Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France 9781789620665, 9781789624762

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POSTCOLONIAL REALMS OF MEMORY SITES AND SYMBOLS IN MODERN FRANCE

EDITED BY

Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick and Lydie Moudileno This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 10 Jan 2021 00:07:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 53 Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod, Locating Guyane 54 Adrian May, From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987–2017

61 Joshua Armstrong, Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel 62 Thomas Baldwin, Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations

55 Charlotte Hammond, Entangled Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean

63 Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction

56 Julia Waters, The Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging

64 Naïma Hachad, Revisionary Narratives: Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Actst

57 Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque 58 John Patrick Walsh, Migration and Refuge: An Eco-Archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017 59 Ari J.  Blatt and Edward J. Welch, France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture 60 Nicholas Harrison, Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education

65 Emma Wilson, The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin 66 Margaret Atack, Alison S. Fell, Diana Holmes and Imogen Long, What Forms Can Do: French Feminisms and Their Legacies 1975–2015 67 Ruth Cruickshank, Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction

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ET I E N N E AC H I L L E , C H A R L E S FOR S DIC K A N D LY DI E MOU DI L E NO

Postcolonial Realms of Memory Sites and Symbols in Modern France Postcolonial Realms of Memory

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

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First published 2020 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2020 Liverpool University Press The right of Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick and Lydie Moudileno to be identified as the editors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-066-5 cased eISBN 978-178962-476-2

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

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Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Postcolonizing lieux de mémoire 1 Institutions Archives 23 Oana Panaïté L’École républicaine 34 Leon Sachs La Sorbonne Ruth Bush

44

The Clamart Salon T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

55

Literary Prestige Claire Ducournau

63

Territory Regions/Province 73 Kate Marsh Borders 85 Michael Gott Banlieues 101 Hervé Tchumkam

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17 October 1961 Michel Laronde

109

Marseille 119 Kathryn Kleppinger The Mediterranean Kathryn Kleppinger

128

Monuments Fort de Joux Cilas Kemedjio

139

La Case créole 148 Julia Waters Memorials and Museums Robert Aldrich

159

Slavery Memorials Anny-Dominique Curtius

167

The Memorial ACTe Fabienne Viala

186

The Abolition of Slavery Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune

195

Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration Patrick Crowley

204

Displacement/Mobility Le Bagne 217 Charles Forsdick Rivesaltes 227 Susan Ireland Ouvéa 236 Pim Higginson BUMIDOM 244 H. Adlai Murdoch

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Contents

vii

Les Sans-papiers 255 Dominic Thomas Bodies Colonial Exhibitions Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard

269

Les Tirailleurs sénégalais 290 David Murphy Colonial Heroes Berny Sèbe

298

Jeanne Duval Mireille Rosello

307

Women’s Rights Françoise Vergès

314

Words and Images French Language Cécile Van den Avenne

327

Anti-colonialism 334 David Murphy Children’s Literature Philip Dine

343

Post and the Postage Stamp David Scott

351

Colonial Photography Xavier Guégan

360

The Everyday Vine and Wine Jacqueline Dutton

373

Couscous 383 Sylvie Durmelat

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Toys

394 Elizabeth Heath

Bande dessinée 403 Mark McKinney Sport

411 Philip Dine

Index 421

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AcknowledgementsAcknowledgements This volume was edited while Charles Forsdick was AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for ‘Translating Cultures’ (AH/N504476/1). He records his gratitude for this support. The contribution ‘Women’s Rights’ is based on a chapter from the book Le Ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, Racialisation, Féminisme (Albin Michel, 2017). The contribution ‘Children’s Literature’ by Philip Dine is based on his 1997 article ‘The French Colonial Empire in Juvenile Fiction: From Jules Verne to Tintin’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 23.2: 177–203. The original publication offers a fuller and more detailed discussion of the points made in the present publication, for which the permission of Berghahn Books is gratefully acknowledged.

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In Memoriam Kate Marsh, 1974–2019

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Introduction Postcolonializing lieux de mémoire Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick and Lydie Moudileno Introduction

It is high time for Francophone postcolonial studies to address systematically the flaws that have been identified in Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire by numerous critics. While the collection’s omissions and blind spots concerning the French empire have been pointed out sporadically over the past two decades, we now need a more sustained and collective intervention. The need to make visible the invisible thread that links the colonial to French culture is indeed more urgent than ever: a manifesto published in the French magazine Le Point in 2018 shows that a certain class of French intellectuals is still reluctant to entertain a postcolonial understanding of the Republic, accusing, for example, decolonial thinking of being a ‘shameful hijacking of the values of liberty, equality and fraternity on which our democracy is built’ [‘un détournement indigne des valeurs de liberté, d’égalité et de fraternité qui fondent notre démocratie’]. The manifesto focuses primarily on the oftenpolemical discourse of activists linked to groups such as the Indigènes de la République, whose promotion of a radical political project is associated with strategies dubbed increasingly as ‘décolonial’. Some of the text’s signatories have articulated elsewhere prominent critiques of the intellectual project of postcolonialism, but that field of inquiry is not the specific target of the text in Le Point. The manifesto does, however, contend that postcolonial scholars are sympathetic to and have offered platforms to activists presenting themselves as decolonial. Although it is not our intention to blur the boundaries between, on the one hand, forms of political discourse that foreground the unresolved

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legacies of empire and, on the other, the kind of postcolonial work to which the present volume seeks to make a contribution, we contend that both play an integral and often complementary role in the current malaise to which this book responds. In other words, such approaches (and the visceral responses to them) underline the urgency of asserting the central place of the colonial in the making of modern France, and of anchoring it in a collective memory that has often evacuated traces of empire, as if deemed unworthy of remembrance or simply considered marginal. In extreme (yet more and more frequent) cases, as shown in the example above, such a proposition – whether articulated in political or academic terms – can even be labelled anti-republican or ‘un-French’. In spite of continuous resistance by some in the conservative sphere, an increasingly critical postcolonial discourse on French historiography provides momentum for engaging in a project seeking to discern and explore an initial repertoire of realms (lieux) around which cohere traces of colonial memory. At the same time, the approach highlights the inherently dialectical relationship between such memory traces and traditional, firmly instituted and often state-sanctioned national memory. These issues are central to discussions of French identity, or what some would call ‘Frenchness’, especially at a time when the increasing hybridization of France – not least in terms of ethnicity and religious affiliations – raises questions about current understandings of republicanism and how this ideology fits (or does not fit) the sociocultural realities of the early twenty-first century. Among the signatories of the 2018 anti-decolonial manifesto in Le Point mentioned above was the historian and académicien Pierre Nora. His monumental Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92) has been recognized as one of the most influential studies of memory in the late twentieth century in France and internationally, not only by historians but also more widely across the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Les Lieux de mémoire was published in seven volumes over a period of eight years: La République (volume 1), La Nation (volumes 2, 3, 4) and Les France (volumes 5, 6 and 7). This collective endeavour comprised 133 topics accounting for periods ranging from prehistory (with the case of Lascaux) to the present. It has allowed for the elaboration of a ground-breaking paradigm for rethinking the relationship between the nation, territory, history and memory. There is no doubt that both the individual essays in the seven volumes and the conceptual gesture behind Les Lieux de mémoire have fostered new readings of the past as it is represented, remembered and inscribed in the nation’s collective

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Introduction

3

imaginary. Following Nora, lieu de mémoire has become a widely used (some would argue even an overused) critical term over the past two decades. Nora’s project emerged out of the particular French context of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period which the editor himself has characterized as a ‘moment mémoire’ [memory moment]. During this period, the ‘émergence de l’intérêt pour les phénomènes de mémoire’ [emergence of interest in the phenomena of memory] witnessed ‘le retour d’une préoccupation largement partagée sur le “fait national”’ [the return to a widely shared preoccupation with nationhood] (Lavabre, 1994: 480, 481), particularly as the nation prepared for the 1989 bicentennial of the French Revolution that would inaugurate France’s ‘era of commemoration’ (Forsdick, 2009). For Nora, this collective methodological reflection on history and memory takes place at a critical time marked by the ‘acceleration of history’ (1989: 7), a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that the continuity of memory has itself been disrupted. Nora’s now famous claim is that this disruption harks back to the embodiment of memory in certain sites, phenomena or concepts where historical continuity persists. In Pierre Nora’s terms, there are lieux de mémoire, defined as realms ‘where memory crystallizes and secretes itself’ (1989: 7) or sites that ‘anchor, condense and express the exhausted capital of our collective memory’ (1989: 24). These exist because, according to him, there are no longer milieux de mémoire, by which he means real environments guaranteeing the unmediated transmission of memory necessary to the construction of a collective heritage (1989: 7). Consequently, one of the many influential strands in Nora’s work was a conceptual, transhistorical one that established an epistemological shift in the relationship to memory in traditional societies and in modernity. For Nora, there is an increasing tendency towards the externalization of public memory instead of the internalization with which previous periods have been identified. The impact of Nora’s collection at the time of its publication was considerable, and the concept of lieux de mémoire has since gained substantial currency as a term of reference in memory studies, often spreading beyond an academic context to achieve a clear resonance in the media as well as the heritage industry (the Grand Robert de la langue française included the expression in its 1993 edition, and a Petit Futé guide to lieux de mémoire in France was published in 2005, reflecting the growing importance of memory tourism, often in the form of dark tourism, in modern France at the turn of the century). Les Lieux de

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Postcolonial Realms of Memory

mémoire has appeared in numerous translations, including selections of essays published in English: Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman and translated by Arthur Goldhammer for Columbia University Press, and Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire, edited again by Nora himself with the translation overseen by David P. Jordan for Chicago University Press.1 In part facilitated by these translations, Nora’s concept has also achieved clear transnational reach, as it acquired the status of travelling theory − Nora himself has discussed the exportability of the lieu de mémoire (1993) − and has been transposed into a variety of other contexts, Frenchspeaking and other (Kmec, Majerus, Margue and Peporte, 2009). Projects have indeed been developed in different national frames, most notably in Canada (Mathieu and Lacoursière, 1991), Germany (François and Schultze, 2007) and Russia (Nivat, 2007). More striking for the purposes of this volume, however, are the attempts to extend the concept of realms of memory to colonial and postcolonial situations in the global South, following Henri Moniot’s call – in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa – to ‘faire du Nora sous les tropiques’ (1999; see Konaté, 2006; Somé and Simporé, 2014; Alcaraz, 2017). The boundaries of Nora’s theoretical concept have also been tested in several studies focusing on sites of imperial memory (Sengupta and Schulze, 2009; Geppert and Müller, 2015), with others rearticulating the European-nation-centred concept of the lieu de mémoire according to transnational and transcontinental dynamics (Derks, Eickhoff, Ensel and Meens, 2015). Recent initiatives have also led to the elaboration of alternative terms such as noeuds de mémoire (Rothberg, Sanyal and Silverman, 2010), lieux d’oubli (Dumontet, Porra, Kloster and Schüller, 2015) and lieux de traumatisme (Gröning, 2016). As these alternative studies show, sustained criticism has been levelled at Nora’s Lieux de mémoire since its initial publication, despite its continued paradigmatic relevance. Considering the period under scrutiny, it is true that, in the original study, some silences or absences are particularly striking. For instance, while an entry is devoted to ‘Français et étrangers’ (Noiriel, 1992), this focuses primarily on intraEuropean mobility, and the issue of migration and the interplay between immigration and postcolonialism are otherwise largely absent from Nora’s seven volumes, despite the visibility, political urgency and 1 Kritzman and Goldhammer chose the term ‘realms’ to translate ‘lieux’, whereas the Chicago translation preferred to keep the original French expression. We have adopted the former but acknowledge that others prefer ‘sites of memory’.

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Introduction

5

relevance in public debate that these matters acquired throughout the 1980s. The importance granted to issues of immigration in that period was, for instance, reflected in the rise of the extreme-right party the Front National, and in counter-political events such as ‘La Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme’ in 1983. Known colloquially – and, it might be argued, misleadingly – as ‘La Marche des Beurs’, this has since been posited as a lieu de mémoire de l’immigration in its own right (Abdallah, 2004). 2 And yet the growing militancy on the part of civil society in the mid-1980s does not appear to have had a major impact on the conceptual and editorial frame within which Nora’s project evolved, despite this being the immediate context of its production. Nora’s collection relies heavily on realms associated with the Third Republic under which ‘Greater France’ was constructed and also states a clear ambition to represent the heterogeneity and plurality of France’s collective heritage. As a consequence, Les Lieux de mémoire has been attacked for the glaring absence − famously described as ‘nothing short of fantastic’ (Mann, 2005) − of references to empire, colonial legacy or (post) colonial topography. The collection actively accepts the fluidity of the borders of metropolitan France: contributions discuss the acquisition of Corsica in 1768 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian War, but any sustained sense of trans-Oceanic and trans-Mediterranean expansion into colonial empire and the Outre-mer is largely hidden by the methodological nationalism on which the conception of the project depends. Central to Perry Anderson’s well-known critique (in his essay entitled La Pensée tiède) is the recognition of the absence of any traces of colonial memory, seen in Anderson’s terms as ‘objet d’un non-lieu au tribunal de ces souvenirs à l’eau de rose’ [with charges dismissed at the trial of these sentimental memories] (2005: 52). Rejecting Charles-Robert Ageron’s essay on the 1931 Exposition coloniale as a study of ‘babioles exotiques’ [exotic trinkets], for instance, Anderson concludes: ‘Que valent des Lieux de mémoire qui oublient d’inclure Diên Biên Phû?’ [What is the worth of a Lieux de mémoire project that forgets to include Diên Biên Phû?] (2005: 53). Les Lieux de mémoire has therefore become emblematic of a certain French incapacity and/or unwillingness to engage with the inherent and 2 There has been growing attention paid to identifying lieux de mémoire de l’immigration in France (Barou, 2000; Hommes et Migrations, 2004; d’Adler, 2008), including to provincial locations such as the Lorraine region (Boubeker and Galloro, 2016).

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increasingly undeniable imbrication of the colonial in the roman national [national narrative] (Hargreaves, 2005). Since the late 1990s, however, postcolonial studies has increasingly gained institutional ground not only in the English-speaking academia but also in France itself, where fiction, testimonies and a new theoretical body of scholarship have contributed to a formidable expansion of the bibliothèque postcoloniale (Cohen, 2007), which finally emulates its Anglo-Saxon counterpart (Forsdick and Murphy, 2003; Donadey and Murdoch, 2005). Among these contributions is the significant work of ACHAC (Association Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine), whose approach to the investigation of France’s colonial past stands as an explicit counterpoint to Nora’s ‘hexagonal’ focus. In their introduction to La Fracture coloniale (2005), one of the publications that marks the epistemological turn in France characteristic of the new century, Bancel, Blanchard and Lemaire underscore the absence of any colonial dimension in Nora’s project, lamenting the fact that it is systematically ‘minorée, presque oubliée’ [underestimated, almost forgotten] (16–17). These are some of the numerous critiques that have been levelled at Pierre Nora and his Lieux de mémoire for implying not only an exclusively republican and ‘Hexagonal’ conception of history but also a classic, if not narrow, perception of national memory in which ‘the porosity of “Frenchness”, the progressive hybridization of any such notion, its ability to be displaced and transculturated’ are all absent (Forsdick, 2009: 278). More recent articulations of this critique further castigate Nora’s editorial and intellectual decision, interpreting it as an active choice on the part of the editor, all the more paradoxical in the light of the historian’s earlier interest in Algeria. Speaking of ‘colonial aphasia’, Ann Laura Stoler, for instance, tracks back this silencing – ‘neither an oversight nor blindness’ (2016: 161) – to Nora’s training in French republican historiography and also to his first book, Les Français d’Algérie (1961), in which she detects a barely veiled disdain for his eponymous subjects, who are seen to deviate from any benchmark of authentic Frenchness. Building on Stoler’s argument, one may add that Nora’s overtly eurocentric conception of ‘French history’ is actually made clear in a statement in the introduction to the first volume of Les Lieux de mémoire. In this foundational text, which outlines his theory of lieu de memoire − and illustrates his new public posture (Mercer, 2013) − Nora, talking about the colonies, makes the rather conservative statement that ‘independence has swept into history societies newly awakened from their ethnological slumbers by colonial violation’

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Introduction

7

(1989: 7). He reiterates here the well-established Hegelian trope relating to Africa’s perceived ahistoricity and as such strikingly anticipates the rhetoric of Nicolas Sarkozy’s controversial Dakar speech of 2007 (Chrétien, 2008; Gassama, 2008; Konaré, 2008). In addition, Nora’s contention that non-Western societies have a different relationship to the nexus of history and memory – that is, these are ‘groups that until now have possessed reserves of memory but little or no historical capital’ (1989: 7) – excludes them from the logic that underpins the concept of lieu de mémoire. And yet the empire is not completely absent from the volumes’ contributions, and many critics have singled out to make this point the one essay that overtly addresses questions of colonial memory: ‘L’Exposition coloniale de 1931’, by Charles-Robert Ageron. The oft-cited essay now stands as the most notable exception to Nora’s ‘colonial aphasia’. Ironically, though, the author reaches the conclusion that the exhibition has entered the sphere of myth and is no longer really to be seen as a lieu de mémoire in its own right, thus questioning its relevance by virtue of its ephemerality. Still closer scrutiny of the volumes reveals that some entries arguably contain slightly more substantial references to the colonial than they have been credited for. While they do not challenge the criticism laid out above, its diluted presence in the project’s 5,000 pages is certainly worth considering. One could mention ‘L’Hexagone’ by Eugen Weber, which traces the evolution of representations of France in relation to its empire; Hélène Himelfarb’s essay on Versailles, which locates the national campaign for the preservation of the palace in the context of the wars of decolonization in Indochina and Algeria; and Maurice Agulhon, writing about ‘Le centre et la périphérie’ [centre and periphery] and linking the rise of regional sentiment in France with the decline of imperial patriotism in the same period. Other entries make it clear that national memory cannot stand in isolation from its colonial counterpart: in ‘Le front de mer’ [seafront] Michel Mollat du Jourdin discusses the (on occasion) random distribution of material between colonial and naval archives; Marcel Roncayolo’s ‘Le paysage du savant’ [the scholar’s landscape] notes the significant impact of colonial expansionism on French thought; and, offering a specific example of traces of empire in France, Jean-Marie Mayeur’s exploration of the notion of a ‘mémoire-frontière’ [memoryborder] in Alsace reminds readers of the role of Algerian troops in the Battle of Wissembourg in 1870. Nevertheless, what makes Nora’s project so regrettably narrowminded is that many of his chosen entries could have easily teased

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Postcolonial Realms of Memory

out the colonial dimensions of the memory practices they describe. It might indeed be argued that there is no entry in the original collection that would not benefit from scrutiny from a postcolonial perspective. 3 Let us consider a few examples: Antoine Prost’s contribution on war memorials focuses almost exclusively on a French national narrative, failing to explore the complex nature of similar monuments to the same conflicts erected Outre-mer; at the same time, he pays no attention to the presence in France itself of numerous memorials to colonial troops, which are liable to disrupt the coherence in conventional narratives of national memory of the kind taught in French schools. Likewise, the essay on the drapeau tricolore, although written by colonial historian Raoul Girardet, alludes little to the travels of the flag and to the symbolic role it played in numerous colonial contexts. Finally, Mona Ozouf’s analysis of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ also considers the Revolutionary slogan in a national context, yet does not acknowledge the extent to which the Haitian Revolution contributed to and interconnected with its revolutionary equivalent, pushing it to logical limits of universal emancipation arguably unimaginable in France at the time (Dubois, 2000). Given the extent of the lacunae exposed above, it is obvious that there is good reason to seek to postcolonialize the lieu de mémoire. Engaging in such a task obviously involves making editorial choices and raises a number of methodological challenges with regard to the original work we intend to reconsider. First is the distinction between history and memory. Central to our intention is a focus on memory understood not as a primary preoccupation with recovering what actually happened in the past (subsequent accounts of which are liable to vary widely across time and space) but as a term that encompasses diverse forms of representation of that past (whether personal, academic, journalistic, state-sanctioned, polemical or artistic) produced in any medium (written, oral, architectural, audio-visual and so on). In that sense, the subject of the volume and the challenge to which contributors have responded 3 Several essays in this volume are directly based on Nora’s original division, which is also the source of inspiration for many others: if ‘The Hexagon’ does not appear in the table of contents, this realm is omnipresent in the essays making up the section on ‘Territory’. Similarly, the sections on ‘Monuments’ and ‘Institutions’ refer to a certain number of central themes developed in Les Lieux de mémoire. It is therefore possible to maintain the classificatory lexicon of the original collection (including the use for individual contributions of concise thematic titles), whilst opening up Les Lieux de mémoire to a wider global French geography.

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Introduction

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concerns the realm of representation: as stated in the subtitle, our realms encompass the everyday sites and symbols that freight postcolonial memories in France. Some of the lieux discussed in the current volume are understood in the traditional meaning of the term: that is, in connection with a material and spatially defined place. This would be the case of cities, buildings, museums, statues and other material objects. Others, however, as Nora himself proposed, consist of events, figures and other intangible entities that transcend the strictly spatial dimension. Language and discourses would fall into this category. Postcolonial or not, realms are heterogeneous, some more visible than others, and take a variety of forms. Postcolonial realms of memory, as we (re)conceptualize them, are therefore defined here as spatial/functional or immaterial sites, potentially subject to abstraction and imbued with a symbolic aura that, in the context of the French everyday, refers to more or less tangible memory traces linked to the colonial. The second challenge was the question of the actual territory to be investigated. Should priority continue to be given to the space covered by Nora – that is, a ‘Hexagonal’ France – in order to more forcefully assert its postcoloniality? Or is it indispensable to engage, directly or contrapuntally, with realms located in the former colonial empire? Between the two, the need to revisit Nora’s original conception of France imposed itself as the more indispensable. As we saw, Nora was primarily interested in finding and consolidating French continuities in their ‘Hexagonal’ manifestations. By contrast and in response to it, our project calls for an investigation of national culture that would consider the territory of the Republic in its broadest geopolitical sense: limiting postcolonial France solely to its hexagonal contours would only reproduce another form of the denial that permeates Les Lieux de mémoire. Consequently, we understand modern France in the inclusive constitutional sense as encompassing both the Hexagon and its overseas departments, regions, collectivities and territories known as the Outre-mer. This approach allows for an exploration of the limits of any shared narratives of remembrance generated by French institutions and memorial legislation (Löytömäki, 2018), while disrupting at the same time any monolithic understandings of the ‘Francosphere’ or wider ‘Francophone world’. In addition, it allows further elaboration of the notion of a ‘contrapuntal’ memory linking France to its overseas departments and territories in the neo-/postcolonial period. Including the Outre-mer in our definition of ‘France’ thus expands our investigation to inquiries that are all the more transcontinental, transcultural and even translingual, while giving us the

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opportunity to engage in comparative studies of postcolonial representations and memorial practices – that is to say, to reterritorialize these practices in a territory seen as differently French, autrement français. Difficult choices also had to be made regarding the selection of entries that would potentially allow us to achieve such objectives. Among the absences from the table of contents that may be considered regrettable, that of ‘Paris’ will certainly be noticed. Going back to the polysemy of the term métropole, which underscores the city’s dual status as both urban geopolitical and imperial/colonial centre where national, transnational and postcolonial cultures coalesce, it is indeed possible to conceive of the capital as the archetypal French postcolonial site of memory. However, although Paris dominates as the hegemonic centre of the Francophone world, it has also been largely reclaimed as one of the crucial poles of the Black Atlantic that has been formed historically, as Paul Gilroy has famously demonstrated (1993), by centuries of encounters, exchanges and cultural production. Following Gilroy, there now exists an important body of scholarship further documenting the centrality of Paris to the transnational and transcultural history of colonization and in particular of Black intellectual history (Stovall, 1996; Jules-Rosette, 1998; Edwards, 2003; Braddock and Eburne, 2013). What emerges from such works is that the postcoloniality of such a ‘Black Paris’ also reveals itself through a set of multiple, or fragmented, realms. La Sorbonne or the Nardal sisters’ literary salon in Clamart (both of which are discussed in detail in this volume) represent such historical realms, referring to an intellectual history that also connects to what Brent Hayes Edwards (2003) called ‘the practice of diaspora’. As a result, much remains to be done within the memorial landscape of the capital city itself, starting with one of its emblematic realms, the Panthéon. It would have been possible to imagine the Panthéon as the metonymic example of a postcolonial realm of memory located in the heart of Paris. In a major contribution to Nora’s collection, Mona Ozouf – another signatory of the Le Point manifesto mentioned above – describes the French Panthéon as one of the key Republic ‘sites of memory’ in the country, a secular shrine that has played a major role in sustaining a sense of continuity in national narratives of republicanism even during those many periods when their coherence was seriously tested. The inclusion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Giovanni Battista Caprara among those interred in the Panthéon during the revolutionary period itself and in its immediate aftermath tellingly reveals the site’s flexibility and its capacity to conscript to French memory practices those born beyond the Republic.

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In her essay on this lieu de mémoire, Mona Ozouf describes the ‘peaceful cohabitation of great figures of the past’ (1997: 156), summarizing such a transcultural solidarity and the accompanying erasure of historical difference that may be seen to underpin the institution. This transnational openness was for a long time limited, however, and, in a 2002 speech marking the transfer of Alexandre Dumas’s remains to the site, then president Jacques Chirac noted the author’s Haitian origins and presented this pantheonization as an acknowledgement of the racism evident in the practices of inclusion and exclusion associated with the location. The progressive yet often ambivalent willingness to acknowledge colonial empire in the symbolic spaces of the Panthéon is strikingly illustrated by the integration of narratives of slavery – and more notably abolition – in the context of the bicentenary of the French Revolution. The culmination of the 1989 celebrations included the pantheonization of the abolitionist Abbé Grégoire, whose remains were transferred alongside those of Monge and Condorcet. What is often ignored, however, is that there were plans to add a fourth figure to this ceremony: in a 1988 interview Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Mission created to oversee the Bicentenary events, associated the Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture with Grégoire, Condorcet and Monge, suggesting that he might act as the fourth ‘emblematic figure’ of the celebrations. In the event, such recognition proved impossible, in part because Louverture’s remains had long been dispersed: buried in a common grave in the Château de Joux (one of the sites explored in this volume) in 1803, they had been disturbed from this resting place in the expansion of the fort in the later nineteenth century (the absence of physical remains is not, in fact, insurmountable: two of the most recent pantheonizations, those of Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de GaulleAnthonioz, involved the transfer of soil from their graves, as the families did not want their remains to be disturbed). Toussaint nevertheless played a key role in the Bicentenary of the French Revolution, as the in many respects more radical implications of the parallel events in Haiti were co-opted to serve other means (Forsdick, 2005). Another focus at this site might have been vault XXVI of the Panthéon, which includes the tombs of three figures each of whom played a key role in the history of modern France (and a fourth plinth, where the remains of Louverture would perhaps have been located had he been pantheonized himself; see Forsdick, 2012). In 1949 the remains of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès were joined by those of the abolitionist

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Postcolonial Realms of Memory

Victor Schœlcher in a ceremony overseen by Gaston Monnerville, the Guianese-born president of the Conseil de la République, to mark the centenary of the abolition of slavery the previous year. At the same time, the ashes of the colonial administrator and Free French leader Félix Eboué – also born in French Guiana – were moved from Marseille to the third plinth in the vault, the first (and for the time being only) Black historical figure to receive such an honour. A similar analysis might be offered of the subsequent inscription to Aimé Césaire, also in proximity to vault XXVI, unveiled by then president Nicolas Sarkozy in April 2011. Sarkozy’s relationship to the Martinican poet and politician was a fraught one, not least because Césaire had – in the context of the controversial 23 February 2005 law, the fourth clause of which stipulated that French educators should teach ‘the positive role of the French presence overseas’ – declined to receive Sarkozy in his office in December 2005. Sarkozy’s championing of this legislation is to be understood in the frame of his outspoken hostility towards ‘colonial repentance’ and his refusal to accept that France itself should be considered ‘postcolonial’. The example of the French Panthéon is therefore a multi-layered one, and closer scrutiny of the site reveals the ways in which – often for calculated political purposes – colonial memory has been permitted entry to this national lieu de mémoire. Evident, however, is close control of any potential disruption of the centralized and centralizing narratives that such inclusion entails. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, studying the postcolonialization of sites of memory is a double-edged process, involving recognition of the colonial dimensions – latent or more overt – evident in such locations and phenomena, but also applying a critical lens that acknowledges the continued practices of stage-management and control associated with their inclusion in official narratives and memory practices. Another potential approach related to Paris would be to account more clearly for its multi-sitedness and for the heterogeneous range of cultures whose presence have shaped the capital. This would entail, for example, acknowledging sites not restricted to the Black diaspora, and better accounting for signs and symbols associated with other colonial histories. For example, the site of the Grande Mosquée de Paris – inaugurated as a memorial to the so-called tirailleurs indigènes killed in 1914–18 and alluded to in the entry below on memorials and museums – stands as a telling trace of these historical presences in the very heart of the capital. Still marginal or even invisible (including to a large extent in

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Introduction

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our study) is French Indochina, despite traces in the Parisian cityscape: one can think here of the commemoration of South-East Asian troops who fought in the First World War (Jennings, 2003) or of the plaque marking Ho Chi Minh’s residence in the 17th arrondissement and his memorial bust in the parc Montreux in Montreuil. Although France’s relationship to China was never more than a semi-colonial one, the 200,000 Chinese workers drafted to support the allies during the First World War are also remembered by a plaque at the Gare de Lyon. There is also no doubt that Francophone Postcolonial Studies would benefit from a more frequent decentralization with regards to the Hexagon itself, which entails remapping France’s postcolonial geography (Moudileno, 2012). Following Dominic Thomas’s consideration of Black France, our own conception of the territory also ‘broadens and decenters the symbolic territory to provincial sites’ (Thomas, 2006: 9–10) in order to highlight the fact that colonial traces can be found throughout the entirety of metropolitan space and not exclusively in its capital. In addition to the Parisian region and major urban centres such as Marseille, Bordeaux, or Nantes, our new geography thus extends to several regional départements and sometimes rural spaces: the Doubs in Eastern France (Fort de Joux); the Creuse in Central France; CharentesMaritimes (île de Ré); Pyrénnées Orientales (Rivesaltes); and the Marne (Reims). We might again have supplemented the list with a number of a villages, from the Vosges to the south-west, in, for example, SainteLivrade-sur Lot, where the so-called ‘Little Vietnam’ bears the memory of a former ‘Camp d’accueil des rapatriés d’Indochine’. Regarding immaterial realms of memory, we also acknowledge that many other symbols could/should have been included. The Marseillaise is, for example, another striking trace of ‘sacrifice’ that had to be made: the national anthem was part of Nora’s repertoire, but evidently without reference to the multiple controversies that emerged around it during the 1990s. The militant gesture of Christian Karembeu, the football player from New Caledonia, who refused to sing the Marseillaise before international games in the late 1990s, was explicitly connected to his family’s experience of colonialism (his grandfather was among the Kanak exhibited in the 1931 ‘human zoos’ at Vincennes [Dauphiné, 2001]). Jean-Marie Le Pen’s comments on the subject prefigured the many more contemporary controversies surrounding sport in relation to questions of identity. If one considers the symbolic function of the Marseillaise in the domain of sports, especially its implications regarding the question of the ‘citizenship’ of players who decide to sing it or not during pre-match

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ceremonies, the Marseillaise must be conceived as a pertinent postcolonial realm of memory. Yet, as is suggested in this collection, sport can itself be considered a site of memory that encompasses the recent controversies connected to the idea of Frenchness while in the meantime opening up a wider array of possibilities going far beyond the current debates. Identifying and analysing the postcolonial realms of memory that bridge the gap between an instituted French memory and traces of a never fully consolidated – and subsequently discarded – colonial memory on the Republic’s soil is the first step of a potentially unlimited project: it necessarily entails choices, and therefore creates its own lacunae. We invite readers in their own identification and visiting of specific sites, in their reading, study and research, to reflect on extending and diversifying the range proposed in this volume. We also acknowledge that the focus in this collection on France and locations in the so-called Outre-mer could be usefully complemented by a parallel and often entangled consideration of lieux de mémoire in the wider Francosphère: it is clear that, as a transnational memorial/memorialized space characterized by colonial and semi-colonial histories and their memorial afterlives, the wider Francophone world deserves a volume of its own.4 Indeed, it is hoped that a future companion volume will extend the geographical reach to encompass realms of memory in France’s former colonies in the Americas (Québec and Haiti), North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Several contributions in this volume already gesture towards this ambition: the discussion on vine and wine inevitably touches upon the establishment of viticulture in Algeria, while the entry on colonial photography also builds on representations of this part of ‘Greater France’; the discussion of the French language considers the linguistic evolution of so-called ‘petit-nègre’ in non-metropolitan contexts, and the contribution on postage stamps also signals the forms of comparison that are possible, with its emphasis on Anglophone and Francophone Africa. 4 Such a development can be envisioned as part of an open-ended and longer-term endeavour taking advantage of the possibilities afforded by the digital humanities (see, for example, Nicola Frith’s ‘Cartographie des mémoires de l’esclavage’ [https://www.mmoe.llc.ed.ac.uk/fr/]; the digital application of the concept of the lieu de mémoire in a broader context is explored in Cunha Matos, Lagae and Lee, 2013).

