ The complex Corsican struggle for autonomy, with the exception of a brief honeymoon at the start of Socialist rule, has been treated in Paris as a problem in crime fighting more than as a cultural concern. Overseas, at the moment of decolonization in the early 1960s, struggles for greater local freedoms broke out in places that would remain regions of France. In 1963 representatives of twenty-four organizations from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion united in Paris to demand autonomy for their homelands. In the year of liberty, 1968, they issued a ‘‘Manifesto of Self-Determination.’’ And in 1971 in Martinique, with representatives of the Catholic Church for the first time joining them, autonomist spokespeople from these major overseas departments called for a ‘‘united anti-colonist front.’’∞∞ 18

Bringing the Empire Back Home

Cartoon by Estaça for the Larzac militants’ newspaper showing the oppressed regions of France. President Georges Pompidou is saying, ‘‘I am not disposed to yield to the terrorism of a small minority.’’ To delight those whose own mother tongues have historically been scorned as incomprehensible patois, the footnote marks the President’s statement as ‘‘French, French writing.’’ Archives of gll. 5.

It is clear that there is a direct line of connection from these regionalisms of France back in time to the wave of decolonization of the 1960s and forward to the anti-globalization movements in subsequent decades. The historian Jean Chesneaux valued the impact of the movement of Larzac within France, in Overseas France, and with the nation’s relation to the Third World as ‘‘this decentering, or rather this recentering.’’∞≤ The story of the ‘‘regional’’ struggles—as we go on, we have to deconstruct the teleology of this word—against the national government in Paris dominated politics throughout the decade of the 1970s. First, in the course of the decade, there grew in the population a powerful nostalgia for a lost France. We see just the external, and Gardarem lo Larzac! 19

successfully commercialized, traces of the sentiment in the rampant ‘‘mode rétro’’ of the period. The economic depression beginning in the mid-1970s increased popular skepticism about the promise of growth forever. The depopulation of the countryside had paradoxical e√ects: more and more of the city people who could a√ord to buy résidences secondaires in dying old farming villages saw firsthand the world they were losing, and regretted the loss. The usual story of regionalism versus centralization under France’s first four Republican governments casts regionalists as rightists with local power bases resisting the Jacobin steamroller roaring down on them from Paris. In periods when post-Revolutionary France was ruled by kings or other sorts of powerful conservatives, the left in the provinces challenged the power of Paris.∞≥ The defeat of 1940 added an additional plot line: decentralization was forced upon France during the incremental German occupations of 1940–44. Then the economic development of the postwar years dotted the country with new industrial centers and, as a result, spread the sophisticated and educated population more widely throughout the nation. The final chapter— in the normalized tale—introduces a second, primarily cultural, refounding of the nation. In the 1960s President de Gaulle and his culture minister, André Malraux, began to reel in the provincialism of the war years. All roads, and for that matter all trains and planes, still led to Paris, to be sure, but the population of the regions now obtained increased access to new modalities of vertical, horizontal, and electronic mobility. Today, people living in the regions can more easily get to things Parisien, and Paris can get to them more readily. The student rising of May 1968—which we should remember began in Strasbourg and erupted for local reasons in many cities around France— was above all a protest against the top-down nature of these cultural changes and of the consecration of a new technocratic élite, which was being introduced in the guise of ‘‘democratizing the culture.’’ There’s a certain validity to this account. But it elides a much more fascinating and, finally, more coherent modern story which links the postcolonial movements for self-determination in Brittany, in Alsace, in New Caledonia, and in Occitanie, where Le Larzac lies, with that of decolonized Senegal, Madagascar, and Guinée. The better story— it should more properly be called ‘‘Postcolonial Regionalism’’—also adds an as yet unwritten chapter to the history of the development of the French left and especially to that of the ecology movement. One 20

Bringing the Empire Back Home

of Marx’s lasting insights points to the dialectical nature of power. Foucault started his own theory of control and resistance from this insight, although he tells us only half the story. If there is oppression, we should look for the resistance to it which makes the repression necessary. Reciprocally, from the ways people resist, we can learn how power is organized and works in a society. L’Établi

To understand the state’s sudden interest in the cultural heritages of the regions—after so many centuries of trying to dissolve them—we have to revisit two events that shattered postwar French society: the e√ects of both the student rising of May 1968 and the end of the old colonial empire. These seemingly separate events came together and were forever entwined far o√ from Paris in the poor grazing lands of the Southwest. In the entire decade of the 1970s, the sheep farmers of Larzac, aided by ex-’68ers, held the attention of the nation with their movement of resistance. The Larzacians fought to keep their land in the face of the government’s e√orts to expropriate them in order to have a larger terrain to train troops in the technological warfare that it expected to fight in the Third World. First, briefly, the consequences of May 1968. Whatever the longterm cultural successes of the student rising—and there were many— the radicalized students’ e√ort to change the political order failed when the gates of the Renault factory in Paris were closed against them. They could not form an alliance with the young workers, which might have transformed a primarily middle-class youth movement into a powerful national political force. Various leftist groups, and in particular the Maoists, interpreted 1968—despite their having driven de Gaulle from power—as a defeat for the working class. Antonio Gramsci’s works were on the reading list of every study group on the left in the late ’60s. Louis Althusser had adapted Gramsci’s ideas about how the ruling class maintains social power into his own influential synthesis of Marxist theory. Three central Gramscian ideas appealed to young French leftists. First, after what many gauchistes felt was the disappointing outcome of the explosive summer of 1968, they accepted Gramsci’s word of caution that some revolutionary struggles are not immediately decisive. The contest within each institution of society might be long term, like the war of maneuver— Gardarem lo Larzac! 21

the trench warfare—that World War I had become after the failures of the first great mass assaults. Second, because we are speaking about France, the philosophical or ideological nature of these struggles over what Gramsci termed ‘‘hegemony’’ was also understandable and attractive to once and future intellectuals. Finally, when they read the few stunning paragraphs on ‘‘organic intellectuals’’ in the Prison Notebooks, the young leftists began to understand how they might relate to workers. They did not want to patronize the less educated members of the working class. And they wanted also to protect themselves, these relatively privileged young people, from the naïve error that would-be leaders of the left have sometimes fallen into, the conviction that theworkers-are-always-right.∞∂ They would try to make themselves the ‘‘organic intellectuals’’ of the oppressed. In Gramsci’s view, everyone was an intellectual because everyone tried to understand how his or her world worked. But not everyone had the time or the training to do this full time. Organic intellectuals, according to Gramsci, worked hard to understand the relatively inchoate needs, fears, and wishes of the working class and then—in politically coherent and usable ways—read them back, as it were, to the workers. If workers recognized themselves and their condition in the intellectuals’ accounts of their circumstances and possibilities, then—regardless of social origins or style of life—the specialized intellectuals who had soundly interpreted the route that the workers wished to travel qualified as organically related to the class struggle. Gramsci saw the Communist Party as the collective organic intellectual of the workers’ struggles in Italy. Gramsci’s theoretical formulation of a student-worker connection melded well with the imperative that Chairman Mao had given to intellectuals on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. He urged them to enter the worlds of workers and peasants to learn ‘‘their lives, their work, and their way of thinking. We advocate that intellectuals go among the masses and go to the factories and countryside.’’ Some party members, he understood, would only take a quick tour and return to their desks. Others might even remain at a factory or in a village for a few months. But ‘‘still others might go and stay there a long time, two or three years, for example, or even longer and just live there; This is called ‘settling down’ (in the French, ‘s’établir’).’’∞∑ After their disappointments with the results of ’68, still militant young gauchistes left lycée and universities, and their parents’ home— 22

Bringing the Empire Back Home

some two to three thousand of them—to take jobs as assembly line workers at Renault, Citroën, and other large industrial establishments in France. No more could the pcf leader Georges Marchais make sneering remarks about their estrangement from working-class life, as he had done in the summer of ’68. No more could the factory gates be closed on them as outsiders who didn’t belong on the shop floor. They worked on the line. But who were they? Their social origins tended to be more or less that of other students of their generation. Max Weber had hypothesized that dramatic upward or downward mobility disposed social groups to revolutionary action. The peasants of the Larzac may well have fit the downward mobility hypothesis, but the Établi themselves did not come from families whose social positions were ascending or descending in any marked way. So there is no Weberian explanation for their political choices. They tended to have gone farther in their studies than the average of other students. A full 22 percent of them had attended preparatory classes for the exams to the Grandes Écoles. Remarkably, more than one future Établi in five had been a boy scout! Even though the French scout movements were divided along religious and ideological lines, being a scout—whether sponsored by a lay, Protestant, or even Catholic institution—seemed to have given these young people a taste for comradeship and to have taught them about going to meetings, organizing group tasks, and living by a strict code of behavior. Their religious backgrounds were also significant. Of the sample that Marnix Dressen assembled, 62 percent had received Catholic religious instruction when younger. In addition, 7.7 percent had been in Protestant religious classes. Only 2.4 percent had attended Jewish schools. Even if there were other, non-practicing Jews among the young leftists, the myth of the overrepresentation of Jews in radical movements is not supported by Dressen’s findings. Yet there was something unusual about the religious past of the Établi. The time they had spent in religious education, as a group, was comparatively longer than the average of other students. In addition, 45 percent reported that they had been believers as adolescents. And 14 percent were still believers when they began doing leftist politics.∞∏ But despite the dedication of these young Établi, the campaign of political work at the ‘‘point of production’’ yielded disappointing results.∞π Few workers became Maoists or members of any of the other gauchiste groups to which the worker-students belonged. After the Gardarem lo Larzac! 23

first post-’68 enthusiasms, from 1970 on, the Établi began leaving the factories. Nearly a quarter of them had been fired because of their political activities in the shop. But another third reported leaving because their political views had changed. Another fifth left out of sheer discouragement. Except for a higher rate of departures in the beginning (8 percent for each year from 1970 to 1973), in the rest of the decade they were leaving at a relatively steady annual rate of 6 percent to 7 percent. The anarcho-Maoists (La Cause du Peuple) disappeared first. They tended more often to get fired for their militant organizing e√orts in the shops, and then their movement split and dramatically self-destructed in 1973. The young gauchistes also supported the struggle to keep the lip watch factory going as a worker-run enterprise when the owners tried to close it. But they were not qualified to assemble watch parts in the occupied factory, so they could not play a large role inside the shop. Anyway, the left Catholic union at lip, linked to the still left-Catholic cfdt, was hegemonic in that struggle, leaving little for others to do than rally support and, perhaps, sell sympathizers the watches made in the liberated factory.∞∫ What was to be done? The disappointing results of e√orts to better reach the working class on the shop floor coincided, in the early 1970s, with the regionalist explosions all over France. In his address to the Party Congress in 1957, Mao had spoken of connecting to both workers and peasants. The young French gauchistes reread their Mao. Read as abstract theory, Maoism was not very sophisticated. Mao had taken care to purge the ‘‘returned students’’ who brought back from the ussr a normative version of Soviet Marxism. They might have known the classic texts and their right explications, but they did not have Mao’s finely tuned political mind, nor his intuition of the revolutionary potential of the peasants of China. His own chief and ultimately successful innovation was to recognize this peasantry in and for itself as a potentially revolutionary class. After the Kuomintang’s murderous destruction of the urban communism of the South in 1926, and the party’s retreat to the northern countryside, the rural population became necessarily the sea in which the movement had to swim. One has only to read accounts of the Long March to see how sensitive the Chinese communist leaders—Mao— were to regional di√erences and local issues as they marched from the coast, which had borne the brunt of western imperialism, to the rela24

Bringing the Empire Back Home

tively backward and agricultural North.∞Ω Cadres of the retreating Red Army listened attentively to the troubles and grievances of the peasants along their route and especially to those of the poor peasants of their final regrouping area in Yunnan province. Maoism organized and achieved a peasant-based social revolution, and its renewal in Mao’s Cultural Revolution—which put its hopes in the students and the peasants—was in full swing in the late ’60s. The Postcolonial Military-Industrial Complex

May ’68 had wounded Gaullism. True, the legislature elected immediately that fall returned a big conservative majority. But then too many voters withheld their ‘‘yes’’ at the subsequent plebiscite on changes in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, by means of which President de Gaulle had hoped to reconsolidate his authority. He resigned and retreated to his country home at Colombey les Deux Églises. But he left standing his great work of making France less a political force in the colonial world than an economic and cultural one. The general died in November 1970 and was buried in the village cemetery. Georges Pompidou, his designated successor, assumed the presidency, with Jacques Chaban-Delmas as his choice for prime minister. Chaban-Delmas suggested that Michel Debré be given the ministry of culture. No, this was not the job that interested the Gaullist Machtmensch. Instead the president created for him a new o≈ce for the combined armed forces, a new ministry of national defense. And the Gaullists tried to continue their hegemony without the charisma or the political intelligence of the general.≤≠ Debré was a good choice to head the military at that juncture in French history. He was fiercely nationalistic. He understood money. He had been strongly committed to keeping the colonial empire, even as it fell apart. He saw it as an integral part of France’s identity as a great power. ‘‘Without Africa,’’ he once said, ‘‘France would be Switzerland.’’ [Sans l’Afrique la France serait la Suisse].≤∞ After decolonization, he made it his business to keep up his knowledge and contacts with the ex-colonies and Overseas France. And he worked hard to keep loyal those places which had remained with France. In 1963, when many of the onetime colonies were breaking away, Debré ran as the Gaullist candidate for deputy of the département of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. He won. Despite a significant pro-autonomist Gardarem lo Larzac! 25

Communist Party, whose candidates tended to win on the few occasions when the elections were poorly rigged, the island of Réunion remained in the fold as a département of France. The continued dominance of the ‘‘nationals’’—those who wished to keep the island French, in the ferocious if not normally shooting, civil war—was due in great part to Debré’s energetic management of the politics of the département. Although the overseas departments and territories which had chosen to stay with France at the moment of decolonization often elected left or autonomist députés, as Martinique had done with the Communist candidature of Aimé Césaire, most kept safe seats warm for right-wing politicians who might have trouble getting elected on the mainland. Debré was one such unsuccessful metropolitan conservative candidate. Metropolitan voters did not appreciate his cold rationalism. On the island, in the face of a strong and well-led left, the divided right united around him in 1963. They returned him as their representative year after year, until he stepped down in 1988. The island successfully modernized its inequality in those twentyfive years. The poor improved their lot a little but the income gap between rich and poor opened ever wider between 1963 and 1988. Debré brought lots of state money to the island that was used to improve housing, build school buildings, and enhance social services. There remained only one industry, however, making sugar from the cane grown on the island. And the French government had to supply a hefty subsidy of 38 percent to the growers to make their exports competitive in the world markets. In e√ect, Debré nationalized the old system of paternalism and political corruption. He assured protective subsidies for the local growers and industrialists. Collaterally, he committed the state to underwriting the increased social costs consequent on this classical instance of dependent development. One educated estimate done just after he stepped down as député found 60 percent of the population of the island dependent on allocations from the social services. Soon after his election as député, Debré launched a ghastly project in Réunion that echoed the slave trade of the past. It should not surprise that this nationalist and imperialist should also have been against women’s reproductive rights. He was a natalist—as they usually are—for the glory of France.≤≤ But the islanders were having many more children than could be managed with the means that France 26

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supplied. The welfare costs to the state were too high. Meanwhile, back in European France large areas in the agricultural South were su√ering from labor shortages. Their European deputy had a solution. Debré had the government create a Bureau for Immigration from Overseas France. Then he culled Réunion for orphans, young people in trouble with the law, and large families with many children, whose parents might be persuaded to o√er their children a better life. From the mid-1960s well into the 1970s, 215 young people—ranging in age from six months to twenty years, properly tagged, were put aboard Air France flights for Orly. When they arrived, social workers escorted them to the homes of farm families in the ‘‘underpopulated’’ Creuse. There they grew up, some, as ‘‘bronzed’’ members of the family, but most as just cheap farm workers. Few later reported experiencing much love or a√ection in their land of exile. Almost none got the skills training their parents had been promised. On some farms the children experienced living and working conditions no di√erent from slavery. As adults, a few managed to return home. Some remained in France. A number of them, now adults, have filed a class action suit against the French state for kidnapping. Debré was certainly one of the most innovative of workers in making peasants’ children into Frenchmen.≤≥ So when Debré took up the defense post and began to do battle with the Peasants of Larzac, he had already spent seven years dealing with a backward agricultural region living from one money crop. He had solid experience fighting a powerful leftist autonomist movement. He had gained a sophisticated understanding of the economic, social, political, and, especially, military problems of the Third World. And he remained dreadfully colonial.≤∂ On taking up his o≈ce as defense minister, Debré drew up very precise new plans for France’s force de frappe and its deployment. He set out immediately to modernize and upgrade the military’s hardware. The land army, especially, urgently needed to be more mechanized. In the future, missiles, tanks, and armored troop carriers would be the most important way the army would bring war to an enemy. But in 1970, who was the enemy? ‘‘I hadn’t the least doubt,’’ Debré wrote in his memoirs, that ‘‘to the menace coming from the East, we have to add a menace coming from the South. . . . From Cairo to Casablanca, the independence of North Africa has created problems of security in the Mediterranean. . . . I decided that [the North African Gardarem lo Larzac! 27

governments] should know that the big cities of the Maghreb were within range of our missiles . . . as well as of our submarines and war planes.’’ Although the ussr would always cause France worry, ‘‘the menace coming from the South could at any moment flame up quite suddenly.’’≤∑ Debré had no confidence in what was clearly a failed project of knitting economic and military ties between the new African states and a number of France’s allies in Europe, all led by France. Despite initial German, therefore eec, support amounting to more than a half billion dollars to economically develop what in the late 1950s was still the French colonial empire at the time, France’s hopes for a European-funded, French-led Eurafrique were disappointed, finally.≤∏ Under Pompidou and Debré, France went it alone in Africa. Eventually, in the 1990s, the by-now-seasoned practice of French unilateralism got its more fitting name of Françafrique.≤π But what was then called ‘‘the Third World’’ of Africa was vital to France in another, more domestically important, way. Debré wanted to create a modern, well-armed military, as he explained, to defend France from enemies, especially those in recently independent Africa. Armaments construction imposes a heavy fiscal burden on a state. In the postwar decades, no nation could a√ord to build planes or weapons systems just for its own military’s use. Once a factory was built, machines installed, workers trained, and materials bought, those heavy costs had to be amortized with as long a production run as possible. Savings came from economies of scale. In other words, the first airplane o√ the assembly line costs a lot to make, the second cuts the cost of each, and so on. So, as an economic consequence of enduring military tensions in the years of the cold war, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France—in that order—became the major arms dealers to the world. To this end in the early 1970s ‘‘la délégation à l’Armement [the council speaking for businessmen on state armament policy] transformed itself into export merchants.’’ If each of the major powers had big investments in the arms business, to whom could they sell? Certainly not to each other. France turned to cultivating the élites of the new nations of the Third World, especially those in former French colonial Africa, as possible buyers. Not only did their nations still have cultural, that is, linguistic, ties with France, but the new leaders—often dictators—in several cases had learned soldiering in the French colonial army. Debré felt ‘‘a 28

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legitimate concern to respond to the desires of Third World countries, in particular those of Africa, who wish to not get stuck with an undesirable choice, and so look neither to the Soviets nor the Americans to provide them with weapons.’’≤∫ In his memoirs Debré did not say, but he well knew, that the armies of his customers outfitted with modern French weapons were employed primarily in crushing local democracy and keeping authoritarian rulers in power. Nor did he sort out the apparent contradiction that while he saw the great danger for France coming from African problems, he still targeted the new nations of the continent for French weapons sales. In the unpredictable brushfire contests of the Cold War, a power needed to have its troops in top form, trained for future wars on the kind of terrain on which they might be fought. Before the human sea of fighters that the nations of the Third World could mobilize (at least in Debré’s imagination), French soldiers had to have weapons that made up for their smaller numbers by their greater e√ectiveness. These arms had to be well made and well tested.≤Ω They had to have a lot of firepower if they were to do the job on the teeming hordes that their users might have to confront. They would be carried by French citizen draftees as well as special operations units in risky ventures. Of equal importance, in the world’s competition for arms sales, the French had to o√er the generals of Third World armies a product of high quality that would intimidate or kill their enemies impressively. Michel Debré’s Good Idea for Some Waste Land

The year 1970 was a major turning point for France in yet another way. On 12 October, at the departmental congress of the Gaullist udr party in the garrison town of La Cavalarie in the southern part of Larzac, André Fanton, a deputy of Minister of Defense Debré, first made public the government’s plan to increase the size of the local military base. France had lost many such sites abroad as a result of the previous decade’s wave of decolonization (much like those the United States su√ered when it moved its troops out of the Philippines and the Canal Zone). The Minister of Defense felt a need for additional training areas now in metropolitan France. The three thousand hectares of military exercise ground adjoining the little town of La Cavalarie, a base which had been there since 1899, would be extended to seventeen Gardarem lo Larzac! 29

thousand hectares to accommodate tactical missile exercises and tank maneuvers.≥≠ The base in the Larzac had also functioned as a prison camp. The French government used it to inter the Spanish Republic soldiers who had crossed into France after Franco’s victory. After 1944 the army of the liberation made it a prisoner of war camp for captured German soldiers. And beginning in April 1959, 3,500 Algerians suspected of being members of the outlawed fln (Front de la Libération Nationaliste Algérienne) were held there. The use of the facility as a prison was not well known, even in the neighboring region. But when in the early summer of 1959 some local anti-militarists found out about the detention of the Algerians, they picketed the camp. Then seven of them insisted on being arrested to join their fellow French in the jail. The police, of course, did not oblige them. Many of the local farmers thought that this act of solidarity with the terrorist enemies of France was wrong. But when a decade later the Larzac movement helped these same farmers see the Algerian War as a war of liberation against colonial rule, among the things-not-said during the decade-long struggle over the installation were several questions: Would it in the future again hold prisoners? And who this time? And for what reasons of state? But neither the justice of using the camp as a prison, nor the defense of France against attack by, say, the Soviet Union, seemed to matter overmuch to the udr delegates gathered in La Cavalarie. Visions of new jobs for the region, new customers for the businessmen, and above all profits from selling land to the army danced in their heads. Not a few of them had somehow learned ahead of the government’s intention of buying up farmland for the base expansion. In anticipation of reselling to the army at much higher prices, local notables, at least those close to the udr, had been quietly buying out local poor farmers at bargain prices. The delegates heartily applauded Debré’s project. But not many of the local farmers were as enthusiastic. The Larzac is a windy and not very fertile plateau at the edge of the Massif Central. It’s starkness—outcropping boulders, mountainous terrain, patches of green—can be very beautiful. About 63 percent of the land is used to pasture sheep; 9 percent is wooded, mostly upland; and only 28 percent is worth cultivating. Until the 1960s, the region had not shared the growing a∆uence of most of the rest of France. 30

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Much of what the local farmers grew was consumed in the region, often in their own households. Selling sheep milk for making Roquefort cheese was crucial to their survival. The cheese had been made in the region since 1060, but only a bit later (1666) had the farmers earned the exclusive right to use the name Roquefort. They sold their milk to the few big companies that had gained the legal right to use the cheese’s appellation contrôlée.≥∞ After maturing the thick rounds in the caves near the village of Roquefort to get the green veins produced by the molds growing there, the makers marketed the cheese under several labels all over France, in Europe, and beyond. Local wisdom claimed that the milk from Larzac was the best for making the cheese. American gourmets made the United States a major market. The shepherds of Larzac supplied only about 3 percent of the total amount of the milk purchased for cheese making. But this 3 percent equaled 1.3 million liters, which made 325 metric tons of finished cheese, or about half the Roquefort sent to the American market.≥≤ The military base brought some modest income to merchants both in Millau, the most industrialized town on the plateau, and to La Cavalarie, which was situated just at the camp’s gates. Although Millau had factories and a good-sized working-class population, at election time the Socialist and Communist vote in the city was overwhelmed by the predominantly conservative loyalties of the rural population. So while the city people of Millau voted left and had a large Protestant population, in 1970, the beginning year of the struggle, most of the farmers were practicing Catholics with Gaullist voting habits. The ‘‘agriculturalists,’’ as some of the more successful local farm people had begun to call themselves in the ’60s, were not very welcoming to outsiders. They had confidence in the government in Paris. They had faith in the standing institutions. Notables and priests shaped the local common sense. Yet paradoxically, this intense provincialism was financed by soldiers brought in for training from all over France, as well as from Britain and even West Germany, and from the income of a wideranging marketing network for local agricultural products. The backward region lived a highly internationalized provincialism. Its inhabitants’ desire to continue being small peasant farmers in industrializing France led them to invent France’s newest modernity. Gardarem lo Larzac! 31

A New Going-to-the-People

In the Larzac, rumors of the government’s plan to extend the military camp continued to circulate after the leak at the udr congress. But no o≈cial would comment on their truth or falsity. Finally, on 28 October the other shoe dropped. During a television interview that evening, Michel Debré announced the government’s o≈cial decision to enhance the size of the camp. He made no e√ort to hide his complete contempt for the Larzac farmers. Extending the camp would cause ‘‘minimum inconveniences,’’ he told his television interviewers, although it was true ‘‘that there are a few peasants there, not many, still living more or less as they had done in the Middle Ages, who pass their time [vaguement] raising a few sheep, and whom, therefore, it will be necessary to expropriate.’’≥≥ Before this media appearance, Debré had not brought the plan before the legislature. Nor had he consulted with any of the region’s députés, senators, or other locally elected o≈cials, and certainly not with the farmers who would be a√ected. What was supposed to happen next was clear enough to all concerned: in such cases, the state invokes the French version of eminent domain. More than a hundred farms would be listed in some judicial record as marked for confiscation ‘‘in the public interest.’’ Their owners would receive fair remuneration. In November the peasants who wished not to sell their farms gained new allies when all the priests of Millau read a letter from their pulpits from the Bishop of Rodez urging, in that oblique discourse used by the church in complicated matters of public morality—complicated for its leaders, at least—that imagination, work, and money be put toward the tasks of peace, not war. As soon as it got warm enough, in early May, gauchistes, especially from Paris, and pacifists from Montpellier—a total of about fifteen hundred—arrived in Millau and went up to the plateau to bring the message of revolution to the countryside. Like their progenitors in Russia in the 1870s, the student revolutionaries found the country folk unappreciative of the bearers of the news of their historic mission. The young students could easily act like know-it-alls, socially privileged city kids. They had been the troublemakers of May 1968. Most of them were not very clean, and their shocking sexual looseness . . . ! A leaflet written with a certain poetic economy and distributed in the streets of Millau by a shadowy Association pour la Vérité sur le 32

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Larzac oriented local readers and at the same time told the new allies of the farmers to get out:≥∂ IT’S TOO MUCH . . .

the hippies Paid by certain Roquefort companies, are ruining our region. –no to a red flag flying over Nant and Saint Martin –no to free love in our Cemeteries and Churches! –get out lazy bums –get out of larzac LEAVE WITH YOUR DRUGS AND YOUR UNWASHED BODIES!

Maybe the leaflet expressed the sentiments of the Le Penist movement, which had newly won a small following in town, or maybe it was just written by one or more locals addressing the hippies in the only language they felt would be understood. The young gauchistes were not destined to be the organic intellectuals of the movement in the Larzac. But to their credit, they were willing to stay and take an active role in the struggle firmly led by the local farmers. Also that same spring the mainstream left groups of the local city people—the Communist Party, the Trotskyists, plus the industrial unions—organized a support and leadership group, the Comité Millavois de Défense du Larzac. And later in the summer the Occitanlanguage theater group Teatra de la carrièra arrived on the plateau to tour the villages with its agitprop play on inner colonization, Mort et Résurrection de M. Occitania, rewritten to include this latest injustice to be visited on Occitanie. But already early in 1971, some of the farmer-leaders understood that if they conducted their struggle alone, as the Midi winegrowers had done at the beginning of the century, they too would be isolated and defeated. The economically distressed vintners had in 1907 tried to go it alone against the government and had lost. Even Frédéric Mistral, the champion of Midi life, refused to go to Montpellier to show solidarity with the winegrowers’ anti-tax movement. He felt none. Reviving Provençal language and literature in a strong national state was his project. So, many of the first contestants in the Larzac came to tolerate, and eventually to appreciate, the aid pro√ered by the young Maoists, the Gardarem lo Larzac! 33

left socialists of the Parti Socialiste Unifié (psu), as well as other allies. That summer, for example, the Maoists conducted a survey among the local farmers to discover the strength of the anti-extension sentiment. It was the moment of new French social science in the making. But more on this contestatory social science later. The survey’s findings of strong opposition to the enhancement of the base documented for the first time the emergence of a consensus in the Larzac public sphere. This was a valuable contribution to local political praxis. When the farmers began construction of the sheepfold on military land, the young leftists threw themselves into the project. They annoyed the local farmers greatly by wanting to stop all the time—at least that’s how the farmers saw it—to have interminable political discussions. Finally, in an example of the good will that made the unusual collaborations of the movement of Larzac work, the young people submitted to the ultimatum: no work, no meals! Still, many times in the struggle when the local farmers were growing exhausted—after all, they had conservative upbringings, farms to run, sheep to take care of—the young urban leftists supplied their own abundant energy. As one gauchiste, who had already settled in the Larzac before the struggle began, told the American anthropologist Alexander Alland, ‘‘For the generation of 1968 the Larzac was our promised land. It was a place where we could put our ideas in practice. The [struggle of ] Larzac would not have happened without 1968.’’≥∑ The Red-White-Black Spring of 1972

The impetuosity of the young urban leftists, the mobilization of the old left, and the involvement of the Occitan regionalists forced the farmers to define their own goals and create their own organizations. In September the farmers carried out a first action on their own, employing a semiology uniquely their own. A group of them showed up at the house of the mayor of La Cavalarie. He worked in the army camp as its business manager. They dumped rocks and piles of steaming fertilizer at his front door. The movement of Larzac continued to gather force. The cheese companies announced support for ‘‘their’’ peasants. An o≈cial of the Association des Industriels de Roquefort, Pierre Laur, a conservative, and for a short time even a supporter of the new extreme rightist on the block, Jean-Marie Le Pen, threw his energy into the cause of the 34

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sheep farmers. With his own money he placed a full-page ad in Le Monde calling for cancellation of the base extension. In an interview Laur assured Alland that he had nothing against the army. He considered himself a patriot. But the ecological harm, the disregard of local opinion by the authorities in far-o√ Paris, and the military uselessness of the Debré project o√ended him. Alland suggests in his report of the interview that Laur’s dependence on sheep milk from the Larzac to keep his small company going might also have played a role in Laur’s unwavering loyalty to the cause of the Peasants of Larzac. Local city councils voted support. An assembly of the mayors of the Département of the Aveyron, in which most of the Larzac was situated, voted to condemn the extension. The young big city gauchistes continued to arrive, some for just weekends, but scores more for the duration. Finally, again, using their own vocabulary of symbols, on 12 February 1972 the Peasants of Larzac lit great bonfires on the hills overlooking Millau, while their pastor friends in town rang the church bells as signals of alarm. This was an old country practice of signaling an alarm, an emergency, perhaps an attack. The Larzac was on fire and Millau, which depended on the surrounding countryside, was also menaced. The spring of 1972, the incredible ‘‘red-white-black spring of revolt,’’ fixed the main lines of the struggle. Gauchistes, Catholic Peasants, and communitarian Christians allied—however uneasily—against the state and its army. The Catholic clergy soon spoke out more directly against Debré’s plan, and their Protestant colleagues seconded them. We have looked at the role of the gauchistes. But the radicalization of the church in the late 1960s and 1970s is also an important part of the story of Larzac. Pope John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council adjourned its last session in December 1965. Its influence spread rapidly in France, whose clergy and active laity had for at least half a century shown great interest in both modernizing the church and more widely extending its solace to the poor everywhere. The message of Vatican II translated in France as an endorsement of an up-to-date Christian socialism. Several of the founders of the Parti Socialiste Unifié, and a significant number of its militants active in the Larzac movement, for example, were Christian socialists. The Christian project of aiding the poor everywhere knew no national boundaries. From the very beginnings of France’s mission civiliGardarem lo Larzac! 35

satrice in the nineteenth century, the faithful had been urged weekly to contribute to the good works of the overseas missions. The missions, mostly in the southern hemisphere, were in peasant lands. These faraway poor farmed, some of them, not much di√erently from the small farmers of Larzac. Long before capitalists or even communists got the idea, the church had thought and worked from a global perspective. So in the 1970s its thoughtful adherents knew how to di√erentiate a good globalization from an unchristian one. The Peasants of Larzac were hooked into international politics with the military base and into international capitalism with the export of their cheese. But despite the conservative aspects of their thinking and way of life, their Christian heritage of Caritas—for the most part unthinkingly practiced on Sundays in church during the collection, rather than consciously deliberated, had made them spiritually ready for the anti-colonial and pacifist messages they heard during the Larzac decade.≥∏ That March Lanza del Vasto, a kind of European guru, a follower of Gandhi’s idea of nonviolent resistance, established himself on a farm with a community (l’Arche) of his followers. Like the other participants, he and his followers quickly joined in, but in their own manner. Lanza del Vasto immediately began a fast to protest against extension of the camp and militarism in general, with a di√erent activist local farmer joining him each day. Finally, on the last day of his active witness, the bishops of the two nearest big cities, Rodez and Montpellier, fasted with him in Millau. But not everyone was nonviolent. Someone threw firebombs against the wall of the prefecture in Rodez. Later in the struggle, on the other side, a never-found perpetrator tried to set fire to the home of one of the farmers holding out against the army’s plan. At the end of that passionate month, the farmer-resisters published their pledge to refuse to sell out to the army. Of the 107 farm owners whom the army had planned to put out, a remarkable 103 had sworn not to sell. In a solemn ceremony on 28 March 1972, the 103 took the oath on the Bible. A week later they sent to the local press the wording of their pledge along with the names of the signers.≥π And finally, to complete the national connection, on 1 April three thousand peace marchers come from all over France arrived in La Cavalarie. From there they dispersed throughout the plateau to visit the farms and farmers who had in their turn declared a day of ‘‘farms open’’ [fermes ouvertes]. Later, celebrants listened to the ideologically rich songs of 36

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Claude Marti, who in the late ’60s had become the singing organic intellectual of French Third-Worldist and anti-imperialist sentiments. In the earliest moments of the regional movements, he quickly added the struggle for a free Occitania to his repertoire. The day ended with a dinner for all of—what else could it be?—mouton and Roquefort. Pur Porc

On 14 July of that summer of 1972 the farmer militants celebrated the anniversary of the Revolution by driving their tractors to Rodez to join twenty thousand waiting supporters in a grand demonstration of regional unity. When the speechifying started, Robert Gastal, who ran a farm near La Cavalarie, spoke for the agriculturalists of Larzac. He crystallized the new militancy in a new language. Gastal had earlier contributed to the movement by coining the phrase ‘‘Pur Porc,’’ the tag that local militants of the first hour applied to themselves. During the German occupation and the hard years of the late 1940s, with meat in short supply, fillers were sometimes added to sausages and pâtés. So despite the customary packaging, it was not always certain what one was eating. When culinary normalcy became possible again, producers printed ‘‘Pur Porc’’ on charcuterie made in the region as a mark of authenticity. You were getting the real thing.≥∫ By such strategies of authenticity, the local farmers kept a firm hold on the leadership of the coalition. They were a minority amidst all the resisters, local, resettled, and weekenders. Squatters like José Bové and his wife, for example, had come from outside to live and to share the ongoing struggle. Several religious voluntary communities established themselves on farms on the plateau. Their members threw themselves into the struggle against the military. Of course, the various groups of left militants came for short- or long-term stays. And then there were the ‘‘neo-rurals,’’ the new settlers who had arrived in the 1960s, so before the struggle had begun. They got there as largely apolitical people. They had wanted only to flee industrial society.≥Ω Gastal, himself, was Pur Porc. He became a capable spokesperson for the movement, although, to the amusement of his friends, he liked to preface his speeches, as he did this one, with the phrase ‘‘Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .’’ [Je ne suis pas habitué à faire des discours]. Along with the other ‘‘agriculteurs’’ of Larzac, he told the crowd, he had driven his tractor the hundred kilometers to Rodez Gardarem lo Larzac! 37

‘‘not to perform folklore, but to prove our strong determination.’’ ‘‘After 28 months of our being jerked around [fait le con] in Algeria,’’ now at this moment in our lives, ‘‘the army wants to kick us out, to amputate us . . . of all we have accomplished, of all we have built.’’ ‘‘The thing that really insults us, we Paysans du Larzac,’’ is when people like Debré call us ‘‘mauvais Français.’’ Gastal ended his talk by once more calling the members of their movement ‘‘paysans’’: ‘‘In the name of the Peasants of Larzac, I want to thank all the men, women, and young people who support us. You are from everywhere and you represent di√erent options: respect for democracy and freedom, peace, disarmament, protection of nature, and so on. It’s thanks to you that we have held out to now and that we will continue to hold out.’’∂≠ The Larzac resisters took up Gastal’s new phrase, Paysans du Larzac. In a classic reversal—as with the use of ‘‘black,’’ or ‘‘gay,’’ or ‘‘juif, ’’ or yes, ‘‘intellectual,’’ a label first applied in derision and dismissal became the proud badge of a self-chosen new identity. By now, it should be clear that these were not the paysans of Balzac or Zola, ignorant brutes, blindered, closed in on themselves. But neither were they the businessmen in the fields of the French economic planners. The Peasants of Larzac understood themselves, and their fight, as part of a larger freedom movement. First, of course, they maintained ties with the larger regionalist movement in the South, l’Occitanie, with the Breton antinuclear protesters at Plogo√, the site of a new atomic energy plant, as well as other regionalist activists in metropolitan France. But they also identified with regional and national liberation struggles overseas, and were in turn seen by many as brothers and sisters in a worldwide struggle of Third World peoples. If we consider the ways in which the Larzac was like a colony of the metropole, the parallels are impressive. Here was a predominately peasant region, living from exporting its single crop. The country was poor and forgotten in the capital. What money capital could be realized locally tended to be reinvested elsewhere, in more promising places.∂∞ The Peasants of Larzac regularly received visitors from peasant and minority groups from all over the world. For instance, in May 1973 a group of ira sympathizers came to see the successful mobilization on the plateau. A delegation of Hopi members of the radical American Indian Movement also arrived that May. Japanese farmers, protesting confiscation of their land to build a new airport in Tokyo expressed 38

Bringing the Empire Back Home

their solidarity. They took part with other groups from within France in an ‘‘encounter of minorities contesting the power of their oppressive states.’’∂≤ In April 1973 more than fifty peasants sent their draft cards [livrets militaires] back to the Ministry of Defense, along with a letter of explanation. They specifically denied being ‘‘anti-militarist’’ (as some of their allies on the plateau in fact were). They were of course protesting against the army’s project to take their land. But they also did not want ‘‘the Larzac to become a proving ground for weapons destined for use in the Third World.’’ Appreciating the gesture, other protestors from all over France began sending their draft cards to a special post office box in Millau, to be held by the Peasants, with the plan of sometime in the future returning them to the government. In the first two years, 1973–74, 300 draft cards came in, followed by 120 in 1975, 300 in 1976, 450 in 1977, and 1,000 during the movement’s renaissance in 1978. Late that August, after the harvest, sixty thousand people gathered in the Rajal del Guorp [the Valley of the Crow] to support the struggle of their own group and at the same time that of the farmers of Larzac. Many marched to the sheepfold being built illegally on army land, La Blaquière. Each delegation had brought a stone from its own homeground, and when the demonstrators arrived at the site, they ceremonially added their contribution to erecting the stone sheep barn. A delegation of workers at the occupied lip watch factory presented to one of the woman Peasant activists a mantle clock embedded in the stomach of a full-sized replica of a sheep. (Never mind, it was the thought. . . . ) The leaders of the 103 refusers-to-sell were there. Farmers from other parts of France. Far-left groups like the PaysansTravailleurs. The crowd heard performances of Breton, Occitan, Irish, and even French-language folksingers. Anti-militarist poets recited their work. Gathered together, they networked and they spoke of everything: peasant struggles for the land everywhere, problems caused by the military, the self-management movement [autogestionnaire] of the workers of lip who were running their own factory, their hopes for the survival of the Allende government in Chile, and the oppression of national minorities all over the world.∂≥ And it was in the next year, 1974, that they dedicated the harvest to the Third World and sent two Peasant-militants with the money to build a water reservoir for a village in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) in the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa.∂∂ Gardarem lo Larzac! 39

6. A later visit of Kanak representatives to Larzac. The flag above their heads is that of the Kanak Liberation Movement, date unknown. Photo Alexander Alland.

7. Cheyenne representatives of the American Indian Movement arrive to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Larzac victory, 1991. Photo Alexander Alland.

8. Delegates of the Japanese farmers’ movement, whose land was being condemned

to build Tokyo’s big new airport, visit the Larzac. The Europeans wear Japanese headbands reading, as far as is legible, ‘‘Anti-airport . . .’’ ‘‘Stop Building . . .’’ in Japanese and ‘‘Solidarity’’ in French. Some of the words on the vertical posters read, from left to right, ‘‘Build milestone to unite. . . .’’ ‘‘Solidarity to Eliminate Every Gap . . .’’ ‘‘Unite Internationally to Spread . . .’’ ‘‘Attack . . .’’ Archives of gll.

Even members of the respectable right, in their sometimes-obtuse way, appreciated the struggle in Larzac as ‘‘colonial’’ in nature. While they criticized the left’s involvement as manipulation and opportunism, they denied neither the symbolic stakes of the struggle nor that there were real problems in the region. One M. Bassi, writing in the 28 August 1973 issue of Le Figaro, for example, accused the leftists of creating a ‘‘symbol’’ (whatever that meant), directed against the installation of the camp. Still, Bassi characterized the enemy as, if not the French army, then certainly ‘‘this modern society which, in the name of industrial centralization, uproots lives [les êtres], shows contempt for their history, and depopulates the countryside before reoccupying it with organized and ‘polluting’ tourism—this other form of colonization—be it that of the military or of vacationers.’’∂∑ But even in the face of this local, national, and even international mobilization to save the farms, Debré and the army did not yield a square centimeter. They would not back down before a bunch of yokels with their weird assortment of supporters made up of GauGardarem lo Larzac! 41

chistes, leftist Christians, pacifists, draft resisters, environmentalists, and the Babas Cools [hippies] come down from the city to check out what’s goin’ down. If anything, the government’s will hardened in the first years. Debré, however, dropped the Defense Ministry in 1973, and high o≈ce forever. His memoirs, other than a few bitter words, are reticent about the battle for Larzac. Pierre Messmer, graduate of the École Coloniale (1937) and an excolonial administrator who had preceded Debré as minister of the armies, became prime minister in 1972. Messmer had a strong military background, having commanded under General de Gaulle a unit of Foreign Legionnaires in the Middle East during World War II. And as premier he continued to concern himself with problems of security in Africa. Messmer maintained the main lines of military policy laid down by Debré. Under him the French maintained their readiness to intervene in postcolonial Africa to protect their economic interests or maintain governments in states friendly to France.∂∏ But for this rapid reaction, troops needed to be trained and kept sharp. Messmer ordered the planned expansion of the Larzac training base continued. For the nearly eleven years of contestation—under Presidents Pompidou and then Giscard d’Estaing, and several Gaullist prime ministers—the government o√ered few concessions. Robert Lafont, the leading Occitan theorist, had come often to what the French press sometimes called ‘‘les happenings’’ in Larzac. He had been gratified to see the new flag of Occitanie hoisted for the first time ever on the plateau. His friends among the regionalists of Occitanie, the Basque country, Corsica, and Brittany prevailed upon him to run for president in 1974. The polls predicted that he would receive at least half a million votes. But the Conseil Constitutionnel, a judicial appeals body a bit like the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled him ineligible to run for lack of enough signatures on his candidate petitions.∂π Finally, having defeated François Mitterrand for the presidency in those same elections, Giscard d’Estaing determined to take the cause of regionalism away from his enemies. The regionalist movements were in full flower and being heavily wooed by the parties of the left. The South, Occitanie, had given Mitterrand his biggest vote in the presidential contest. In the second half of the 1970s, Giscard began working out plans both for a fake political decentralization and for a real celebration of a year of the local heritages of France (see chapter 3). With new presidential elections looming for 1981 every folksy act 42

Bringing the Empire Back Home

that this sti√ technocrat could do would help him politically.∂∫ This was especially so if at the same time he could end the nagging and embarrassing media war in the Larzac. On the eve of the 1981 elections his desperate government proposed to cut back the area of the planned base extension, which would spare many of the farms. This last-minute gesture toward a compromise put pressure on the exhausted members of the movement to yield and make a deal with the army. However, the Peasants of Larzac, hoping that if François Mitterrand and the Socialists won they would keep their promise to scrap the entire plan for the camp, decided after a great deal of debate and much anguish to temporize, at least until the elections. ‘‘Paris Will Tremble before Your Tractor!’’

In the course of their long struggle, the Peasants of Larzac perfected the local deployment of an infuriating weapon of the weak: they hassled the military wherever and whenever they could. They let air out the tires of army trucks; they blocked maneuvers with their tractors. They clogged the roads with their sheep at unexpected moments and places during motorized military exercises. They leafleted the French draftees with the story of their resistance, asking the young recruits for at least their passive support. They encouraged friends to write letters to the minister of defense as well as other government o≈cials pointing out the damage the base extension would cause. The friends of Larzac pioneered the now-classic endangered species strategy. Two major national ornithological societies meeting in Paris in March 1972 voted to warn the government of the certain damage that the camp’s extension would produce ‘‘to the biological community living on this site, the last refuge of several rare species of birds, mammals, and of the vegetation they require.’’ G. Grolleau, president of the Groupe Ornithologique Parisien, headquartered in the Vertebrates Laboratory of the cnrs, took the government to task for the ecological harm that the extension would cause, of course, but even more importantly, for the harm that would come to the 495 people currently earning their livelihood on the targeted land. ‘‘The Paris Ornithological Group stands totally opposed to this project.’’ Artists made their contributions. In behalf of the governing council of the Association Nationale des Arts Plastiques, its president wrote the government of their concern about not only the ravaging of the Gardarem lo Larzac! 43

9. Woman passing out Gardarem lo Larzac newspaper to military recruits. Archives of gll.

The militant activist Pierre Burguière confronts a military o≈cer about the camp’s extension. Collection Christiane and Pierre Burguière.

10.

French countryside but also the displacement of farmers who serve as the ‘‘sole guarantors of the [preservation of the] exceptional architectural treasures’’ of the region. The artists’ organization protested ‘‘the planned cold-blooded destruction of the aesthetic, architectural, and natural riches’’ of the Larzac.∂Ω The movement of Larzac organized massive demonstrations, which at the same time heartened members of the movement and produced gridlock on the country roads near the base. They would also drive their tractors and bring their sheep to a local town, or, when they could, to Paris, collecting friends and allies along the route. Once arrived at their destination with their herd, they would, as it were, mess up the place for a time. A Larzac farmer assured his son, about to drive the family tractor to Paris on one of the marches, that ‘‘Paris will tremble before your tractor!’’∑≠ There’s a famous photograph—which became an iconic movement poster—of sixty Larzac sheep grazing on the Champs du Mars with the Ei√el Tower stretching up above them. A group of peasants would show up suddenly one morning to plough a field on a farm which a speculator close to the Gaullist party had bought some years before from its discouraged owner, at the time eager to sell. A certain M. Christian de la Malène, a former udr (Gaullist) minister, had been one such local buyer. He had resold to the army at ten times the price he had paid. The Peasants descended on his, or rather, the army’s land this day and tilled and seeded it. Then the tractor-wielding guerillas would strike unexpectedly at another confiscated farm on another day, leaving the newly plowed field as a kind of warning, a peasant mark of Zorro. In a conscious application of Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance on French soil, they also put their bodies in front of rolling tanks. José Bové is remembered in the movement as having done this once at a most dramatic moment, and having been almost run over. They— especially the draft resisters and left Christians among them—courted being lifted from the road or base entrance that they were blocking with their bodies, and being carried away by the ba∆ed police from the site of nonviolent confrontation. With luck, they were arrested. But the Larzacians could be violent against property. On 28 June 1976 a group of twenty-two militants broke into the base o≈ces to rifle through and destroy records related to the expansion Gardarem lo Larzac! 45

Local sheep do their bit to deny the country roads to the military. Photo Alexander Alland.

11.

Poster for the united regionalists’ mobilization of summer 1975. ‘‘Against the Army, Nuclear Energy/Weapons, and the Real Estate Developers.’’ It calls for ‘‘Larzacs Everywhere!’’ The sponsors are the Peasants of Larzac, the Millau Support Committee, and the movement’s sympathizers all over France grouped into Larzac Committees. Collection of Alexander Alland.

12.

13. Larzac tractors

in convoy on a highway adjoining the base. The round signs display their unity with the lip watch-factory strikers. The lower sign on the lead tractor reads, ‘‘lip larzac our resistance is a right and a duty.’’ Collection Christiane and Pierre Burguière. Poster calling for support of the occupation by the Peasants of Larzac of the Champs de Mars. Collection of Alexander Alland.

14.

The Larzac sheep on the Champs de Mars with the Ei√el Tower above them, 1972. Archives of gll.

15.

project. The military called the civil police, who smoked out the protestors with tear gas. When the group was forced out of the building, its members were arrested and spent the night in jail. Judged guilty a few days later, they were all sentenced to four to five months in prison. As part of the systematic policy of the authorities to plant dissension and division in the movement, the local people had the entirety of their sentences suspended. The outsiders had to serve one to three months. And some of the nonviolent Larzac fighters moved in and squatted on land the army had already confiscated, staying there and farming with their families. In 1975 José Bové and his wife, Alice Monier, came from Bordeaux to ‘‘squatter’’ on farmland in Montredon on a farm the army had recently acquired.∑∞ The practice of collective squatting, as a resistance act, had sprung up—or at least gotten its name—in the late 1960s, when movement people all over the United States and Western Europe occupied empty buildings in the cities to protest bad or nonexistent housing for the poor. Sometimes the army arrived on land it had acquired to level a stillstanding farmhouse with big bulldozers. Using an improvised and illegal telephone system, resisters could rally their forces to converge 48

Bringing the Empire Back Home

quickly on the threatened farm. As a way of pressuring the rebellious locals during the contest, the government would not make any improvements in the local infrastructure. The government-owned France Télécom refused requests to hook the farms into the telephone grid. Nor, for that matter, during the period of peasant resistance, would the state improve the terrible roads, or extend needed irrigation pipelines. Often enough the peasants arrived in time to stop the demolitions by interposing themselves or their tractors, or both, before the tanks and bulldozers. It’s probably these exercises that gave José Bové and his friends the idea of deconstructing the almost completed Millau McDonald’s decades later. Miraculously, no one was killed or even seriously injured in these confrontations. But like other resistance-only movements, they could not bring the Peasants victory. Still, the constant provocations, incidents, and little victories kept the struggle and the hopes alive, while the activists thought about how to do something more decisive. What Is to Be Done?