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Until then, the aims of the current collection are multiple: a disruptive challenge to current nationally focused understandings of sites of memory and a call to integrate colonialism and its afterlives more actively into the practices and study of collective memory, but also an invitation to extend this conversation at the intersection of memory studies and postcolonialism. The urgency of such a project is underlined by more recent publications, patently in the wake of Les Lieux de mémoire, that overtly perpetuate its methodological nationalism: the selection of sites in Olivier Wieviorka’s and Michel Winock’s Les Lieux de l’histoire de France (2017) reflects a similar blind spot regarding the visible and tangible presence of colonialism and its afterlives: the essay in that volume on the Renault factory at Billancourt alludes in its opening paragraph, for instance, to the diversity of the workforce, but then fails to follow through the impact of the flows of North African labour during the Trente Glorieuses; the contribution on Reims makes no mention of the thousands of tirailleurs indigènes who transformed the city during the First World War; Wieviorka’s and Winock’s collection also includes one of the sites on which we focus in this volume, the Sorbonne (in an essay by Pascal Ory, who also contributed to Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire), but it does not tease out the colonial and postcolonial dimensions identified in the current volume. Notwithstanding the historiographic controversies they generated, the essays of Patrick Boucheron’s collection Histoire mondiale de la France (2017) focused on colonial histories and postcolonial legacies have recently suggested that, even in France itself, there is an openness to post-national and transnational approaches to history and memory. There is a persistent risk, however, that such approaches, although moving beyond the national, fail to follow an actively postcolonial logic, evacuating alongside the nation any reference to colonialism and its memorial afterlives. It is in such a context that the contributions in this volume constitute a further interrogation of the lieu de mémoire and suggest how understandings of the concept must evolve to encapsulate the dynamics of memory in theory and in practice. The case of Algeria, as Benjamin Stora has forcefully and on occasion controversially demonstrated, illustrates amply what is at stake. On the one hand, the problematic of multidirectionality (Rothberg, 2009) connects the war of independence to other major twentieth-century world historical events. On the other, the multilayered and often entangled narratives reflect the fragmentation of memorial landscape along community lines, revealing tensions that have been characterized

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as a guerre des mémoires [memory war]. The unresolved legacies of this conflict continue to impact on the fraught relationships between multiple groups often involving their inter-generational complexity: Harkis; pieds-noirs and others affected by repatriation; appelés; and Algerian nationalists and their descendants. At the same time, this situation feeds an often-politicized nostalgia for the colonial past, summed up in the ambivalent term nostalgérie (Hubbell, 2015; Ruscio, 2015). Unlocking the colonial does not for us mean re-rehearsing the potentially interminable and ultimately sterile polemics revolving around reactionary impugnations of repentance. Instead it allows us to redefine more effectively the parameters of urgently required debates about the future of the French Republic. To this end, and as a collective and ongoing intervention, the present volume contributes to mapping the territory, generating the resources and setting the agendas that allow us to prise open France’s multidirectional pasts and mobilize their postcolonial afterlives in a more productive way. Works Cited Abdallah, Mogniss H. 2004. ‘La Marche pour l’égalité, une mémoire à restaurer’. Hommes & Migrations 1247: 99–104. Achille, Etienne, and Lydie Moudileno. 2018. Mythologies postcoloniales: pour une décolonisation du quotidien. Paris: Honoré Champion. d’Adler, Marie-Ange. 2008. Le Cimetière musulman de Bobigny. Lieu de mémoire d’un siècle d’immigration. Paris: Autrement. Alcaraz, Emmanuel. 2017. Les Lieux de mémoire de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne. Paris: Karthala. Anderson, Perry. 2005. La Pensée tiède: un regard critique sur la culture française. Paris: Gallimard. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, eds. 2005. La Fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial. Paris: Autrement. Barou, Jacques. 2000. ‘Lieux de mémoire de l’immigration’. Écarts d’identité Hors-Série: 2–4. Boubeker, Ahmed, and Piero-D. Galloro. 2016. Les non lieux de la mémoire des immigrations en Lorraine. Mémoire et invisibilité sociale. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy. Boucheron, Patrick, ed. 2017. Histoire mondiale de la France. Paris: Seuil. Braddock, Jeremy, and Jonathan P. Eburne, eds. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity and Diaspora. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Chrétien, Jean-Pierre. 2008. L’Afrique de Sarkozy: un déni de l’histoire. Paris: Karthala. Cohen, Jim. 2007. ‘La bibliothèque postcoloniale en pleine expansion’. Mouvements 51, no. 3: 166–70. Cunha Matos, Madalena, Johan Lagae and Rachel Lee. 2013. ‘Digital lieux de mémoire. Connecting history and remembrance through the Internet’. ABE Journal. https://journals.openedition.org/abe/568. Dauphiné, Joël. 2001. Canaques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie à Paris en 1931: de la case au zoo. Paris: L’Harmattan. Derks, Marjet, Martijn Eickhoff, Remeco Ensel and Floris Meens, eds. 2015. What’s Left Behind. The Lieux de Mémoire of Europe and Beyond. Nijmegen: Vantilt. Donadey, Anne, and H. Adlai Murdoch, eds. 2005. Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Dubois, Laurent. 2000. ‘La République métisée: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History’. Cultural Studies 1: 15–34. Dumontet, Danielle, Véronique Porra, Kerstin Kloster and Thorsten Schüller, eds. 2015. Les Lieux d’oubli de la Francophonie. Hildesheim: Olms. Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2003. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forsdick, Charles. 2005. ‘The Black Jacobin in Paris’. Journal of Romance Studies 5, no. 3: 9–24. — 2009. ‘Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Cultures of Commemoration’. In Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World, edited by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, 271–84. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. — 2012. ‘The Panthéon’s empty plinth: commemorating slavery in contemporary France’. Atlantic Studies 9, no. 3: 1–19. Forsdick, Charles, and David Murphy, eds. 2003. Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction. London: Arnold. François, Etienne, and Hagen Schultze, eds. 2007. Mémoires allemandes. Paris: Gallimard. Gassama, Makhily. 2008. L’Afrique répond à Sarkozy: contre le discours de Dakar. Paris: Philippe Rey. Geppert, Dominik, and Frank Lorenz Müller, eds. 2015. Imperial Sites of Memory. Commemorating Colonial Rule in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gröning, Sarah. 2016. ‘Les “Lieux de traumatisme” dans la littéature antillaise contemporaine’. Revue des Sciences Humaines 1: 193–209.

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Hargreaves, Alec G., ed. 2005. Memory, Empire and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Hubbell, Amy L. 2015. Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity and Exile. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Jennings, Eric. 2003. ‘Remembering “Other” Losses: The Temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne’. History and Memory 25, no. 1: 5–48. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1998. Black Paris: The African Writer’s Landscape. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kmec, Sonja, Benoît Majerus, Michel Margue and Pit Peporte, eds. 2009. Dépasser le cadre national des ‘Lieux de mémoire’. Innovations méthodologiques, approches comparatives, lectures transnationales. Brussels: P.I.E; Peter Lang. Konaré, Adame Ba, ed. 2008. Petit précis de remise à niveau sur l’histoire africaine à l’usage du président Sarkozy. Paris: La Découverte. Konaté, Doulaye. 2006. Travail de mémoire et construction nationale au Mali. Paris: L’Harmattan. Lavabre, Marie-Claire. 1994. ‘Usages du passé, usages de la mémoire’. Revue française de science politique 44, no. 3: 480–93. ‘Le “décolonialisme”, une stratégie hégémonique’. 2018. Le Point, 28 November. https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/le-decolonialisme-une-strategiehegemonique-l-appel-de-80-intellectuels-28–11–2018–2275104_20.php. Löytömäki, Stiina. 2018. ‘French Memory Laws and the Ambivalence About the Meaning of Colonialism’. In The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945, edited by Berber Bevernage and Nico Wouters, 87–100. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mann, Gregory. 2005. ‘Locating Colonial Histories: Between France and West Africa’. American Historical Review 110, no. 2: 409–34. Mathieu, Jacques, and Jacques Lacoursière. 1991. Les Mémoires québecoises. Quebec: Presses de l’université de Laval. Mercer, Ben. 2013. ‘The Moral Rearmament of France: Pierre Nora, Memory, and the Crises of Republicanism’. French Politics, Culture and Society 31, no. 2 (Summer): 102–16. Moniot, Henri, 1999. ‘Faire du Nora sous les tropiques’. In Histoire d’Afrique: les enjeux de mémoire, edited by Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Jean-Louis Triaud, 13–26. Paris: Karthala. Moudileno, Lydie. 2012. ‘The postcolonial province’. Francosphères 1, no. 1: 53–68. Nivat, Georges, ed. 2007. Les Sites de la mémoire russe. 3 vols. Paris: Fayard. Noiriel, Gérard. 1992. ‘Français et étrangers’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3 Les France, edited by Pierre Nora, 275–319. Paris: Gallimard. Nora, Pierre. 1961. Les Français d’Algérie. Paris: Julliard. —, ed. 1984–92. Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard.

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— 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’. Representations 26: 7–25. — 1993. ‘La notion de “lieu de mémoire” est-elle exportable?’ In Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales, edited by Pim den Boer and Willem Frijhoff, 3–50. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. — 2001–10 [1984–92]. Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire. Translation directed by David P. Jordan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds. 1996–98 [1984–92]. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. Ozouf, Mona. 1992. ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3 Les France, edited by Pierre Nora, 582–629. Paris: Gallimard. — 1997 [1984]. ‘Le Panthéon: l’école normale des morts’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1 La République, edited by Pierre Nora, 155–78. Paris: Gallimard/Quarto. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, Michael, Debarati Sanyal and Maxim Silverman, eds. 2010. ‘Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture’, Special issue, Yale French Studies, 118–19. Ruscio, Alain. 2015. Nostalgérie: L’interminable histoire de l’OAS. Paris: La Découverte. Sengupta, Indra, and Hagen Schulze, eds. 2009. Memory, History and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts. London: German Historical Institute. Somé, Magloire, and Lassina Simporé. 2014. Lieux de mémoire, patrimoine et histoire en Afrique de l’Ouest: aux origines des ruines de Loropéni, Burkina Faso. Paris: Éditions des Archives contemporaines. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stovall, Tyler. 1996. Paris Noir, African Americans in the City of Light. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Thomas, Dominic. 2006. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. The University of Edinburgh. n.d. ‘Cartographie des mémoires de l’esclavage’. https://www.mmoe.llc.ed.ac.uk/fr. ‘Vers un lieu de mémoire de l’immigration’. 2004. Hommes & Migrations 1247 (January–February). Wieviorka, Olivier, and Michel Winock. 2017. Les Lieux de l’histoire de France. Paris: Perrin.

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Institutions

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Archives Oana Panaïté Archives

The study of archives authored by Krzysztof Pomian in ‘Les France’, the third quarto volume of Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, is one of the entries included in the last major section of the entire project, ‘De l’archive à l’emblème’. The fact that it features in the sub-category ‘Enregistrement’ or ‘recording’ underscores its conceptual and symbolic value for an overall undertaking predicated on the forms of conflict and convergence between memory and history. As Pomian states in the beginning, when he quotes the founding act of France’s modern archives department, the mission of this office, created in 1979, is ‘[d]e gérer ou de contrôler les archives publiques qui constituent la mémoire de la nation et une part essentielle de son patrimoine historique’ [to manage and control public archives that constitute the nation’s memory and an essential part of its historical heritage] (1997 [1992]: 3999). The official decree thus ratifies an inextricable connection between two distinct ways, i.e. memory and history, of relating the past and relating to it. Yet the object itself remains to be defined, beginning with what constitutes an archive and what materials belong in it. Les Lieux de mémoire’s obfuscation of colonialism in French memory and history is confirmed by the ‘Archive’ entry, made even more evident by the hapax: ‘En 1699, sont établies les archives de la Marine, des Colonies et des Galères’ [In 1699, the archives of the Navy, Colonies and Galleys are established] (Pomian, 1997 [1992]: 4051) – a reference that remains woefully undeveloped. I therefore propose to examine two sites – that is, two forms and practices of document conservation and management, along with their public and didactic uses – that define the postcolonial context in France. The first site is represented by former colonial archives whose relocation and renaming reflects public attitudes and

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state policies of obfuscation rather than disclosure of the colonial past. The second site is literature, which constitutes itself, as an intermediate space between memory and history, as a realm of living memory that assumes the responsibility of remembering by fulfilling the three tasks incumbent upon the archival institution: managing public recollections, salvaging private memories, and conserving, selecting, organizing and transmitting the archives for social, political and cultural purposes. Before focusing on literature as artistic creation, I will briefly examine its institutionalization through the practice of literary history insofar as it constitutes, in the post-Lansonian French culture, a nation-building archival genre. Pomian points out the open semantics of the concept of ‘archival documents’ stemming from the erasure of a whole host of limits: temporal (documents can be both old and new); formal (the archive incorporates a range of objects, written or visual, large or small); material (paper items stand alongside a papyrus or a magnetic tape); and even spatial, meaning that a document remains so regardless of the place of its production (1997 [1992]: 4000). This cross-boundary quality is clearly at work in both the concept and the practice of the colonial archive. In Édouard Glissant’s project of recovering ‘what was concealed under the surface’ (1989 [1981]: 74), the tension between the individual and communal memories of the dispossessed (the slave and the colonized) and the official records of ‘a History with a capital H’ (1989 [1981]: 76) is predicated on a similar heterogeneity of temporal lines, formal instances and material manifestations: The summary of a journey, the account of an expedition into the universe of the Americas, this multiple discourse carries the stamp of an oral exposé, thus making a link with one of its most promising agonies. When the oral is confronted with the written, secret accumulated hurts suddenly find expression; the individual finds a way out of the confined circle. (1989: 4)

Furthermore, the postcolonial critique of the archive places the oral tradition at its core, and thus complicates the notion of ‘recording’, expanding its meaning beyond the objective materiality of the media (papyrus or tape) to include the subjective experience of remembering (the living witness). Another methodological distinction introduced in Les Lieux de mémoire is that which separates the document, which belongs to the archive, from the monument, which does not. Drawing this line is

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all the more necessary because the difference between the two is in actuality fuzzy at best: a building or war site can be construed as a document, while a written text can be endowed with monumental value. However, Pomian points out that monuments have an invisible connection to the past while being easily identifiable; made of rare materials, standing out thanks to their majestic bearing, their primary role is to serve as mediators between past and future (1997 [1992]: 4002). Archival materials, on the other hand, manifest a common appearance, grounded as they are in often humble materiality, and only reveal their meaning under close scrutiny and to the keen eye of the specialist or scholar. Moreover, documents are defined by their relational nature, generated as they are by a person’s or group’s activities in an unintentional way (unlike collections, which betray their owner’s will, taste and choices); archives are therefore ‘secreted’ like an organic substance or ‘sedimented’ like geological deposits (Pomian, 1997 [1992]: 4007). These differences are both confirmed and complicated by the colonial and postcolonial contexts. Among the buildings that signal, even to the untrained eye, a potential connection to France’s imperial past, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, inaugurated in 1931 on the occasion of the Exposition coloniale and situated in Paris’s 12th arrondissement, stands out in several ways (see the essay by Patrick Crowley in this volume). First, its eclectic architecture, which combines elements of Art Déco with orientalist (Moroccan and South-Asian) influences, constitutes a testament to the artistic and historical period of its conception. Second, it has undergone multiple changes in name and official status, from Musée colonial (until 1935) to Musée de la France d’outre-mer (until the late 1950s), before becoming an art museum tasked with holding collections from Africa and Oceania and, more recently, being designated in 2007 as Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration and in 2012 as Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration; this ‘sémiophore’, to use Pomian’s terminology, wavers between a visually majestic reminder of France’s dominant place in the world – thus a pure monument – and a repository of documents attesting to France’s long tradition of immigration.1 Government decrees that oversee these changes point to the state’s active role in shifting the emphasis from the symbolic value of the building itself as a symbol of the ‘empire colonial’ to the patrimonial task of preserving and publicizing a trove of documents that showcase France as a ‘pays d’accueil’ [host country]. 1 http://www.palais-portedoree.fr/.

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Thus, in the postcolonial economy of memory, the centrifugal political force of the monument is tempered by the centripetal function of the archive. Moreover, as the Archives nationales d’outre-mer in Aix-enProvence also attest, the phenomenon that can be called the archival turn in France’s current management of its colonial history serves as an obliquely redemptive gesture. Redemptive because these institutions are presented as sites of preservation of a past that does not reflect a current state of affairs but is rather placed in a historical perspective that underscores the political and ethical distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’. But also oblique insofar as the critical dimension is not stated explicitly and is not supported by a methodological or theoretical engagement with the sources that compose the archive. The introduction page to the ANOM website states: As heir to more than three centuries of history, the Archives nationales d’outre-mer keeps two large collections with different administrative and archive pasts: • The archives of the Secretariats of State and the Ministries responsible for the French colonies from the XVIIth Century to the XXth Century. • The archives transferred from the former colonies and Algeria when independence took place between 1954 and 1962, apart from the management archives which remained in the countries concerned. 2

The archives owe their existence to a colonial history only indirectly acknowledged in this brief prefatory statement and in the more detailed information provided about the origin and organization of the different collections (ministerial, repatriated and private) held in Aix-enProvence. Any reference to the actual process of colonization is either replaced by its chronology (‘three centuries’, ‘between 1954 and 1962’) or implied in the expressions ‘French’ or ‘former’ colonies. What is underscored instead is the claim to a heritage whose actual formation through conflicting agendas and policies engendering various forms of domination, dispossession, resistance, participation and maintenance remains largely unexplained. The last reference to the partitioning of the archives during the time of the Algerian war is puzzling in its laconicism, which clashes both with the contentious nature of the political event that 2 www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/anom/en/Presentation/Historique. html.

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oversaw its creation and with the many unaddressed methodological, legal and ethical issues surrounding the ownership and administration of these split archives. The example of the ANOM is a test case for Pomian’s own investigation of the ‘in-between’ status of archives, determined by the overlap of legal and practical matters. Their contents require a constant negotiation between diverging agendas and interests (private/public) and distinct uses (legal/scientific). For instance, the date when documents become available to the public marks a ‘frontière de la mémoire’ (Pomian, 1997 [1992]: 4010), a memorial boundary that marks the passage from a set of private documents associated with an individual or a group to an archive that, freed from the restrictions of private ownership, belongs to all and becomes the object of history. The guiding principle of this approach is document conservation as a means to prevent their loss or damage: ‘Conserver les archives, c’est les soustraire à toute action susceptible de les détruire ou de les détériorer’ [To preserve archives is to remove them from any action that could potentially destroy or damage them] (Pomian, 1997 [1992]: 4008). This raises a number of questions about the legal and practical parameters that determine the very creation and transmission of the archives. But what do archives conserve and how? Nora’s project does not account for the exclusionary side of the archive, as it is enlisted by state institutions and private organizations to project a collective national ideal. In Derrida’s interpretation, according to which the archive represents a negotiation between the death drive and the pleasure principle, there is ‘no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation’ (1996 [1995]: 4). It can be argued not only that this absence is a lacuna in Nora’s project but that it actually reflects the national attitude towards the postcolonial question in general. The relatively few French scholars who have addressed the issue, along with their more numerous peers from the UK or US, have worked to expose and overcome what Nicolas Bancel calls a political and institutional ‘blockage’. He expressly refers to the ‘minor’ (‘minorée’) place afforded to colonialism and postcolonialism in Nora’s monumental series (2006: 17). This ‘epistemological trouble’ (Panaïté, 2013: 147) transpires, for instance, in early twenty-first-century works of literary history (Tadié, 2007; Touret, 2008; Viart and Vercier, 2005) where postcolonial Francophone literature is dealt with in a

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peritextual or parenthetic manner, any reference to it being limited to a paragraph or short sub-chapter. The fact that this vast production is consigned to a discrete or peripheral place is rendered even more evident by the broad scope of these scholarly works. When an ‘extension of the field’ (Touret, 2008: 245) is contemplated, one study dedicates an entire essay to writers from the colonies, covering only the postwar period until the 1960s, the decade which saw the advent of decolonization. After this decade, writers and their works cease to interest French literary history and criticism, being returned, as it were, to the literatures of their nations, although it is unclear how this rule applies indiscriminately to Algeria, an independent country, and Martinique, a French overseas department. To this temporal partition the authors add a geographical one, setting themselves the rule to not include literatures in French from Canada, Haiti, Vietnam or Lebanon. One explanation summarizes the political and ethical principles that guide this approach: ‘The concept of “Francophonie”, owing its belated appearance to the political context of decolonization, covers a variety of situations which cannot be assimilated. We will not deal here with this field and its unstable borders’ (Touret, 2008: 253). The question raised by these colonial and postcolonial classifications is not unlike those used by Pomian to distinguish between documents in pre- and post-Revolutionary France: did the change in political status bring about a sudden transformation in archival materials and memory forms and objects? Les Lieux de mémoire establishes the French Revolution as an historical caesura that generated two types of archive: the ones it produced as it was unfolding and the ones belonging to the Ancien Régime – or, in Derrida’s terms, ‘archivization produces as much as it records the event’ (Derrida, 1996 [1995]: 17). The event transformed dynastic memory into state memory, and the genre of chronicle gave way to the scholarly treatise as the dominant manner of addressing the past. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Revolution, the past became the object of a double controversy. First, history has had to negotiate its course between an ‘histoire-continuité’ that serves as an extension of the old memory and an ‘histoire-rupture’ that purports to reject all identification with pre-revolutionary political institutions. Second, post-revolutionary France has had to contend with an ongoing tug-of-war between state memory and the people’s memory as they compete for the authentic representation of national memory (Pomian, 1997 [1992]: 4055–56). Yet, the dismantling of the colonial empire from 1946 to the indépendances of the 1960s marked

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a break not only in the imagined continuity of French history but also in the memories of millions of people, citizens of the Republic and subjects of the empire, whose lives were radically altered by their change in political and administrative status, social rank, economic conditions and place of residence. In the case of the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration and the Archives nationales d’outre-mer, the only signs of change are noticeable in the renaming and repurposing of colonial monuments and documents. The former highlights the history of immigration rather than colonization, which becomes a secondary topic for exhibits, collections and dossiers. The latter hosts archives that were relocated under the pressure of historical events when France was entering its postcolonial era. The euphemistic naming of these institutions that preserve colonial documents together with the absence of a systematic scholarly apparatus dedicated to the historical, non-European context to which they owe their existence makes short work of the didactic duty assigned to the archives by the 1979 decree. 3 Nora’s totalizing and pragmatic approach points toward but never meets with Foucault’s, for whom the archive is not ‘the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past’ (1972 [1969]: 130) but rather a ‘system of discursivity’ that makes memory and history possible (1972 [1969]: 129). To be sure, Pomian’s analysis does not evince any of the late twentieth-century scepticism towards the archive, predicated on the beliefs that ‘hard facts have gone soft’ (Darnton, 2003: 1) and rife with doubts about ‘archive as a fetish’ whose contents present only a selective, mediated and biased version of a past that remains irretrievably lost (LaCapra, 1985: 92). Yet, from this perspective, two definitions of the archive as a colonial realm of memory emerge, drawing a stark contrast between official and fictional archives, where fictional, meaning ‘imagined’ or ‘virtual’, stands in contrast with official, taken as ‘historical’ or ‘physical’, but not with ‘real’, ‘true’ or ‘authentic’. Fiction operates as a restorative site 3 Recent government initiatives point to possible developments in this area but their nature and extent are yet to be determined. Among them, it is worth noting the 2014 appointment of the historian Benjamin Stora, well known for his works on the French colonization of Algeria and the war that brought it to an end, to the position of president of the Conseil d’orientation in charge of developing scientific and cultural projects within the patrimonial complex of the Palais de la Porte Dorée. See http://www.palais-portedoree.fr/fr/ letablissement-public-du-palais-de-la-porte-doree.

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of memory that lays claim to the truth of the archive by supplementing its scarcity, correcting its falsehoods or making up for its complete absence.4 In the context of the French empire, novels such as Doguicimi (1938), by Paul Hazoumé, Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue (1960), by Djibril Tamsir Niane, or Crépuscule des temps anciens (1962), by Nazi Boni, draw on both documentary accounts and oral traditions in order to reveal the history, traditions and everyday lives of the Bwa people during the Volta-Bani war, or of those living in the Kingdom of Dahomey or the Mali Empire. The postcolonial era brings with it a whole host of books that set out to bring to light the untold stories obfuscated by the official chronicles of Western history. Memory and history are situated at the opposite ends of the archival spectrum here, with literature endeavoring to fill the emotional and ethical chasm between them. In her historical novel Ségou (1984–85), Maryse Condé undertakes the monumental task of recreating the life of the Bambara people throughout several generations of Traoré rulers and their subjects during the nineteenth century, a crucial time when their empire comes under increased pressure from the forces of European colonization. The Hugolian shape and magnitude of the novel transform it into a sweeping collective saga. It weaves genealogical recreation, ethnographic research and historical facts into a narrative that resurrects and transcends the archive. Tierno Monénembo’s Le Roi de Kahel (2008) recounts the story of Aimé Victor Olivier de Sanderval, a nineteenth-century Lyon-born explorer of Africa. In an epigraph revealing of the book’s entire approach, the author’s acknowledgments to Olivier de Sanderval’s heirs for granting him access to their forefather’s written archives preserved in the city of Caen is immediately followed by a document excerpt that reads ‘Le Créateur les a faits noirs pour que les coups ne se voient pas’ [The Creator made them black so that blows would remain invisible]. The narrative works along the archival grain, embracing rather than rejecting the ‘affective mastery’ (Stoler, 2009: 67) at the core of the colonial project but also undermining the ‘affective knowledge’ (Stoler, 2009: 98) preserved in the colonial archive. Monénembo’s ‘roman d’archives’ exhibits its paratextual devices and bibliographical apparatus 4 ‘Romances of the archive’ have also been used to cast the loss of the empire and the country’s colonial legacy in a generic framework that combines knowledge and affect to provide compensatory narratives, as Susan Keen has shown in her study of British literature.

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while juxtaposing conflicting voices (most notably, those of the different Africans Sanderval encounters on his journey) and perspectives (for and against colonization) in order to highlight the multiplicity of memorial threads that weave the tapestry of the colonial past. In the postcolonial era, works such as Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1992) and Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge: Paris, octobre 1961 (1999) draw on documentary resources to reveal the overlooked socioeconomic consequences of the 1946 creation of the Caribbean ‘overseas departments’ or to question the historical and political lacunae about violent police action against anti-colonial protesters during the war in Algeria. Chamoiseau’s Goncourt-winning novel recounts the struggles of the population of a shanty town against the destruction of a community and erasure of memory caused by urban development in contemporary Fort-de-France, Martinique. The novel borrows the formal features of the archive as it erects a complex fictional scaffolding of official reports and personal notations, private writings and explanatory notes. Its narrative supplements and eventually supplants the silent, failing or false historical records. Using the trope of the second-generation immigrant that ‘does not speak her father’s language’, Leïla Sebbar’s book engages with a crucial episode from the French–Algerian war: the bloody repression of an anti-war protest organized by the FLN in Paris in 1961 along with its subsequent cover-up on the orders of the Police Prefect Maurice Papon. Because, in the absence of a credible official inquiry, the actual number of victims and their cause of death have been the subject of heated contestation, Sebbar delegates the quest for truth to her characters: a ‘Beur’ teenage woman, an Algerian journalist in exile during his country’s ‘dark decade’, and a filmmaker. Their individual narratives illustrate the multidirectional and mediated nature of postcolonial memory, while highlighting the archival vocation of art that gathers and sediments the traces of the past lost in the official discourse. Moreover, from Didier Daeninckx, who in his 1983 detective novel Meurtres pour mémoire also focuses on the 17 October events, probing their disturbing connections to the Occupation years, to Alexis Jenni, whose L’Art français de la guerre (2011) delves into the history of France’s colonial wars, metropolitan writers have increasingly taken an interest in the lived reality of the country’s colonial past and the current manifestations of its postcolonial present both in the world and in the Hexagon. In his conclusion, Pomian points out that the evolution of the concept and function of the archive has transformed it into a futurocentric

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institution that subordinates its contents and mission to the gaze of generations to come and of their historians (1997 [1992]: 4058). This temporal reorientation, along with its underlying ideological and political agendas, may explain why the colonial past and the postcolonial present are often occluded from the future-oriented national archive: their conservation, study and transmission entail returning to an unacknowledged history and facing its enduring and deeply conflicted memory. Works Cited Bancel, Nicolas. 2006. ‘L’histoire difficile: esquisse d’une historiographie du fait colonial et postcolonial’. In La Fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire, 85–95. Paris: La Découverte. Boni, Nazi. 1962. Crépuscule des temps anciens. Paris: Présence Africaine. Chamoiseau, Patrick. 1992. Texaco. Paris: Gallimard. Condé, Maryse. 1984–85. Ségou, vol. 1 Les murailles des terre, vol. 2 La terre en miettes. Paris: Robert Laffont. Daeninckx, Didier. 1983. Meurtres pour mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Darnton, Robert. 2003. ‘How historians play God’. Cromohs 11: 1–3. http:// www.cromohs.unifi.it/11_2006/darnton_historians.html. Derrida, Jacques. 1996 [1995]. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972 [1969]. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Book. Glissant, Édouard. 1989 [1981]. Caribbean Discourse. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hazoumé, Paul. 1938. Doguicimi. Paris: Larose. Jenni, Alexis. 2011. L’Art français de la guerre. Paris: Gallimard. Keen, Susan. 2003. Romance of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 1985. History and Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Monénembo, Tierno. 2008. Le Roi de Kahel. Paris: Seuil. Niane, Djibril Tamsir. 1960. Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue. Paris: Présence Africaine. Panaïté, Oana. 2013. ‘La querelle des bibliothèques ou la gêne de la critique française face à la littérature en français’. Nouvelles Études Francophones 28, no. 1: 145–61. Pomian, Krzysztof. 1997 [1992]. ‘Les Archives’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora, 3999–4067. Paris: Gallimard/Quarto.

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Sebbar, Leïla. 1996. La Seine était rouge: Paris, octobre 1961. Paris: Thierry Magnier. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tadié, Jean-Yves, ed. 2007. La Littérature française: dynamique et histoire. Paris: Gallimard. Touret, Michelle, ed. 2008. Histoire de la littérature française du XXe siècle – après 1940, vol. 2. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Viart, Dominique, and Bruno Vercier. 2005. La Littérature française au présent. Héritage, modernité, mutations. Paris: Bordas.

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L’École républicaine Leon Sachs L’École républicaine

There is a scene in Laurent Cantet’s award-winning film Entre les murs (2008) in which a student of Maghrebi descent complains that French grammar exercises always use Western European proper names in their examples. Why, she asks, is there never a Fatimah or Aïssata? In almost the same breath, the student explains that she takes no pride in her French national identity. Later, she ridicules the elevated vocabulary and grammatical structures she and her classmates are expected to learn, finding such language both alienating and useless in the world outside of school. Scenes of this kind have become stock episodes in recent literature and film about education in postcolonial France. Students belonging to racial or ethnic minorities and typically from working-class families express bemusement, frustration and resentment in the face of a curriculum that seems to take no account of the socioeconomic and cultural diversity in the classroom. Though born in France, these descendants of immigrants from former French colonies feel left out or excluded. As Entre les murs suggests, this, in turn, weakens their identification with the nation and its republican values. The marginalization of racial and ethnic minorities in schools is not, of course, unique to France. But the problem is a source of heightened consternation in a country whose very identity hinges on the school as an engine of national unity and egalitarian democracy. This idea is a cornerstone of republican memory. Indeed, it is this sanguine picture of the republican school that emerges in the first volume of Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire. In a section devoted entirely to ‘Pédagogie’, one finds essays on some of the most illustrious names and projects of nineteenth-century republican education reform: Pierre Larousse’s

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Grand Dictionnaire, Ernest Lavisse’s influential history textbooks (le ‘petit Lavisse’), G. Bruno’s bestselling civics primer Le Tour de la France par deux enfants and Ferdinand Buisson’s Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction, an editorial tour de force and reference encyclopedia for republican schoolteachers. These works were mainstays of the Third Republic’s sweeping education reform, a primary goal of which was to wrest control of the schools from their traditional steward, the Catholic Church. They insist that national identity, unified around republican values and informing a shared conception of Frenchness articulated most notably in relation to colonial ideology, depends on a widely disseminated secular education rooted in scientific inquiry and experiential learning.1 These scholastic ‘realms of memory’ are also, therefore, paeans to the rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment and the Revolution; they celebrate the republican traditions that, according to republican doctrine, freed the people from autocratic rule and religious superstition. To consider the school as a postcolonial realm of memory is to jump forward a hundred years, from the Third to the Fifth Republic and, most significantly, from a confident view of the school as an incubator of unity to a persistent fear that the school no longer fulfils its republican egalitarian mission. By the end of the twentieth century France had become a multicultural society. Unlike the regional, linguistic and cultural diversity that characterized metropolitan France a century earlier, the diversity of the second half of the twentieth century resulted from decades of postwar immigration predominantly from France’s former colonies in North and West Africa. By the 1970s and 1980s the children and grandchildren of these immigrants had come of age. Born and raised on French soil, they lacked deep knowledge of the language and customs of their forebears, yet, in their native France, they found themselves the targets of racism and other forms of discrimination (in, for example, employment and housing). They were caught between – and alienated from – two cultures, that of their parents and that of France. The 1980s was a watershed decade for these so-called second- and thirdgeneration immigrants (who, in fact, were not immigrants at all). A number of high-profile demonstrations (such as ‘La Marche des beurs’) and newly founded organizations (such as SOS Racisme) drew public 1 As scholars such as Sandrine Lemaire and Gilles Manceron have made clear (2005; 2006; 2003), the role of textbooks was instrumental in this process, in particular to the extent that it involved active pro-colonial propaganda.