In the mid-1970s, after about five years of resistance, the Peasants of Larzac moved their struggle into three new fields of power: the press, education, and real estate. Academics from Paris and Montpellier, as well as other universities, were now coming frequently to the plateau to o√er their help. There was a need to find something for sympathetic professional intellectuals to do. Even with the best spirit, they were often not much good at farming or stone masonry. Sheep tending, forget it! In contrast with local conversational usages, some of the academics tended to lecture rather than to chat. And yet they could be valuable working in their own métier. On 19 May 1975 academics met with Peasants and activists from Millau to found Larzac Universités. In part, it was to be a kind of tra≈c center for ideas: Larzac-U (as it came to be known) funneled useful outside ideas into the region. It also provided another way for people not from the plateau to get involved. But it was mostly the outsiders who came to Larzac-U to take the courses and hear the lectures given by, among others, the Sinologist Jean Chesneaux (‘‘The West Confronts the Third World’’), J. Colombel (‘‘Sartre and Liberty’’), the retired Admiral turned pacifist A. Sanguinetti (‘‘Regional Minorities and LibGardarem lo Larzac! 49

erty’’), P. Bouchet (‘‘Property’’), S. de la Bollardière (‘‘Women Confront War’’), L. Puisieux (‘‘The Why and How of the Nuclear’’), De Félice (‘‘Our Freedoms’’), and the then gauchiste philosopher André Glucksmann (‘‘War’’). There were as well short courses on local and national history and on the flora and fauna of the pays. The very busy local peasants had time only for useful knowledge. The educated could be very helpful here. They organized stages (the practice of taking short courses to improve skills, paid for by employers or the state) on preventive health care. A cooperative veterinary service was also started for the farm animals. People at Larzac-U sometimes wrote or edited leaflets and pamphlets for the movement as well. Then there was the need to improve communication within the movement and with friends outside.∑≤ In his famous pre-revolution pamphlet written three-quarters of a century before, What Is to Be Done?, Lenin gave his Bolshevik comrades the sound advice to start a newspaper. A movement newspaper—or whatever is the contemporary form of information transmission—would allow all the militants to learn what was happening in the struggle. It provided the group with a forum to exchange views, and so to end on the same page ideologically. Supporters farther away could keep up with the struggle and send reports of related contests. Announcements and editorials in the paper could alert and motivate them for upcoming demonstrations. And it was a means to reach new people. By 1975 the movement of Larzac was complex and national enough, even international enough, to need such a systematic means of correspondence. That year, Alain Grandremey and Claude Vadrot, reporters for the Paris-based satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, o√ered to help the Larzac movement begin a newspaper. Who knows, they may have been one-time young gauchistes who wanted to make their own contribution to the movement. A little editorial sta√ was put together in Millau with the farmer Léon Maillé listed as ‘‘Directeur de la Publication.’’ Using the local dialect of Provençal, it was called Gardarem lo Larzac. In Provençal the word ‘‘gardarem’’ means to defend or protect in the way a shepherd guards his sheep from predators. This sense is hard to render in English. ‘‘We Will Protect Larzac’’ is approximately right. The newspaper’s contents were written in French. Normally, it came out monthly. It was soon referred to simply by the initials gll. 50

Bringing the Empire Back Home

The first number came out in June 1975. It, and subsequent early numbers, were clandestinely printed by the publishers of Le Canard Enchaîné in their Paris printing plant. In the beginning Maillé was not very gifted with words, ‘‘a little too ‘peasant,’ ’’ his collaborators felt. But he gradually began to gain greater mastery of written French, and remained the editor until 1987.∑≥ Today, an organ of the successor movement, L’après Larzac, continues to appear regularly. Finally, the Peasants invented a clever way of helping distressed landowners who felt they had to sell to the army, while at the same time more strongly attaching supporters who may live far away. They began a fictional commerce in real farmland. Two entities, each called Groupement Foncier Agricole (gfa), were created to buy parcels that the army wanted, but that the owners were willing to sell to the gfa, as long as the price was reasonable. The land was real enough and the gfa purchases helped greatly to keep the army buyers at bay. The gfas raised funds by selling shares in the land to supporters. These thereby became landowners and firmer allies in the struggle of the Peasants of Larzac. There were, of course, di√erent-sized parcels, but someone who had only a little to give, and so bought only one share certificate for a few square meters of land, was deemed—symbolically, at least—as much a part of the struggle as any of the other proprietors. In the ’70s all over France, left-wing absentee landlords, trade unions, and political organizations sustained their movement to take care of their land. There were no boundaries marked separating the holding of, say, a section of the cfdt in Paris from that of Jean-Paul Sartre or of the theater group Cartoucherie de Vincennes—all proprietors in Larzac. A group of students at the École Polytechnique, some of them frequent volunteers at Larzac, organized a fund to purchase liberated land in Larzac in behalf of the student body. There was overwhelming support, but some high percentage of yes votes had been set by the school authorities as a minimum if the purchase was to be allowed. The Larzac supporters fell just short. Now, nearly thirty later, one of them told me this story, still with some regret. It would have been great to own a bit of that hard-won land—with the Peasants, with the Kanaks, and with Sartre.∑∂ The land of Kanaky, the extra-territorial piece of New Caledonia, was posted and fenced o√. The field is still referred to today as ‘‘Kanaky.’’ Gardarem lo Larzac! 51

Gardarem lo Larzac conducted a poll in 1977 asking gfa shareholders to provide information about themselves. The results, based on 2,558 responses, were tabulated and published in the June–July issue. The largest number of subscribers, as the gfa owners were called, 625—nearly a quarter of the sample—were teachers. Then came white-collar workers and retired people. Only 4.1 percent (105) were farmers. And only 33 priests had bought shares in liberated land. Most respondents (71 percent) were men. Most subscribers owned only one share, some 80 percent of the sample. But 64 percent of the capital raised by the gfa came from these small holders. Of course, the two big agglomerations of population, the regions of Paris and Marseilles, had the largest numbers of shareholders. As D. Guillobez, author of the article in gll, put it, ‘‘If the army wishes to pursue its project at any price, it has to figure on not only expropriating the peasants immediately targeted, but also the 2,558 members of the gfa Larzac. . . . and the numbers continue to climb.’’∑∑ The Arts in the Service of Justice

As the years of struggle unfolded, some of the peasants and their supporters left the field, but many held out. Of great practical importance, and even greater symbolic importance, almost all of the peasants who had sworn to refuse to sell out to the army held to their oath.∑∏ And supporters continued to send their words of encouragement. On 28 October 1978, Jean Paul Sartre proclaimed his great admiration for the movement. ‘‘I salute you, peasants of Larzac and I salute your struggle for justice, freedom, and peace—the most beautiful struggle of our twentieth century.’’∑π Others helped the struggle in Larzac with their own art. At various times in 1975 and 1976 the avant-garde Théâtre du Soleil at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes performed the play Des moutons, pas de Dragon. The piece told the history of the centuries of struggle of the peasants of Occitanie against various incarnations of ‘‘The Beast.’’ An early version was collectively written by local actors and militants in the Larzac and played there at least a dozen times in the summer of 1975. In Paris the next year, the rough parts were smoothed out a little by the professionals. Adding a current countercultural prop, the staged version was done with huge head-masks. In di√erent ways, both in the fields of the Southwest and in Paris, the production skill52

Bringing the Empire Back Home

16. Poster announcing the production by the Groupe de la Cartoucherie of their play on the historical resistance of the peasants of Occitanie against various incarnations of the Beast. Collection of Alexander Alland.

fully put fantasy in the service of justice while at the same time making the struggle for justice into good art.∑∫ We have no means of measuring the help given to the movement by the Larzac diaspora. From hints in conversations, stories, and reports collected by the movement, it appears to have been significant. As in other poor countries, for years the young people of the region had been leaving for job possibilities elsewhere. But because it was France, the exiles continued to see the Larzac as their petite patrie. When they could, they returned for holidays and summer vacations. Several of the people who became major militants had been born in the region, gone far away to work, and then come back in time to add their knowledge and know-how to the struggle. Then there were the Larzac hometown Gardarem lo Larzac! 53

American demonstrators picket the o≈ces of Air France on Fifth Avenue in New York. Collection of Alexander Alland.

17.

societies all over France, organizing support groups, explaining the issues to their friends and co-workers, sending money, welcoming marchers, and returning to the plateau for demonstrations. In New York, demonstrators picketed outside the o≈ces of Air France on Fifth Avenue, urging passers-by not to fly on the airline. They circulated a letter in support of the peasants addressed to ‘‘President d’Estaing’’ [sic] with something like a thousand signatures. The paper gll carried a handsome photograph of the New York demonstrators bearing their homemade posters. One of them wore a disturbing mask in the form of a sheep’s head. It was a moment in New York when groups like the Bread and Puppet Theater were integrating huge full body masks into both aesthetically and politically powerful street theater.∑Ω 54

Bringing the Empire Back Home

Avem Gardet lo Larzac!

The government of Giscard d’Estaing decided to celebrate 1980 as the year of regional heritage (Année du Patrimoine). The resistance movement seemed out of options, save one. François Mitterrand, leader of the reinvented Socialist Party, had shown interest in the struggle already in the mid-1970s. When he ran for president in 1974, he appreciated the high numbers that the voters of the Midi gave to him. Despite an embarrassing incident during one of the Larzac fetes when Mitterrand showed up unexpectedly and was pushed around and hit on the head with a stone thrown by a few anarcho-Maoists who shouted denunciations of him, his party, and imperialism, the courtship between the one-time conservative Gaullist peasants and the Socialist Party matured.∏≠ In the elections of the spring of 1981, the desperate Peasants of Larzac put their hopes, and their votes, behind the Socialist presidential candidate. The election results of 10 May gave the Socialists the presidency and the parliament for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic. The headline of the movement paper of June 1981 celebrated the victory. ‘‘We Have Defended the Larzac,’’ it rejoiced in Provençal. The Larzac countryside, ten years before a stronghold of all that was conservative and clerical, had given its votes to the Socialist party. One of the first acts of the new Socialist president, on 3 June, was to cancel the planned base expansion, keeping the promise he had made to the militants during the election. On the night of 7 June, the army quietly packed up and moved out of the five farms it had confiscated and occupied since 1976–77. Later that summer, on 24 August, the prefect of the Aveyron annulled the decree that the day after Christmas 1972 had declared the farmland ‘‘d’utilité publique,’’ permitting the legal alienation of citizens’ property. The provincialism and conservatism of the farmers made them unlikely troublemakers. But then in pursuit of overseas grandeur the government in Paris unilaterally decided to expropriate some 107 farm households to retool the base there for training troops for future military interventions. This act violated the old unwritten contract of paternalism and subordination that had allied the powerful with the weak. Local resistance was met by an arrogant state power. The magma of an old order of values melted in the fierce new fire of identity politics. Provincialism became local pride. Distrust of outsiders, Gardarem lo Larzac! 55

peasant solidarity. And faith, an ideology of resistance. When the modernizing masters violated moral obligations—what E. P. Thompson nicely termed the moral economy—they provoked an anger seen only in times of peasant Jacqueries. But in the early 1970s no one paraded the head, nor any other part of the body, of Michel Debré on a pike. The wives and children of local lords were not molested. But part of the tradition of peasant risings lived on: the Peasants of Larzac invaded the castle to destroy the pieces of paper on which the clerks had inscribed the injustices visited upon them. But unlike medieval chatelaines, the masters of the army base had carbons and photocopies. Then again, the scatological traditions of old lived on in the periodic loosing of barnyard animals in houses of government and the law. The ten years of the peasant rising were remarkably free of any real violence against persons. In fact, drawing on a certain strain of Catholicism and on the Gandhianism brought to Larzac by Lanza del Vasto—as well as a clearheaded appreciation of the rapport of forces between themselves and the state cum army—the Peasants of Larzac, unlike some of the Breton autonomists who planted bombs, made nonviolence the weapon of the struggle. Nonviolence was the common ground rule that most participants—out of conviction or opportunistically, it didn’t matter which—honored. All were at the same time drawn together and pulled forward by their convergent utopian anticipations. The hope of a better life in the future has always been part of the Christian heritage, and was very much alive among the local resisters from the beginning. Wanda Holohan remarked on the utopianism she found in the ranks of the advocates of a liberated Occitanie.∏∞ In his Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch, the Marxist theologian, writes of the expectations of the early Christians, the urban poor and oppressed of the Roman Empire, for a second, a better life. But in subsequent centuries, a triumphant and institutionalized religion did not fulfill that unfading hope. Millenarian movements, peasant rebellions, even some of the Protestant Reformers regularly returned to the language of Christian utopia to express their dreams of salvation. Bloch argues that Marxism attracted adherents as a replacement for the failed religious promise. It o√ered the fulfillment of the same millenarian hopes, but in the here and now. In his study of the young Maoist idealists who entered the factories, and then came down to Larzac, 56

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Marnix Dressen was struck by the religious background of so many of them, and their own intensely utopian—if secular—vision of a changed society. Is it too hard to imagine that the radicalized Peasants raised in the church, their Protestant supporters in Millau, the religious pacifists around Lanza del Vasto, the young urban Marxists, as well as the visiting Kanaks, Amerindians, Bretons, and Latin Americans were as much repelled by a bad world as pulled by a shared hope for a much better one? Larzac was not just a place for the military to learn new tactics and strategies for warfare in a postcolonial world. It was just as much a training site for militants in later anti-imperialist and antiglobalization struggles. The key to making such frankly nebulous utopias a praxis is the belief in the possibility that by acting one can bring a better world. In his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France in 1982, Pierre Bourdieu spoke of the important contribution that emancipatory movements make in challenging the oppressively ‘‘real.’’ Such movements, he proposed, kept alive ‘‘a certain measure of utopianism, this magical negation of the ‘real.’ ’’ In fighting for their visions of France’s future, the members of the movement of Larzac were challenging an older state project to create a national culture. To see something of this long-term cultural project against which they fought—which was still at the top of the state’s agenda when they began their struggle—we have now to go back and look at the colonial beginnings of the new Gaullist Republic.

Gardarem lo Larzac! 57

CHAPTER TWO

‘‘What You Did in Africa,

Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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ike participants in other regional movements since at least the days of the Albigensian Crusade, the Peasants of Larzac had had to confront a modernized version of the French state’s historic cultural mission to force the inhabitants of often distant regions into a Paris-created national imaginaire. During the entire decade before the Peasants engaged to Garder lo Larzac, in the 1960s the new government of the Fifth Republic pursued as its principal cultural project the disciplining of regional identity wherever it might be found. In 1959 Charles de Gaulle invited André Malraux to create a new ministry dedicated to cultural matters—the first in French history. As he had jumped at chances for adventure before, the writer now accepted this challenge. And like earlier adventures such as his forming a Spanish Republican bomber squadron (with no competence in either Spanish or flying a plane), he wasn’t sure what he would do, exactly. No one—not Gaullist barons, not the sta√ members originally recruited from the Ministry of Education, not the administrators from the annexed Beaux-Arts o≈ce—knew what a ministry dedicated to ‘‘cultural a√airs’’ did.∞ Nevertheless, as during the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance, Malraux would commit himself existentially to the battle. Deep social divisions troubled French society. The enforced, but sometime locally welcomed, regionalism of the war years remained alive. Economic modernization was changing urban lives and abolishing the peasants, with a consequent increase in both internal vertical and horizontal mobility. Most of France Outre-Mer pulled away, leaving a heritage in France of millions of colonial travailleurs immigrés and displaced white settlers. These two groups brought their mutual animosities with them to France. The Gaullists saw ‘‘culture’’ as a kind of universal adhesive for these splits and breaches. But what policies in this realm, just what exactly, should the state implement? The unlikely union of the two words ‘‘cultural policy’’—a contradiction between

adjective and noun, in the eyes of the aesthetic conservative Marc Fumaroli—was yet to be consummated. Not only was the ministry’s work ill defined, there was no one to run it, nor, once decisions were made, to carry them out. Like the heroes of his novels, Malraux was one whose personal organizational forte was leading small bands of committed fighting men. We might think of it as a kind of military existentialism. He knew better how to lead a bombing raid on the Opéra than to reform it. With machine guns and grenades he and his old comrades of the Brigade AlsaceLorraine could have cleaned out snipers defending the Comédie Française, but as a minister he never gained control of that building. The bureaucrats who had come from Education with their transferred agencies took a look at the Ministère farfelu [the fantastic or weird ministry] and quickly asked to be returned to their old posts.≤ No new graduate from a Grande École would take such a posting in the startup years. Where do you find people to run a ministry with an ambiguous mandate to spread an undefined French culture to poorly marked boundaries? They would certainly encounter strong local resistance. And what person entrusted with so serious a mission would accept not having much of a support structure? In one of those historical conjunctures of accident and intention, Malraux was trying to recruit sta√ for his ministry just at the moment when the colonial empire was fragmenting into many independent new nations. Decolonization had downsized hundreds of just the kind of men—they were all men—that he needed for his civilizing mission in France. As he struggled to get his ministry going, the ex-colonial administrators were returning to France to find new jobs to fit their unique skills. It had taken two centuries to acquire the colonial empire and to create classical and modern France. The final meltdown of both France Outre-Mer—the changed name after World War II—and of the Fourth French Republic took a brief eight years. In 1954 the Indochinese states won independence in combat in the siege of Dien Bien Phu, defeating French troops recruited largely from other parts of the empire. Pierre Messmer, himself a graduate of the École Coloniale (1934–37), a colonial administrator and also a Gaullist resistant of the first hour, saw the military defeat in the Indochinese hostilities as more than just a loss in the colonies. ‘‘This war weighted heavily in the history of the Fourth Republic, which died from its inability to de‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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colonize Indochina and Algeria. The fall of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 was the final warning before the coup de grâce delivered four years later in May 1958 in Algiers.’’≥ In 1958, on taking o≈ce at the behest of the insurgent military champions of Algérie-Française, and then later legitimating his power by plebiscite, Charles de Gaulle took the powerful presidency of the new Fifth Republic. He immediately ordered his colonial administrators to conduct local voting to decide the future political status of each colony. Immediately Guinée, led by the revolutionary Marxist Sékou Touré, voted for a complete break. Two years later, most of the other territories of Overseas France followed suit. In 1962 the Gaullist government finally acknowledged its failure in the long Algerian War. With representatives of the fln it signed an agreement recognizing an independent Algerian Republic. For most of the 130 years of French rule, Algeria had been three départements of metropolitan France. During World War II Chad, or at least its governor general, Félix Éboué, was the first large French territory to throw its support to General de Gaulle in London rather than to Marshal Pétain in the metropole. Even though less than twenty years later the population voted for independence from France, the Gaullists maintained a special esteem for the country. That and the French desire to keep strong cultural ties to the new states of the former empire immediately brought one prospective sta√ member to the new ministry. During the institution of the new government of Chad, Gabriel Lisette, one of the state’s founders, asked a young colonial administrator with whom he had become friendly, Émile Biasini, to stay on to help him in the period of transition. At about the same time, a friend on Malraux’s ministerial sta√ asked Biasini if he might want to work in the new agency in Paris. Biasini agreed to come to the new ministry— it was a more stable job than the short-term activity of organizing the independence of a former French colony—but he first wanted to complete an important task he had started when he arrived in Fort-Lamy in spring 1959. Seeing the ex-colonies as an important field for French cultural influence, Malraux embraced Biasini’s project and urged him to carry it through before joining him in Paris. Spurred by the loss of political control over France d’Outre-Mer, the new government of the Fifth Republic sought to keep its influence alive by cultural means. It was decided to finance the construction of a French cultural center in the main square of Fort-Lamy. Malraux put 60

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Biasini in touch with Le Corbusier, who agreed to design the building. The évolué-led new government of Chad and the just-created Gaullist Republic signed an agreement to do the project. Everything was in place to build the first House of French Culture in postcolonial Africa: the land in a choice spot in the capital, a promise of ample local labor, and architectural plans by the greatest living architect. Everything but the capital budget, which France had agreed to provide. With some trepidation—he was ill at ease with bureaucrats and budgets— Malraux presented the plan to the fiscal guillotine–wielding finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. To his relief, Malraux left the budget commission hearing believing that Giscard had said yes. But then when he got the paperwork he was chagrined to find that as agreed, Giscard had authorized the credits asked for—but in French African francs, worth only half the value of the metropolitan franc. The mean-spirited bookkeeper—of, admittedly, a fiscally shaky new French republic—had played a cruel trick on him. But there it was. Malraux could not get the rest of the money. The plan of the Ministry of Cultural A√airs’ first House of Culture had to be shelved. And as if more obstacles were needed, the head of the new o≈ce for what was now called the Communauté was o√ended that the writer should meddle in the a√airs of ex-Overseas France. It was with this background that the regretful, but still optimistic, Malraux asked Biasini, ‘‘What you did in Africa, can you come back and do it in France?’’ To which the ex-colonial administrator had readily replied, ‘‘Sure, it’s just a matter of adapting.’’ In January 1960 Biasini took up his new job of applying what he had learned in Africa to spreading the culture of Paris to the provinces. How do you prepare for this kind of work?∂ Learning Colonialism

Émile Biasini had been admitted to the École Coloniale de la France d’Outre-Mer (now enfom), the school for colonial administrators, in 1944. To get in, he had to pass an examination heavily weighted with questions on literature, especially French literature. The school had been created in 1888 to train Cambodian administrators to assist the French governors. But by the end of World War I, the Cambodians were gone, and the École Coloniale had been transformed specifically to educate French civil servants for the colonies, so that the military administrators—primarily naval and marine o≈cers—could gradually ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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The marvelously Orientalist doorway of the École Coloniale in the Latin Quarter. Photo by the author.

18.

be phased out. Here, in a building decorated with Moorish arches and Arabesque architectural accents—its students referred to it as ‘‘the old mosque’’—situated across from the Luxembourg Garden, candidates learned both metropolitan and colonial law, some anthropology, basic civil engineering, practical natural sciences like botany and zoology, animal psychology (the lab for which met at the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes), perhaps a colonial language, and much French literature. On graduating, they were sent out to the colonies to collect taxes, organize local construction projects, settle disputes, and, often by themselves, keep the peace in areas in Africa or Indochina nearly as large as their native land. The French colonial empire was ruled not by far-away Paris, or even by local notables. In its seventy years of existence, until it was closed in 1959, the school graduated a total of four thousand administrators.∑ In the late 1950s in the vast French possessions in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, about fifteen hundred mostly young colonial o≈cers—so over a third of the graduates—represented the French power to rule, to tax, and to punish. In the spirit of the ideology of Greater France in the interwar years, the École Coloniale in 1934 was renamed L’École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer. Robert Delavignette headed the school from 1937 to 1946. Accord62

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ing to a study he had done immediately upon assuming o≈ce, the family backgrounds of the 259 students on the administrative track in the program in the years 1930–35, equaling about 75 percent of the student body, were heavily weighted toward commerce and state service. Of the total, 10.8 percent had parents who were agricultural landowners. But 35.5 percent came from families involved in commerce and industry. And over half (53.7 percent) had fathers who were in the military, state administration, or middle-class professions.∏ Because the school was one of the Grandes Écoles of Paris, the social backgrounds of the students should not astonish. But these were children of bourgeois families from unfavored areas of France. Like the Scots and the Irish who sta√ed the British Empire (and like the African Americans who increasingly perform similar functions for the United States), French colonial administrators were often recruited from among the formerly colonized. Some came from wellestablished overseas areas of France such as Martinique or, like Félix Éboué, Guyana.π But many more came from poor parts of metropolitan France such as the Southwest and especially Corsica. The story that Olivier Colombani tells in his memoirs of service in newly independent Niger is perhaps an extreme case, but statistically it points in the right direction: Niamey, it was Niamey. All the directors of the cabinets of [Niger’s] ministers were Corsicans. The ambassador’s name was Colombani (He was not a relative). . . . There was a certain family feeling. Every morning the telephone rang in my o≈ce. Ambroise [my cousin, chief of police, and friend of President Diori] called, and in Corsican, caught me up about what had happened the night before. He asked me what he should say to the President. I did a triage, and then telephoned the ambassador, also a Colombani, speaking with him in Corsican too, and asked him of what we should inform the President. He in turn made a triage, ruling certain items out with ‘‘no, no, that’ll upset him. . . .∫ Then there was the case of the aid that Niger gave for economic development in Corsica. ‘‘My cousin, Ambroise Colombani, who was mayor of Belgodère, our village [back home], needed money for piping in water. He was a personal friend of Amani Diori and at the same time he served as his Chief of Police [directeur de la sûreté]. The President of Niger asked him how much money did he need. The ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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budget for the project was twenty-five million francs. Amani Diori immediately gave him the money out of fides funds [French aid money]. It was a loan, but Belgodère never paid it back.’’ But not everyone, no matter how bright, had the right stu√ to be a successful district o≈cer, as George Orwell discovered and described in his powerful short story ‘‘Shooting an Elephant.’’ Formal training could take the young European district o≈cer only so far in the brush. He had to be emotionally and mentally equipped for the work. The consensus of the memoir literature identifies the best o≈cers as those who could think quickly and improvise on the ground. They saw themselves as ruling by having strong character, not by reading the manuals.Ω Little that happened in their districts astonished them. Biasini, for example, was very good at his work and, despite being of Swiss-Italian descent and not a Corsican, quickly climbed through the ranks. Then there was the cultural project especially dear to Robert Delavignette, who had done so much to shape the curriculum of the colonial school in its important years. In his teaching and in his books, he reminded his students—and the French people—what an immense historical opportunity they had been given: ‘‘Use the Sudan to remake the polity [cité] back in France. Africa salutes Europe! Let her guide you in reforming France.’’∞≠ As for their spiritual preparation, the immersion of the colonial administrators—the later cultural ministry o≈cials—in belles lettres was mandated with as much practical intent as the lessons in compass reading. First, as all who had read Rousseau’s Émile knew, literature would refine and soften the attentive reader. The students should know the law, wrote Robert Delavignette, director of the school from 1934 to 1946, ‘‘but above all, they should know what ought be done with humanity and sensitivity in the societies of Africa and Asia.’’ Himself a published novelist, Delavignette required all students to take his course on ‘‘Littérature et psychologie d’outre-mer.’’ In his class, for example, they read Balzac’s Le Médecin de campagne [The Country Doctor]. In the beginning of the novel Doctor Benassis clears and irrigates a valley and shows the villagers, ‘‘up to then without any intelligence’’ [jusqu’alors dépourvus d’intelligence], how to farm the land. Here in Balzac could, and should, students find a model for their colonial vocation.∞∞ The entrance examination of 1946 asked appli64

Bringing the Empire Back Home

Still from the film L’Homme du Niger (1940) by Jacques de Baroncelli. Sometime in the 1930s a colonial o≈cer (played by Victor Francen) wants to increase the productivity of the local soil in the French Sudan (today Republic of Mali) by enlisting the local population to build a dam on the Niger River. He is stricken with leprosy and gives up the woman he loves. Courtesy of Pascal Blanchard.

19.

cants to comment on a text of Michelet. And to begin the orientation to their new careers, candidates taking the admissions examination in 1948 were asked to write an essay on ‘‘Solitude in the Thought of Pascal and of Rousseau.’’∞≤ In 1949, once Delavignette had stepped down as the school’s head, the administrative council of the enfom agreed to a limited modernization of the curriculum proposed by his successor. Clearly, more training in political science was needed. And they agreed, for example, to drop questions from the admissions exam like ‘‘What should we understand Voltaire meant that we must cultivate our garden?’’ Many critics outside the school, led by Delavignette and Paul Rivet, head of the Musée de l’Homme, protested this debasement of the standards. The reforms were dropped. Armelle Anders commented on this episode, ‘‘The enfom, we see, was not easily going to give up recruiting its candidates according to a model it fancied to be that of the ‘honnête homme’ of the seventeenth century.’’∞≥ This literary preparation did prove useful for the two successive ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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civilizing missions in which many of them engaged. Consider the career of Félix Giacomoni, a contemporary of Biasini at the school. Michel Leiris, writer and an instructor, had very much liked his short thesis (mémoire) on Rimbaud. It brought new insights to the work of the writer whom Leiris in a written comment described as a ‘‘symbolist poet and one of the first French travelers in Abyssinia.’’∞∂ On graduating in 1947, Giacomoni served for almost a decade and a half in Chad and Cameroon. Then in 1960, with no more colonies to administer, he returned to France, where his classmate, Biasini, found him a place working with him as head the national theaters in the new ministry. The one-time Rimbaud scholar and old Africa hand served the Ministry of Culture through various changes in government until he retired in 1986. Then there was the e√ect of the European classics on softening the rude colonized themselves. Witness Biasini’s tales of cultural exchange and initiation: Everything I knew [of cultural transmission], I had learned in Africa, where I had first discovered the need for a policy of this type. There, on the ground, I worked out empirically in very concrete ways how to implement our cultural tasks. Under often the most straightened circumstances, everywhere I went, I organized for African évolués encounters with aspects of our culture that they could not learn in school. I played them music, gave them poetry to read, and showed them reproductions of paintings. At the same time, I asked them to show me their own modes of cultural expression: their dances, tam tams, masks, and legends. On each tour of inspection, I sought out their griots (story tellers), their shamen, and their dancers. At night, camped near a village, Biasini was fond of playing classical 78s on a crank-up phonograph with one of his ‘‘ ‘petits boys’ ’’ acting as disk jockey. But since a long piece often required multiple disks, and the disk jockey was still an apprentice in la civilisation française, the order of the musical sections of the piece was not always the conventional one. Or maybe the young man was doing sampling, avant la lettre. No matter: ‘‘Camped for the night, seemingly isolated in my mosquito netting, the light inside the tent making the gauze opaque on my side, I put on a concert for the whole village, which observed me in the shadows. The villagers listened religiously. They liked Mozart 66

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most, and the fanfares and carrousels of Charpentier and Lully. The next morning, they asked me to play the pieces again, before I left.’’∞∑ We see that the mission civilisatrice in Africa worked in wondrous ways. Of course, the rays of French enlightenment could not as easily reach the villages of the back country as they radiated on the urban centers. Most country people, so most Africans, could only experience French culture intermittently through missionaries or the activities of district o≈cers like Biasini. The more educated population, the primarily urban évolués, living hybridized identities in each of at least two cultures, which at the same time both empowered and filled them with anguish, became the leaders of nationalist revolutionary movements against their former mentors. In all, sixty-three ex-fom o≈cers found high administrative positions in the ministry. Biasini was the key link.∞∏ The corps of colonial administrators was especially a tightly bonded group. They went through a rigorous training together. Not many people in metropolitan France knew or cared about what they did, so they tended to be convivial mostly with each other when they could leave their isolated posts. Then too they tended to come from similar backgrounds. Many of them were children of French civil servants. They had a family history of serving the state. And many—the Corsicans, for example—were from the same regions of France. Once back in France, they could readily call on the network that had sustained them personally and in their work when they were overseas. After a brief spell as an adviser on Malraux’s sta√, in 1960 Biasini was assigned by the minister to work with Gaëton Picon, the writer’s old friend and an early admirer of his work. Picon had been made head of the o≈ce of arts and letters, which before had been an o≈ce of the Ministry of Education. The two made a good team. In his memoirs, Biasini remembered of Picon that ‘‘he knew how to read Hegel, but not an administrative file.’’∞π Very quickly, Biasini took up the organizational work that his grateful literary critic boss turned over to him. The first problem he addressed was sta≈ng. Biasini suggested that an old classmate and fellow colonial o≈cial, Jean Autin, be put in charge of what was at first called the Direction des A√aires Générale of the ministry. Autin came on board and immediately went to work at the main function of his new post: hiring sta√. As the work expanded and as unhappy people left to return to the Education Ministry and no one from the élite training schools would ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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apply, Autin filled the vacant positions with the returning fom administrators. Many of them were in their thirties and forties, at the height of their powers, but yet to make their mark on their world, which had now shrunk to metropolitan France. Biasini and his old comrades fit well into the new ministry. Malraux was, to say the least, a hands-o√ boss, such as they were used to from their former work. He knew little about complex organizations and nothing about money. He liked to work one on one, almost never holding sta√ meetings. An individualist given to the grand gesture, he gave his old African hands a great deal of freedom to act—until and unless they crossed him or embarrassed him before the Gaullist barons. His forte was making stirring speeches at important occasions, in which he variously spoke for the role of art as the only hope of human immortality, proclaimed art museums the cathedrals of the twentieth century, and denounced ‘‘the dream factories,’’ of Hollywood, which could produce only sex and blood, but nothing that would last after our deaths. It was up to his resourceful sta√ to translate this intoxicating meta-aesthetic into cultural policies and literally, buildings, on the ground. Once resettled in Paris, Biasini had a chance immediately to put his colonial style to work. A labor dispute had broken out at the troubled Opéra. A summit of the Big Four world leaders—Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, and de Gaulle—had been planned to open in May 1960. There would be a gala at the Opéra. But the opera sta√, members of the Union of Artists (cgt), announced their intention to strike on the day of the festivities. Malraux dispatched Biasini to the troubled locale. The aggrieved employees were summoned to a meeting in the theater. Biasini banged on the table for silence: ‘‘We have to settle this problem. I’m from Africa, where I had to be justice of the peace, mayor, and banker all rolled into one. Listen, I had to take on any task needing to be done and to concern myself with everything from the smallest details to the most important things. And that’s the way we’re going to work here.’’ Robert Sandrey, head of the union of cultural workers, was there. He and others in the hall that day had been ‘‘rather amused’’ by Biasini’s bombast, ‘‘while at the same time leaving us a bit uneasy’’∞∫ We do not know whether Biasini was disappointed that the musicians did not play and that the corps de ballet did not dance in honor of the 68

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visiting administrator. But it is clear that Biasini saw dealing with the striking unionists as ‘‘just . . . adapting’’ his African way of working to a slightly new situation. It proved too late to prevent the close down of the house that time, but there were no more strikes at the Opéra for the next two decades. Colonial troubles once more erupted in Paris to advance Biasini’s new metropolitan career. It was September, a few months after he had ridden out to quiet the unrest at the Opéra. With French forces heavily committed in combat against the fln, 121 intellectuals signed a declaration supporting the right of any French draftee to refuse the call-up for military service in Algeria.∞Ω The high-handed prime minister, Michel Debré, quickly responded by cutting state funding of any kind to anyone who had signed. Although they had not themselves put their names on the declaration, the heads of the three big national theaters—Jean Vilar at the tnp, Jean-Louis Barrault at the Odéon, and Maurice Escande of the Comédie Française—resigned in protest against the proscription of so many of the nation’s most talented of artists. Malraux’s top arts administrator, Pierre Moinot, realized immediately what a disaster for the arts the firings would cause. He also shared the views of the 121. He handed in his resignation.≤≠ Moinot’s leaving necessitated a reorganization in the ministry. Malraux named Biasini the first director of a new o≈ce charged with overseeing the state theaters, music, and activities—not yet fully defined—called ‘‘l’action culturelle.’’ Fortunately, Biasini could depend on the loyalty and resourcefulness of his old buddies, whose numbers in the ministry were fast increasing. In 1947, just as Biasini was getting his own district to manage in Africa, Jean-François Gravier had published an influential book whose title used a harsh metaphor to refer to provincial France, Paris et le désert français.≤∞ Paris got everything, the regions nothing; it was not fair, it was not economically wise, it was not good for the unity of the nation. By the time Malraux hired Biasini some thirteen years later, decentralization—to be sure, decentralization from above—had become a self-evident goal, a doxa of the new France. Malraux expressed his aim to end the cultural backwardness su√ered by non-Parisians by undertaking the most important project of his ten years as culture minister: he and his companions would ‘‘abolish this hideous word ‘province.’ ’’≤≤ Biasini was up to this new mission civilisatrice. ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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Tours of Inspection and Palavers

So at thirty-five I found myself plunged for the first time in the life of the métropole, with serious responsibilities in a very parisien universe, and the charge of decentralizing the modalities of cultural life. First I had to do some learning. For that, I applied the good old method I had learned in the bush: the tour of inspection, making contacts, holding palavers. That is, I did what I knew how to do. I saddled up my camels and rode o√ to discover France.≤≥ The project here, as it had been in Africa, was not decentralization, as Biasini claims, but the opposite, connecting the regions to Paris. So, on taking up his new job of l’action culturelle, Biasini and his deputies, whose many years of service thousands of miles away from France had given them very little opportunity to keep up their knowledge of their own homeland, rode o√ to discover la France profonde. What were the locals doing about culture on their own? Should they be encouraged? Ignored? Could cultural infusions from Paris be regularized? Biasini’s riders found three sorts of existing complexes of cultural practices that—like scarification and fertility rituals—were no longer right for the new times. There were first the amateur arts groups. They had been largely scorned by the arts institutions of the local patriciate, as well as having su√ered from lack of facilities and funds. Many of them saw the ministry’s new interest in the regions as a chance for support. Biasini’s people visited them. An inspector looked over Chants et Danses de France, which the choreographer Jacques Douai had organized to perform the musical arts of the various regions of France. ‘‘Too amateurish,’’ read his report. L’Association Bourguignonne Culturelle organized jazz and film clubs, procured theater and concert tickets, and arranged driver education and crafts courses for its members. An inspector visited it. ‘‘No coherence,’’ he concluded. The Congrès Européen des Loisirs in Strasbourg was a network of Catholic social clubs and activities. ‘‘Religious uplift,’’ went the dismissive verdict. There was a report on La Confédération Musicale de France, which ran musical competitions for children all over France. Its letterhead included as honorary sponsors President de Gaulle and the composer Arthur Honegger. Many of its prizewinners went on to pass the rigorous examinations to enter the Paris Conservatory. But overall, not good enough, was the verdict. Biasini and his team found most exist70

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ing grassroots organizations too amateurish for the task of bringing the French people what they deserved: the very best of the great culture, presented at the very highest professional level possible.≤∂ Then there were the elaborate networks of ideologically aligned organizations and recreation clubs. These came in many flavors, but the prime division among them ran along the fault line, republicanlaïc on the one side and Catholic-clerical on the other. Malraux and Biasini didn’t want to become entangled in the wrestling match of these historically quarreling partners—especially as they served a president who headed a secular republic but was a practicing Catholic. Finally, of course, there were the existing municipal theaters, opera houses, museums, and part-time orchestras to assess. These organs were funded and frequented by the established local bourgeoisie. For the most part they dispensed culture lite: old melodramas with lots of naughty scenes, ancient war horses of the musical repertory, academic and local art. The pride of a town’s notables, these institutions were instruments unsuitable either to bring the richness of high-quality (that is, Parisian) French culture to the regions, or to help make a unified, and unifying, national culture. No point in throwing the ministry’s money in their direction. They would not cooperate with what was planned for them from Paris. Something new was needed, something better than what was in place now, or what the amateurs could do, yet something more permanent than classical music played through the mosquito netting of a tent for a few hours by a lonely traveling emissary of French culture. But in his new post Biasini had less reason to feel alone. He had an organization and he had his old comrades to help him. Just what did the ex-fom people do in the new culture ministry? There are several kinds of answers to that question, and to the related one: Were there enough of them to institutionalize their o≈ces’ ways of working? By the end of 1960 seven ex-colonial administrators were already on the sta√, Biasini, of course, having been the first to arrive. Their involvement in the ministry rose rapidly to reach a high plateau in the decade 1970–80, when their number fluctuated between thirty and thirty-five. When the Socialists scored their big electoral victory in 1981, twenty-five ex-fom people were still on the job. They stayed on, although retirements gradually thinned their ranks. By 1990 only five were active in the ministry and by 1995 only two. Some sixty-three in all had held high executive posts. ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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Slowly, new people came in to work with the ex-fom people, and gradually to replace them as they retired. At first, very tentatively starting in 1962 and in growing numbers from the late 1960s, new recruits from the Grandes Écoles, especially the École Nationale d’Administration, began to take positions in the now-established and growing ministry.≤∑ Marie-Ange Rauch, the culture ministry’s historian, admits to the conflictual relations between these two corps. Going to school in the radical ’60s and ’70s, the young graduates from this top administration school did not hide their scorn for these old, and in many ways unreconstructed, agents of imperialism.≤∏ Servants of colonialism, pacifying the French provinces, versus young technocrats, who knew what was good for the French people—who are the good guys in this conflict? Neither group had been elected to their posts. Ministry heads came and went. The ex-fom administrators remained. Malraux resigned his post at the retirement of President de Gaulle in 1969. Various Gaullist and mixed governments followed until the Socialists took control of both the presidency and the parliament in 1981. When polemicists like Marc Fumaroli denounce the culture-state of Malraux and Lang, it is the continuity of the old colonial hands which makes that unlikely linkage plausible, and largely true. As a first answer to the question of what they did, the ex-fom people did everything. Beginning with Biasini in 1960 and extending to 1976, five of them in all served in the culture ministers’ cabinets. Between 1960, when Biasini recruited Jean Autin to run the administration, and 1984, twenty of them occupied positions hiring sta√ and generally managing the organization in the Direction de l’Administration Générale. Autin ran things to 1967. Then from 1970 to 1972 Michel-François Selliers took the relay. Bridging the big political change of 1981, Guy Brajot assumed the administrative director’s post from 1980 to 1984. Finally, between 1965 and 1991 a total of thirteen former district o≈cers in the colonies worked as inspectors general, in the hands-on supervisory arm of the ministry. So much for the sta√ functions of making the budget, hiring, management, supervising projects and field o≈ces, and policy reviews. The ministry was divided into agencies called Directions. Of the line functions, ex-fom people were most numerous in the all-important o≈ce of cultural outreach, the Direction Régionale des A√aires Culturelles et Correspondants Permanente. Some twelve in all worked 72

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there in the years after Malraux’s departure. Taken together, they had served in almost every French colony, including Algeria. There were seven in the arts museum administration. One of them, Jacques Mullender, headed the Louvre from 1983 to 1985. Nine supervised the state theaters and directed the Houses of Culture for the first two decades of the ministry’s activities. The last of them left in 1982. From 1964 to 1983 a total of eight ex-fom supervised the Direction devoted to urban planning and preserving the national architectural heritage (patrimoine), while during approximately the same period seven held posts in a parallel administration that looked after the architectural treasures of the regions. Roger Delarozière, who had learned his trade in Cameroon, Niger, and Dahomey, became the first head of the Doomsday Book of French monuments and historic treasures that Malraux ordered to be drawn up, the Service de l’Inventaire Générale des Monuments et Richesses de la France. They oversaw archaeological work in France as well as arts education. Five looked after music, dance, and opera, Jean Autin serving for over a year (1970–71) as director of the Paris Opéra. From 1960 to 1977 Félix Giacomoni, he of the literary tastes as a student in the colonial school, oversaw the national theaters. In his last nine years of service (1977–86) he was second in command of the national archives of France. Maybe because of their past work, or, alas, as a harbinger of the future, only two old fom people, each in a di√erent o≈ce, concerned themselves with the world of letters, books, and readers.≤π Finally, one more way of measuring influence is to ask: Who was in charge? Four heads of major Directions, six associate directors, and almost all the inspectors general had been colonial administrators.≤∫ But what can be said about the impact of these cultural decision makers and doers? Here, for a start, we can look at the ministry’s enterprise that Malraux and Biasini had the most hopes for, and took the most pride in, the Houses of Culture (Maisons de la Culture). From the very first days of the ministry, Biasini and Malraux knew what they wanted to do in the regions of France. They would dot the landscape with powerhouses built to transmit French culture, much like those Biasini had undertaken in Fort-Lamy in Chad, and for the same reasons in both cases. Of course, the new institutions would be ‘‘adapted’’ to the new terrain.≤Ω Immediately, they set to building and opening the new cultural ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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centers. In each, most of the space was to be reserved for theater—the prime art of cultural di√usion—but also areas for exhibiting art, and rooms dedicated to listening to both jazz and classical music, were provided for in the drawings. The goal was to build at least one center in every département. The first one—actually a renovated and rededicated museum—opened in 1961 in Le Havre. A just-completed new municipal theater opened in Caen as the second House of Culture soon after. Bourges, Thonon, Firminy converted existing buildings. Then for the rest of the decade specially built structures began to go up quickly: in Amiens, Grenoble, Rennes, Rheims, Nevers, and Chalon. The House of Culture of St. Étienne was nearly finished by the early summer of 1968. By May 1968, the date of the students’ and young workers’ rebellion against the old culture, twelve had been built, with ten more on the drawing boards. The ministry, in collaboration with over a dozen other municipalities, was working out the details of future centers. Finally, and fittingly, the Ministry of Culture contracted with the Ministry of Youth to collaborate in building Maisons de la Culture in the once-colonial regions that in 1946 had been made departments of France: Réunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia, and Cayenne. The twelve houses built were, with only one exception, run by theater people. Under Vichy and German rule, when regionalism was almost forced upon the country, vigorous local theaters had grown up in the provinces. Biasini and Malraux felt comfortable entrusting the new institutions to these young directors in this most public and auratic artform. And accordingly, putting on plays for the local public was the prime activity in the centers. Fully half of the plays performed were classics on the order of Greek theater, Shakespeare, and Molière. Audiences were exposed, too, to some works from the modern repertoire But avant-garde pieces, for example, by Genet, Ionesco, or Beckett, were not done; better leave such di≈cult and controversial stu√ to the Parisians. Who frequented the centers to share the new national culture in formation? Not everyone in the village, as Biasini had hoped. The old local bourgeoisie, who saw the nationalization of culture as a threat to their oligopoly of culture, did not come much. Nor did farmers—the few left in France. Few workers could come. Those that did were usually members of the labor and party élite, or plugged-in trade unionists. Schoolchildren, the unwilling public of many a little-visited 74

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cultural institution, were trooped o√ in large numbers to attend plays, concerts, and screenings of old films. The new class of technically trained white-collar workers was an important part of the public at the Houses of Culture. Often new arrivals in town, with no loyalties or connections to the local élite, and a more national outlook because of their migrations, members of this new middle class reached out to the Houses of Culture as if to a lifeline to the real thing in Paris.≥≠ The May ’68 events changed everything. When every one of the directors of the Houses of Culture sided with the students in the cultural uprising, local mayors or the national government—depending only on who reacted most rapidly—took the centers over and remade them as multiple-use social halls or as just another municipal theater. Yet despite the short life of the experiment, the Houses of Culture set the pattern for the present system of hub-and-spoke cultural di√usion— much like that of the airlines—in France. Today, nearly half a century later, unlike in the years of Malraux and Biasini, the localities and the regions expend the greatest part of the nation’s fiscal allotment for culture. In a sense, there’s been a kind of political and even economic decolonization in France too. But the municipal and regional councils still get their aesthetic ideas from Paris. And until his retirement in 1993, the old colonial hand Émile Biasini continued to frame that Parisian state culture. As part of his work under Malraux, Biasini was charged with putting a new national music policy in place and choosing a person of standing to direct it. Once again showing the convergence of the colonial and the modern, Biasini wanted Pierre Boulez, champion in France of a most rigorous version of the twelve-tone compositional system. Malraux wanted Marcel Landowski, conservative, team player, dull, safe. In the course of the bitter polemics around the appointment, Boulez dismissed his rival in print as one of France’s ‘‘failed composers.’’ Biasini pushed hard for his candidate. He displayed that singleness of purpose that had earned him his nickname, ‘‘the bulldozer.’’ Finally, in 1966 Malraux named Landowski. Apparently angry at his aide’s insubordination—he never gave a reason—he also fired Biasini. But the French administration takes care of its own. With the help of some Gaullist well-wishers, including Georges Pompidou, Biasini was soon named head of the new state television company. He liked ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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the post and seemed to do it well—until the May 1968 explosion. To his honor, he sided with the tv journalists who took the moment to protest against the curbs, more accurately, the censorship, that the Gaullist government imposed on their news reporting. For this defection, as the vindictive Gaullists saw his action in the post-’68 purges of the public services that they carried out, he was fired again. After that he spent some years coordinating the development of the tourist infrastructure of the Aquitaine coast in southwestern France. And then, miraculously, one day in March 1982 he was summoned to the o≈ce of President François Mitterrand. Imperial Monuments

They two men had never met before. But Mitterrand had heard of Biasini’s can-do style. He asked him to run the huge building program known as les Grands Travaux that the president planned for Paris and the provinces. But how could Biasini go from working with the Gaullist Malraux to now building culture for the Socialist president of the Republic, François Mitterrand? ‘‘The explanation is simple: each of them, minister or president of the same Republic, asked me to help them to do the same thing. . . . If there was a common and universal domain, it’s the cultural sphere. Malraux and Mitterrand both wanted to make it an instrument of democracy, by making it accessible to the largest number possible.’’≥∞ Some six months later, Jack Lang, the culture minister, agreed to hire Biasini. He had a say because Biasini was nominally attached to his o≈ce and because what would be built would devolve to his ministry. However, Mitterrand had mandated a special planning and construction agency, headed by Biasini, with its own budget, and reporting directly to the president. Recalling his aborted French cultural center in Fort-Lamy, Chad, nearly three decades before, and the poverty of the first years of the new ministry, Biasini rejoiced at his new freedom to act.≥≤ Once more, and for the next eleven years, he became the master builder of cultural transmitters, on a scale not seen in France since Louis XIV decided to convert an old hunting lodge at Versailles into something a bit roomier. To assist him with the Grands Travaux, he called on Guy Brajot (Guinée, Dahomey, the theater administration, administrative chief of the culture ministry, French Tele76