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attention to this marginalized segment of the population and stimulated efforts to rectify the social injustices it regularly suffered. At the same time, many members of this population took a newfound pride in Islamic identity. The first of several ‘headscarf affairs’, in which Muslim school girls refused to remove their headscarves in class, was seen as a challenge to the French republican model of integration through the institution of the school. As the aforementioned scene from Entre les murs illustrates, the school’s struggle to integrate France’s minority population into the collective national fold has continued into the twenty-first century. What is more, cultural exclusion is often accompanied by academic inequality. Minority students from low-income families fail to acquire basic skills at a higher rate than their classmates from more affluent and autochthonous families. The latter obtain in their homes cultural knowledge, linguistic competence and familiarity with institutional customs and practices that elude students from low-income immigrant backgrounds (these two categories, one socioeconomic and the other cultural, often go hand in hand). Academic inequality results from social inequality and the school, despite its efforts, continues to reproduce this disparity. To understand this chronic inequality and cultural exclusion in a school system that so vigorously posits equality as one of its principal values, we must consider the ideological underpinnings of the school captured in the doctrine of republican universalism (Dubet et al., 2013: 219). The doctrine is as fundamental to republican identity and values as is the egalitarian school itself, and, like the school, it, too, has its roots in the intellectual ferment of the Revolutionary period. A core concept of republican universalism is that of the autonomous rational individual, a rational being whose identity is free and distinct from determinants that are not of his or her own choosing (such as race or gender). When applied to the classroom, republican universalism requires that the school deliberately ignore the social, racial or ethnic particularities of the student. The teacher’s primary concern should be the cultivation of the student’s rational faculties of observation, analysis, discernment and linguistic mastery; these skills, it is argued, are best achieved through methodical study of the natural and cultural objects of established academic disciplines. Not every student is expected to gain these skills and knowledge to an equal degree. All schooling is to some extent inegalitarian insofar as it classifies students according to relative achievement. Republican egalitarianism dictates, however, that every student have an equal opportunity to obtain this education, the only limitation being that which results from the individual’s natural

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intellectual ability and effort. These factors being equal, all students have an equal chance to succeed in school. No social, racial, ethnic, moral or other biological aspect of the student’s identity should interfere with academic pursuits. Such features of a student’s identity, according to republican universalism’s staunch defenders, should be ‘checked at the classroom door’ (Dubet et al., 2013: 219). Critics of this universalist position complain that it places greater value on disciplinary knowledge than on the student him- or herself. It fails to account for the whole person (child, adolescent or youth), who, in reality, cannot be separated from his or her sociocultural specificity. The republican school mistakenly imagines itself as a ‘sanctuary’ cut off from the environment from which students come. As a result of an increasingly heterogeneous student population with ever stronger ties to non-Gallic cultural origins, the school-as-sanctuary notion, critics point out, has been more difficult to maintain in the postcolonial context of recent decades. As the sociologist of education François Dubet puts it: ‘The school has been profoundly destabilized by the crumbling of the sanctuary’s walls that protected it up until now’ (Dubet et al., 2013: 219). It struggles to remain the hermetic cultural institution that universalism seems to prescribe. Beyond the factual details of the school’s history, it is the symbolic value of the school as a sanctuary that continues to structure the virulent school debates at the heart of French political and cultural life. The idea of the school as a sanctuary has deep roots in the republican imagination, dating back to debates in the Revolutionary assemblies of 1792 over the ideal school system for the new democratic Republic. The philosophe and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet’s project for l’instruction publique is often seen as providing the philosophical inspiration for later republican universalist views of the school as sanctuary. Condorcet’s project gave pride of place to the cultivation of the student’s reason: ‘instruct the student to listen to [reason] alone and to protect [him- or herself] against enthusiasm that could lead the mind astray or overshadow it (l’obscurcir)’ (Condorcet, 1792: 26). This vision would be challenged by the Calvinist minister Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne in the distinction he drew between instruction and éducation. While Condorcet’s instruction was concerned primarily with the intellect, reason and knowledge, l’éducation addressed, above all, moral virtues. The former trained the mind, the latter the heart, explained Rabaut Saint-Étienne (Rabaut Saint-Etienne, 1842: 131). While both were important, it was l’éducation nationale, he maintained, that was the most

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valuable for fostering devotion to the Revolutionary principles captured in the motto Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. To assure this ideological training, Rabaut Saint-Etienne promoted the methods of inculcation (catechisms, ceremonies, sermons, monuments and works of art, and so on) perfected over time by the Church in order to unify its followers. By appealing not only to reason but also to the imagination and the senses, such teaching methods would ‘enthuse’ the impressionable student and prospective citizen. Condorcet’s instruction publique was conceived to protect against precisely this scenario. It purposely championed the cultivation of reason as a safeguard against the power of enthusiasm that could too easily be put in the service of error. To see more clearly how the idea of the school as a sanctuary emerges from the instruction–éducation distinction, we must note its spatial dimension. Education nationale relied on public performances: ‘the grand and pleasing spectacle of society gathered together; it needs a great space’. Instruction, noted Rabaut Saint-Étienne, required only schools and books: ‘it is enclosed within walls’ (Rabaut Saint-Étienne, 1842: 131). In its appeal to passions and the imagination, éducation depended on the collective participation of the wider community; instruction, in its appeal to reason above all else, needed an isolated space – in other words, a sanctuary, a site protected from external influences that might impede the training of the autonomous rational individual. It would be hard to overestimate the hold of this dichotomy – instruction versus éducation; inside versus outside – over the French republican imagination. It is one of the guises in which the school as sanctuary concept has continued to manifest itself in school debates for more than two centuries. The opposition underlay the Third Republic’s sweeping school reform at the end of the nineteenth century. As mentioned above, one of the republican reformers’ objectives was to seize control of education from the Catholic Church so that future generations would be won over to republican rationalism and the Enlightenment tradition. In addition to legislation that formally proscribed religious teaching and removed Church involvement in public instruction, reformers promoted the introduction of scientific learning in all areas and levels of study. The Republican school taught its students to be suspicious of all forms of authority that attempted to shape students’ beliefs in ways that were not supported by rational inquiry. The school became a bulwark against opinion and superstition taught by the Church and reinforced at home. Herein lies a source of the longstanding perception of the republican school as a rival to the family. It is captured succinctly by the philosopher

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Ernest Renan in his famous 1871 plea for increased scientific education as a means of revitalizing the nation: ‘L’instruction takes place in school, l’éducation at home’ (Renan, 1871: 238). As the source of objective scientific knowledge that promised to improve society in tangible, material ways, the school became synonymous with progress. It thus appeared at odds with the institution of the family, a source of unscientific belief, ancestral customs and traditional morality that seemed retrograde from a rationalist republican perspective. Many today look upon the school reforms of the early Third Republic as a golden age of republican education, a time when the school succeeded in purveying Enlightenment rationalism and thereby fulfilling Condorcet’s vision of instruction publique. The role of Jules Ferry in this process, combining a commitment to secularism with pro-colonial zeal, cannot be underestimated. While it is true that many of the initiatives that he spearheaded with his lieutenants did promote scientific learning and rational inquiry, it is also true, as recent historians have shown, that republican educators were equally committed to inculcating republican (and consequently colonial) ideology by appealing to passions and bypassing reason (Citron, 1987; Nique and Lelièvre, 1993; Guiney, 2004). In other words, the school also had recourse to the techniques of moral education that Condorcet had explicitly denounced. In sum, the enduring image of the rigorous rationalist school of the Third Republic owes its survival in part to historical reality and in part to late twentieth-century nostalgia for a school that existed arguably more in spirit than in practice. The myth of the school as a sanctuary – a sanctum of intellectual training protected from family, Church and other influences uninformed by reason – began to erode in the 1970s. The work of sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, who questioned the school’s claim to be an intellectual meritocracy, provided part of the impetus. They showed that socioeconomic and cultural background played an important role in a student’s academic performance and that, consequently, the French school system, despite its egalitarian claims, reproduced inequality. The republican belief that student success was a function of individual ability and effort – that is, merit – and unrelated to external factors such as wealth, race and national or cultural origin appeared chimerical in light of the sociological evidence. In other words, the school was not as impervious to external forces as the sanctuary myth would have one believe. A turning point in the history of the republican school occurred in the 1970s with the creation of le collège unique (secondary school in

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the UK; junior high in the USA). This attempt by the government to create a more egalitarian school system set off further debate over the legitimacy of the sanctuary concept. Since the late nineteenth century the republican school had in fact consisted of two distinct tracks: a primary system (l’école primaire) for working-class students that led to vocational, technical training and a secondary system (lycée) for the bourgeoisie that provided general education preparing students for management positions and liberal professions. To solve this patently inegalitarian system, successive ministries of education (beginning with that of René Haby in 1975) reformed le collège in order to provide a similar curriculum for all students in preparation for high school. The reforms raised a number of new problems, most of which resulted from the challenges that came with the unprecedented heterogeneity of the new student population. Again, this diversity was not only socioeconomic; recent waves of immigration primarily from the Maghreb brought an influx of students with cultural backgrounds and linguistic abilities markedly different from the majority of their autochthonous classmates. Teachers complained that they lacked the training to work with students of such varying degrees of preparation and instructional needs. Devoted first and foremost to their respective disciplines, they found themselves unable to transmit their disciplinary knowledge to their new audience. Disciplinary expertise seemed inflexibly at odds with the reality of the classroom. In other words, the transmission of knowledge – what had traditionally been thought to be the intellectual mission of the school – found itself hampered by sociocultural forces emanating from beyond the classroom walls. The sanctuary’s walls, to repeat François Dubet’s formulation, were ‘crumbling’. The 1982 report Pour un collège démocratique, prepared by the educator Louis Legrand and commissioned by the minister of education Alain Savary, aimed to redress ongoing problems of inequality in the collège. It became a blueprint for curricular development in the 1980s and beyond. The report made the question of classroom diversity a central concern. Recognizing that students from different socioeconomic, cultural and ethnic backgrounds had different attitudes toward school and different ways of processing information and of approaching disciplinary knowledge, the report called on teachers to take into greater account the specificity of their students and to adapt their methods and curricular content to better suit the new school population. Inspired by the constructivist ideas of Jean Piaget, the report recommended, for instance, that students take a more active role in their education,

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apply their own life experiences to the learning process, engage in more collective projects with their peers and be given more opportunities to express themselves. It advocated placing the arts, sports and practical training on an equal footing with traditional disciplines. The report also encouraged teachers to adapt methods and content to the particular demographics of the classroom. Moreover, it called on schools to develop stronger lines of communication with the students’ families and the surrounding communities. With its emphasis on attending to the student’s cultural background and personal experience to the detriment of the transmission of traditional disciplinary knowledge, the report weakened the idea of the school as a sanctuary with rigid boundaries separating the inside from the outside. Indeed, the first theoretical essay of the Legrand report, entitled ‘Éducation et instruction’, explicitly sought to diminish the rigidity of this opposition. As a ‘living space’ (un lieu de vie) providing practical as well as purely intellectual training, the essay, like the report in general, aimed to overcome this notion of school as sanctuary. Criticism of the Legrand report came from many sources, but none has had as much lasting impact as Jean-Claude Milner’s De l’école (1984), a book that galvanized the defenders of the traditional republican school in their opposition to progressive reform. Targeting not only the Legrand report but also progressive education more generally, Milner decried above all the sacrifice of disciplinary knowledge and the weakening of academic standards. He caricatured progressive reforms for valuing the teaching, for example, of crêpe-making over spelling and derided apparently frivolous school activities such as field trips to local businesses or other destinations of dubious intellectual value. A refrain throughout Milner’s book is that the progressive school, in an effort to be more democratic, models itself on the family, precisely the social institution from which the republican school should remain deliberately distinct. For Milner and others like him, progressive educators such as Legrand, while claiming to fight inequality, actually perpetuated it with an inequality of another kind. By adapting curricula and pedagogy to particular populations based on socioeconomic and/or cultural background, the new pedagogues, according to Milner, treated some populations as more worthy than others of rigorous intellectual fare. They violated the right of every individual to not belong to – or be treated as belonging to – a particular social subgroup. For Milner, freedom was inseparable from knowledge, which, in the French tradition, must be universal: there cannot be one kind of knowledge for some and another

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for others. Milner’s book is remembered as a classic formulation of republican universalism: the idea that the free autonomous individual should have the rights of all others and not be bound by accidents of birth that he or she did not choose. De l’école is often credited with delineating two competing camps – the Républicains and the Pédagogues – that continue to define the basic ideological positions in school debates through the present day. As the name suggests, the Républicains defend a traditional idea of the school for which Condorcet’s instruction publique is viewed as the inspiration; it is the idea of the school as a sanctuary devoted to the cultivation of reason and protected from the forces beyond its walls that might interfere with that mission. The Pédagogues, in the main, are comprised of progressive educators such as Louis Legrand, trained in the twentieth-century sciences of education. They typically advocate changes in policy and pedagogy that blur the boundaries between instruction and éducation, between inside and outside, between pure disciplinary knowledge and intellectual training, on the one hand, and, on the other, concern for the student as a whole person inseparable from a complex socioeconomic and cultural background. A full history of the école républicaine in recent years would outline the specifics of successive reform efforts undertaken by governments on both the left and the right (see Prost, 2013). All of them in one way or another have attempted to redress the seemingly intractable problem of inequality with which this essay began. Underlying the specific reforms remains the question of the relative closed- or openness of the school, of its status as a sanctuary – a status that is inviolable for some yet nonviable for others. French educators today repeatedly declare the obsolescence of the sanctuary notion and the instruction–éducation opposition (Dubet and Duru-Bellat, 2015). And yet, for every one of these voices, another counters with an apologia for the rigid boundary between school and family, between the sacrosanct republican institution and the real world (Julliard, 2015). There would appear to be something in the republican imagination that cannot do without this defining structure. If school debates in France are so perennially virulent, it is because they call into question the founding myths of the Republic and the extent to which an increasingly heterogeneous nation should remain faithful to what many see as its philosophical and ideological origins.

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Works Cited Citron, Suzanne. 1987. Le Mythe national: L’histoire de France en question. Paris: Éditions Ouvrières. Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat. 1792. Rapport et projet de décret sur l’organisation de l’instruction publique. Réimprimés par ordre de la Convention nationale. Dubet, François, and Marie Duru-Bellat. 2015. 10 propositions pour changer d’école. Paris: Seuil. Dubet, François, Olivier Cousin, Eric Macé and Sandrine Rui. 2013. Pourquoi moi? L’expérience des discriminations. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Guiney, M. Martin. 2004. Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Julliard, Jacques. 2015. L’École est finie. Paris: Flammarion. Legrand, Louis et al. 1983. Pour un collège démocratique: rapport remis au ministre de L’Education nationale, Collection des rapports officiels. Paris: Documentation française. Lemaine, Sandrine. 2005. ‘Colonisation et immigration: des “points aveugles” de l’histoire à l’école?’ In La Fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire, 93–104. Paris: La Découverte. — 2006. ‘Histoire nationale et histoire coloniale: deux histoires parallèles (1961–2006)’. In Culture post-coloniale 1961–2006, edited by Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel, 53–68. Paris: Autrement. Manceron, Gilles. 2003. ‘École, pédagogie et colonies’. In Culture coloniale: La France conquise par son Empire, 1871–1931, edited by Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, 93–103. Paris: Autrement. Milner, Jean-Claude. 1984. De l’école. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Nique, Christian, and Claude Lelièvre. 1993. La République n’éduquera plus: La fin du mythe Ferry. Paris: Plon. Prost, Antoine. 2013. Du changement dans l’école: Les réformes de l’éducation de 1936 à nos jours. Paris: Seuil. Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Jean-Paul. 1842. Discours et opinions. Paris: Henri Servier. Renan, Ernest. 1871. La réforme intellectuelle et morale. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères.

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La Sorbonne Ruth Bush La Sorbonne

In a 1961 speech given on the occasion of his official ‘Réception’ at the Sorbonne, Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor expressed deep gratitude to and admiration for this ‘haut lieu de l’Homme’ [Esteemed site of Mankind] (Senghor, 1964b: 319). Senghor had spent formative years studying for the agrégation in Paris’s Latin Quarter three decades previously. His speech on this occasion, a year after the independence of Senegal, was framed by the image of a returning prodigal son. He addressed his tutors and ethnologist Marcel Griaule directly and praised both their academic rigour and perceived openness to knowledge concerning the African continent: ‘N’est-ce pas vous, vieille Sorbonne, maternelle Sorbonne, qui avez créé […] sur la Colline Sainte, une chaire d’ethnologie négro-africaine?’ [Isn’t it you, old Sorbonne, motherly Sorbonne, who created on the Holy Hill, a chair of Negro-African ethnology?] (316). His tutors had succeeded in generating an inclusive ‘humanisme intégral’ [complete humanism] (316) that valued African culture as a source of universal civilisation and encouraged independent critical enquiry. He acknowledged his approach to their lessons: ‘Oui, j’ai attaqué Descartes au coupe-coupe et soutenu, avec une passion toute barbare, la raison intuitive contre la raison discursive […] J’ai voulu faire de vos leçons, non pas un ornement, non pas un boubou blanc, mais une règle de vie intégrale’ [Yes, I attacked Descartes with a machete and defended, with a barbaric passion, intuitive reason against discursive reason […] I wanted to transform your lessons, not into an ornament, not into a white boubou, but into a complete life principle] (319). Referencing Michel de Montaigne’s essay on education, Senghor emphasises the importance of assimilating his education as a pathway to thinking independently, rather than a parade of erudition or

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fanciful adornment (316).1 The resulting opposition between two forms of reason (‘intuitive’ and ‘discursive’) lay at the heart of Senghor’s philosophical vision of négritude, enabling him to reconcile notions of logic, method and clarity with those of intuition, warmth and rhythm (Diagne, 2011 [2007]: 69–96). Senghor’s speech evokes memories of the Sorbonne as an enabling and accommodating place of thought. The Sorbonne emerges in Senghor’s speech as a symbolically free site with a central paradox: that its role as catalyst for universal modes of understanding sat alongside its avowed privilege as a metonym for exemplary Frenchness (318). Moving beyond the singular status of this particular alumnus, a portrait of the Sorbonne as a ‘realm of memory’ that created physical and psychological forms of freedom for students of the French empire becomes less straightforward. The chair of ethnology mentioned by Senghor, for example, which was founded in 1942, has been described by one historian as a ‘poisoned chalice’ (Conklin, 2013: 307). Its creation illustrates the vexed relationship between ethnology and empire in France and, more specifically, between ways of knowing ‘other’ cultures and the modern French education system. 2 This opening discussion raises some central questions: to what extent have historians and cultural critics engaged with colonial dimensions of French university life? How have recurrent calls to ‘provincialise’ France and Frenchness played out in the metropole’s most visible (if not its most prestigious) institution of higher education? Senghor’s claim for the enabling function of the Sorbonne for African students sits at odds with the cursory consideration of those students’ experiences and contributions in the institution’s written history. Memory of the Sorbonne within the field of Francophone postcolonial studies has tended to cluster around key events, in particular the 1956 First Congress of Black Writers and Artists. What is needed is an account of the Sorbonne that stretches within and beyond the national metropolitan framework proposed by Pierre Nora. As a starting point, in what follows I will signal moments of political and epistemic tension within that institution’s history before turning to the lasting effects of French universities on the post-independence generation of political leaders and higher education on the African continent. 1 Senghor’s reference is to Montaigne’s ‘De l’institution des enfans’. 2 On the links between Griaule’s ambitions as first incumbent of the chair and the Vichy regime, see Conklin (2013: 294–308).

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The Sorbonne’s sedimented reputation has depended in part on its ability to uphold certain forms of symbolic prestige, underpinned by a ‘cultural aristocracy’ germane to the French university system (Bourdieu, 1988: 100). Founded as an organised structure in the thirteenth century by Robert de Sorbon, the Sorbonne (known first as the Collège de Sorbon) has long been considered an elite establishment. Distinguished by the quality of its library, which housed the first printing press in France from 1469, the Sorbonne gained a reputation for theological conservatism during the Renaissance (memorably captured in François Rabelais’s puncturing of pompous scholastic learning in Pantagruel). It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the Sorbonne began to establish Chairs in specific disciplines and teaching became more specialized. The University of Paris, which had lapsed as a constitutional body following the Revolution, was re-established in 1896 and expanded through extensive building work in the years that followed. By the 1930s following huge losses in the student body during WWI, the number of students had tripled to 14,500. While the ‘vieille’ Sorbonne bears a reputation primarily as a teaching institution (in contrast to the Collège de France), there has often been some overlap between professors in both institutions (Charle, 1986: 390). Transformative changes took place following the upheaval of 1968 and student occupation of a Sorbonne that was seen, once again, as a site of political stagnation. This led to the creation of thirteen autonomous universities in Paris under the Loi Faure, usually referred to as Paris I, Paris II, Paris III and so on. 3 In 1974 the Chair in Francophone Studies – currently held by Romuald Fonkoua, as director of the Centre International d’Etudes Francophones – was inaugurated (by Senghor) at Paris IV. The Sorbonne’s conservative reputation – only partly abated since the reorganization under the Loi Faure – can be seen as both a catalyst for and an obstacle to attempts to frame this university as a transnational ‘lieu de mémoire’. It leads to the broader and more complex question of how such institutional prestige – understood in the longue durée – has been perceived by non-metropolitan students. We can turn to two key perceptions of the Sorbonne: the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, and Cheikh Anta Diop’s doctoral viva. The first claims the university as a memorial site for the articulations of black diasporic internationalism, while the second – less familiar to 3 Three of these retain the Sorbonne in their name: Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne); Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle); and Paris IV (Université de Paris-Sorbonne).

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postcolonial cultural critics – shifts our focus to the broader epistemic conflicts at stake within the institution. The Sorbonne’s Amphithéâtre Descartes was the location for the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, organized by Présence Africaine and the Société africaine de culture. The Congress galvanized the intellectual work of a generation of black writers and artists and has become a touchstone in surveys of black intellectual history (Jules-Rosette, 1998: 52–64; Mudimbe, 1992). As Alioune Diop, founder of Présence Africaine, noted in his opening speech, the organizers chose ‘cette Sorbonne, symbole de la raison, de la liberté sous le signe desquelles [the delegates] désirent placer leurs travaux’ [this Sorbonne, symbol of reason, of liberty under the aegis of which [the delegates] wish to locate their work] (Diop, 1956: 11). The event brought together intellectual luminaries of Africa and the African diaspora, with participants including Aimé Césaire, Langston Hughes, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant and Mamadou Dia. Senegalese historian and scientist Cheikh Anta Diop (then a doctoral student at the Sorbonne) lauded this opportunity to develop ‘la conscience historique sans laquelle il n’y a pas de grandes nations’ [the historical consciousness without which a nation cannot achieve greatness] (Diop, 1956: 342). It offered a precious chance to renew and forge cultural connections. Alioune Diop’s opening argument set out the task at hand: ‘Notre héritage, codifié et momifié à l’intention des musées et des curieux d’Europe, ne peut servir convenablement. Les classiques d’un peuple ont besoin d’être réactualisés et donc repensés, réinterprétés à chaque génération’ [Our heritage, codified and mummified for museums and the curiosity of European people, is not adequate. The classics of a given people need to be updated and therefore rethought, reinterpreted by each generation] (Diop, 1956: 16). Supported by the Sorbonne, this was also an occasion at which political realities and differences were close to the surface, both in hostile conservative press coverage and in the limited sympathy shown for négritude by prominent African American delegates Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Alioune Diop’s call to ‘re-think’ heritage for each generation chimed with many of the contributions to the congress. Earlier modes of ‘knowing’ Africa, developed for curious Europeans, were to be replaced by an epistemic starting point that looked outward from the African continent as primary (but not exclusive) point of reference. Though it would be a mistake to oversimplify divergent efforts to Africanize education in the years that followed, such arguments anticipated Ngugi

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wa Thiong’o’s influential call to ‘decolonize the mind’ through the development of teaching and learning in African languages, and the abolition of the English department at the University of Nairobi (wa Thiong’o, 1995 [1972]; 1986). They also signalled the situation faced by many participants in the 1956 congress, namely that their calls for reorientation of the dominant episteme were taking place from within a prestigious and accommodating site of European reason. This implied conflict between institutional location and calls to reframe academic content and methods was even more apparent three years later, on the occasion of Cheikh Anta Diop’s doctoral viva at the Sorbonne. Diop is best known for his polemical defence of the black African origins of ancient Egypt and the cultural unity of the African continent. These ideas – developed in a series of publications over more than three decades of research – were central to his comparative doctoral thesis, presented under two titles, ‘Etude comparée des systèmes politiques et sociaux de l’Europe et de l’Afrique, de l’Antiquité à la formation des Etats modernes’ [Comparative Study of European and African Political and Social Systems, from Antiquity to the Formation of Modern States] and ‘Domaines du patriarcat et du matriarcat dans l’Antiquité classique’ [The Domains of Patriarchy and Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity]. Diop’s viva took place on 9 January 1960 in the ornate salle Louis Liard, lined with portraits of Descartes, Pascal and Bossuet, among other canonical figures. The chair of the viva committee remarked that the large audience present was unusual given it was almost entirely made up of Africans (Fall, 1960). Jury members included M. Aymard (Dean of the Faculté des Lettres), Georges Balandier, Roger Bastide, André Leroi-Gourhan and Paul Deschamps. A report in the glossy magazine La Vie Africaine (produced in Paris, under the direction of Olympe Bhêly Quénum) described the characteristic jousting of a doctoral viva: Précisons que la tradition de la Sorbonne veut que le candidat soutenant une thèse de doctorat, soit considéré comme un accusé devant se justifier; les juges ses professeurs, devant lui démontrer que le domaine de la connaissance est si étendu qu’il est impossible de l’embrasser entièrement dans une thèse, et que lui-même en sait encore si peu. (Fall, 1960) [Let’s specify that according to the tradition of the Sorbonne, doctoral candidates presenting their dissertation are considered defendants having to explain themselves. The professors are judges demonstrating that the sum of knowledge is so vast that it is impossible to engage with it in its

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entirety in one dissertation, and that therefore the candidate still knows very little.]

The ritual of the viva is in some respects less significant than the recognition of the academic order that it implies, and initiation thereby into certain institutionalized modes of producing and appraising knowledge. As Bourdieu argues, ‘there is no master who does not recognize the value of the institution and its institutional values, which are all rooted in the institutionalised refusal of any non-institutional thought’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 95). In Diop’s case, his work and its interdisciplinary methodology presented a challenge to academic orthodoxy at the Sorbonne, while also acknowledging the need (and desire, it is important to add) to pass via this institution. On this occasion, dominant modes of perceiving and constructing knowledge about Africa’s relationship with Europe came into direct contact with an alternative, albeit one that was filtered through the structures and ritual of a doctoral viva. Diop’s viva was in some ways a more significant moment than the Congress of 1956. It confronted the Sorbonne’s consecration of knowledge and learning with a radically different approach to knowledge, underpinned by both scientific advances and a powerful emotional charge. The report in La Vie Africaine goes on to list some of the remarks made at the viva by Diop’s jury committee: M. le Doyen: De l’entêtement malgré mes conseils … [Stubborn despite my advice …] M. Leroi-Gourhan: Vous m’êtes d’une sympathie qu’il serait inutile pour moi de décrire ici, mais j’ai envie de vous boxer à cause de votre indiscipline … [Needless to say that I have sympathy for you that there would be no point in describing here, but your indiscipline makes me want to punch you …]

Diop’s stubborn resistance to the academic disciplines laid out by French university system in his research and writing here finds itself coming to blows with the gatekeepers of that system. The audience was ‘tour à tour songeur, admiratif, troublé et inquiet, mais suivant toujours les interventions avec passion’ [successively pensive, admiring, troubled and worried, but always passionately captivated by the exchanges] (Fall, 1960). What begins to emerge from this affective audience scene are the complex responses to academic prestige, bound up with the seductive symbolism of the university as a place of highly institutionalized freedom.

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Of course, both Senghor and Diop had exceptional trajectories. A fuller account of the Sorbonne as ‘postcolonial realm of memory’ would attend to the work of African student associations, notably the ‘Fédération des étudiants d’Afrique noire en France’ (FEANF) during the period of decolonization (Blum, Guidi and Rillon, 2016; Dieng, 2011). Their campaigns were more radical in tone than Senghor’s public praise for his alma mater. The Sorbonne – and the social sphere that emerged among ‘overseas’ students – generated oppositional thought connected to currents of anti-colonial political activity that sought to disrupt categories of ‘nation’, ‘colony’ and ‘empire’ (Wilder, 2005: 28; Rice, 2013: 132). One student recalled that young Africans studying in Paris in the 1950s were ‘neocolonized before we were decolonized’ (Rice, 2013: 142), arguing that a more radical form of student politics, influenced by Marxist thought, emerged during the late 1950s. The connections between these student movements and the newly independent governments across the former French West Africa go beyond the remit of the current article. However, at the least, it is evident that the translation of concepts, ideas and ways of thinking learned in Paris (in lecture theatres, libraries and informal settings) to contexts of governance was not straightforward. Many of the more radical students who called for more complete or definitive forms of independence from France continued to be distant from the governments in newly independent African nations. In December 1959 Senghor inaugurated the Université de Dakar, founded as the ‘eighteenth French university’ (Leney, 2003: 417).4 The university system forged in French West Africa during the period of decolonization was modelled on the French university model. This suggests a further spectral role played by the Sorbonne as a ‘realm of memory’ in the wake of the French empire. Senghor’s opening speech used similar rhetoric to that given just a year later during his reception at the Sorbonne. Articulating publicly his view of what the university was and could be, Senghor frames Dakar’s new university in abstract terms as a site ‘où souffle l’Esprit’ [‘where the Spirit blows’] (Senghor, 1964a: 294). The campus is connected to modern international infrastructure 4 The university was renamed the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in 1987, following the sudden death of Cheikh Anta Diop. Its curriculum achieved full autonomy from France only in 1968, following student protests concerning lack of employment opportunities and ‘inadequate Africanisation of the academic staff’ (Bathily et al., 1995: 396, 466).

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‘exactement située entre l’aérodrome et le port, pour ne pas parler du chemin de fer’ [located exactly halfway between the airport and the port, without mentioning the railroad] (294). This was to be the setting for what Senghor termed ‘le commerce de l’esprit’ [trade of the mind] (294). What did Senghor mean precisely by this expression? It might be read as another allusion to Montaigne’s essay on education and in particular the latter’s defence of the value of listening in ‘le commerce des hommes’ [trade of men] (Montaigne, 1969 [1580]: 202). For Montaigne, ‘commerce’ is linked to forms of emotional reciprocity and friendship (the phrase ‘commerce de l’esprit’ later appeared in Diderot’s Encyclopédie under the entry for ‘friendship’). Yet its mercantile resonance (which also obtained in Montaigne’s essay) gains additional meaning in the wake of European colonialism and as a deliberate counter-balance to the dehumanising violence of transatlantic slave routes. It reinforces the need for reciprocity and exchange, rather than exclusionary modes of education, while opening implicitly to the role of education as conscious, individual self-improvement that will contribute to post-colonial national development. Senghor relies on the central tenets of his experience of French university education to illustrate his vision for the new university: ‘la raison inventant méthodes, techniques, machines et s’en servant pour humaniser la nature’ [reason inventing methods, techniques, machines and using them to humanize nature] (1964a: 294). The repeated claim for the value of ‘discursive reason’ alongside ‘intuitive reason’ is to be given institutional weight by the creation of this new university. The disciplines taught ranged from maths and physics to anatomy and law, organized in four faculties on the model of French universities. Indeed, Senghor stressed that ‘on y enseigne surtout le génie français: la clarté et la rigueur, l’esprit de finesse à côté de l’esprit de géométrie’ [the French genius is taught there: clarity and rigour, the spirit of finesse alongside the spirit of geometry] (295). It is only after this exposition that he confirms the creation of chairs and disciplines specific to the continent: African linguistics, Arab language and civilization, tropical medicine and sociology. For the latter, he anticipates new methods that will emerge from the present context: ‘le sociologue, en découvrant une civilisation de l’émotion et du sens, devra dépasser, s’il veut comprendre son objet, la méthode factuelle en honneur – celle des enquêtes et des statistiques – pour prendre une vision en profondeur des choses’ [the sociologist, when discovering a civilization built on emotion and senses, will have to go beyond, if he wants to understand the object of his study,

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the usual factual method – surveys and statistics – to adopt a more in-depth approach] (296). The aim of university students in Dakar, then, is to unite ‘discursive reason’ with ‘intuitive reason’ in order to move beyond the alienating effects of colonization. Senghor warns against the creation of a ‘civilisation planétaire’ [planetary civilization] that is not able to place ‘culture’ and ‘l’esprit’ at its heart through reciprocal processes of mutual giving and receiving. For some, including Cheikh Anta Diop, who found themselves and their ideas marginalized in this adapted version of French higher education, the University of Dakar remained a site of frustration and only limited possibilities. Reciprocity lay at the heart of Senghor’s philosophical and political vision for an ongoing post-colonial relationship between France and Senegal. The Sorbonne and the Université de Dakar were two theatres in which that idea could be tested. The subsequent history of the Université de Dakar suggests that it has continued to grapple with the material realities of the theoretical task set by the country’s former president. The decolonization of the university, in terms of administrative structures, curricula and pedagogy, has been hampered over the past forty years by the material consequences of rising student numbers, limited budgets and the consequences of World Bank aid packages (Leney, 2003: 484–91). To understand the Sorbonne as a ‘postcolonial realm of memory’ – under the remit of the current volume – requires reflection on the possibility of an active, decolonizing realm of memory. In a recent article sparked by student protests in South Africa and the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall campaigns, Achille Mbembe argues that ‘the decolonization of buildings is not a frivolous issue’ (Mbembe, 2016: 30). He goes on to defend the potential role of universities under the neoliberal climate and in the age of the Anthropocene, stating that these institutions retain the work of shifting and renewing epistemes, vital within a framework of decolonization. Within his discussion of the seemingly intractable role of the university as a system of authority and the promotion of education as a marketable good, we might usefully return to Senghor’s (and Montaigne’s) earlier arguments for education as an enabling form of ‘commerce’ leading to better forms of listening and mutual understanding. This essay has highlighted the need for further self-reflexive excavation of the French university system’s links to empire. The Sorbonne’s connections with France’s colonial past and ‘postcolonial’ present remain relatively unexamined amid recurrent calls to ‘provincialize’

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France and Frenchness. That project might usefully turn to recent and ongoing critical work on the lives and experiences of former students and student associations; the work of staff; material traces in buildings, libraries, archives and student residences. Via the trajectories of two of its most distinguished African alumni, the Sorbonne’s ambivalent role as a symbolic site of intellectual emancipation and institutionalized discipline begins to emerge. That ambivalence had consequences within the well-charted territory of May 68, both in Paris and in Dakar. More significantly, it has had consequences in ongoing epistemic challenges faced by African higher education establishments modelled on the French system. Works Cited Bathily, Abdoulaye, Mamadou Diouf and Mohamed Mbodj. 1995. ‘The Senegalese Student Movement from its Inception to 1989’. In African Studies in Social Movements, edited by Mahmood Mamdani and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, 368–407. Dakar: Codesria. Blum, Françoise, Pierre Guidi and Ophélie Rillon. 2016. Etudiants africains en mouvements: contribution à l’histoire des années 68. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988 [1968]. Homo Academicus. Translated by Peter Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press. Charle, Christophe. 1986. ‘Le Collège de France’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 2 La Nation, edited by Pierre Nora, 389–424. Paris: Gallimard. Conklin, Alice L. 2013. In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. 2011 [2007]. African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude. Translated by Chike Jeffers. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books. Dieng, Amady Aly, 2011. Mémoires d’un étudiant africain. De l’Université de Paris à mon retour au Sénégal (1960–1967). Dakar: CODESRIA. Diop, Alioune. 1956. ‘Discours d’ouverture’. Présence Africaine 8–10 (juin– novembre): 9–19. Fall, A.B. 1960. ‘Cheikh Anta Diop. Docteur ès Lettres’. La Vie Africaine 6 (mars–avril): 9. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1998. Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Leney, Katya. 2003. Decolonization, independence and the politics of higher education in West Africa. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press. M’Backé Diop, Cheikh. 2003. Cheikh Anta Diop: L’homme et l’oeuvre. Paris: Présence Africaine. Mbembe, Achille. 2016. ‘Decolonising the university: New directions’. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1: 29–45. Montaigne, Michel de. 1969 [1580]. ‘De l’institution des enfans’, Essais, Livre I, XXVI, 193–225. Paris: Flammarion. Mudimbe, V.Y. ed. 1992. The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Rice, Louisa, 2013. ‘Between empire and nation: francophone West African students and decolonization’. Atlantic Studies 10, no. 1: 131–47. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1964a. ‘Université de Dakar’. Liberté I, 294–97. Paris: Le Seuil. — 1964b. ‘Sorbonne et négritude’. Liberté I, 315–19. Paris: Le Seuil. wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: James Currey. — 1995. ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’. In The Post-colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 438–42. London and New York: Routledge. Wilder, Gary. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

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The Clamart Salon T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting The Clamart Salon

Essie Robeson was all anticipation as she waited to board the Paris-Montparnasse train. Her destination was the Paris suburb of Clamart. Her goal was to interview Paulette Nardal, a Martinican-born French woman of African origin, and her companion, a black American professor of French from Tuskegee University, Clara Shepard, for an article on the African diaspora in Paris. That article, ‘Black Paris’, would evolve into two separately published articles with the same title in the journal Challenge. The second in the ‘Black Paris’ series, published in June 1936, featured Paulette Nardal. Six miles south-west of the centre of Paris, Clamart in 1932 was a sleepy commune bisected by a forest and famous for its peas. It had enticed painter Henri Matisse to take up residence before the Great War and, in 1962, found itself at the centre of intrigue and turmoil after a botched assassination attempt of French president Charles de Gaulle occurred in the formerly peas aplenty fields that were razed to make way for the urbanized petit Clamart. The historical centre, bas Clamart, had cheaper rents. It was where Nardal and her two sisters, Jeanne, sometimes called Jane, and Andrée, lived, worked on a bilingual journal called The Review of the Black World (La Revue du monde noir) and hosted an intellectual salon. It was there, at 7 rue Hébert, that Essie collected back issues of The Review and also subscribed to the journal. It was also there that Essie Robeson would make history twice over: first by titling her ethnography of the African diaspora in the City of Light ‘Black Paris’, a turn of phrase and concept that had yet to be inaugurated in print, and second by introducing scholars in her second instalment of ‘Black Paris’ to the Nardals’ Sunday afternoon Clamart salon.