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vision, and the Louvre), his dependable right-hand man both in the ministry and later at the tv administration. Biasini began work as the planning for the new Grand Louvre was just starting. The Ministry of Finance had finally agreed to vacate its prestigious but antique o≈ces in one of the huge palace’s wings. It had been o√ered a new, large, modern o≈ce building further up the Seine, with even a powerboat provided to take the minister to other government o≈ces along the river. With the o≈ces gone, a stunning rebuilding was possible; it was essential, the president willed. This time, Biasini got the modernist candidate he wanted. He picked I. M. Pei as the architect of the renovation and expansion. On 22 June 1983 President Mitterrand accepted Pei’s plan for thrusting up a great glass pyramid in the Cour Carrée, the central, U-shaped courtyard. The proposed redesign of the old palace aroused controversy. How could it not? A monument of the classical age was being altered. Biasini asked Pierre Bourdieu to periodically conduct polls to keep up with public opinion in the contentious city.≥≥ Le Figaro, of course, found what was being done to the old Louvre an abomination. More out of political solidarity than aesthetic delight, the Socialist-leaning papers, like Le Monde and Libération, uneasily supported the building of the Grand Louvre. There were design changes and money problems. Archeological finds of medieval castle walls had to be integrated into the building plan. But the work moved ahead steadily to the opening in 1988. President Mitterrand’s term ended in the same year. Already diagnosed with prostate cancer, he nevertheless ran for another seven-year term. Soon after his election, he called Biasini in again, and now asked him to lead the construction of a final grand building, a new national library for France. The old nineteenth-century building on the rue Richelieu was full. The overflow of books and periodicals had to be stored outside the city. The facilities were out of date. It took hours of waiting to get a seat in the undersized main reading room. Mitterrand asked ‘‘the bulldozer’’ to hurry the construction. He wanted to dedicate this monument to the book and to himself before he died. Dominique Perrault, a thirty-six-year-old novice architect, showed the president a model of a rectangular building, with a high glass tower shaped like an opened book standing on its bottom edges on each of the four corners. It would be erected along the Seine in a run-down section of the thirteenth arrondissement. The glass towers on the Seine would ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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hold the books and the readers would sit deep in the bowels of the building. Through glass walls, they could look out on a forest garden, also planted deep in the inner court of the building. No one could enter the garden. Despite acrimonious criticism on the part of library professionals and many scholars of the building’s unsuitability as a library and of its retro-modern coldness, Perrault’s plan prevailed. Mitterrand short-circuited the usual vetting process and ordered the books-in-the-sky to be built. Planning started in 1988, just as the Grand Louvre was being completed. His cancer continued to grow worse, but President Mitterrand lived to perform the dedication ceremony for the new (not yet opened) library in 1993. Only three years later did the spreading illness finally end his life. The Grands Travaux changed Paris. Along with the Grand Louvre and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France the team of Mitterrand and Biasini put up the Grand Arc at La Défense (1989) at the edge of the city, to rival Napoleon’s arch at L’Étoile. In gleaming white, a handsome new conservatory, museum, and concert center, La Cité de la Musique, opened at La Villette (1990), the one-time meatpacking district. And completed just in time to mark the bicentennial of the Revolution, another very personal project of the president, a new opera house ‘‘for the people,’’ opened at the Place de la Bastille (July 1989). In all, there were fourteen buildings put up in Paris under the aegis of the Grands Travaux. But the provinces were not neglected. Over thirty new museums, médiathèques, and historical restoration sites rose all over France. Most interesting, and for us an appropriate stopping place on our journey around the infrastructure of French culture in the second half of the twentieth century, was the creation of a Kanak cultural center in Nouméa, New Caledonia. Renzo Piano, architect of the Pompidou museum, designed it in 1990. The Kanak are an unhappy minority on their own island. Between the invasive mining interests and the French cultural mission, we have to wonder if the French state has given the Kanaks an elegant modern building to renew their culture, or to serve as a memorial to it. Having diminished Kanak culture, France is trying to give it back, wrapped in Europe’s modernism. Stephen Greenblatt has given us fascinating insights into the literature of the Renaissance, especially Shakespeare, by casting the light given o√ by a document from an archive onto a work of literature. Because we must explain the history, not the literary text, historians 78

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unfortunately have to read many, many dusty old documents. But sometimes a historian gets lucky and he or she can discover a historical actor, or actors, whose life, or lives, are a microcosm of the macrocosm we are trying to understand. So following the careers of Émile Biasini and of his fellow colonial alumni has helped us follow the dialectic of colonial-metropolitan cultural exchanges. In Eric Auerbach’s compelling phrase, their lives were ‘‘fraught with meaning.’’≥∂ Tropical Imports

Let me conclude by reviewing the principal messages that passed from the colonies to metropolitan France as I have deciphered them from the story that begins with the creation of France’s first cultural ministry and ends with the great monuments of the Grands Travaux. First, the very definition of France’s cultural problem in mid-century had been refined and elaborated in the colonial experience. The backcountry—the bush in the colonies, the provinces in France—was not well hooked up to the transmitters of the capital. In the colonies, a break from France had been the danger. In France, it was regional, social, and political fragmentation, a weakening of the historic idea of France. Second, once France’s cultural troubles were defined, we see recourse to the cultural missionary model worked out in the colonies, with its top-down, authoritarian transmissions. Biasini played his records for all to hear. He tells us that the villagers liked the music, but he did not discuss with them whether they wanted to attend the concert that night, or any other night. We discover in Biasini’s stories of Africa a fundamental insight into what I will call the style of French colonial rule. Let me explain. On 23 October 2001 the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (maao) opened an exhibition put together at the Kanak cultural center in New Caledonia. It ran for nearly four months, and in that time drew an impressive 100,000 visitors. The show’s organizers tried to be ‘‘politiquement correcte,’’ as they say in France. The widow of the autonomist leader who had come to Larzac to claim a piece of France as Kanaky, Marie-Claude Tjibaou, now head of a state-funded agency for the development of Kanak culture, had given her blessings to the show. But in fact Roger Boulay, head of the Oceanic section of the maao, and in appearance a European Frenchman, was listed in the ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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catalogue as the organizer. I add this bit of information to suggest that the exhibition’s paternity seems to me in doubt. Boulay had given the exhibition the provocative title Kannibals et Vahinés (‘‘Cannibals and Hula Dancers’’). The strategy of the show was apparently that by totally emerging the visitor in hundreds and hundreds of racist and stereotypic images of Pacific Islanders—drawn from adventure story illustrations, movie posters, advertising, fruit juice labels, vacation brochures, and so on—their evil power, their power to do harm, could be exorcised.≥∑ I find this a doubtful strategy. Irony is a good postmodern way of not deciding, in the worst case; or distancing ourselves from past evil deeds, in the best. But it rarely persuades. The criticisms of another sort by some members of the audience during the conference dedicated to the exhibition allows us to understand a key element in the French colonial style. To reinforce its hip new message, the conference on the show, 8 and 9 February 2002, was held not in the old ex-colonial museum at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes but rather in the Forum des Images, in the bowels of the monstrous mall which replaced Les Halles. The chief of the cultural o≈ce of New Caledonia spoke, as did several Paris museum o≈cials and some anthropologists. It soon became evident to the audience that none of the scholarly participants knew much about the cultures of the Pacific. Attendees—some of them workers in that field themselves, as well as a few who identified themselves as Kanaks—repeatedly remarked on how little work French researchers had done on the cultures of the South Seas. The British, the Dutch certainly, and other countries’ scholars as well had much better records on this score. These critiques were received with murmurs of assent, even on the part of some of the speakers. But why this apparent lacuna in knowledge, an ignorance which was also matched to a greater or lesser degree for other parts of colonial France? Paradoxically, through much of the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth, France was at the same time a world center of cultural learning and overlord of one of the greatest modern colonial empires. Here is where style of rule was decisive. The French model of cultural sensitivity in the colonies may without too much simplification be described as ignore and reconstruct. So if the dominant tendency of French colonial administration was, finally, either to discount or to abolish the local cultures, why study them? Local knowledge was important, to be sure. The highest praise that one French colonial ad80

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ministrator could bestow on a colleague was that ‘‘he knew all the chickens and all the rabbits’’ in his district. But then why go on tours of the backcountry? Robert Delavignette trained many of the administrators. Here is his rationale: ‘‘If we did not go on tour we should merely be a body of o≈cials superimposed on the country; it is on the tour that we learn to know it and keep it fast, by taking it in the right way, from the inside; and here also we taste at the same time the pleasures of travel and of being the chief.’’≥∏ Learning the district, the adventures of tourism, and showing the locals who’s the boss—jobs equally useful in a district in Africa or a province in Europe. But like their later work in the culture ministry in Paris, this roving of the backcountry should not be exaggerated. In 1937, for example, of the 385 colonial administrators in French West Africa, fully half served at headquarters in the cities. Biasini’s tours of inspection in the colonies, as in France, could easily be displaced for the work of cultural centralizing in the capital.≥π But in important ways, having a lot of detailed information about life in administrative districts is not at all to know how the cultures work. Recall that it was British, not French, anthropologists who invented structural functionalism. They were encouraged to do so by colonial administrators who had neither the cultural project, nor the capacity, of turning Africans into Englishmen. British administrators used, wherever possible, their good knowledge of a local culture to control the populations they governed. French administrators, like Biasini and his fellow graduates from the republican schools and the ‘‘Colo,’’ arrived knowing what they wanted to do or teach. So, too, when they returned to France to work for the Ministry of Culture, they already knew what had to be done in the provinces. Their republican school teachers in Brittany, the Southwest, Guyana, and Corsica had taught them. The experience of colonial rule had refined and completed their authoritarian republican education, the education they had received back home in their native province. Biasini and Malraux planned to strengthen French cultural influence by creating Houses of Culture in the ex-colonies. Once posted to France, after some initial reconnoitering in the French backcountry, Biasini and his team set to work giving their provincials national, that is Parisian, culture at its highest level. No room for amateurs or celebrations of local arts.≥∫ No democratic initiatives allowed. What was not fully carried out in far o√ Africa could be done for the regions ‘‘Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

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of the European land—and for the same reasons: to cultivate loyalty to France. In addition, there was the sharply limited database from which the messages were drawn. As part of France’s mission civilisatrice, a ‘‘standard’’ French culture was elaborated that was deemed appropriate to lay on the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. It included reading authors of the classical age, for example, but not Jean Jaurès’s history of the French Revolution. The children read texts informing them that the Gauls were their ancestors, but they were taught little about the contested ways in which France had been made. Of course, dissidents like the Marxists or Surrealists, or later literary troublemakers such as Jean Genet, were unsuitable for people in the colonies. When Biasini and his team set out to unite the provinces with Paris, they knew to establish a ‘‘standard’’ French culture. It did not include very troublesome, unsuitable materials. And it was intended to teach the provincials about a united, homogenized society. Finally, the role of the Grands Travaux. There are, I think, three especially striking things about this gluttony for big buildings. First, for all the new talk of decentralization under the Socialists, the capital got the most money and the grandest projects. Second, and more tellingly, the buildings erected—the arch, the conservatory, the Grand Louvre, the opera house—were all monuments to the largely exhausted arts of the old culture.≥Ω And third, these structures were all remakes of institutions that had been founded or had flourished at moments of French triumphal power, either in Europe or the colonies. In the postcolonial era, they serve as display cases for accumulated cultural capital. In 1995, with a new president of the Republic, and with his building work largely finished, Biasini left government service for the last time. He had completed the voyage that is the subtitle of his autobiography, From Africa to the Louvre. ‘‘And now, well now,’’ he concluded his memoirs, ‘‘I can tether my camels.’’∂≠

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CHAPTER THREE

I

Combating Guerilla Ethnology

n the last hectic food-buying weeks of 1980, an advertisement with an unusual marketing pitch for Roquefort cheese appeared on bus shelters all over Paris. The ad urged people to eat this delicious product of the Southwest not because it was good, nor because it was the season of the Christmas-New Year grande-bou√e. Roquefort belonged on the table, according to the ‘‘pub,’’ because it was part of the national heritage (patrimoine national). To adapt an old aphorism, we see here the tribute that hype pays to history, for December 1980 was the dénouement of the Year of the Heritage. At the end of thirty years of brilliant economic growth (1944–74), France had been transformed into a modern, heavily urbanized, and technologically sophisticated society. This ‘‘New French Revolution’’ came to an end not with another Thermidor—General de Gaulle had already supplied that episode—but with economic depression. And then many in France could pause and take stock of what they had gained and to assess ‘‘the world we have lost.’’ As prosperous urbanites fixed up their country homes, or as the less prosperous city people stayed with relatives in the provinces, they could not but see and feel the erosion-unto-death of nineteenth-century rural France. Leaking through the closed shutters of the mas, the bastide, and country café, the blue-gray shadows of Paris television performed a nightly dance of death in the deserted village street. Young people were leaving the villages in such numbers that only older people—and not many of them—were to be seen in village stores, on the streets, or at the Sunday morning markets. In the 1970s, the cry went up that the French heritage (patrimoine) was in danger. The patrimoine had to be saved. Saved from what, for what? From neglect and decay? From real estate speculators? From Americanization? From oblivion? These were all certainly growing concerns in the postwar decades. But the answer of the government of President Giscard d’Estaing was the most interesting reason: From the leftists. And for the social order. Let us look at the state’s activities to ‘‘save’’ the cultural heritage of France and its regions in the late 1970s. The politics of heritage culminated in the elaborate campaign in the Année du Patrimoine of 1980 to sensitize

the French people not to their disappearing legacies—they were much troubled by this already—but to the strategy of the government of President Giscard d’Estaing and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac to impose a conservative reading of those heritages (they always used the singular, patrimoine). Cultural anthropology, since the end of the colonial empire a field in crisis in France, grasped for the national heritage as drowning people reach for a life ring tossed down to them in the boiling sea. In the course of this decade the national reassessment of urban and industrial growth took several forms. Publishers flooded the magazines and bookstores with a wave of books and articles by threatened literary intellectuals about the evils of modern technology. Jacques Ellul, José Bové’s mentor in Bordeaux, was the best known antitechnology theorist at the time. Speculating about the social price of modernization and the new love of the old past troubled the souls of growth-weary citizens. The government of President Giscard d’Estaing and his prime ministers, Jacques Chirac (1974–76) and Raymond Barre (1976–81), seemed unable to do anything to mitigate the crisis in the nation’s new modernized economy, nor, for that matter, to stop France’s decline as a world power. The more reason for o≈cial France to join the celebration of Old France, of the patrimoine national. The word ‘‘patrimoine’’ originally meant—and still does mean— the legacy that a family leaves to the next generation. Houses, investments, furniture, jewelry, and the family name, for example, are all part of the heritage that parents hand down to their children. But increasingly in the postwar years we see references to the heritage of the nation, meaning in the first instance, the treasures of France embodied in ancient chateaux, churches, museums, and other such structures of ‘‘old stones.’’ The idea of a national heritage grew slowly in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, the Inventaire, in e√ect a great doomsday book of French national treasures, was launched only in 1964 when the minister of cultural a√airs André Malraux realized that the state did not know with any precision what it possessed. Before that moment, France did not have an up-to-date unified accounting of what it owned in the way of buildings, monuments, valued documents, and art treasures. But the word ‘‘patrimoine’’ was not much applied to this project to inventory the state’s valuables. Only in 1978 did the Giscardian government create within the culture ministry an o≈ce of the patrimoine culturel. In 1980 the agency was 84

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supplemented by an o≈ce for the patrimoine ethnologique. Nostalgia with a budget line? Hardly. Political Sciences

The government wanted to take the regionalist cause away from the new going-to-the-people of the radical populists infiltrating the French countryside in the late 1960s and the 1970s. But the grassroots trend was strong. It could not just be dismissed as leftist mischief making. Early in 1973 the minister of cultural a√airs had dismissed Louis Balsan from his post as conservateur des arts et antiquités in the Aveyron, where Larzac is located. The minister’s letter justified the firing because of M. Balsan’s ‘‘repeated public declarations on the question of the [military] camp at Larzac.’’∞ In other words Balsan had put his capital as protector of the regional patrimoine on the line for the Peasants of Larzac. The ‘‘termination of his mission,’’ in the language of French administration, aroused disquiet in both ministry and academic circles. But the government’s just reacting to events would not work. O≈cial France needed to sponsor and fund its own safer vision of regionalism and heritages. For this, the help of the keepers of the secrets of regionalism, the ethnologists, was essential. Since his return from New York at the end of the war, Claude Lévi-Strauss had used his great influence in the field variously called social anthropology or ethnology to make kinship studies central in the discipline. In the social sciences, ethnologists were the specialists on questions of inheritance, family legacies, and cultural continuity. They did fieldwork in culturally circumscribed areas, usually in the countryside. Ethnology seemed the discipline most suited to deal with the heritage of the regions of France. As researchers who shared the lives of those they studied, they were good at acquiring what Cli√ord Geertz called local knowledge.≤ And it is important to keep in mind that in France social scientists are civil servants. The demand for their work comes from the state.≥ The academy, in turn, wanted more posts, more funding, and more research opportunities. Crippled by the crisis of knowledge set o√ by decolonization, gate keepers of the disciplines needed the state’s help to create a new postcolonial social science. As scientists, they felt that they could sup with the devil (the Giscard government) at the village Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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café, without becoming his disciples. We have now to follow the paths of two projects—that of the disciplines trying to renew themselves and that of an astute government trying to pacify the countryside—as they cross and recross each other to make one tight network to contain the patrimoine. The first crisis to get the president’s attention occurred in the field of archaeology.∂ In curious ways digging great holes in search of traces of older civilizations has always been a highly political activity.∑ Current violent struggles over holy sites in Jerusalem, in Hindu and Muslim India, exYugoslavia, or slave and Amerindian graveyards in the United States today make the point. In the nineteenth century, the historian Guizot understood that ‘‘history is written on building stones,’’ and I would add that this is even more so with the recently unearthed ones. One widespread archaeological project of the golden age of West European nationalism in the century before World War I was to find traces of a lost past—understood always as the national past—which linked the current nation to the grandeur of the classical world, that is, usually with Republican or Imperial Rome. After the French conquest in 1830, a particularity of the archaeology of Algeria allows us to further nuance this observation. Archaeology was not a profession in the nineteenth century. It was rarely taught as such in universities. Enthusiastic amateurs did most of the prospecting, and lacking graduate students, poor local peasants did the actual digging. So it is not surprising to learn that French army o≈cers did the chief archaeological investigations in nineteenth-century Algeria. Some found it a welcome alternative to playing cards and drinking every evening in the o≈cers’ club. The hunt for ancient sites allowed them to use their often well-educated brains a bit. And it made for a nice change from pacifying the backcountry. In 1844 Governor General Bugeaud, suppressor of metropolitan revolutions and of resistance in Algeria, issued a circulaire to the Army of Africa requesting his o≈cers to note carefully Roman roads, ruins, military markers, and monuments to serve as the basis of a future ‘‘definitive geography of Roman Africa.’’ There was always a tension between the army corps of engineers who found old Roman sites often ideal for putting up modern military structures and the more historically minded o≈cers with a real interest in preserving ancient ruins. JeanLuc Carbuccia, colonel of the Foreign Legion, and Captain Adolphe Edwige Alphonse Delamare, captain of artillery and Polytechnician, 86

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were such scholarly soldiers. In the mid-decades of the century, they did especially distinguished archaeological prospecting and excavating while stationed in Algeria. But like Bugeaud, they were interested only in Roman traces. They were searching for the French patrimoine in the ruins of ancient Roman settlements. They charted the a≈nities between the ancient empire and their own in these sites. The past of the peoples of Algeria, certainly descendents of those ruled by Rome, but in terms of contemporary identity Muslims, Arabs, Berbers—and in any case conquered people—was of no interest.∏ When ten megalithic tombs were discovered not far from Algiers, the Académie des Inscriptions immediately classed them as Gallic in origin, most likely Druid monuments. They were very much like those found in southwestern France, in the Aveyron. Since neither the Moors nor the Arabs left such traces (to be understood: were incapable of such stonework), the communication in the bulletin of the académie continued, these might well be Gallo-Roman sites. That would mean, as Monique Dondin-Payre has remarked, that the ancestors of the contemporary French were already settled in Algeria long before the mid-nineteenth-century (re)conquest. And if that were so, French rule over Algeria was not an invasion and occupation, but simply the continuation of an interrupted tradition. The ‘‘absurdity,’’ to use Dondin-Payre’s word, of the doctrine of Gallic origins was very soon evidenced by reports of such megaliths coming in from all over Europe and other parts of Africa. Everyone had built them. But historical mislabeling on this scale usually has a deeper social or political cause. Looking for Gallic traces in ancient North Africa was a little bit about Algeria, but much more about France. We can better understand this colonial event in the context of the fierce nineteenth-century metropolitan debates over the nation’s Celtic, or Roman, or Frankish origins. And every hole dug to find old ruins since mid-century may be suspected of holding some findings that tell a group’s story to contemporaries the way the diggers might want it told. That archaeology can be a highly exact science only increases the stakes. But it does not make the discipline value-free. Jacques Soustelle—whose academic specialty was the archaeology of extinct South American civilizations, and in his political role was de Gaulle’s man in Algeria—was the perfect person to fight to save archaeology from the challenges of decolonization.π A distinguished social scientist, he was also a Gaullist of the first hour. In the years Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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1955–56 he had served in the government of Pierre Mendès-France as governor general of Algeria. After a spell as President de Gaulle’s minister of information, in 1959 he accepted a special o≈ce as minister ‘‘chargé du Sahara, des dom et tom et des A√aires Atomiques.’’ The Sahara, overseas France, and atomic energy—what a curious mix! De Gaulle and the then prime minister Debré had chosen Soustelle to manage the conflicts in Algeria, among other reasons, because he was an anthropologist-archaeologist with experience and proven empathy for indigenous peoples. But Soustelle remained at his post even after the main work of governing in Algeria became one of using the state’s terror against the rebels. He was also charged with holding onto the petroleum just discovered in the Sahara, no matter the political resolution of the fighting. He broke with his comrades by insisting on keeping Algérie française by any means, when the Gaullists were ready to move on. In the early 1960s Giscard d’Estaing, too, had wanted to keep control of Algeria. The later good rapport between the two may have begun in those tense days. In the mid-1970s Soustelle sat in the National Assembly as a député from the Rhone, which was by this time the heartland of new-old Occitanie. On 30 September 1974, Soustelle obtained an audience with Giscard d’Estaing, now president, to discuss, as he characterized the meeting afterward, ‘‘problems in the social sciences.’’ Giscard showed interest. The president had ‘‘manifested the concern that the government should have for the continued progress of research in French archaeology and anthropology.’’ Giscard, the scion of a family that had made its wealth in colonial investments, did manifest a certain paternalistic sensitivity to problems made for France by the end of the colonial empire. A Parisian technocrat with a suspect aristocratic ‘‘d’ ’’ in his name, during the election campaign a few months before he had tried a bit to soften his somewhat forbidding image by dinning with simple working-class families in their homes. He appeared (on camera) in a sweater, playing the accordion, and even put on wooden shoes for the photographers.∫ Perhaps his conversation with Soustelle reminded Giscard to fulfill other social obligations. At any rate, two months after he saw Soustelle, at six o’clock on Christmas morning, Giscard’s driver picked up three African sewer workers, two from Mali and one from Senegal, at their residence for immigrant workers to take them to the Élysée Palace for breakfast ‘‘tête à tête’’ with the president. The workers wore 88

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their red day-glo rubberized work jackets. After a breakfast of restrained conversation—they told the president something of their work; he listened—he presented each with a turkey and a bottle of Champagne. One of the Maliens, a Muslim, turned down the wine. Giscard then conducted them to the front steps and the waiting photographer. The picture of the president’s breakfast appeared in the evening papers.Ω He later implemented a policy of expelling all North African and African legal foreign residents. Just five days after his 30 September interview with the president, Jacques Chirac, prime minister and major political heir of the Gaullist legacy, took Soustelle onto his personal sta√ with wide powers to assure the cooperation of all agencies of the state in making a study of the needs of these sciences humaines, and of proposing remedies. This was not the first attempt to salvage archaeological research in France. A few years before, in 1968 in fact, Henri Seyrig, head of national museums, had proposed some measures. But like too many studies by knowledgeable people commissioned by French governments, Seyrig’s suggestions bore no fruit.∞≠ Because of the political moment, Soustelle’s did. Soustelle wrote his report in a dry and professorial language. Throughout he limited himself to only a few lines of advocacy—which stood out the more, because of the style of the rest of the text—to show how the government would benefit directly if it increased support of his discipline. So, beginning in the scholarly vein, he pointed out that for all the years of scholarship about other societies around the world, ‘‘Much neglected up to now, the ethnography of our own country remains to be done’’ (15). ‘‘Why do we know more, scientifically speaking, about African peasants than of those living near Toulouse?’’ (18; see also 69 hammering the same point). But lots of things haven’t been studied, so why should the government put money into aiding people who collect old broken pots or film quaint ceremonies? Because, he argued, any state e√ort at regional development that ignores local ethnographic factors ‘‘would run the risk of provoking [the thing notsaid—had provoked in Larzac, for example] grave [social] tensions.’’ Then, too, there were the new immigrants flooding into France: ‘‘Where are the researchers, especially Arab and Berber speakers, where are the scholars who have studied Islam who might act as advisers to [qui pourraient conseiller] the French authorities?’’ (18–19). Soustelle followed with a detailed, well-informed, clear, adminCombating Guerilla Ethnology

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istrative and budgetary elaboration. With this he both validated his case to the ‘‘hard-headed’’ politicians by addressing them in their own fiscal patois, and at the same time demonstrating that he, the exminister, Jacques Soustelle, knew how to use the state’s funds wisely (21–65). He brought the scholarly and the political together nicely: ‘‘The French ethnology of today ought to be thought about in conjunction with the new widespread and growing awareness of local cultural identities. Economic and administrative regionalism, the rebirth of local languages, as well as wide public interest in the development of our archaeological heritage all point in the same direction. So, the anthropology of France [domaine français] has a vast task before it’’ (69). What, then, was to be done now by the state? Having just made a strong case for the usefulness to the authorities of good anthropological knowledge, Soustelle paradoxically insists on the highest scientific objectivity and rigor: ‘‘These sciences, the human sciences in general, will fall into discredit if we allow them to sink into sloppiness, amateurism, or the spirit of partisanship. All possible means must be employed to insure serious scientific oversight on research done both abroad as well as here in France’’ (102). Soustelle wanted several things: He recommended that funds be made available immediately for pressing projects of salvage archaeology and anthropology, such as when a builder discovers an ancient site while digging a new building’s foundation and needs to complete his building against a contracted deadline. He wanted more positions created and more institutions founded, especially ones that interfaced with the state and the academy. He wished to rationalize the administrative and academic centers concerned with these disciplines. Finally, he proposed divers improvements, like forging better links to foreign researchers, creating hospitable institutions to receive visiting foreign colleagues, and an information campaign among the researchers to make them aware of foundations and other private funding sources. (104–5) Soustelle submitted his proposals to Prime Minister Chirac and the president in 1975. The government immediately granted the recommendation closest to Soustelle’s heart. It increased the funding for the o≈ce of historical monuments by 40 percent. Then, in 1979, the department’s budget rose from 264 million francs to 400 million. And 90

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Soustelle got the promise that archaeological work and care for monuments would continue being funded at this new high level for five more years.∞∞ Moreover, looking at the larger picture, the government undertook its own initiatives beyond what Soustelle had requested. ‘‘With certain concrete measures in behalf of the arts craftspeople, Culture Minister Lecat added his ministry’s support to Valérie Giscard d’Estaing’s policy of revalorizing manual labor. Echoing the President’s address on regional development (given at Vichy on 6 December 1978), [Lecat] announced that a ‘rural quarter,’ that is, 25 percent of the ministry’s budget for cultural action in the regions, will be reserved for initiatives aimed at developing this ‘cultural third world’ which is rural France’’ (acp, 13 March 1979).∞≤ In August 1978, at their last meeting of the summer, the council of ministers agreed to create a major new o≈ce of the cultural heritage of France (Direction du Patrimoine). It was charged with overseeing all archaeological work in France, as well as historical monuments and national palaces.∞≥ Since at that time neither wandering Germanic tribes nor invading Muslim troops posed any serious threat to the current French state, it isn’t clear why Prime Minister Chirac chose so quickly to fund this part of Soustelle’s request. Certainly, the act was a gesture of solidarity from one Gaullist to another, a relatively underemployed one. But also, Premier Chirac realized that archaeology was also one of the contemporary political sciences. Soustelle had saved archaeology, his first love, but there was nothing yet for the study of the living and the struggling, nothing for the anthropology and ethnology of France. ‘‘Emergency Ethnology’’ against ‘‘Guerilla Ethnology’’

What Jacques Soustelle accomplished for his interests by formulating a discourse intertwining the needs of science with those of the embattled government gave other cultural researchers ideas. To begin building interest in his area, the regions of France, Isac Chiva, assistant director of Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratory of Social Anthropology in the Collège de France, quickly organized conferences in the provinces on the French ethnology of the provinces. The first one was entitled ‘‘The Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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Regions of France.’’ These meetings had two purposes. One was to show how much local knowledge ethnologists had of unruly provincial France, as well as how much there was still to do in regional studies. Second, the conferences were implicitly a criticism of the immobility of the museum of popular arts and traditions.∞∂ Chiva then sent Jack Ligot, research director of the Ministry of Culture and of Communication, some of his own thoughts on adding an additional bureau to the new o≈ce of the patrimoine, this one dedicated exclusively to overseeing the French ethnological heritage. Since, as we saw, the president and the culture minister had already been thinking about doing something to end the ‘‘third world’’ status of great areas of rural France, Chiva’s initiative was not unwelcome. Within the ministry, Jacques Rigaud, who headed the economics desk, strongly supported Chiva’s proposal.∞∑ Ligot responded by asking Chiva, as Soustelle had been asked, to participate in a study commission on the question. On the advice of Ligot, and at the behest of President Giscard d’Estaing, Minister of Culture Jean-Philippe Lecat created such a group.∞∏ Although Chiva and Lévi-Strauss were the prime academic movers supporting the creation of some such o≈ce within the new heritage department, there was never any question during the whole of the proceedings that important state questions were at issue. Soustelle was an old companion of Gaullism; he could be trusted. And although Lévi-Strauss had worked well with de Gaulle when he sta√ed the French cultural service in New York, as a professor at the Collège de France he possessed a certain amount of independence from political pressures. Lecat appointed someone close to the concerns of the president, Redjem Benzaïd, inspector general of finances, and later in his career head of the Institut du Monde Arabe, to chair the inquiry. The major players on questions of French culture were invited to become members. Representatives of the important divisions for music and dance in the culture ministry participated, as did the director of the (largely fine arts) Musées de France, as well as heads of regional and ecomuseums, and the folklore museum, the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (matp) in Paris. Important academics in the fields of peasant and popular culture studies also took part.∞π But why not just confer the task of reorganizing French ethnological studies to the folklore museum just a few years ago installed in a building, designed by a student of Le Corbusier, in the Bois de 92

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Boulogne? One wing housed France’s biggest cnrs ethnological research center. Why not shake it out of its apparent lethargy? It was just the standing of the matp in the museum world and in ethnological research that stood in the way of the new academic-government coalition. The matp had been established to inform urbanites of the lives of their ancestors in the country. In the postwar years the museum sta√ rarely ventured into the countryside. It was a very Parisian institution.∞∫ The exhibitions of rural life established by its first director Georges-Henri Rivière, whose own thinking had been shaped by the experience of the Popular Front of the mid-1930s, had no ‘‘handle’’ for the soft counterinsurgency that the Giscard government had in mind.∞Ω From the ethnologists’ point of view, even if the research center were expanded, it could not supply the number of posts needed. And both Lévi-Strauss and the politicians wanted to create a new organization which they could shape to their di√erent present purposes. The ethnology task force started its work in October 1978. As it happened, early that month, after a relatively quiet period, the Peasants of Larzac had once more begun to escalate their actions. First, fifteen peasants staged a four-day fast in the cathedral of Rodez. In other towns in France, and in other countries—Cologne, Koblenz, and Rome—sympathizers fasted with the people in Rodez. Should events in Rodez have been too far away to be noticed in the capital, a group of nine people, four of them from Larzac, fasted also for four days in the Église de Saint-Séverin in the Latin Quarter, just across the Seine from Notre Dame de Paris. Militants from Larzac released ten sheep in the lobby of the Ministry of Agriculture. Then back on the plateau, peasants from all over the département driving one hundred and fifty tractors trespassed on army-owned farms and began to prepare the soil for winter planting. The harvest, they promised, would go to groups fighting the (French) international commerce in weapons and the world arms race. Five thousand people came to the Larzac to support the action. The harvest of 1974 had been dedicated to the Third World. Now in 1978 the peasants promised some of the profits from the coming harvest to workers in Millau, who in reaction to the Henfer company’s firing of forty-seven of their number occupied their factory. President Giscard d’Estaing, a man claiming strong roots in the Auvergne, prudently canceled his planned visit to Rodez.≤≠ In the first hours of the committee’s work members received a most Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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curious framing paper by Hugues de Varine of the culture ministry. Entitled ‘‘La Place des cultures populaires dans la politique nationale d’action culturelle,’’ the paper by de Varine pointed out reasonably enough that ‘‘work with popular cultures does not readily fit into any institutional structure, any scientific framework, or any funding policy.’’ Certainly a correct starting point; popular and regional cultures, as distinct from the national culture, were indeed diverse and unique. Presumably, their specificities were what needed to be saved. But de Varine proposed that ‘‘in the face of the manifest institutional void, it would seem necessary to integrate the popular cultures within the national cultural policy by creating a policy framework which contained them both.’’ An o≈ce for popular cultures was needed to ‘‘develop the norms and the rules . . . to regulate in uniform fashion the nation-wide e√ort and to finance projects to save what could be saved in the sectors undergoing rapid transformation.’’ Above all, activities bearing on the regional and popular cultural heritages—especially ‘‘sur la terrain’’—needed ‘‘organizers to discipline them’’ [animateurs pour l’encadrement].≤∞ The state moving in to take over an incipient voluntary activity was not a new practice. For example, ten years before, in 1968, the Ministry of Cultural A√airs took the direction of the Cinémathèque away from its founder Henri Langlois, and gave it to a safe ministry o≈cial. Ah, once more in this case, the paternalistic French State must save the innocent and restless provincials from their own naïveté and folly. A national commission composed of cultural technocrats will rescue the endangered local and the popular by creating a uniform national policy for their preservation. Specialists on the question will keep people in the provinces on the right track. Once more, it would seem, we see the French State’s centralizing engine slip into automatic drive and begin to flatten everything in its path. But it was not so simple as the commonsense judgments (the doxa) of French national life with which we historians—both foreign and French—try to make our work easier. The two well-known ethnological thinkers who appeared before the panel, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the former head of the museum of popular arts and traditions, Georges-Henri Rivière, both appeared to warn against the dangers of too much control and bureaucratic rigidity. Rivière, who had been one of the pioneers of ecomuseums, wanted the e√orts in the regions to be better appreciated and allowed to continue unencumbered by 94

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administrative handicaps. Clearly, he wanted to protect what he had built from what was being planned to be built. But also, formed intellectually in the Popular Front, he remained a democrat. Perhaps with di√erent worries in mind, Lévi-Strauss agreed that the activities around the patrimoine ethnologique should not be too hemmed in by ‘‘administrative constraints.’’ He did not want to see o≈cial barriers created between the amateurs and the so-called experts working with local heritages. ‘‘The guiding rule should be administrative decentralization,’’ he insisted, adding of course that ‘‘that required a central organ.’’ As regards the salvage metaphor (le sauvetage ethnologique) which informed the committee’s work, he was skeptical about the possibility of fixing clear scientific criteria for what is worth saving and what is not. He preferred paying attention to new cultural inventions and those from the past that were still vital in the lives of people today.≤≤ This last point was not only a statement of a newly emerging paradigm of ethnologic studies, it was equally in line with Chiva’s plans for a present-minded, hands-on agency. It was clear that two di√erent agendas were on the table. But that of the social scientists could only be fulfilled by advancing that of the government. And vice versa. Two other key heavily contested issues surfaced in the course of the inquiry. Early in the commission’s work, B. Jeannot, of the interministerially funded o≈ce of regional culture grants, the Fonds d’Intervention Culturelle (fic), raised the question of saving the nation’s industrial heritage (le patrimoine industriel). This was an old complaint about the biased content of French public memory, which the creation of the Musée National des Arts and Traditions Populaires during the Popular Front of the mid-1930s had specifically set out to address. But very little had followed that first important step. Visitors to the matp in the Bois de Boulogne (usually schoolchildren on a forced march) did not see in the permanent exhibitions much suggesting that France had either industrial workers or specifically urban cultures. Part of the need for the new o≈ce, it was understood on the commission, was that the matp had never been able to fulfill this aspect of its mandate. Jeannot wanted studies of not just the histories of shutdown factories and obsolete processes, but also workers’ memories. He frankly expressed skepticism of both the ‘‘notion of salvage archaeology’’ and the capacity of traditional ethnology ‘‘to deal with the problems of the city and of urban civilization.’’ He had the support Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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of his (heavily academic) subcommittee on the inventaire, education, and research. When he presented his case before the larger panel he received some support there too, especially from de Varine, the research coordinator of the culture ministry. De Varine may have thought Jeannot’s a good idea, or may have seen the opportunity for more research projects coming under his aegis, or both. But the urban and industrial heritage remained clearly far less pressing to the mixed committee of academics and government o≈cials—as the final report shows—than the current worries about the troubles in the regions of France.≤≥ Fleeing the Frame

Chiva and some of the other professional ethnologists on the commission wanted to deal with troubles that came from farther away than Occitania or Brittany. Much like the three thousand repatriated excolonial administrators, many French anthropologists and ethnologists had been put out of work by the end of the colonial empire. The new nations no longer welcomed European field workers inquiring into religious practices, or kinship patterns, or new local power arrangements. Western-educated for the most part, the new national leaders did not want French ethnologists nosing around the old-new postcolonial society, as they had once done to increase colonial knowledge before independence.≤∂ When he became chief of state in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah hung a very large painting in the antechamber of his presidential suite. It depicted, in a great surge of force, a giant Nkrumah breaking the chains of colonialism. The figure was surrounded by dramatic storm clouds and flashes of lightning. At his feet, fleeing toward the edge of the canvas, as if to avoid the storm and the wrath of the emancipator by leaving the frame, were three small figures. One was a pallid white man carrying a briefcase: a capitalist. The second scurried while holding a Bible: a missionary. The third figure, smaller than the other two, but the most important for us, was a man carrying a book. Its title was legible: African Political Systems. He’s the anthropologist.≤∑ And, at least at the beginning, the leaders of the new states preferred the help of economists, agronomists, and engineers to develop their usually patchwork and very fragile societies, as well as, too often unfortunately, the help of military men to train their new armies. 96

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After decolonization, Western businessmen and missionaries quickly learned to conduct their a√airs by other means. But where could the anthropologists go once they left the frame? Following the lead of Soustelle, the social scientists on the Chiva panel tried to employ the government-sponsored new initiative to address the current crisis of employment in their discipline. To increase their leverage, they had made sure to get the Ministry of the Universities to cosponsor the study with the culture ministry. They succeeded. The final report, as we will see, addressed this problem of unemployment in the intellectual labor force by proposing extensive reconversion. This commission, then, was a structured field of contention, in which, because so much was at stake for each participant, everyone tried to take the strongest possible position.≤∏ The government had financial resources, but no academic capital. The ethnologists and museum people managed a great deal of cultural capital, but lacked means and institutions to solve pressing professional problems. In particular, Isac Chiva, the specialist on France and Europe in the division of labor at Lévi-Strauss’s atelier, saw the moment as ripe for the refounding of French ethnological studies with himself as the principal gatekeeper.≤π The activists of the regionalist movements, who were not at the table but very much in the field, claimed—against both conservative politicians and distressed social scientists—large reserves of popular legitimation.≤∫ Within this frame the commission had to find answers to key cultural and political questions. Who would define what was valid in the local heritages? Every aspect of the state—not least the army, the finance ministry, and the president’s o≈ce, as, for example, the movement in the Larzac had shown—touched the popular and local culture. How might new relationships between the edges and the center be worked out? Would the involvement of the local with the national continue to be determined in Paris or, rather, in Larzac, or Arles, or Toulouse, or Rennes, or indeed in Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe or Nouméa, New Caledonia? Not many years before (from 1954 to 1962) this question had been posed in Algeria. There it had been resolved by force. That and other recent independence struggles which had gone against Paris were very much on the minds of both radical regionalists and the policymakers planning a new ethnological policy for France. Not that anyone (at least anyone in government) could even imagine the amputation of any of the regions contained in the hexagon. But in Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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the late 1970s the deciders of France had recognized that the forces for local self-determination were real, popular, and irresistible.≤Ω Employing the arguments and even the wording of Isac Chiva’s draft text of February, the committee submitted its final report to the government in September 1979.≥≠ The findings skillfully plotted a curve which passed through the di√erent interests represented on the panel. With each player guaranteed a bit of turf in the field, the conservative government could exercise its hegemonic project to take away regionalism and the discourse of a capitalist-caused world-we-havelost from the left.≥∞ The preface of the report promised the government a set of proposals which would be spelled out in the body of the report for carrying out ‘‘an emergency ethnology.’’ To help lay readers understand the scope of the impending cultural tragedy, the report began by evoking just a few dramatic instances of how historic France was disappearing. The fourteen thousand pieces of country furniture carefully inventoried by field researchers from Georges-Henri Rivière’s folklore museum between 1941 and 1946 had been scattered and sold o√, and with their disappearance was lost much evidence of regional material culture. A clever first point: antique furniture is highly valued in France. The loss of so much of this part of the patrimoine would certainly have made the grand bourgeois readers of the report in Giscard’s government shiver. There remained scant systematic knowledge of the life and way of working of the nineteenth-century silk workers, the Canuts, of Lyon. The transnational society of semi-nomadic fisherfolk of the South was gone. From the early nineteenth century, this itinerant community of mixed populations, but with a shared fisherculture, had moved along the Mediterranean littoral from Spain to France and then Italy, and back again, following the movements of the schools of fish. This unique community was now disbanded. The accumulated knowledge of the medicinal qualities of local plants all over France was being lost. Cutting down the hedges in Brittany and Normandy to permit the use of modern farm machines had destroyed historic ecologies. And, in general, the conservationist wisdom of our ancestors everywhere in France was being lost with the forced modernization of the countryside. But amidst the ruins of the deserted villages, the authors of the report saw some signs for hope. The depopulation of the countryside was stimulating the birth of a new awareness among the remaining 98

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provincial population, better educated and better connected to the outside world. In the light both of the urgency of the task and the growing national awareness of the need for action, the Chiva committee addressed two top issues: immediately putting salvage ethnology to work, and addressing this new coming to consciousness of the people of some of the regions. For this second concern, the reporters took care to protect themselves from accusations of political partisanship: any specifically political projects or consequences, the report insisted, that might follow from findings about a rising regional consciousness—how could they not? —went beyond the scope of work of scientific researchers. The project of the academics converged most clearly with that of the politicians in setting as a major goal of future work the stopping of what the report termed ‘‘the pseudo-scientific illusion of a spontaneous ethnology that individuals and groups might carry out on themselves by themselves.’’ Certainly, as Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, and their coauthors have demonstrated, a lot of ‘‘revived’’ nationalism or regionalism deployed invented traditions. But since traditions qualifying to their heritors as authentic were also at one time invented, or deliberately frozen and canonized as the tradition, the source of concern for what the report calls ‘‘guerilla ethnology’’ [l’ethnologie sauvage] needs elucidation.≥≤ The phrase is richly overdetermined. A part of what was meant here was the way the regionalist intellectuals of the 1970s were loudly indicting the state’s acts of historical and present-day oppression—for example, the Albigensian Crusade, the diminution of local languages as in the Southwest and local religious usages as in Brittany, the suppression of Corsican liberties, and the plan to extend the military base at Larzac. But ‘‘guerilla ethnology’’ does not refer to a rival body of ‘‘scientific’’ theory. Rather the phrase devalues an activity by regionalist political actors which the ‘‘real’’ scientists find both occupationally and politically unacceptable. And so it means that ethnological studies should be left to scientifically trained and politically nonpartisan specialists, educated and sent from Paris, of course. Political partisanship in the social sciences, as we know, is always the work of others, never us. The former investigators of colonial cultures and their students waited in the wings to do it right. The Chiva commission collected data on whether there were Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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enough professional ethnologists currently working in France to do the work needing to be done in the regions of France. A questionnaire sent to 400 institutions and 350 individuals by the commission’s sta√ yielded responses which painted a bleak picture of a poorly trained sta√ inadequate to the work that the new ethnological initiative called forth. The survey revealed too many people with inadequate or improper training working at cross-purposes. In other cases, it found individuals doing the same work as others, or similar work, but each unaware of the other’s project. Not only was there duplication, but the contrary was also true. Whole areas and important topics were being ignored. There were relatively few trained ethnologists working at posts in their discipline. Of the seventy university teachers with ethnological training who sent in answers, most held appointments in other social science disciplines. One even worked as a pharmacologist. Only about fifteen taught the ethnology of France, ‘‘although by their own admission, their specialties were societies outside of France’’ (19). To this poor showing in higher education, the reporters could add only a little more than twenty museum curators working on French ethnology and folklore. Everywhere, but especially in Alsace and Lorraine in the east, Brittany in the west, and the Midi, local amateur societies were doing work which ran the gamut from serious weekend and summer research to work by the vast number of hobbyists of the archaic. And then, there were the underutilized talents: ‘‘about fifty ethnologists, for the most part young, working under precarious conditions of employment, with no formal job titles in their organizations.’’ (19). In the past ten years, the national research foundation, the cnrs, had been able to o√er only a total of eight posts to ethnologists specializing on metropolitan France (32). As to topics which interested the respondents to the questionnaire, local material culture (housing, tools, costumes) led the list, followed by the study of the social system (kinship, sociability, the history of local power and authority) and then the symbolic system (music, local religious and ritual practices, oral traditions). The authors of the report were disappointed in not finding much interest expressed in new cultural invention, ‘‘the modern, or just emerging heritage.’’ Most investigators reported studying rural or preindustrial cultures. No one was studying urban artisans, workers, or industrial activities, nor, ‘‘in general any social and cultural forms of urban life.’’ (22). The authors 100

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also found no interest in the study of ‘‘problems of ethnicity,’’ ‘‘collective identity,’’ or ‘‘cultural pluralism.’’ No one was studying community norms of equity and justice, what already in the 1960s E. P. Thompson in Britain had called ‘‘the moral economy’’ of the rural poor. The study of popularly used medical plants and practices had found no students. Nor was anyone investigating local conservation and ecological practices. The report urged that these omissions be made good. The research topics reported currently under way were unevenly distributed geographically as well. Of the 450 ongoing projects inventoried in 1979, 120 concentrated on the Midi (the Pyrenees, the Côte d’Azur, and Corsica), 50 on the valley of the Rhone and the Maritime Alps , fewer than 60 on the West (Brittany, Normandy, the Loire), only about 30 on Lorraine, Alsace, and Franche-Comté, 20 on the Paris area, and a mere 60 on the vast region of the Center, encompassing the Auvergne, Poitou-Charentes, the Limousin, and Burgundy. ‘‘Here too, we see a marked research interest in Southern France [the country of the Occitan movement], while the North, the Center, and the West of France are relatively ignored [déserté]’’ (23). The most critical deficiency noted, however, was the lack of teaching posts and research aids for ethnology. There was no professorial chair anywhere in France dedicated to the study of ethnology of metropolitan France. And only about a dozen institutions of higher learning in the whole country even o√ered programs of study on the subject. Too much of the research that was accomplished remained, for all practical purposes, invisible. In the last five years students had written literally hundreds of masters and doctoral theses on ethnological topics, but had done so in programs or in ways not easily accessible by other interested researchers. Most of the work had not even been published (24–25). Just a few weeks after the ethnologists had delivered their report to President Giscard, the Peasants of Larzac o√ered him a reading aid. This time, he was visiting Rodez and, on the 13th of November, dinning with friends at one of the good restaurants in the center of town. Across the street from the restaurant, in the Maison de l’Agriculture, fourteen Peasants were in the second day of a weeklong hunger strike. The Peasants waved their banners and their supporters hooted him when Giscard went in to eat. Once the president was safely at his table, some of the other diners turned their plates upside down as a sign of Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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protest and criticism. This was surely a presidential dinner finishing with antacid pills.≥≥ Stop ‘‘Guerilla Ethnology’’!

Ethnology is a sensitive subject capable of distortion in the wrong hands. It is guided by methods requiring carefully trained field workers. ‘‘So we cannot allow the development of a [competing] guerilla ethnology [ethnologie sauvage]’’ (27). To begin with, we have to get the attention of ‘‘the public.’’ No one knows what ‘‘ethnology’’ is. We have to speak of our work as ‘‘popular arts and traditions,’’ as ‘‘popular cultures,’’ or as the discipline concerned with saving ‘‘the heritage.’’ As it happened, those were often just the words that radical regionalists were using in their e√orts to rally the people to reclaim lost or suppressed local practices of liberty and justice. To fight unscholarly distortions such as these, the Chiva report called for mobilizing the modern electronic and print media in all ways possible to tell the right stories of the present and past of the regions: ‘‘The participation of ethnologists in the preparation of such programs is indispensable for avoiding the clichés of the folkloric and the typical’’ (and the thingnot-said—of leftist regionalists; 28). France: A Place for American Strategic Fieldwork

A striking foreshadowing of this French e√ort to understand and redirect regionalist striving was the research programs sponsored by the United States beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing for at least two decades more, on social stability, the options for counterinsurgency, and breakaway regionalist movements. French Canadian separatists were studied by Project revolt, destabilizing forces in certain rural regions in Colombia by Project simpático, Indian areas of Peru by Operation task. And then there was the most ambitious and best-funded social science grand study ever (at least to that point), called, perhaps to honor the Kennedy moment in the White House, Project camelot. In December 1964 the Special Operations Research O≈ce (soro) of the American University in Washington invited selected anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists to an information meeting. soro had the go-ahead (from the U.S. Army, its sole 102

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client) to plan a large, well-funded social research project on determining ways to assess the risks of ‘‘internal war’’ in ‘‘the developing nations of the world,’’ and to identify a range of means for governments to avoid such domestic instability. The participants were told that the funding would come from the U.S. Army, but that they need not fear political or ideological pressures for certain outcomes on that score. Here was a chance to do Big Social Science. Here was a moment for social science praxis for research directors and their students. And here was an opportunity to profit from the government’s largesse, as the physicists and engineers had been doing for decades.≥∂ Many—overwhelmingly academic liberals—agreed to participate. And if a year later, just as the work was beginning, the scholarly cover on the project had not been blown by an inept and marginal participant who clumsily leaked news of the project to Chilean politicians and so to the Chilean press, it would have continued. But once the news about camelot did get out, the public fuss mobilized liberal congressmen, aroused the jealousy of the State Department, and shocked academic colleagues. Before the end of 1965 the project was canceled. But with better care taken for secrecy and discretion— apparently the main lesson learned from the fiasco—U.S. government agencies continued to sponsor this kind of research well into the 1970s, and possibly after. Ironically, Chile, then under the moderate Frei government, was not targeted for pressing research by the Army and the American University planners of Project camelot. But Latin American nations did lead the list of places targeted for study: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela. In the Middle East, research focused on Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand were the sensitive states of the Far East. In a final category, ‘‘Other Countries,’’ wonderful to relate, we find together France, Greece, and Nigeria. This was Gaullist France, post–Algerian War France! Probably France’s having one of the biggest communist parties in the free world, together with the recent insurrection of the military over France’s withdrawal from Algeria, won it that special place on the list as the only advanced European country needing watching. As France ‘‘studied’’ its own regions and the newly independent colonies, U.S. intelligence o≈cers wanted in turn to keep a wary eye on France. Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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The little fish are eaten by the bigger ones, which are devoured by the yet bigger fish, which . . . Irving Louis Horowitz characterizes the larger issue at stake in o≈cial descriptions of the work being planned as one of legitimacy. That is, whether such in-country e√orts represent ‘‘ethnography or espionage.’’ In a comfortingly ambiguous manner, the government’s document containing the list of countries needing surveillance speaks of both ‘‘knowledge and understanding’’ and ‘‘relevance of selected countries to U.S. foreign policy interests.’’≥∑ If we control for the di√ering public roles of the state in France and the United States when launching projects like this—and the political status of the places investigated—we have parallel and instructive stories. It is unlikely that the United States figured on any French list of nations needing surveillance, but in France certain regions did. The policy convergence was not extraordinary. The decolonization of the 1960s threatened to upset the old balances of power, and it was understood by sophisticated policymakers everywhere as domestically infectious. In France there was a widespread suspicion that the Algerian troops who had fought in Indochina, especially those who had been prisoners of war, returned home infected with their captors’ nationalist and socialist ideas.≥∏ In the twenty years encompassing the 1960s and the 1970s, winning hearts and minds rose to become the key weapon in pacifying disordered societies at home and abroad. As centralization and globalization grew in the metropoles, centrifugal forces working at the edges gained strength against them. The Soviet Union exploded in 1989, remember, not for reasons of economic or social conflict. It blew into the pieces of former ‘‘soviet republics’’ and regional minorities. With so many trained ethnologists ‘‘who find themselves obliged to reconvert [from studying societies in the colonies]’’ there were enough good people for new tasks. There is much to be gained ‘‘by refocusing on the French field.’’ Leading researchers (cnrs) who have up to now specialized on ‘‘extra European civilizations’’ are becoming increasingly aware of the need to reorient the discipline. We should facilitate ‘‘intensive retraining programs’’ [stages] as well as provide funding for continuing education (33). But most immediately important for the success of an ‘‘emergency ethnology’’ is the ethnologists’ ‘‘establishing new relationships within the groups with whom they work.’’ ‘‘Aid to the new ethnological project would include activities, which, although 104

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not in themselves exclusively scientific, aimed at conserving and valorizing an ethnological heritage,’’ which these new kinds of relationships make possible. Appropriately, the new sta√ would be called ‘‘ethnology councilors’’ [conseillers pour l’ethnologie]: One can very well imagine the profile of an ethnologist-as-educator and even an ethnologist-as-animator. It was to be someone whose idea of research implies the restitution of cultural objects, of wellconsidered interventions in local and regional cultural activities, and of frank openness to the projects originating from the local population when ordinary people seek new uses for the data they have gathered collectively. Especially in the regions where the ‘‘current quest for identity is most militant [très vive], it is this strategy that will empower us to refute with their own weapons [de soimême] these rampaging regionalists with their guerrilla ethnology, [these agitators] who contest serious ethnologic research by using their local knowledge to fabricate unfounded charges of the theft of the regional heritage. (39) Local amateurs should be courted for their support. Their collaboration with us would ease ‘‘resolving the sometimes delicate problems that crop up in the course of ethnological fieldwork’’ (51). ‘‘Because of the widespread passion for ethnology today,’’ the final report continued, we often see a certain contradiction between ethical, ideological, and even political demands and motives which translate local initiatives to get back their disappearing culture and the minimal obligations of science: quality control of the research, guarantees of the conservation and analyses of cultural objects and documents, and the inalienability of collections. It would be simpler for a group not directly tied to the State to see to it that these obligations are honored, as well as to coordinate those complicated tasks that can be at the same time scientific, cultural, and administrative which need local participation, need a populist echo. In particular, such a non-State organ would be in a better position to organize a rapid intervention on its own to prevent some cultural harm, since it could count on the active support of local people. (51) Gramsci himself could not have better described the role that French political leaders saw for their organic intellectuals in the guerCombating Guerilla Ethnology

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illa warfare of cultural politics in the French regions of the 1970s. While commonly dismissing Marxism as so much bad political rhetoric, the decision makers of France were intelligent enough to appropriate its best ideas. The commissioners even envisioned organizing a kind of ‘‘democratic centralism.’’ Amateurs would work with trained ethnologists on the ground. These ‘‘cells’’ [sic] would work out procedures to organize the research and intervention, to train and control [encadrer] qualified workers (52). Six regional centers were targeted for immediate attention: the Midi pyrénéen, Provence, Brittany, the Rhône-Alpes region, Alsace, and Franche-Comté. Brittany, in the northwest, had perhaps the most powerful leftist regionalist movement in France. The advocates of the recognition of an Occitan identity in the Midi (the Southwest, Provence, and the Southeast) were not far behind the Bretons. Alsace, whose citizens had had to change their passports five times in the past hundred years, in 1944 once more had become French territory. How could it not have regional identity problems? And the Franche-Comté, once belonging to the House of Savoy, had been French for only about a hundred years. Interestingly, Corsica was not on the list. It has always been seen as a special region, with unique problems, an island more often seen as the concern of the national police than of cultural anthropologists. Nor, despite the often violent militancy of Corsican nationalists, is there any trace of any positive e√orts on their part, nor that of the government, to save the historic culture of the island.≥π In each region, one of the professionals would serve as a ‘‘permanent regional correspondent,’’ reporting to a new o≈ce for the ethnological heritage (Mission du patrimoine ethnologique) within the Ministry of Culture and Communication in Paris. In an unusual concession for a state agency, the Direction was in turn to be overseen by a Conseil du Patrimoine Ethnologique made up of social scientists with positions outside the ministry and cultural administrators. Chiva would take his seat as its first director. On the completion of their work, President Giscard d’Estaing graciously had the members of the commission to dinner at the Élysée Palace. The historian François Furet had also been invited. At table, he launched into an attack on the ethnology project, asserting that historians were fully capable of doing all the scholarship that the ethnologists were claiming as their new field of work. The new initiatives proposed in the report, he argued, were unnecessary. In view of the still unformed state of French domestic ethnological studies, Furet, 106

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then head of the still new and resource-hungry École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, may not have been wrong, at least intellectually. From the time of Marc Bloch’s brilliant treatments of medieval society, the Annales group had always shown an interest in anthropological questions and theory. But saving the discipline of ethnology by putting it in the service of the state’s need to combat cultural dissidents was not the best way to do scholarship. Historians rummaged in archives; ethnologists went into the field and dealt with people. There could have been another way of integrating new ethnological knowledge. The new o≈ce for the patrimoine might have been attached to the folklore museum or its research center. To the distress of that institution’s sta√, too, it was not. The refounding of domestic ethnology as a state project, as outlined in the report of Benzaïd and Chiva, went ahead.≥∫ 1980: The Year of the Heritage

At the same meeting of the Council of Ministers in August 1978 which had created the new o≈ce for the French heritage in the Ministry of Culture, President Giscard d’Estaing announced that 1980 would be the Year of the Heritage. It was for Minister of Culture Jean-Philippe Lecat to launch the discourse and to organize the celebrations.≥Ω Following the example of his new o≈ce for the ethnological heritage, Lecat set up in each region of France a Committee for the Year of the Heritage which included the elected o≈cials, artists, historians, representatives of local folklore associations, and some private individuals. He charged each committee to spell out a year’s program around the regional heritage. He mandated the local groups especially to target young people, to sensitize them to the local heritage. Their involvement, he believed, was key to the continuation of local ways. French radio and television made prime-time listening hours available for programs on the heritage. The electronic media also regularly covered events on news programs. And he requested regional o≈cials to report back at the end of the year what had been accomplished. The collective report of Julien Vincent, prefect of the region Champagne-Ardennes; Maurice Pretoteau, president of the Regional Council of the Marne; Léon Pressouyre, professor at Paris I, conservateur of the cloister of Notre-Dame-en-Vaux, and member of the Economic and Social Committee of Champagne-Ardennes; and FranCombating Guerilla Ethnology

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çois Bourguignon, regional director of cultural a√airs, expressed a certain satisfaction with the year’s activities. But the reporters had eyes only for ‘‘old stones.’’ Pretoteau felt that the architectural heritage of the Marne region had been especially ravaged by history. Eighteenthcentury indi√erence to the treasures of the past, followed by what he termed the vandalism of the revolutionaries of 1789—‘‘The French Revolution had been terrible’’—had ruined much. Continued insensitivity to the destruction of local treasures throughout the nineteenth century had cost the nation more of its architectural treasures. Both World Wars I and II had been fought in the region, producing massive ‘‘collateral damage.’’ The cathedral still showed the scars of the German shelling in the first war. Theft made for more loses. The Marne area was being stripped of its treasures by what Pressouyre aptly called ‘‘elginism,’’ after Lord Elgin who, claiming they needed better protection, had stolen the statues of the Parthenon for display in the British Museum. In the nineteenth century, curators of the Louvre and the Cluny Museums felt no compunction about taking medieval statuary from anywhere in France to ‘‘furnish’’ their sculpture halls. The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Philadelphia and Detroit art museums now show many great pieces once belonging to churches in the Rémoise and Chalonnaise regions. To see fine column statues of the Champagne-Ardennes you have to go to Anvers, or Bern, or Cleveland. But other contributors to the survey were more upbeat. Each in his way invoked the trope of patting on the back the organizers of the regional fete of the heritage (that is, themselves) while decrying the insu≈ciency of sta√ and funds which would have allowed them to do more. Only François Bourguignon said anything about what had been done to benefit the culture of living people. He listed the improvement of local library services, the opening of a little museum dedicated to the treasures of the destroyed Abbaye Saint Remi, an organ festival, concerts of symphonic music by young musicians from around Reims (ninety-five concerts between February 1979 and June 1980), and various collaborations with the Maison de la Culture of Chalon, for example, on the occasion of the Bimillennium of Chalon-sur-Marne, and on an audiovisual presentation on the cathedral. Clearly, most of these e√orts were intended more to attract tourists than to enrich local lives. Bourguignon hints vaguely at a project to compile an almanac of 108

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traditional festivals, but his sentence trails o√ without a conclusion ‘‘. . .’’∂≠ The region was conservative. It was quiet. With no leftist regionalists giving the Marnais bad ideas, there was no great need for ‘‘saving’’ the human heritage here. The distressed old stones needed the help. If anything, the e√orts of the cultural guardians in the three departments of Lower Normandy were even more minimal. They padded their report on their contribution to the special year with extraneous materials, including praise for exhibitions in Paris! What would be the special focus of the regional authorities here? ‘‘The written heritage (archives, libraries, literature . . .).’’ People had already been sensitized to the monuments. Last year, for example, the region celebrated l’Année des Abbayes Normandes. But it was the written word that seemed to fit the salvage paradigm in France of 1980. The Normandy committee for the year of the heritage, for example, contributed heavily to a massive printed edition of the o≈cial seals of the towns of France. The summary of activities in the region sent to the Mission du Patrimoine contained the usual job-well-done macro: everyone had pitched in, everyone had been cooperative, there were lots of posters, brochures, and so on. Ceremonies inaugurating the year were celebrated in several towns in the three departments. A mobile exhibition of twenty panels stopped in thirty villages and towns. No aspect of (high) culture was missed: books, museums, music, theater, archaeology. Especially singled out for praise was a project called (but not explained) ‘‘From reading to writing.’’ In a word, in 1980 this part of Normandy celebrated the high national culture, tried to buttress the endangered print culture, and entertained the tourists. This was a minimal adherence to the goals of the Année du Patrimoine. But here too in Calvados, the Manche, and the Orne, not much revolutionary fervor had manifested itself in the 1970s—or for that matter, since 1789.∂∞ In the course of the Year of the Heritage France celebrated some hundred national rites of the patrimoine. Additionally, the Ministry of Culture gave its imprimatur to five hundred celebrations in the provinces. According to the ministry, these were mostly locally initiated. On the national level the ministry had mounted a large exhibition on the nineteenth-century architectural restorer Viollet-le-Duc. In view of the aesthetic vandalism that he energetically carried out all Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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over France in the nineteenth century, it ill behooved France’s governors to criticize the contemporary radical regionalists for proposing their own interpretations of the great and typical moment of the local heritage. Demolishing the architectural contributions of centuries to leave the essential unified-style building, as Viollet-le-Duc had done with the Cathedral of Vézelay, or re-casting whole towns in one architectural style, as he had done with medieval Carcassonne, falsified history much more than any Occitan stories about the gentle and freedom-loving Cathars. Nor did the inauguration of the king’s bedchamber and the Hall of Mirrors at the Chateau of Versailles in June 1980 strike the right note for the government of a republic. Admittedly, the restoration of these rooms, and, in fact, of the whole chateau, had been the idea, and used the money, not of the French state but of American philanthropists. Rather than revive a heritage, such restorations suggest more the idea of a theme park for conservative tourists. Visitors were o√ered displays of the restored fountains and fireworks. Today we might call the whole e√ort ‘‘Ancien Regime Franceorama.’’ The other arts were equally mired in classicisms: a Monet show in Paris, seventeen concerts of French symphonic music especially organized for the year of the heritage, an exhibition of manuscripts of Gregorian chants, one of Burgundian illuminated texts, a handsome edition of the town seals, a show entitled ‘‘Backstage at the Comédie Française,’’ held in the unlikely venue of the Centre Pompidou, as well as a show on ‘‘Les Métiers de l’Art’’ (work of high aesthetic quality by artisans, like stained-glass makers, organ restorers, muralists) held from November 1980 to March 1981 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The ethnological heritage, a category of the patrimoine established only two years before, although, as the final report put it, ‘‘a theme which we have come to realize is fundamental in the regions,’’ was recognized at the Grand Palais in Paris with a large show organized by the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, ‘‘Hier pour Demain.’’ Yet the curators, Noëlle Gerome and Martine Segalen, in their brief afterword to the exhibition catalogue could only conclude unhelpfully that the way the ‘‘patrimoines ethnographiques’’ are remembered, and how they are expressed in the present and the future, are ‘‘at the heart of a debate in which no social group inside the nation is absent.’’ Certainly the two distinguished anthropologists did not wish to be scorched by the flames of contemporary regionalist identity politics. 110

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But neither in the exhibition nor in their text did they acknowledge that recent immigrant groups, without a Heimat in the provinces of France, were not to be seen at the Grand Palais and were certainly absent from the discussion.∂≤ The visual media were also mobilized. Several shows on the history of photography, two on that of the cinema, and one on the audiovisual heritage which was honored with reruns of tv shows selected from the last thirty years of programming rounded o√ the national (that is Parisian) celebrations. Of the six hundred special cultural events put on in the year, the five hundred regional ones were o≈cially recognized by the Ministry of Culture as part of the Year of the Heritage. The Ministry partially or fully funded 322 of them. The final report of the o≈ce for the Année du Patrimoine did not break down the events of the year by region except to note that the Île-de-France (Paris) and Aquitaine (the Bordeaux area) had the most with a total of about seventy events. The greatest number of regional celebrations were dedicated to the ethnological heritage, although curiously the report o√ered no examples of what had been done, as they had with high culture events. There were seventy-five such government-funded activities in the year. Musical events came second with a total of sixty. Activities connected with historical monuments, like making them more welcoming, improving signage, and enhancing visitor guidance (the often patronizing ‘‘sens de la visite’’) totaled about forty. All the regions instituted celebrations of ‘‘Writers and Their Native Soil,’’ some 170 events, in the last months of 1980. Archaeological exhibitions, the plastic arts, and artisanal creativity were recognized with about twenty to thirty events or exhibitions each. The other media cooperated. What better way to promote the highly commercial mode rétro than with state-sponsored enthusiasm for old things? In the course of the year, television stations carried a total of six hundred programs on the cultural heritage of the country. The advertising firm Médiavison donated a ‘‘spot publicitaire’’ on the Année du Patrimoine which was projected with its other ads before the main film in four hundred movie houses. Centers of Information about the doings of the year were opened at all the big cultural institutions, such as the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou. The print media did their part to promote heritage consciousness with 3,215 articles in dailies, regional papers, and the periodic press. More than half the Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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pieces (1,900) appeared in regional papers. The subjects most written about—in order of frequency—were historical monuments, media, ethnological topics, music, and the plastic arts. The ministry cut a special deal with the daily Le Quotidien de Paris to run a three-week series on the major themes and works of the Année du Patrimoine. In the end, the newspaper had run a total of forty-nine full newspaper pages dedicated to the year. Even the State tobacco company (seita) got involved. It distributed sixty million boxes of matches advertising the Année du Patrimoine. The post o≈ce printed twelve million copies of a special heritage stamp. People could buy postcards, each carrying an image of one of sixteen regions, with the visiting hours of the principal monuments printed on the back.∂≥ But after twelve months of this all-tocontemporarily orchestrated festival of Old France, had the public become heritage conscious? For centuries past, clever rulers would send spies among the people to uncover their discontents. They feared evil gossip against the royal house, public grumbling, potential riots, plots to organize regional uprisings, the eruption of revolutions. Today, governments can hire public opinion firms to do the work. And they—both rulers and pollsters—have a more nuanced interest in the people’s attitudes. They want the good news too, not just the bad. This naturally costs more than the occasional little purse filled with coins tossed to a royal spy. The Ministry of Culture asked the polling firm l’Institut de Sondage Lavialle to sample French opinion on ‘‘The Impact of the Year of the Heritage.’’ Employing a sample of about a thousand individuals, the firm made periodic surveys from November–December 1979 to December 1980. The answers to the questionnaires were coded and analyzed by the Ministry of Culture’s own computational specialists, working with its Service des Études et Recherches. The respondents liked old things: 64 percent would ideally live in ‘‘une belle maison ancienne,’’ while 68 percent preferred ‘‘old towns’’ (11). Given a choice of living in another time, over half (51 percent) expressed a desire to go back in history to see how people lived in the past. Only 37 percent (though a majority of students and young people) wanted to live in the future (12). The overwhelming majority of respondents (83 percent) was much attached to old artisanal ways of making things, from furniture to house décor (14). Proper use of the language, good manners, and traditional food and ways of eating were 112

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all highly prized. This was generally more so for middle-class women and less so for young people (14–17). ‘‘Old stones,’’ works of art, antiques, and old songs found the greatest favor in the sampled population, with the combined positive responses ‘‘very much’’ and ‘‘quite’’ ranging from 62 percent for old glass and porcelain to 81 percent for old houses, old neighborhoods, and old towns (19). The answers to questions about modern culture were, as we would expect, reciprocally negative, with one understandable exception. The French sampled had a deep thirst for knowing what was going on today: 78 percent watched the television news. But at the same time 69 percent preferred also to see old photos and historical documentary films on the media (20). Remarkably, one in four respondents declared himself or herself ‘‘very interested’’ in visiting archaeological sites. This was especially true of the young, the educated, white-collar workers, and people living in big cities. In response to a question asking people to assess the meaning of the Chateau of Versailles as either a ‘‘symbol of national grandeur or of the distress of the people,’’ 53 percent saw the restored Versailles as a marker of France’s historic grandeur, while a goodly 38 percent flatly rejected that judgment. Down the age pyramid dislike of the monument to Louis XIV’s absolutism went up, with 46 percent opposed among 20- to 24-year-olds and 49 percent opposed among younger students. A similar level of opposition, 47 percent, was measured among educated white-collar employees (38). The surveys showed great success for the year’s campaign to sensitize the population to its cultural heritage. By the end of 1980 six French people in ten knew that they had just lived through a special year dedicated to it. In 1979 only 12 percent of the respondents associated the word ‘‘patrimoine’’ with the national, cultural, and artistic heritage, understood as one of the public goods [biens publics] rather than simply as a family’s legacy. By the end of the Année du Patrimoine 36 percent of the population had come to accept this new use of the word. This threefold increase in appreciation of the ideals of the special year very much gratified its organizers, who immediately issued a press release celebrating the news. Young people between 18 and 24 showed the most marked awareness and appreciation of the year’s events. But older and country people had also been reached.∂∂ Only on the last page of the summary report (53) did the pollsters dare hint at the political concern informing all the others. The Combating Guerilla Ethnology

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questionnaire asked respondents to assess the role played by ‘‘the associations for defense’’ [les associations de défense] in saving the patrimoine of the regions. Although 51 percent agreed that these associations ‘‘have an essential role to play and they should be strongly encouraged,’’ others demurred; 26 percent said that ‘‘in certain cases they could have a beneficial influence, but in others, their activities are very debatable.’’ And 14 percent agreed with the statement that ‘‘they make lots of noise for no good reason and that it is for the public authorities not for them to decide what has to be done or not done.’’ Although the question—just loosely described in the summary report, but not directly quoted as in the other sections of the report— ostensibly asked about the thousands of groups dedicated to defending the environment and local landmark buildings, the choices given the respondents clearly pointed them toward including their assessment of the activities of the contemporary political regionalists. The pattern of responses was useful to knowing how many friends the government had on the politically dangerous and hydra-headed questions of regionalism, cultural heritage, and national identity. The questionnaire also allowed the authorities to identify with some precision the part of the population supporting its political enemies. With the 1981 elections just a few months away, findings that half the population was sympathetic to the radical regionalist movements was not good news for the government of President Giscard d’Estaing and Prime Minister Chirac. Nor was it good news for France’s future that at no time in the o≈cial Année du Patrimoine were the traditions, or even the existence, of the millions of immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa mentioned.∂∑ As the year’s planners understood the term, the new immigrants were peoples without heritages. In 1981 a coalition of the left, dominated by the Socialist party, swept both rounds of legislative elections and brought François Mitterrand the presidency. Both the will and the means were now at hand for redirecting the search for France’s enduring cultural heritage. The sense of new possibilities filled so many hearts.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The E√ect Le Pen:

Pluralism or Republicanism?

I

t would be gratifying to conclude this narrative in 1981 with the ‘‘happy end’’ that European intellectuals find typical and so shallow in American films and plays. After the spring elections, it looked as if that might be possible. In the May elections the Socialists won everything: the National Assembly, the presidency, and a huge treasury of popular goodwill. Their leader François Mitterrand took the throne made for Charles de Gaulle. A Socialist government would now make the state’s policies and the laws. A pervasive mood of overflowing hope, of infinite possibilities, of the rebirth of fraternité su√used its supporters. Older sympathizers likened the triumph of 1981 to that of the United Front government in 1936, but better: in 1981 there was no fascism to worry about. And it even started well. One of the first acts of President Mitterrand—against the will of his minister of defense—was to cancel the plan for the expansion of the Larzac military base. More than ten years of resistance had finally won out. Soon after the decision to keep the base as it was, when the new president came to Larzac the ‘‘guerilla’’ leftists wanted to celebrate their victory. Mitterrand smartly corrected them: they had won because he had been elected president. He had made it happen. Their concerns would now be taken care of by their friends in Paris. They could return to farming or go back to school. And indeed a year later the government passed a new law on decentralization. It brought more funds for locally determined uses, especially cultural projects, into the provinces. Victory began the rapid decline in numbers and in militancy of the regionalist movements—including that of Larzac. Now the state, with its new discourse of a pluralist France, would see to the needs that these activists had defined as regional under the conservative government. At all levels and places of government plans were taking shape for a new cultural policy. In civilized societies, when policymakers hear the word ‘‘culture’’ they have to reach not for their pistols but rather for their budget printouts. The Commission Générale du IXe Plan (for the

years 1984–88) asked the economist Marc Guillaume to forecast the important long-term trends that might be expected in the culture. In a book published just before the elections, Guillaume had stirred up emotions on all sides by likening the previous government’s Année du Patrimoine to a neutron bomb: ‘‘It destroys the living but spares the buildings.’’ He also made cogent arguments about how historical restoration always makes a district too expensive for the original residents, who then must move out. So the neighborhood renewals of the preceding government just created ‘‘new residential hierarchies and greater social segregation.’’ He dismissed the Year of the Heritage and the Gaullists’ ‘‘obsession with historical preservation’’ as an ideal which would turn the whole of society into a museum. France was being conned into believing a ‘‘fantasy of a total Museum.’’ Behind all the promising words and the renewed façades, ‘‘preservation is creating a world of simulacra.’’∞ Clearly, Guillaume was both well informed (he understood the economics of culture), and well read in the new post-Marxist social critics (Baudrillard, de Certeau, Habermas). In the study he was asked to do by the new government he could be expected to make a powerful and provocative diagnosis of what ailed contemporary cultural policy and what might be done about it. Guillaume made his analysis within the long-honored discourse of ‘‘cultural crisis.’’ Foreigners find their credulity strained with the claim that the France of the moment, almost any moment, is in ‘‘cultural crisis.’’ Is this cry just a way for certain intellectuals to draw the spotlight back to themselves, and sell to an alarmed public yet another book as rich in indisputable opinions as it is poor in evidence? Sometimes, yes. But the frequent alarums about cultural crisis might be better understood as a marker of the weight of culture in the society. Many Americans’ savings and pension funds—and therefore future—are invested in the stock market. Millions follow anxiously the daily ups and downs reported from New York, London, and Tokyo. Every jiggle is scrutinized for the information it might yield of one’s personal fate and, shamefully, that of the nation. French intellectuals, the political class, and even significant parts of the population feel the same anxiety about the fate of their culture. Was the glass pyramid of the Louvre a defacement of a great monument? Who was responsible for tearing down a wonderful neighborhood to erect the hideous Montparnasse Tower? Is a flowering of 116

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cultural pluralism the way to keep the culture alive? Or must all share a carefully delimited common culture to preserve the nation? The capital of the cultural heritage is France’s future. Guillaume saw the contemporary cultural crisis as happening on three levels. First, the institutions in place were ill suited to their tasks. Second, there was a widespread rejection of the old narrow boundaries defining what was and what was not culture. Finally, following Habermas, he observed a ‘‘legitimation crisis’’ in the economic and social system as a whole. He was especially interested in further investigating what might be done to make culture once more meaningful in modern France, to make it creditable in a new economic and communications setting. He found the language for the cultural turn, like many of the best policyoriented minds of the 1970s, in the writings of Michel de Certeau. In a word, for culture to reestablish its central role in French life again, Guillaume stressed that the French ‘‘had to learn to conjugate culture in the plural.’’ By all means state funds should continue to go to keeping the old ruling-class culture alive as one element of the patrimoine. But there was no need to acculturate everyone to it. There were other living cultures in France. ‘‘It was time to relax the domination exercised by one o≈cial culture on all the others.’’ To accept the pluralism of cultures in France was at the same time to accept culture as part of everyday life—at work, in communications, in school, and where we live.≤ These were hopeful new ideas, but how to make them reality? Both French and foreign commentators mark the French ‘‘exception’’ as the special place of culture in national life. But I think an even more compelling case for a French exception might be made for the role of the state in everyday life. This is not the place to argue that case, but a piece of it would include a discussion of Guillaume’s recommendations for achieving cultural pluralism. ‘‘The state has to manage its own institutions in a new and responsible way, and to undertake a strategy of social intervention which not only respects the autonomy and the initiative of social groups, but strives to develop these to their maximum. It must act, paradoxical as it may sound, while it stands aside [s’e√açant].’’ Even members of his committee, Guillaume admitted, questioned ‘‘how decentralization could go with a cultural policy defined and launched by the state?’’ To which he answered, for this ‘‘grand objective’’ [grand dessein] to work there had to be ‘‘a certain convergence, a certain consensus.’’≥ The E√ect Le Pen

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But if that consensus did not come from a shared culture, from where did it come? Clearly, Guillaume was persuaded by some of Habermas’s ideas for recreating a collapsed public sphere. Habermas premised that participants in this arena would put aside their prejudices and partis-pris and agree to dialogue rationally and for the good of all. Perhaps standardizing highway markings or emergency medical delivery systems throughout the land o√ers examples of rational unified action, but unfortunately these are also products of state action. It has proven di≈cult to go beyond operational questions such as these to solve issues where the participants feel much is at stake. So, we are led back to the paradox of French republicanism: bringing into some democratic rapport the will of all and the general will. There are three major frustrations, or traps, in studying the relation of policy statements and action. First, reports such as Guillaume’s ‘‘The Cultural Imperative’’ are sometimes commissioned just as décor, to prove to the public that its leaders are concerned, that they are gearing up to do something about some pressing problem. Second, there are the unanticipated consequences of intended actions, such as when President François Mitterrand had the system used to award seats in legislative elections changed to proportional representation, in an attempt to fragment the vote for the right. The Socialist Party did keep control of the Assemblée Nationale, but the change in the way votes were apportioned also elected thirty new Front National (Le Penist) deputies. Third, things change. That is, recommendations made under certain assumptions about the current political mood, budgetary possibilities, and economic conditions make less sense to political leaders under altered circumstances. We’ll see below that the rise of Le Pen is a case in point. I think the multiculturalist strivings of the new Socialist government of 1981 were honest, if contested within the ranks. In the first five years of the decade, fair-minded people both inside and outside the Socialist government were divided. Some continued to hold to a Jacobin republicanism as the tried and true way of making anyone into Frenchmen. Others, like Guillaume, championed what was admittedly a pluralism new to the left. So, although Guillaume’s report went beyond what could be done politically, the government sought to implement its recommendations. But that same government’s good intentions were overwhelmed both by the racist agenda of the enemies of pluralism and by the change of course that the government decided 118

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to e√ect in the face of a serious economic depression and growing unemployment. The good news first. In the first exercise of the new government, the Ministry of Culture had its budget doubled. Jack Lang took over the Ministry of Culture and Communication, and the spotlight. Like others on the left, he had distrusted the whole heritage campaign of the right. He immediately initiated important policy changes at the three-year-old Direction du Patrimoine. The new policy took three forms. One was a change in the policy orientation of the heritage agency. Another brought changes in personnel. The third created a new, alternative body to deal with the ethnological heritage. In 1981, as the extent of left’s sweep became manifest, the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique quickly refocused its field of interest. The o≈ce had served as a tool for keeping an eye on the troublemakers in the regions while pumping Parisian high culture into the countryside, and encouraging the tourist trade as a depression-fighting measure. Now, with a new government, the just-created o≈ce for ethnology would have more freedom to investigate and to fund what the social scientists thought important, and maybe too what they thought the Socialist government might find interesting. Just before the elections, when the polls were predicting an overwhelming victory by the left coalition, the mission issued its first call for new research projects to fund. A new request for proposals invited applicants to investigate hitherto ignored topics. By the July 1981 deadline 140 proposals had come in. Once more, investigators showed little interest in the politically quiet parts of France: the Auvergne, the Center, Champagne-Ardennes, Limousin, Lorraine, the Loire, Picardie. Not even Paris attracted ethnological researchers much. With the colonies closed to them, the Midi became the prime destination. Of the total projects submitted, forty-eight made the first cut. The mission had mandated four major research areas: family and kinship, popular medications and cures, old industrial sites and technical knowledge, and the ethnology of urban life. The first had surely been o√ered in deference to Lévi-Strauss and Isac Chiva. Since LéviStrauss’s great book on kinship, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, the topic had been a special concern of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. Better understanding how kinship worked was important in family-centered France. It could have been chosen, as well, as a good transitional topic for fieldThe E√ect Le Pen

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workers who not so long ago had been trying to understand populations in Madagascar, Africa, or Algeria by studying their kinship systems. Folk medicine was both interesting and not much studied; the Chiva report had urged more work on it. The last two topics, industrial ethnology and city life, were renewals of the disrupted progressive social science of the Popular Front of nearly half a century before. Only fourteen projects could be funded. But more than half were studies of industrial ethnology (six) and urban ethnology (three). Popular medical practices won three slots. With only one award, kinship studies did not fare well. The fourteenth project worked in several areas and so was not readily classifiable. Salvaging Workers’ Cultures

Ethnology can be a science more dismal than even economics. Postcolonial ethnologists usually begin their work at the moment when a local culture expires—for example, when the French regions were under threat of becoming little more than areas on the tv weather map. So too, industrial anthropology took o√ in France only after deindustrialization hit. One of the most interesting research projects submitted in the first group of requests for proposals, in 1981, was that of a team led by Gérard Noiriel, then teaching history at a local lycée. Working under the academic umbrella of the labor historian Yves Lequin, the social science graduate students, local history bu√s, and workers brought together by Noiriel proposed to study the culture of the miners and steelworkers of the Longwy basin of Lorraine.∂ In 1975 economic depression had hit the region very hard. That part of the Northeast, heavily industrialized—iron, coal mining, and earthenware—was soon degraded into a French junk belt. By 1979, when the government announced a major plan for economically restructuring the region (read: rationalizing its industrial death), many long-established mines and steel mills had already closed down forever. In just the two years between 1979 and 1981, half the workforce of the region was put out of work, with little hope of new jobs. Some of the desperate workers occupied their factories, as the lip people had done. They marched on Paris on 23 March 1979, as the Larzac Peasants had done too. But they could save neither the industries nor their jobs. The research group’s original plan for an extensive study proved impossible when the funding that the Mission du Patrimoine o√ered 120

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came in under what was needed. The team quickly reoriented the project to focus on doing a more limited oral history of the mines and mills. Some twenty-seven retirees and their families agreed to speak to the researchers. It was a fitting choice, for soon not much more would remain of this historically most industrialized space in Europe than the retirees, their memories, and the huge hills of slag. The team proposed as its working hypothesis ‘‘that the violence of the [industrial] conflicts in the local steel industry in 1979 expressed a fundamental crisis of collective identity.’’ This crisis had broken out as ‘‘a consequence of the brutal challenge to the values around which the local population—very heterogeneous owing to the continued immigration since the beginning of the century—little by little had been able to unite.’’ The group’s project was, first, to investigate the local society’s culture-in-crisis, and then to ‘‘save and preserve a large number of documents, objects, etc. seriously menaced at this moment of [industrial] restructuring.’’ The researchers intended, too, in the ten months of the inquiry to transform the society in whose name they had requested the funding, L’Association pour la Préservation et l’Étude du Patrimoine du Bassin de Longwy, from a local preservationist group sta√ed by volunteers into, at the same time, a research center and a place where workers could come to speak for themselves. Their model was the contemporary British left’s History Workshop movement. The British group focused on the daily lives of members of the working class. Participants did oral histories and local cultural studies, and collected objects of the workers’ material culture. But there the parallel stopped. For while the History Workshop people worked from the beginning with the idea of a specific workers’ culture, the French group started from the premise ‘‘that workers do not produce their own culture; rather, there is only a market, with the dominant and the dominated.’’ But under the influence of the findings on the other two themes marked out for investigation, domestic life and ‘‘the problem of [ethnic] origins,’’ the French team softened its strict Marxian republicanism, a bit. ∑ Ethnicity played an undeniably central role in the story of the workers of Longwy. Of the twenty-seven retired miners and steelworkers, nine had been born in Italy and two in the Ukraine or Poland. Another seven were born in France but of foreign parents. Only nine—a third— had been born in France of French-born parents, ‘‘français de souche,’’ as the investigators put it. What was the relation between class and The E√ect Le Pen

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ethnicity? Italian workers, for example, made up both the majority and leadership of the strong local Communist Party. The East Europeans were less militant. Then some of the interviews with former workers, most of whom had lived many decades in France, had to be conducted in Italian or in one of the Slavic languages. In the course of these conversations old workers would often manifest a strong identification with their old homelands. The part of the study devoted to domestic life concluded that the family was the central a√ective and organizational institution in workers’ lives. At this point in French labor history—the early 1980s— many male scholars on the left were not yet able to conceptualize a study in which the social and economic roles of women could be treated in their own right. Noiriel’s team concluded that it was indeed a hard-won collective identity that was being dissolved in the Longwy Basin. But going beyond a narrow class model, the participant-researchers saw that cultural identity resting on the three important themes they had investigated. To be sure, the job was key. But of nearly equal weight were the family and finally, too, the sense of an ethnic identity still alive in the hearts of so many of the workers. Given the composition of the labor force, we would expect family and ethnicity to be very strong axes of self-identification among the retired workers of Longwy. Family and the old country heritage even influenced the strength and nature of class consciousness. Noiriel was intrigued to find that the local Communist Party—historically France’s greatest party of social assimilation—was the stronghold of workers of Italian descent. Why did the Poles and Ukrainians stay away from it? ‘‘False consciousness’’ was not a very useful explanation of the role of ethnicity in labor politics, or the lack of it. Although never published in book form, while singled out for praise by Jack Lang, the Longwy study served as an important bridge from an old social history of class, seen as a material force, to a new, more nuanced way of looking at workers’ lives. The study also changed the labor historians who had done it. After turning in the final report of the study in 1983, Gérard Noiriel went on to become one of France’s most innovative and most important historians of the immigrant population.∏ As in all cultures, artifacts specific to it figured importantly in the 122

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lives of Longwy workers. Medals for good work were highly prized, as were household items—like food choppers or knives—made by workers with company materials on company time. As for places of memory, the sites that had had so much meaning for the industrial history of the region—the factories, the mines, even the industrial detritus—took on a heavy emotional charge for some workers, and for the research team. The huge slag heaps which stood at the entrance to the industrial town, high, grey-black monuments to an expired life, had just been sold to a construction company. The buyers planned to cart the material away and incorporate it into roads and building materials. So, even these reminders of the industries of Longwy were destined to disappear. The company was eager to recover its investment and began immediately gearing up to remove the material. Deciding that these great dark mounds too were part of the regional workers’ heritage, Noiriel, fellow researchers, and members of the local preservationist society they had founded blocked the trucks as they arrived to load up. They went so far as taking turns at night—at least for a short period— watching over these unlikely places of memory.π Decolonizing Mentalités

Right after the new lines of social investigations were defined, Elizabeth Lévy (same person as Elizabeth Fleury), now head of the ethnology o≈ce under the just elected (May) Socialist government, had spelled out the change in direction in a note to the sta√ on her philosophy of ethnology. Lévy wished to guide researchers in changing their way of relating to the communities in which they worked. It was no longer acceptable ‘‘that the greatest number of professional ethnologists continue the tradition of the independent researcher, a law unto himself in the gathering and analysis of the data. A [new] methodology which takes as its central principle ‘giving the culture back [le retour] to the people,’ to the population studied, is incompatible with this conception.’’ She wanted to see research ‘‘with’’ combined with research ‘‘on.’’ The ‘‘give back’’ was to share the research and its results with the local population for its own uses.∫ As the director of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique in the culture ministry, Lévy could scarcely enThe E√ect Le Pen

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dorse the guerilla ethnology of the regionalists. The policy shift that she proposed pointed in a more culturally democratic direction, even if it remained a guided democracy. In addition to a new director, the Socialist government appointed ten additional members of the Conseil du Patrimoine. As it happened, these new people were su≈cient in number to outvote the sitting members, many of whose terms would not expire very soon.Ω The mission’s next call for papers, in 1983, asked for research proposals on regional belonging and cultural identity. The political reorientation of the agency was well under way.∞≠ Jack Lang had a larger project in mind than just orienting the work of the ethnology o≈ce in a new direction. And he had just had his budget doubled, to the dreamed of, magical 1 percent of the total state budget. After a change in government, the administrative sta√ of a French agency does not turn over in massive numbers, as is the case in the United States. This is the usually given reason for stability in French government policies despite often big, and in certain periods, frequent changes of the political leadership. It is also the reason for why old policies often remain stubbornly in e√ect, despite a di√erent political will at the top. But it was not di≈cult immediately to get the agency that Lang inherited to include the culture of workers and city life as part of its area of concern. These reorientations had already been prefigured in the discussions of the Chiva committee, even if they were only sketched in the recommendations to the government. But Lang also wanted to address the deeper perplexities of devising a cultural strategy for the regions and for the hitherto excluded ethnic groups in the making of a modern, progressive, and tolerant France. For that he needed his own team.∞∞ On taking o≈ce, he created within his ministry a rival body to the o≈ce of ethnology. He named Henri Giordan, head of the cnrs laboratory on intercultural research, chief of this new Conseil des Cultures et des Langues Régionales.∞≤ He asked Giordan to make recommendations to him for moving France beyond the Popular Front’s ideal (which as minister of cultural a√aires Malraux had put back on the table) of ‘‘democratizing the culture.’’ Lang wanted to go further, to begin to build a ‘‘cultural democracy.’’ The first was essentially André Malraux’s old idea of fostering greater accessibility to the culture for all strata of the population and all regions of the country. Imagine the inkblot of high culture spreading slowly from Paris outward to all the borderlands, slowly soaking 124

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the whole nation. When the taint reached the edges the whole surface would be of one color, of one culture. Lang asked Giordan to find ways of guaranteeing to all citizens ‘‘the fundamental freedom to live their cultural di√erences.’’ Of course, he wished to continue to honor and to protect the historic heritage. But in the long term, he wanted the new cultural policy to construct in each region ‘‘an original cultural space, a language-culture ensemble.’’∞≥ Very much on the same wavelength as Lang, Giordan also wanted to change the Paris-centered élitist course that Malraux had charted when, in the early 1960s, he created the ministry of cultural a√airs. Giordan declared his goals directly in the title of his recommendations to Lang, Démocratie culturelle et droit à la di√érence [Cultural Democracy and the Right to Di√erence]. Actually—also like Lang—Giordan was trying to straddle two diverging ideals, each with many committed adherents in the Socialist camp. To put the divergences most strongly, the Socialist Party and much of the nation divided over including everyone in the culture of the nation or honoring di√erences. Certainly people found intermediary positions, but the two ideals set the horizon of the thinkable. More about this dilemma in a moment. Giordan declared the so-called ‘‘decentralization’’ of the past a fraud. ‘‘The policy of decentralization in e√ect since 1959 [the year Malraux took o≈ce] has essentially distributed cultural goods in the regions which were made outside the regions. It was this practice which caused the [strategy of seeding the country with] Houses of Culture to fail.’’ The old cultural policy favored cultural di√usion from the center. It refused to build the infrastructure and provide the means which would have empowered the population to enrich its own culture. Consider the example of theater policy, the art form most favored by the ministry in the past, but one which draws only a small and élite public. When Paris wanted to do something in a region, ‘‘it concerned itself more with the choice of the creators it could implant in this region, than with an attentive assessment of what local initiatives might have been possible. This way of decentralizing the theater . . . has had as its premier e√ect, to abort the developing local troupes.’’ Local élites played along; they still looked to Paris for their culture. So, for a real democratic decentralization to succeed, we have to foster a ‘‘decolonization of mentalités.’’ Note Giordan’s deployment of the The E√ect Le Pen

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metaphors of empire and colony: local theater troupes ‘‘in the process of development,’’ the need for ‘‘decolonizing mentalities.’’ In the 1970s ‘‘empire’’ and ‘‘imperialism,’’ ‘‘colony’’ and ‘‘colonialism,’’ passed into the armory of metaphors of the critics of the really existing domestic culture. In Giordan, these code words played on a more radical notsaid: that he favored aid to the regions to throw o√ the cultural yoke of local collaborators with Paris (labeled in contemporary dependency theory as the comprador bourgeoisie) with the larger purpose of breaking the colonial grip of Paris itself.∞∂ Giordan urged Lang to go beyond attending to just the people of the regions. In a passing remark, Jacques Soustelle had momentarily plucked the many millions of ethnic minorities in France out of their invisibility because, in his eyes, hidden in unexplored obscurity, they—at least the North Africans and black Africans—posed a threat of disorder or subversion. But Giordan wished them recognized to honor their di√erence. ‘‘Up to 10 May 1981 [date of the Socialist electoral victory], of all the countries of Western Europe, France has been the most stubbornly deaf to the growing wants of the linguistic and cultural minority populations living in the nation.’’ A state both blind and deaf to the needs of large parts of the population was shameful. An immediate change of course was necessary. In 1789 France had established the right to ‘‘political citizenship.’’ After the Liberation in 1944 this right was made universal with votes for women. France was now working on insuring ‘‘social citizenship’’ for all. ‘‘Passing from the élitist idea of culture to a conception which takes in the whole of the social person, and inventing the means collectively to guide the cultural apparatus, including the environment [was] to lay the first stones of the edifice of cultural citizenship.’’∞∑ As soon as the Socialists had taken up their o≈ces in 1981, the new minister for research and industry, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, had asked the anthropologist Maurice Godelier to organize an inquiry on the ‘‘The Social Sciences and French Society: Analysis and Propositions for a New Policy.’’ Godelier invited anthropologists from various perspectives to contribute. Reporting on French anthropological research in the last two decades on ‘‘the Third World,’’ Michel Izard noted two contradictory trends. He saw that the anthropologists who were working in the new postcolonial nations of the Third World were turning away from the static, snapshot studies of before and beginning to focus increasingly on the modalities of social, economic, and cul126

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tural transformation. But at the same time he also noted a strong trend in the discipline toward studies of industrialized societies. He didn’t say which trend was stronger, but his articulation of two divergent ones confirms the national turn in ethnological studies that I have noted. Izard was one of the academic anthropologists who in 1979, just as the Mission du Patrimoine was being organized, had taken part in founding the Association Française des Anthropologues. Since then the society had carried on an existence independent from the Mission du Patrimoine of the culture ministry. Under the editorship of Marc Henri Piault, of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, the association put out a mimeographed newsletter carrying reports on conferences and commentaries, as well as reports by members on the state of the discipline. Here in this publication, Izard, for one, insisted on the necessity of keeping the discipline independent from certain government projects. In an article on French anthropology in the Third World in 1983 he wrote skeptically of ‘‘so-called ‘applied’ anthropological research.’’ He doubted that such work had any epistemological basis. Decoded: he thought there was no science in it. In any case, whatever the state authorities [pouvoirs publics] might do to further such applied work, it didn’t free them from the obligation of adding much needed research positions in the cnrs, the national research society, and the orstom, the main sponsor of overseas social science research. ‘‘Nor did [the past preference for applied research] permit them to consider anthropologists ‘social’ workers rather than researchers.’’ Having been denounced by leftists and nationalists in the new states as social scientists in the service of colonialism, some academic anthropologists did not wish to see their discipline fall under the same cloud in its metropolitan reincarnation.∞∏ Godelier had asked Isac Chiva to do the section on ethnological studies of France and Europe. Chiva invokes the classic trope sacred to academic reports of this sort—which Izard’s contribution also employs—that with but a little more funding how much better the discipline would be. Nothing very novel in that. But what he didn’t say is quite interesting. Just a few years after he had written a pessimistic evaluation for Giscard d’Estaing, here under the Socialists we find no complaints about lack of jobs. Nor are there any more alarums about guerilla ethnology. The jobs created and funds authorized by Giscard seemed on their way to working. And the recognition and cooptation The E√ect Le Pen

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of the regionalist movements by the enthusiastic new left government of 1981 had e√ectively demobilized the regionalists. Remember Mitterrand’s dropping the military base expansion, and enhancing the funding for regional projects, and the consequent loss of energy in the Larzac movement? In addition, Chiva, who was born in Romania, understood that new fields of research were waiting in the new Europe, both within the European Community and in the East. He urged that the discipline gear up for this new space for fieldwork. In 1983 Lang began dismantling the apparatus he had inherited from the conservatives for supervising and controlling the regionalist movements. In January he created consultative bodies [collèges], chosen locally to review architectural sites. He also mandated the creation of new commissions for the historical, archaeological, and ethnologic heritages of the regions. These bodies replaced the appointed regional committees of the Inventaire as well as the departmental o≈ces left by the Giscard government. This local ethnology police force he ordered dissolved in July of the same year. The next year he had a ‘‘cellule’’ on the industrial heritage of France created in the patrimoine o≈ce of the ministry.∞π And in 1985, he eclipsed Soustelle’s initiative with his own Conseil Supérieur de la Recherche Archéologique. Gone now was the elaborate regional ‘‘culture watch’’ of the conservative government. Jacobin Equality or the Right to Difference

But how to avoid the cultural scissors crisis? If the state leveled unjust social and economic di√erences to give all the citizens equal chances, it could only do so in a shared cultural frame. But wouldn’t claims for special consideration—in gender questions, in the use of regional languages, in social practices, in religious matters—break the unity of the republican culture which underpins the rights of all citizens? If the blade of equality opens in one direction while that of di√erence pivots the other way, how can a just society be fashioned? By mid-decade, largely as a result of the left coalition’s acts of good will, the conflict around regional identity—with the exception, of course, of Corsica— had subsided. But also, by mid-decade not just the Socialist-led government but many thinking French people, after decades of nonrecognition (méconnaissance), suddenly ‘‘discovered’’ the immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa and their children as people living and staying in France. With a deepening economic depression, 128

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heavy unemployment, and heightened sensitivity to being culturally overwhelmed by external powers (the United States and the immigrants), a three-cornered debate began among those I will call ‘‘Inclusionists,’’ ‘‘Pluralists,’’ and Le Penists. Unfortunately, in 1985 the left debated its options at two rival conferences, one attended only by pluralists and the other only by inclusionists. The exchange of ideas dedicated to ‘‘Cultural, Industrial, and National Diversity’’ featured the usual suspects of pluralist advocacy, Henri Giordan and Marc Guillaume, joined by Gilles Verbunt, a specialist on immigrant workers. Guillaume set the tone by articulating the three possible directions open to regional communities and immigrants in contemporary France. They could, of course, always accept the model of Paris and the provinces, that is, one dominant national culture with minor subcultures in the regions and among the ethnic groups. This choice was currently being massively refused in France. But groups could instead build their own haven of decentralization by developing ‘‘mythologies of authenticity and of uniqueness, of a return to sources, and of deepening the roots of regional identity.’’ In the chapter on Larzac, we have seen these two options in action against one another. Giordan pointed out that national and even international economic and political forces do not go away just because a group or region wants cultural recognition or autonomy—as we have also seen in Larzac. He also underlined the potential dangers of a politics of roots by o√ering the example of the ‘‘racism’’ manifested by Corsicans toward North Africans who try to settle on the island. In France, ‘‘racism’’ means many di√erent kinds of exclusion, not just the racism of color or appearance. But the problem he posed is clear enough. There was a third path which Guillaume considered both desirable and possible. Regional and ethnic minorities could ‘‘create their own cultures but in a way which opened them to others.’’ Because of his own training and interests, Guillaume spoke to the inevitable interconnection between cultural questions and questions of everyday life as well as housing policy and urban planning. What he said was both good and interesting, but he added nothing new to what he had already written. After a great deal of discussion (265 printed pages), with many other papers more or less in the same vein as those of Giordan and Guillaume, Verbunt tried to summarize the ideas shared, in the end, The E√ect Le Pen

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Poster for a festival of immigration, held in Rennes just after the Socialists took power in 1981. Courtesy of Pascal Blanchard.