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The 1992 reissued edition of The Review of the Black World by Jean-Michel Place contained within it even more insight into the Clamart salon courtesy of a prefatory note by one of the salon’s attendants and the Nardals’ cousin, Louis-Thomas Achille: A dominant feminine mood ruled the tone and rituals of these convivial afternoons, not at all like a business circle or a masculine club. The furniture of the two connecting rooms, the living room and the dining room, did not reproduce in any way the décor of a salon of the traditional bourgeoisie of France or of the Antilles. Some English armchairs, airy, comfortable and light, furnished the accommodations for the conversation, which took place rather naturally also in English. There was neither wine, nor beer, nor French cider, nor whiskey, nor exotic coffee, nor even creole ti-punch to refresh the throat. Only English tea cut into these meetings, which never went beyond the dinner hour. (Achille, 1992: xv)

The Clamart salon was representative of a black cosmopolitanism, a ‘[c]olored cosmopolitanism’ that ‘was increasingly defined and redefined by women’ (Slate, 2012: 91), with its erudite multinational guest list who conversed on local and world events and racial antagonisms. The salon followed and yet forged its own path in the sociocultural history of European literary salons hosted by women. Dena Goodman’s The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment notes the centrality of women in salon culture of the eighteenth century, from which the sœurs Nardal would have drawn historical and cultural inspiration in theory and practice, despite the Clamart salon’s Anglophonic mode of expression, refreshments and even décor: The practices of intellectual sociability and discourse which defined the Enlightenment Republic of Letters were grounded in cultural and epistemological assumptions shared by those who considered themselves to be citizens of that republic. […] By the eighteenth century, French men of letters had come to identify French culture with sociability and sociability with the polite society of men and women referred to as le monde or la bonne compagnie. They viewed their own culture as the best in the world because the most sociable and most polite[,] it had reached the highest point civilization had yet attained. Women were central to their understanding of sociability and civilization. […] Her role as civilizer was the historical key to the realization of sociability and civilization. In the civilized world of the Republic of Letters, she was both the basis of social order and the governor of its discourse. (Goodman, 1994: 3, 5–6)

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Goodman also discusses the importance of the discourse of conviviality as a function of sociability within le monde and among la bonne compagnie. Women in particular were associated with conviviality, a hallmark of human achievement and the linchpins of civilization (Goodman, 1994: 4). Achille too immediately references conviviality in his reminiscences of the Clamart salon and its atmosphere of civility and companionability – traits that were considered distinctly feminine and therefore most suitable for salon culture. That three black Antillean women, Andrée, Jane and Paulette, helmed the Clamart salon was, though, necessarily a departure from the typical salonnières of the ‘age of conversation’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Craveri, 2005). Scrupulously paying attention to the customs of politesse and avoidance of, as Achille notes, ‘personal politics’, the salon did indulge in politics of the racial variety, more specifically. While eighteenth-century dictums of salon culture and women’s role in public and political culture attempted to curtail women’s activities in such realms, the Clamart salon, like that of Madame de Staël’s, who followed in the footsteps of her salonnière mother, Madame Suzanne Necker, dabbled in both and usually through the prism of literary culture. As a primarily African diasporic salon in the belly of colonialist politics and European imperialism, and in the long shadow of the Great War of 1914–18, and whose illustrious visitors included none other than the easily roused to testiness author René Maran, who wrote a problematic but nonetheless provocative denunciation of French colonial policy in Africa three years before André Gide’s equally finger-pointing Voyage au Congo, adherence to an apolitical script would have been nearly impossible. The sisters themselves had been roused to race consciousness via their studies and participation/publications in scores of colonial-reformists journals such as La Dépêche africaine. Jane wrote to Alain Locke of her particularly heightened race consciousness after witnessing Anna Julia Cooper’s dissertation defence on the Haitian Revolution at the Sorbonne. And yet the Clamart salon emerged differently from past and even contemporary salons of Americans such as Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney in their choice of refreshments. Stein indulged in wine, while Barney preferred whiskey. English tea carried the afternoon at 7 rue Hébert, which probably had more to do with each of the sisters passing time in the British West Indies learning English, where they would have become habituated to British tea time while developing their ideas about black middle-class Antillean women’s propriety and Catholic principles.

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Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique to educated, middleclass parents, Louise Achille and Paul Nardal, Andrée, Jane and Paulette represented three of the seven Nardal sisters – all especially accomplished. The sœurs Nardal were descended from a line of bold women who took courageous steps towards personal and social equality and freedom. Their paternal great grandmother walked into a local French municipal office in Martinique to claim her and her five children’s new status of citizens of France in 1850, two years after abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Blending their Catholicism with their social activism and race consciousness, Jane and Paulette also belonged to the Union Féminine Civique et Sociale (UFCS), a moderate organization with religious principles. Paulette published in the organization’s journal, le Cerf. Throughout the late 1920s and through to the mid-1930s the sisters published in a variety of journals and newspapers, where their particular brand of race consciousness – one that heralded race pride, reclaimed Africa, celebrated Pan-black cultural expressivity and still managed to possess a surfeit of bonhomie regarding their ethnic and cultural French identity – were on display. As has been explored in depth elsewhere, the Nardal sisters’ salon, as well as the writings of Jane and Paulette, are representative precursors to the New Negro movement in the French context that would become known as Négritude and was associated with Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Boittin, 2010; Edwards, 2003; Sharpley-Whiting, 2002). Jane Nardal’s ‘Black Internationalism’ (1928) and Paulette Nardal’s ‘The Awakening of Race Consciousness among Black Students’ (1932) in particular are iconic essays that engage, among other things, class, identity, a reclamation of Africa as Europe’s artistic, cultural and intellectual compeer, gender and race consciousness. Of the two sisters, Paulette Nardal would also go on to write several short stories, of which ‘In Exile’ (1929) both encapsulates concepts that would later become associated with Négritude and precedes Frantz Fanon’s meditations on black subjectivity in his first published work, Black Skin, White Masks. In the seminal chapter ‘The Fact of Blackness’ Fanon writes: And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. (Fanon, 1967: 110)

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Arriving in Lyon to study and later in Paris, fellow Martinican Fanon ruminates some twenty-three years after Paulette Nardal on recognition and misrecognition, on how the black body is fragmented, reconfigured, objectified in the ‘white man’s eyes’ such that it is not recognizable even to the black subject. Fanon too experiences the feeling of non-belonging, social exclusion and exilic existence that Nardal attempts to capture in her short story, whose protagonist Elisa is an elderly, workaday Antillean domestic in Paris. Fanon’s famous declaration, ‘Look a Negro’ is ‘Oh! What a beautiful blond!’ (116) in Nardal’s ‘In Exile’. Both are distortions of the black subject in the ‘colonial metropolis’. Unlike Fanon’s narrator, who laments these attempts to alienate him from himself, who understandably chafes at his body being handed back to him in ‘a thousand details, anecdotes, stories’ (111), Elisa is ‘indifferent’ to the racist–sexist joke by the young white men, yet no less disillusioned by the ‘mirage of Paris’ (117), a cosmopolitan city that held out promises of economic opportunity – and, thus, social mobility, recognition and fraternité. Our educated narrator, whose hopes were dashed by the ‘mirage of Paris’ and tortured by the distance between French assimilationist rhetoric and deeply racialist daily practices, turns to the Negritude poets Victor Schœlcher, Maurice Delafosse, Leo Frobenius and others to ground him in the bounty of Africa’s rich cultural and historical legacies. Elisa’s simple reveries of Martinique, on the other hand, already account for ‘African tales adapted to the Antillean soul’ and the ‘soul of old Africa’ passing into an ‘Antillean tom-tom’ (116–17). And yet, like Fanon’s narrator, the ‘weight of [Elisa’s] existence falls back more heavily on her shoulders’ when the ‘veils of her reverie’ are lifted and ‘the reality’ of ‘strained faces’, ‘hard eyes’ and ‘closed or indifferent physiognomies of whites’ bear down on her (118). If the Clamart salon stayed within the boundaries of conviviality while dipping over into internationalist and racial subjects as engaged citizens of the Republic, Nardal’s ‘In Exile’, published in La Dépêche africaine – a journal that was more ‘mend it don’t end it’ with respect to the French colonial enterprise – managed to veil her criticism of white French racism in a story on exile and all of its attendant feelings of non-belonging/belonging with an ironic twist. Though the 1946 ‘oui’ to departmentalization was still seventeen years off in its articulation, at the heart of ‘In Exile’ is an attempt to address/redress questions of citizenship, immigration, class, gender and Antillean identity. In effect, Martinicans are French and therefore should belong. Martinique may

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be the pays natal, but France is the mère patrie. And yet they are exiles abroad in a place that should feel like a home away from home because of their lived experiences in France as blacks. Therein lies the cleverness of Nardal’s use of the literary devices of irony, point of view (Elisa’s), characterization, dialect, theme and tone, as well as the selection of the short story as the canvas upon which she deftly sketches these conflicts. The progressive and critical undertones of Nardal’s fiction, like those existent in the Clamart salon, which led to the founding of a bilingual journal, have been consistently undercut by biases toward more masculinist expressions of political culture. The conventions and civility that characterized the Clamart salon have led to depictions of the salon as bourgeois and apolitical (Hymans, 1971; Sharpley-Whiting, 2002), despite Louis Achille’s descriptive claims against such a portrayal. And Nardal’s fiction lacked, in her own words, the ‘flash and brio’ (Hymans, 1971: 36) associated with the poetic literary productions of Césaire, Damas and Senghor. The subtlety of Nardal’s critiques was overshadowed by the brazenness of the youthful chorus. This seeming absence of boldness trumped the Negritude seedlings contained within her admittedly thinner archive of creative works. Genealogical remappings of Negritude historiography have been central to a good deal of scholarly work on the movement and recuperation of the sœurs Nardal. As literary production – particularly works of fiction and poetry versus creative nonfiction – has become, for critics, the primary source for articulations of Negritude in the 1930s–1950s, what remains for scholars in the next frontier in sourcing Negritude is more in-depth probing of the sœurs Nardals’ creative literary output. A second tripartite task at hand involves connecting the Clamart salon to the larger project of rethinking France’s national past and the salon as a ‘lieux de memoire’, or site of memory, in the context of that French past, locating the salon and the sœurs Nardal in the long and rich history of Black France, more specifically, and situating the salon and its varied conversations in the broader ethos of race consciousness emergent in the Black Atlantic world of its time, as theoretically articulated by art historian Robert F. Thompson (1983) and popularized by Paul Gilroy (1995). Such interventions would serve as a corrective to Pierre Nora’s multivolume collection Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92), which not only purges France’s national past of its imperial conquests and colonial encounters and thus, subsequently, those French sites of memory – cities, monuments, museums, novels, salons and so on associated with that past – but of the black presence, in particular, for our

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purposes. Likewise, Marc Fumaroli’s essay on French salon culture, ‘La Conversation’, included in Nora’s volume on French traditions, also excludes the Clamart salon as a site memorializing the French past and national identity and culture. In our present moment of mining Black French sites of memory, most impressively carried out in historical sociologist Karen Field’s visually stunning and recuperative documentary film project Black Bordeaux (2004), other such critical interventions to the national narrative would also highlight the Clamart salon’s role as ground zero for debates about the multilayered identity that is Frenchness. The sœurs Nardal and subsequently the Clamart salon are spectral hauntings in these various narratives of the French past and present. Their inclusion, though, would provide a more expansive understanding of Frenchness and the gender-inclusive meanings of blackness in the French context. Works Cited Achille, Louis-Thomas. 1992. Preface to La Revue du monde noir/The Review of the Black World, vii–xvii. Paris: Jean-Michel Place. Boittin, Jennifer. 2010. Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Craveri, Benedetta. 2005. The Age of Conversation. New York: New York Review of Books. Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2003. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Fields, Karen. 2004. Black Bordeaux. Work in progress. Fumaroli, Marc. 1992. ‘La Conversation’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora, vol. 3, 679–743. Paris: Gallimard. Gilroy, Paul. 1995. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodman, Dena. 1994. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hymans, Jacques Louis. 1971. Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nardal, Jane. 1928. ‘Internationalisme noir’. La Dépêche africaine, 15 February. Nardal, Paulette. 1929. ‘In Exile’. La Dépêche africaine, 15 December.

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— 1932. ‘L’Eveil de la conscience de race chez les etudiants noirs’. La Revue du monde noir, 6 (April): 25–31. Nardal, Paulette, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. 2009. Beyond Negritude: Paulette Nardal and Essays from Woman in the City. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1984–92. Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. ‘President Senghor Says Negroes Have Transcended Chains’. 1966. The Pittsburgh Courier, 15 October. Sharpley-Whiting, T.  Denean. 2002. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Slate, Nico. 2012. Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House.

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Literary Prestige Claire Ducournau Translated from the French by Andrea Lloyd Literary Prestige

Literary prestige surely becomes a site of memory once the name and the work of a writer become established over a long period in popular memory. From writing to recognition, the journey of the author follows different stages that can be prolonged after their death: publication; reception by literary institutions such as the press, prizes and academies; addition to school or university syllabi; posthumous tributes. Maintained by cultural agents, such renown is transmitted through practices and representations ranging from the appearance of scholarly work to the honorary naming of geographical locations, schools, universities, monuments or streets. For this reason, literary recognition comprises a good part of the fourth volume of Les Lieux de mémoire, published in 1986. The second part of this volume starts from the principle that the study of the ‘words’ of the ‘nation’ must necessarily have as its corollary the study of the ‘system of institutions that underpin them, and that maintain their technique, discipline, teaching, celebration and recording’ (Nora, 1986: 319). Following this materialist bias, we nonetheless propose in this essay a postcolonial revisiting of ‘places’ such as the Académie française and scholarly classics – according to both the chronological and adversarial meanings of the term postcolonial. Though the forms of French colonization varied greatly in their intensity and duration, this study re-evaluates, on the one hand, the status of those territories that were politically dominated outside the borders of the Hexagon within such realms of memory, by expanding the edges of the nation as it had been envisioned. Pierre Nora indeed argues that his study brings to light

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the ‘political leadership of language’ (319) that echoes the particularly strict link that exists in France between nation, language and literature. But the price is the omission of the imperial expansion of the republic, including its overseas territories and their inhabitants. Over the long term, the legitimacy of ‘greater France’ – the name widely adopted at the height of imperial expansion under the second French empire at the beginning of the twentieth century – has been at times publicly affirmed, more or less explicitly, and at times rejected, which continually impacts opportunities for positions in the literary arena. On the other hand, this essay highlights the existence of silences and instances of marginalization in national literary heritage, as well as demonstrations of resistance, historical and varied, in the face of this colonial or neocolonial order. The French literary canon is home to a variety of authors who treated the colonial order as a matter not to be questioned, and even vigorously defended. As in the case of Great Britain, analysed by Elleke Boehmer, this textual corpus fed into a social discourse that served the colonial enterprise: it existed alongside administrative treatises, legal decrees, textbooks, newspapers, maps, religious texts and so on, all ‘vehicle[s] of imperial authority’ (2005: 14). Pierre Loti, a member of the Académie Goncourt and then of the Académie française, and one of the few French authors to have been honoured by a state funeral, could not, without his military career that was sustained by the colonial conquests at the end of the nineteenth century, have undertaken the world travel that furnished the material for his literary works. Edward Said groups him alongside Maurice Barrès or Victor Hugo (both honoured as well by national funerals) among the authors who constructed orientalist discourse (Said, 2005: 118–19). Among the explicitly colonial authors, certain were also beneficiaries of official awards. Best known by their pen names Marius-Ary Leblond, Georges Athénas and Aimé Merlo received the Goncourt prize and that of the Académie française for works that postulated the inequality of races and promoted the colonial project. Little remains today of their prolific writings, which are now disregarded by editors and critics (Kapor, 2012: vii–xi): they are nonetheless at the origin of an association that continues to award a dozen literary prizes each year, honoring implicitly, in some of its discourses, such founding figures (Ducournau, 2017). If André Gide denounced the abuses of sugar companies in his 1927 Voyage au Congo, he still validated the colonial system that he merely sought to reform. The anti-colonial positioning adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre, writer of prefaces twenty years later for Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi

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and Léopold Sédar Senghor, while he flourished in a literary scene from which Gide had faded (Boschetti, 1985), attests to a shift: colonization was no longer part of the official republican agenda from the 1960s. That did not prevent it from taking place in certain zones, from Djibouti to Martinique to New Caledonia, or in other forms, notably economic and cultural. The dominance of certain French editors, such as Hatier, in the school textbook market in francophone Sub-Saharan Africa is one example. Official recognition of literary consecration was awarded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to inhabitants of regions colonized or formerly colonized by France, whose geography largely encompasses that of so-called Francophone literature. At first rare for (ex-)colonized authors, it was awarded more often from the turn of the 1990s, and then from the early 2000s with the appearance of, alongside general literary prizes, awards specifically dedicated to overseas and/or francophone authors, exemplified by the RFO book prize (1995–2011) or the five continents of the Francophonie prize (created in 2001). This rhythm and scope distinguish them from authors of the Commonwealth, recognized earlier and more regularly honoured by the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. If the latter was given to Albert Camus in 1957 (born in Algeria to a French father and an impoverished Spanish mother) and in 1960 to Saint-John Perse (born and raised in Guadeloupe in a privileged French milieu), the origins and forms of their socialization make them colonizers more so than colonized, which translates in part into the content of their works. Awarded as early as 1921 to René Maran, the Goncourt was also given to Tahar Ben Jelloun in 1987, to Patrick Chamoiseau in 1992, to Amin Maalouf in 1993 and to Leïla Slimani in 2016. The Renaudot prize went to Édouard Glissant in 1958, Yambo Ouologuem in 1968, René Depestre in 1988, Ahmadou Kourouma, Nina Bouraoui, Alain Mabanckou and Tierno Monénembo in the 2000s and Scholastique Mukasonga in 2012. The Femina prize went to Léonora Miano in 2013 and Yanick Lahens in 2014; the Médicis prize to Dany Laferrière in 2009. The Académie française opened its doors to Senghor in 1983, to Assia Djebar in 2005, to Maalouf in 2011 and to Laferrière in 2013. One must, however, be careful with such an enumeration: the names on this list in no way form a homogeneous group. These authors are firmly distinguished by their literary, geographical and social histories, their nationalities and the places in which they live, and above all by how they define themselves. In connection with the specificity of the French colonial

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influence on their areas of origin, less evident in Lebanon (Maalouf’s country of origin) than in Senegal, for example, their relationship with France varies from adherence to republican universalism via the call for cultural and/or national difference to the rejection of the nation in favour of a different kind of identification, one that is more cosmopolitan, for example. And their public stances, which can evolve over time or according to the context in which they are uttered, are not connected without important mediations to the content of their works, by virtue of the relative autonomy of the literary field, particularly in France, home to a denationalized ‘universal literature’ (Casanova, 2008: 134). These apparent marks of prestige, these events that are at times tarnished by polemics and censorship, such as in the case of Maran and, later, Ouologuem, appear moreover to be determined by certain conditions that, though less visible, are decisive. Three parameters can be highlighted: the place of publication of literary works, the cultural resources of the authors and the wider French political environment. It is not insignificant that Albert Camus and Saint-John Perse are two authors published early by Gallimard – the former after exchanges with André Malraux, the latter after having published his first poems in La Nouvelle Revue Française when the publishing house was first set up. Moreover, these two white men had both, contrary to all the other authors cited above, seen their works published in the prestigious Pléiade collection. The editorial selection processes of the great publishing houses in effect constitutes an important external filter that is duplicated, at the internal level, by access to one or more collections. Hence, since the 1980s, publishing houses and collections specifically reserved for authors from Africa and/or the Caribbean have emerged in France. They appear, as do certain literary prizes, to be differentialist strands, of which some have been denounced as second-rate ghettos that have kept these authors away from less demarcated literary recognition. The second condition relates to the education level and mastery of the French language of these postcolonial authors, both of which are generally high. More often than not polyglots, with skills ranging from Creole to Arabic via Maninka as a result of a multilingual upbringing, they earn their literary prestige in French, with no account taken of the interest of intellectual circles in their writings in other languages. Compared with other authors, well-known writers from francophone Sub-Saharan Africa hold remarkably distinguished university titles (Ducournau, 2017: 295–307).

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Sociopolitical considerations ultimately often play a role in the consecration of these authors. The co-optation of Senghor to the Coupole, which took place at the same time as that of Jacques Soustelle, a former supporter of French Algeria, reveals the conservatism of an institution that is linked to the powers that be, and has for this reason harboured a good number of supporters of colonialism over time, even though no mention is made of this in Les Lieux de mémoire (Fumaroli, 1986). Closed for four centuries to Blacks and women, the Académie opened up to the laureates of these dominated social groups as a result of political shifts and the development, in 1981, of a new politics of culture. As for Césaire’s national funeral in 2008, which added him to the small handful of similarly honoured authors, it seems to have righted a series of prior political wrongs, notably the diplomatic gaffe that was the lack of attention paid to Senghor’s death, followed by the 2005 law on the positive role of colonization and Sarkozy’s 2007 speech in Dakar in an international context marked by the popularity of Barack Obama and by a positive discourse on multiculturalism (Moudileno, 2011: 64–67). This exposes a form of instrumentalization of exceptional cases, in contrast with the generally weak recognition of this literature in those places that are more decisive in the edification and transmission of a legitimate memory (Miano, 2012: 134–39). Even if it is never the root cause of an author’s success, the integration of authors into school and university curricula renders their consecration ‘supreme’ by making it more visible: this constitutes the ‘most coveted and above all most “profitable” posthumous existence’, above all because curricula have been centralized in France since the nineteenth century (Milo, 1986: 517–19). While French publishers produce ‘classics’ destined for education programmes in former colonies, the literary works in question are far from being considered as such in France itself (Ducournau, 2017), where the presence of postcolonial authors in the pedagogical system has remained rare. Senghor’s poetry was placed on the baccalaureate programme and then that of the agrégation for the Humanities after his election to the Académie française in the 1980s; Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma and Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances were included in the exams of the École normale supérieure in Lyon in 2009 and 2012; and Césaire was chosen alongside Akhmatova, Hikmet and Neruda in 2009–10 for the comparative literature exam of the modern literature agrégation. In 1993 Discours sur le colonialisme was placed on the final-year high school syllabus, but it was removed after one year on the pretext that the teachers were not sufficiently trained to

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tackle such texts. For Christiane Chaulet-Achour, the scholar behind a Dictionnaire des écrivains francophones des sud-s, promoting these authors equates to a ‘passion and sometimes a militantism’ (2015: 118). If the cultural power of the school, whose programmes have lost some of their conservatism following the 1970s, has weakened over the long term (Milo, 1986: 550–56), this low level of representation allows for neither a shared knowledge of the colonial past nor a collective reinvestment in the affects and emotions linked to its memory. Symbols of consecration are, moreover, concentrated on a small number of authors, to the detriment of other figures sometimes better known outside France, such as Maryse Condé, Calixthe Beyala, Mongo Beti or Sembène Ousmane, who are all studied more in American than French universities. An author such as Léon Gontran Damas was regularly eclipsed by the focus on the other two representatives of Negritude, Césaire and Senghor. It is interesting to interrogate the reasons for such discrepancies: along with patterns of publication of texts by certain authors – less readily available (Sylvain Bemba or Yodi Karone) – that are at times erratic, ephemeral or fragmented, modes of reception are in play, the price of which the authors pay, adapting with varying degrees of success to the games of the media and francophone institutions. The aesthetic or ethical content of their works also lend themselves to the expectations of legitimizing bodies that can prove favourable to amusement or appeasement, or to typical representations of minority groups, in a literary field that has been depoliticized since the 1970s. Authors from (formerly) colonized territories have regularly demonstrated their resistance to this dominant order – generally a posteriori for the most consecrated. They question the genesis and presuppositions of French citizenship, the importance of the French language, silences surrounding slavery and colonization, or literary hierarchies that are not free from racism. Alain Mabanckou was in 2016 the first writer elected to the chair of artistic creation of the Collège de France, a place of ‘edification of an intellectual counter-power’, favourable to innovation, to the contesting of tradition and to foreigners (Charle, 1986: 389–91). Mabanckou does not hesitate to tackle head-on the French colonial and slave past or the influence of publishers on the choice of covers for books by African authors, and to support the claim of these authors to be French, but also Congolese, Senegalese, Haitian or African-American (Mabanckou, 2016). The rite of the visit to the great writer, illustrated in Les Lieux de mémoire by that of the brothers Jean and Jérôme Tharaud, supporters

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of colonization and commercially successful authors, to the nationalist writer Barrès (Nora, 1986: 563), in fact takes place in a specific manner for postcolonial authors. They claim their own icons, Césaire, Kourouma or Labou Tansi, or their own genealogies, such as a seat that is more ‘American’ than French granted to Laferrière, who, elected after Barrès and the Tharaud brothers to the Académie française, praised the ‘wounded earth’ of Haiti and Alexandre Dumas, grandfather, father and son (Laferrière, 2015). From one literary generation to another, a line of mutual respect links Chamoiseau to Glissant in Martinique. Their shared reflection has called into question the foundations and the definition of the French nation, the cause of ‘disasters’ when it follows a ‘rigid and exclusive identity imperative’ (Glissant and Chamoiseau, 2007: 3), and has promoted the connection and passage of borders. Borrowing the musical term ‘afropean’, Miano also makes the border a ‘space of connection’ to be inhabited as a means of distinguishing between neighborhood, continent and diaspora on a geographic scale other than the nation, which is denounced as ‘intrinsically bellicose’ for its amnesia and implicit exclusions (Miano, 2012: 82–85). Works Cited Boehmer, Elleke. 2005. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boschetti, Anna. 1985. Sartre et Les Temps Modernes : une entreprise intellectuelle. Paris: Minuit. Casanova, Pascale. 2008. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil. Charle, Christophe. 1986. ‘Le Collège de France’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 2: La Nation, edited by Pierre Nora, 388–423. Paris: Gallimard. Chaulet-Achour, Christiane. 2015. ‘Le Dictionnaire des écrivains francophones des Sud-s: le projet, sa réalisation, échos premiers de sa réception’. In Classique ou francophone? De la notion de classique appliquée aux œuvres francophones, edited by Corinne Blanchaud, 117–27. Cergy-Pontoise, Amiens: Centre de recherche textes et francophonies, Belles Lettres. Ducournau, Claire. 2017. La Fabrique des classiques africains. Écrivains d’Afrique subsaharienne francophone (1960–2012). Paris: CNRS éditions. Fumaroli, Marc. 1986. ‘La Coupole’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 2: La Nation, edited by Pierre Nora, 321–88. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard, and Patrick Chamoiseau. 2007. Quand les murs tombent. L’identité nationale hors-la-loi? Paris: Galaade Éditions.

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Kapor, Vladimir. 2012. ‘Introduction: apologistes de la grande France des lettres’. In Écrits sur la littérature coloniale, Marius-Ary Leblond, vii–xxxi. Paris: L’Harmattan. Laferrière, Dany. 2015. ‘Discours de réception à l’Académie française’. 28 May 2015. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-receptionde-dany-laferriere. Mabanckou, Alain. 2016. ‘Leçon inaugurale. Lettres noires: des ténèbres à la lumière’. 17 March 2016. http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/alainmabanckou/inaugural-lecture-2016–03–17–18h00.htm. Miano, Léonora. 2012. Habiter la frontière. Paris: L’Arche. Milo, Daniel. 1986. ‘Les Classiques scolaires’. Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 2: La Nation, edited by Pierre Nora, 517–62. Paris: Gallimard. Moudileno, Lydie. 2011. ‘Fame, Celebrity, and the Conditions of Visibility of the Postcolonial Writer’. Yale French Studies 120: 62–74. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1986. Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 2: La Nation. Paris: Gallimard. Said, Edward. 2005 [1978]. L’Orientalisme. L’Orient créé par l’Occident. Translated by Catherine Malamoud and Claude Wauthier. Paris: Seuil.

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Territory

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Regions/Province Kate Marsh Regions/Province

In a speech given on 23 February 1900 at a conference held at the Société d’économie politique de Lyon, the industrialist Ulysse Pila – known as the ‘vice-roi d’Indochine’ for his successful pursuit of markets in the South China Sea – stressed the economic ties forged between various localities in metropolitan France and different overseas colonies: Ainsi, c’est Marseille qui a le plus de rapports avec nos établissements de l’Afrique occidentale. Et Lyon, pour des raisons que tout le monde connaît, regarde de préférence les pays d’Extrême-Orient, Bordeaux, le Havre, Rouen ont aussi leurs relations. (1900: 29) [It is Marseille that is the most connected with our West African institutions. Lyon, for the reasons we all know, looks primarily towards the countries of the Far East, and Bordeaux, Le Havre and Rouen also have their own particular connections.]

Pila’s aim in mapping out the specific colonial relationships enjoyed by different metropolitan towns, départements and regions was to accentuate his argument that France needed a network of colonial schools across France that would train not only administrators for France’s overseas empire, as did the École coloniale (created in Paris in 1889), but also businessmen and fonctionnaires [civil servants] with the requisite skills to make the empire an economic success. To this end, on 20 November 1899 the École coloniale de Lyon had held its first classes in the meeting room of the Lyon Palais du Commerce (Klein, 2006: 148), the École being the result of a concerted effort by a group of Lyonnais manufacturers, including Pila, to develop markets in South-East Asia and to train a group of young men able to launch such markets – a development for which Laffey coined the

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phrase ‘municipal imperialism’ (Laffey, 1974, 1975). Other provincial chambers of commerce rapidly followed the Lyon example: écoles coloniales were established in Marseille (1900), Bordeaux, Nantes and Nancy (1902), Le Havre (1908) and, for a short while, Montpellier (1931) (Morando, 2004: 274). Colonial sections were also added to existing commercial schools in Clermont-Ferrand (on the initiative of the departmental préfet [prefect], who was a former chef de cabinet du gouverneur général de l’Indochine [chief of staff of Indochina’s governor general]) in 1920, in Mulhouse in 1920 and in Alger in 1931 (Singaravélou, 2011: 60). Regions in metropolitan France were connected materially and affectively with overseas territories in various ways, in what became known as la plus grande France [Greater France]. These included specific commercial links with lands overseas, as was the case of the silk trade in Lyon; the creation of missionary societies; the actions of political figures, as in Clermont-Ferrand; and the activities of other local individuals who played an important role in either developing the empire economically or promoting des connaissances coloniales [colonial knowledge] (such as Jules Charles-Roux in Marseille, Edouard Aynard and Ulysse Pila in Lyon, Jules Siegfried in Le Havre and Emile Maurel in Bordeaux). If, for an earlier generation of researchers, the received idea about French imperial consciousness was that it was shallower than British imperial consciousness and that it was geographically specific – restricted to areas such as ports, which had trade links with certain colonies or garrison towns – recent research has overturned this idée reçue.1 Focusing on ‘regionalist imperialism’ under the Third Republic (Aldrich, 2015: 180), such work has included histories of locations with obvious geographical links with colonies (Bordeaux (Bourkata, 2004), Marseille (Lewis, 2002), Le Havre (Malon, 2006)) as well as areas with less explicit connections (Limousin (Grondin, 2011), Rennes (Godin, 2007)); alongside research into the promotion of the ‘colonial idea’ through the exhibitions, geographical societies (Goerg, 2002) and associations (the ‘sociabilité savante’ (Grondin)) that thrived under the Third Republic it demonstrates that, as Aldrich asserted in 2005, ‘the history of the provinces cannot be completely understood without some reference to the place of the colonies in their past’ (2005: 104). The uncovering of connections between provincial towns and France’s overseas territories has generated a new historiography that 1 For a discussion of this idée reçue, see Hargreaves, 2005: 2.

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emphasizes the imbrication of republicanism and colonialism.2 At the same time, postcolonial scholars have shown how towns across France are impregnated with references to colonial history. These range from specific monuments, such as the Maison de la Négritude et des Droits de l’Homme in the small town of Champagney (Haute-Saône), which opened in 1995 and is a lieu de mémoire of the Atlantic slave trade and a memorial to the protest registered by the inhabitants of the village against the practice in 1789 (Aldrich, 2005: 101–04), to street names, such as those in the landlocked and historically infamous spa town of Vichy, whose urban geography inscribes France’s colonies in the Maghreb (rue d’Alger, rue de Constantine) and key colonial administrators (with streets named after Maréchal Lyautey, Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny, and Maréchal Gallieni). 3 These physical lieux de mémoire serve to memorialize the history of French colonizers and colonialism, and inevitably evoke only part of France’s colonial history; as Chamoiseau has warned with reference to the majority of colonial monuments in the Antilles, ‘L’Histoire, la Mémoire et le Monument magnifient, ou exaltent (du haut de leur majuscule), le crime que la Chronique coloniale a légitimé’ [History, Memory and Monuments glorify, or exalt (with their capital letters), the crime legitimized by the chronicle of colonial empire] (Chamoiseau and Hammadi, 1994: 14–15). Focusing on another material site – departmental archives – it is the aim here to elucidate how these lieux de memoire, established in part to document local imperialism from the perspective of la France colonisatrice, embody what Nora terms the ‘dialectic of remembering and forgetting’, housing that which is ‘susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived’ (1989: 8). In exploring what departmental archives reveal about local interactions with the colonies – whether this interaction be in the form of exhibitions (held in Lyon in 1894, Rouen in 1896, Marseille in 1906 and 1922, Bordeaux in 1923 and Strasbourg in 1924) or via the institutions of republican France (education, associations and colonial trials) – these lieux de mémoire not only allow an exploration of changing reactions to vestiges of the colonial past but also show that the production of colonial knowledge was not simply the 2 See, for example, Wilder (2005), who emphasizes the interplay between universality and particularity and encourages a reviewing of former arguments about the apparent contradictions between the promises of republican universalism and the realities of the colonial project; and Schaub (2008). 3 http://www.ruesdemaville.com/VILLES_03/page_ville_1391.htm.