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by those who attended. He found a consensus on two basic issues. One, that France was now a multicultural society. Given that, the real question was how to integrate that reality into the collective life of the nation. Two, the task before France was to build ‘‘an intercultural democracy.’’ Why was there resistance to the truth of diversity and to its acceptance as multicultural unity? The ‘‘eradication of cultural di√erences’’ is an old tradition in France, and not an easy one to eliminate in its turn. The economic depression of the moment has exacerbated unitary nationalist feelings in the population. The necessary institutional changes are di≈cult to accomplish under such conditions. Many in France do not yet understand that neither will the minorities go away nor can they be repressed. But in turn, the minorities themselves have 130

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to learn to resist ‘‘micro-nationalism,’’ both in its fundamentalist form (intégrisme) and as a celebration of some lost past glory (passéisme). The dangers of a French apartheid, as preached by the New Right, were real. France had also to avoid American-style pluralism, by which Verbunt seemed to mean imposed as well as self-chosen varieties of social segregation. France had to avoid the growth of a Third World population within. So Verbunt saw the need to use the state to build a new democratic society which nourishes many cultures.∞∫ But still, in the end one question remained hanging over the participants’ heads: How precisely might di√erences be honored without threatening to weaken social solidarity, as has happened in the United States, for example? Or, put another way, how could social solidarity be insured, if all members of the society did not share fundamental values? And if the state led the way, how could the danger of an o≈cially authorized and policed multiculturalism be avoided? That this fear was, and still is, strong in France is evidenced by the widespread misunderstanding of the need to fashion a new language to describe new social ideals. The same intellectuals who would go to the barricades to retain useless accent markings in a few words seem willing to dismiss socially more important language issues as silly ‘‘political correctness.’’ Frenchmen, One More Effort?

At the conference of Espace 89, a moderate socialist forum, the Inclusionists responded both to the exclusionists of the far right and to those of the left they considered naïve ‘‘pluralists.’’ Held in the same year as the multiculturalists’ discussion, this meeting was dedicated to nothing less ambitious than defining just that ‘‘identité française’’ that the other camp saw as the very worst way of thinking about how to bring social justice and social peace to contemporary France. Elisabeth Badinter set the tone by asking, ‘‘Have we all become schizophrenics?’’ Alain Finkelkraut defined the uniqueness of France precisely by its dedication ‘‘to universal values,’’ which, since the Enlightenment, have transcended localisms. Jean-Denis Bredin, attorney and author of a massive book on the Dreyfus case, didn’t think it necessary to ‘‘invent a new way of being a citizen.’’ He believed that France’s citizenship laws were adequate to making new immigrants French. But the views of Pierre-André Taguie√, perhaps France’s leading The E√ect Le Pen

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author on racism and prejudice, charted the social politics that the government would pursue in the following years. He pointed out how both the more respectable ultra-right think tank (Le Club de l’Horloge) and the fascists (Le Pen’s Front National) had seized upon some of the left’s call for recognition of ‘‘la droit à la di√érence,’’ and had made it their own battle cry. Immigrants, blacks, Jews, and the others they detested as ‘‘unfrench’’ indeed had a right to their cultural di√erences. But, Le Pen insisted, so had the real French. In speech after speech—and he is one of France’s greatest orators—Le Pen cleverly transformed an appeal for a new democratic vision of pluralism into a formula for cultural and racial exclusion. Suddenly, enriching multiplicity becomes impenetrable, unscalable, high walls. Respect their di√erence, by all means, declared Le Pen: let the non-French go home! Le Pen’s hostility to new immigrants, his racism, and his extreme nationalism were attracting voters, especially in regions of high unemployment and where pieds noirs were heavily settled. Taguie√ could see only one response to this threat to republican values, the classic Jacobin response: in a time of crisis, the nation must close ranks. France faced the choice of either ‘‘universalism or barbarism,’’ between rea≈rming the Rights of Man and accepting ‘‘the fundamentalism of di√erence.’’ ∞Ω Led by the followers of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, but also supported by many in the parties of the left, an unreconstructed republicanism confronted bigoted exclusion. The multiculturalists were suddenly marginalized as the national debate changed to universal inclusion or expulsion of those who refuse to embrace ‘‘the French Identity.’’ But finally, the way the question of assimilation or di√erence was posed in the public sphere was not controlled by either side of the left debate. The Effect Le Pen

When knowledge of the new regionalist and pluralist cultural direction proposed by Giordan’s report to Lang had leaked out, Michel Debré, a man always counted as among ‘‘the more Gaullist than de Gaulle,’’ fiercely condemned it in the pages of Le Figaro. ‘‘A weapon of war directed against national unity calculated to ‘break-up the nation,’ ’’ he thundered. The only hope of continuing the unity of his132

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toric France, for this man, born Jewish, but having left the faith, was ‘‘teaching everyone only our culture and our language.’’≤≠ Certainly this leader of a beaten and dying Gaullist movement was voicing the despair of the many still committed to a challenged classicism. But buried deep in the bile lay a legitimate question: given her history, can France really become a decentralized and pluralist society? Put that way, even Socialists didn’t know what to do, what was possible. Debré had spoken for the moderate right, which could imagine only one way to be French.≤∞ Most conservatives saw no need to change the historic republican contract: to be French meant that individuals gave up their regional and ethnic parochialisms and embraced the language and the culture, and the nation of France, alone. But could new immigrants to France from North and sub-Saharan Africa and Portugal be expected to make this transition, to be motivated to do so, to be permitted to do so? So, we come to the E√ect Jean-Marie Le Pen. The terms of the national debate about the relations of French people living some time in France and the new postwar wave of immigrants from di√erent parts of Africa were defined neither by intellectuals nor by the left government in power. Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National called the tune. And Le Pen’s vicious ‘‘France for the French’’ politics would continue to define how the issue was understood in France from the rise of the Front National in the early 1970s, to its division in the 1990s, to its phoenix-like revival in the first round of the presidential elections of April 2002. Son of a fishing boat captain in Brittany, Le Pen early felt the need to act to defend his France against her enemies. In 1953, as a reserve o≈cer, he joined the First Regiment of Foreign Legion Paratroops. He wanted to play his part in gaining victory in the war against Indochinese independence. But he got to the battlefront too late. He only arrived in Indochina two months after the defeat in Dien Bien Phu. When he was mustered out after the colonial defeat, he decided to devote himself to politics. He joined Pierre Poujade’s movement of resentful small shopkeepers and farmers. In 1956 he was elected, as a Poujadist, the youngest deputy in the legislature. But fighting was what he liked to do. He joined up again—with his old para regiment— to take part in France’s Suez invasion. Back as a deputy he voted for Premier Guy Mollet’s proposal to send draftees to fight in Algeria. All the earlier colonial wars had been fought by recruits from the colonies The E√ect Le Pen

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and a flood of ss veterans. This move would really bring the Algerian war home. In a gesture both ethically and politically astute, he himself put on his uniform of lieutenant in General Massu’s Foreign Legion para unit, and left to do his part to pacify rebellious Algeria. There, from January to March 1957, he served as an intelligence o≈cer. In those three months he tortured fln suspects to extract information from them. In an interview he gave to the newspaper Combat in 1962, Le Pen admitted to more than once doing these acts. But then in a case that he first brought to the courts in 1989 he sued the onetime premier Michel Rocard and the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet for quoting his published admission of his having tortured prisoners. Finally, in 2001 Le Pen lost his last appeal. More recently, in 2002, four Algerian witnesses stepped forward to describe their experiences of torture at the hands of Le Pen and General Paul Aussaresses, his superior o≈cer. On the eve of the legislative elections of 2002, under the headlines ‘‘Révélations sur Le Pen: Tortionnaire en Algérie’’ (screaming headlines, for Le Monde), the testimony of these hitherto silent accusers filled two full pages.≤≤ Le Pen sued the newspaper for defamation. On 26 June 2003 the Tribunal Correctionnel of Paris found for the newspaper. Of course, Le Pen appealed the verdict. In 1960 Le Pen had become one of the founding members of the Front National, whose full name, it is important to point out, was originally Front National pour l’Algérie française. It is clear already back then that Le Pen was learning his racism and resentment of colonial peoples from the colonial pacifications to which he committed himself. But fighting in uniform in far-o√ places had not achieved the results he wanted. Worse, the enemy was now within. His attention shifted from defeating people in the colonies to defeating those who were immigrating to work in France. The battles had now to be fought in metropolitan France. The first two decades of the Fifth Republic o√ered little opportunity for his kind of militancy to thrive. Part of this time, he honed his political skills running an advertising and marketing agency which sold, among other things, records of old favorite ss marches. But with the election of the Socialists in 1981, the serious economic downturn, and the betrayal by Mitterrand’s party of the great hopes voters that had invested in it during a deliriously hopeful election campaign, the Le Penists began to see light. In the municipal elections of 1983 they surprised all by getting 17 percent of the votes cast, and winning a 134

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number of local governments in the Midi. Always good with the media, charismatic, witty, and willing to say what was forbidden, Le Pen increased his national standing with radio interviews and television appearances. He would say outrageous things. Critics would respond in print and in the media. Le Pen would demand print space or media time to reply, and use the opportunity to pitch his message nationwide. In the elections for European deputies in 1984 his party received 11 percent of the vote. The mid-decade elections for the presidency looked as if they might be close. In 1986 President Mitterrand, known as the ‘‘Florentine’’ for his way of doing politics, got the voting system changed to a variety of proportional representation which would give small parties a better showing. His plan was to split the right by increasing the fn vote— harmless as a small minority—and so defeat the Gaullists. It worked. Mitterrand was reelected for another term. The price was thirty-five LePenist deputies entering the parliament—and national political legitimacy for the movement. Then when he ran for president against Mitterrand in 1988, Le Pen gained 14.5 percent of the national vote. Le Pen was blaming all of France’s troubles, real and imagined, on the immigrants, these strangers who eat the bread of the French and commit crimes. And a certain resentful minority of the French population, especially in areas of unemployment and North African immigration, were prepared to accept Le Pen as their organic intellectual. In his slogan, ‘‘A national preference,’’ he was formulating what they could not, what they dared not, say. Le Pen turned the Socialists’ multicultural argument against them. Yes, he said, hammering home the message, the immigrants do have di√erent cultures. He coined the word ‘‘di√erentialism’’ for this racist doctrine. He meant by it that people were fixed in their cultures of origin and could not assimilate to a new one. Thereby cultural di√erence takes on the immutability of a racial category. The immigrants from North and West Africa were not French. They cannot become French. Many of them do not want to be French. Kick them out! The Socialists responded like old firehorses hearing the alarms ringing, as the Jacobins had done in 1789 and the left again during the Dreyfus case. They rallied to a unitary Republic. If Le Pen wishes to divide us with his evil pluralism, we defenders of France will respond with Republican monism. And so died, along with the other emancipatory projects envisioned in 1981, the idea that France was a mosaic The E√ect Le Pen

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of cultures held together by a love of a land that had been good to them. The conservative Republicanism of Jules Ferry came back again, this time as farce. In the beginnings of the 1990s Bruno Mégret, Le Pen’s closest advisor, architect of his rise, and son-in-law—he always ran his movement like a small family business—challenged the aging lion for leadership of the movement. Unsuccessful, Mégret and some followers split o√ in 1999. The ongoing tensions within the extreme right at first greatly reduced the creditability of their solutions for France. Le Pen honed his strategy of gaining free media exposure by making outrageous pronouncements, which were printed, and then denying that he had said what he meant, which was also printed. Then he sued, which again got him in the papers. Now his movement got more publicity than it wanted, Le Pen being petty, petulant, uncharitable to former comrades, and above all stupid. Bruno Mégret was just technocratic and colorless. In attempting to gentrify the message of the fn, Mégret turned o√ many followers who got their kicks from the seemingly straight-talking exuberance of the old ‘‘para’’ of the colonial wars. Nevertheless, in the long run, as Le Pen’s stunning electoral success in the presidential elections of April 2002 showed, Mégret’s steely technocratic fascism made the now grandfatherly, garrulous Le Pen seem like a moderate. The initial weakening of the camp of narrow Republicanism—exclusive like Le Pen’s, inclusive like the left’s neo-Jacobins—was not immediately evident in public life after this decline of the Front National.≤≥ Public opinion passed through a period of latency, until a hot night in mid-July 1998 when all of France sat before the tv to watch the World Cup soccer final between France and Brazil. The best way to complete this account about France’s continuing Zerrissenheit, its soul-trying ambivalence about its cultural identity, is to turn to the sports page.≤∂ Zidane! Zidane! Barthez! Barthez!

I have in mind two soccer matches that tell us more about the state of the national soul at the end of the century than a whole year of L’Esprit, Le Débat, and Le Nouvel Observateur, and I’ll throw in Libération in the morning and Le Monde in the afternoon (in Paris). I still vividly remember the bizarre spectacle I came upon when I 136

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arrived at my habitual café in Paris on a hot, heavy July evening in 1998. Instead of the usual young people animatedly exchanging the day’s ‘‘he-saids-she-saids’’ and the usual quieter older types—like me— ruminating on Derrida’s latest ambiguous formulation or Bourdieu’s newest denunciation, and the more fundamental question of where to eat dinner that night, I encountered a mass of tricolor-painted fanatics screaming at two tv sets set up on the café’s terrace. They were watching the World Cup Final between France and Brazil. Mind you, these delirious spectators were not the Brazilians’ fans, known for their soul-felt football partisanship. They were French, arguably one of the most publicly restrained people in Europe. It was noisy and humid, and some of the inhabitual facepaint was running. No football widows here: the many women in the café were as much into the national epic being played out on the screen as the men. People in the crowd were shouting (to my French historian’s ears) uncommon names: Zidane, Zidane; Barthez, Barthez. Zidane, the French team’s star, I knew, was from Marseilles, of Algerian heritage. Barthez, the goalkeeper, was a poor kid from southwestern France, a rebel, rumored to be a leftist. As the game continued, the announcer identified other players: Desailly, Thuram, Lama, Henry, Viera, Wilford. Of African origins these six, I had read. My first—hopeful—take on seeing all this theater was to try to imagine that I was participating in the sudden rebirth of a renewed and media-savvy Surrealist movement. If only André Breton and his friends could have seen so many weirdly painted young French people, their irrational screams welling up from deep in their psyches. But as we know, it was not a neo-Surrealist happening; for the moment, there are no interesting new intellectual or political movements in France. On both sides of the tube, I was seeing the living popular theater of the New France. In the weeks before the match, everyone had read Jean-Marie Le Pen’s dismissals of the French team: too many noirs—half the team, in fact. As for the others, he dismissed them as not really a sports team, but rather an ‘‘épicerie,’’ referring with sly racist insinuation to the usually North African– or Asian-run grocery stores that stay open late at night and on holidays. This assortment of non-French would bring shame to the real France. And yet, and yet, they won the World Cup that summer evening. At the end of the game, ‘‘les Blacks,’’ Thuram and Desailly, ran out on the field with the tricolor over their shoulders for all to see. The E√ect Le Pen

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21. French spectators

watching the soccer World Cup match on tv, 1998. Note the possibly North African man, undecorated, and a little apart. Photo ∫ G. Korganov. Jubilant French World Cup champions embrace, wrapping themselves in their nation’s flag. Photo ∫ G. Atger.

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In an even more exciting game two years later, in the summer of 2000, France defeated the ‘‘all-Italian’’ Italian team to take the Europe Cup.≤∑ Everyone—the coach, Aimé Jacquet, team members, the media— proclaimed the victories as the fruit of French multiculturalism, of the unity-in-diversity of a team which was a microcosm of today’s real France. Le Pen, proven wrong, sulked mostly in silence, and began a slide into political oblivion. Et alors? If there is a new France being born, it’s not primarily about finally ending the humiliation of generations of being losers in the most crowd-pleasing sports. But, in important ways, the new France is about the complex history that produced that winning team and the winning spectators who—Rousseau-like—collectively willed that victory. The World Cup victory of 1998 was celebrated late into that night, the 12th of July, and the national rejoicing continued without halt for the next two days to—it seemed to everyone I spoke to—its natural dénouement at the fête of the Republican nation on July 14. Let’s look more closely at the weave of the fabric of France at that moment to try to find the most important strands, the ones that make the overall design. First, as evident in the radiant optimism—and smart clothes—of so many of the excited people in that café that night, there is, despite periodic economic downturns, the unprecedented prosperity of the France of the second half of the twentieth century. Then, of course, there are the immigrants and children of immigrants—the tv heroes that July night—that figure so importantly in many aspects of society, not just sports. Third, we must recognize the importance of the creation of the new society of the Gaullist Fifth Republic. The Gaullist regime mediated the industrial modernization of France. And it was the prime mover in the prosperity of contemporary France. It birthed all those jeunes cadres dynamiques [dynamic young executives on the make] whom I saw rooting for their national team. It admitted the immigrants to France because their hands were needed for the expanding economy. It also dispatched peasant France. But it left its own heritage of a divided France. For once prosperity slowed in the mid-1970s, the regime, like the California growers with their Mexican hands, wanted the new immigrants, their wives, and their children to disappear. But that could not be. The children of the immigrants, the Beurs of the second generation, were French, albeit in a disappointed and angry way. The E√ect Le Pen

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Change of scene. We are at the Stade de France in St. Denis at the edge of Paris. It’s 8:30 on a pleasant Saturday evening in early October 2001. The crowd is spirited. Supporters of each side are shouting out words of support for their team and waving flags. The match is a special one. The French national soccer team would be playing Algeria for the first time since 1962, since the end of the Algerian War. The kicko√ is near. Supporters of the White-and-Greens, the Algerians’ colors, are there in large numbers, perhaps as many as 80 percent of the people in the stands. Algerian flags are everywhere, but there are some French flags too. The many young people sing, holler, and act rambunctious. In interviews on the eve of the match Zidane, the great French striker, had expressed his hope that the upcoming event might bring greater amity between the homeland of his ancestors and France, his country. In the weeks before, other players and coaches on both sides expressed similar sentiments of good will and tolerance. The match had been arranged by the politicians as a gesture toward reducing the strong tensions between the two nations. Lionel Jospin, Socialist premier, and Marie-Georges Bu√et, Communist deputy and minister of youth and sports, sit in the stands to watch their work of reconciliation in motion. But the evening begins badly. When the Marseillaise is played, some of the young Beurs try to drown out the music with loud whistling, the French way of booing. It is not their national anthem. Play begins. It becomes immediately evident that on the field there is real friendliness and sportsman-like behavior between the players of the two teams. They are happy to be playing each other and they are playing well, all of them. As the game goes on, it also becomes increasingly clear that the Algerians are hopelessly outclassed. With mostly the same players as in 1998, when they took the World Cup, the French dominate play. The Algerian team can scarcely run with their opponents. Most of the match is played at the Algerian end of the field. With fifteen minutes remaining on the clock, the Blues are ahead 4 to 1. Suddenly two young Beurs—a boy and a girl—maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, leap from the stands and run onto the field, trailing, cape-like, Algerian national flags. If the young woman had been in the land of her parents, she would not have dared act so ‘‘immodestly.’’ The two could have been adolescent stand-ins for the multi-ethnic 140

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players and fans who had run around the field on that intoxicating summer evening three years before when everyone celebrated that French victory. Except that in 1998, the young people on the field flaunted French flags. The security people in bright red blazers rush out, grab the kids, and try to hustle them o√ the field. The two young people—especially the feisty girl—resist. The guards can’t hold them. The players move to the sidelines, eager to resume play. You can tell from the tv close ups, their expressions run from ‘‘oh, the usual jerky fan high jinks,’’ to impatience, to, with some, annoyance. Then, apparently as an act of support for the young woman who, finally trapped, was being wrestled to the ground in a pile of red blazers, more young Maghrébin adolescents, boys and girls, jump over the railings and begin running around the field. The guards try now to catch up with these new trespassers. Then more young Beurs, more than a hundred of them, leap the low railings and run onto the field. The security people are overwhelmed. The field takes on the appearance of a mass game of tag being played by lunatics. The coaches send the players o√ the field to the locker rooms to wait. The referee considers whether the game could be resumed or not. It is his decision to make. In the stands Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and Marie-Georges Bu√et, and next to them, Claude Simonet, President of the French Football Federation, watch the match fall into ruins. The tv sportscasters begin mooting the possibility of the rest of the game just being cancelled. Confusion for some minutes, fans and security still running around the field. Suddenly, black-clad o≈cers of the crs, the paramilitary riot police, begin to line up along the two short ends of the field. A rent-a-cop in a blazer is one thing, but a beefy crs in full intimidating black riot gear is another. The crs are notorious kid bashers, especially with North African youth. Prudently, some of the young people decide to leave the playing field. But many continue to run around the field with flags and banners flying. The referee calls o√ the match. The crowd in the stands explodes in anger. Out of ideas, a stadium o≈cial hands Minister Bu√et a microphone. She calls on the spectators to ‘‘Respect the match, respect the joy [joie].’’ She is loudly whistled down. The head of the sports federation then takes the microphone to tell the spectators to go home in The E√ect Le Pen

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‘‘joy and friendship.’’ And, after a bit, they do without further incident. Lionel Jospin does not take the mike that night, a non-act that many see as weakness. His indecision that evening will cost him politically in the subsequent presidential elections. On Algerian radio the sports commentators covering the match deny that the troublemakers were Algerians. No, they were young ‘‘Beurs who wished to express their frustration at being marginalized and out of work.’’ In his brilliant legal and historical investigation into what a French person is, Patrick Weil agrees.≤∏ The kids were demonstrating their imagined belonging to Algeria, the home of their ancestors. But by exercising this particularly confrontational kind of pluralism, the young people had ruined the evening planned to demonstrate the friendship, the mutual tolerance, and the good will of both the people there and those watching the match in the two nations. The Beurs who disrupted the game were there to remind all that France’s history of internal colonialism was not yet ended. As Djida Tazdaït, leader of the Beurs’ march for recognition in 1983, and more recently deputy for the Greens in the European Parliament, put it, ‘‘France has always treated its [poor] suburbs as colonies.’’≤π These young people felt an urgent need to establish a certain cultural identity in France, among the French. In French, unlike American English, compound ethnic labels like Algerian-French have no accepted meaning. One is first a citizen, and then second come the things consecrated in the private sphere: family origins, your religion, or until very recently, your gender. And yet, how then should we understand what a young women wearing an Algerian sweatshirt had shouted that night, ‘‘Zidane, il est à nous!’’ (Zidane is ours!)?

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CHAPTER FIVE

I

The Dance of the Museums

f the eiffel tower were to topple sideways on the Quai Branly, its peak would fall precisely in the center of France’s first museum of the global twenty-first century. I found this strange description of the location of the new museum for the art of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas going up next to the Tower in the planning report for the museum’s construction. The prime symbol of the nineteenth-century republic triumphant will forever loom over France’s first museum of globalization. Not that anyone expects the tower celebrating the Republic that created the modern colonial empire to fall on the building intended to mark the end of French colonialism. I think proximity to old symbols of glory is the planners’ point. But implicit in the image of the old and the new monuments is the recognition of a constant of French culture: in France, there is always the danger of the old structures crushing the new. Perhaps building far away from the fortress city of classicism might help? In Marseilles, France’s second-biggest city, the state is remodeling the old seaside fort of St. Jean to make a new museum dedicated to French regional, European, and Mediterranean cultures. Together, these two museum projects are the greatest transformation ever of the representation of the French national heritage, at the same time, to the nation itself, and to the rest of the world. In all, eight major museums in the capital and a new one on the Mediterranean will be, in every sense of the word, repositioned. Museums holding peoples’ arts are potent places to validate prescribed definitions of heritages, both ones considered ‘‘ours’’ and those of ‘‘others.’’∞ Fred R. Myers put it this way, ‘‘Art is an institution that purports to judge, place, and define a range of di√erences within its own hierarchy of values. As a medium of objectification, the materiality of art and its meanings have made it particularly productive, in the context of modernity, as an arena for constituting and considering human di√erences and value.’’≤ The openings and closings have caused an earthquake in the museum world. Three long-established museums are losing their collections and their historic identities: the museum of overseas ethnog-

raphy, the Musée de l’Homme (MdH); the former colonial museum, now called the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et Océanie (maao); and the museum of French regional cultures, the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (matp). The Musée Guimet, dedicated to Asian art, has surrendered some of its less ‘‘high art’’ holdings to Quai Branly. The MdH has become a museum of physical anthropology. The maao will display the distant French of the overseas departments and territories. Once planned and then dropped by the former Socialist government, a museum of immigration has again been put on the drawing boards by President Chirac. Finally, as sensational as the decision to build the museum on the Quai Branly—at least in the French press—is the establishment on a permanent basis of a ‘‘primitive’’ art wing in the Louvre. The Emancipation Proclamation of Once ‘‘Primitive’’ Art

In 1990 a manifesto appeared in the Paris morning paper Libération, under the title ‘‘Masterpieces from the entire word are born free and equal.’’ It advocated opening a department in the Louvre devoted to the arts of Africa, Oceania, the Americas, and the East Indies. Jacques Kerchache, its instigator, had collected the nearly three hundred signatures from artists, writers, philosophers, anthropologists, art historians, and others which were printed with the manifesto. Despite this sounding of the trumpet, Kerchache’s declaration was followed by nearly half a decade of public silence. In the meanwhile the onetime businessman who had become a dealer in the African art that he praised in the newspapers had retired from the art business. A good friend of President Chirac, the expert advised the president on pieces he was considering buying. When the president’s o≈ce announced that works of non-European, non-urban art would be placed in the Louvre, some conservative art lovers and some of the museum’s curators immediately expressed their dismay that their old Louvre was going to be colonized by an art foreign to its mission, to its very nature. This was not the first aesthetic reversal the devotees of the museum had su√ered. There had been a similar uproar in the 1830s, which continued into the mid-century, when ‘‘Egyptian, Assyrian, and even Mexican [sic] monuments’’ were put on display in the temple of European art.≥ But at least these were 144

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high urban cultures, and except for the Mexican works, not foreign to the heritage of Europe. At the end of the 1970s, when the well-known dealer in ‘‘primitive’’ art Charles Ratton had o√ered his collection to the Louvre, it was refused, and the works were dispersed at auctions. The story in Le Monde on the new hall was headed ‘‘The Louvre Gets Ready / To Receive the ‘Primitives’ Coldly.’’∂ Putting this first outpost of this art in the Louvre was ‘‘a manifesto’’ [manifeste], in the words of the Quai Branly director Stéphane Martin, ‘‘perhaps first to get the attention of people beyond our borders, and then to show them that the attitude of the French about non-European civilizations is not exactly what they might imagine it to be.’’∑ The conversion of a space in the eastern end of the Grand Louvre was begun in June 1998. Museum conservatives consoled themselves with the belief that the pieces were being placed in the Pavillon des Sessions as a staging area while awaiting the completion of their permanent home, the new building going up across the Seine. This was how the Louvre’s director, Pierre Rosenberg, a specialist on eighteenthcentury French art, told the story of the new hall in his many interviews with the press.∏ Jacques Kerchache and Jacques Chirac had met by chance while each was visiting the Île Maurice. There Kerchache persuaded the president that it was high time that traditional art from non-European lands should be brought back into the Louvre.π Such art had been once in the grand museum. In 1827 a permanent Egyptian wing had been dedicated. In 1837 the ethnographical collection of the naval museum—naval o≈cers first administered the colonies—was transferred to the Louvre. But in 1911 suddenly all the non-European art, save that acknowledged as precursors to that of Europe—the Egyptian court art, for example—was suddenly banished from the building. From its beginnings during the Revolution, the Louvre has always been a kind of palimpsest on which the changing ideas of the French heritage have been written and rewritten.∫ When time came to make the selection of pieces to be exhibited, Chirac asked his friend to choose them. Kerchache selected 170 primarily statuary works. He selected from the four cultural areas that the team working on the Quai Branly project had defined as their primary interest. Every one was of exceptional aesthetic quality. He had a good eye. But, stuck still in pre–World War II modernism, albeit decorated with the fig leaf of more current textuality-talk, Kerchache The Dance of the Museums

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A computer-generated aerial view as if from the Ei√el Tower of the projected Musée du Quai Branly. Courtesy Ateliers Jean Nouvel.

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showed interest only in formal excellence: ‘‘the artist’s integrity, his project, his gesture. Sculpture is writing in three dimensions. You have to learn how to read it.’’ This was the language of a dealer presenting a work to a rich buyer. Compared to the culturally sophisticated exhibitions of many contemporary museums of the art of small cultures, Kerchache’s strategy gave the Louvre’s hall a retro-modern look. His exhibition design takes the visitor back to the days when Picasso discovered and began to quote formal moves that he saw in African art.Ω The peoples, or artists, who made the art, as in interwar modernism, are largely left out. The works are presented not as culturally specific, but literally in the light of a one-dimensional vision of modern France. Ruth Phillips, 146

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at the time director of the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver—a museum known for its special attention to the aesthetics of its displays—was amazed when for the first time in the fall of 2002 she walked through Kerchache’s installation. ‘‘Seeing the Louvre’s new Arts Premiers was a shock. Totally beautiful, breathtaking masterpieces all reduced to an incredible sameness by lighting, installation, and the reduction of each to its minimalist formal elements through cleaning, conservation and the removal of all the ra≈a and messy bits.’’∞≠ Nevertheless—or perhaps because of the undemanding beauty on exhibit—the Pavillon des Sessions was a big hit. The hall was inaugurated in 13 April 2000. Seven thousand visitors came that first Thursday, the maximum that safety regulations permitted. The bookstore–gift shop could not handle the customers pressing around the registers.∞∞ In his address at the opening, President Chirac emphasized his decision to make the Louvre space a permanent outpost of the Quai Branly. Until his retirement a year later, suitably on the first anniversary of the opening of the new hall, 13 April 2001, Pierre Rosenberg continued to refer to the installations in the Pavillon des Sessions as a temporary use of the space. Heroically, his ever-present red scarf wrapped around his neck, he went down with his Occidentalist guns still blazing. Of foreign visitors to French museums, 60 percent go only to the Louvre. By o√ering tourists a foretaste of the extraordinarily splendid pieces that Kerchache has assembled in the Pavillon des Sessions, the state museum administration hopes to disperse, maybe decentralize is the right word, the people who have come to witness France’s special relationship to the cultures of the world. Like the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s creation of the Michael Rockefeller Wing of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in 1982—upon which the Pavillon des Sessions was modeled—the project of honoring the art of the South was at the same time subsuming it in a western project of cultural hegemony.∞≤ To create the Rockefeller Wing, Nelson Rockefeller had first closed the Museum of Primitive Art, which he had founded in 1954 to house his excellent collection. He turned over its 3,300 pieces to the Metropolitan. Thereby, the museum of great urban cultures on Fifth Avenue swallowed some of the art objects of the world’s ‘‘primitive’’ cultures. Kerchache’s move was a little di√erent. For him and for PresiThe Dance of the Museums

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dent Chirac, installing the Louvre’s new hall was just planting a forward outpost, a manifesto of future actions expressed in the media of wood, clay, metal, glass beads, grasses, and feathers. Germain Viatte, the arts director of Quai Branly, has been entirely candid about the politics of repositioning the art of once colonized peoples in arguably the most sacred place of the patrimoine of metropolitan France. ‘‘We have to think back to the origin of this enterprise: the political determination to a≈rm both symbolically and forcefully the equality of all cultures, and for France to endorse this equality, as a start, within its most prestigious institution.’’∞≥ So, while the cultural conservatives were still fuming about the forced entry of non-European works into their cathedral of our time— to take Malraux’s image—a new grand cathedral dedicated entirely to the art of the Other, with their strange gods, was rising across the Seine. The Museum of Whose Arts?

In 1995, a year after his election for the first time as president of the Republic, Jacques Chirac announced his intention to build a new museum—quite apart from the project for the Louvre hall—which would group together the collections of the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et Océanie (30,000 pieces) and the Musée de l’Homme (270,000 pieces). Initially, the people he appointed to plan the museum seemed to have agreed upon three distinct roles for the new institution: to conserve and exhibit the collections, to stimulate research, and to develop an educational program. But those goals were significantly altered in the ‘‘prefiguration,’’ or early planning, period with the angry departure of the anthropologist Maurice Godelier from the sta√. More about this below. The project to build the president’s museum was made o≈cial in a decree issued just two days before Christmas 1998. Three hundred thousand Christmas presents in a handsome new glass wrapping made for a great holiday at the Élysée Palace. The museum came under the joint supervision of the then minister of culture and communication, Catherine Trautman, and the minister of national education, research, and technology, Claude Allègre. Without hesitation, the Socialist parliamentary majority voted the funds needed. Here, the much criticized governmental cohabitation between left and right worked with no friction. President Chirac would have his 148

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monument. In any case, there was a wide consensus from left to right about the value of replacing the old, little-visited museums with a new, more up-to-date one.∞∂ The Council of Ministers on 23 December 1998 confirmed Stéphane Martin as president responsible for the general management of the establishment. By a decree of 28 January 1999, Jacques Friedmann was appointed chairman of the steering committee. On the proposal of the president of the establishment and his arts adviser, by a joint order of 11 May 1999, the two ministers concerned appointed Germain Viatte, a specialist on contemporary western art, as director of the museology project and Maurice Godelier, economic anthropologist and specialist on New Guinea, as director of the educational and research project. Currently (2004) the museum is just a set of temporary o≈ces in the 16th arrondissement and a construction site on the Seine. But it is already virtually impressive. The web site is handsome and quite elaborate. There is a computer terminal on the sidewalk in front of where they are building. From there the curious can connect to the museum’s web site and read what is planned. The plan is to open the physical doors of the building in the summer of 2005. Meanwhile, the reader can access www.quaibranly.fr to follow the musée’s own account of the progress toward the opening. There is also an automated camera continuously feeding the web site images of the construction work. Designed by Jean Nouvel, one of France’s greatest contemporary architects, the new museum for the art of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas occupies the last site left along the Seine in the heart of Paris capable of housing so large a building. When completed, the Ei√el Tower will, well, tower over it on one side. The museum of the nineteenth century, the Orsay, will be down the quai a few blocks.∞∑ And the Louvre, fortress of classicism, will stand not far away on the other bank of the Seine. The modern, mostly glass structure occupies a whole big block on Paris’s museum row. The building measures nearly forty thousand square meters and houses an auditorium and a photothèque. It has been customary in France to associate a research center (usually cnrs) with museums of society. This was the case with both the Museé de l’Homme and the Museé des Arts et Traditions Populaires. And the new museum of popular culture being built in MarThe Dance of the Museums

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A computer-generated elevation of the Musée du Quai Branly. Courtesy Ateliers Jean Nouvel.

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seilles will include a cnrs group. These museums were, and will be, built to serve as social science laboratories for the study of societies. The materials on exhibition and in storage in these museums are there—in principle—to facilitate the scholarly work. But since the departure of Godelier there has been no more talk of a research function planned for Quai Branly. It will be an art museum. From the sidewalk running along the river, visitors will enter a planted forest which will bu√er the museum from the noises of the highway and river tra≈c. Once through the woods, they will walk in landscapes evoking several of the ecologies from lands where the art inside originated. Jean Nouvel wishes to re-enchant this world. ‘‘The Paris garden will become a sacred wood, and the museum will dissolve in its depths.’’∞∏ We see how contemporary French aesthetic modernism continues its longtime romance with the magic of ‘‘primitivism.’’∞π 150

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There have been other takes on this vision of place of a magical art in a sacred wood. The museum’s director Stéphane Martin was invited to speak on the museum at the Maison Française at New York University in September 2000. After he finished his proud description of its bucolic setting in the heart of the city, an artist from Guinée sitting in the audience could not contain himself, ‘‘What! Visitors will enter the museum of African art through a jungle!’’ Did they plan, he asked, to play recorded parrot and monkey calls?∞∫ When President Chirac first proposed the museum, the term ‘‘primitive art’’ was used in o≈cial statements to describe its contents. People who knew something of the subject immediately protested. This unacceptable label was soon dropped, to be replaced successively by the equally objectionable euphemism Museum of the First Arts [arts premiers], Museum of Societies and Civilizations, and then Museum of Man, Arts and Civilizations. The planners have ended the distasteful naming game, at least temporarily, by simply calling the museum by its street address: Musée du Quai Branly. Reelected in 2002 for five more years, President Chirac will still be in o≈ce when the museum opens in 2005. Since this is his principal public monument to his presidency, the museum will surely one day be called the Musée Chirac. François Mitterrand was generous with monuments to himself. Georges Pompidou’s devotion to creating a new modern art museum was recognized in his own lifetime by giving the Centre Beaubourg his name. Jacques Chirac has demonstrated admiration for some of the kinds of art—in particular Asian and Amerindian—that will be on display in the new building, so why not a Musée Chirac? Given the huge expense, the turmoil that the new institution has caused and will continue to cause in the French museum world, and the choice of which art will be honored, the story of the French state’s recognition of the arts of non-urban peoples, largely of the southern hemisphere, is more complicated than can be captured by the phrase ‘‘President Chirac wanted it.’’ Himself an avid collector of modern art, Georges Pompidou wanted to have a museum dedicated to twentiethcentury art, certainly as a monument to his own preferences in art, but also to recover for France some of the prestige that Paris lost after World War II when ‘‘New York stole the idea of modern art,’’ to use the striking title of Serge Guilbaut’s book.∞Ω Whereas modern art museums in New York (the Whitney, the Modern) and in Washington (the Corcoran) played a decisive role from the 1930s onward in legitiThe Dance of the Museums

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mating the new contemporary art by both showing and collecting new works, there was no such parallel institution in Paris. The Musée de l’Art Moderne, installed after the 1937 Exposition in the former Palais de Tokyo, wasn’t performing that function. Its director Jean Cassin, handicapped by having conservative tastes in modernism—the socalled École de Paris of the pre–World War II decades—by being a communist, and by being close to the mandatory retirement age, was not the right man for the Gaullist president. In the early 1970s the old modern art museum was emptied of its treasures, which were then installed in the new Centre Pompidou. The move came too late to save the standing of Paris as the world’s art capital, but any origins-story that would make the building of the Pompidou simply a monument to a dying head of state is just too simple-minded. The periodic building of new state museums has followed this same pattern of associating an art style or period enshrined in the institution with new state cultural and political policies.≤≠ The Louvre was created as a public museum of the treasures of Europe and the Middle East confiscated by victorious French armies in the era of the French Revolution. The ethnographic museum, built in 1878, celebrated France’s dawning colonial project. The widespread conviction that the colonial empire had reached its apotheosis in the interwar years was celebrated at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931 and monumentalized in the Colonial Museum built for the event in the Bois de Vincennes. The rededication of the old ethnographic museum on 1 May 1937 as the Musée de l’Homme marked an attempt—unsuccessful, it turned out—by the temporarily dominant left of the Popular Front to redefine the relation of France to the colonial world. Michel Leiris, who was one of the principals in the transformation, once explained to the anthropologist Sally Price that the Musée de l’Homme deliberately reinstalled the old collection in new, simple glass-and-metal cases, posting extensive ethnographic information close by, to underscore the new curators’ wishes to transvalue the objects on display from old curios of imperial expansion to scientific specimens of an emergent social science. The new director, Paul Rivet, Socialist deputy from the 5th arrondissement, employed a strategy of representing other cultures not as oddities but rather as sites of investigation of the laws of human social life. Stemming from his deep involvement in the Popular Front, his move aimed at reviving the lapsed heritage of the first founding of a humanist, universalist ethnography during the Enlightenment.≤∞ 152

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A further feature of the Popular Front moment, also in 1937, was the creation—in a kind of cell division—of a museum of French provincial life in the same building as the Musée de l’Homme. There had been a hall of provincial France in the museum since 1888. But now, under Georges-Henri Rivière it would become a separate entity. Creating two social science museums, one for ‘‘primitive’’ societies and one for the French countrysides, was in line with the challenge by allies of the Front Populaire to the ultra-right’s claim to speak for the real nation against merely the legal one which it controlled. But the price was high. The left staked its claims in politics to speak for all humanity. But because of the threats of German and French radical nationalisms, at the same time French progressives built two separate museums, and with them consecrated two di√erent social sciences for di√erentially valued portions of this humanity. The distinction would prove fatal to ethnology at the moment of decolonization after the war. It was fitting that at the height of the new regionalists agitations, in February 1972, the museum of France, the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, opened its doors in its new home on Boulevard Mahatma Gandhi in the Bois de Boulogne.≤≤ The creation of the Musée du Quai Branly is inscribed in that old tradition of the separation between the arts of great cultures and the arts of the others. Like the other creations, it projects a major rereading of the French cultural heritage. In so doing, it o√ers a new answer to the perennial questions: What is France? Who are the French? What is special about Quai Branly? Stéphane Martin thinks the newness of the museum lies in the fact ‘‘that the museum is no longer the setting of a simulacrum [of the colonial empire], which in any case never came o√, but rather a social setting among others that the citizen uses for forging a tool for interpretation.’’ But what is being interpreted? I think it is still a simulacrum, but now not of the old empire, such as presented at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931. The new institution is not the metaphorical appropriation of the colonies, a simulacrum of the Greater France—which was the theme of the 1931 show. The colonial era is over. I think that is what Martin might mean by ‘‘the museum is no longer the setting of a simulacrum, which in any case never came o√.’’ Quai Branly is a new copy for which there is not yet an original of France’s chosen vocation to be—in this era when globalization threatens to flatten all cultural distinction—the principal patron of the art of the small cultures of the world. Quai The Dance of the Museums

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Branly is being launched as France’s most important aesthetic marker of the arrival of postcoloniality. The stormy departure of Maurice Godelier from the planning sta√ also marks the triumph of a certain postcolonial episteme, and the defeat of a possible alternative. Godelier is not only a distinguished field worker and theorist of modern anthropology but was for some years the senior social scientist at the National Center for Scientific Research (cnrs). Clearly, in terms of disciplinary credentials, he was the right man to be put in charge of the scientific and educational work of the Quai Branly. Despite almost irreconcilable di√erences, he and Kerchache managed to collaborate in planning the Louvre installation. Both wanted to see art that had once been marginalized in ethnographic museums installed in the fortress of European culture. Kerchache got his art gallery and Godelier carried out a kind of historic revenge in behalf of the once colonized. He also got—placed o√ in an obscure corner of the hall—some computer terminals with lots of ethnographic information on cds. The two men consolidated the beachhead at the edge of the Louvre. Because Godelier understood that the Louvre was about art, he was willing to compromise his ethnological principles. But Quai Branly, that was to be more his kind of museum. Soon, his di√erences with his colleagues over the planning of Quai Branly began to produce tensions. Godelier wanted to make a better Musée de l’Homme. He wanted a modernized ethnology museum with lots of immediately accessible information available to visitors about the societies which produced the artifacts being exhibited. He agreed that the old Musée de l’Homme was unsalvageable. Its functioning was seriously compromised by deep internal rifts. Such intense divisions are not the cause of disaster; they are usually the consequences of shipwreck. Because policymakers do not like to entrust funds to divided and perhaps doomed institutions, the MdH hadn’t been able to carry on an adequate acquisition policy for decades. Godelier’s own judgment was severe. ‘‘Nothing on towns, as if from the Ancient world to the present the town had not been a major human fact.’’ The Musée de l’Homme showed visitors only forest peoples, ‘‘plumed savages’’ [des sauvages emplumés], and sedentary or nomadic peasants.≤≥ When I made my farewell visit in January 2003, just before its close, I passed the familiar Northwest Coast pole at the entrance. The tall, 154

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weathered pole had served for so many years as a totem for the artist who had carved it, for the honor of the people who had it made, for the culture of the museum which displayed it, and for a disappearing way of representing tribal cultures. Inside I climbed the worn stairs and walked along the dirty and unpainted walls. I encountered few other visitors. And yet I was still drawn to the dusty, badly presented, but withal beautiful things on display in ‘‘scientific’’ showcases in the style of the 1930s. But I also was once more pained to see the pole inside that had been sawed in two to fit its place of display. On leaving, I wandered next door to the Musée de la Marine, also an antique of a museum, to perhaps find out if any changes were being contemplated in this dry dock of boat models of the classical age of French sea power. The guard with whom I spoke brought my museological musings down to the French earth: No, as far as he knew no changes were planned, ‘‘at least not until my retirement.’’ Germain Viatte, Stéphane Martin, and Jacques Chirac wanted to build a museum displaying the great art of Amerindians, Central Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Africans. The French state had such works in abundance. Quai Branly is neither budgeted for, nor plans, an aggressive acquisitions policy. That means that it automatically becomes a classical museum of dead peoples’ arts. Trained as a specialist in contemporary western art, Viatte had learned his duties on the job as head of the museum of African and Oceanic arts in the Bois de Vincennes. Martin is an Enarque, a graduate of the National School of Administration. His knowledge about Africa, and its art, comes primarily from his several years’ residence in Senegal, where he was on loan from the French government to help run the country’s finance ministry. In the word that native American intellectuals and artists use with so many shades of largely negative meaning, Chirac is ‘‘a collector.’’ Godelier’s political project—he is a man of the left—was to tell the story of ex-colonial people and their struggles for liberty. He wished, also, to make the museum relevant to France’s large immigrant population. He had planned to create a web site at the museum where, for example, a French schoolchild from Mali, or with parents from Mali, could with the help of his teachers in perhaps one of the less favored schools in the immigrant suburbs of Paris access information about Mali posted online by the museum. Thereby, at will and in depth, youngsters could put themselves in touch with their ‘‘non-European The Dance of the Museums

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Northwest Coast totem pole at the entrance of the Musée de l’Homme. Photo by the author.

25.

Totem pole sawed in two to fit space on exhibition inside the Musée de l’Homme. Photo by the author.

26.

27. Musée Guimet, whose collection will go to the Quay Branly museum. Photo by the author.

heritage.’’ But no matter where the works come from, metropolitan museums of great art celebrate, finally, only one heritage: that of the rulers. One day Godelier arrived in his o≈ce to find that his key no longer fit his o≈ce door. The lock had been changed. When he asked, he found that the secretary had a copy of the new one. She o√ered to open his o≈ce for him whenever he needed to get in. Le Monde of 4 January 2001 carried the news of Godelier’s resignation. The same news story announced his replacement by Emmanuel Désveaux, a forty-six-yearold one-time student of Lévi-Strauss and a specialist on North American woodland Indian cultures. Désveaux is more comfortable than Godelier was about the way the new museum is developing.≤∂ What does that mean, just exactly, that Quai Branly will be an art The Dance of the Museums

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museum? In his incisive Exhibiting Contradiction, this is how Alan Wallach portrays ‘‘traditional art historical wisdom’’: ‘‘Choose the best works, gather them together under a familiar if tendentious label (‘Treasures,’ ‘Masterpieces,’ ‘Genius,’ ‘Paradise’), add wall texts with a smattering of background information, and, voilà, success is pretty much assured.’’ He is writing about museum practice in the United States and the showing of nineteenth-century American art, but it is remarkable how universal such museum practices are.≤∑ But nocontext is a not-shown that like what is not-said speaks volumes of organized meaning. Looking at the not-shown is especially valuable, as it can help us to decode—depending on the greater context of the museum and the society—various invisible, and therefore powerful, a≈rmations. Like the Louvre, its much older sister institution which displays France’s great dedication to the art of Europe, Quai Branly is being positioned to advance a new French claim: France has a special relationship, a special concern, a special respect, for the cultures which will be on display there. When completed, Quai Branly will envelop the objects it shows in yet another layer of European meaning, that of the modernist work of art. But with its high modernist aesthetic agenda, the layers will neither be seen nor evoked. This layering—which is always there—nests many messages. I mean that a museum piece carries the meanings, for example, given it by the artist who made it, by members of the society where it was wanted, by the specific ceremony, rite, or status hierarchy it may have been a part of, by the missionaries or collectors who gained possession of it, by the dealers and their clients who paid for it, by the museum curators who acquired and displayed it, and by the public who came to see the apparently decontexted (yet multiply contexted) piece on exhibition. And most movingly, there are the complex and often painful meanings that the African or Amerindian visitor understands when standing before a dismembered piece of his or her stolen heritage. Adopting an idea from Fredric Jameson in my True France, I called these strata of meaning inhering in a work of ethnographic art ‘‘wrapping.’’ I focus on the historical stratifications of meanings added to the object. More exactly, it is a genealogy of the imperial gaze. But an approach out of time, a series of freeze frames, could equally foster heightened understanding. 158

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Jacques Hainard, the innovative director of the Musée d’Ethnologie of Neuchâtel, speaks of his work as making a ‘‘millefeuille,’’ that delicious, rich, layered pastry enjoyed—also like a museum visit—on a Sunday afternoon. There’s no need to dispute metaphors, nor methods. What Hainard has decided to show in his museum is not the layers of meaning adhering to the object, but rather the ways the discipline of ethnology situated the meaning, at any given moment, of cultures and their object. What is certain is that neither of us is proposing an exercise in hermeneutics. We do not think that deep down we can find a final, correct, or profound meaning. But unlike the historian, the museum curator can show us what she or he means. Since he became its director in 1980 Hainard has made his institution ‘‘a museum for bringing things into question.’’ When evolutionism dominated anthropology, cultural objects were exhibited as markers of how far a people had evolved culturally. But with the developmental paradigm discredited, finally, what is the status of the objects we show in ethnography museums? Hainard has brilliantly practiced what he calls ‘‘cultural deconstruction,’’ [déconstruction culturelle] in order to reveal the layers of our history with the largely African things he exhibits. Neuchâtel chronicles the stages of development, not of the lives and arts of ‘‘primitive’’ peoples but rather of the changing Western understandings of their cultures. In a series of spaces the museum shows the millefeuille that Western observers baked (or half baked), not one made by the cultures represented. For example, there is a reconstruction of an eighteenthcentury Cabinet of Natural History which belonged to the Swiss general Charles Daniel de Meuron, who collected much of the material while serving in the French army overseas. It is arranged in four categories: mineral (gems, stones, pottery), vegetable (wooden and woven things), animal (stu√ed birds and little creatures preserved in jars), and artificial (objects like bows, knives, spears, and masks). Then the curators have recreated a room after the models of nineteenth-century ethnographic museums. Objects are displayed on the walls and in cases according to their functions, that is, ‘‘typologically’’: spears and swords in nice fanlike or other elegant patterns on this wall, tools on another. Drums from all over in one place, textiles in another. Jewelry of many cultures in the same cases. This is the way General Pitt Rivers wanted his collection shown in Oxford, for examThe Dance of the Museums

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ple. And there it remains, still frozen in the heroic age of colonial categorizing. Neuchâtel also shows the evolutionist museum of the nineteenth century: series of metal tools or weapons, for example, ever more refined with the passage of time. There is also a display of the theory of cultural di√usionism, demonstrating borrowings and showing linkages of even distant cultural spaces. Cowry shells usually have pride of place in such presentations; they come only from certain places but are found everywhere. Finally, still in the world of classical ethnology, visitors can see examples of ‘‘ethnotechnology’’: among other things, photographs of indigenous peoples. They can hear recordings of their music. Moving forward in time, we come to a room dedicated to the museology aptly called ‘‘The Aesthetic Temptation.’’ This is how Hainard introduces this style of exhibition on the museum’s web site: Trapped between grandpa’s ethnology and today’s reflexive and critical gaze, the people in charge of ethnographic museums o√er an aesthetic discourse or camouflage themselves behind respect for the Other in order to display in a fragmentary manner and without situating them in time and space (sans recul) the treasures of these Others. Because of the enchantment produced by these masterpieces, ethnographic objects are positioned as if they were works by Western artists: form and aesthetic audacity are put in the center of discussion, and work on how they fit into the society (leur fonctionalité) becomes superfluous. Finally, we come to the room called ‘‘The Cabinet of Curiosities of the 21st Century.’’ Coke cans, Frankenstein masks, plaster busts of Charles de Gaulle, little tin or plastic airplanes, Bulova watches, candy bars, carvings of missionaries riding in a jeep, local ritual objects made from industrial materials, Bibles in the local language, and some objects for a long-time part of the culture—these kinds of things, and many, many more, cover tables and display areas in colorful and jumbled profusion. For this is the material culture of the people studied today by ethnologists. The display is open-ended, non-judgmental, non-aesthetic. It takes as ‘‘authentic’’ that which exists in the cultures today. The objects displayed are people-centered, not the object fetishism of arty shows. Here Hainard and his team o√er us one sketch for the museum of the postcolonial, globalizing age. And in so doing, they 160

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invite us, and the people of the cultures on display, to come discuss with them.≤∏ Will there be an ethnographic side to the Musée du Quai Branly? The new education and research director, Emmanuel Désveaux, understands that the peoples from where the art comes do not want, do not need, anthropologists to speak for them. The era of anthropologists as mediators between authorities and local peoples—the era when Godelier was entering the discipline—is closed.≤π Today, the only museological choices, as Désveaux sees it, are to let the native voices speak, or to let their art speak for them. The first option—with its implication, for him, of allowing people from different societies to take part in planning their representation in the museum—would be unacceptably chaotic, a kind of ‘‘ethnographic bazaar.’’ Since Désveaux’s special area of interest is eastern Canadian Indians, he must know that it is now the normal practice of museums in Canada and, for that matter, the United States, to invite native peoples to participate in organizing exhibitions about their lives and their art. But the plan of Quai Branly will mandate that the groups stay home, and the things their members make, at least those objects which the curators especially admire, will represent them. But then Désveaux’s training as an anthropologist adds one more layer of complexity to his understanding of the museum’s mission: in an interview with me, he said he was not sure one should use the word ‘‘art’’ to characterize these works, since none of the cultures on display did art as we understand it in the modernist sense—for its own sake. If native peoples do not do art the way, say, Picasso did art, why is work from their hands on walls, on stands, and in display cases shown as if it were art like Picasso’s? Or was ‘‘primitive’’ art done only by dead or anonymous people? The organizers of Quai Branly risk falling into a permanent ontological muddle. The museum will provide a partial remedy to the out-of-date and patronizing exhibition style of showing ritual artifacts of the ‘‘peoples without history,’’ and therefore without artists. The historical anthropologist Alban Bensa has been asked to do a gallery devoted to named artists of works on exhibition at Quai Branly. That is, as with a Rembrandt, or an unknown painter of the School of Venice, or the Master of the Such-and-Such Altar, the gallery will tell us—where the information is available—about the artists, the historical influences, and The Dance of the Museums

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the moment for a work from Africa, or Polynesia, or the Pacific Northwest Coast. But what about the artists from the cultures on display who are alive and doing new art in the old traditions, or indeed new art in new traditions? These are not hypothetical cases. Contemporary African and Native American artists are today, for example, doing new work in both old and new styles. We know the artists’ names, their personal styles, their dealers, and where they exhibit. Perhaps the museum will put on special shows of current work, but that is not its main emphasis. The museum will show what it owns, the accumulation of French history. Limited new acquisitions will primarily enrich what is already there, or fill unacceptable lacunae. The new museum will follow the tried and true path of French arts classicism: it will show the aesthetically best pieces by dead, mostly male artists in a minimal historical context. It bodes badly for the exhibition choices that will be made at Quai Branly, when we realize that of the pieces Kerchache assembled in the Pavillon des Sessions in the Louvre there were no textiles, tapestries, pottery—art often made by women. Quai Branly as the ‘‘Louvre’’ of Third World art is more than a metaphor of valorization. It is also the price tag bearing the social cost of aesthetic distinction for France. It should not be surprising, then, that there is not much concern at Quai Branly—at least at this stage—about people showing up at the museum’s door and demanding back their grandfather’s mask, or an uncle’s power figure. French law, Désveaux points out, makes state property inalienable. No claim that an object from a community or a relative was taken improperly, illicitly, or impiously will be honored. Germain Viatte, art historian coming from the African and Oceanic museum to direct the arts aspect of the museum, takes a tough position on questions of restitution. France owns the art in its possession. As he made perfectly clear in an interview reprinted in Le Débat, We have to face the question: to whom do these heritages belong? Certainly, to the history of our country. But even more to the cultures that in some cases are already gone or in their death throes, and in others, ones hoping to bring about a cultural rebirth [renaissance]. In setting up our museum we have to take into account this necessary sharing of cultural heritages between us and their creators, while taking heed not to sink into that all too familiar 162

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paternalism out of a misplaced sensitivity to ‘‘political correctness,’’ which consists in imprisoning our partners in their distinctiveness while keeping the monopoly of the universal for ourselves. We cannot agree to any requests for restitutions, which France has been able to avoid since 1815, but which are continuing to be put to the English in the case of the Pantheon Marbles or the Benin Bronzes. But we could undertake international collaborations which would permit us to reach viable compromises between di√ering and incompatible claims, like for example, between those calling for restitution and the need to protect the objects.≤∫ According to Désveaux, certain objects will be loaned to groups with the established right to them for ceremonial or religious purposes. And, of course—as is now standard museum practice in the United States and Canada—objects that for religious or cult reasons should not be viewed will be taken o√ display. For the moment, none of France’s pressure groups created to defend the interests of the immigrant population have shown any interest in the Quai Branly. Republican discouragement of ‘‘communitarianism’’ inhibits ‘‘African-French,’’ for example, from insisting on the connection between their heritages and the museum’s displays. That was the case, too, with the African and Oceanic art in the museum at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes from the time that Malraux gave it those specialties. Nor have organizations such as sos Racisme shown much concern. We Americans are accustomed to much more Sturm und Drang over questions of who has the right to speak for a minority culture. So this disengagement in France is curious to us. Will it continue? Finally, the relation of the museum to the colonial past concerns the Quai Branly team as much as it did Godelier. Whereas Godelier’s idea was to begin the healing by remembering and displaying past injustices, the current sta√ has decided to turn its backs on history, especially colonial history, and show its respect for the once colonized by promoting the works on display into the ranks of modernism. By removing the works from the archaic ethnographic contexts in which they were situated at the Musée de l’Homme and the former colonial museum—putting them literally in Jean Nouvel’s handsome new glass-and-steel frame—Désveaux believes that both visitors and the objects they will see will leave the world of colonialism.≤Ω The Dance of the Museums

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The Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean

The opening of the new museum of popular culture in Marseilles is scheduled for 2006. But even before it opens its doors, it has announced to the public an exhibition to run from November 2003 to March 2004, in a temporary space, to be entitled ‘‘Tell me about Algiers’’ [Parlez-moi d’Alger]. A second show will celebrate the di√erent culinary traditions of the cultures that the museum embraces, ‘‘Cuisines en fête’’ (2004–5). The museum will do ‘‘Fado’’ music (2005–6) and ‘‘Saints and Pilgrimages’’ (2006–7).≥≠ A children’s wing is also planned. What Marseilles will show and do is not yet fully worked out, but the transition team thinks that demonstrations of ethnic cooking—maybe a North African woman showing how she makes couscous or perhaps someone of Portuguese heritage doing something with salt cod—might work well. In any case, such live demonstrations will be experimented with in the ‘‘Cuisines en fête’’ exhibition. Even the museum café will feature dishes related to the places and the themes of the museum.≥∞ Algeria, immigration, cultural diversity as manifested in diverse food traditions, the popular music of the poor neighborhoods of Lisbon, popular veneration of the holy, and the multiculturalism which French children experience every day—these are the colors the new museum on the Old Port will fly. The director, Michel Colardelle, and his team want to create a museum of Euro-Mediterranean life, emphasizing the history of the areas’ diversity and at the same time the extensive, enriching cultural exchanges. But why build another ethnology museum? What is wrong with the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires? The answer, in part, is that like the Musée de l’Homme, no one visits it. The location in the large wooded park at the western edge of the city is hard to reach by public transport. The original museology of its first director, Georges Henri Rivières, innovative in its time, screams 1930s modernism.≥≤ And there is nothing as old as yesterday’s modernism. The temporary exhibitions have not been very compelling over the years. Built in the early 1970s, at the high point of both the economic and nostalgia booms, the public of the matp began to disappear with the deflation of both bubbles. Nostalgia for the old things and ways has little rapport with trustworthy information about historic French popular and regional cultures. Reading color cata164

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28. Building of Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires. The collection will go to the new museum of popular culture being built in Marseilles. Photo by the author.

logues devoted to replicas of old-time farm furnishings turned out to be more attractive than schlepping o√ to an out-of-the-way museum. In a peculiar way the matp fell victim to the seductions of French universalism. Exhibiting the distinctiveness of the rural regions of France, it just could not compete for the foreign visitors’ attention with the Louvre, for example, the museum of the West’s high art. The doggedness of classicism in French culture on the one side, and a tumultuous new cosmopolitanism on the other, have frozen the old matp as a museum of a certain moment in the history of museums of popular culture. Although mostly trained ethnologists, Colardelle and his people do not want to do another matp at a better location. They have another model in mind. In 1989 the Canadian National Museum of Man—its name since 1968—moved into its new building in Gatineau, Quebec The Dance of the Museums

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Province, just across the river from Parliament Hill in Ottawa. In its new setting it became the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Designed by the architect Douglas Cardinal, himself a culturally self-conscious Canadian métis, it is devoted to the mosaic (the o≈cially preferred Canadian metaphor) of Canadian cultures. The entry level handsomely displays the art and artifacts of Canada’s First Nations. Along the long axis of the hall run six full-size and handsomely painted house-fronts, each in the style of one of the Northwest Coast peoples. They line a walkway overlooking an artificial waterfront, as each of them might have appeared on a shoreline in British Columbia. The houses have appropriate totem poles in front, and inside are held up by carved houseposts. The upper floors of the museum deal with the emigration experience, the pioneers, and the cultures of the other peoples who built the country.≥≥ At Marseilles they will necessarily have to tell a di√erent story, but the theme of unity in multiplicity is there too. ‘‘Drawing on, as needed, all the available sciences, ethnology, of course, but also sociology, geography, the environmental sciences, history, archaeology, linguistics, etc., Man [sic] will be understood [in France’s own museum of civilization],’’ writes Michel Colardelle, ‘‘in his totality, in his complexity.’’ Colardelle marks his team’s vision along several convergent vectors of representation. The museum in Marseilles will not define itself in terms of a precise geographical area. Where are the boundaries of the Euro-Mediterranean space, after all? Always urbanized, but primarily agricultural, the Euro-Mediterranean world will be divided for display purposes along ecological lines: the lands of wheat, the lands of the vine, and those of the olive. Within this setting, the exhibitions will be dedicated to the slow, historical, sometimes peaceful but sometimes conflictual marking of a crossroad at which many cultures intersected and fused. The organizers see the museum’s spatial field of interest as ‘‘perfectly coherent,’’ as well, in the dimension of time. It will be the museum of ‘‘European and Mediterranean civilization from the Hegira and the birth of the great Christian-Islam rivalry and the establishment of the basic structures of social life to the [present-day] economic globalization with its accompanying socio-cultural model.’’ Viewed from the standpoint of historical processes at work, the new museum will display a world marked by ‘‘historicity, diversity, population movements, contact, exchange, transmission, innovation, 166

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hybridity [métissage], and centralized and stratified [hiérarchisation] social and technological organizations.’’ Yet for all its manifest diversity, there were certain fundamental qualities which di√erentiated this Mediterranean world from other areas: of course, the permanence of cultural change, but also syncretism, monotheism, accumulation and circulation of wealth, the early use of instruments of money and credit, the birth of states in more or less recognizable form around the year 1000, feudalism in the Christian lands, multi-functional towns, evolution toward democratic forms, and above all, a certain self-conscious sense of the world as historical. The museum’s ambition is to show visitors not timeless outcomes, but rather the permanence of change in the hybridized world that the museum will help them to understand as the one they share with so many others. The final name of the museum has still not been fixed. ‘‘Musée des Passages’’ is the number one choice of the sta√. ‘‘Rose de Vents’’ [The Points of the Compass] is second. ‘‘Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée à Marseille,’’ the designation currently used, is the safest, the most explicit about the museum’s project, but the least interesting. Colardelle had first wanted to install the new museum somewhere in Paris, but it proved di≈cult to pry loose a space big enough. The move to Marseilles became Plan B. It was not a bad choice. It’s France’s second-largest city. From its Phoenician origins to its current role as an entrepôt for immigrants from Africa, it has been an epicenter of the Euro-Mediterranean world to which the museum is dedicated. Colardelle points out that Marseilles currently counts sixty ethnic groups of foreign origin living together in the city. It is in a sense a living compendium of the Mediterranean. And then, there is the hoped-for Bilbao e√ect. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum built in the middle of a railroad freight yard in the decaying Basque capital has produced an astonishing tourist renaissance. City fathers all over Europe didn’t have to read Pierre Bourdieu to appreciate the near magical transformation of accumulated art capital into the economic kind. In the planning document, Colardelle notes that each year 200,000 cruise ship passengers disembark in Marseilles. About 1.529 million people live less than a thirty-minute drive from the city. No small consideration is that 220,000 of them are schoolchildren, the cannon fodder of the educational museum. And The Dance of the Museums

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the same thirty-minute radius reaches an annual potential public of, as they say in the travel business, seven million tourist-nights. Finally, there is the research dimension. Whereas the Musée du Quai Branly will take the objects but shed the research program of the Musée de l’Homme, the Marseilles institution will root itself in the academic sphere. The research center of the old matp will be reestablished in Marseilles. In keeping with its task as a center for the study of ‘‘civilization’’ and ‘‘the popular,’’ its prime task will be to reflect on ‘‘the role of the museum in social relations, and especially, in [the development or discouragement] of attitudes of exclusion, of cultural domination, or in the breaks in cultural transmission.’’ When located in Paris the researchers were only concerned with French regions. The transplanted cnrs center will network not only with local research institutions, like the new Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in nearby Aix, but also with other museum research centers like itself in Berlin and Brussels. It will not be hard to find additional partners in eastern Europe. But so far it has proven di≈cult to forge relations with museums in Islamic countries. The new museum has tried honorably to make up for these lacunae by inviting representative scholars from all over the Euro-Mediterranean world onto its planning commission, its Conseil Scientifique. This reaching out to Africa and eastern Europe will go far to erase the invidious institutional and theoretical barrier erected in 1937 when the folklore of France was separated in the newly created matp from the ethnology of the rest of humanity as represented in the new Musée de l’Homme.≥∂ The planners of the establishment in Marseilles see their institution also as discharging a social mission. Unlike at Quai Branly, artistic criteria will not be the most important in assembling and displaying its collections. ‘‘The search for the beautiful is an essential feature of all societies at every level of historical development. So objects of beauty ought to be shown in the museum, but according to the [aesthetic] criteria of the societies which produced, or produces, them.’’ Accordingly, the museum will show its collections as well as make new acquisitions as its research programs mandate. The exhibition and the research programs will share two goals. First, they will preserve and show examples of the heritages entrusted to them. But the purpose is not simply to be a model for what should 168

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be admired and emulated. Rather, the exhibitions will serve ‘‘as ways of interrogating and challenging received ideas.’’ But collecting and conserving the popular past is second to what the new team sees as its principal contribution to the solidarity of life in the republic. ‘‘The museum is one of the instruments which the public authorities have fashioned . . . for enlarging the concept of a less centralized state in the cause of reinforcing the social fabric, of underpinning democratic solidarity, and of encouraging individuals to engage with the idea of a republican cohesion which respects diversity.’’ In the most modern of architectural settings, Quai Branly will enhance the standing of France as the protector of the once colonized peoples of the world by celebrating their artistic pasts. Stéphane Martin and his colleagues hope that Quai Branly will mark the definitive end of France’s colonial era. The only remnant of those bad old times—other than the works of captive heritages on display—will be aesthetic. The historic linkage of aesthetic modernism and ‘‘primitive ’’art will be monumentalized in steel, glass, and faux-tropical urban landscaping. The museum in a refurbished old redoubt at the entrance to Marseilles harbor, Fort Saint-Jean, is, in contrast, about people and places. It will signal the acceptance in o≈cial France, finally, of regional identities in a new Europe and a new Mediterranean world. So, in another fashion, largely ethnologic and historical, it will invite visitors to come into a new definition of French identity in the greater world. These new relational definitions of France’s cultural heritage—to the South, to the East, and not least to its own regions—will of course require the nullification of older, outworn or rejected ones. Death and Transfiguration

Although the sta√ of the Musée de l’Homme has fought hard by striking, picketing, and leafleting to save the institution, it has not managed to stop the planned closing. But the emptying of its cultural collections does not mean that the Musée de l’Homme will disappear. The ugly caterpillar that no one wanted to look at has been reborn as a new butterfly. And appropriately its midwife will be an entomologist. Patrick Blandin wrote his thesis on spiders in the savannas of Africa. In recent years he has become interested in questions of ecology. At The Dance of the Museums

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the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, the parent institution of the Musée de l’Homme, he was asked to redo the Grand Gallery of Zoology in the Jardin des Plantes. The refurbished hall reopened to great critical praise in 1994. The old bones artfully displayed—the central exhibit is a mass death march of scores and scores of animal skeletons trudging toward extinction—brought the public back to the museum. The experience gave Blandin a taste, and a skill, for museum work.≥∑ Appointed head of the Musée de l’Homme–to–be on 1 July 2002, Blandin is taking the old institution through its metamorphosis from culture to biology. Here too there is an irony. There has always been a tension between physical anthropology in France (historically called anthropologie) and the study of social relations in non-urban societies (in the nineteenth century labeled ethnographie and beginning in the mid-1920s ethnologie). In the nineteenth century—as today—the social and the biological o√ered contradictory explanations for human behavior. In 1937 Paul Rivet, a physical anthropologist with a background as a naval doctor, like many anthropologists of his day, created the new institution that he baptized the Musée de l’Homme. Although primarily devoted to the cultures of humankind, it maintained a laboratory of physical anthropology. While Rivet tried to work out how blood types, which had just been discovered in the 1930s, might serve as a basis for a ‘‘scientific’’ theory of races, his sta√ at the MdH looked for the commonalities of human cultures.≥∏ Now, for the Musée de l’Homme, biology is its destiny. In the fall of 2002 the Natural History Museum reorganized itself into two functional units. One will coordinate all the centers of research and of graduate teaching. The other comprises the institutions of the Museum devoted to general education and culture. As part of the second group, the MdH is paired with the zoos, botanical gardens, and natural history halls in the Jardin des Plantes. Henceforth, the Musée de l’Homme will be entirely devoted to the ‘‘natural history of man.’’ The old departments of ethnology, prehistory, and anthropology-biology are being dissolved as such, with the promise that some research— primarily physical anthropology—will still be done at the reformed museum. And the rich library and ethnographic archives of the MdH, what happens to them? The (Socialist) government mooted the idea of dispersing the collection along the lines of the museums’ reorganization. For example, the holdings on physical anthropology would re170

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main at the Palais de Chaillot, while the ethnographic photograph collection would be transferred to Quai Branly. At the end of January 2001, a group of ethnologists and librarians urged the minister for research—then a member of the still reigning Jospin government—to keep intact the museum’s current library and ethnographic archives. Maurice Godelier lent his support and Isac Chiva chaired the group and wrote the statement. So we can see that this was an interested, if laudable, rear-guard action to stop President Chirac’s plan for museum dominoes. Godelier, Chiva, and their group went beyond trying just to keep the books and archives together for scholars. They also called for a complete rethinking of the president’s projects. They urged the appointment of ‘‘a public body, neutral [sic] and capable of carrying out fuller and longer term deliberations on the problems posed by [the reorganization] of the three museums, dedicated to man and society.’’ With the conservative landslide in the elections of 2002, it is unlikely that any of these appeals will be heard.≥π So Quai Branly gets the art and the Palais de Chaillot keeps the body parts. And the research materials will end up here and there . . . somewhere. A Brief History of the Museums That Do Not Exist, May Be Created, May Not, But Extant or Not, Will Cause Even More Headaches

To end this history of museums which are disappearing and museums which are coming into existence, we must make last visits to two museums whose birth is even more uncertain than even the ones only at the planning stage. These are a museum of France’s overseas departments and territories and a museum of immigration. Currently, we know more about the roller-coaster planning exercise for the immigration museum. Just days after the great French ‘‘multicultural’’ World Cup victory in July 1998, Patrick Weil, cnrs specialist on immigration, and Philippe Bernard, journalist at Le Monde—both men close to the Socialist government in power—approached Premier Lionel Jospin with a proposal for building a national museum of immigration. The moment was right to make this suggestion. The boost to national grandeur through multiculturalism was still the rage.≥∫ Jospin liked the idea. In the real world of state administration, The Dance of the Museums

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dreams and desires have first to go through the caterpillar stage of becoming written reports. In due course, in late November 2001 the commission, on which among others Weil and Bernard served, turned in its recommendations for the building of an immigration museum.≥Ω Prime Minister Jospin sent the commission’s proposal with his recommendation for action to Catherine Trautman, the minister of culture. Trautman, who had served as mayor of Strasbourg, the German-speaking city which had hailed the French Revolution, and where the Marseillaise had been written, hated the idea of a museum of immigration. She stonewalled the project. Like André Malraux, its creator, she saw her ministry as the guardian of French cultural unity. The Socialists continued to be divided internally between pluralism and republicanism. And the prime minister is only the first among equals. If he pushes very hard, he has a chance of getting his way. But he can be resisted, or sabotaged. When Jospin had engaged his government to recognize the cultural specificities of Corsica, Minister of the Interior Chevènement resigned his post rather than violate his idea of a unitary republic. On the eve of the 2002 elections, Jospin tried Catherine Tasca, Trautman’s successor and herself a supporter of a unitary culture. The new culture minister informed members of the commission that the proposed museum was not possible at the moment. She explained that the necessary money had been used up by Pierre Boulez for his music institute, ircam. This division in Socialist ranks, in itself clearly not one of the most important, nevertheless was symptomatic of the indecisiveness of the government on so many issues—crime and criminals, immigration, citizenship, the status of Corsica, globalization, and even the role of the working class in the Socialist Party—which touched on the questions of what France was and what it should be. If we add shameless manipulative moves—it was certainly not Pierre Boulez’s fault!—we get an idea why a few months later in 2002 the electorate threw out the Socialist government. It will be interesting to see how the Marseilles museum, with its clearly pluralist agenda, will tell the story of the peoples who made France. Nor has this part of the story ended. In January 2003 President Chirac decided to establish an institution—a center—dedicated to French immigrants. In a certain sense he has picked up the project that the outgoing Socialists dropped, and, to their shame, will give it his own imprint. Rather than just a museum, however, the president 172

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wants a research and documentation center for immigrant studies. And therein lies a political tale. Remember, France has been the greatest receiver of immigrants in the twentieth century. Many of France’s new citizens—certainly the four million or so Muslims, and perhaps the older ones still conscious of their immigrant heritage (Armenians, Jews, Portuguese)—will appreciate the president’s interest in their special relation to the nation’s history. Minister of Interior Sarkozy has organized elections in the Islamic community to identify o≈cial ‘‘interlocutors’’ with the state. The Jewish and Protestant religious each have such a body of notables to represent their community’s interests in dealings with the state. Moreover, disquieted by the large majority of imams born and trained in Arab countries ministering in France, Sarkozy has stepped up the e√orts first begun by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, when he was interior minister, to train French, republican imams. With first regional elections looming in 2004 and then presidentials in 2007, Chirac has stolen a march on the dispirited Socialists. While the classic voter base of the Socialists and Communists shrinks, the right might well expect significant support from the assimilating and upwardly mobile sections of the immigrant population.∂≠ Then there are the questions surrounding the standing of the ‘‘repatriated’’ French, like the pieds noirs from Algeria, or the ex-colonials who chose to be French rather than nationals of their birthplace (like the Harkis of Algeria or the Tunisians or Moroccans), or people arriving from the Antilles and the Pacific departments. With the installation of such a research center, the government will have an observation post on these communities, whose exact numbers, for example, are not even known. We can expect that the Culture Ministry, the ministry that André Malraux built, will continue to oppose the idea, or to try to water it down. But the president’s new initiative will surely find support at the Ministry of the Interior . . .∂∞ Finally, what will become of the handsome ex-colonial museum at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes? It had been built for the colonial exposition of 1931. After decolonization Malraux rededicated it to African and Oceanic art. Once its treasures have been moved to Quai Branly, it will be ready for yet another repositioning. Since Germain Viatte serves as the current director of the maao, as well as heading the arts at Quai Branly, it has been, so far, less di≈cult to move its collections to the staging warehouses of the new Quai Branly. The Dance of the Museums

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One strong possibility is to use the Palais de Porte-Doré, as it is now called, for the immigration center and museum. The what and where of that center are still under study. In 2003 Chirac’s government announced its intention to create a museum of France’s overseas departments and territories, what are called the dom-tom. One suggestion mooted was that the empty former colonial museum be picked as its site. A museum celebrating Guyana, Martinique, Réunion—but why these places and why that building so deeply soaked in the history of colonialism? This is neither republicanism of the old sort nor an acknowledgement of a certain pluralism. Actually, I would characterize the project as a new breakthrough in cultural classifying: a museum for the not-quite French. Or maybe a museum for French people from hot places. . . . I hope finally, that the dom-tom plan will be dropped or folded into a proposal to locate the new immigration museum in the Palais de Porte-Doré. In any case, for the years 2003–5 the building will temporarily house a national institute for architecture while the old national museum of monuments at the Trocadéro is being renovated for the architects.∂≤ The explosion of museum building, and closings, and transformations sends two conflicting messages. First, as the organizers of the Quai Branly insist, the new displays in the Louvre and in the new building on the Quai Branly will move France—at least aesthetically— out of the colonial era. Before he left the planning team of Quai Branly, Maurice Godelier announced that he wanted to build a ‘‘postcolonial’’ museum. By this he meant a museum with a cultural pluralist relationship to the peoples whose arts would be on display. The history of colonialism would have to be part of the evolving convergent narratives he wished to launch. He hoped to master the colonial past by historicizing the evil and bringing it to the surface, much as Freudian therapists deal with the origins and healing of neurotic troubles. This was not what his colleagues, nor what the president, wanted. They want a post-colonial museum too. But the museum they are building will close the colonial era for France by means of aesthetic modernism. Showing beautiful creations of gifted artists, and showing them without history, without social context, and without evidence of the relations of power that they embody—in a word, without the 174

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29. Built in 1931 as the Colonial Museum, most recently the

Musée des Arts d’Afrique et Océanie, possible future home of the museum of French overseas departments and territories, or an immigration center. Photo by the author.

layers—has been now for over a century and a half the classic exhibition strategy for eliding the human reality from which the art emerged and about which it speaks. It remains today the West’s oldest, and most honored, way of occulting a terrible past. Stéphane Martin has justified this exhibition strategy by claiming that it is not necessary to explain the works. He argues that we no longer live in times when the things first put on exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme astonished European visitors. The art that will be on display in the new Quai Branly has become familiar to many of us. The European works shown in the Louvre—the altarpieces, the paintings of saints and kings, the Mona Lisa, the reliquaries, the classical statues, and even the mummies—are exhibited ‘‘with much of the context The Dance of the Museums

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assumed.’’ It is a sign of the cultural integration of the art Martin and his team will show that now it too needs little explanation.∂≥ The argument is ingenious, but not convincing. Today, perhaps more European and American museum visitors understand the aesthetic conventions, and something of the world from which the works came, than in the late nineteenth century or even in the mid-1930s. But The Love of Art (1966), Pierre Bourdieu’s study of who visits art museums and what most visitors get out of the experience, contradicts Martin. Nor do working museum professionals concur.∂∂ The Louvre’s lack of context or explanation was not innocently chosen. Its exhibition strategy has a lot to do with the purposeful decontextualization of works removed from churches and other nations’ treasuries by a revolutionary republican government that wished to give to the works its own stamp of meaning. In the era of the French Revolution the Louvre’s accessions were made with one principle in mind: out with the old superstitious magic, in with the new republican spirit. Napoleon continued the policy of decontextualization—remember the two lions removed from the roof of San Marco in Venice to show in the Louvre—simply substituting empire for republic as the prime signifier. Whereas Godelier wanted to rework the colonial past to make peace in the present, scarcely an entertaining endeavor, the current team is proposing—at least in historical terms— a Great Never-Mind to the colonial era. It’s the handsome art in its distinctive modernist setting the tourists will come to see. That is what they will get. In Marseilles, embedding displays of French regionalist cultures in a European and Mediterranean setting—there we see some attention to the wrappings—can also be seen as promoting a new idea of a France-in-Europe. We may even think of the museum as dedicated to a post-national France, one in which ethnic and national identities are seen as processes not as things. The museum is proposing new meanings for old concepts of regions, nation, Europe, and the Mediterranean littoral. Neglected histories and changed perspectives will be the method preferred. But in a curious way, all this modernizing updates the old ‘‘we’’ and the ‘‘other’’ of the colonial era. For when all the moving is done, the old dichotomy between the ‘‘civilized’’ and the ‘‘primitive’’ will literally be reconstructed. A museum—admittedly a handsome one—will collect in one site the treasures that France gathered from the colo176

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nies. Another—in Marseilles—will honor a very European France. The provinces, which once began at the edge of Paris, will now lie at the edges of Europe and the Mediterranean. Admittedly, North Africa along with central and eastern Europe gain social promotion. They are upgraded from foreign to a new kind of provincial in this scheme. But for the rest, we could as well be looking at a museum rendering of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. At the end of his book. in an elaborate scenario for a possible ‘‘civilizational war,’’ Huntington evokes the fear that moved Debré to expand France’s military —and so evict the farmers of Larzac—to meet the threat of the nearby former colonies. His book contains the sentence: ‘‘Meanwhile, a missile with a nuclear warhead, launched from Algeria, explodes outside Marseilles. . . .’’∂∑ The closure of the colonial era or its aggiornemento—both readings are possible. Like the significant number of African American visitors to Washington’s Holocaust Museum—there perhaps because of their own sense of historical danger in America—who visits the new French displays may well tell us more what the museums are about than the drawings and words of the planners. The public, finally, will determine what the new museums say about the French heritage today. But that these museums taken together are the most important markers in our day of what French leaders see as the living French heritage, of France’s evolving cultural identity, there can be no doubt.

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CONCLUSION

I

have tried to explore the question of who in contemporary France is ‘‘us.’’ Both French racist, fascistic movements (for the moment, Le Pen’s) and unreconstructed Jacobin republicanism (as most recently championed by Chevènement) are agreed that the nation France is in danger. Both see the question of who ‘‘us’’ is as equivalent to asking what is the national identity of France. But the world in which most people in France now live has made nonsense of this one-dimensional political ontology.∞ I have found it most useful to approach this ever more insistently posed self-interpellation of the second half of the twentieth century by a kind of triangulation, a bit like the kind that navigators plot when they find themselves on poorly charted and dangerous seas. As I have explored the varieties of interrogations in the 1970s of what was proposed as the real French heritage, the uncertainties about the patrimoine have allowed me to demonstrate how three historical vectors converge to locate present-day France. One narrative line plots the power of Paris in the history of republican France. A second intersects that path with a story of regional aspirations and movements. The third historical vector—the one absolutely necessary if we try to fix the locus of the present-day nation—joins the colonial and postcolonial empires of France at the confluence of the histories of the central power and of regional aspirations. Yet history is not plane geometry. In a book of grounded historical inquiry, these three lines are not always straight. They can curve, and, at moments, disappear from view. They even seem to double back on themselves, as with the volatile political odyssey of regionalism. But finally, they do come together when we locate today’s France on the world globe. The Fifth Republic was born of a crisis of colonialism—a failing colonial war and the threat of a coup d’état by the military pacifiers of that uprising. Although President Charles de Gaulle saved republican rule, the rebellions throughout society in May 1968 showed that what the Fifth Republic was—what it was above all, culturally—had not yet

been worked out. Like the post-1989 new Germany, it was—and is still—a state in search of its heritage. In the roughly four decades since the founding of the Fifth Republic, destabilizing new-capitalist modernity challenged French society in a way not experienced since the Great Revolution. Consider: in just a few years, not only did France lose its world political and military standing, it lost its large colonial empire. De Gaulle, the great nationalist, had to give up some of France’s sovereignty to the European Community as the only safe countermove to American economic and military expansionism. The Gaullist Golden Age of stressful but materially rewarding modernization—almost all the boats rose with the rising tide—came to a crashing end in 1974. The French economy has not fully recovered yet. And globalization, to the increasing advantage of America, has menaced e√orts to stabilize domestic arrangements. Creeping neoliberalism threatens to make France vulnerable as never before to market forces outside its control. It is no wonder that it is the western world’s center of alter-mondialisation, an alternative vision. The domestic political realignments have been important too. In these decades Gaullism was transformed from a democratic adaptation of integral nationalism to the mindless conservatism of a right made up largely of business interests. With both conservatives and socialists accepting de Gaulle as a kind of French George Washington, Gaullism has been emptied of partisan political meaning. There is no Gaullist party; President Chirac, who earlier proclaimed his Gaullism, now leads a party with a totally operational title: the Union for the Presidential Majority. Yet the social and cultural implications of Gaullism, as I have argued in this book, continue to work their stultifying e√ects. In 1960 André Malraux asked Emile Biasini and over sixty other recently unemployed colonial administrators to help him keep Paris’s domestic possessions loyal—in the wake of losing most of the overseas ones—by retrofitting the unified French culture. Second only to the schoolteachers of the Republic who had done good service in making peasants into French people, these overseas agents of the French state were the masters of carrying out the civilizing mission. The exadministrators took the French culture they had assimilated in their own schooling in Corsica or in the poor Midi, improved and adapted it for their work with the future French overseas, and returned to France with a hands-on know-how and adaptability unusual in the 180

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French administration. They rode the backcountry. They held palavers with local chiefs. They resisted the flattery of the small-town chieftains, as well as the spells cast by local artists, singers, and performers, who wished to relieve them of their budgets. But despite their best e√orts, important social and regional parts of the nation had not been knit into the Gaullist imaginaire of the national culture. The widespread Great Refusal of May ’68 and the regionalist resurgence that followed it demonstrated that. But the relative failure of Gaullism should not be judged too harshly. Just the bold conceit of doting an old nation with a new culture—without going through social revolution—was remarkable. Malraux and Biasini did not have the means available to them of, say, Atatürk or Chaim Weizman, nor those of the charismatic leaders of the more recently decolonized new states. The faraway lands of the old colonial empire had played two contradictory roles in French cultural history. They served, of course, as test sites for modernist experiments in technology, architecture and city planning, medicine, education, military practice, and of course cultural di√usion. This role as a proving ground—after that of the millions of colonial soldiers and workers who both saved France in war and built France in peacetime—has got a lot of attention in current writing about the former French colonies. After decolonization most new experiments in technocracy had to be done at home. Michel Debré and his collaborators, who after World War II created the National School of Administration, the ena, saw it as the replacement of the now out-of-date Colonial School. But the empire’s role in continuing older European social relations of dominance and submission, of irrational exercise of power and brutal punishment, of sharp class, status, and racial demarcations, is also a heritage of colonial rule. Under constant attack in nineteenthand twentieth-century France, the ancien régime lived on in the empire. And, styles of class behavior and rule—if not actual aristocrats— were repatriated to France with decolonization. Charging headlong into urban, industrial, capitalist modernity while at the same time proposing to save the great high cultural value system of the nineteenth century—the culture of the old regime— Gaullism produced no little cognitive dissonance in French society.≤ The Gaullists’ economic project triumphed completely, while they achieved only partial success with the cultural one. Conclusion

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It was the worst result that could have happened. Malraux and his successors saved and refurbished the humanist model inherited from the past. But that philosophy and literature-dominated culture illprepared the educated young for the di√erent, the post-Baudelairean, modernity. Nor could many of them find places in the overburdened universities to prepare for life in either old or new France. And the Paris-centeredness of the new modernity aroused in the metropole what it had sparked in Indochina and Africa—an angry, particularist, that is localist, response. The French modern had begun in the middle decades of the nineteenth century with the consolidation of the colonial empire. In the course of the century the colonies and the provinces—the di√erences could not be drawn until the postmortem of decolonization—became an important medium upon which artists of modernism painted and wrote. The colonial infix of the nineteenth-century modern makes historical sense, for example, of Baudelaire, the poet of modernism, who dreamed of living in Asia and in Les Fleurs du Mal nurtured his obsession with his ‘‘mulatto’’ [sic] mistress, his Black Venus. Baudelaire’s relation to her—both in his imagination and in his life—bore striking similarities to France’s rapport with its colonial empire.≥ Understanding the union of the modern with the colonial illuminates, as well, Gauguin’s easy transition from admiring in turn the ‘‘naïve’’ cultures of Brittany, of Martinique, then of the Midi, of Tahiti, and finally those of the peoples of the Marquesas in the Pacific. ‘‘I like Brittany. Here I find a savage, primitive quality,’’ he wrote to a friend in 1888. In Tahiti and the Marquesas he found the final destination of his voyage of self-discovery, which had begun in the provinces of France.∂ Postmodernity began with the dissolution of the colonial empire. The abstract, non-western Other of mystery and magic in the poems of Baudelaire, the art of Gauguin, Picasso, and the Surrealists had suddenly become visible in the years after the World War II as flesh-and-blood fellow humans—sometimes with weapons in hand— demanding recognition and the independence of real people living exploited lives. The belief in both universal rules and a world made of formal arts elements could not assimilate these assertive once misrecognized, but always-there newcomers.∑ With the wave of decolonizations—both violent and plebiscitary— which brought down the Fourth Republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s, modernism was exhausted. But its friend-enemy, its raison 182

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d’être, classicism, expired at the same historical moment. What Foucault had called the classical episteme completed its dissolution. The conjuncture of May 1968 serves as a good marker of the vast cultural transformations that have been too easily simplified by tacking on a ‘‘post’’ to the old categories. I have tried here to explore just how and why at the same time the old classical, the modern, and the colonial expired and were reborn as phenomena, set o√ conceptually with a ‘‘post.’’ The post-’68 generation of Gaullists intimidated or bribed most of the students and workers into going back to work. But the great and small ‘‘No’s!’’ of the ’68ers—which did not stop with the fall of de Gaulle—made clear that the state would not necessarily be the one dreamed of by General de Gaulle and André Malraux. The most politically committed of the students, known as the Établis, ‘‘settled’’ into factory jobs to carry out a long-term campaign to win the workers back to the cause of revolution. Suddenly starting in the late 1970s and gaining strength in the 1980s, groups in André Malraux’s despised provinces once again posed the question to the nation: Who is ‘‘us’’? From the same hinterlands came challenging new answers to it. The new defiant regional movements—in Brittany, Alsace, Corsica, Occitania, and, within Occitania, the Larzac—raised their banners of regional heritage as their marker of identity to challenge Paris’s pennant, with its array of sailing vessels ruling the Seine. In 1970 the arrogance of power on the part of some of the Gaullists—now unencumbered by the political good sense and moral restraint of the general—provoked a minor conflict with some hundred peasants in a distant corner of the hexagon. Michel Debré wanted to train a military reaction force more appropriate to fight for French interests in the new postcolonial era. The Peasants of Larzac—Catholic, mistrustful of strangers and of change—just wanted to be left alone on their poor farms to raise a few sheep and sell their milk to the Roquefort makers to get the cash for the things they had to buy at the store. Like so many other radically innovative movements in history, the peasants’ attempt to hang on to what Debré characterized as their ‘‘medieval’’ way of life provoked a far-reaching renewal of the French left and of France. For it soon became evident that it was not just a few isolated farmers who were unhappy about the Gaullist brand of top-down Conclusion

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modernization. Cultural and political resistance to Paris now took the form of regionalist movements mushrooming all over the country. When the e√orts of the Établis bore little fruit while the regionalist movements flowered, the young urban radicals rethought their strategies. They came down to Larzac to o√er themselves as the farmers’ organic intellectuals. Wishing to control their own struggle, the shepherds organized themselves as the Peasants of Larzac. To their credit, the young urban radicals stayed on to work e√ectively in collaboration—rather than as the vanguard—with the members of the new social movements also drawn to the cause that expressed so much that was wrong with contemporary French society. Radicalized Catholic farmers worked side by side with the socially conscientious Protestants from Millau. Seeing themselves as also ‘‘colonialized,’’—for this was the moment that word became the prime way of characterizing relations between Paris and the regions—French regionalists made common cause with advocates of the apparently ex-colonized and the still-colonized peoples of the world. Ecologists who wanted to save the earth—beginning with Brittany—collaborated successfully with Marxist groups who had historically seen nature as something which must be conquered. The French Communist Party, even its members in Millau, the epicenter of the struggle, kept a wary distance. This was not a movement they could control. Nor did they want to; the politics of cultural resistance were not their thing. The countercultural Parti Socialiste Unifié (psu) led by Michel Rocard, however, was heavily involved. At the same time, casting o√ the shame of Guy Mollet’s engagement with the Algerian War, a refounded socialist party, under François Mitterrand, a latter-day convert to socialism, began to challenge Gaullist power. The socialist voting potential of southern France attracted the party’s new leader. In the course of the 1970s Mitterrand committed himself to the cause of Larzac. The struggle transformed the region’s once dependable Gaullist voters into supporters of the ps. Mitterrand’s associates were right to call him ‘‘the Florentine.’’ In the 1970s the radical energy in France flowed toward the regionalist struggles. The Larzac movement kept agitating throughout the decade. In late April 1968 extreme Breton autonomists firebombed the vans of the paramilitary police (crs) parked in the police lot in SaintBrieuc. In November 1978 one of their number was convicted for a bomb attack against the Palace of Versailles. And the Breton anti184

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nuclear protestors’ actions and marches were often in the headlines in the decade. The relations between the Kanak population in New Caledonia and the settlers—especially after the start of large-scale nickel mining—grew increasingly poisonous. Autonomous movements in both Martinique and Guadeloupe gained adherents. Corsican nationalists blew up polluting vessels o√shore and tourist facilities under construction. They shot it out with the police. And then they gave press conferences wearing ski masks and brandishing weapons. Was France at risk of coming apart? Enter the new concern for the nation’s patrimoine. Malraux and Biasini had tried to save the contemporary, if classical, culture. Now in the ’70s the right hoped only to save the heirlooms. The heritages of the regions were at risk from centrifugal movements, which, in the eyes of the nation’s rulers in Paris, read the past in a divisive manner. A partisan reading of local historical and present culture was sowing mischief. For the sake of national unity, guerilla ethnology had to be defeated. At the same moment, the intellectual damage to France resulting from decolonization was beginning to become manifest. Whole areas of the world were now barred to French social scientists. The future of several of their disciplines was cast in doubt for lack of research opportunities and available positions. The disciplinary gatekeepers—for archaeology, Soustelle; for anthropology, Lévi-Strauss; for domestic ethnology, Chiva; and for history, Braudel—invested their holdings in academic and political capital to refound their respective disciplines, now as primarily French studies. The government of President Giscard d’Estaing needed trained social sciences to counter the regionalist troublemakers. The revitalized social sciences blossomed. The government created an institution sta√ed by trained ethnologists within the Ministry of Culture to validate ‘‘governmentally correct’’ regional aspirations and to guard against illicit ones. In addition, with the help of American foundations interested in encouraging area studies in that tense period of the cold war, the French social sciences got a new home in the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. In 1980 the Year of the Heritage, l’Année du Patrimoine, celebrated the government’s versions both of the regional heritages and of their subordinate relations to the center. Curiously, the heritages of the millions of people from the former colonial empire settled in France were neither feted, nor even mentioned in that year of celebration. Yet Conclusion

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Algerians living and working in France had been French longer than, for example, the inhabitants of Nice. And many of the Senegalese settled in the metropole came from the four coastal towns where their ancestors had been declared subjects of the King of France long before the Revolution of 1789, and full citizens since 1889. But the forces of discontent could not be so easily tamed. The left also renewed itself by feeding o√ the energies that the new social movements had generated. In the national elections of 1981 the Socialist Party, refurbished by François Mitterrand, knocked over the hollow men that the Gaullists had become to take both the presidency and a parliamentary majority. The Socialists immediately set out to correct the authoritarian nationalism of the old regime. Immediately on taking o≈ce, President Mitterrand canceled the base expansion in the Larzac. A year later a serious plan for national decentralization became law. In the government, perhaps the most sensitive to regionalist and France-Overseas questions, Michel Rocard worked out an honest peace in New Caledonia. More local languages, and more subjects in these languages, could be taught in the public schools of Brittany. The terrorism stopped, temporarily, in Corsica. To rival the existing representational organization of French farmers, the Peasants of Larzac turned to building their own national professional body, which became the Confédération Paysanne. The action against base expansion broadened its horizons even more, ecologically and internationally, becoming the movement Après Larzac. The other regional movements began to calm. The regionalist cause seemed safe with the new government, especially after the law on decentralization of 1982. Yet many people in France—immigrants and industrial workers, above all—had no recognized heritage and no petite patrie from which their group had arisen over the centuries of French history. It was relatively easy to correct the lack of urban and industrial ethnology. The new government funded new studies and new museums. This was made the more unproblematic, unfortunately, as the industrial working class was becoming very much like those peoples in the southern hemisphere, whose numbers and cultures were disappearing with economic progress. Gérard Noiriel and his team in Longwy knew very well that they were doing salvage ethnology. In the 1980s ethnic consciousness in France continued to grow. It became the prime problem, or the great revelation—depending on one’s take—of the historic conjuncture. Just after the victory of 1981 a 186

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joyous cultural pluralism was celebrated, especially under the aegis of Jack Lang, the new minister of culture. Lang’s understanding of culture finessed the passage from local heritages to ethnic heritages. (He did the same for the tension between the high and the youth cultures.) But other Socialists, like Jean-Pierre Chevènement, feeling that di√erence made for inequality, clung to the Jacobin vision of the Republic as a bloc. The debate, in the first years of their accession to power more or less contained within the ps, became a serious public question with the rise of the xenophobic and racist movement of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The unitary republicans urged people of good will to close ranks and deny the vicious essentialist pluralism—although not quite in that language—of the Front National. This sentiment prevailed, finally, on the left. O≈cial recognition of mixity, multiplicity, and di√erence faded in the move to close ranks against the sowers of ethnic discord. On the other side, expressions of di√erence—wearing a Muslim head covering to school or acts of self-identification as an ethnic or religious minority manifested outside the home—either met with governmental prohibition or produced agonizing debates among French democrats. We saw the changed attitudes—or at least their mediatic representations—in the instances of two soccer matches. In July 1998 members of the victorious, ethnically mixed French team literally wrapped themselves in the national flag. But in October 2001, the young Beurs broke up the game by demonstrating before the tv cameras their sense of di√erence from others in the nation. With their rejection in the elections of 2002 of the wishy-washy, intellectually bankrupt Socialist party, French voters opted for the safe refuge they have historically sought in times of uncertainty: a center-right government. In our day that means a return—as much as possible—to the latest version of eternal ‘‘basic values’’: a firm public and aesthetic order, triumphant if bu√ered capitalism, a campaign against supposedly rising crime, reduced immigration, and a firm repression of regionalist or ethnic flare-ups. In foreign policy, we see once more a politics of grandeur, but largely by cultural means, not with guns. Under these new circumstances, what has become of the heritage talk? The national discussion of the contents of heritage also took the path of a return to order. To close or at least freeze the debates, the new masters of the state found a special way, one available only to the state, of expressing a hegemonic definition of the patrimoine. Eight muConclusion

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seums will be created or repositioned to tell the o≈cial story of the French heritage. For example, in another instance of the central government’s production of the local, a new museum of domestic popular cultures will go up in Marseilles. Here the French regions, and the population of the most recent immigration, will be represented, like those Russian dolls-within-dolls, as part of France, of Europe, and of the Mediterranean world. Meanwhile in Paris, a new wrapping of the art of once-colonized peoples will be put on display in a fine building on the museum row along the Seine. The aesthetic splendor of both the building and the art will signal to the world France’s new role as the world’s best protector of the cultures not just of Europe but of the once-colonized world. Yet in di√erent ways, using di√erent language, but still mindful of past engagements, the heritage struggles continue. Former militants, like the recently elected head of the Green Party, Gilles Lemaire, return for holidays, and perhaps political renewal, in the Larzac. His friend Alain Lipietz, also a leader of the Verts and also a computer programmer, remembers that ‘‘between 1972 and 1981, and even after, [Lemaire] was an active supporter of the peasants’ struggle against the army.’’ Larzac ‘‘was his true rear base in the provinces.’’∏ José Bové’s campaigns for the small farmer and against neoliberal globalization also grew directly out of the struggle against French international military ambitions of the 1970s. But in today’s Larzac, local o≈cials together with businessmen are conducting an active campaign to erase the memory of the successful struggle of the 1970s and replace it with more romantic, touristattracting tales. Through glossy brochures, co√ee-table books, and eye-catching signs, they are trying to make the new heroes of local struggles the medieval Knights Templar who made the plateau one of their fortified places near the Mediterranean.π And o√ the coast, the troubles will not go away. Corsican autonomists continue their struggles. Movements of discontent continue to flourish in Caribbean France. And despite their beautiful modern cultural center, the Kanaks have been neither mollified nor pacified. But is it entirely fair to characterize these moves toward postcoloniality, which necessarily is at the same time the moment of the postmodern, as a return to order? Perhaps not entirely. The positives in the story are the continuing attempts to escape the identity prison that the hexagon risks becoming, and an e√ort at mastering—as the Germans 188

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used to say of their dark recent history—the colonial past. But as long as neither the peoples of the regions nor those of the South have a say in the installation and running of these museums of their captive heritages, it is the French state which proposes their identities to them, not they themselves. We Americans have had a tragic history of seeing the state impose racial and ethnic identities on many of our people. Such actions have been decisive in blocking our way to democracy. On being chosen premier by President Chirac in 2002, Jean-Pierre Ra√arin immediately realized that Giscard d’Estaing’s work of pacifying the regions had not been finished. Whereas suppressing alternative visions of state-region relations had been Giscard’s goal in the 1970s, Ra√arin wanted to leave domination to the workings of the free market. In 2003 he called the 577 deputies and 321 senators together in congress at the Chateau of Versailles to vote changes in the Constitution of 1958, the one written by Michel Debré for General de Gaulle. The changed basic law now defines the organization of France as ‘‘decentralized.’’ A new Article 72 speaks not only of the usual communes and departments of France but now also of ‘‘regions, political entities [collectivités] with a particular status, and overseas collectivities.’’ These entities are specifically given the right, for a defined goal and time, to experiment with new legislative and administrative forms which may give them new powers to act. And Articles 73 and 74 name, for the first time, the ‘‘overseas departments and territories [collectivités].’’ These are guaranteed that no legislative changes may be made that a√ect them without ‘‘the consent of their electors.’’ Approved by the conservative majority, France’s revised constitution became law on Monday afternoon, 17 March 2003. Its budgetary and administrative changes begin to go into e√ect in 2005. Maybe the voices of the regionalists and the overseas French have penetrated the thick walls by which the central state defends itself. Maybe Corsica may know some peace. But then again, the left largely voted no. Ségolène Royal, spokesperson for the Socialist legislators, critiqued the changes as ‘‘an American-style idea [which] will put the regions in competition with each other and [which], because there is no commitment to reallocating fiscal burdens and benefits among the regions, will further the growth of inequalities.’’ She feared that national solidarity would be destroyed by this creation of a republic with its regions ‘‘running in di√erent gears.’’ So the story we began in Larzac is not finished, nor Conclusion

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that of the ex-colonies, nor that of the museums of heritage. And the question of ‘‘what does it mean to be French’’ continues to be the central one in culture, civil society, and politics.∫ The finest outcome, thoroughly possible in today’s France, would be to accommodate a respect for multiplicity without violating the egalitarian promise of the Republic.Ω Among many of the young, including the young scholars studying France’s imperial past and ethnic present, the project is well under way. Pay attention to France: the experiment in synthesizing the regional, the national, the European, the ethnic postcolonial, and the global is beautiful high drama. Is it too naïvely American to hope for a ‘‘happy-end?’’