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result of Jacobin centralization. It was not unidirectional from Paris to the provinces; rather, it was locally specific in its form and its generation, and, as in the case of the regional écoles coloniales advocated by Pila, it presented a deliberate challenge to the perceived monopoly of Paris on colonial education (Morando, 2004: 277). Historians have contested the totalizing myth of French centralization, accentuating instead how the French state was formed not only by centralizing Parisian forces but also by competing loyalties to village, region and nation (Ford, 1998; Gerson, 2003). Studies that have systematically investigated municipal and regional responses to la plus grande France have revealed the role played by empire in shaping the republic. The discourse of ‘regions’ in France is, however, ambiguous – referring, as Revel has argued, to a marker that is at once administrative, geographic and historical (1997: 2931–32). The creation of départements in France after the Revolution was designed to erase the provinces and regions of the Ancien régime and their political affinities, but slippage and overlap between the new nomenclature of départements, the continuing tendency to identify with the older provincial localities and the additional layer of administrative terminology as the départements were grouped into regions meant that ‘regions’ could refer to a range of territories. Discussion of ‘regional’ identities could be divisive under the Third Republic, and is still so under the Fifth Republic – as attested by the heated debates over the names of the thirteen new regions that were created as part of the territorial reform that came into effect on 1 January 2016 (Roger, 2016: 7). Given changing regional boundaries between 1870 and 2016, and the flexibility of the term ‘region’ in French, region here is understood as locality – a département, a town or a larger area – that is defined, and defines itself, as having distinct characteristics. Centralized promotion of France’s colonial mission developed throughout the Third Republic, gathering particular momentum in the 1930s and later under the État français. In February 1933, for example, the Ministre de l’Intérieur wrote to all préfets stressing the need for the intensification ‘à travers le pays’ [throughout the country] of all colonial propaganda to ensure that the results obtained in proliferating the idea of empire during the 1931 Exposition coloniale did not cease (ADSM, 2 Z 109: 19 January 1933). While this was to involve ‘top-down’ initiatives, such as the Semaine Coloniale Française (the first of which was held in May 1934), the centrally organized campaign was reliant upon local actions and the plethora of pro-colonial groups that could be utilized. In Seine-Inférieure, for example, a département that boasted

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the major Atlantic port of Le Havre, the préfet noted that, in addition to the Ligue d’action coloniale and the Institut colonial in Le Havre, the Ligue Maritime et Coloniale in Fécamp could be mobilized (ADSM, 2 Z 109: 2  March 1933). Under the État français an imperial fortnight was organized in May 1942, with the aim of promoting the colonies and strengthening the links between the overseas territories and regions of France (ADSM, 2 Z 109: 18 February 1942); activities included an exhibition train that visited fifteen university towns in the occupied and unoccupied zones (ADSM, 2 Z 109: 27 April 1942). The Semaine Coloniale Française was conceived nationally, but the accompanying exhibitions and events had a local inflection and promoted, via films and conferences, the specific colonial connections between towns, départements, regions and provinces.4 Ports and other provincial locations with clear economic, military or demographic links with the empire are not lacking in physical lieux de mémoire that establish the embedding of colonialism within republicanism. For Aldrich, it is the Midi where colonial memory is most ‘nourished’, not only as a result of the geographic proximity of the region to French North Africa but also as direct result of the arrival and settling of rapatriés in the wake of decolonization and large numbers of travailleurs immigrés [immigrant workers] (2005: 91). But departmental archives throughout France reveal that affective links with the empire were forged by the sociabilité savante [scholarly sociability] that thrived under the Third Republic. Colonial organizations and associations were part of the networks of polite culture that developed at the end of the nineteenth century (Fox, 1980). Geographical societies that, following the creation of the Société de Géographie de Paris in 1821, appeared in a number of provincial cities after the defeat of 1870 are a prime example of this, headed by Lyon (1873), Bordeaux (1874) and Marseille (1875). While not exclusively ‘colonial’, their journals, which published reports and accounts of journeys covering the entire planet, contributed actively to the dissemination of colonial knowledge. By 1890 they had approximately 16,000 members across France (Clout, 2008: 25). As the popularity of geographical societies declined after 4 The Institut Colonial du Havre: Bulletin Mensuel (June 1937), for example, reported that screenings of colonial films featuring goods that were imported through Le Havre had been held in local cinemas ‘Le Select’ and the ‘Nouvel Empire’, with, in the case of the latter, the auditorium not being of an adequate size to seat the 1,000 attendees (43).

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1900, Instituts coloniaux developed, frequently linked with colonial museums (Bordeaux, Marseille) and schools (Le Havre) and funded by local chambers of commerce. As the Director of the Institut colonial du Havre pointed out to the préfet of Seine-Inférieure in February 1933, the Institut (created in 1929 and receiving subventions from the département and the town council) not only ensured that colonial education was encouraged in the Havrais region but also served an economic function: the Institut actively promoted the colonial goods (particularly cotton and coffee) that were imported through Le Havre (ADSM, 2 Z 109: 2 February 1933). Indeed, the École pratique coloniale du Havre, which opened in 1908, had been founded under the auspices of the Association Cotonnière Coloniale, with the support of the Ministère du Commerce, the Ministère des Colonies, the Gouvernements généraux de l’Afrique occidentale française et de l’Indochine and the Municipalité and the Chambre de Commerce du Havre, and prided itself on training young workers in the production of cotton. Just as Lyon’s École coloniale specialized in producing young men ideally suited to deal with the silk markets of Indochina and the China seas, where Lyon industrialists saw their future, so colonial education in Le Havre, Nancy, Nantes and Bordeaux was moulded by local economic interests (Morando, 2004: 280–81). Colonial propaganda was integrated into discourses of local identity but served also as a means of promoting local interests. As historians have noted, these provincial networks, which provided the bedrock of Ageron’s parti colonial, largely disappeared from collective memory after decolonization (1978). And yet this local colonial history has been ‘hidden in plain sight’ in departmental archives across France. All departmental archival catalogues contain the category ‘colonial propaganda’ (invariably under the classification ‘M’: Archives modernes). As historians have revisited these archives as a means of uncovering forgotten histories of regional and municipal imperialism, the material archives have become symbolic lieux de mémoire: places where, when documents are read against the grain, alternative experiences of colonialism can be laid bare – or, in the words of Said, used to uncover ‘both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it’ (1994: 79). 5 5 Said advocated ‘contrapuntal reading’ of texts so that ‘both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it’ should be taken into account, thus ‘extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded – in L’Etranger, for example, the whole previous history of France’s colonialism and

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A pertinent example of how local archives can be used to reveal not only the transformation of their role over time but also the problematic nature of lieux de mémoire is the history of a colonial trial held in Nantes in 1931. On the eightieth anniversary of the opening of an extraordinary session of the cour d’assises in Nantes for the trial of twelve men and two women, the departmental archives of Loire-Atlantique staged a four-month-long exhibition entitled ‘Le Procès des Insurgés de Cayenne’ [The Cayenne Insurgents’ Trial]. The fourteen defendants, all French citizens from Guyane, were accused of looting and murder during riots that had taken place on 6 and 7 August 1928 in Cayenne and over the course of which six men had been killed.6 On 21 March all fourteen were acquitted. The riots had broken out following the sudden death of Jean Galmot, a populist politician, in the wake of flagrant electoral fraud in the legislative elections of April 1928 that had seen his candidate blocked from victory despite a majority vote. Although investigations into the subsequent riots, in which an estimated 10,000 people took part, began in Cayenne, the trial was moved to Nantes for security reasons. The story of the fourteen proved to be ‘un oubli de l’histoire’ [a historical blind spot], and the trial dossiers held by the departmental archives of Loire-Atlantique were unknown until 2006 (Marsh, 2015).7 Alongside the exhibition itself there was a series of cultural and academic events, including an academic conference, hosted in partnership with Nantes university; a music concert dedicated to musique aléké, the music of Guyane; and cinema screenings, notably of the documentary by Barcha Bauer and André Bendjebbar, ‘Les insurgés de Cayenne: Le premier procès colonial à Nantes’, first broadcast by France 5 on 21 March 2010. As Patrick Mareschal (then président of the Conseil-Général de la Loire-Atlantique) explained in the editorial to the exhibition guide, the aim of the exhibition at the archives was to tell the forgotten story: ‘une histoire d’injustices et de droit, où la loi a été bafouée, où des vies ont été prises, où la parole des avocats a fait its destruction of the Algerian state, and the later emergence of an independent Algeria (which Camus opposed)’ (1994: 78–79). 6 The ‘Registre d’Ecrou’ at the Prison de Nantes, where the defendants were transferred on 7 October 1930, records that Hibade, Lamer, Thiberon, Mathur, Mustapha, Mondor, Rosemond, Hauradou, Flambant, Concel, Soyon and Frédusse were accused of ‘complicité d’assassinat’ [complicity to murder]; Iqui and Radical were accused of ‘pillage’ [looting] (ADLA, 2 Y 284: 53–60). 7 The trial is largely overlooked in recent scholarship, either reduced to Monnerville’s plaidoirie (Wilder, 2005: 170) or subsumed under the story of Monnerville and misdated (Marshall, 2009: 238).

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s’exprimer la solidarité républicaine entre métropole et Guyane, entre ville au passé négrier et colonie atlantique’ [a story of injustice and rights, where the law was flouted, where lives were taken, where republican solidarity between the metropole and French Guiana, between a town with a slave trade past and a colony in the Atlantic, was heard through the words of lawyers] (2011: 2). Taking place during the year-long programme of events designed by Sarkozy’s government to spotlight France’s overseas territories (the Année des outre-mer), the exhibition coincided regionally with the ‘fraternité’ exhibition, the third in a triptych organized by the conseil général de Loire-Atlantique since 2005 on the devise républicaine, and was staged a year before the port’s Mémorial de l’abolition d’esclavage de Nantes was finally inaugurated (Loire Atlantique Conseil general, 2011). In his editorial, Mareschal, connecting the history of the trial to the other exhibitions staged by Loire-Atlantique on the devise républicaine, inscribed the trial within a republican narrative, calling it ‘une leçon d’histoire’ [a history lesson]: ‘Le Conseil général de Loire-Atlantique a à cœur de l’exposer, en écho aux manifestations qu’il a conçues autour de la devise républicaine, pour que ses valeurs soient toujours aussi présentes chez nos compatriotes et contemporains’ [The Loire-Atlantic departmental council wishes to exhibit it, as an echo to the events organized around the republican motto, so that its values may persist among our compatriots and contemporaries] (2011: 2). This universalizing and conciliatory message about the importance for the twenty-first century of recovering the forgotten story of the Guyanese fourteen was adopted elsewhere. In the press pack accompanying the 2010 documentary the director, Bauer, similarly stressed how ‘Ce procès fut un détonateur mettant en lumière les carences de la République sur les colonies. Ce procès sera le révélateur de la prise de conscience que l’homme noir est égal à l’homme’ [This trial blasted open the Republic’s shortcomings with regards to the colonies. This trial will symbolize the collective realization that being a black man is the same as being a man] (2010: 4). Such rhetorical marketing usefully served a municipal memorial agenda in the departmental capital of Nantes, a socialist stronghold, which, under the political domination of Jean-Marc Ayrault (1989–2012), had begun to confront its history as France’s leading port négrier (Gualde, 2013: 81); more widely, the discourse of equality served a convenient political function, particularly in the contexts of the ongoing controversies over France’s colonial legacy in the DOM-ROM and of France’s difficulties,

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as Manceron puts it, in ‘viewing head-on’ its history as a colonizer (2007: 29). The recovery of the trial in 2011, and the creation of a municipal lieu de mémoire that linked the history of the former slaving port with that of Guyane, highlights how departmental archives – a repository for republican history – can be used to memorialize resistance to French colonialism. But if the memorialization agenda evident in 2011 is useful for revealing twenty-first-century reactions to France’s colonial past, it was not without its problems. A republican narrative was a key theme of the exhibition of 2011; it, like the documentary broadcast a year before, made much effective use of the trial as a critical juncture in the history of France’s relationships with its Atlantic colonies. According to this narrative, an exceptional court session, held in a former port négrier, had recognized the rights of the inhabitants of France’s vieilles colonies and confirmed that they were full citizens. The civic memorialization agenda here is obvious, and took place against a backdrop of long discussions and competing viewpoints about how the port could and should recognize its slave trading past (Chérel, 2012). The academic conference that was hosted as part of the exhibition continued this theme, opting for the title ‘Quand l’injustice crée le droit: Le procès des insurgés de Cayenne à Nantes en 1931’ [When injustice leads to rights: the 1931 Cayenne insurgents’ trial in Nantes]. The neat opposition of ‘injustice’ and ‘droit’, rhetorically emphasizing what was perceived as a correction to the unjust colonial order, once more emplots 1931 as a watershed. The fourteen defendants, invariably termed ‘des émeutiers’ [rioters] by the press in 1931, were, in the 2011 exhibition, and previously in the documentary by Bauer and Bendjebbar, called ‘des insurgés’. Although the new appellation of ‘insurgés’ restores agency to the fourteen defendants and stresses their active rebellion against the inequities and corruption of the electoral system in Guyane it subsumes them under a revolutionary and republican narrative, flattening out the specificities of Guyane and its status as a former slave colony to work it into a teleological progression. A narrative of idealized republicanism is perpetuated, in which the metropolitan French courts had corrected abuses happening ‘là-bas’ [over there] in Guyane, and the rights of the colonized were henceforth recognized – all of which neglects the political inequalities that persisted, and persist, in Guyane. As Pila had made clear in 1900, each region, département and town developed its own specific relationship with France’s overseas empire. Whether as a result of trade, military links, demographic

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changes, political events or the knowledge networks established over the Third Republic, these areas communicated their own images of the colonies according to local particularities. Such exchanges, meticulously documented in local archives, can allow the uncovering of alternative stories of colonization. As lieux de mémoires, departmental archives show the indelible link between colonial and republican memories at the height of empire, and also show how this imbrication may be perpetuated in the twenty-first century. Works Cited Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1978. France coloniale ou parti colonial. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Aldrich, Robert. 2005. Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. — 2015. ‘Colonialism and Nation Building in Modern France’. In Nationalizing Empires, edited by Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, 135–94. Budapest; New York: Central European University Press. Bauer, Barcha. 2010. ‘Note du réalisateur producteur’. In Dossier de presse: Les Insurgés de Cayenne: le premier procès colonial à Nantes. March. Bourkata, Souad. 2004. Bordeaux: Une économie et société coloniales au début du XXe siècle. Bordeaux: Institut aquitain d’études sociales. Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Rodolphe Hammadi. 1994. Guyane – Tracesmémoires du bagne. Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites. Chérel, Emmanuelle. 2012. Le Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage de Nantes: enjeux et controverses (1998–2012). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Clout, Hugh. 2008. ‘Popular geographies and scholarly geographies in provincial France: The Société Normande de Géographie, 1879–1937’. Journal of Historical Geography 34: 24–47. Ford, Caroline. 1998. Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and  Political Identity in Brittany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fox, Robert. 1980. ‘Learning, politics and polite culture in provincial France: The Sociétés savantes in the nineteenth century’. Historical reflections/ réflexions historiques 7, nos 2–3 (Summer–Fall): 543–64. Gerson, Stéphane. 2003. The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Godin, Emmanuel. 2007. ‘Greater France and the Provinces: Representations of the Empire and Colonial Interests in the Rennes region 1880–1905’. French History 21, no. 1 (March): 65–84. Goerg, Odile. 2002. ‘The French Provinces and “Greater France”’. In Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, edited by Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, 82–101. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Grondin, Reine-Claude. 2011. L’Empire en province: Culture et expérience coloniales en Limousin (1830–1939). Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi. Gualde, Krystel. 2013. ‘Histoire et mémoire de la traite de l’esclavage à Nantes’. Africultures 91: 78–84. Hargreaves, Alec G. 2005. ‘Introduction’. In Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism, edited by Alec G. Hargreaves, 1–8. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Klein, Jean-François. 2006. ‘La création de l’Ecole coloniale de Lyon: Au cœur des polémiques du Parti colonial’. Outre-mers 93, nos 352–53: 147–70. Laffey, John F. 1974. ‘Municipal Imperialism in Nineteenth Century France’. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 1: 81–114. — 1975. ‘Municipal Imperialism in France: The Lyon Chamber of Commerce, 1900–1914’. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 119: 8–23. Lewis, Mary Dewhurst. 2002. ‘The Strangeness of Foreigners: Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille’. French Politics, Culture & Society 20, no. 3: 65–96. Loire Atlantique Conseil général. 2011. Liberté, égalité, fraternité: une histoire des solidarités: Livret de visite, 25 November 2010–20 May 2011. Nantes: Hôtel du Département. Malon, Claude. 2006. Le Havre colonial de 1880 à 1960. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen. Manceron, Gilles. 2007. ‘La Colonisation, un passé que la France a du mal à regarder en face’. Cultures Sud: Retours sur la question coloniale 165: 29–33. Mareschal, Patrick. 2011. Editorial. In Le Procès des Insurgés de Cayenne: liens d’archives, exhibition guide, February 2011. Marsh, Kate. 2015. ‘L’Affaire Galmot: Colonialism on Trial in 1931’. French Cultural Studies 26: 260–76. Marshall, Bill. 2009. The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Morando, Laurent. 2004. ‘L’Enseignement colonial en province (1899–1940): “impérialisme municipal” ou réussites locales?’ Outre-mers 91: 273–94. Nora, Pierre. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire’. Representations, Special issue Memory and Counter-memory 26 (Spring): 7–24.

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Pila, Ulysse. 1900. Vingt ans de progrès colonial, nécessité d’un enseignement colonial. Conférence faite à la Société d’économie politique de Lyon le 23 février 1900, par M. Ulysse Pila. Lyon: Rey. Revel, Jacques. 1997. ‘La Région’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora, vol. 2, 2907–36. Paris: Gallimard/Quarto. Roger, Patrick. 2016. ‘Ces nouvelles régions en quête d’identité’. Le Monde, 1 July 2016. Said, Edward. W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Schaub, Jean-Frédéric. 2008. ‘La Catégorie “études coloniales” est-elle indispensable?’ Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63: 625–46. Singaravélou, Pierre. 2011. Professer l’Empire: Les ‘sciences coloniales’ en France sous la IIIe République. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Wilder, Gary. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Unpublished documents ADSM, 2 Z 109: 19 January 1933

Le Ministre de l’Intérieur to Messieurs les Préfets; Rouen, Archives départementales de la Seine Maritime ADSM, 2 Z 109: 2 February 1933 Charles Marande (Director of the Institut Colonial du Havre) to M. le Préfet, Seine-Inférieure; Rouen, Archives départementales de la Seine Maritime ADSM, 2 Z 109: 2 March 1933 Le Préfet de Seine-Inférieure to the Ministre de l’Intérieur; Rouen, Archives départementales de la Seine Maritime ADSM, 2 Z 109: 18 February 1942 Le secrétaire d’état à l’éducation nationale et à la jeunesse to MM. Les Préfets, les Recteurs, Les Inspecteurs d’Académie; Rouen, Archives départementales de la Seine Maritime ADSM, 2 Z 109: 27 April 1942 Quinzaine impériale: Circulaire; Rouen, Archives Départementales de la Seine Maritime ADLA, 2 Y 284: 53–60 Registre d’Ecrou, 1930; Nantes, Archives départementales de la Loire-Atlantique

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Borders Michael Gott Borders

Any assessment of the postcolonial borders of France and their place as realms of memory must account for multidirectional postcolonial population flows, the effects of European border policies, dramatic North–South economic imbalances and the importance of borders as concepts that delineate identity in relation to the wider context of immigration history. French borders are increasingly diffuse geographically and conceptually and in order to assess their significance this essay will approach borders in two ways: first as social and political concepts and then as physical spaces or zones. In a contemporary context, the term ‘border’ evokes a number of different ideas and spaces that are linked yet at times seem irreconcilable. Borders are inextricably connected to memories of past passage and of the life that preceded this act. Yet they also remain unavoidably contemporary. The borders of France are continuously reinforced and reimagined by back and forth trajectories that cross physical borders and also by discourses surrounding juridical and ideational boundaries. In strictly spatial terms, the contemporary borders of Europe are not simply lines (however fluid or permeable) where people cross or are compelled to stop, but zones, spaces of contact and back-andforth, a ‘borderland’ (Balibar, 2009). Étienne Balibar’s term ‘borderland’ inevitably connotes the context of the historically and culturally fluid line and space that separates the United States from Mexico. In that context scholars have theorized the border as a fertile ground of exchange, a ‘place of politically exciting hybridity, intellectual creativity and moral possibility’ (Johnson and Michaelsen, 1997). Balibar sketches out the potential of European borderlands in similar terms, noting the possibility ‘for hybridity and cultural invention’ (2009: 200). Despite

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the alluring potential for blurring lines of demarcation inherent in this concept of borderlands, it is crucial to avoid a utopian reading of border zones. Mary Louise Pratt identifies the ‘contact zone’ – abutting borders and more broadly (colonial) ‘frontiers’ – as the space where cultures come into contact but also a site of ‘coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (1992: 8). Sandro Mezzadra’s more cutting assessment is that the policing of European borders is comparable to a war, ‘and a much dirtier one in not being waged or conventional’ (2004). This point is even more salient in 2018, when the recent annual totals of migrants who perish attempting to reach Europe have surpassed the casualty figures that Mezzadra cites for the decade that preceded his essay (nearly 4,000). Borders signify different things at different points in French history. As citizens or colonial subjects, immigrants from North and West Africa had a ‘confused and ambiguous status’ that continued after decolonization. The freedom of movement clause in the Evian Agreements allowed ready access to France for Algerians until it was renegotiated in 1968, while citizenship in other former colonies offered some immigrants a ‘privileged status’ that lasted until 1973 (Hollifield, 2014: 163). However, Algerians and others, while not ‘strictly immigrants’, were ‘treated as obviously foreign’ (Kedward, 2007: 119). This points to a different idea of the ‘border’, which is not solely significant as a geographic or administrative frontier crossed during passages from one place and culture to another. Such conceptions demarcate perceived and real difference and ideas about citizenship and belonging that inevitably inform postcolonial border conceptions. The history of widespread immigration to France dates back to 1848 and, despite the often problematic inclusion of immigrants within national narratives, the official and juridical openness and inclusivity of republican citizenship has been well documented (Noiriel, 1996; Hollifield, 2014: 157–59). The physical and mental lines between France and Frenchness on the one hand and ‘other’ places and ‘otherness’ on the other have been unevenly experienced and remembered by immigrants. Early immigrants primarily crossed and settled near the Belgian, Italian and Spanish borders (Kedward, 2007: 31). For many of the Portuguese and Spanish immigrants who made their way to France in the twentieth century, the border was a trammel. Their stories of crossing the frontier – passed on to and cultivated by subsequent generations or silenced and stowed away – involve privation, hardship and often dodging border guards and police on both sides of the frontier (Volovitch-Tavares,

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1997). In the case of the Spanish refugees fleeing their nation’s civil war, crossings were followed by detention in camps built under the Third Republic to quarantine foreigners who were deemed problematic (Soo, 2008). After World War II and increasingly during the 1950s and 1960s, many migrants from French colonies and former colonies followed a different path, at least until additional restrictions on immigration imposed in 1974 and later in the 1990s with the Pasqua (1993) and Debré (1997) laws. While immigration and by extension border crossing are often associated with ‘clandestine’ or ‘illegal’ population flows, the major cycles of French immigration largely involved influxes that were officially sanctioned and promoted as responses to labour shortages (Noiriel, 2002: 12). In such officially unobstructed trajectories, the border takes on a different signification: not a legal barrier but a cultural and psychological gap between the familiar and the strange, the ‘national’ and the ‘foreign’ or indeed the European and the less- or non-European. This brief discussion should help illustrate the concept that borders are both ‘hard facts’ and ‘soft facts’ (Eder, 2006), often simultaneously. For theorist Klaus Eder hard borders involve in the most literal form a policeman ‘telling you to stop’ (2006: 255). By contrast, soft borders are the result of narratives constructed by Europeans: ‘Defining who we are and who the others are creates borders between groups of people that are as volatile as the discourses about them. Such soft borders are boundaries that we draw between people’ (255). In its different forms, whether ‘security borders or administrative separations’, the border constitutes, or ‘produces’, the stranger or foreigner as a social type (Balibar, 2009: 204). ‘Soft’ and ‘hard’ facts are often conflated in discussions of the borders between France and its former colonies. ‘Immigration’ as a physical process of course involves the crossing of borders. In France, however, the term connotes the act of migrating and crossing the border as well as the integration of immigrants and their descendants who are already in France, or what might be called ‘race’ or ‘ethnic’ relations (Thomas, 2014: 449). The borderline lingers as an imagined concept in problematic social constructions of so-called ‘second-generation immigrants’ (Noiriel, 2002: 40). Borders persist as a delimiting concept well past the end of the spatial act of border crossing. Postcolonial subjects in particular are commonly confronted with societal and institutional mentalities that effectively reproduce revisionist narratives about the imperviousness and stability of national borders. The notion of a monolithic and pure French culture is contradicted by the realities of

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centuries of cross-cultural contacts occurring both within and outside of the borders of present-day France. Hafid Gafaiti suggests that such narratives have long been cultivated by institutions that tended to ‘describe the relationship between the French and immigrants in terms of oppositions’ (2003: 191). In practical terms, this is manifested by the internal identity checks that many visible minorities of perceived foreign (particularly African, Caribbean or ‘Arab’) origins must constantly endure. These contrôles resemble the inspection of documents that would more typically occur at the national (or Schengen) border and leave many citizens in a position of constantly proving they belong in France (Hargreaves, 2007: xiv). In November 2016, the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court, ruled that identity checks by police based solely on racial or ethnic characteristics were discriminatory and ordered the police to modify their tactics. These prescribed ideas of Frenchness – and by extension of the borders delineating such a concept – exist despite the historical prevalence of immigration in France. According to Gérard Noiriel, approximately 20 per cent of persons born in France in 1991 had at least one immigrant parent or grandparent. Including great grandparents increases the percentage to nearly one-third of the population (Noiriel, 1996: xiii). Such figures demonstrate that to a significant extent such exclusionary ‘soft’ borders are applied primarily to postcolonial subjects, who make up an increasingly large percentage of the immigrant population in France. The population of African immigrants in France, for example, more than doubled between 1990 and 2008, and the 5.3 million immigrants counted that year included higher numbers of Tunisians, Algerians and especially Moroccans than in 1990 (Hollifield, 2014: 163). Nonetheless, in the context of this discussion of borders as concepts and as physical spaces, it is important to understand the imbrication of race and space in exclusionary constructions of French identity. One example of how the reflex to posit difference in spatial terms is promulgated by institutions is offered by a conference held in 2004 by the Haut Conseil à l’intégration (High Council on Integration). Dubbed the ‘Forum de la réussite des Français venus de loin’ (Forum on the Success of French from Far Away), the conference featured guests such as French actress Isabelle Adjani, who was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris yet was branded with the ‘from far away’ tag because her father was Algerian (Marteau and Tournier, 2006: 15). As a qualifier applied to French citizenship, ‘far away’ effectively situates the past border crossing by the individual, or more probably their antecedents, at the centre of their identity.

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Before I proceed to address specific examples of borders as places or spaces, it is worth stopping to consider an alternative perspective on how borders function as ideational and social constructs. Nancy Green and François Weil contend that ‘immigration has come to be seen as a litmus test for how nations define themselves’ and that how the Other is perceived is a crucial component in how the nation is defined (2007: 1). Their observation is made in relationship to ‘those who leave’ – that is to say, emigrants – and their argument is that ‘exit, like entry, has helped to define citizenship over the last two centuries’, yet has nonetheless generally been overlooked (1). While for evident reasons immigration has garnered significantly more attention in French identity debates than emigration, the impact of multidirectional border crossings on contemporary, postcolonial French conceptions of identity should not be neglected. Patrick Weil suggests that French institutions have not yet taken into account new parameters of population movements and flexible identities. Immigration, he contends, is no longer primarily a voyage with the permanent goal of sedentary settlement, but an ongoing process of ‘migration in movement’ (2005: 46). Weil’s observations refer to retired immigrant workers who wish to move back and forth between their native land and France, but movement away from France also encompasses the regular temporary returns to the nation of origin for holidays and to visit family, as well as mobility for work or education. The latter processes have been dramatically altered by EU policy, which influences conceptions of (postcolonial) borders in several key ways. For instance, the implementation of the Schengen accords eliminated border checks within the EU, while other programmes promote mobility such as the Erasmus student exchange. In fact, mobility in the broadest sense is critical to the project of European unification, which is fundamentally based on the principle of ‘free movement of goods, people, services and capital’ as well as on the recognition that all citizens of the EU have the right to reside wherever they desire within the limits of the Union (Verstraete, 2010: 4). French citizens of Portuguese origins, for example, have expressed the opinion that the latter nation’s integration into the EU has facilitated the process of assimilating two previously discrete and problematically reconcilable national identities. The fact that some 500,000 Portuguese citizens and French of Portuguese origins make the trip from France to Portugal annually and no longer even require a passport to do so reveals that the Portuguese diaspora in France enjoys a relationship to borders that is practically and symbolically different from that of many postcolonial subjects (Pereira, 1997: 79–80). Despite

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linguistic and historical ties with France, many postcolonial migrants, particularly from the Maghreb, have opted in increasing numbers for destinations such as Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands (Abderrezak, 2016: 3). The internal permeability of European borders means that these people cross the same Schengen administrative border that they would negotiate on a voyage to France. Lastly, the flipside of this internal mobility within the EU has been a hardening of the external frontiers of what is commonly theorized as ‘Fortress Europe’. One consequence of this has been that France itself has become a border zone for the thousands of migrants attempting to reach the United Kingdom. In the following pages I will discuss some of the specific sites that correspond to the conceptual outlines drawn above. Where precisely are the borders of France, be they physical ‘hard’ boundary lines or socially or administratively imposed ‘soft’ lines of demarcation? In a world of diffuse borders, where are the memories of borders situated? The short answers are, first, not necessarily in metropolitan France (or on and along its external borders), and, second, potentially anywhere in France and sites along the route taken towards France. EU border controls have been increasingly externalized since 2000. The tangible result of this for French-speaking (and other) migrants from Central and West Africa is that the most crucial border they must cross on the way to France or elsewhere is not the actual border of the destination nation. Increasingly the ‘border’ is not a physical border line, wall, or body of water but is a ‘zone’ of transit, encampment and/or impasse. It is common for migrants from Africa to be stalled in Morocco for years, a state of affairs that effectively means that the nation itself becomes a border zone that surrounds enclaves of the Schengen zone (Ceuta and Melilla) and abuts convenient points of departure by water to Spain (Pian, 2013: 11–14). Places such as the forest of Gourougou, overlooking the Mediterranean and Melilla, have become key waypoints on the trek to Europe from Africa and by extension central elements of migrant testimonies and realms of memory. In a similar sense, ‘the border’ also extends beyond the physical point of border crossing. In its reach the border apparatus must be considered as an ‘institution’ rather than a specific place. The unofficial networks that define the migrant experience before the crossing into Europe (smugglers and ghettos organized in strict hierarchies and controlled by ‘chairmen’) are replaced with an official apparatus that functions as an extension of the border and comprises detention centres and the system for processing asylum claims that migrants must negotiate after crossing

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(Veron, 2013: 19). Didier Fassin identifies a parallel system that involves the hardening of external borders and of less visible internal boundaries forged along racial and social categories (2010; Thomas, 2014: 460). Étienne Balibar goes even further, suggesting that borders ‘are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever the movement of information, people and things is happening and is controlled – for example, in cosmopolitan cities’ (2004: 1). Specifically, this includes airports and train station but also virtually all zones of transit, particularly in urban spaces. Any metro station, bus or busy street can be transformed into a ‘hard border’ as defined by Eder. Persons discovered by the authorities to not have legal authorization to be on French soil are ‘retained’ while their case is processed in one of a network of twenty-five CRAs (Centre de rétention administrative [immigration detention centre]) located across France and in the overseas departments and territories. These facilities have historically been shrouded in secrecy, although over the past decade they have become the subject of a growing output of documentary and fiction films and bande dessinée albums, often with an investigative bent (Meybeck, 2014). CRAs are in a way borderlands themselves in both the positive and negative senses of the term; migrants from different places mingle while awaiting either the acceptance of their asylum application or their deportation. Officially all of the CRA facilities combined house fewer than 2,000 people, a significantly smaller number than the migrants residing in improvised camps such as the so-called ‘jungle’ in Calais. Migrant encampment has become a lightning rod for political and ethical debates and for French border anxieties. Calais has also become a highly visible symbol and a microcosm for a range of border issues. The city’s large port and proximity to the Eurotunnel entrance makes it a strategic site on the migrant route to the United Kingdom. More than simply the point of exit from France, since the 2003 Le Touquet agreement Calais has been the official site of the administrative border with the UK. This means that people and goods must be approved for border crossing before they cross the geographic space of the frontier. In October 2016 the French government dismantled the camps and dispersed the 6,000–8,000 migrants sojourning there. Previously a much smaller iteration of the ‘jungle’ was dismantled under Sarkozy and Interior Minister Éric Besson in 2009, and in 2002 Sarkozy as Interior Minister oversaw the closing of a centre for refugees in nearby Sangatte. Before the camp was cleared out in 2016, the French government announced a plan to construct a wall – perhaps the ultimate symbol of a border – protecting the port

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and the tunnel entrance. Since 2015, a similar situation has played out on a much smaller scale at the border between Ventimiglia, Italy and Menton, France. There migrants waiting to cross into France have been waylaid at the Italian side of the frontier, which had been entirely open to passage and unpatrolled prior to 2015. Erstwhile border posts are not the only sites of impasse for migrants. Internal ad hoc border controls have become a regular practice in places of transit such as the Nice railway station, where hundreds of migrants en route for Paris are stopped by the police (Barelli, 2015). I still have not yet specifically discussed the most evident and visible geographic borders of Europe and France. Water, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, forms incredibly diffuse points of access to France, its departments and territories, and the European Union. The peril involved in crossings into French or European territory makes seas particularly poignant realms of border memories. Throughout history, seas have facilitated both contact and cultural exchange on the one hand and trauma and misery on the other, as Paul Gilroy famously posits in his study on the ‘Black Atlantic’. Gilroy focuses on the British colonial legacy, but it is worth mentioning here the fashion in which he draws on the history of the Atlantic to question the significance of the nation state, suggesting that ‘[N]either political nor economic structures of domination are still simply co-extensive with national borders’ (1993: 7). Today, the islands of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean, Lesvos in the Aegean and the Canaries in the Atlantic are especially visible sites on the route to Europe. Migrants from Comoros make their way to the French territory of Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean, while thousands of Haitians have sought asylum in French Guiana. In numerical terms, the Mediterranean basin has been the most significant front on the border of Europe. It is also the deadliest. Currently between 3,000 and (at least) 5,000 migrants perish in its waters and on its shores annually. It also bears mentioning that the Mediterranean has long been and remains a space of more commonplace and less treacherous crossings between France and its former colonies. Ferries remain an important mode of transportation between Europe and the Maghreb, as well as a nostalgic and often romanticized symbol of the act of migration (Abderrezak, 2016: 18, 161–62). A typical trajectory has long involved disembarking in French ports, particularly Marseille (see Kleppinger’s essay in this volume). France’s second most populous city was also the primary point of departure for settlers and workers bound for the French colonies and