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NOTES

preface Jürgen Habermas, ‘‘Moral Development and Ego Identity,’’ in his Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1979), 69–74. 2 Robert Lafont, quoted in Le Monde, 19–20 June 1994, 13–14. Claude Liauzu, ‘‘Interrogations sur l’histoire française de la colonisation,’’ Genèses 46 (March 2002): 46. And to draw the third leg of the triangle, Bernard Mouralis puts ‘‘the accent on a fact often left in the shadows: decolonization is a phenomenon which plays out as much in the metropole as in the colonies.’’ République et colonies: Entre histoire et mémoire, La République française et l’Afrique (Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1999), 13. 3 Edward Said’s idea of ‘‘traveling theory,’’ an appreciation of how the same texts, for example those of Marx or Darwin, in di√erent settings and at di√erent moments are understood di√erently, made me begin to think of the profoundly dialectical nature of colonial cultural power and of the need to theorize its dynamic. James Cli√ord’s interest in how cultures travel and translate runs along similar lines. See his chapter ‘‘Traveling Cultures,’’ in his Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–46. The guiding work for many of us interested in the interaction of colonial and metropole has been that of Frederic Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), especially their introductory essay ‘‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,’’ 1–56. Ann Stoler’s critical engagement with Foucault is the best theoretical work on the confluence of empire, race, and sexuality, especially her concept of the ‘‘education of desire’’ that she developed in Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Gayatri Spivak has now started to theorize the role of ex-colonial intellectuals situated in western centers of learning and working with primarily Western cultural materials, unless we might count her complete oeuvres as a search for her place in the two worlds. See her recent Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), where she turns to the new task of self-location by expanding vision to issues of transnational globalization. 1

introduction 1

In his recent memoirs, François Roux, his attorney since the Larzac struggle of the 1970s, quotes a recent statement of Bové’s on his debt to the Protestant social theorist: ‘‘I owe to Jacques Ellul his insight on the autonomy of the economy, from technology (la technique), and from government. My thoughts on the Organisation mondiale du commerce created by the various states, in principle a legitimate venture, but one which has become autonomous and only works for and on itself.’’ François Roux with Jacky Vilacèque, En état de légitime révolte (Montpellier: Indigène, 2002), 111. 2 For a British empire parallel see Ashis Nancy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and the Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 32–33. 3 Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 6. 4 As I worked, I had hoped to find some consciousness of the new Europe appearing in French discourses of heritage. As the reader will see, I found no important e√orts by the state or by dissidents to think of historic France as part of the European Community, or none until the late 1990s. José Bové’s Confédération Paysanne, created much after the Larzac struggle, speaks of peasantry in the eu (as the photograph of one of its demonstration illustrates). And of course, my last chapter deals with the new museum of popular culture in Marseilles. But that will focus on regions of Europe and North Africa, not the European community as such. Europe seems not yet to have become a pole of heritage in French culture the way the regions, Paris, and the former colonial empire are. 5 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), and newly, in the same vein, Huntington and Lawrence E. Harrison, eds., Culture Matters: How Human Values Shape Progress (New York: Basic Books, 2000), xxi–xxxiv. 6 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 223 (italics mine). This pithy work is at the same time Cassirer’s abridgment and a rethinking of his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, first published in Berlin before the war and his exile. Kant had tried to work out the epistemological conditions of human connection to an external world. Cassirer moved the discussion beyond formal questions of the theory of knowledge to an inquiry into the social conditions, the symbolic forms, by which we interpret our worlds. See further his newly available Logic of the Cultural Sciences, trans. S. G. Lofts from the original German text published in Göteborg, Sweden, in 1942 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Here he wrote that the systematic study of culture ‘‘teaches us to interpret symbols in order to decipher their hidden meaning—so that we can make the life from which they sprang visible again’’ (I have improved the klutzy rendering in English of the German sentence). Pierre Bourdieu wrote of the value of Cassirer’s work for his

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7

own, in particular Cassirer’s emphasis on scientific change—both in the physical and the social disciplines—coming not from new concepts but rather new relationships of concepts. ‘‘Landmarks,’’ In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 40. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘From Rules to Strategies,’’ In Other Words, 59–75. Also ‘‘Célibat et condition paysanne,’’ Études rurales 5–6 (September 1962): 32–136; ‘‘Les stratégies matrimoniales dans le système de reproduction,’’ Annales 4–5 (July–October 1972): 1105–27.

chapter 1: gardarem lo larzac! 1

A copy of the poster can be found in the Archives du Larzac (hereafter adl), 1Z28 1974 4. The Dépêche du Midi of 19 August 1974 counted about 100,000 attending; the Ouest-France of the same date counted 103,000. See for example the full-page interview with one of the local Larzac militants, Léon Maillé, with a statement by the Peasants of Larzac about the unjust ways in which France relates to its poor farmers and those of the Third World, printed, amazingly, on page 10 of the vacation section of Libération, 22 July 1974. 2 Not to clutter the text with many specific citations, I note here that my account of the struggle years is based on my reading of the run of the movement newspaper Gardarem lo Larzac (gll) from its start to the victory (1975–82), preserved in the very well run Larzac Archives in the Millau public library; interviews with participants, conducted mostly in the Larzac in the fall of 2001 (which I cite on important issues); and conversations with the Columbia University anthropologist Alexander Alland Jr. and Sonia Alland, each of whom, for years, has done very valuable participant-observer investigations in the Larzac. In the way of what historians call secondary accounts—which are not really ‘‘secondary’’ because the authors were there for important parts of the story—I have benefited from the accounts in Alland’s study Le Larzac et après: L’Étude d’un mouvement social novateur, trans. Sonia Alland (Paris: L’Harmattan: 1995; see also 2d ed. Crisis and Commitment: The History of a French Social Movement [London: Harwood Academic, 2001]), and by Didier Martin, whose thesis in sociology is still one of the best books on the movement of Larzac, Le Larzac: Utopies et Réalités (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), 31–106. 3 Mistral and the members of the Provençal renaissance of the late nineteenth century, the Félibrige, also had a wider vision of their cause. But their greater world was ‘‘Latinity,’’ that is the south European Romance-language countries, including Romania. Anne-Marie Thiesse, cnrs, helpfully clarified this major difference between the two movements. On the Breton nationalist collaborators, see George Cadiou, L’Hermine et la croix gammée: Le mouvement breton et la collaboration (Paris: Mango, 2001); Kristian Hamon, Les Nationalistes bretons sous

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l’occupation (Kergleuz: An Here, 2001); Ronan Calvez, La Radio en langue bretonne (Rennes: Presse Universitaire de Rennes, 2001). 4 François Roux, lawyer in nearby Montpellier, brought the two groups together. Active Protestant layperson, influenced by both Buddhism and Gandhi, in 1979 he was representing the Kanak independence movement in metropolitan legal proceedings when the Larzac militants sought him out for legal advice. Interview with Michelle Vincent, onetime Larzac activist and director of the library in Millau, which houses the archives of the movement. Millau, 6 November 2001. 5 On 22 April 1988 a group of Kanak extremists attacked the police station on the island. They killed four members of the Gendarmerie Nationale, wounded two, and took twenty-seven hostages. They were besieged in a cave until 5 May, when the military launched an assault. The militants were defeated at the cost of the lives of two soldiers and nineteen of their own number. Jean-Marie Tjibaou and his second in command, Yeiwéné Yeiwéné, met their deaths at the hands of an extremist Kanak assassin as they led a memorial ceremony marking the one-year anniversary of the killings of 5 May. 6 Alland, Le Larzac et après, 144. Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out that ‘‘inversion of the symbols of authority was almost inevitably the first act of rebellion by insurgent peasants.’’ Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. See further Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 7 See the perceptive chapter of Alejandra Osorio’s Stony Brook dissertation on the annual ceremonial display of the Spanish king’s image in colonial Lima, ‘‘Inventing Lima: The Making of an Early Modern Colonial Capital, ca. 1540–ca. 1640’’ (2001). 8 Serge Mallet, Les Paysans contre le passé (Paris: Le Seuil, 1962); Robert Lefont, La Révolution régionaliste (Paris: Gallimard/nrf, 1967), and Décoloniser en France: Les Régions face à l’Europe (Paris: Gallimard/nrf, 1971), esp. 281–308. There were of course many other authors fighting to liberate Occitanie. A certain Joan [Jean] Larzac (pen name of a Catholic priest) ardently championed the cause. His work in Occitan, Descolonsar l’istória occitana (Tolosa [Toulouse]: ieo, 1980), seems to have impressed those who could read the language. Unfortunately, I am not one of those. 9 Vincent Porhel has allowed me to read an insightful section of his forthcoming doctoral thesis (Rennes 2) on the industrial struggles that became part of the Breton regionalist discourses in the 1960s and 1970s. He convincingly argues that the metaphor Bretagne = colonie was first widely used in this regionalist movement on the occasion of an industrial strike at the big gasket manufacturer Joint Français. In Brittany, the cultural struggle for Breton liberty was key to the successes of the social struggles in the big, often internationally connected manufacturers of the cities. Porhel documents the transformation in the 1960s and 1970s of the historic struggles for a Breton nation into the struggles of Bretons for social

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justice. See further on the ‘‘new regionalism’’ the work of Michael Keating, The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998). 10 Shown by Canal+ in two parts on 17 and 18 March 2003, the three-hour documentary was made by Gilles Perez and Samuel Lajus. The filmmakers interviewed many of the major open and clandestine leaders who gave frank accounts of the movement, including the killings and the factionalism. At this writing the film is the best account of this unique terrorist regionalism. 11 Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 317–18 n. 103. 12 Jean Chesneaux, ‘‘Il était cent trois paysans . . . ,’’ in Pascal Ory, ed., Mots de Passe (Paris: Autrement, 1985). 13 See Pierre Bernal, ed., ‘‘Aspects régionaux de l’agrarisme français,’’ Mouvement Social 67 (April–June 1969) [special issue]. 14 Historically called ouvrierisme on the left. 15 The quotations are from Mao Zedong’s ‘‘Speech at the National Conference on Propaganda Work,’’ called by the Chinese Communist Party, 12 March 1957. People outside the cpc were also invited to speak. Mao used the words an jai le hu in quotation marks. The phrase usually means settling one’s family down somewhere or creating a homestead. The action was rendered in French as s’établir and the young people who took part as the établi, giving the name to the strategy. I will use the French word in the text, since there seems to be no single word in English equally well known for the strategy. The passages which concern us are cited in the epigraph to Marnix Dressen’s De l’amphi à l’établi: Les étudiants maoïstes à l’usine (1967–1989) (Paris: Belin, 1999), 7. For my translations I have used the English text of the speech, to be found in John K. Leung and Michael Y. M. Kau, The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 2:381 and 389 n. 14. 16 The role of religion here in teaching what become the political habits of being dependable, organizing, planning, and persuading remind one of the role of Methodism as a training school for the early English labor movement. 17 See the article of Roger Cornu, ‘‘Nostalgie du sociologue: La classe ouvrière n’est plus qu’elle n’a jamais été,’’ in Joelle Deniot and Catherine Dutheil, eds., Métamorphoses ouvrières (Paris: Harmattan, 1995), 2:345–53. 18 On the établi, the best study is still the dissertation of Marnix Dressen, De l’amphi à l’établi, 11, 31, 39, 41–44, 52–53, 253–54, 264, 288. See also the book by the daughter of a onetime établi, Virginie Linhart, Voluntiers pour l’usine: Vie d’établis 1967–1977 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994). 19 See for example that of Harrison E. Salisbury, who repeated the Long March so as better to write its history. The Long March: The Untold Story (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). 20 Michel Debré, Combattre toujours, 1969–1993, vol. 5 of his Mémoires (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 15–19.

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21

Cited by Marc Michel in his talk ‘‘Penser l’empire’’ at the ‘‘Colloque Michel Debré: Premier minister, 1959–1962,’’ organized by the Centre d’histoire de l’Europe du vingtième siècle, Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, held 14–16 March 2002. 22 Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries, 144. 23 Isabelle Bissey, news report, ‘‘Voyage sans Retour des Orphelins malgré eux,’’ broadcast on France Inter, 7 July 2002. This story is not in Debré’s memoirs, and when many years later interviewers asked him about this episode, he refused any comment. 24 On this little known aspect of Debré’s capabilities, see Gilles Gauvin, Michel Debré et l’Isle de la Réunion (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), esp. 285–312. Debré’s broad vision and his constant attention to holding on to the colonies is even evident in the plan he put forth in 1945 for creating a new school for high state administrators, the École Nationale d’Administration. In the decree creating the school he emphasizes the importance of having the students ‘‘do internships [stages] in the provinces, in the overseas territories, in other countries, or even in Paris.’’ Journal O≈ciel, Ordonnances et Décrets, Ordonnance no. 45-2283, 9 October 1945. 25 Debré, 5:50–51. Debré was troubled not only by the high birthrate of the recently decolonized countries of North Africa—an old French natalist nightmare vis-à-vis the rest of the world—but also that there was talk there of the Battle of Poitiers! How history haunts French leaders! In 732 near Poitiers Charles Martel defeated an Arab Islamic army on its way to conquering northern France. I suppose Debré feared the outcome of a future rematch, what with all the soldiers the North Africans were breeding. 26 The Delavignette papers at the colonial archives in Aix contain a fatuous but at the same time fascinating six-page report done in 1953 by important businessmen, trade union leaders, and metropolitan colonial o≈cials proposing the tighter economic and political integration of France Overseas with the metropole. It speaks both of Eurafrique and of ‘‘a greater France extending from the Rhine to the Congo’’ [une grande France étalée du Rhin au Congo]. The unwillingness of Europe to subsidize for long the French empire and the colonial risings and independence movements a few years later killed that idea. Commission de modernisation et d’équipement des Territoires d’Outre-Mer, ‘‘Rapport générale de la sous-commission d’intégration métropole-outre-mer,’’ anfom, Dalavignette papers 19A, carton 3, folder 38. The report is annotated skeptically in Delavignette’s hand. He found, for example, the characterization of the peoples of French Africa as ‘‘in search of a civilization: it only depends on us that they adopt ours.’’ He noted in the margin, ‘‘Islamic Africa?’’ And he wondered what ‘‘Senghor might think’’ of the claim that Africans have no civilization. On France’s uses of Europe to aid its colonial policy see also the essay by William Hitchcock, in Kenneth Mouré and Martin Alexander, eds., Crisis and Renewal in France, 1918–1962 (New York: Berg-

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28 29

30 31

32 33

34 35 36

37

38 39

hahn, 2002), and Irwin Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). François-Xavier Verschave, La Françafrique: Le plus long scandale de la République (Paris: Stock, 1999). Jean de la Guérivière, Les Fous d’Afrique, 77, counted over thirty major French military interventions in black Africa alone between decolonization and 2001. This is not counting the simpler military ‘‘gestures.’’ Debré, Combattre toujours 5:70, 103. After decolonization the French state had to find many new bases and test sites. Larzac was just one place chosen and one center of contestation. For example, soon after losing the Sahara atomic test area to the new Algerian state in 1962, France began using the atoll of Mururoa in French Polynesia to test thermonuclear blasts. François Roux, the attorney of the Peasants of Larzac, and of the Kanaks of New Caledonia, went to the aid of the local residents there, too. Francis Roux with Jacky Vilacèque, En état de légitime révolte (Montpellier: Indigènes, 2002), 39–47. A hectare is 2.47 acres. See the excellent thesis by Magli Fabre, ‘‘La Lutte du Larzac (1971–1981): L’exemple d’une lutte sociale originale et novatrice,’’ Université Versailles–Saint-Quentin en Yvelines, September 2000, 14. Fabre, ‘‘La lutte du Larzac,’’ 37. Michel Debré, speaking on 28 October 1971, on tv as reproduced on the video ‘‘La lutte du Larzac, 1971–1981’’ (Potensac, Millau: Atelier Arcadie, 2000), produced by Pierre Burguière et al., members of the movement of Larzac. Fabre, ‘‘La lutte du Larzac,’’ appendix, 171. Alexander Alland, Le Larzac et après, 192. On this progressive moment in the life of the French Church, see the excellent book by Denis Pelletier, La Crise catholique: Religion, société, politique en France (1965–1978) (Paris: Payot, 2002), esp. 7–33, 107–87 , 268–77. Pascal, clearly a precursor of Michel Foucault, understood where ideas come from: Fall to your knees, clasp your hands, and pray. Faith will come. Michelle Vincent had to point out to me that the oath was taken on the Bible. None of the written accounts—almost all written by leftist sympathizers—included that information. Interview with Vincent, 6 November 2001. Fabre has reproduced a copy of it, ‘‘La lutte du Larzac,’’ 25. Henri Boyer, ‘‘ ‘Pur Porc, Question de legitimité,’ ’’ in Henri Boyer et al., Le Larzac revisité (Montpellier: Edisud, 1986), 93–96 [special issue of Amiras]. Some neo-rurals supported the struggle, although they had not come to the Larzac with any such purpose. They tended to be apolitical, at least at first. In the course of their attempts to flee industrial France here and in other parts of the country, they discovered ‘‘deep in the forest . . . the State’’ [au fond de la forêt . . . l’État]. Danièle Léger and Bertrand Hervieu, Le retour à la nature: ‘‘Au fond de la forêt . . . l’État’’ (Paris: Le Seuil, 1979), 219–28.

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40 41

42

43

44

45

46

198

The quotations are from a printed version in Alland’s Le Larzac et après, 77. The italics are mine. In their long overview of the centuries of cultural history of the country of Larzac, Jean-Luc Bonniol, Florence Hostingue, and Deborah Puccio see two central themes in the ten-year struggle against the expansion of the military base: the successful creation of an ‘‘invented tradition’’ of continuity among the poor, old peasantry of the region, and, as a result, the possibility of achieving among the peasantry ‘‘a new identification with the peasants of the Third World.’’ Le Passé du Larzac: Mémoires: Histoire, patrimoine du lieu: Rapport à la Mission du patrimoine ethnologique, Centre d’ethnologie méditerranéenne (Aix-en-Provence, 2000), 31. The phrases quoted in the last two paragraphs are from Martin, Le Larzac, 57. A Lazarc militant, Yvette Naal, had spent two and a half years in the United States, part of which near the Hopis, and wrote in gll of ‘‘le système colonial qui continue au sein même d’une grande nation, les U.S.A.’’ Fabre, ‘‘La lutte du Larzac,’’ 134. gll regularly reported on the movement at lip. See for example, in the November–December 1975 issue, the commentary headed ‘‘Lip-Larzac: même combat,’’ and the long articles in the May 1976 and February 1978 numbers. To the fete of the Third World in 1974 came a delegation made up of representatives of ‘‘les organisations révolutionnaires des pays d’origine des migrants’’: Union Générale des Travailleurs Réunionnais en France, Association des Marocains en France, Comité des Travailleurs Algériens, Union des Travailleurs Immigrés Tunisiens; from subsaharan Africa, Union Générale des Travailleurs Sénégalais en France, Mouvement des Travailleurs Ivoiriens en France, Comité de défense des libertés au Mali, Comité de soutien à la lutte du peuple Sénégalais, Union Nationale des étudiants du Cameroun, and l’Association culturelle des Travailleurs Africains en France; and finally, Comités Unitaires-Immigrés. The participation of these groups represents, importantly, the first recognition by the Larzacians of migrant groups in France as part of both an international, but also French national, struggle. The contact was initiated by the travailleurs-immigré groups. See the correspondence preceding the August 1974 event in adl 1Z40 1974. Quoted in Martin, Le Larzac, 119. The peasants made alliances with the striking watchworkers at lip, the shoeworkers at Romans, and the aluminum founders of Pechiney-Noguères. These connections are better known and more widely discussed in the literature than the ‘‘anti-colonial’’ dimension of the Larzac movement. In 1974 the feminists of the Mouvement de libération de l’avortement et de la contraception came to the plateau. See also the ‘‘discovery’’ of the importance of women on the farm and in the movement of Larzac in the collection of interviews by Gérard Guérinet and Martine Vantses, Paysannes: Paroles de femmes du Larzac (Paris: Albatross, 1979). By Messmer’s count, and only including the major actions, between 1962 and 1972 the French intervened militarily in independent African states three times, be-

Notes

47 48

49 50 51

52

53 54 55

56 57 58

59 60 61

tween 1972 and 1982 five times, and between 1982 and 1992 eight times. With accelerating rhythm, just between 1992 and 1997 French paras or commandos undertook nine further operations. Pierre Messmer, Les Blancs s’en vont (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 235–69. In fairness, it must be said that Messmer understood that most of these actions were both futile and wrong. Frédéric Bobin, ‘‘Robert Lafont, Encylopédiste occitan,’’ Le Monde, 19–20 June 1994. See the collection of essays, largely on Giscard’s failed political projects, edited by Vincent Wright, Continuity and Change in France (London: George Allen, 1984). Yves Mény’s contribution to the volume, ‘‘Central Control and Local Resistance,’’ points out, in relation to his Larzac problem for example, that Giscard aroused mistrust in his likely supporters without either disarming his enemies or settling regional grievances (202–18, esp. 210). A selection of copies of these letters is in the Millau Archives, 1Z11 1972 7. ‘‘La Lutte du Larzac’’ (video, Atelier Arcadie). The archives of the movement contain a leaflet inviting all to come to the Harvest Festival for the Third World on 17 August 1974, distributed by the Comité de soutien aux Paysans du Larzac, José Bové, secretary, and giving a Bordeaux address. Bové was already working with the movement before his move to the plateau the next year. See the pages of course o√erings and commentary on ‘‘Larzac-Universités’’ in the movement-compiled brochure Larzac: Un enjeu national (Millau, 1977 or 1978), 38–39. adl 1Z40 1976–1977. Interview with Marizette Terlier in Millau. See also the interviews with the Maillé and the other founders of gll in Alland, Le Larzac et après, 96–101. I wish to thank Marc-Olivier Baruch of the cnrs for this anecdote of his youth. gll, June–July 1977. The interest was apparently in the individual gfa subscribers. The many organized groups who bought shares are not represented in the data. Patrick Fridenson of the graduate school of social sciences in Paris (ehess) told me that his cfdt union at the time was a proud proprietor of some square meters of the Larzac. See the Annexe to Alland, Le Larzac et après, 249. adl 1Z 50 1978 4. Le Comité du Larzac, Larzac: Un enjeu national (Millau, 1977 or 1978), 17, brochure by the movement on its activities, periodically updated. adl 1Z40 1976–77. See also the appreciative review of the Paris production in Le Monde of 11 February 1976. ‘‘Le Larzac à New-York,’’ gll, 7 January 1977. On the incident see Minute, 21–27 August 1974, 21. Wanda Holohan, ‘‘Le conflit du Larzac: chronique et essai d’analyse,’’ photocopied essay in the Larzac Archives (n.p., 1976), 296–97. See also her dissertation, ‘‘Dimension régionale des mouvements sociaux en France à travers le mouvement du Larzac’’ (Grenoble: Université des Sciences sociales de Grenoble, 1975).

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chapter 2: ‘‘can you come back to france and do it?’’ My Mona Lisa’s Escort (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) is about creating the new ministry. 2 After an early book by Malraux with that title about a never-never land. 3 Pierre Messmer, Les Blancs s’en vont: Récit de décolonisation (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 50. 4 Emile Biasini, Grands Travaux: De l’Afrique au Louvre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995), 124–28. 5 Armelle Enders, ‘‘L’École nationale de la France d’Outre-mer et la formation des administrateurs coloniaux,’’ Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 40 (April–June 1993), 272–73, 278. 6 Robert Delavignette, Freedom and Authority in French West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 24. 7 Some candidates from the Caribbean colonies, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyana, were regularly admitted into the school. On graduation they were always assigned to ‘‘Black’’ colonies, never to Asian places, and always far from their homes. Their rise, as a group, in the colonial service was very slow. The naming in the 1930s of Félix Éboué to the governor-generalship of an African colony was, and remained, exceptional. A little-known, and too late, last attempt to keep the loyalties of its overseas citizens in the last days of the empire was the institution of a policy of ‘‘equal opportunity’’ in the colonial administration. In 1957 the Ministry of France Overseas decreed that henceforth 70 percent of new administrators had to be from the Overseas Territories. Unable or unwilling to carry out what Americans would call ‘‘reverse discrimination,’’ the enfom closed its doors two years later. It encouraged its recent graduates to find positions in the state services of metropolitan France (Enders, ‘‘L’École nationale de la France d’Outre-mer,’’ 278). See further the valuable manuscript by Véronique Hélénon, ‘‘Un Aspect de la politique coloniale française en Afrique: Les Administrateurs coloniaux aux origines des colonies Guadeloupe, Martinique et Guyane.’’ The essay is part of a thesis, soon to be published, on the role of colonials in administrating the colonies. 8 Olivier Colombani, Mémoires coloniales: La fin de l’Empire français d’Afrique vue par les administrateurs coloniaux (Paris: La découverte, 1991), 176–77. Colombani continues, ‘‘C’est ainsi que Georges Cha√ard, dans ses Carnets secrets de la décolonisation, a pu écrire que le Niger était aux mains des trois Colombani qui faisaient la pluie et le beau temps, mais une telle concentration de Corses n’était que le fruit du hasard des mutations. Moi excepté, ces gens étaient en poste au Niger avant l’autonomie. Ils connaissaient parfaitement le pays, et personnellement tel ministre qui avait pu être l’élu de leur cercle. De plus, il ne faut pas oublier qu’il y avait énormément de Corses dans l’administration coloniale.’’ 9 See my comparison of the factor of ‘‘character’’ in shaping French and British 1

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11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19

20

21 22

23 24 25

colonial administrators, ‘‘Not the Right Stu√,’’ in my forthcoming When the White Man Turns Tyrant. Robert Delavignette, Soudan-Paris-Bourgogne (Paris: Grasset, 1935), cited in Jean de la Guérivière, Les Fous d’Afrique: Histoire d’une passion française (Paris: Le Seuil, 2001), 93–94. Association des élèves de l’enfom, Annuaire exceptionnel du centenaire de l’enfom (Paris, 1985), Introduction. Armelle Enders, ‘‘L’École nationale de la France d’Outre-mer,’’ 276. Béatrice Grand, ‘‘Robert Delavignette, Directeur de l’école nationale de la France d’outre-mer (1937–1946),’’ in Bernard Mouralis and Anne Piriou, eds., Robert Delavignette: Savant et politique (1897–1976) (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 160. Enders, ‘‘L’École nationale de la France d’Outre-mer,’’ 279. Marie-Ange Rauch, Le Bonheur: d’Entreprendre (Paris: Documentation française, 1998), 47 n.18, citing a document from the colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence. Biasini, Grands Travaux, 144 Rauch, Le Bonheur, 66. Approximately three hundred others found other state administrative positions back home. There’s another good story on the empire’s influence on the metropole, if we could investigate it. Biasini, Grands Travaux, 135 Text of interview with Robert Sandey (24 October 1995), in Rauch, Le Bonheur, 73. Carried as a small news item in Le Monde, 6 September 1960, but neither it nor any other French newspaper had dared to publish the text of the Declaration of the 121. The government still had a powerful censorship law in its arsenal, as anyone who read, or reads, newspapers from the era of the Algerian War might know. In defiance, the more progressive dailies left the spaces blank where the pre-publication censors had removed articles they deemed dangerous to print. Pierre Moinot, Tous comptes faits (Paris: Quai Voltaire Edima, 1993), 161. In the end, the directive was not put into e√ect and the three house directors withdrew their resignations. J. P. Gravier, Paris et le désert français: décentralisation, équipement, population (Paris: Le Portulan, 1947). ‘‘Discours prononcé par M. André Malraux le mars 1966 à l’occasion de l’inauguration de la Maison de la Culture d’Amiens,’’ in the folder ‘‘Discours d’André Malraux, 1959–1970,’’ archives of the Département des Études et de la Prospective (Paris), Ministry of Culture. Biasini, Grands Travaux, 141. Philippe Urfalino, L’Invention de la politique culturelle (Paris, 1996), 13–89, 109–30. Rauch, Le Bonheur, 156. Since its creation in 1945, the new National School of Administration, in contrast with the enfom, actively recruited students from the French empire as part of an extensive postwar national project to save the empire by practicing what we today call ‘‘reverse discrimination’’ and ‘‘equal opportunity’’

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26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34

202

in jobs throughout the state administration. See on this Biasini, Grands Travaux, 161–63. Rauch, Le Bonheur, 111–17. It was ironic that the students of the colonial school in the years after World War II should have professed themselves, in increasing numbers, committed socialists, sympathetic to democratic movements in the colonies they would administer. The confrontation in the culture ministry between graduates of fom and those of the ena was in some ways a fight between an old compromised left and a new left without a history. See William Cohen, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stamford, 1971), and the recollections of Pierre Vérin, member of a group of enfom students who published in the school paper their refusal—two years before the school’s closing—to be ‘‘the handymen [les hommes à tout faire] of imperialism.’’ ‘‘Révolte et anticipation à l’école nationale de la France d’outre-mer en 1956,’’ in Mouralis and Piriou, Robert Delavignette, 165–72. Compiled from data in Rauch, Le Bonheur, 143–59. Lebovics, Mona Lisa’s Escort, 99. Here’s a prime example of the dialectic of culture. The first Houses of Culture were created soon after the Revolution to wean the population away from the old Czarist culture. Malraux had probably visited some when he went to speak in the ussr in the 1930s. In the mid-30s during the Popular Front, French Communists and their allies set up several such institutions on the Russian model. Malraux served on the program committee of the Paris one. So what Biasini had done in Africa and was about to do in France had a rich institutional pedigree, although the uses of the African and Ministry of Cultural A√airs versions have to be put in the hegemonic column, in contrast to the counter-hegemonic goals of earlier e√orts. For a more detailed discussion of the role of these Houses of Culture, see chapter 6 of my Mona Lisa’s Escort. Emile Biasini, Sur Malraux: Celui qui aimait les chats (Paris: O. Jacob, 1999), 208. Mitterrand and Malraux had detested each other. Biasini, Grands Travaux, 303. Ibid., 261. In theoretical writings Bourdieu had questioned the validity of such inquiries. But I have to assume that Biasini remembers asking Bourdieu to do public opinion polling for him. Maybe Bourdieu’s own bad experiences with the activity, or its contemporary commercial and political uses, finally made him reject the very idea of ‘‘public opinion.’’ Greenblatt credits his reading of Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis for the method of literary and historical correlation we know as the New Historicism. Lecture by Stephen Greenblatt, 11 September 1996, Humanities Institute, suny Stony Brook. In one notable essay, for example, Auerbach extracts the whole import of the Old Testament—a book ‘‘fraught with meaning’’—from a consideration of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Notes

35

‘‘Cette exposition est faite pour la joie de briser les clichés, de détruite l’imagerie, de tordre le cou aux stéréotypes et de rencontrer des hommes et des femmes dans la vérité de leurs destinées.’’ From the ‘‘Avant tout propos’’ of the exhibition catalogue Kannibals et Vahinés: Imagerie des mers du Sud (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001), 15. 36 Delavignette, Freedom and Authority in French West Africa, 42. 37 Delavignette, Freedom and Authority in French West Africa, 72 n. 1. This important shaper of French colonial policy believed that what he had done in Africa and the Sudan was fully applicable in France; see for example 10–11. 38 The regional (dead) arts of France were collected in the new Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, built by the Malraux ministry, designed by one of Le Corbusier’s students, and tucked away in the leafy Bois de Boulogne, next door to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, where flora from the colonies were planted to see if they would flourish on French soil. 39 Even the Centre Beaubourg, built by Georges Pompidou, although striking architecturally, has as its permanent exhibition the great works of modernism largely predating World War II. It’s become a kind of museum of classicism bis. The art historian Patricia Mainardi is working on a study of the ‘‘persistence of classicism’’ in the arts in France. 40 Biasini, Grands Travaux, 333. [Eh bien, voilà, je peux parquer mes dromadaires.] On the last page there is a short poem from Apollinaire’s Alcools, ‘‘Le Bestiaire’’: Avec ses quatre dromadaires Don Pedro d’Alfaroubeira Courut le monde et l’admira. Il fit ce que je voudrais faire Si j’avais quatre dromadaires. With his four camels Don Pedro d’Alfaroubeira travels the world and admires it. He does what I would do If I had four camels.

chapter 3: combating guerilla ethnology The letter is cited by Didier Martin in Le Larzac: Utopies et Réalités (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), 53 and 75 n. 4. 2 Daniel Fabre, ‘‘La Politique de l’ethnologie du ministère de la culture depuis les années soixtante-dix,’’ talk given to the Groupe de travail sur l’Histoire des politiques du patrimoine, Comité d’histoire du Ministère de la Culture, 15 April 2002. The social science vocabulary in this period was very fluid, evidencing both the e√ort to move the object of study from overseas non-urban societies to metro1

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politan France, as well as of course the postwar turf wars in all the disciplines. I will therefore follow the practice of contemporaries and use ‘‘ethnology,’’ ‘‘anthropology,’’ ‘‘social anthropology,’’ and even ‘‘sociology’’ interchangeably. When the choice of the word used to describe the science of society seems to matter in a usage, I will note that. 3 Pierre Bourdieu put weight on this fact when he considered why sociology in France has so long resisted doing a sociology of sociology. ‘‘Landmarks,’’ In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 50. During the postcolonial crisis, however, this lack of reflexivity was functional for the new deal between state and social science that was in the o≈ng. 4 Isac Chiva, ‘‘L’Ethnologie de la France en Perspective,’’ Bulletin de l’Association française des Anthropologues 12–13 (September 1983): 4. See also the untitled piece by Marc Abelès in the same issue, esp. 18–19. 5 This identification of buildings and ruins with historical claims is not a selfevident strategy, although it has been naturalized by its many proponents. See on this move the insightful work by Daniel Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 6 Quoted in Monique Dondin-Payre, ‘‘L’Armée d’Afrique face à l’Algérie romaine: Enjeux idéologiques et contraintes pratiques d’une oeuvre scientifique au XIXe siècle,’’ in L’Africa romana: Atti XIII convegno di studio Djerba, 10–13 Dec. 1998 (Rome, 2000), 725–45, esp. 744. Napoleon III reissued the order in 1858. 7 Monique Dondin-Payre, ‘‘L’Archéologie en Algérie à partir de 1830: Une politique patrimoniale?,’’ paper presented to the Groupe de Travail sur l’Histoire des Politiques du Patrimoine, Comité d’Histoire, Ministère de la Culture, 5 March 2002, 4–5. 8 Jean de la Guérivière, Les Fous d’Afrique: Histoire d’une passion Française (Paris: Le Seuil, 2001), 335, tells the story. Giscard’s hospitality proved fickle. By 1991 he was writing in Le Figaro of ‘‘the invasion’’ of these same immigrants he had welcomed to his table, and the need to return to the ‘‘traditional idea of conferring French citizenship on the basis of birth [le droit du sang].’’ His words are cited in Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel, De l’Indigène à l’immigré (Paris: Découvertes, 1998), 118. Le droit du sang was indeed one of the ways France had conferred citizenship, but introducing it in this context made of one historical practice a statement of racism. 9 Henri Seyrig, ‘‘Note sur la réforme de la recherche archéologique en France, suivie d’un projet de statut,’’ September 1968. Nor were Seyrig’s and Soustelle’s the last reports proposing cures for the discipline. After Soustelle’s, eleven more sets of proposals were formulated up to 1998. But such a flurry of report writing is characteristic of epistemological and organizational crises that are structural in

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nature. Alain Morel, for many years director of research at the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique (about which see further along in this chapter), believes that the end of the Algerian War, and so the termination of his full-time political role, was crucial in Soustelle’s new interest in domestic archaeology. Interview with Alain Morel, director of research at the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique, Paris, 12 January 1991. 10 ‘‘Au titre du sauvegarde, il faut rappeler tout d’abord que le budget 1980 consacre plus d’un milliard de francs au Patrimoine (crédits des: directions du Patrimoine, des Musées, des Archives et du Livre). Une hausse substantielle des crédits des Monuments Historiques ont été obtenus pour 1980. Dans un contexte économique particulièrement di≈cile les crédits progressent de 40% et passent de 264 millions en 1979 à 400 millions en 1980. Cet e√ort sera poursuivi en 1981 dans le cadre d’un programme pluriannuel de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur qui permettra maintenir en valeur pendant cinq ans la dotation exceptionnelle de l’année 1980.’’ Discours de [Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, Jean-Philippe] Lecat à l’Académie des Beaux-Arts, 10 October 1980, mimeographed copy, Archives du Centre de Documentation du Département des Études et de la Prospective, Ministère de la Culture. 11 Emmanuel Wallon, Lecat (ministère), in Emmanuel de Waresquiel, ed., Dictionnaire des politiques culturelles de la France depuis 1959 (Paris: Larousse cnrs, 2001), 361. 12 On the recent history of archaeological work in France, see the Ministry of Culture’s internal research newsletter. Culture et Recherche 85–86 (July–October 2001) is entirely devoted to archaeology in France. 13 Isac Chiva, speaking autobiographically at a seminar of the Comité d’histoire of the Ministry of Culture, Paris, 4 June 2002. 14 Attribution of motives is always risky business for historians. With this warning to the reader, I propose that Rigaud, a longtime active member of the French Communist Party, might have been just as disturbed as Chiva and Giscard by the ultra leftist goings-on—Leftist Christians, Maoists, Trotskyists, Michel Rocard’s psu, ecologists, and hippies in the regionalist movements of provincial France. What is certain is that the pcf stayed clear of them in the 70s, and in some cases—for example, in Larzac—criticized them. 15 Although there were a number of proposals for action on the cultural heritage already in the planning drafts of the Commission de la Recherche of the VIIe Plan in 1975, these never entered the final budget. 16 See Lecat’s Lettre de Mission of 28 December 1978 to Benzaïd, as reproduced in Annexe 1, 56, of the final report. Groupe de Travail sur le patrimoine ethnologique, ‘‘Rapport sur l’ethnologie de la France: besoins et projets,’’ Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, September 1979. 17 Isac Chiva, seminar of the Comité d’histoire of the Ministry of Culture, Paris,

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18 19 20

21

22 23 24

25

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4 June 2002. A personal motive may have played a role. Chiva was a likely successor to Georges-Henri Rivière as director of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires. But was not named. The creation of the Mission du Patrimoine in the Ministry of Culture, which he would dominate as the head of its scientific council, gave him a competing base of operations, and a budget from the state. On Rivière, see my True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), chaps. 4–5. Gardaram lo Larzac, March 1978; Martin, Le Larzac, 91. Hugues de Varine, ‘‘La Place des cultures populaires dans la politique nationale d’action culturelle: Première ébauche d’une analyse du problème et propositions de solutions,’’ in the folder Création de la Mission, 1979, 1980, 1981, 14–18, archives of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique; de Varine’s italics. Hereafter, until noted otherwise, the memos, minutes of meetings, and report drafts cited are from this folder. Groupe de Travail Patrimoine Ethnologique, hearings chaired by R. Benzaïd, ‘‘Entretien avec Georges-Henri Rivière’’ (19 February 1979), ‘‘Entretien avec Claude Lévi-Strauss’’ (28 February 1979). Groupe de Travail Patrimoine Ethnologique, ‘‘Compte-rendu de la réunion plénière du 12 février 1979,’’ 1–2. Benôit de l’Étoile, talk at the New York University Institute of French Studies Conference dedicated to the theme of métissage, 1 April 2001. This was the real title of a real book published in 1940 by the great men of British structural functionalism, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes. In the increasingly self-assertive years of the colonized societies following World War II, British anthropology, with its twin interests in kinship patterns and political systems, dominated the discipline. The concerns of researchers on the one side, and the need for smooth, peaceful, and, above all, culture-specific British colonial administrative systems on the other, show the same convergence of interests we find with French overseas ethnology and colonial administration. The theoretical apparatuses di√er a bit. See Maurice Godelier, ‘‘Is Social Anthropology Still Worth the Trouble? A Response to Some Echoes from America,’’ Ethnos 65 (2000): 301–16. The painting is described in Johan Galtung, ‘‘After Camelot,’’ in Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge: mit Press, 1967), 298–99. In a delightful conversation with me, Pierre Kipré, of the École Normale Supérieure d’Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, confirmed the existence of the painting, which he had seen in the room on the occasions when he visited the chief of state. A leading historian of regional and rural France, Le Roy Ladurie, had been invited to participate, but apparently he expected little of value to come from the commission. The minutes show him to have absented himself from all sessions. Isac Chiva, oral memoirs given at a seminar of the Comité d’histoire, Ministry of

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28

29

30

31

32 33

34

Culture, Paris, 4 June 2002. In the years 1977–79 there was no real discipline of ethnology in France, he remembered. Just the matp. Such a judgment, of course, depends very much on one’s point of view. There were revues, courses, and professors. The research arm of the matp was at work producing and publishing studies. It is important to understand these di√erent forces as distinct, each with its own agenda and specific capital holdings. The capital of each is not reducible nor subsumable to those of the others, although bargains could be struck between, for example, actors with lots of money and political authority and those with no money but abundant academic legitimacy. For a brilliant example of the value of such a theoretical model, see, most recently, Gisèle Sapiro’s study of how writers and publishing houses in France in the Vichy years employed their cultural prestige to gain concessions and privileges from the new government, La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). In an interview with the author, Elizabeth Fleury, who had worked in the Ministry of Culture in the years 1975–88, in the 1980s as head of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique, confirmed the government’s fear of the new regionalist movements, and its desire for an agency to track, and possibly disarm, their activities. Interview, Paris 3, November 1988. Isac Chiva, ‘‘Le Domaine et les moyens d’une politique du patrimoine ethnologique de la France: Quelques propositions,’’ February 1979, draft report distributed to other members for the pre-report to the minister. ‘‘Compte-rendu de la réunion plénière du 12 mars 1979 of the Groupe du Travail,’’ 5, carton 25, folder Secrétariat du Conseil du Patrimoine Ethnologique, deposit 99V64 to the Archives Nationales at Fontainebleau, May 1999. ‘‘L’Ethnologie de la France: Besoins et Projets: Rapport du Groupe de Travail sur le Patrimoine Ethnologique,’’ Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, September 1979. In the pages that follow, references to the text of the report will be given as page numbers in parentheses. The social scientists who worked on the report admitted as much. In view of the ever-renewing nature of living cultures, the text expressed skepticism about the real possibility of carrying out an ‘‘ethnologie de sauvetage’’: ‘‘On peut même douter, à la limite, qu’une telle démarche ait une base épistémologique’’ (16). Fabre tells the story, 98. Robert A. Nisbet, ‘‘Project camelot: An autopsy,’’ in Philip Rie√, ed. On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies, Case Studies (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 283– 313. The invitation to social scientists is reprinted as Document Number 1 in Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 47–49. ‘‘Document Number 3, Extract from a Working Paper Issued by the Army to Guide O≈cers Involved in the Project,’’ in Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 56–59. See also the latest damning reassessment in the chapter ‘‘Project Camelot

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and Its Aftermath’’ in Ellen Herman’s The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts, 1940–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 153–73. 35 The cia’s word for the dramatically bad consequences of an operation on its initiators is ‘‘blowback.’’ 36 I owe this insight to Anne-Marie Thiesse, the leading scholar of regionalist cultures in France. After reading all the materials from the six corners of France about preserving or fighting to revive the lost Breton, Occitan, Alsacean, and other cultures, she was surprised not to find any such language being used by nationalists in twentieth-century Corsica. Where there were allusions to language and local practices—as during World War I—it was usually Italian propaganda. Italy has often cast a longing look at the island, where, after all, people speak a dialect of Tuscan. Perhaps the Corsican nationalists felt that their culture was alive and well; only the French e√orts to subvert had to stop. 37 Recollections of Isac Chiva on the origins of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique before the Groupe de Travail on Histoire des Politiques du Patrimoine of the Comité d’Histoire of the Ministry of Culture, 4 June 2002. See also the report of Alain Morel, responsible for research in the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique, writing in the internal research newsletter of the Ministry of Culture, Alain Morel, ‘‘Dossier: L’Ethnologie: La Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique,’’ Culture et recherche 87 (November–December 2001): 4–5. 38 ‘‘Discours sur l’Année du Patrimoine du Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication: Jean-Philippe Lecat à l’Académie des Beaux-Arts,’’ 10 October 1980, mimeographed copy, Archives du Centre de Documentation du Département des Études et de la Prospective of the Ministry of Culture. 39 Julien Vincent et al., ‘‘L’Année du Patrimoine dans la Marne,’’ published by the o≈ce of the Prefect of the Marne (n.p., 1980), mimeographed original text in the archives of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique. 40 ‘‘1980: Année du Patrimoine: Le bilan,’’ Action culturelle en Basse-Normandie, no. 57 (March 1981): 8–14. 41 Noël Gerome and Martine Segalen, ‘‘En guise de conclusion: Les conflits et les contradictions du patrimoine ethnographique de la France,’’ in Jean Cuisenier, ed., Hier pour demain: arts, traditions et patrimoine (Paris: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1980), 240. 42 Direction du Patrimoine, ‘‘Bilan de l’année du patrimoine,’’ mimeographed report, January 1981. 43 The press release dated Paris, 7 January 1981, was entitled ‘‘Un sondage sur l’impact de l’Année du Patrimoine.’’ The full report was put together by the marketing firm Analyse, Recherche et Conseil en Marketing et Communication (arcmc) and entitled ‘‘Éléments d’information sur les attitudes des français à l’égard de leur patrimoine culturel.’’ Mimeographed copy, archives of the Service des Études et de la Recherche of the Ministry of Culture and Communication.

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See further on the discovery of the immigrants, Blanchard and Bancel, De l’Indigène à l’immigré.

chapter 4: the effect le pen 1 Marc Guillaume, La Politique du patrimoine (Paris: Galilée, 1980), 13, 166, 171–72. 2 Some of the most important things de Certeau wrote on contemporary culture— in particular L’Invention du quotidien—were first reports solicited by his friend Augustin Girard, head of the research o≈ce of the Ministry of Culture. Once the appropriate context of the problem he handles in any given essay is supplied, the texts become quite clear. See the new intellectual biography by François Dosse, Michel de Certeau (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). 3 Marc Guillaume, rapporteur général, L’Impératif culturel: Rapport du Groupe Long Term Culture: Commissariat Général du Plan (Paris: Documentation Française, 1983), 22, 27, 38, 44–46, 78–83, 94. 4 Lequin had done a pioneering local study of workers’ culture which was initially— until they modified the scheme for the specificity of their area—the model for the Longwy group. ‘‘Givors: Les ambiguités du changement,’’ Archives de l’observation du changement social et culturel 2 (1980). 5 Jean-Marc Leveratto and Fabrice Montebello, in their ‘‘Faire l’histoire des hommes du fer,’’ in Alban Bensa and Daniel Fabre, eds., Une Histoire à soi (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2001), 52, although critical of Noiriel, I think unjustly, for allegedly using the study to promote his academic career, admit that he was universally admired—even by enemies in the struggle—for the way he could combine first-rate scholarship with political militancy. The article by Leveratto and Montebello (47–69) on the fight to preserve the workers’ heritage at Longwy, although tendentious, is useful for the parallel e√orts there by left Christians and young Maoist Établi, which Noiriel’s research report does not discuss. 6 Gérard Noiriel, ‘‘Recherches sur la ‘Culture ouvrière’ dans le Bassin de Longwy: Rapport e√ectué pour la Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique (Ministère de la Culture): Appel d’o√re du 30/4/1981’’ (n.p. 1983), photocopied text, 2, 4, 18, 32, 60, 88–114, 116, 177–83, 188. There is a copy in the library of the Paris Maison de Sciences de l’Homme. 7 Interview with Gérard Noiriel, Paris, 20 September 2001. 8 Elizabeth Lévy, ‘‘Patrimoine ethnologique: Bilan et perspectives,’’ folder Création de la Mission, 1979, 1980, 1981, quotation at 19–20. For good measure she announced dropping LeRoy Ladurie, appointed by the previous government, from the council of scholars of the o≈ce and replacing him with Héritier of the atp and adding Gérard Althabe of the ehess (in e√ect, the Socialists’ think tank), one of the few publishing senior urban ethnologists in the country (22). The industrial heritage was given its own agency in 1984, as the ‘‘cellule du patrimoine industriel’’ within the Sous-Direction du Inventaire.