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territories across the Mediterranean as well as the port where many pieds-noirs arrived after Algerian independence (Shepard, 2006: 218). Thousands of pieds-noirs also arrived in Port-Vendres, near the Spanish border, which just two decades before had been the site of arrival and detention for many of the 500,000 refugees who arrived in France after fleeing the Spanish civil war. More recently, other (im)migrants continue to land in airports, on flights from Algiers, Dakar or even Fort-de-France and other points in overseas departments and territories. Airports have surpassed sea ports as the primary point of entry onto EU territory for third-country nationals (FRA, 2014). The airport serves as a physical border zone that is often in the middle of national territory. The agents staffing the border checkpoints are just the tip of an iceberg of technologies, policies and procedures enforced by police, travel agents and airline employees that enforce the sanctity of the airport border. The Schengen Agreement codifies the principle of ‘carrier’s liability’, which makes airlines and other transport enterprises liable for transporting passengers (whether knowingly or not) who are denied entry to the destination country (Verstraete, 2010: 100). I will close with a very brief consideration of filmic representations of the aforementioned sites of memory. Other art forms have of course contributed to the understanding of borders and to the memory work associated with the act of crossing and its aftermath. The bande dessinée album CRA – Centre de rétention administrative (by Jean-Benoit Meybeck, published in 2014) and Fatou Diome’s 2003 novel Le Ventre de l’Atlantique come immediately to mind in the context to the preceding discussion. However, as a medium with widespread currency in France and in large swathes of the francophone world (where films are often co-productions with France), cinema provides the most visible – and arguably the most incisive – artistic representation of postcolonial borders in all of their complexities. It is no surprise that borders have featured prominently in French cinema and cinematic co-productions with other nations, given the industry’s continued preoccupation with the spaces of the Hexagon and with the ways in which France relates to the world beyond its borders. French cinema, as James S. Williams contends, ‘has always been preoccupied with issues of spatial identity and difference’ (2013: 22). Commenting on the broader European context that France is situated within, Yosefa Loshitzsky argues that cinema has ‘become a recent site of articulation of Europe’s new sociocultural space’ (2010: 14). This European context is evident in the examples below, which include French co-productions with European neighbours

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and a number of films made outside the French industry altogether but featuring migrants from francophone Africa. Sea departures, arrivals or crossings are narrated and memorialized in a growing array of French-language films (Gott, 2018). The chronotype of the ship evokes a rich process of memory work (Berghahn, 2013: 62) in films such as Yamina Benguigui’s feature Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001) and documentary Mémoires d’immigrés (1997), as well as Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal (2000), all of which deal with or evoke past migrations in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, whether forced or voluntary. Heremakono (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002) tells the story of a young Mauritanian headed towards Europe. Although he remains in stasis and never reaches the point of sea departure, several poetic images of the Atlantic coastline – the rusted hull of a shipwrecked boat and the body of a migrant that washes ashore – evoke the past and present dangers of sea departures (Gott, 2015). André Téchiné’s Loin frames border crossing as an economic imperative within the context of French colonial connections with Morocco by comparing the ease of crossing of a French lorry driver to the desperate situation of a young Moroccan who wishes to reach Europe by hiding in his vehicle. Other films complicate border-crossing narratives by staging departures by sea away from France, pointing out that the nation is now a border space as well as a final destination. For example, in Clandestins (1998), by Quebec filmmaker Denis Chouinard and Swiss director Nicolas Wadimoff, migrants who are facing deportation from France hide away in a cargo ship bound for Canada. Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009) tells the story of a young Kurdish migrant stuck in Calais but desperately wishing to reach the United Kingdom. In this case recurring images of ferries taking those with the correct passports serve as a symbol of the young man’s immobility as he trains to swim across the Channel. Similarly, in Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011), a young migrant from Gabon finds himself waylaid in the titular port when his UK-bound container is offloaded there by mistake and must rely on the solidarity of a local to depart from France and complete his voyage. Over the past decade an ever-growing number of films have narrated and testified about the perilous sea voyages undertaken by migrants and refugees towards Europe, in particular Italy and Spain (Gott, 2018: 146). The French–Algerian co-production Harragas (Merzak Allouache, 2009) follows the desperate flight of Algerians across the Mediterranean towards the coast of Spain, while Moussa Touré’s

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2012 French–Senegalese film La pirogue traces a voyage by a polyglot group of West Africans through the Atlantic towards Spanish territory. In Hope (2014), by French director Boris Lojkine, the eponymous female Nigerian protagonist, and Léonard, a Cameroonian man she encounters, chart a course towards Europe through Algeria, Morocco and the Mediterranean. In a memorable scene they wait for forward passage in the Gourougou forest, a common gathering place for migrants in transit, as mentioned above, while African voyagers share stories of their own unsuccessful crossing attempts. Hope is unique for the way it gives migrants a different voice; they share their experiences of travel not simply as victims but as ‘adventurers’, a stance that allows them to better cope with the travails they face (Gott, 2016: 156–61). The cinematic medium is particularly well suited to explore the complexity of contemporary border situations and migratory routes in Europe, as evidenced by a number of multilingual films that follow the trajectories of francophone migrants to or through various European countries. These works attest to the recent tendency identified by Hakim Abderrezak (2016) for migrants from the region to favour other destinations over the land of their former colonial rulers. Mediterranea (Jonas Carpignano, 2015, an Italian–French co-production) narrates the trip of two French-speaking brothers from Burkina Faso to Italy. The German film Die Farbe des Ozeans/The Colour of the Ocean (Maggie Peren, 2011) has no production connection to a Frenchspeaking nation but contains French dialogue because of an encounter between Senegalese migrants and a French-speaking German tourist (Gott, 2018). Retelling stories from the dangerous and frequently deadly sea voyages undertaken by contemporary migrants is not only the purview of fiction films. Bruno Boudjelal’s 2011 installation ‘Harragas’, assembled from nine different videos shot on phones by migrants themselves, has been on display at the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris since 2012. The videos disappear one by one, ultimately leaving a black background, a technique that eerily evokes the tragic fate that befalls many migrants. Documentary films have also investigated the situation at the borders of the Continent. Les Messagers (Hélène Crouzillat and Laetitia Tura, 2014) is the result of a four-year-long investigation by the directors, who allow the migrants that the film follows along the route to Europe via Melilla to recount their own stories. These ‘messengers’ speak for those who have died en route and cannot pass along their own memories.

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The Mediterranean is also crossed by boat – in the opposite direction – in a number of films that trace voyages of ‘return’ by the descendants of immigrants. In Tony Gatlif’s Exils (2004), two young French of Algerian origins (one pied-noir, the other Maghrebi–French) revisit family history on a voyage through Spain and then by ferry to Algiers. In Ten’ ja (Hassan Legzouli, 2004), the protagonist visits Morocco for the first time in order to fulfill his father’s dying wish to have his body returned there via the same route by which he came. Both films arguably problematize the ‘myth of return’ and the process by which memories of heritage become fossilized among some members of postcolonial diasporic communities (see Higbee, 2012 for an alternative reading). In Exils the protagonist Zano’s improbable discovery that the interior décor of the family’s home in Bab El Oued remains virtually unchanged some forty years after their departure from Algeria seems to critique the way that many in the pied-noir community remember French Algeria. Ten’ ja calls into question the return myth and the concept of origins in general. The travelling protagonist’s rather static and folkloric image of Morocco is constantly – and sometimes humorously – refuted, as when he falls ill after eating a traditional couscous meal, and the village his father left years ago has been long since abandoned, making literal return impossible (Gott, 2016: 136). If sea crossings represent the most visible trajectory towards France during the colonial and postcolonial eras, airports are now the primary point of entry into Europe. Although air travel is perhaps less cinematically interesting than voyages by road or sea, some directors have explored the border implications of this typical point of entry in rather complex ways. Most notably, Philippe Lioret’s 1993 Tombés du ciel follows the misadventures of a Quebec-born man with dual French– Canadian citizenship who lost his passport immediately before boarding a Paris-bound flight. As his situation is being sorted out by border authorities, he finds refuge in an improvised apartment in the bowels of the airport, where a small band of stateless people have taken up temporary residence. Among them is the young Zola, a Guinean detained in the airport en route from Africa following the deportation of his father. Boat crossings often feature in Merzak Allouache’s filmography, but the director acknowledges new modes of transportation in his 2005 feature Bab el web, which explores the layers of belonging that complicate a binary distinction between French and Algerian identities and borders. Whereas many of the officially sanctioned voyages between Algeria and France in Allouache’s prior films (such as the 1994 film Bab

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el oued city and Salut Cousin from 1996) take place by ferry, in Bab el web the Algerian-born Laurence’s return to and departure from Algiers are both staged in scenes just outside the airport. The border zone of the airport often extends to a nearby detention facility for newly arrived migrants awaiting immigration or asylum hearings or for those facing deportation, all of which are part of a system that reinforces distinctions between insiders and outsiders (Thomas, 2014: 461). Two films made in French in neighbouring countries aptly illustrate this state of affairs. Swiss productions, Fernand Melgar’s Vol special (2011) is a notable documentary that follows the life of migrants and asylum seekers from francophone Africa and elsewhere as they await their imminent deportation, often on so-called ‘special flights’ that are chartered by the Swiss government. Illégal (2010), by Belgian director Oliver Masset-Depasse, recounts the violent physical resistance that some migrants – in this case women from Mali and Russia – undertake in order to resist deportation by air from Belgium. A similar notion of an airport and its environs as a ‘border zone’ is evident in Viagem a Portugal (Journey to Portugal, 2011) by Sérgio Tréfaut. In this film a Ukrainian women is detained at the Faro airport, where she has arrived to visit her Senegalese husband, who works in Portugal. The husband is also questioned by border police when he arrives at the airport to meet his spouse and expelled from the airport zone but not the country. Alongside the aforementioned Spanish and Italian films about francophone migrants, the Portuguese production demonstrates that within Schengen Europe the border between France and its erstwhile colonies is no longer simply situated at the exterior frontier of France. The act of travel and the physical crossing of the border – whether it be a line or a checkpoint at an airport – is not necessarily the primary focus in films about borders and border experiences. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 2017 Une saison en France opens with a flashback of a furtive border crossing by a refugee from the Central African Republic and his family. Most of the narrative, however, focuses on the tenuous position of many undocumented migrants in Europe. The border in Haroun’s film is not simply a line to be crossed but an endless process to be negotiated, whether through appointments at the OFII or constant movement in search of work and housing or to evade the authorities. A similar outlook on the ‘border’ as an ongoing process is evident in Franco-Senegalese director Dyana Gaye’s Des étoiles (2013). This multilocal film, with dialogue in English, French and Italian, follows the

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exilic paths of several interconnected characters, reflecting increasingly varied trajectories between places within and beyond the francophone world. Works Cited Abderrezak, Hakim. 2016. Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Balibar, Étienne. 2004. We, the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. — 2009. ‘Europe as borderland’. Society and Space 27: 190–215. Barelli, Paul. 2015. ‘Gare de Nice: terminus des espoirs des migrants’. Le Monde, 6 June 2015. http://www.lemonde.fr/immigration-et-diversite/ article/2015/06/13/gare-de-nice-terminus-des-espoirs-des-migrants_ 4653559_1654200.html. Berghahn, Daniela. 2013. Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eder, Klaus. 2006. ‘Europe’s Borders: The Narrative Construction of the Boundaries of Europe’. European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2: 255–71. Fassin, Didier. 2010. ‘Frontières extérieures, frontières intérieures’. In Les nouvelles frontières de la société française, edited by Dider Fassin, 5–24. Paris: Éditions la Découverte. FRA – European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. 2014. Fundamental rights at airports: border checks at five international airports in the European Union. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Gafaiti, Hafid. 2003. ‘Nationalism, Colonialism, and Ethnic Discourse in the Construction of French Identity’. In French Civilization and its Discontents: Colonialism, Nationalism, Race, edited by Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele, 189–212. New York: Lexington Books. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gott, Michael. 2015. ‘The Slow Road to Europe: the Politics and Aesthetics of Stalled Mobility in Heremakono and Morgen’. In Slow Cinema, edited by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, 299–311. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. — 2016. French-language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration and ‘New Europe’. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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— 2018. ‘Lost at Sea or Charting a New Course? Mapping the Murky Contours of Cinéma-monde in Floating Francophone Films’. In Cinéma-monde: Decentered Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French, edited by Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt, 131–54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Green, Nancy L. and François Weil. 2007. ‘Introduction’. In Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, 1–9. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hargreaves, Alec G. 2007. Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society. New York: Routledge. Higbee, Will. 2012. ‘“Et si on allait en Algérie?” Home, Displacement, and the Myth of Return in Recent Journey Films by Maghrebi-French and North African Émigré Directors’. In Screening Integration: Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France, edited by Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy, 58–76. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hollifield, James F. 2014. ‘France’. In Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, edited by James F. Hollifield, Philip L. Martin and Pia M. Orrenius, 157–87. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Johnson, David E. and Scott Michaelsen. 1997. ‘Border Secrets: An Introduction’. In Border theory: the limits of cultural politics, edited by Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, 1–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kedward, Rod. 2007. France and the French. New York: Overlook Press. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2010. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marteau, Stéphanie, and Pascale Tournier. 2006. Black blanc beur  … La guerre civile aura-t-elle vraiment lieu? Paris: Albin Michel. Meybeck, Jean-Benoît. 2014. CRA – Centre de Rétention Administrative. Vincennes: Ronds dans L’O. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2004. ‘Citizenship in Motion’. Translated by Arianna Bove for MakeWorld#4. Generation Online. http://www.generation-online. org/t/tmezzadra.htm. Noiriel, Gérard. 1996. The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship and National Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — 2002. Atlas de l’immigration en France. Paris: Autrement. Pereira, Carlos. 1997. ‘Vers une biculturalité franco-portugaise?’ Hommes et Migrations 1210 (novembre–décembre): 78–85. Pian, Anaïk. 2013. ‘Des frontières de la migration aux représentations de l’Europe’. Hommes et Migrations 1304: 11–18. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eye: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Shepard, Todd. 2006. The invention of decolonization: the Algerian War and the remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Soo, Scott. 2008. ‘Between borders: The remembrance practices of Spanish exiles in the south-west of France’. In At the Border: Margins and Peripheries in Modern France, edited by Sharif Gemie and Henrice Altink, 96–116. Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press. Thomas, Dominic. 2014. ‘Fortress Europe: Identity, race and surveillance’. International Journal of Francophone Studies 17, nos 3–4: 445–68. Veron, Daniel. 2013. ‘Cartographie de la frontière et topographie clandestine’. Hommes et Migrations 1304: 19–26. Verstraete, Ginette. 2010. Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Volovitch-Tavares, Marie-Christine. 1997. ‘Du temps des baraques au temps de la mémoire retrouvée’. Hommes et Migrations 1210: 18–31. Weil, Patrick. 2005. La république et sa diversité: Immigration, intégration, discrimination. Paris: Seuil. Williams, James S. 2013. Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Banlieues Hervé Tchumkam Banlieues

Nicolas Sarkozy’s incendiary statement in 2005 in which he referred to some inhabitants of the banlieues as scum (‘racaille’) is believed to have exacerbated tensions in France during the fall of 2005, but also suggested a particular relation between the French state and the inhabitants of its banlieues. More so than Sarkozy’s provocative and demeaning remarks, the law of 23 February 2005 marked a significant moment in contemporary French history, politics and culture. This controversial law aimed at reviving and rehabilitating France’s colonial grandeur, as it ‘asserted the nation’s duty to acknowledge the “positive” dimensions of colonization and oriented academic research in that direction’, to use Nicolas Bancel’s words (2009: 167). One could argue that, although the law was later rescinded, its passing was an ingenious attempt to minimize any historical reconsideration of the violent excesses and other effects of French imperial expansionism in the colonies. Taking into account the social and political context of France’s uprisings across almost the past four decades, I will argue that because the status and treatment of the banlieues are reminiscent of French colonial history, the banlieues now stand out as a site of memory in their own right. Looking at the new politics of memory that the French parliament tried to impose by passing the 23 February law, it is pertinent that Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire notoriously ignores the colonial history of the French nation, which, for better or worse, has considerably reshaped the contemporary political landscape in France. After showing how the banlieues and the colonies have many commonalities despite their differences, I will shed light on the uses of memory (or lack thereof) that inscribe the banlieues as a site of memory to which France as a country should return as an important historical episode in

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order to negotiate the present better, and project itself as a country in a possible postcolonial future. Taking my cue from Didier Lapeyronnie (2005), who reflected on the French banlieues as a ‘colonial theatre’, I propose that the powder keg that the banlieues are now perceived to constitute can be explained by the fact that their inhabitants, the majority of whom are French citizens of African heritage, have little or no political visibility or agency. As I have argued elsewhere, the inhabitants of the French banlieues, offspring of migrants from Africa or the African diaspora, occupy a paradoxical situation that considerably blurs the boundaries between the banlieues and the colonies in Africa: this is the paradox of necessity and expendability. Just like the ‘indigènes’ once in the colonies, the banlieusards are necessary for the glory of sovereign power when their bodies are used in the construction of national power, but this very power that often derives its visibility from the use of bodies does not hesitate to punish them or track them down, by means of an often impressive deployment of repressive measures: double jeopardy, profiling, prohibition of the veil, creation of anti-crime squads and so on. As a consequence, youths in the banlieue consider themselves to be second-class citizens who are permanently faced with an injunction to integrate, integration being in my opinion a task to be carried out by immigrants, and certainly not by existing citizens. This can explain why, as Isabelle Coutant pointed out in her book Délit de jeunesse (2005), young people hailing from the French cités continually refuse to be treated as their kin were in colonial times, while also pointing out the economic exploitation that prevents African countries from developing. For residents of the cités, the perpetuation of the colonial past can no longer be tolerated. Achille Mbembe presents a similar analogy between colonial rule and the treatment of the banlieues, offering an interpretation that goes as far back as the era of Atlantic slavery: The most important context of the Republic’s brutality and discrimination was the plantation during slavery, and the colony from the nineteenth century. Quite directly, the problem raised by the plantation system and the colonial order is that of the functionality of race, which becomes the principle for the exercise of power and, by the same token, the condition of sociability. In today’s context, to talk about race is to call for a reflection on difference, i.e., about those with whom one does not share anything or just a little, – about those whose presence, albeit with us, near us or among us, is ultimately not the same as ours. Before the empire, the plantation and colony were elsewhere, and entailed strangeness and

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distance – something overseas. The extreme limits of those territories continue to shape their presence in metropolitan imaginaries. Nowadays, the plantation and the colony have been displaced here, outside the walls of the city (in the banlieue). (2010: 94)

It is clear that the inclusive exclusion that characterizes the French banlieues as spaces neither fully within nor completely outside of the French national sphere remains very paradoxical. But more importantly, it authorizes a further comparison between the banlieues and colonial space during French expansionism. And, continuing this comparison between the colonies and the banlieues, the spatial division of French cities in two distinct parts, centre and periphery, is also reminiscent of the division between white administrative neighbourhoods and the bidonvilles of the indigenous population during colonial times. In both cases, one is faced with a context in which any peaceful call for justice became inaudible. To be clear, the spatial partition both in the colonies and in the banlieues today has a feature in common: it is the blurring of the threshold between the audible and the inaudible, or, in other terms, the clouding of the boundary between existence and nothingness. The troubling situation and lack of prospects for those of African heritage in the French banlieues and the colonial logic evident in former French colonies share many features on at least two levels: first, the ‘othering’ of Black people and Arabs and, secondly, to quote Jacques Rancière, the ‘polemic distribution of spaces, times and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to distribution’ (2004: 12). The ‘othering’ of Black people and Arabs has to do with the ways in which citizens of French African descendant, because of their origins, are reduced to silence in the same way that their grandparents once were in the colonies. The state reaction to the 2005 riots and especially the state of emergency that was declared signalled what Paul Silverstein and Chantal Tetreault have identified as a particularly interesting form of ‘postcolonial urban apartheid’. For them, The deployment of colonial law in response to the present crisis points to an enduring logic of colonial rule within postcolonial metropolitan France. Like settler cities of the colonial period, contemporary French urban centres function in opposition to their impoverished peripheries, the latter being consistently presented in the media, state policy and popular discourse as culturally, if not racially, different from mainstream France. (2006)

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The above statement sheds light on a system that, more than four decades after the independence of French colonies in Africa, has resorted to a repressive apparatus that reached its peak in Algeria during the war of decolonization and in Cameroon, where France waged an undeclared and hidden war until 1971 (Deltombe, Domergue and Tatsitsa, 2011) – that is, eleven years after independence. The repressive government measures in question here are multiplied by what Nacira Guénif-Souilamas has called the ‘gouvernement des corps’, the government of bodies, with the bodies of the descendants of African migrants to France becoming veritable ‘objects of a fantastical investment that is tied to the alienation and submission that were imposed upon their grandparents and great-grandparents’ (2006: 204). The sociologist in fact goes back to the colonial period to establish that, just as the indigènes of that time were kept in reservations, their offspring – that is, a generation that often is unaware of colonial history, or much of it – are faced now with comparable difficulties, as if, through some kind of genetic transfer, the sons and grandsons and the daughters and granddaughters were meant to continue to bear the burden that was unjustly imposed upon their parents and grandparents. We can truly see the paradoxical (to say the least) nature of the presence of these bodies of the ‘offspring of immigrants’, or more specifically, ‘offspring of colonization’, in today’s France, a paradox that echoes with that of the ‘indigènes’ who were the parents of the French of African heritage who are today restricted to the banlieues. If the historical context has certainly changed, it still remains true that, more than half a century after the end of French colonization in Africa and after independence itself, the stigma of the ‘savage’ who needs to be civilized seems to have been transmitted from grandparents to their children. As GuénifSouilamas brilliantly summarized in her challenging statements, ‘just as the mores of the indigènes were considered to be savage, absolving the colonial order of responsibility in maintaining a patriarchal order, those of yesterday’s immigrants and their descendants today are held in suspicion, for they elicit the resurgences of a bygone, immoral order’ (2005: 207). Understandably, the stigmatization of the banlieues as a space but also of its inhabitants as a group that is socially and ethnically marked brings about a new politics of memory in France. In contemporary France one is faced with two symmetrically opposed state models inside which the citizen is supposed to develop. On the one hand, we have the problematic model of a state that, in its practices and choices, chooses to perpetuate what Walter Benjamin called the

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‘tradition of the oppressed’ (1940). On the other hand, and despite what one might say about the apologetic mode, what we have is the continuation of the model of a normal state that does not transform the bios (natural life) into zoè (a particular form of life), that does not convert social and political existence into bare life. To illustrate the above and situate it in terms of the politics of memory in today’s French banlieues, I cite Mamadou Mahmoud N’Dongo’s 2008 novel El Hadj. In this novel, which deals with the banlieues, the narrator’s explicit commentaries on the cité of La Muette in Drancy, along with his obsession with the image of deportees and those in the concentration camps of World War II, reinforces a reading that correlates the banlieues and the Nazi concentration camps. In this novel the recurrent mention of winter, associated with Drancy, necessarily makes us think of the infamous Vélodrome d’Hiver of World War II. For the narrator of El Hadj: Living in the La Muette projects is to live in a time that is not your own, a time that doesn’t belong to you; that proximity, that promiscuity with History is pregnant with meaning. You are always confronted with the past, all you have to do is cross the street to get bread, cross the street and come back to the projects, to see over and over again that monument, that freight car, that covered space, those buildings  … The camp. I remember an old guy, a visitor to the camp who was sitting on a bench, who was crying as he watched us play football [soccer]. I remember feeling annoyed, in fact ashamed […]. To live in a place of death gives the impression that the museum, the freight car, the monument, the camp itself could not be a place of memory. (2008: 152–53; my emphasis)

Moreover, when the narrator affirms that they, the inhabitants of La Muette, perceived that they felt that they were not supposed to live there, he seems to be challenging a literal form of profanation of a space that is nevertheless supposed to be a place of memory. There are two possible interpretations of this analogy between the banlieues and the Nazi camps. On the one hand, we could say that the space described and decried by the narrator predisposes them, according to a logic of history repeating itself, to be doomed to a destiny similar to that of those whose presence, made manifest in absence, fills the La Muette projects: the victims of the Jewish genocide. On the other hand, this reflection by the narrator of El Hadj could also indicate that Drancy is marked by the absolute presence of Jewish memory. In that case, Drancy will always be a reference to the Jews and, as such, the banlieusards who occupy that same space will never exist, and they will never have their own history. The past has therefore not succeeded in influencing the present, and

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the future risks being but a replication of a past that is regretted and acknowledged in all official discourse in France. Regarding this point of comparison between France’s colonial past and resulting contemporary practices, on the one hand, and France’s antisemitism, on the other hand, Joëlle Marelli puts forth the challenging observation: That antisemitism is endowed with a specific structure and a specific history is evidentiary justification to study it separately, just as the specific history and structure of anti-African American racism, for example, justifies that it be studied separately from colonial French or British racism. But there is no justification to distinguish, from the political viewpoint or even more so from the point of view of its police or legal treatment, the phenomenon of antisemitism from other racist phenomena. Politics, police, and the legal system must treat attacks against the law, attacks that must not be hierarchized by just any definition related to the origins of the victims. Now it is hard to see the reason for making a distinction in this matter, other than to establish a hierarchy. (2006: 136)

According to the words of the narrator, given above, and to Joëlle Marelli, there is an unequal treatment of historical realities, with some benefiting from excessive attention while others, atrophied, are confined within the avenues of silence and amnesia. With regards to memory, it is remarkable that, in a country so passionate about sites of memory, the memory of colonization seems to be a victim of systematic erasure, to say the least, or indeed a refusal. Now, as Tévanian underscores so well: It is most often in the name of the Republic and its superiority (over African ‘feudal’ societies, for example, or Muslim jurisdiction) that racist hierarchies were constructed during the time of colonization, and it is in the name of the Republic that the inegalitarian status quo is maintained: it is always ‘the Republic’ that is invoked, as an ex-voto, to call the immigrants or the ‘coloured’ French back to order when they gather together and organize in order to combat racism and discrimination. (2007: 7–8)

Faced with this state of affairs, we can now readily understand why this systematic repression, not only of colonial memory but also of legitimate claims to equality, unleashes a response from the young inhabitants of the banlieues. Returning to the law of 23 February 2005, I suggest that France’s refusal of its own history has fuelled a crisis of memory

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that is visible in the rejection of what young people in the banlieues consider a replication of colonial rule. Where Florence Bernault sees a ‘colonial syndrome’ and the ‘deceptions of history’ (2009), Benjamin Stora (1999, 2007) identifies a war of memory that derives from ‘a need for history’ and the ‘transfer of memory’ from wars of independence in Africa and especially in Algeria. Because of the banlieues, the colonial has returned to haunt social life in France, as immigration and race now stand out as some of the most visible and controversial issues in France. It is therefore urgent that the banlieues cease to be perceived as lawless zones and become real sites of memory: they are not only lieux de mémoire but can also constitute the ultimate site where both the French state and its citizens of African heritage can converge around a common memory. In this sense, the banlieues ultimately stand out as sites of a shared memory, which is nothing less than the communal memory of all French citizens, regardless of their race or origin. For, unless France rehabilitates the banlieues as sites of French national memory, thereby healing the wounds of the colonial past, ‘La France a brûlé, brûle et brûlera’ [in other words, France is likely to be yet again the theater of violent uprisings]. Works Cited Bancel, Nicolas. 2009. ‘The Law of February 23, 2005: The Uses Made of the Revival of France’s “Colonial Grandeur”’. In Frenchness and the African Diaspora, edited by Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola and Peter J. Bloom, 167–83. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2000 [1940]. Sur le concept d’histoire, vol. IX. Paris: Gallimard, Folio/Essais. Bernault, Florence. 2009. ‘Colonial Syndrome: French Modern and the Deceptions of History’. In Frenchness and the African Diaspora, edited by Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola and Peter J. Bloom, 120–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Coutant, Isabelle. 2005. Délit de jeunesse: la justice face aux quartiers. Paris: La Découverte. Deltombe, Thomas, Manuel Domergue and Jacob Tatsitsa. 2011. Kamerun! Une guerre cachée aux origines de la Françafrique 1948–1971. Paris: La Découverte. Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira. 2006. ‘La réduction à son corps de l’indigène de la République’. In La Fracture coloniale: la société françaie au prisme de l’héritage colonial, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire, 203–12. Paris: La Découverte.

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Lapeyronnie, Didier. 2005. ‘La banlieue comme théâtre colonial, ou la fracture coloniale dans les quartiers’. In La Fracture coloniale: la société françaie au prisme de l’héritage colonial, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire, 185–95. Paris: La Découverte. Marelli, Joëlle. 2006. ‘Usages et maléfices du thème de l’antisémitisme en France’. In La République mise à nu par son immigration, edited by Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, 133–59. Paris: La Fabrique Éditions. Mbembe, Achille. 2010. Sortir de la grande nuit. Paris: La Découverte. N’Dongo, Mahmoud Mamadou. 2008. El Hadj. Paris: Le Serpent à plumes. Rancière, Jacques. 2004 [2000]. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Silverstein, Paul, and Chantal Tetreault. 2006. ‘Postcolonial Urban Apartheid’. Social Science Research Council. http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/ Silverstein_Tetreault. Stora, Benjamin. 1999. Le transfert d’une mémoire: de l’‘Algérie française’ au racisme anti-arabe. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. — 2007. La Guerre des mémoires: la France face à son passé colonial. (Entretiens avec Thierry Leclère). La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube. Tevanian, Pierre. 2007. La République du mépris. Paris: La Découverte.

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17 October 1961 Michel Laronde 17 October 1961

On 17 October 2001 a commemorative plaque was affixed to the wall of Quai Saint-Michel in Paris, next to Pont Saint-Michel, at the level of the main police headquarters. Inaugurated by the mayor of the city, Bertrand Delanoë, the plaque marks the fortieth anniversary of the massacre of an unknown number of Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961 during a peaceful march by thousands of unarmed families in favour of the independence of Algeria. Organized by the FLN (National Liberation Front), the march was also in protest of a curfew imposed on them by the Paris chief of police, Maurice Papon. Algerian families from the suburbs, including women and children, were summoned to converge on the centre of Paris and gather together to march through the main thoroughfares. Even though they were met with extreme violence by the police when they reached the strategic points of entry into the city, such as bridges and train stations on land, and metro stations underground, thousands of people still managed to arrive at the Grands Boulevards and join the march. The massacre’s death toll reached at least a few dozen and possibly several hundred North African people. Yet an official toll of ‘3 killed (2 Algerian protesters and 1 French person from metropolitan France) and 64 wounded’ was relayed by the media the day after the march, on 18 October. This official figure was the matrix that would impose silence on the documented realities of the event for many years. But an unknown number of North Africans were killed by police, drowned in the Seine, hanged from trees in Bois de Vincennes, left to die during their detention at the identification centre in Vincennes, at Palais des Sports, Stade de Coubertin, and Parc des Expositions. Although dead bodies were discovered for several weeks following the event, such unmistakable

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proofs of the manipulation of reality did not lead to a correction of the initial official announcement made by the state. As a result, it was not until 1998 that a French government commission, the Mandelkern report, acknowledged the event as a massacre and raised the death toll to an estimated forty-eight victims. Over the course of time the official withholding of information, designed to render the event invisible, forced other forms of discourse into playing an alternative role as channels of knowledge. Public investigations, personal accounts from victims, eyewitness testimonies, the work of historians, the declassification of the police archives in October 2011 and other sources of documentation and information (Brozgal, 2014), have challenged this 1998 figure. On 17 October 2000 an article by French philosopher Etienne Balibar in the ‘Tribunes’ section of Libération approached the reality of the event with a more objective and nuanced evaluation: ‘La ratonnade d’octobre 61 (assassinat et disparition de dizaines ou centaines de manifestants civils identifiés par leur type ethnique et livrés sans défense à la violence exterminatrice d’un corps de police incité ou couvert par le gouvernement)’ [The October 1961 racial attack on North Africans (the murder and disappearance of dozens or hundreds of unarmed civilian protesters identified by their ethnic type and subjected to the deadly violence of a police force encouraged or protected by the government)]. Today, the number of victims remains vague, but, as noted above, the estimates span from a few dozen to several hundred. Forty years after the massacre, in 2001, the event was officially acknowledged by the city of Paris with the placement and unveiling, on 17 October, of a memorial plaque next to Pont Saint-Michel as a result of the work on memory initiated by Bertrand Delanoë, the socialist mayor of Paris at the time.1 The plaque reads: ‘In memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961’. Not as precise as Balibar’s statement in its attempt to provide a more 1 This inauguration is part of a wider set of memorial practices relating to October 1961 since the 1980s. Numerous individuals and groups were active in consciousness-raising efforts prior to and separate from the unveiling of the 2001 plaque, most notably the ‘Au nom de la mémoire’ association (House and MacMaster, 2006). Beyond the work of historians, it is also important to remember the role played by novelists, film makers, playwrights, musicians and comic book writers in bringing to wider public attention the memory of the massacre (Barclay, 2011; Brozgal, 2014; Chambers-Samadi, 2015; Gorrara, 2018; Laronde, 2018).