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9 Daniel Fabre, ‘‘La Politique de l’ethnologie du ministère de la culture depuis les années soixtante-dix,’’ talk given to the Groupe de Travail sur l’Histoire des Politiques du Patrimoine, Comité d’Histoire du Ministère de la Culture, 15 April 2002. Statement by him in post-talk discussion. 10 Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique. ‘‘Recherche scientifique, 1980–1981: Compterendu des recherches engagés, 18 August 1981,’’ aide-mémoire in the folder Création de la Mission, 1979, 1980, 1981, in the archives of the mission. Employed at the culture ministry since 1975 and head of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique from 1986 to 1988, Elizabeth Fleury confirmed this shift in research focus, and its persistence to the mid-80s, when the o≈ce’s interest shifted to ‘‘the savoir-faire’’ of artisans. Interview with author, Paris, 3 November 1988. 11 Interview of Elisabeth Fleury with the author, Paris, 3 November 1988. 12 Interview with Alain Morel, director of research at the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique, Paris, 12 January 1991. 13 Jack Lang, ‘‘Lettre de mission à Henri Giordan,’’ appendix to report by Henri Giordan, Démocratie culturelle et droit à la di√érence: Rapport presenté par M. Henri Giordan à M. Jack Lang, Ministre de la Culture, for the Commission des cultures régionales et minoritaires, February 1982. 14 In the same spirit, at the end of a conference held at Jussieu in 1974, Pierre Bourdieu had called for ‘‘decolonizing sociology.’’ Pierre Bourdieu, ed., Le Mal de Voir: Ethnologie et orientalisme, politique et épistémologie, critique et autocritique . . ., Cahiers Jussieu no. 2. See also Contributions aux colloques: Orientalisme, africanisme, américanisme (9–11 mai 1974), Ethnologie et politique au Maghreb (5 juin 1975) (Paris: 10/18, 1976), 422. 15 Giordan, Démocratie culturelle, 35–36, 58–59, 129–31; all italics mine. There is of course another dimension of citizenship that is not being addressed in Giordan, that of legal citizenship for the many living in France with no legal status. On this story see the excellent study by Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un français?: Histoire de la nationalité française de la Révolution à nos jours (Paris: Grasset, 2002). 16 Michel Izard, ‘‘L’Anthropologie et les recherches en sciences sociales dans le Tiers Monde,’’ Bulletin de l’Association française des anthropologues 11 (March 1983): 9– 35, quotation at 24. 17 Meanwhile he kept the Conseil du Patrimoine Ethnologique in place and renewed Chiva’s appointment as its chair. Reforms in the French government are hard to do. The easiest path is to create either a new layer or new bodies. ‘‘Discours d’ouverture de monsieur le ministre [Lang],’’ at the new session of the Conseil du Patrimoine Ethnologique, 6 December 1984, carton 25, folder ‘‘Secrétariat du conseil du patrimoine ethnologique,’’ deposit 99V64 to the Archives Nationales at Fontainbleau, May 1999. 18 Gilles Verbunt, ed., Actes du colloque, diversité culturelle, société industrielle, état national (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), 33–37, 225–41, 251–65.

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Martine Stori and Jacques Tarnéro, eds., L’Identité française (Paris: Tierce, 1985), 21–28, 45, 75, 96–117. Some strongly Jewish-identified intellectuals like Taguie√, among others, were haunted by Vichy’s writing Jewish citizens out of the Republican contract, which then opened them to unjust treatment and, in many cases, to death. In their eyes this earlier ‘‘pluralism’’ discredited any contemporary notions of citizenship based on di√erence. But then Jacques Derrida, educated in part in Jewish schools in Algeria, champions di√erence and diversity. 20 Quoted from Le Figaro by Giordan, ‘‘Vers la démocratie culturelle,’’ in Verbunt, ed., Actes du colloque, 33; italics mine. 21 See my True France for more on rightist essentialism. 22 Le Monde, 4 June 2002. 23 See the articles on the formation, development, and emergence as a national political force by Jean-Yves Camus, Pascal Perrineau, and Piero Ignazi, in Nonna Mayer and Pascal Perrineau, eds., Le Front National à découvert, 2d updated ed. (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1996), 17–80. For a reading of the LePenist movement—with the politics largely left out—as a chance for inclusion for alienated outsiders, see Brigitta Orfali, L’Adhésion au Front National: De la minorité active au movement social (Paris: Kimé, 1990), 277–79. 24 Pierre Bourdieu uses folksy sports metaphors to describe struggles in society: ‘‘feel for the game,’’ ‘‘field,’’ ‘‘strategies.’’ It’s not a bad place to begin the story of the return to pluralism. 25 Unpublished senior seminar paper, ‘‘A New National Team for a New Nation,’’ by Ivan Federo√. Because in France it is not done to refer to people by racial designations—in a society which has real racial problems, the compromise English word ‘‘un Black’’ has come into usage. It means a self-identified person of color. 26 Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un français: Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Paris: Grasset, 2002), 274–75. 27 Interview with Olivier Bertrand in Libération, 12 April 2002, 8. 19

chapter 5: the dance of the museums 1

There are, of course, small museums containing the objects that the groups on display brought in to show others who they were and are. All over North America, Native American museums have sprung up, created and run by the tribe or band itself, such as the splendid display of Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) ceremonial objects curated by Gloria Webster at the U’Mista Cultural Center at Alert Bay, British Columbia. Note the avoidance of the dead word ‘‘museum.’’ The masks, hand objects, and blankets are shown as ready to be taken o√ display for the next potlatch or other ceremony. But Quai Branly is no little regional museum: the rules for whose voice speaks from the exhibits may have to be di√erent. The latest big new national museums are being curated and even run by the indigenous peoples.

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5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

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This is the case with the Maori sections of the just-built Te Papa Museum in New Zealand and of the entirety of the National Museum of the American Indian going up on the mall in Washington. Fred R. Myers, The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 2001), 30. The essays in this volume—new studies of material culture, a rich vein, stimulated by publication of the essays edited by Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)—are of a uniformly high quality. For my work I have profited especially from those by Myers, Claudio Lomnitz, Nicholas Thomas, Annie E. Weiner, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Benjamin Guérard, ‘‘Du musée du Louvre,’’ Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 3d series, 4 (1852–53): 70–77; Krzystof Pomian, ‘‘Museums, Paintings, and History,’’ Nordisk Museologi 2 (1993): 61–72. Emmanuel de Roux, ‘‘Le Louvre s’apprête à accueillir froidement les ‘primitifs,’ ’’ Le Monde, 4 January 2000. At his death in 1908 the great collector Jacques Doucet left his collection of modern art to the Louvre. It included Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, arguably the canonic work marking the crossroads of European Modern and African arts. The whole collection was refused. Eventually, in 1937, Alfred Barr bought it from a French dealer for the new Museum of Modern Art. Talk by Stéphane Martin at the ‘‘Journée d’Information du mercredi 27 juin 2001 au Collège de France, sur l’état d’avancement du Musée du Quai Branly’’ (hereafter cited as Jd’I). Emmanuel de Roux, ‘‘Les sculptures de quatre continents font leur entrée au Louvre,’’ Le Monde, 14 April 2000. One can find a brief biography of Kerchache in Patrick Longuet, ‘‘Jacques Kerchache, globe-trotter et tête chercheuse,’’ Le Monde, 14 April 2000. It includes his start as a dealer in French contemporary art, his discovery of African art in 1965 while scouting the Flea Market at Saint-Ouen, his brief arrest in Gabon for having ‘‘forgotten’’ to declare some of the pieces he had taken out, his friendship with Jacques Chirac, and above all, his near-obsession to get African art into the Louvre. See the very good article on the Pavillon de Sessions by Nélia Dias, ‘‘Une Place au Louvre,’’ Le Musée cannibale (Neuchâtel, Switzerland: ehk, 2002), 15–29. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 274–75. Personal communication to author, 12 November 2002. Philippe Dagen, ‘‘Malgré la pluie, malgré l’attente, le triomphe des arts premiers au Louvre,’’ Le Monde, 18 April 2000. Since 1957 the Rockefeller collection had been housed first in the Museum of Primitive Art, before that was closed and its contents transferred to the Met. Probably more than any prior show, because of its aestheticism, its location, and of course its hype, the Museum of Modern Art’s blockbuster ‘‘Primitivism’’ in 1986— however flawed—credentialed ‘‘primitive’’ art as potentially includable in the

Notes

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18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25

canon of the fine arts. Marine Degli and Maurie Mauzé, Arts premiers: Le temps de la reconnaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 117. Text of an interview by Krysztof Pomian with Germain Viatte, 13 October 1999, in Le Débat 108 (January–February 2000), reproduced on the Museum website with no page numbers. See also Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001), 118–20. By decree no. 98-1191. See the nice anthropological overview by Nélia Dias, ‘‘Esquisse ethnographique d’un projet: Le Musée du Quai Branly,’’ French Politics, Culture, and Society 19 (1991): 81–101. The Orsay has a few works on the colonial nineteenth century. There is Delacroix’s Tiger Hunt, Léon Belly’s Pilgrims Going to Mecca, three African heads on the main floor, and a display on North Africa as it looked under the Roman Empire. I thank Judy Stone for helping me find these pieces. Jean Nouvel, ‘‘Présence-absence, ou la dématérialisation sélective,’’ 22 September 2001, statement by the architect published on the museum’s website, www.quai branly.fr. Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art. See further the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art’s ham-handed ‘‘primitivism’’ show, ed. William Rubin, Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art: A≈nity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). Stéphane Martin, director of the Musée Branly, speaking at the New York University Maison Française on 26 September 2000. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Leora Auslander has shown a parallel association between styles of decorative art and governments—in particular furniture styles—in her Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 86. On the origins of the matp see chapters 4 and 5 in my True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). I further explored the fatal consequences of defining two distinct social sciences of humanity in 1937 in my talk, ‘‘L’Ethnologie et le folklore: Pourquoi deux disciplines?’’ at the conference ‘‘Du Folklore à l’Ethnolgie,’’ held at the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in March 2003. ‘‘L’Ethnologue et le Musée: Entretien avec Maurice Godelier,’’ Le Débat 108 (January–February 2000): 86, 91. All statements attributing motives to Godelier in the paragraphs above are based on my interview with him in his o≈ce at the ehess, 28 January 2002. He suggests as an alternative good practice—as one possible model for showing American art—the exhibition organized in 1988 by Lucy Vogel at the Center for African Art, Art/Artifact, where sometimes the same African works were variously

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displayed uncontexted as modern artworks, as ethnological specimens with diorama, even as part of a ‘‘curiosities room.’’ The visitor sees the works and sees the contexts which give the works di√erent meanings. It is the wrappings unwrapped. Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 120–21. On visiting a particularly innovative exhibition of American painting which had been installed in reverse chronological order, Wallach, who as a specialist in nineteenth-century American art had seen these works many times before, reports ‘‘It became evident to me that, by walking through a gallery space . . . , museum visitors acted out, and thus in some sense internalized, a version of art history’’ (1). My own argument here is that the visitor acts out and internalizes a version of history tout court. 26 Franz Boas had worked out the systematic critique of evolutionism in anthropology already some hundred years ago. Jacques Hainard, ‘‘La Nouvelle cuisine muséographique,’’ talk given at the conference on the Arts Premiers at the Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian (Paris), 28–29 March 2001. ‘‘Aujourd’hui coincés entre l’ethnologie à grand-papa et le regard réflexif et critique, les responsables des musées d’ethnographie tendent vers le discours esthétique ou se camouflent derrière le respect d’autrui pour étaler fragmentairement et sans recul les trésors des autres. Du fait de l’enchantement produit par les chefs-d’œuvre, les objets ethnographiques sont contemplés comme ceux des artistes occidentaux: la technique, la forme, l’audace esthétique sont au centre du débat et les travaux sur leur fonctionalité deviennent superflus.’’ See the Neuchâtel museum’s website for an idea of how Hainard and his team exhibit the history of their theories of knowledge of the objects on display: www.ne.ch/neuchatel/men. It is social science history of the best kind. 27 This was still being proposed as an honest role for ethnologists on the eve of decolonization. See Michel Leiris’s article ‘‘L’Ethnographie devant le colonialisme,’’ Les Temps Modernes 6 (1950): 357–74. 28 ‘‘Un Musée pour les arts exotiques: Entretien avec Germain Viatte,’’ Le Débat 108 (January–February 2000): 82–83. 29 My report of Emmanuel Désveaux’s thoughts about the museum are drawn from my interview with him in his planning o≈ce in Paris, 4 March 2002. In her important comparative study of contemporary museology, Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Age (London: Routledge, 1996), 266, Moira Simpson concludes di√erently: ‘‘The context in which western museums and their collections were established has changed, and the museum must also change in response to the contemporary contexts of the objects—the lost heritage of peoples still fighting for cultural autonomy and self-determination in the post-colonial era.’’ 30 Michel Colardelle, Le Musée des civilisations: France, Europe, Méditerranée (intitulé provisoire) à Marseille (Paris: Ministry of Culture, cnrs, 30 June 2001 [published

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33

34

35 36 37

38

39 40

41 42

31 October 2001]), 142. Unless otherwise noted, quotations will be from this report: 1, 6, 14–19, 22, 26, 29, 44, 46, 48, 5–6, 52–53, 123, 145. Interview, at the matp with Denis Chevallier, one of the principals charged with organizing the move to Marseilles, 12 July 2002. For a more sympathetic discussion of the heritage of Rivières’s museology, see Nina Gorgus, Der Zauberer der Vitrinen: Zur Museologie Georges Henri Rivières (Münster: Waxmann, 1999), esp. 229–41. In 2003, for example, the museum mounted special exhibitions on the Inuvialuit (The ‘‘Other Inuit’’), Italian-Canadians, the musical heritage of La Francophonie, the art of Canadian artists of Arab origin, and Tsmshian prehistory. These were in addition to the permanent halls devoted to a thousand years of Canadian history, modern social history, the history of Canadian workers, and other topics. See the museum’s website: www.civilization.ca. I have discussed the multiply harmful consequences of this creation in 1937 of two disciplines and two museums for the study of humankind, one for France, the other for the colonial world, in my paper, ‘‘L’Ethnologie et le folklore: Pourquoi deux disciplines?,’’ given 20 March 2003 at the conference held at the matp in Paris, ‘‘Du folklore à l’ethnologie: Institutions, musées, idées en France et en Europe de 1936 à 1945, Colloque International, 19–21 mars 2003.’’ Emmanuel de Roux, ‘‘L’Entomologiste Patrick Blandin, une nouvelle tête pour le Musée de l’Homme,’’ Le Monde, 20 June 2002. William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The recommendations, framed as a report to the minister of research, is reproduced as ‘‘Ministère de la Recherche, Rapport du groupe de travail sur les collections de la bibliothèque du Musée de l’Homme,’’ Gradhiva 29 (2001): 109–13. Driss El Yazami, Rémi Schwartz, and Hayet Zeggar, ‘‘Rapport pour la création d’un Centre National de l’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Immigration: Remis au premier minstre, le 22 novembre 2001.’’ I thank Patrick Weil for providing me with a copy of this masterful e√ort to steer between republican solidarity and the recognition of di√erence. Ibid. De-industrialization and, around Paris, gentrification have eroded the once-solid voter base of the left. The political cynicism among many o√spring of the immigrants—young people whom one might expect to vote socialist, if they voted—can only aid the right in future elections. See the study of the sociologist Olivier Masclet, La Gauche et les cités: Enquête sur un rendez-vous manqué (Paris: La Dispute, 2003). The word ‘‘cités’’ in the title refers to big public housing projects. I will continue to follow this story. I am currently collecting materials for a booklength manuscript on the museum changes that I could only sketch in this chapter. For the time being—to about 2005—the Palais de Porte-Doré, as the building is

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43 44 45

now called, will temporarily house L’Institut Français d’Architecture while its permanent location in the space of the former museum of national monuments at the Palais de Chaillot is being prepared. Once moved to its permanent quarters, it is to become the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. Stéphane Martin, introductory remarks at the conference on Arts Premières, Gulbenkian cultural center, 28 March 2002. I owe this point to Aldona Jonaitis, who assures me that museum sta√s are by no means certain of what visitors see as they walk their halls. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 312–15.

conclusion Although Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) has fascinatingly shown the way that we increasingly are globally embedded, especially with the large new migratory labor force, I am persuaded that the polarity ethnic-global is not adequate to describe current developments at the local, national, and international levels. 2 Pace Daniel Bell, who devotes his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976) to denying just this socioeconomic contradiction of capitalism. The culprit for him was the culture of modernism, which he sees as relatively unconnected to the economic system. 3 In her biography Enid Starkie concludes, ‘‘He came back from the East with a romantic yearning for rich, warm countries, for exotic splendor, and beauty impossible to achieve in this world. . . . This journey to the East was the turning-point of Baudelaire’s life.’’ Enid Starkie, Baudelaire (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1958), 62–63, 67, 69. On Jeanne Duval, one of the names of his flesh-and-blood Black Venus, see Claude Pichois, Baudelaire, with additional research by Jean Ziegler, trans. Graham Robb (London: H. Hamilton, 1989), 198–204. See also Gayatri Spivak’s subtle reading of his poem ‘‘Le Cygne’’ and her deconstruction of some of Baudelaire’s texts about Jeanne Duval in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 148–56. 4 See for example the catalogue of the exhibition in 2002 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. Colta Ives’s essay ‘‘Gauguin’s Ports of Call,’’ 3–149. The exhibition and the catalogue show a teleological progression, a natural and logical itinerary, of Gauguin from Peru, to Paris, to the provinces, to Martinique, and finally to the Pacific islands. The Metropolitan exhibition was underwritten by suez, a French-Belgian group that works in 130 countries—many of them formerly colonized—to provide ‘‘pure water, ample and clean energy, and the swift 1

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Notes

and ecologically sensitive disposal of waste’’ (vi). The colonial-provincial continuum in the French aesthetic imagination deserves a work of its own. Here I o√er just a few hints for a future work. 5 Bourdieu’s concept of training people systematically to misrecognize the workings of certain social phenomena is extremely useful in the story of French colonialism, as it is for the persistence of racism in nineteenth-century America, and for understanding the invisibility in the media of the parts of our population who have not shared these past recent years of prosperity ‘‘we have all enjoyed.’’ Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 51, 160, 171–72, 250, 194–95. 6 Quotations from the article by Paul Quinio, Libération, 13 January 2003, 40. 7 Jean-Luc Bonniol, ‘‘La Fabrique du passé: Le Larzac entre mémoire, histoire et patrimoine,’’ in Alban Bensa and Daniel Fabre, eds., Une Histoire à soi (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2001), 169–93; as well as, in the same volume, Bensa’s ‘‘Fièvre d’histoire dans la France contemporaine,’’ 9. 8 See the article by Patrick Roger on the results of the constitutional congress, from where I took the quotes, Le Monde, 18 March 2003, 18. 9 That this is not just a French concern, as I suggested in my Preface, is evidenced, for example, in the useful discussion of possible meanings of equality and diversity in our global age by Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Taking examples from the cultural politics of Spain, the Netherlands, Canada, and her native Turkey, Benhabib theorizes a moral and political universalism which respects democratically expressed and recognized di√erences. See also, newly, Dominique Wolton, L’Autre mondialisation (Paris: Flammarion, 2003).

Notes

217

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

B

ecause i can express my gratitude publicly, and because writing the acknowledgments means my work is finally done, I’m always pleased to record my debts to the many people whose criticisms, corrections, and praise have helped me. Let me do so the way I have organized the writing, in everwider geographical circles. I owe much to Dan Monk, friend and interlocutor of high value, as well as Sara Lipton, who wears her great learning lightly. She helped me puzzle out the Provençal and Occitan words and phrases. Who would have expected a medievalist to be so helpful a resource person for my contemporary history? My friend and colleague of many years, Richard Kuisel, now at Georgetown University, read part of an early draft and once more demonstrated both his sympathetic reading skills and his grounded sense of history. Thanks too for useful advice from my colleagues Judith and Arnold Wishnia and Kathleen Wilson. My departmental chair, Gary Marker, helped me maximize my time for research at a key moment. Also at a most important juncture, Dean Robert Liebermann granted me funding for travel. Finally, I owe a special thanks to Emmuelle Saada and to David Prochaska for their very helpful readings of the manuscript. I wish to thank my fellow members and the scholars we invited to present their work in progress at our New York Area French History Seminar. Over the years they have taught me so much about how to think about and write history, and, as important, how not to. I appreciate also the helpful reading of a late draft by Victoria Williams. Megumi Ukai gave me clues to the reading of the banner carried by the Japanese farmers who came to Larzac. I thank both Barbara Weinstein and Gary Gerstle for inviting me to present early drafts of parts of the manuscript at the Seminar Series on National Identities of the Center for Historical Studies of the University of Maryland, College Park, in April 2001. Thanks are also due to the members of the French Cultural Studies Seminar of the University of Pennsylvania who invited me to speak later that month. Roger Chartier’s skepticism that New Caledonia, after all a department of

France, could be discussed under the rubric of ‘‘French colonialism’’ encouraged me to sharpen my published analysis. Susan Suleiman also proposed good things to think about. I appreciated the informed comments of Lydie Moudileno, specialist in francophone literature. Both the Maryland and the Pennsylvania encounters posed questions which in the end helped me do, I hope, a better study. Aldona Jonaitis improved the preface and introduction as well as, in my last chapter, guiding me with her expertise about how to talk about displaying the arts of conquered cultures. Finally, while we are on the North American continent, let me thank Serge Guilbaut for allowing me to present, at the conference organized in the fall of 2001 under his aegis at the University of British Columbia, my chapter on the former colonial administrators hired to work in the Malraux cultural ministry. I come now to the provinces of France. When I traveled to research the movement of Larzac in Millau in the fall of 2001, I was received most warmly and helpfully by Madame Michelle Vincent, directrice of the splendid local library and of the Larzac movement archives. For many years she had been a Larzac activist; her sophisticated local knowledge helped a lot. M. Jacques Frayssenge, head of the municipal archives, made rich materials available to me from his jewel of a research center. Alain Desjardins was a fount of information about the movement in which he too was active for many years as one of the main persons in the Paris Larzac support group. He is still deeply involved in the successor, l’Après Larzac. Other than traveling around the world to advise peasant and ecological movements, he acts as a welcoming host at the Gîte La Salveta, which had once been a farm bought by the army for its base expansion and then was taken over by squatters during the struggle. After trying for years to be a good sport and quietly eat what I think of as ‘‘movement food,’’ it was a delight to dine at the long table next to the walk-in fireplace on good, simply made local dishes with sympa companions. This is the best place to thank Alexander Alland Jr. of Columbia University and Sonia Alland, his co-worker—brilliant participant-observers and authors of valuable studies on the struggles in Larzac. They have a home near the plateau. I am much appreciative of the introductions, tips, and interviews they arranged for me. Their archive of photographs of the movement, both those taken by Mr. Alland and those loaned from the movement newspaper gll, enrich the first chapter of this book. The guidance and friendship that I found in Paris were very impor220

Acknowledgments

tant to me. The rich half-year in 2002 that I spent as a fellow of the Columbia University Institute for Scholars allowed me to complete the research for this book and write most of the first draft. The sta√, now my friends, provided working conditions and a welcoming atmosphere that were very special. I will forever cherish the memory of marching on May Day 2002 against Le Pen with our cuis group just behind the Green Party elected o≈cials of the Paris regions. In particular, I appreciated the warmth, the skills, and the friendship of Mihaela Bacou. The organizational and scholarly work of the executive director, Danielle Haase-Dubosc, was important for me. I cannot imagine a better pairing of Danielle and the missions of Reid Hall. Meenisha Lal and Brunhilde Biebuyck were always thoughtful and helpful. I appreciated getting to know and playing with Phyllis Birnbaum, Steve Ungar, and Collin Jones. I thank Nélia Dias of the iscte for the conversations in Paris on the anthropological issues of my book, and for inviting me to speak at her home institution in Lisbon. At the Ministère de la Culture et Communication I thank the archivist, Lise Treullé, as well as Alain Morel, head of research, both in the ministry’s Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique. At the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie et d’Histoire de l’Institution de la Culture (unr 2558) both Daniel Farbre, its head, and Annick Anaud, his assistant, graciously helped me with sources. Gérard Noiriel and Christophe Prochasson invited me in 2000 to be a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (ehess). The next year, during my longer stay in France, I was gratified to be voted Chercheur Associé by the members of the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the ehess. My friend Patrick Fridenson, of the same history department, was helpful as usual in many ways, this time especially on the histories of the radical students who went down to join the struggle on the Larzac. Christian Baudelot, Florence Weber, Benoît de l’Estoile, and Eric Fassin o√ered me the hospitality of the sociology group at the École Normale Supérieure. I thank Gisèle Sapiro for her friendship, and for the invitation from her and her colleagues of the Laboratoire de Sociologie Européenne, to present material from my third chapter, about Pierre Bourdieu’s important achievement of removing the invidious theoretical distinction between a discipline to study ‘‘indigènes’’ (ethnology) and another to study Europeans (sociology) at their Commemorative Conference in Bourdieu’s honor, January 2003. My friend Anne-Marie Thiesse Acknowledgments

221

(cnrs) o√ered me her masterful guidance on questions of regionalism, but also I am beholden to Anne-Marie and her husband Michel for their gracious hospitality at their splendid table. Finally, Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, Eric Deroo, and Gilles Boëtsch and the other active members of the Association Connaissance de l’Histoire d’Afrique Contemporaine, the achac, have created a remarkable scholarly and journalistic project to confront their compatriots with their racialist and colonialist heritages. Connecting to their work was immensely valuable, and at the same time, delightful, for me. My friends in Paris, Bernard and Marcia Scholl, Jim Greene, and Nicole Gaüzère continued to nurture me in many important ways. Finally, bringing it back home, let me conclude with a special thanks to Barbara Weinstein for inviting me publish in the new Duke University Press series that she directs with Danny Walkowitz. Valerie Millholland and Miriam Angress, of Duke University Press, have been splendid interlocutors, negotiators, and editors.

222

Acknowledgments

INDEX

Académie des Inscriptions, 87 Africa, 27–28, 81, 114, 120, 126, 128, 133, 135, 182 Air France, 54 Albigensian Crusade, 99 Algeria, 69, 73, 97, 104, 120; immigration from, 18, 173, 186; archaeology of, 86–88; in World Cup, 140–42 Algerian War, 30, 60, 103, 133–34, 184 Alland, Alexander, 34, 35 Allègre, Claude, 148 Alsace, 14, 20, 100, 101, 106, 183 Althabe, Gérard, 209 n. 8 Althusser, Louis, 21 American Indian Movement, 38, 40 American University, 102 Anders, Armelle, 65 Annales school, 107 Année du Patrimoine (Year of the Heritage), 8, 55, 83, 107–14, 116, 185. See also patrimoine anthropology, 81, 84, 85, 88–91, 107, 127, 159, 170. See also ethnology antinuclear movement, 38, 184–85 Après Larzac, 186 archaeology, 86–87, 90, 91 Argentina, 103 arms trade, 28–29, 93 Assemblée Nationale, 118 Association bourguignonne culturelle, 70 Association Française des Anthropologues, 127 Association pour la Presérvation et l’Étude du Patrimoine du Bassin de Longwy, 121

Association pour la Vérité sur le Larzac, 32–33 Auerbach, Eric, 79 Aussaresses, Paul, 134 Autin, Jean, 67–68, 72, 73 Auvergne, 13, 93, 101, 119 Aveyron (département), 35, 87 Badinter, Elisabeth, 131 Balsan, Louis, 85 Balzac, Honoré de, 64 Barr, Alfred, 212 n. 4 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 69 Barre, Raymond, 84 Basque region, 17, 42 Bastille Opera, 78 Baudelaire, Charles, 182 Baudrillard, Jean, 116 Bell, Daniel, 216 n. 2 Benhabib, Seyla, 217 n. 9 Bensa, Alban, 161 Benzaïd, Redjem, 92, 107 Bernard, Philippe, 171–72 Beurs, 140, 142, 187 Biasini, Émile, 60–61, 64, 66–71, 73, 74, 75–77, 79, 81, 82, 180, 181, 185 Bibliothèque Nationale, 77–78 Blandin, Patrick, 169–70 Bloch, Ernst, 4, 56 Bloch, Marc, 107 Boas, Franz, 214 n. 26 Bolivia, 103 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 78, 176 Bouchet, P., 50 Boulay, Roger, 79–80 Boulez, Pierre, 75, 172

Bourdieu, Pierre, 57, 77, 176, 192–93 n. 6, 204 n. 3, 217 n. 5 Bourguignon, François, 107–9 Bové, José, xiv, 1, 2–3, 15, 37, 45, 48, 49, 188 Brajot, Guy, 72, 76 Braudel, Fernand, 185 Brazil, 103, 136, 137 Bredin, Jean-Denis, 131 Brittany, 8, 14, 17, 20, 42, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106, 182, 183, 184–85, 186 Bu√et, Marie-Georges, 140, 141 Bugeaud, Governor General, 86, 87 Burguière, Pierre, 44 Burgundy, 101 Calvados region, 109 camelot, Project, 102, 103 Cameroon, 66, 73 Canada, 102, 161 Canadian National Museum of Man, 165–66 Canard Enchaîné, Le (newspaper), 50, 51 Carbuccia, Jean-Luc, 86–87 Carcassonne, 110 Cardinal, Douglas, 166 Cartoucherie de Vincennes, 51 Cassin, Jean, 152 Cassirer, Ernst, 11, 192–93 n. 6 Catholics, 18, 23, 24, 31, 56 Cayenne, 74 Center region, 101, 119 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (cnrs), 43, 100, 127, 149, 150, 154, 168, 171 Centre Pompidou, 78, 110, 111, 151, 152, 203 n. 39 Césaire, Aimé, 26 cfdt, 24, 51 Chaban-Delmas, Jacques, 25 Chad, 60, 61, 66, 73, 76

224

Index

Chaillot, Palais de, 171 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 194 n. 6 Chalon sur Marne, 108 Champagne-Ardennes, 108, 119 Chants et Danses de France, 70 Chesneaux, Jean, 19, 49 Chevènement, Jean-Pierre, 4, 5, 126, 132, 172, 173, 179, 187 Chile, 103 China, 22, 24–25 Chirac, Jacques: multicultural proposals of, 9, 144, 145, 147–49, 151, 155, 171, 172, 173, 174; as Giscard’s prime minister, 84, 89, 90, 91, 114; as Gaullist, 180 Chiva, Isac, 8, 91–92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 106, 107, 119, 127, 128, 171, 185 Christian socialism, 35 Cinémathèque, 94 Cité de la Musique, 78 Clash of Civilizations, The (Huntington), 177 Clemenceau, Georges, 9 Cli√ord, James, 191 n. 3 Club de l’Horloge, 132 cnrs (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), 43, 100, 127, 149, 150, 154, 168, 171 Colardelle, Michel, 164–67 Collège de France, 91, 92, 119 Colombani, Ambroise, 63 Colombani, Olivier, 63 Colombel, J., 49 Colombia, 102, 103 Comédie Française, 69 Comité Millavois de Défense du Larzac, 33 communism, 22 Communist Party, 23, 26, 31, 33, 122, 173, 184 Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité (crs), 141, 184

Confédération Générale du Travail (cgt), 68 Confédération Musicale de France, 70 Confédération Paysanne, 186, 192 n. 2 Congrès Européen des Loisirs, 70 Conseil des Cultures et des Langues Régionales, 124 Conseil du Patrimoine Ethnologique, 106, 124, 210 n. 17 Conseil Supérieur de la Recherche Archéologique, 128 Cooper, Fred, 191 n. 3 Corcoran Gallery, 151 Corsica, 8, 42, 63, 99, 101, 106, 128, 129, 172, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189 Côte d’Azur, 101 crs (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité), 141, 184 Cuba, 103 Cultural Revolution, 22, 25 Dahomey, 73, 76 Debré, Michel, xiv, 25–29, 32, 35, 38, 41–42, 56, 69, 88, 132–33, 177, 181, 183, 189, 196 nn. 24–25 decentralization, 8, 69 de Certeau, Michel, 116, 117 Défense, La, 78 de Gaulle, Charles, 68, 70; provincialism reined in by, 20; retirement from politics of, 21, 25, 72, 183; military career of, 42; cultural ministry created by, 58; presidency assumed by, 60; Soustelle appointed by, 88; Lévi-Strauss and, 92, republicanism saved by, 179–80; constitutional changes engineered by, 189 de la Bollardière, S., 50 de la Malène, Christian, 45 Delamare, Adolphe Edwige Alphonse, 86–87 Delarozière, Roger, 73

Delavignette, Robert, 62–63, 64, 65, 81, 196–97 n. 26 de Meuron, Charles Daniel, 159 Départements et Territoires d’OutreMer (dom-tom), 10, 174 Derrida, Jacques, 211 n. 19 Désir, Harlem, 8 Des moutons, pas de Dragon (play), 52– 53 Désveaux, Emmanuel, 157, 161, 162, 163 de Varine, Hugues, 94, 96 Diori, Amani, 63–64 Dominican Republic, 103 dom-tom (Départements et Territoires d’Outre-Mer), 10, 174 Dondin-Payre, Monique, 87 Douai, Jacques, 70 Doucet, Jacques, 212 n. 4 Dressen, Marnix, 23, 57 Dreyfus a√air, 135 droit du sang, 204 n. 8 Éboué, Félix, 60, 63, 200 n. 7 École de Paris, 152 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 107 École Nationale d’Administration (ena), 71, 155, 181, 201–2 n. 25, 202 n. 26 École Nationale (Coloniale) de la France d’Outre-Mer (enfom), 61– 62, 65, 200 n. 7, 202 n. 26 École Polytechnique, 51 Egypt, 103 Eisenhower, Dwight, 68 Elgin, Thomas Bruce, 7th earl of, 108 Ellul, Jacques, 2, 84 El Salvador, 103 Émile (Rousseau), 64 ena (École Nationale d’Administration), 71, 155, 181, 201–2 n. 25, 202 n. 26

Index

225

enfom (École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer), 61–62, 65, 200 n. 7, 202 n. 26 environmentalism, 18, 20, 184 Escande, Maurice, 69 Espace 89, 131 Établis, 23–24, 183, 184 ethnology, 83–114, 123–24, 128, 152, 153, 159–60, 170, 185. See also archaeology Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 206 n. 24 Exhibiting Contradiction (Wallach), 158

Front de la Libération Algérienne (fln), 18, 30, 60, 69, 134 Front de la Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, 15 Front National (fn), 9, 118, 132, 133–36, 187 Front National de Libération de la Corse (flnc), 18 Front Populaire, 93, 95, 120, 124, 152, 153 Fumaroli, Marc, 59, 72 Furet, François, 106–7

Fanton, André, 29 Félibrige, 193 n. 3 Ferry, Jules, 136 fic (Fonds d’Intervention Culturelle), 95 Fifth Republic, 58, 60, 134, 139, 179–80 Figaro, Le (newspaper), 77 Filidori, Matthieu, 18 Finkelkraut, Alain, 131 Fleurs du Mal, Les (Baudelaire), 182 Fleury (Lévy), Elizabeth, 123, 208 n. 28, 210 n. 10 fln (Front de la Libération Algérienne), 18, 30, 60, 69, 134 flnc (Front National de Libération de la Corse), 18 fn (Front National), 9, 118, 132, 133–36, 187 Fonds d’Intervention Culturelle (fic), 95 Fortes, Meyer, 206 n. 24 Foucault, Michel, 21, 183 France Télécom, 48 Franche-Comté, 101, 106 Franco, Francisco, 30 Frei Montalva, Eduardo, 103 French Canadians, 102 Friedmann, Jacques, 149 From Africa to the Louvre (Biasini), 82

Gandhianism, 36, 56 Gardarem lo Larzac (newspaper), 44, 50–51, 52, 54, 193 n. 2 Gastal, Robert, 37–38 Gauguin, Paul, 182 Geertz, Cli√ord, 85 Gehry, Frank, 167 ‘‘Génération flnc,’’ 18 Genet, Jean, 82 Gerome, Noëlle, 110 gfa (Groupement Foncier Agricole), 51 Ghana, 96 Giacomoni, Félix, 66, 73 Giordan, Henri, 124–26, 129, 132 Girard, Augustin, 209 n. 2 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry: Year of the Heritage proclaimed by, 8, 83–84, 90–91, 107; electoral victory of, 42; as finance minister, 61; paternalism of, 88–89; Chiva commission backed by, 92, 106, 127; Larzac campaign and, 93, 101; growing discontent with, 114; regionalism opposed by, 185, 189 globalization, xii, 3, 7, 19, 180 Glucksmann, André, 50 Godelier, Maurice, 126, 127, 148, 149, 154, 155, 157, 161, 163, 171, 174, 176

226

Index

Gramsci, Antonio, 21, 22, 105 Grandremey, Alain, 50 Grands Travaux, 76–78, 82 Gravier, Jean-François, 69 Greece, 103 Greenblatt, Stephen, 78 Green Party, 188 Grolleau, G., 43 Groupement Foncier Agricole (gfa), 51 Guadeloupe, 18, 74, 185 Guatemala, 103 ‘‘Guerilla ethnology’’ (Ethnologie sauvage), 7–8, 83–114, 127 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 167 Guilbaut, Serge, 151 Guillaume, Marc, 116–18, 129 Guillobez, D., 52 Guinée, 20, 60, 76 Guizot, François, 86 Guyana, 63, 174 Habermas, Jürgen, xii, 116, 117, 118 Hainard, Jacques, 159, 160 Harkis, 173 History Workshop, 121 Hobsbawm, Eric, 99 Holocaust Museum, 177 Holohan, Wanda, 56 Homme du Niger, L’ (film), 65 Honegger, Arthur, 70 Horowitz, Irving Louis, 104 Huntington, Samuel, 11, 177 Indochina, 59–60, 104, 133, 182 Indonesia, 103 Institut du Monde Arabe, 92 Institut français de recherche scientifique pour le développement en coopération (orstom), 127 Inventaire Générale des Monuments et Richesses de la France, 73, 84

Iran, 103 ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), 172 Irish Republican Army (ira), 38 Izard, Michel, 126–27 Jacobinism, 132, 135, 179 Jacquet, Aimé, 139 Jameson, Fredric, 158 Jardin des Plantes, 170 Jaurès, Jean, 82 Jeannot, B., 95–96 Jews, 23, 173 John XXIII, Pope, 35 Jospin, Lionel, 140, 141, 142, 171–72 Kanak nationalism, 15, 40, 51, 185, 188 Kennedy, John, 102 Kerchache, Jacques, 144, 145–48, 154, 162 Khrushchev, Nikita, 68 Korea, 103 Kuisel, Richard, 6 labor unions, 24 La Cavalarie, 29, 30, 36 Ladurie, LeRoy Emmanuel, 206 n. 25, 209 n. 8 Lafont, Robert, xiii, 17, 42 Landowski, Marcel, 75 Lang, Jack, 72, 76, 119, 122, 124–25, 126, 128, 132, 187 Langlois, Henri, 94 Lanza del Vasto, 36, 57 Larzac: Roquefort produced in, 1, 31, 183; military base proposed for, 8, 13, 21, 29–34, 99, 115, 186 Laur, Pierre, 34–35 Lecat, Jean-Philippe, 91, 92, 107 Le Corbusier, 61 Leiris, Michel, 66, 152 Lemaire, Gilles, 188

Index

227

Lenin, Vladimir, 50 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 4–5, 34, 118, 179, 187; political responses to, 8–9; oratorical skills of, 132, 135; background of, 133–34; internal challenge to, 136; World Cup and, 137, 139 Le Penism, 33 Lequin, Yves, 120 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 8, 85, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 119, 157, 185 Lévy (Fleury), Elizabeth, 123, 208 n. 28, 210 n. 10 Liauzu, Claude, xiii Libération (newspaper), 77 Lieux de mémoire, Les (Nora), 6–7 Ligot, Jack, 92 Limousin, 101, 119 Lipietz, Alain, 188 lip watch factory, 24, 39, 120 Lisette, Gabriel, 60 Loire valley, 101, 119 Longwy basin, 120–23, 186 Lorraine, 100, 101, 119, 120 Louis XIV, 76, 113 Louvre, Musée du, 7, 73, 108, 111, 149, 158, 175–76; multicultural currents at, 10, 144–47, 154, 174; renovation and expansion of, 77; origins of, 152, 176 Love of Art, The (Bourdieu), 175 maao (Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie), 10, 79, 144, 148, 173, 175 Macmillan, Harold, 68 Madagascar, 20, 120 Maillé, Léon, 50, 51 Maisons de la Culture, 73–75, 81, 125 Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 127, 185 Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme (Aix-en-Provence), 168

228

Index

Malaysia, 103 Mallet, Serge, 17 Malraux, André, 72, 163, 172, 173, 185; provincialism reined in by, 20, 69, 183; cultural a√airs ministry created by, 58–61, 67, 68, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 125, 180, 181, 182; cultural inventory launched by, 73, 84; democratizing culture as goal of, 81, 124 Manche region, 109 Maoists, 33–34 Mao Zedong, 18, 22, 24–25 Marchais, Georges, 23 Maritime Alps, 101 Marne region, 108, 109 Marquesas, 182 Marseilles museum of popular culture, 164–69, 172, 176–77, 188 Marti, Claude, 37 Martin, Stéphane, 145, 149, 151, 153, 155, 169, 175–76 Martinique, 18, 26, 63, 74, 174, 182, 185 Marx, Karl, 21 Massu, General, 134 matp (Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires), 10, 92, 93, 95, 144, 149, 153, 164–65, 168, 205–6 n. 17 McDonald’s, xiv, 1–3 mdh (Musée de l’Homme), 10, 65, 144, 148, 149, 152, 154–55, 156, 163, 164, 168, 169–71, 175 Médecin de campagne, Le (Balzac), 64 Mégret, Bruno, 9, 136 Mendès-France, Pierre, 88 Mény, Yves, 199 n. 48 Messmer, Pierre, 42, 59, 198–99 n. 46 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 108, 147 Mexico, 103 Michelet, Jules, 65 Midi region, 100, 101, 106, 119, 135, 182 Millau, 31, 32, 35, 93, 184 mission civilisatrice, 35–36, 67, 82

Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique, 119, 120, 123, 127, 205–6 n. 17 Mistral, Frédéric, 33 Mitterrand, François, 42, 43, 55, 151; electoral victory of, 8, 114, 115, 134, 186; Grands Travaux and, 76–78; Larzac cause espoused by, 115, 128, 184, 186; proportional representation backed by, 118, 135; reelection of, 135 modernism, 158, 164, 182 Moinot, Pierre, 69 Mollet, Guy, 133, 184 Monde, Le (newspaper), 77 Monier, Alice, 48 Montpellier, 36; University of, 15, 17 Morel, Alain, 204–5 n. 9 Morocco, 173 Mullender, Jacques, 73 Musée de Cluny, 108 Musée de la Marine, 155 Musée de l’Art Moderne, 152 Musée de l’Homme (mdh), 10, 65, 144, 148, 149, 152, 154–55, 156, 163, 164, 168, 169–71, 175 Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (maao), 10, 79, 144, 148, 173, 175 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 110 Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, 110 Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, 10, 164–69 Musée d’Ethnologie (Neuchâtel), 159– 60 Musée d’Orsay, 149 Musée du Quai Branly, 10, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150–51, 153–58, 161–63, 168, 171, 173, 174, 175 Musée Guimet, 144, 157 Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (matp), 10, 92, 93, 95, 144, 149, 153, 164–65, 168, 205–6 n. 17

Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, 170 Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), 147 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 151, 212 n. 4, 212–13 n. 12 Museum of Primitive Art (New York), 147, 212–13 n. 12 music policy, 75 Muslims, 173 Myers, Fred R., 143 neoliberalism, 180 New Caledonia: independence movement in, 15–16, 20, 186; mineral resources in, 16, 185; cultural institutions in, 74, 78, 79–80 Niger, 63, 73 Nigeria, 103 Nkrumah, Kwame, 96 Noiriel, Gérard, 120, 122, 123, 186 nonviolence, 56 Nora, Pierre, 6–7 Normandy, 98, 101, 109 North Africa, 27–28, 114, 126, 128, 129, 135, 177 Nouvel, Jean, 149, 150, 163 Occitania, 8, 17, 20, 42, 88, 183 Odéon, Théâtre de l’, 69 Opéra de Paris, 68–69, 73 Operation task, 102 Orne region, 109 Orsoni, Alain, 18 orstom (Institut français de recherche scientifique pour le développement en coopération), 127 Orwell, George, 64 Osorio, Alejandra, 194 n. 7 Ouvéa massacre, 16 Palais de Chaillot, 171 Palais de Porte-Doré, 174

Index

229

Paraguay, 103 Paris Colonial Exposition (1931), 152, 153 Paris et le désert français (Gravier), 69 Parti Communiste Français (pcf), 23, 26, 31, 33, 122, 173, 184 Parti Socialiste Unifié (psu), 34, 35, 184 patrimoine, xi, 3, 73; exclusive vs. inclusive, 6; museums’ role in, 9–10; in late 1970s, 83–85; industrial, 95– 96, 120, 186. See also Year of the Heritage Pavillon des Sessions, 145, 147, 162 Peasants of Larzac, 13, 17, 27, 35, 38, 43, 49, 51, 55, 85, 93, 101, 184, 186 Péguy, Charles, 9 Pei, I. M., 77 Perrault, Dominique, 77–78 Peru, 102, 103 Pétain, Henri Philippe, 60 Phillips, Ruth, 146–47 Piano, Renzo, 78 Piault, Henri, 127 Picardie, 119 Picasso, Pablo, 146, 182, 212 n. 4 Picon, Gaëton, 67 pluralism, 117, 118, 129, 132 Poitou-Charentes, 101 Pompidou, Georges, 19, 25, 42, 75, 151 Popular Front, 93, 95, 120, 124, 152, 153 Porhel, Vincent, 194–95 n. 9 Porte-Doré, Palais de, 174 postcolonial regionalism, 20 Poujade, Pierre, 133 Pressouyre, Léon, 107, 108 Pretoteau, Maurice, 107–8 Price, Sally, 152 Principle of Hope (Bloch), 56 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 22 Project camelot, 102, 103 Project revolt, 102 Project simpático, 102

230

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proportional representation, 118, 135 Protestants, 23, 31, 173 Provençal language, 50 Provence, 106 provinces, 7 psu (Parti Socialiste Unifié), 34, 35, 184 Puisieux, L., 50 Pur Porc, 37–43 Pyrenees, 101 Quotidien de Paris, Le (newspaper), 112 Ra√arin, Pierre, 189 Ranger, Terence, 99 Ratton, Charles, 145 Rauch, Marie-Ange, 71 regionalism, 7, 8, 14, 20, 42–43 religious education, 23 Renault, 21 republicanism, 5 Réunion, 18, 25–27, 74, 174 revolt, Project, 102 Rhone valley, 101, 106 Rigaud, Jacques, 92 Rimbaud, Arthur, 66 Rivers, Pitt, General, 159 Rivet, Paul, 65, 152, 170 Rivière, Georges-Henri, 93, 94–95, 98, 153, 164, 205–6 n. 17 Rocard, Michel, 16, 134, 184, 186 Rockefeller, Nelson, 147 Rodez, 8, 36, 93, 101 Roquefort, 1, 31, 83 Rosenberg, Pierre, 145, 147 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 64, 65 Roux, François, 192 n. 1, 194 n. 4 Royal, Ségolène, 189 Said, Edward, 191 n. 3 Saint Remi, Abbaye, 108 Sandrey, Robert, 68 Sanguinetti, A., 49

Sarkozy, Nicolas, 173 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 51, 52 scouting, 23 Second Vatican Council, 35 Seducing the French (Kuisel), 6 Segalen, Martine, 110 seita (Service d’Exploitation Industrielle des Tabacs), 112 Selliers, Michel-François, 72 Sénégal, 20, 155, 186 Sétif massacre (1954), 18 Seyrig, Henri, 89 Shakespeare, William, 78 ‘‘Shooting an Elephant’’ (Orwell), 64 Simeoni, Robert, 18 Simonet, Claude, 141 simpático, Project, 102 Simpson, Moira, 214 n. 29 soccer, 9, 136–42, 187 Socialist Party, 31, 55, 71, 72, 114, 115, 118, 125, 126, 134, 172, 173, 186, 187 soro (Special Operations Research O≈ce), 102–3 sos Racisme, 8, 163 Soustelle, Jacques, 8, 87–91, 92, 97, 126, 128, 185 Soviet Union, 24, 28, 104 Spanish Civil War, 58 Special Operations Research O≈ce (soro), 102–3 Spivak, Gayatri, 191 n. 3 squatting, 48 Stoler, Ann, 191 n. 3 Structures Élémentaires de la parenté, Les (Lévi-Strauss), 119 student uprising (1968), 20, 21, 25, 75, 181 sugar refining, 26 Surrealism, 182 Taguie√, Pierre-André, 131–32, 211 n. 19 Tahiti, 182

Tasca, Catherine, 172 task, Operation, 102 Tazdaït, Djida, 142 Teatra de la Carrièra, 33 Thailand, 103 theater policy, 125–26 Terlier, Marizette, 199 n. 53 Théâtre du Soleil, 51 Théâtre National Populaire (tnp), 69 Thiesse, Anne-Marie, 208 n. 36 Thompson, E. P. 56, 101 Tjibaou, Jean-Marie, 15, 16–17, 194 n. 5 Tjibaou, Marie-Claude, 79 tnp (Théâtre National Populaire), 69 Touré, Sékou, 60 Trautman, Catherine, 148, 172 True France (Lebovics), 158 Tunisia, 173 Turkey, 103 udr (Union pour la Défense de la République), 29, 30, 32 Union for the Presidential Majority, 180 Union of Artists (Confédération Générale du Travail; CGT), 68 unions, 24 United Front, 115 U.S. Army, 102–3 Vadrot, Claude, 50 Venezuela, 103 Verbunt, Gilles, 129–31 Vergès, Françoise, 195 n. 11, 196 n. 22 Versailles, Chateau of, 76, 110, 113, 184 Vézelay, Cathedral of, 110 Viatte, Germain, 148, 149, 155, 162–63, 173 Vichy government, 14, 74 Vidal-Nacquet, Pierre, 134 Vilar, Jean, 69 Vincent, Julien, 107

Index

231

Vincent, Michelle, 197 n. 37 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 109–10 Wallach, Alan, 158, 213–14 n. 25 Weber, Max, 23 Weil, Patrick, 142, 171–72 What Is to Be Done? (Lenin), 50 Whitney Museum of American Art, 151 World Cup, 9, 136–42, 187

Year of the Heritage (Année du Patrimoine), 8, 55, 83, 107–14, 116, 185. See also patrimoine Yeiwéné, Yeiwéné, 194 n. 5 Zidane (soccer player), 137, 140, 142

Herman Lebovics is a professor of history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lebovics, Herman. Bringing the Empire back home : France in the global age / by Herman Lebovics. p. cm. — (Radical perspectives : a radical history review book series) Includes index.  0-8223-3260-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Regionalism—France. 2. Radicalism—France. 3. Globalization—Economic aspects—France. 4. France—Colonies—History. 5. Postcolonialism—France. I. Title. II. Radical perspectives. 2610.442 2004 306’.0944—dc22 2003025001

232

Index