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Inauguration de la Plaque du 17 Octobre 1961 à Paris, courtesy of Henri Pouillot (www.henri-pouillot.fr/spip.php?article28 (consulted on 18 November 2016)).

objective account of the situation, the text of the plaque is nevertheless the most significant concrete gesture to date aimed at correcting the misrepresentation of reality that resulted in the original matrix generated by the official announcement on 18 October 1961, the day after the massacre. In 2000, a year before the unveiling of the plaque, former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin had used the term ‘tragic events’, even though neither the police’s nor the government’s responsibility for the crime had been officially stated. In 2011, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the event, the action group ‘Au Nom de la Mémoire’ [In the Name of Memory], together with the French online investigative and opinion newspaper Médiapart, made a ‘Call for the official recognition of the tragedy of 17 October 1961 in Paris’ [Appel pour la reconnaissance officielle de la tragédie du 17  octobre 1961 à Paris], which drew many signatures, including François Hollande’s. The president acknowledged this appeal on 17 October 2012 by stating: ‘Le 17 octobre 1961, des Algériens qui manifestaient pour le droit à l’indépendance ont été tués lors d’une sanglante répression’ [On 17 October 1961, Algerians marching for their right to independence were killed during a bloody repression]. The news media commented that the president had taken an important step towards recognizing the ‘repression’. In his statement, however, the expression ‘state crime’ was not used, and therefore the responsibility of

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the state was not clearly expressed or defined; and although the strong phrase ‘bloody repression’ was indeed chosen, that might have acted to overshadow the content of the rest of the sentence. Saying that ‘Algerians […] were killed’ dismisses the question of the number of victims; it does not identify the perpetrators of the ‘bloody repression’ and the possibility of the state’s responsibility is not even suggested. On the contrary, the use of the passive voice seems to make both victims and perpetrators of the crimes anonymous, as if in an attempt to encourage forgetting, and to camouflage. Once more, the state seems to mark time, if not to backtrack, in relation to the text of the 2001 plaque, despite appearances to the contrary in the form of a recognition that seems to advocate for truth, but remains vague at best. In 2001, eleven years earlier, the commemorative plaque had said more than the statement by the president of the Republic in 2012 when it specified that the ‘Algerians killed’ were ‘many’ and that the demonstration was ‘peaceful’, which was not stated in the president’s announcement. On the other hand, does the fact that the expression ‘bloody repression’ was inscribed on the plaque suggest that the devoir de mémoire [a duty to remember] had made its way, at least partially, into the president’s corrective discourse, and therefore also point to the state’s public political engagement? This confrontation of terms seems to indicate that the devoir de mémoire is a war of words in which elements of language are symbolic of the many small steps that have marked the slow progression of the discourse toward truth between the time of the event and 2001. In the age of social media the pressure to disseminate corrective information is heightened, accelerating the process of repair. In that sense, the placing of a plaque across from the police headquarters next to Pont Saint-Michel was a gesture of political agency carried out under pressure from different associations whose work is relayed to the public via social media. Social networking ensures the passage from the public recognition of the need for manifestations of memory to the political construction of sites of memory. The plaque, therefore, functions as a sign of cultural memory and signals a corrective initiative in at least two directions: one shows a postcolonial effort beginning in the 1990s to officially confront France’s colonial history and acknowledge the traumas of its colonial past in a liberating discourse; the other is the process by which this ‘postmemorial working through’ is carried out (Hirsch, 2012: 122). On a broader political level of a colonial heritage, the plaque participates in a devoir de mémoire in the sense that it inscribes the remembrance of the event directly onto a site where one

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Aubervilliers passerelle de la fraternité & plaque, courtesy of Claude Shoshany, modification made by Lämpel (www.fr.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Massacre_du_17_octobre_1961 (consulted on 18 November 2016)).

of the state’s most brutal and traumatic acts of violence actually took place, the police headquarters at Saint-Michel. On a societal level, the devoir de mémoire is appropriated by the media and the public and given momentum by various initiatives, so it can be passed on to the political sphere and made into an official initiative to correct the national narrative. For Clotilde Lebas, putting up a plaque serves as a catalyst in the sense that ‘avec la pause de la plaque commémorative s’est amorcé un processus de reconnaissance du 17 octobre 1961, ouvrant la voie à la stabilisation de son souvenir’ [installing the commemorative plaque has initiated a process of acknowledging 17 October 1961, thus paving the way for a firmly established remembrance] (Lebas, 2007). The creation of a site of memory with the commemorative plaque at Pont Saint-Michel may be considered a symbolic acknowledgement of the event and, by association, the first official recognition of a state lie being admitted publicly. The plaque is therefore a step toward

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an increased acceptance of the event and contributes to the process of inserting a corrective narrative of 17 October 1961 in a different discourse, that of France’s postcolonial culture coming to terms with one of the most traumatic manifestations of the Algerian war in France. Considered this way, the plaque assumes a new function as one of the elements in rewriting a foreclosed situation that is in the process of being historicized, or reinserted in the discourse of history. This seems to be confirmed by a phenomenon of repetition and dissemination of the message of the plaque. Exactly the same message is also on a plaque that was installed at Passerelle de la Fraternité, in Aubervilliers, on the same anniversary date, 17 October 2001, as well as in other locations in the banlieues from where the demonstration had started on 17 October 1961. The repetition of the same message at different locations and the dissemination of the references to the event with the renaming of streets and squares do seem to confirm the anchoring of the event in public consciousness through a political act. While most of the initiatives were originally taken by local government, such as the mayor’s office of the cities affected by the event, the repetition of an identical statement suggests an attempt to transform a citizen-initiated act of correction into a larger political engagement and send a collective message with a strong reparative potential. Installing plaques in places where the victims were killed and renaming squares, boulevards and streets ‘17 octobre 1961’ (Quai Saint-Michel, Genevilliers, Le Blanc-Mesnil, Colombes, Clichy la Garenne, Nanterre) participates in the construction and preservation of a consciousness of the past. In that sense, commemorations that were effected by renaming public loci in cities and adding plaques are central elements of a language that ensures the transitional movement from state lie to corrective truth. The use of commemorative plaques to comply with the duty to remember is part of a set of memory-related initiatives that are somehow linked to the complicated question of reparation for a traumatic past. Plaques are one of the steps that states are expected to take along the transitional process toward ‘more’ truth. Memorials, commemorations and public acts of remembrance are memory-related measures that have progressively become part of the state obligation to correct state lies in order to mend the grand national narrative (Campisi, 2014). And yet, using plaques to officially inscribe the event in the public sphere is only one of the memory-related initiatives that liberate a memorial discourse and serve to bridge the gap between past and present. As part of a larger commemorative project, the plaque is, in

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its own right, a form of reparation that launches an active interaction between past and present and, unlike the demand for compensation, which is meant to put a stop to memory, it projects into the future as well. By including the presence of the past in the present, it functions to refuse the meaning of reparation as closure, and moves the idea of reparation toward a notion of ‘transformative justice’ that acknowledges the harm done in the past and the necessity to keep it alive in the present in order to prevent the repetition of traumatic events. A commemorative plaque is a physical object with the same function as a memorial or a monument, even though it may represent a different form of memorialisation in the multi-faceted general obligation by the state to initiate and maintain a reparation programme (Campisi, 2014). In that sense, a plaque is akin to a ‘site of conscience’, or a site of memory, and is clearly perceived as an active memory practice whose discursive function ‘serves a performative political function’ (Howell, 2016). The process of rehabilitating pieces of history that have been silenced in different ways – whether repressed, ignored or manipulated – by the state at some point between the beginning of the war in Algeria and its aftermath, well into the 1980s, is not without reticence on the part of the French state apparatus. Thus, retrieving shreds of the colonial past that are made to emerge with a difference as part of the historical transformation that characterizes the engagement of the postcolonial period is a complex, ongoing and never-ending negotiation between revisionist voices, the resistance of institutional powers to questioning and revisiting the homogeneity of the grand national narrative, and the efforts of historians and other public voices to get ever closer to the ‘truth’ of these camouflaged events. As can be inferred from the presence of a significant number of inscriptions of the massacre of 17 October 1961 in public loci in cities around Paris, the process is marked by a long trail of step-by-step initiatives against the resistance to correcting the official narrative put up by the French institution at the time of the event. Each time new words are accepted as part of the institutional discourse (‘bloody repression’), the wall of resistance is weakened by elements of language as signs of progress toward ‘more’ truth. These ‘accelerations of memory’ (accélérations de la mémoire), as Benjamin Stora calls them (Stora and Harbi, 2004), also concern 17 October 1961 (‘war’ replaces ‘events’ to refer to the conflict in Algeria in 1999; ‘bloody repression’ describes 17 October in 2001). As can be seen in the state’s resistance to amending the national narrative of the event before it is pressured to do so by civil society and the media, aborted attempts

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to ‘accelerate’ the devoir de mémoire have preceded as well as followed the inauguration of the 2001 plaque, making the process of uncovering the truth an uphill battle marked by multiple forms of resistance. The passage from official truth in 1961 to state lie to corrective truth demands, and results from, a profound dynamism in the re-emergence and consequent rewriting of distorted historical events. Once the original assertion made into a truth by the state has been debunked and suspected of being an official lie, the new truth-in-progress (the one that needs to be constantly revisited) has to be told to the public at each stage of its progression. At each stage of the corrective rewriting, telling takes different routes and different forms, beyond the conventional approaches such as the work of historians that comes to mind first. Fiction, for instance, whereby the event is reimagined in novels and films, offers discursive forms that are different from the conventional production of a politico-historical discourse. Yet, fiction plays its own part in the effort to insert a corrective narrative of the event in contemporary French culture, ‘as an insurgent act of cultural translation’ that speaks to the postcolonial rewriting of history (Bhabha, 1994: 7). In this case, the naturalization of 17 October 1961 in two dozen novels since 1982 and several films shows that a traumatic event constitutes an anchor for memory, and that its distribution as different types of memory practices (individual, collective, public, national) generates a range of corrective transformations. Writing about the photographs of the event left as an heritage by Elie Kagan, Clotilde Lebas concludes: ‘This example illustrates the complexity of memory dynamics by revealing how an event can come back, by the detour of photography, as a fact or a trace, and be reinvested in a present time where it still makes sense’ (Lebas, 2007). Among the pregnant references to collective traumatic situations tied to the silences of the Algerian war in France, the massacre of 17 October 1961 is a compelling example of a trail of traumas embedded along the fractal lines that mark the divide between the colonial and the postcolonial in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French history. How does one explain the proliferation of plaques and other references in and around Paris forty and fifty years after the event? A larger perspective suggests that one may consider 17 October 1961 as embedded in an exceptional geopolitical situation – that is to say, in a context that is both political and spatial. Politically and spatially, 17 October 1961 is part of the extension of the war in Algeria to the Hexagon, making France, and precisely here its capital city, a displaced site where antagonistic

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communities are forced to interact and confront each other in a space characterized by the intrusion of the marginalized space of the colonized (the war in Algeria) within the conventional space of the colonizer (the Algerian war in mainland France). Historically and spatially, the event is a postcolonial geo-historical relocation of yet another instance of colonial violence, perpetrated this time on metropolitan soil. In this liminal space, characterized by a geo-historical shift of the war from the margin to the centre, the unwanted, contested event that forces the official silence of the state is very strictly delimited as one day in Paris during the Algerian war on 17 October 1961. This geopolitical dislocation of the event and its deferred relocation in the present is a typically postcolonial rehistoricizing phenomenon. What may seem anachronistic, then, in such a context, is the continued use of conventional forms of normalization such as memorials, monuments, plaques and renaming for events that took place at the edge of a mentality where memory of the past has to resonate in the present. What the commemorative plaque at Pont Saint-Michel tells is that, as part of a set of rituals to answer the needs of an era of ‘memory culture’, the media have played an active role in the process of the ‘postmemorial working through’ that led to the installation of the plaque. Thus, it gave the plaque a dynamic function of making the past present, a commitment to the obligation to memory by the state that has been proven efficient if one considers the numerous acts of commemoration and remembrance that have marked each anniversary of 17 October 1961 since 2001. Works Cited Balibar, Etienne. 2000. ‘Pour la vérité sur octobre 1961’. Tribunes, Libération (17 October). Barclay, Fiona. 2011. Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge. Brozgal, Lia. 2014. ‘In the Absence of the Archive (Paris, October 17, 1961)’. South Central Review 31, no. 1 (Spring): 34–54. Campisi, Maria Chiara. 2014. ‘From a Duty to Remember to an Obligation to Memory? Memory as Reparation in the Jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’. International Journal of Conflict and Violence 8, no. 1: 62–74.

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Chambers-Samadi, Chadia. 2015. Répression des manifestants algériens: La nuit meurtrière du 17 Octobre 1961. Paris: L’Harmattan. Gorrara, Claire. 2018. ‘Black October: Comics, Memory and Cultural Representations of October 17, 1961’. French Politics, Culture and Society 36, no. 1: 128–47. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. House, Jim, and Neil MacMaster. 2006. Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howell, Jennifer. 2016. ‘Investigating the enforced disappearances of Algeria’s “Dark Decade”: Omar D’s and Kamel Khélif’s commemorative art projects’. The Journal of North African Studies 21, no. 2: 213–34. Laronde, Michel. 2018. ‘Narrativizing foreclosed history in “postmemorial” fiction of the Algerian War in France: October 17, 1961, a case in point’. In Reimagining North African Immigration: Identities in flux in French literature, television, and film, edited by Véronique Machelidon and Patrick Saveau, 134–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lebas, Clotilde. 2007. ‘Au fil de nos souvenirs: le 17 octobre 1961, emblème des violences policières’. Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 119–20 (November): 233–48. Stora, Benjamin, and Mohammed Harbi. 2004. La guerre d’Algérie, 1954–2004: la fin de l’amnésie. Paris: Robert Laffont.

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Marseille Kathryn Kleppinger Marseille

When the right-wing mayor of Marseille Jean-Claude Gaudin proposed the creation of a Mémorial national de la France d’Outre-Mer in 2000, he appointed pied-noir historian Jean-Jacques Jordi as the future site’s director. Jordi proposed that the site, located in the Fort Saint-Jean at the Mediterranean entrance to Marseille’s Vieux Port, include space for a museum, venues for artistic performances and a conference area for academic study. In an attempt to justify the project’s proposed apolitical nature, Jordi commented in a newspaper article: Le temps est venu de parler sereinement de tout ce passé notamment de l’Algérie française. Ce mémorial sera un élément structurant pour l’ensemble des populations de Marseille, y compris pour les jeunes venus de ces pays mais qui ne connaissent pas leur histoire. Il n’y a pas toujours eu des conflits! (Schmit, 2004) [The time has come to talk calmly about this past, about French Algeria in particular. This memorial will provide guidance for all of Marseille’s populations, including young people from these countries but who do not know their history. It has not always been conflictual!]

The memorial, however, immediately received harsh criticism from many sides. Evelyne Joyaux, president of the pied-noir association Cercle algérianiste, saw the project as too politically correct: ‘On cherche à fabriquer, pour des générations de visiteurs, une mémoire collective simplifiée en accord avec l’idée des peuples en lutte pour leur libération’ [This is looking to construct, for generations of visitors, a simplified collective memory in line with the idea of people struggling for their freedom] (Gairaud, 2004). Historian Benjamin Stora noted the lack of participation from historians from former French colonies: ‘Pourquoi n’y

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a-t-il pas d’historien d’origine algérienne ou sénégalaise dans le conseil scientifique? Une fois de plus, on ne parle que des Européens!’ [Why are historians of Algerian or Senegalese descent absent from the scientific advisory board? Once again, we are only talking about the Europeans!] (Simonnet, 2007). After several years of debates and projected cost overruns the project was eventually shelved in 2007. A resurrection now seems unlikely, given the subsequent opening of the MuCEM (Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée) near the proposed site for the Mémorial. While this conflict can be productively considered a crystallization of a debate over colonial histories at the national level, the Mémorial itself and the difficulties it created also reveal the particularities of Marseille’s colonial heritage and its current relationship to that past. Including a unique mix of former colonial workers and political refugees and their descendents as well as pieds-noirs and their families, the city’s economic, social and urban fabric has been defined by its geographic setting at the crossroads between Paris and France’s colonies. Remnants of the city’s past can be found in several places, such as the posters for the 1906 and 1922 colonial exhibitions on display in the Chamber of Commerce or the reclining statues of female allegories of the French colonies on the staircase outside the central train station. But this past is nowhere analysed in detail. Marseille’s postcolonial history is both ever-present in its distinctly Algerian central neighbourhoods, such as Belsunce, yet also officially invisible, thus leading to complex moments of conflict when it pushes to the surface, as it did for the Mémorial. The resolution of this conflict through the creation of the MuCEM, which defines itself as seeking to ‘retracer, d’analyser et d’éclairer, dans un même élan et un même lieu, les antiques fondations de ce bassin de civilisation si fertile, ainsi que les tensions qui le traversent jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine’ [retrace, analyse and shed light upon, in one gesture and one place, the ancient foundations of this fertile cradle of civilization, as well as the tensions that extend to our contemporary moment] (‘L’Institution’, 2016) effectively displaces the city’s discursive focus away from the political (colonialism and empire) to the geographical (the Mediterranean region). As one of the largest port cities in Europe and in the Mediterranean, Marseille’s financial well-being has largely been determined by international trade. Over the course of nineteenth-century industrialization, France’s colonial expansions quickly became crucial sources of raw materials. Soap producers, for example, faced a severe shortage of olive

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oil in the early nineteenth century, which limited their ability to satisfy European demand for their soap. By the 1830s, however, the discovery that peanut and sesame oils could provide a worthy substitute led factory owners to seek imports from the West African coast. While in 1832 soap factories imported 430 tons of oil-producing seeds from Senegal and Guinea, by 1842 they were importing 36,700 tons. By 1862, that figure had increased to 118,200 tons (Daumalin and Raveux, 2001: 167). Given this dependence on African imports, the Chamber of Commerce also strongly supported the expansion of France’s colonial empire in order to reduce customs taxes. In the case of Dahomey, for example, the Chamber of Commerce actively lobbied for the full colonization of the region in 1890 rather than a treaty with local leaders ‘pour éviter que le commerce français ne soit écrasé par les droits de douane’ [to prevent French trade from being crushed by custom duties] (Chassagne, 1998: 1013). Beyond West Africa, the colonization of Algeria also provided local companies with new business opportunities. The local trade journal argued strongly in favour of the capture of Algiers and subsequently praised ‘l’heureuse nouvelle de la prise d’Alger’ [the happy news that Algiers had been taken] (Lopez and Temime, 1990: 131) in recognition of the possibilities afforded by new markets. The private shipper Bazin established the first regular shipping route between Marseille and Algiers, Oran and Tunis by 1845, well before government initiatives (Lopez and Témime, 1990: 132). While exports to the colonies comprised 37 per cent of the city’s trade in 1913, by 1938 that figure had increased to nearly 65 per cent, of which 50 per cent was to North Africa (AttardMaraninchi and Temime, 1990: 17). The full economic potential of colonial trade became apparent during the First World War, when trade with traditional European powers was closed off as a result of the conflict. Marseille weathered the storm of this war relatively unscathed, as traders focused their energies on the major port cities of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. As a sign of the increasing importance of imports from the North and West African coasts, in the mid-nineteenth century the Vieux Port became increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of ships docking in the city. While all city leaders agreed that a new port needed to be constructed, they disagreed on the location of an expansion. Some argued in favour of Marseille’s wealthier residential southern region. Others, however, favoured the barren northern region of La Joliette, which would allow space for factories and refineries. This northern

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solution was eventually approved in 1844 and opened in 1853, allowing Marseillais industrialists to process raw materials on-site rather than send them away for use by other regions. This strategy proved vitally important during the colonial era; Marseille had the capacity to process and refine (and hence control) the materials its traders imported from throughout the French colonial empire. Concomitant developments in industry throughout the nation also led to a rising demand for unskilled labourers. As Émile Témime has noted in his study of migration to and through Marseille, the city’s economy was largely defined by the transit of workers through the city, as migrants arrived in France and subsequently travelled on to factory jobs throughout the country. This transit route created jobs in shipping, dock working and even smaller-scale businesses such as hostels and restaurants (Lopez and Temime, 1990: 10). While this immigration was primarily European, Marseille’s docks were also a departure point for government officials and settlers, which required additional infrastructure and manpower. As the national government encouraged Europeans to settle in Algeria through generous land grants and subsidies, all potential settlers from Germany and Switzerland were directed to pass through Marseille. In the reverse direction, the first colonial workers arrived in 1907. Tellingly, these workers from Kabylia were imported as strike breakers in the oil refineries. Early violence against these colonial workers therefore originated from the Italian strikers, who saw their bargaining power slipping away. The first large wave of colonial workers and soldiers arrived during the First World War, with some estimates suggesting the arrival of approximately 6,000 colonial workers per month (Attard-Maraninchi and Temime, 1990: 169). All Tunisian, Moroccan, Algerian and Malgache volunteers were processed through Marseille as a matter of national policy, which placed significant strain on Marseille’s housing market. Many of these migrants were housed in military barracks, where disease (particularly tuberculosis) spread rapidly and created a high mortality rate. Algerian workers generally grouped together in housing in the Saint-Martin district of the city, creating an Algerian enclave that exists until today (Attard-Maraninchi and Temime, 1990: 170). Official figures indicate that 120,000–130,000 Maghrebi workers were brought to France between 1915 and 1918, although the 1921 census indicates only 52,000. How many of these arrivals stayed in Marseille remains undetermined, although records indicate that those who chose to stay in Marseille tended to remain for a longer duration than those

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who travelled elsewhere, as Marseille’s port and industry allowed for a comparatively stable job market. Additional colonial workers arrived throughout the Second World War, particularly from French Indochina: 10,000 Indochinese soldiers and 15,000 Indochinese workers arrived during this period to support the war efforts and were housed in camps throughout the region. The workers were given six-month visas, but by 1949 12,000 were still in France (Jordi, Sayad and Temime, 1991: 42). When the docks closed in 1942 owing to the war, there were 2,012 French, 896 North African and 757 Italian dockers (Attard-Maraninchi and Temime, 1990: 116). As statistics here and above indicate, the French colonial empire was very present in Marseille’s economic structure and population management. The colonies created jobs, both in industry as well as in organizing population management. But these elements of city planning were largely secondary to formal policies: they were a result of decisionmaking at other levels, rather than specifically developed in recognition of contemporary needs. Many of the transit camps housing colonial migrants were improvised and overcrowded, for example, and city leaders often scrambled to find appropriate shelter for new arrivals. The colonies were therefore seen as a resource to manage, based on colonial policies established at the national level. The conflicts marking the end of the colonial period hit Marseille earlier than they did the rest of the country. French soldiers departed for Indochina from Marseille in the early 1950s but were met with political difficulties: the French communist party called for the disruption of this ‘dirty war’ and encouraged dockers to hamper the loading of war ships and to convince soldiers to desert. The substantial Indochinese population in the region also organized into a loose and fractured community that nevertheless celebrated the signing of the FrancoVietnamese accords on 6 March 1946. Differences within the migrant community soon came to a head in 1948, however, when conflicts among Trotskyists, Communists and supporters of Emperor Bao Dai openly attacked each other in the transit camps. These attacks led to high-profile arrests as well as significant media coverage of the supposed importation of a colonial conflict to Marseille (Jordi, Sayad and Temime, 1991: 46). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Marseille supported the arrival of Maghrebi workers, most of whom used Marseille as a point of transit on their way to factories in other parts of France. By 1954 official figures indicate 210,000 North African workers in France, nearly all of whom passed through Marseille (and only approximately 15,000 of

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whom stayed in the region) (Jordi, Sayad and Temime, 1991: 49, 51). The massive waves of arrivals created unique challenges for Marseille, which served as both a processing centre and a sorting centre, preventing ill or otherwise unfit workers from entering the country. City officials faced particular difficulties with the Algerian population, who by this point were legally French and therefore benefited from the right of free circulation throughout the country. The Bouches-du-Rhône département was obligated to create its own commission for North African affairs in 1946, officially developed to support Algerians who were called ‘displaced workers’ (Jordi, Sayad and Temime, 1991: 50). As the Algerian war grew in scope, Marseille was also home to several currents of support for French Algeria. Early groups of repatriated pieds-noirs formed associations and interest groups, while business leaders promoted the importance of maintaining the colonial market. By 1958 the Chamber of Commerce of Marseille passed a resolution noting ‘la prolongation de la situation actuelle ne peut qu’entraîner les plus graves répercussions tant sur le plan de l’industrie et du commerce que sur celui de la main-d’œuvre emloyée’ [the current situation cannot continue without having dramatic consequences for industry and trade as well as for the workforce] (Jordi, Sayad and Temime, 1991: 82). As in the early years of the colonial project, business needs dictated much of the city’s policies and opinions. Nevertheless, the Socialist mayor Gaston Defferre supported Charles de Gaulle’s referendum for a Fifth Republic and published editorials arguing in favour of a peaceful resolution to the Algerian conflict. The unexpected result of Algerian independence, however, soon became apparent in Marseille, with the challenge of accommodating the arrival of returning expatriates who chose to leave their homes in Indochina and North Africa. After an initial wave of 2,000 French settlers from Indochina in the early 1950s, the first major wave of expatriates from Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt began arriving in 1956. Over the course of decolonization more than two million returning expatriates passed through Marseille, and 150,000 settled in the city and its immediate surroundings. This arrival of expatriates remains the largest wave of migration that the city has ever seen, with 25 June 1962 seeing the record of 10,437 arrivals in a single day (Jordi, Sayad and Temime, 1991: 92). Marseille, as the port of arrival for these terrified and exhausted refugees, then faced the difficulty of providing for vastly more people than originally expected. Most ships arrived with significantly more

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people than they were legally allowed to carry, and some ships that were not meant to provide passenger transportation arrived with passengers, to the surprise of officials. Mayor Defferre was forced to provide emergency funding from the city’s coffers to hire additional officials to handle the processing, and non-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross, Le Secours catholique and Le Fonds social juif handled the humanitarian aspects of these arrivals because the city could not keep up with the refugees’ needs. By July 1962 municipal services had written to the national government begging officials to divert passenger airplanes to other cities (Jordi, Sayad and Temime, 1991: 93–94). As this brief overview indicates, Marseille’s relationship with France’s empire has largely stemmed from its geographic location and economic activity. Marseille played a relatively small role in political decisions taken at a national level, but officials nevertheless attempted to influence national politics. Marseille held a Colonial Exhibition from April to November 1906, with a specific focus on the economic benefit of colonial holdings, for Marseille and for France more generally. The exhibition was a notable success, with 1.8 million visitors – primarily from the region, although also including the president of the Republic (Lopez and Temime, 1990: 136–38). The city also held a second exhibition in 1922 focused on the international relevance of colonial trade, which was widely publicized abroad. This exhibition welcomed three million visitors, including many from outside France, and was seen as a testing ground for the 1931 exhibition in Paris. Returning to contemporary debates, Marseille has gained increasing attention for its marked differences from other major French cities. The city’s arrangement as a collection of villages, allowing for intermediaries between residents and municipal services who help address conflicts and concerns, provides one possible explanation as to why Marseille did not see riots during the 2005 outbreak of unrest throughout France (Cesari, Moreau and Schleyer-Lindenmann, 2001: 171). One notable example is the association Marseille Espérance, founded in 1990 to address rising tensions among religious populations in the city. The association brings together the city’s Catholic, Armenian, Protestant, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist communities to meet regularly with the mayor’s office. Finally, the city’s unique geography, on a coast and situated within mountains, also means that words such as banlieue and banlieusards are not geographically appropriate (Cesari, Moreau and Schleyer-Lindenmann, 2001: 20). Residents of Marseille’s poorest neighborhoods are therefore seen as fully Marseillais, rather than as

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outsiders to the city centre, thus eliminating the local need for political movements such as the Indigènes de la République, which noted in their founding manifesto that the treatment of the French banlieues mirrors that of France’s former colonial policies. Nevertheless, Marseille’s relationship to its past, colonial and otherwise, remains strikingly vague. While Marseille is the oldest formal city in France it features very little in architectural or historical remains beyond a few Phocaean ships recently unearthed and put on display in the museum of the city of Marseille. Its colonial history remains even more undocumented: that the posters for the Colonial Exhibition and the staircase of the Saint-Charles train station remain the only visible vestiges of Marseille’s unique colonial past speaks to both national and local politics. The debates surrounding the Mémorial des Français d’Outre-Mer reveal many tensions in the legacies of colonialism, echoed by two existing monuments, the Mémorial aux Rapatriés d’Algérie (1970) and the Monument aux morts de l’armée d’Orient (1927). These monuments reflect specific attitudes concerning France’s colonial past, which many of the Marseille’s postcolonial populations probably find problematic (Aldrich, 2005). In this sense, then, the MuCEM and its Mediterranean focus functions as an emblematic component of Marseille’s current status as a postcolonial lieu de mémoire: both heavily dependent on its location between Paris and France’s colonies and yet also seeking to avoid conflation with France’s colonial past. Works Cited Aldrich, Robert. 2005. Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France: Momuments, Museums and Colonial Memories. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. Attard-Maraninchi, Marie-Françoise and Emile Temime. 1990. Le cosmopolitisme de l’entre deux-guerres (1919–1945), vol. 3 of series Migrance: Histoire des migrations à Marseille. Aix-En-Provence: Edisud. Cesari, Jocelyne, Alain Moreau and Alexandra Schleyer-Lindenmann. 2001. Plus Marseillais que moi, tu meurs! Paris: L’Harmattan. Chassagne, Serge. 1998. ‘Xavier Daumalin, Marseille et l’Ouest African. L’outre-mer des industriels (1841–1956)’. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 53, no. 4: 1012–15. Daumalin, Xavier, and Olivier Raveux. 2001. ‘Marseille (1831–1865). Une revolution industrielle entre Europe du Nord et Méditerranée’. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 56, no. 1: 153–76.

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Gairaud, Michel. 2004. ‘Marseille – Un memorial, des mémoires’. Le Ravi, 1 October 2004. Cited in ‘Musée historique ou entreprise électoraliste?’ Ligue des Droits de l’Homme-Toulon. http://ldh-toulon.net/ le-Memorial-national-de-la-France.html. ‘L’Institution’. Official MuCEM Website. http://www.mucem.org/fr/contenu/ linstitution. Jordi, Jean-Jacques, Abdelmalek Sayad and Emile Temime. 1991. Le choc de la décolonisation (1945–1990), vol. 4 of series Migrance: Histoire des migrations à Marseille. Aix-En-Provence: Edisud. Lopez, Renée, and Emile Temime. 1990. L’expansion marseillaise et ‘l’invasion italienne’ (1830–1919), vol. 2 of series Migrance: Histoire des migrations à Marseille. Aix-En Provence: Edisud. Schmit, Philippe. 2004. ‘Jean-Jacques Jordi veut faire du Mémorial de Marseille la référence sur l’histoire coloniale de la France’. La Provence, 10 December 2004. Cited in ‘Musée historique ou entreprise électoraliste?’ Ligue des Droits de l’Homme-Toulon. http://ldh-toulon.net/ le-Memorial-national-de-la-France.html. Simonnet, Valérie. 2007. ‘Trop de mémoires tue le memorial’. Libération, 29 September 2007. http://www.liberation.fr/villes/2007/09/29/ trop-de-memoires-tue-le-memorial_102808.

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The Mediterranean Kathryn Kleppinger The Mediterranean

It is fitting that the research project that would push French historian Fernand Braudel to revolutionize the practice of history in the 1960s would be the Mediterranean Sea and its surrounding lands, which he discovered could be understood only in terms of a ‘global history’ over a span of several centuries (the ‘longue durée’). His massive work La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philip II (1949) encompasses chapters on the geological make-up of the Mediterranean, how Mediterranean peoples established communities with economic, social and political customs, and finally how interactions among peoples shaped Spanish king Philip II’s policies and decision-making. As Braudel argues, the interlocking imperatives of political, geographic and individual interests made it impossible not to reconsider the practice of history in order to address the richness of even one era of the region’s past (Braudel, 1949: 16). While Braudel’s temporal focus does not include Mediterranean colonialism, the sea and its surrounding land masses were nevertheless sites of extensive colonial aspirations and conflict among several European imperial powers. England eyed Egypt, Italy vied for Libya and France focused on Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, where, in this latter case, successive French governments also competed against Spain. In these instances, the Mediterranean was seen not only as a body of water but as a region of land as well, and European powers understood that controlling ports on the North African coast would further their political and economic interests throughout the region and in Europe more broadly. Seen in this light, the Mediterranean region played a fundamental role in shaping the outcomes of European imperial designs and continues to shape contemporary regional politics. Policies created

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in Paris or London for reasons often national in scope (relating, for example, to trade routes and influence among other powers) were (and are still) often carried out along the Mediterranean Sea’s shores. A colonial history of this region could, in a Braudelian fashion, extend back through the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman conquests of the Maghreb and Anatolia, but for the purposes of analyzing the Mediterranean as a postcolonial French lieu de mémoire, Napoleon’s attempted conquest of Egypt in 1798 serves as a key point of departure. Napoleon understood, well before his colleagues in the Directory government, that controlling the Mediterranean would provide France (and himself) with endless military and economic development opportunities. Indeed, he justified the validity of his project by arguing (among other reasons) that controlling Egypt would be a step toward making the Mediterranean itself a French sea (see Lorcin and Shepherd, 2016: 7). Napoleon’s assertion is characteristically ambitious, given that over two-thirds of the Mediterranean seaboard is located in North Africa and the Middle East (Chambers, 2008: 34). Indeed, as Iain Chambers has noted, the very concept of a Mediterranean was established at this time ‘within terms overwhelmingly established by the cultural gaze that arrives from northern Europe’ (Chambers, 2008: 33). That we continue to discuss this region today as a French lieu de mémoire testifies to the strength of the colonial discursive legacy left behind by Napoleon and subsequent French leaders. And, although Napoleon’s conquest eventually failed, he succeeded in drawing attention to the North African coast and to the advantages of controlling port cities throughout the region. While such moments of colonial expansion crystallize several of the political and economic motivations behind military conquests of North Africa, the Mediterranean is perhaps best known today as a site of dramatic migrant tragedies and rescues, as people fleeing various regions of Africa and the Middle East seek to enter Europe clandestinely by traversing the sea itself. These arrivals have led to a perceived imperative to once again control the Mediterranean, this time by keeping the region out of national affairs rather than incorporating it into the political fold. This has not always been the case, however, as the proposals of former French presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy for regional unification demonstrated in the early 2000s. In order to understand the full complexity of the region’s meaning as a lieu de mémoire, then, it will be necessary to focus first on colonial projects, then proceed to an analysis of discussions of the region’s relationship to France today.

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Many historians have studied Napoleon’s campaign to Egypt and its impact on science, art and trade (Strathern, 2007). Beyond these goals, however, Napoleon also sought to control Egypt and its strategic location to further his goal of making the Mediterranean a French sea. As Julia Clancy-Smith and Charles D. Smith note, Napoleon understood that controlling Egypt would create the possibility of controlling the eastern Mediterranean coast to Syria in order to block Britain’s access to the Persian Gulf and India (Clancy-Smith and Smith, 2014: 22). The Mediterranean thus became a primary focal point for ambitions extending far beyond the immediate goal at hand, and Napoleon’s project revealed a way of thinking about the utility of controlling this large body of water. Egypt’s strategic location on the sea would further France’s imperial interests throughout the world by creating challenges for its arch-rival Britain’s colonial projects. That Napoleon’s troops were eventually forced to return to France in defeat prevented the French from controlling the eastern Mediterranean as they had hoped, but they continued to set their sights on other Mediterranean port cities, such as Algiers. Although the full colonization of Algeria began somewhat accidentally, after French forces found themselves in control of Algiers, the root cause of French interventions concerned a long history of trading debts with France that began in 1798 (Ageron, 1991: 5). Hostilities began when the local dey supposedly struck the unscrupulous French consul and business leader in Algiers, which led to a French naval blockade in 1827. The dey’s reaction to this blockade, destroying two French trading posts on the Algerian coast, led to a military campaign on land. Although King Charles X had not planned to take over Algiers, his minister of war recognized that a victory could serve political goals at home: ‘it would be a useful distraction from political trouble at home to go to the country at the next election with the keys of Algiers in hand’ (Ageron, 1991: 5). Such plans did not save Charles X, however, who was soon defeated in the 1830 revolution. His downfall – and his successor King Louis-Philippe’s lack of interest in Algeria – created a setting in which the French army controlled the Algerian coast with very little oversight from central government. Although the colonization of Algeria had begun as a political sideshow, the French army soon began expanding and organizing its holdings in the region. European settlers immediately recognized the business opportunities that the new region provided, and by 1839 25,000 Europeans had already moved to Algeria and claimed land for cultivation

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(Ageron, 1991: 25). These Europeans eventually tired of military rule, however, and formally requested incorporation into the French political system. Beginning in 1845, Algeria was recognized as a civil territory of France and incorporated into the metropolitan French government. The privileges accorded to these settlers applied only to French citizens, however, which set a precedent for subsequent legislations that delineated between European settlers and ‘native’ populations. In this instance, we can see how the regional specificities of Algeria led to a distinct form of colonial power: the French had taken control over the region because of trade disputes, then, once settlers arrived to cultivate the fertile land that had been taken from local authorities, it became necessary to further regulate the region to protect this population. Once Algeria was formally incorporated in the French colonial empire, pressures to expand east and west soon arose. French forces invaded lands controlled by Tunisian officials in April 1881, ostensibly because local tribes had been crossing the border with Algeria to conduct raids. French designs went far beyond this local concern, however, as the Suez Canal had opened twelve years previously, in 1869. Prominent statesman Jules Ferry subsequently justified expansion in Tunisia with the observation that ‘this policy of colonial expansion was inspired by […] the fact that a navy such as ours cannot do without safe harbors, defenses, supply centers on the high seas’ (Clancy-Smith and Smith, 2014: 40). Ferry also recognized that French industrialists needed new outlets for their goods, as the United States and Germany became more economically protectionist and less interested in French imports. Access to new markets was all the more worrisome because the British government under prime minister Benjamin Disraeli had purchased the Egyptian shares of the canal in 1875, thus solidifying British control over the region. Lord Cromer, British Consul-General in Egypt, observed that ‘Egypt may now almost be said to form part of Europe. It is on the high road to the Far East’ (Clancy-Smith and Smith, 2014: 41). Given increasing British influence in Egypt, Tunis became an attractive political and economic hub as a gateway to the eastern Mediterranean region. Located only 140 nautical miles from Sicily (Lewis, 2013: 20), Tunis could provide a base allowing French forces to reinforce their influence in the region by controlling a gateway to the Suez Canal. Italian forces were concerned with this French plan and asked Britain to support efforts to stop the French, but the British chose to allow France leeway in Tunisia in order to avoid conflicts with France over Egypt. In this instance, broader geopolitical concerns regarding access

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to and control over sections of the Mediterranean Sea dictated European colonial policy in several European states. The French protectorate in Tunisia differed from Algeria for several reasons. Most fundamentally, by 1881 French forces understood that the ‘pacification’ of Algeria required significant military investment and an acceptance of extreme violence when met with resistance. French political leaders also understood that a full colonial takeover of Tunisia would be difficult to justify given recent complaints regarding the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine by Prussian forces. Finally, other European powers also sought to prevent full colonization of Tunisia owing to concerns about the impact of a strong French presence on commercial interests and international relations in the Mediterranean (Lewis, 2013: 19). While Britain and Italy eventually agreed that it was not worth disrupting the fragile peace in the region over control of Tunisia, they focused their efforts on supporting local leaders in order to provide them with the resources to resist full colonization as in Algeria. Combined with French reluctance to repeat the kind of atrocities committed in Algeria, this strategy effectively strengthened the Bey of Tunis to maintain significant local control even after the signing of the Bardo Treaty officially establishing the French protectorate on 12 May 1881. In addition to their pursuit of Tunisia, the French also grew increasingly interested in Morocco in the late nineteenth century. Although Morocco did not allow nearly the same level of strategic control over the Mediterranean as Tunisia, the port city of Tangier, located near the strait of Gibraltar, had long been of interest to the European powers. An extremely cosmopolitan city with significant French, British, Spanish and Italian populations in addition to native elite Jewish traders and Muslim officials, Tangier had historically been treated as a shared base of operations for trade in the entire Mediterranean region. French officials grew increasingly interested in controlling the city as well as much of Morocco, however, as settlers to Algeria pushed for western expansion in order to create a land bridge to French colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa (Miller, 2013: 70). French officials pursued their goals in Morocco via economic influence, aided by the collapse of the Moroccan economy as a result of political instability and drought conditions in the early twentieth century. French loans at exorbitant interest rates further subjugated Moroccan leaders, and the French eventually succeeded in pushing out Britain, Italy and Spain by controlling the region’s finances. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany remained

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the sole holdout against increasing French influence, but French banks eventually outmaneouvered his support for local officials (Miller, 2013: 72) and created the conditions for the establishment of a formal protectorate of Morocco in 1912. In these cases, the unique characteristics of the Mediterranean Sea – providing access to both the Middle East as well as to Asia upon the completion of the Suez Canal – dramatically shaped European colonial policy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While this region’s strategic geopolitical opportunities were not the only reasons determining French activity in North Africa, it is nevertheless clear that French colonial ambitions were strongly shaped by their economic – and hence political – interests in the region. That the Mediterranean Sea created critical trade routes made the colonization of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco not only politically useful for establishing and maintaining France’s power relative to other European nations but also economically vital for France’s industrial production. While France has not been on the front lines of the contemporary Mediterranean migrant crisis, successive French governments have sought to maintain influence in the region after colonial independence. François Mitterrand first proposed a dialogue with Western Mediterranean countries in 1988, before Jacques Chirac sought cultural cooperation in the region in 1995 through the announcement of a series of conferences and events. His proposals were all but defunct by the time Nicolas Sarkozy took office in 2007 and made the creation of a Union of the Mediterranean one of his signature policy proposals. Each of these projects has stalled, however, owing to similar critiques from other countries in the region: each of these programmes features a recycling of France’s old imperial aspirations by placing France at the centre of the proposed organizations. As Jean-Robert Henry notes, As a policy of co-operation, ‘France’s Arab policy’ displays all of the ambiguities of a postcolonial diplomacy: it claims to be a good example of French colonialism’s conversion to becoming more supportive of Third World countries, whilst at the same time taking care to defend its national interests which have been inherited from its colonial past. (Henry, 2012: 47)

At the same time as France has sought to control Mediterranean unification programmes, its European neighbours have faced mass arrivals from migrants, many of whom depart from regions that were formerly colonized by the French (both North and Sub-Saharan Africa).

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In 2018 138,882 migrants arrived on European shores, compared to a high of 1,015,078 arrivals in 2015. In total, 2,275 migrants were reported dead or missing in 2018 after a high of 5,096 in 2016 (UNHCR). These figures represent only one aspect of the migrant crisis today, however, for while migrants are less likely to arrive directly in France via sea routes (due to the relative distance to France’s shores as compared with those of Spain, Italy and Greece), many seek to pass through France on their way to the UK. Such migration routes have created specific challenges for regional and national governments in France, with tensions crystallizing around Calais in particular. The zone around the port has become known as the ‘jungle’, owing to the sprawling shantytowns that have arisen to house migrants from across the world but in particular from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and Sudan (‘The Long Wait’, 2016: 5). Figures regarding numbers of migrants housed in the jungle range from 7,000 (according to government statistics) to 10,000 (according to humanitarian groups) (Thomas and Campbell, 2016). Evacuations from and closure of the jungle are ongoing at the time of writing, and it remains to be seen how government relocation programmes handle the transfer of these migrants to other processing centres. Although this current phenomenon is not explicitly linked to France’s colonial history, it intersects with political discussions of immigration that have been occurring in France since the closure of non-specialized immigration to France in 1974. Since that time, French political discourse has centred around immigration as a type of ‘problem’ (see Noiriel, 2007), and the populations initially identified as problematic originate from former French colonial holdings in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Their decision to immigrate to France was shaped by several factors, all influenced by France’s colonial relationship to their homelands. French companies recruited unskilled labourers from the colonies in the 1950s and 1960s, and workers chose to work in France with the goal of making a living to support families and then returning home. The relatively easy migration routes between metropole and colony facilitated such patterns, but the immigrants soon discovered that returning to their homelands would not be as simple as they had hoped. Many chose to pursue ‘regroupement familial’, or family reunification, in France as a way to reunite their families. As the families settled, a new postcolonial French population has grown in numbers until the present. Fears regarding Mediterranean migration patterns and the arrival of these migrants in France have therefore struck a raw nerve in French

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society and politics, one that activates the sensitive question of colonial and postcolonial immigration. In this way, then, controlling migration from the Mediterranean is an extension of France’s historical activity in the region, when national policies were dictated by the desire to maintain France’s economic strength and political influence in the region by controlling its surroundings in the Mediterranean. Whereas in the past France sought to extend its borders and spheres of influence throughout the Sea and into the land masses surrounding it, political leaders are now attempting to close off France’s borders to this part of the world. In each case, however, the primary motivation for these political decisions has been to protect France’s interests. While the Mediterranean once represented the possibility of expanded control and geopolitical power, it now represents just the opposite, a source of anarchy and chaos that is frequently seen as requiring strong border control. Works Cited Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1991. Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present. Translated by Michael Brett. Trenton: Africa World Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1949. La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philip II. Paris: Armand Colin. Chambers, Iain. 2008. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clancy-Smith, Julia, and Charles D. Smith, eds. 2014. The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents. New York: Oxford University Press. Henry, Jean-Robert. 2012. ‘France’s Mediterranean Policy: Betwen National Ambitions and European Uncertainties’. In France and the Mediterranean: International Relations, Culture and Politics, edited by Emmanuel Godin and Natalya Vince, 37–68. New York: Peter Lang. Lewis, Mary. 2013. Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938. Oakland: University of California Press. ‘The Long Wait: Filling Data Gaps Relating to Refugees and Displaced People in the Calais Camp’. 2016. Refugee Rights Data Project. http://refugeerights. org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/RRDP_TheLongWait.pdf. Lorcin, Patricia M.E., and Todd Shepherd, eds. 2016. French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Miller, Susan Gilson. 2013. A History of Modern Morocco. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Noriel, Gérard. 2007. Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France: Discours publics, humiliations privées (XIXe–XXe siècle). Paris: Fayard. ‘Refugees/Migrants Emergency Response – Mediterranean’. United Nations High Commission on Refugees. http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/ regional.php (consulted on 10 January 2019). Strathern, Paul. 2007. Napoleon in Egypt. New York: Bantam. Thomas, Ed, and Ed Campbell. 2016. ‘The desperate children of the Calais Jungle’. BBC News, 17 October 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/worldeurope-37654552. UNHCR website. http://www.unhcr.org/en-my (consulted on 1 November 2016).

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Monuments

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Fort de Joux Cilas Kemedjio Translated from the French by Katherine Hammitt Fort de Joux

On 4 February 1794 the Convention proclaimed the general abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Toussaint Louverture, general in charge of the army in Saint-Domingue, was named governor for life and enacted the Haitian Constitution on 3 July 1801. On 20 May 1802 the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, reinstated slavery and the slave trade. In Haiti, the French army, led by General Leclerc, encountered fierce resistance. On 7 June 1802 French forces captured and deported Toussaint Louverture. Invited by General Brunet, Toussaint, then general and governor general of Saint-Domingue, left his plantation at Ennery to go to the meeting point at the Cape. As soon as he arrived he was apprehended, restrained like a criminal and taken aboard the frigate La Créole. French troops next apprehended his wife, his children and his nieces, ‘sans leur donner même le temps de prendre du linge, ni aucun de leurs effets’ [without even giving them time to gather clothes and personal items] (Louverture, 2016: 87). After the Atlantic crossing, Toussaint and his family were kept aboard the frigate Le Héros for more than two months in the port of Brest (Louverture, 2016: 86–88). Louverture was then transported to the prison in Château de Joux, on the French–Swiss border. On 9 April 1803 the jailer announced prisoner Toussaint Louverture’s death in these terms: ‘J’ai eu l’honneur de vous rendre compte par ma lettre du 16 germinal (6 avril 1803) de la situation de Toussaint: le 17 (7 avril), à 11 heures et demi du matin, lui portant ses vivres, je l’ai trouvé mort assis sur sa chaise, auprès de son feu  …’ [I had the honor of reporting to you, through my letter dated 16 Germinal (6 April 1803), Toussaint’s situation: on the 17th (7 April),

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at 11:30 am, while bringing him his food supplies, I found him dead, sitting on his chair by the fire …] (Amiot, cited in Césaire, 1981: 330). On 1 January 1804 Haitian independence was proclaimed. The Haitian Revolution became a ‘source of an alternative revolutionary tradition for abolitionists throughout the Atlantic world’ (Sinha, 2016: 35). There followed a mythologization of this heroic moment, characterized by a ‘hagiographical treatment of Louverture prevalent in abolitionist writings’ (Sinha, 2016: 64). On Monday 3 October 2016 the morning fog that envelopes the Château de Joux takes me back to my first encounter with Toussaint in the pages of the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, by Aimé Césaire: Ce qui est à moi aussi: une petite cellule dans le Jura, une petite cellule, la neige la double de barreaux blancs la neige est un geôlier blanc qui monte la garde devant une prison ce qui est à moi c’est un homme seul emprisonné de blanc c’est un homme seul qui défie les cris blancs de la mort blanche (Césaire, 1994: 24) [What is also mine: a little cell in the Jura, A little cell, the snow lines it with white bars The snow is a jailer mounting guard before a prison What is mine A lone man imprisoned in whiteness A lone man defying the white screams of white death (Césaire, 2001 [1939]: 16)]

Césaire will contribute to the rehabilitation process of the hero two decades later in writing Toussaint Louverture, an essay that underlines the limits of the French Revolution in the face of the colonial problem. In 1961 Edouard Glissant takes a sympathetic and complex look at this act of antislavery defiance in the play Monsieur Toussaint, later revised in 2003 and staged at the Fort de Joux during the bicentenary of Toussaint’s death (Ferguson, 2005). Glissant’s play provided echoes of the deadly winter of the Jura: ‘le tombeau c’est la neige sur le corps, allongé dans la boue de l’hiver’ [the tomb is the snow on his body, stretched out in the winter mud] (Glissant, 1961: 134). Here we see the white death, la mort blanche, preventing the prisoner from returning to his birthplace, during his lifetime as in his death, as the wishes of the French government were carried out. For the tomb remains unlocatable and the remains have never been identified. In this sense, la mort blanche incarnates the negation of

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the intention of liberty that is at the heart of marronage. The maroon Toussaint, standard-bearer of the Saint-Domingue slave insurrection, defies the ‘cris blancs de la mort blanche’ [white death’s white screams]. The cell visited by la mort blanche is central to the mémoire des esclavagistes: ‘Ce local est composé de sept casemates voûtées en pierre de taille. La première voûte d’entrée est close de deux portes fermant à verrouils et à ferrures et sert de corps de garde à l’officier chef du poste établi pour la garde du prisonnier d’État’ [This room is composed of seven stone vaulted bunkers. The first entrance vault is shut off by two doors closing to bolts and fittings and serves as a guard room for the chief officer of the post, barn for the custody of the state prisoner] (Baille, jailer of Fort de Joux, cited in Césaire, 1981: 325). The cell represents an absolute negation of the antislavery epic of the Haitian Revolution’s hero, as the character in Glissant’s play explains: ‘les travaux, les victoires et les conquêtes, pour finir dans la nuit d’un cachot’ [labours, victories and conquests – all to end up in a darkened cell] (1961: 124). While Louis XIV had sent Mirabeau to the Fort de Joux by a lettre de cachet, symbol of monarchal arbitrariness, Bonaparte sends Toussaint to the same place, also without legal judgement, transposing into the metropole the clandestine nature of the slaver’s disciplinary apparatus that existed in the colonies (Moudileno, 2014: 54). Toussaint’s cell thus incarnates a reaffirmation of the logic of the slave ship, which is to be understood, in this context, as yet another postcolonial abjection. Imagining the Fort de Joux as a place of postcolonial memory implies acknowledging the historical trajectory from la mort blanche to contemporary commemoration. Such an undertaking also requires a belief in the capacity of our societies to forge common places of ‘fracture’ opposing memories of the enslaved with those of the people who enslaved them. The transformation of Toussaint Louverture’s cell into an abolitionist site of memory would thus require a form of transfiguration. How does one transform the place of death into an emblem of postcoloniality? How does one transform the cell of death, site and symbol of the monologue of the enslaved, into a memorial site for the hero of the fight against slavery? How can one go back in time to provide heat to Louverture’s cell in the harsh winters of the Jura mountains? How would it be possible to go back in time to humanize the conditions of his arrest, of his deportation, of his detention for sixty-seven days aboard the frigate Le Héros in the port of Brest? Finally, is it possible to transform a route associated with trade and slavery into a site of memory that does justice to the original intention of marronnage? The present contribution echoes these

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questions, which actually came up during my visit to the Fort de Joux. The difficulty in beginning to answer these questions becomes all the more acute when we learn that Toussaint died professing his loyalty to France. In the process, Toussaint’s story becomes more of a postcolonial (or post-slavery) misadventure. From his dungeon in the Jura, Toussaint Louverture stands as martyr of the Republic, more precisely as ‘un ancien militaire couvert des blessures au nom de sa patrie [la France]’ [A former soldier covered with wounds suffered in the name of his homeland] (Louverture, 2016: 102). Yet he lived a life of contradictions, caught between his enthusiastic adhesion to the French Revolution’s ideals and his historical challenging of European claims to universality. The Château de Joux is a patrimonial site which, on one of the tourist maps of Franche-Comté Evasion, is situated between the Distillerie Guy and the Grotte des Moidons. In the museum shop I found a postcard offering the following description of the Château: ‘La forteresse édifiée au Xème siècle par les Sires de Joux, commandait le franchissement de la cluse. Elle fut prison d’État à la fin de l’ancien régime. Vauban la modernisa au XVIIème siècle puis Joffre au XIXème pour lui donner sa forme actuelle’ [The fortress, built in the Xth century by the Lords of Joux, controlled the crossing of the valley. It was a state prison at the end of the ancien régime. Vauban modernised it during the XVIIth century, then Joffre gave it its current layout in the XIXth century]. Phillipe Artières, in his edition of Toussaint’s memoires, remarks that the Fort de Joux appears as the ‘lieu idéal pour mettre à l’ombre de l’histoire des sujets hostiles’ [the ideal place to hide hostile subjects in the shadow of history] (Louverture, 2016: 9). Fortification, on the African coasts as in Joux, preceded the roads of servitude. Toussaint’s mort blanche is the result of a logic compatible with slavers’ memory. The steady silencing of French thought preserves the supremacy of la mort blanche at the risk of remaining deaf to the memory of slaves. While Toussaint shines perhaps only in his absence, the ‘Route des abolitions et des Droits de l’Homme’ [Road of abolitions and Human Rights] in Franche-Comté (the region where Joux is located) includes three sites: the Toussaint Louverture technical college in the city of Pontarlier; Toussaint Louverture’s cell in the Fort; and the Toussaint Louverture Memorial situated behind the Fort de Joux. A postcard entitled ‘La Cellule de Toussaint Louverture’ specifies: ‘Enfermé sur ordre de Napoléon Bonaparte, il meurt ici en 1803’ [Imprisoned by order of Napoleon Bonaparte, died here in 1803]. A – now famous – quotation by Toussaint himself also follows: ‘En me renversant on n’a

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abattu à Saint-Domingue que le tronc de l’arbre de la liberté des Noirs. Il repoussera par les racines parce qu’elles sont profondes et nombreuses’ [In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty of Black people. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep]. In the antechamber to Toussaint’s cell the same words are engraved on a bust given by the Republic of Haiti to the Communauté de communes du Larmont for the bicentenary of his death in 2003. The second postcard, like the bust, makes up part of the postcolonial fragments, a tiny monument that attempts to repair the evil of imperial history. The revalorization of Toussaint’s historical presence in the Fort de Joux starts with the transformation of his cell into what one could call a ‘Toussaint suite’. The suite consists of a reception area and the cell itself. In the reception area one finds a bronze bust of Toussaint with words engraved at its base. A commemorating plaque donated by Haitian teachers of history and geography is hung on the wall. A plaque also reminds visitors that the Fort is part of the ‘Route des Abolitions et des Droits de l’Homme’,1 alongside other French regional sites such as the house of Anne-Marie Jovouhey in Chamlanc, the Maison de la Négritude in Champagney, Abbé Grégoire’s house in Emberménil and Schoelcher’s House in Fessenheim. The antechamber introduces the cell’s history. With an emphasis on homages and abolition, the new story accomplishes a ‘réparation historique’ [historical reparation], as recommended by the Comité pour la mémoire et l’esclavage (Condé, 2005: 13). A tourist guide speaks in this antechamber, underscoring the harsh conditions of detention, from the absence of medical care to obscurity. He insists above all on the prison’s transformation from a place of crime into a memorial place of pilgrimage. Fragments on the wall weave the canvas of the heroic cult: La communauté haïtienne de Suisse rend hommage au ‘héros, précurseur de la lutte pour la liberté de tous les nègres esclaves’ à l’occasion de la commémoration du 194e anniversaire de sa mort. 1 Launched in 2004, the ‘Route des abolitions de l’esclavage’ was inscribed in the international project ‘la Route de l’esclave’ supported by the UN and UNESCO on the work of memory and claiming to be the expansion of the law adopted by France on 10 May 2001, tending ‘à la reconnaissance de la traite négrière et de l’esclavage comme crime contre l’humanité’ [to acknowledging the slave trade and slavery as crime against humanity] (http://www.abolitions.org/index.php?IdPage=abolitions, consulted on 15 December 2016). La Route des abolitions is financially supported by the French Republic, the National Assembly, the Senate, and the regions.

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Hommage de la Société haïtienne d’histoire et géographie. Toussaint Louverture (1803–7 avril 2003) [The Haitian community in Switzerland pays tribute to the ‘hero, precursor in the struggle for freedom for all negro slaves’ at the commemoration of the 194th anniversary of his death. A homage from the Haitian Society of history and geography]; Au nom du Peuple haïtien, en hommage au Général François Dominique Toussaint Louverture, né le 20 mai 1743 sur l’habitation Bréda, à Saint-Domingue, grand défenseur des idées et idéaux de la Révolution de 1789, précurseur de l’indépendance nationale de 1804, mort dans ce cachot du Fort de Joux, le 7 avril 1803. La Patrie reconnaissante, Le samedi 1er novembre 2014, Michel Joseph Martelly, Président de la République d’Haïti [In the name of the Haitian People, as a tribute to General François Dominique Toussaint Louverture, born 20 May 1743 on the Bréda plantation, champion of the ideas and ideals of the 1789 Revolution, pioneer of national independence in 1804, who died in this cell at the Fort de Joux on 7 April 1803. The Nation gives thanks, Saturday 1 November 2014, Michel Joseph Martelly, President of the Republic of Haiti.]

Further away behind the Fort, the Toussaint Louverture memorial bears the following inscription: ‘Toussaint Louverture, 1748–1803. Promoteur de l’Abolition de l’esclavage et des principes de la Révolution Française en Amérique Latine. Mort à Fort de Joux le 7 avril 1803. Hommage de Léon R. Thebaud, Ambassadeur d’Haïti’ [Toussaint Louverture, 1748–1803. Defender of the Abolition of slavery and of the tenets of the French Revolution in Latin America. Died in Fort de Joux on 7 April 1803. Homage by Léon R. Thébaud, Haitian Ambassador]. Here, the official homage supplements initiatives that had until then been largely civic, and comes after that of Rama Yade, then minister of the French government: ‘Une plaque inaugurée le 10 mai 2008 par Madame Rama Yade, Secrétaire d’état chargée des Affaires étrangères et des Droits de l’Homme’ [Plaque inaugurated on 10 May 2008 by Madame Rama Yade, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Rights of Man]. In France 10 May is the National Day of Memories of the Slave Trade, of Slavery and of their Abolition, as adopted under Jacques Chirac’s presidency on the recommendation of the Comité national pour la mémoire et l’histoire

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de l’esclavage.2 The committee called for the opening of a ‘débat sur les pages sombres de l’histoire nationale’ [debate on the dark pages of national history] and urged the government to ‘faire en sorte que la mémoire partagée de l’esclavage devienne partie intégrante de la mémoire nationale’ [to do what is necessary for the shared memory of slavery to be included in national memory] (Condé, 2005: 5–7). The plaque of 10 May 2008 is the only tangible manifestation of the French government’s involvement with the commemoration of Toussaint Louverture. From the other side of the road one can see, beyond the Toussaint memorial, another ‘postcolonial’ site, this time paying tribute to Algerian Tirailleurs in the FFI [Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur]. The symbolism of the memorial refers to another liberation, that which delivers from impasses of sectarian, conflictual memories and delineates the paths of shared memories, porous to the breath of our shared humanity. Death without glory at the Fort de Joux symbolizes the unfinished nature of the Haitian Revolution. The memorial is erected on the essential absence of the unfindable body. For all that, the Haitian people have magnified this defeat into a symbolic victory. The revolutionary symbolism has, however, turned out, for more than two centuries, to be incapable of mobilizing Haitians on a durable path towards collective well-being. This raises the question of the pertinence of all postcolonial mythologization to the challenges of those still living. I have remarked elsewhere that a society whose pantheon is made up of martyrs alone could mean a people whose primary function is to struggle to defeat the inevitability of defeat. From such a perspective, the mythologization could be read as an ‘esthétisation de l’inconfort existentiel’ [esthetization of the existential discomfort] (Kemedjio, 2004: 8). Toussaint Louverture’s inscription in the pantheon of liberation will always require some explanation. Haitian writer Jean Metellus confirms this approach. In the play that he dedicated to Toussaint, Metellus suggests that he has inspired emblematic figures of the black world, such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba. Toussaint lives through ‘le grand rêve fraternel de King et la lutte patiente et victorieuse de Nelson Mandela contre l’apartheid’ [King’s great fraternal dream 2 The Committee for the memorialization of slavery was put in place by a decree on 5 January, 2004, to formulate propositions following a unanimous vote on 10 May, 2001, of the so-called Taubira Law making slavery and the slave trade crimes against humanity. The committee was presided over by Maryse Condé and Françoise Vergès was the recorder.

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and Nelson Mandela’s patient and victorious struggle against apartheid] (Metellus, 2003: 20–21). Transforming the defeated Toussaint into the mythic symbol of the visionary resistors testifies to the capacity of the Haitian people to assume their collective identity. It is, moving beyond the necessary refutation of the eradication of memory imposed by the order of slavery, an invention of a memory of the enslaved. As he died, Toussaint Louverture was defeated by la mort blanche, a phenomenon that incarnates the implacable logic of the slave ship. Turning his French cell into a symbolic site on the Route des abolitions is a step towards integrating the memory of the enslaved into the French national story. Such a transformation signals a new direction in the confrontation between the memory of the enslavers and the memory of the enslaved. This kind of parallel recognition allows for the emergence of a postcolonial memory that proceeds from reconciliation. It is a gesture of healing, going beyond the inevitability of competitive memories. Ultimately, it paves the way for a ‘relational memory’, or what Glissant calls mémoire-monde. It is my belief that only collaborative work by both the descendants of Toussaint’s jailers and by the Haitians and other descendants of the enslaved can transform the cell of death into a space authorizing a (dispassionate?) meditation of the past and the present. Works Cited Césaire, Aimé. 1981. Toussaint Louverture: la Révolution française et le problème colonial. Paris: Présence africaine. — 1994. La Poésie, edited by Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier. Paris: Seuil. — 2001 [1939]. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated and edited by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Condé, Maryse et le Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage. 2005. Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions. Rapport à Monsieur le Premier ministre. Paris: La Découverte. Fanon, Frantz. 1971 [1961]. Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte. Ferguson, James. 2005. ‘À la recherche: Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant’. Caribbean Beat 75 (September–October). https://www. caribbean-beat.com/issue-75/a-la-recherche#axzz624f7i3wC. Glissant, Édouard. 1961. Monsieur Toussaint. Paris: Seuil. — 1981. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Seuil.

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— 2007. Mémoires des esclaves. La fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions. Paris: La documentation française, Gallimard. Kemedjio, Cilas. 2004. ‘Mythologies postcoloniales: entre défaitisme de l’histoire et symbole de la citadelle’. Introduction du numéro spécial de Présence francophone 62: 5–11. Louverture, Général Toussaint. 2016. Mémoires écrits par lui-même pouvant servir à l’histoire de sa vie suivi du Journal du général Caffarelli. Édition établie et présentée par Phillipe Artières. Paris: Mercure de France. Maximin, Daniel. 1981. L’Isolé soleil. Paris: Seuil. Metellus, Jean. 2003. Toussaint Louverture ou les racines de la liberté: théâtre. Paris: Haitier. — 2004. ‘Les nombreuses facettes de Toussaint Louverture’. Présence Francophone 62: 13–21. Moudileno, Lydie. 2014. ‘Archéologie du cachot’. Présence Francophone 81, 48–63. Nora, Pierre. 2006. ‘La France est malade de sa mémoire’. Propos recueillis par Jacques Buob et Alain Frachon. Le Monde 2 (May–June): 7–9. Pétré-Grenouilleau, Olivier. 2004. Les Traites négrières. Essai d’histoire globale. Paris: Gallimard. Sinha, Manisha. 2016. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ‘Vous avez dit Libération?’ (éditorial). 2007. L’Histoire, 318 (March): 3.

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La Case créole Julia Waters La Case créole

A cursory scroll through the list of ÎIe de la Réunion’s more than 150 official monuments historiques1 – including over thirty disused cheminées, nearly twenty plantations or domaines, a similar number of Catholic churches, several military buildings, a scattering of statues to the island’s founding fathers (François Mahé de la Bourdonnais, 2 Robert Corbett, 3 Nicole Robert de la Serve4) and the quarantine station for newly arrived indentured labourers, Les Lazarets de la Grande Chaloupe – reads like so many physical vestiges of an often brutal and exploitative history of France’s remote, Indian Ocean département (Chane-Kune, 1993; Leguen, 1979; Vaxelaire, 2001). In addition to the many public buildings classified as monuments historiques – physical manifestations of France’s imperial power – there are also more than twenty maisons or villas: for the most part, the former residences of Reunion’s colonial administrators and plantation owners. Such a listing, compiled by France’s Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, 1 For the most up-to-date list of ‘les bâtiments protégés au titre des monuments historiques de La Réunion, en France’ [buildings protected as historical monument in Reunion, France], see: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_monuments_ historiques_de_La_Réunion. 2 Bertrand-François Mahé de la Bourdonnais, Gouverneur Général des Mascareignes, 1735–47. 3 Robert Corbett was a British naval captain who repeatedly fought to take the Mascarenes islands from the French, during the Napoleonic Wars. He was killed in battle off Île Bourbon in 1810. 4 Nicole Robert de la Serve was a politician and land-owner in the early nineteenth century who founded the Francs-Créoles, a secret society with masonic links that campaigned for greater autonomy for Reunion Island.

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Typical case créole in Hell-Bourg, Cirque de Salazie, Reunion Island. Photograph by Julia Waters.

both preserves and consecrates the historically important places and people of Reunion’s past. As such, it constitutes an official, statesanctioned roll-call of what Nora calls the ‘dominant’ lieux de mémoire of the former French colony. In this context, it is revealing to note the use of the standard French terms maison and villa to describe domestic dwellings that would in Reunion most commonly be known as cases – a linguistic move which, arguably, appropriates as ‘French’ what are, in fact, examples of a distinctive local architectural form. Contrary to its more common Caribbean usage (as, most notably, in the term ‘cases-nègres’) or to standard French dictionary definitions, the Reunionnese term case does not denote ‘des paillottes et des huttes, de pays tropicaux ou exotiques’ [shacks and huts, from tropical or exotic countries] (Barat, 1993: 13). Although Reunionnese vernacular architecture, and hence its terminology, certainly has its origins in such basic shelters, improvised from the raw natural materials of the island, the term ‘case’ has developed locally over time to encompass dwellings of very different sizes and social standings: from the humble ‘cases bois sous tôle’ [wood beneath corrugated iron case] or ‘case béton sous tôle’ [concrete beneath

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corrugated iron case] or even ‘case tôle sous tôle’ [corrugated iron beneath corrugated iron case] of former slaves and the most impoverished sections of society to the imposing ‘grand’ cases’ [large cases] of the planteur [plantation owner] and administrative elites. In contrast to the often one-sided (French) historical significance of many ‘dominant’ historic monuments, the often modest, vernacular case créole embodies, as Asselin and Hennequet et al. note, ‘une architecture originale influencée par les conditions géographiques et la diversité des peuplements’ [an original architecture shaped by geographical conditions and the diverse waves of immigration] (2001: 7). They continue: ‘Ici le génie des lieux pare les formes venues d’Europe, et d’ailleurs, d’accents singuliers qui concentrent dans l’espace familier de la maison traditionnelle les symboles de la culture créole réunionnaise. Maison des racines, l’habitat traditionnel conserve jalousement trois siècles de mémoire de l’île’ [Here, the sense of place endows originally European or other foreign forms with particular, local accents, so condensing into the familiar space of the traditional house the symbols of Reunionese creole culture. A house deeply rooted in its context, the traditional dwelling jealously conserves three centuries of the island’s memory] (7). It is the ‘dominated’ lieu de mémoire of the case créole, as physical ‘crystallization’ of the various stages of Reunion’s history – from trading post to pioneer settlement to thriving plantation colony to département d’outre-mer – and as potent symbol of a lost ‘art de vivre réunionnais’ [Reunionese way of life], that will be the focus of this essay. Recent studies of Reunion’s vernacular architecture repeatedly stress, with nostalgic regret, the seemingly ineluctable disappearance of the case créole – at least as a living, lived-in milieu. Nonetheless, in a final part, this essay will consider recent developments that, somewhat paradoxically, signal the enduring resilience and adaptability of this most evocative of (neo)colonial lieux de mémoire. Any visitor to Reunion will have been struck by the ostentatious, brilliant white façades of the grand’ cases glimpsed through their ornate grilles and barreaux on St Denis’s main avenues, and by the exuberant splashes of vivid colour that draw the eye to the tiniest case bois sous tôle deep in the island’s verdant, mountainous interior. There are estimated to be between 5,000 and 7,000 cases créoles, large and small, scattered across the 2,512 km² of the island’s territory, encompassing both urban and rural areas and extending from the densely populated coastal plains (les Bas) to the remotest heights of its interior (les Hauts). If marked on a map of Reunion, the geographical distribution of these traditional dwellings would indicate the locations of the oldest

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settlements and the original centres of towns and villages, so serving as a revealing palimpsest of the historic patterns of conquest, settlement and development of the island. Yet, despite their number and their undeniable aesthetic charm, the traditional cases créoles are in danger – from cyclones, from termites, from urban development and, until recently at least, from the lack of recognition, by the local population, of their value as physical manifestations of a rich ‘patrimoine culturel multiple et métissé’ [plural and mixed cultural heritage]. 5 Despite their superficial diversity of size, colour and decoration, Reunion’s cases créoles in fact adhere, with remarkable consistency, to the same set of abiding architectural principles – especially, symmetry, order and the controlled relationship between domestic interior and natural exterior – that evolved over three centuries of colonial rule. Indeed, many of these architectural principles were formally dictated, in the eighteenth century, by the Compagnie Française des Indes, keen to impose order on the island’s unruly multi-ethnic population and on its wild, often inhospitable, terrain. The traditional case créole’s defining rectangular shape, high roof and use of local wood and vegetable matter as building materials can all be traced back to the very earliest shelters, constructed by the first French pioneer-settlers – or, more accurately, by the slaves who were brought with them – in the late seventeenth century. With no indigenous dwellings to act as models, these early, largely improvised shelters – that Jonquères d’Oriola describes as ‘une architecture élémentaire issue des besoins immédiats’ [a basic architecture stemming from immediate needs] (2001: 13) – drew their inspiration from the traditional cases of the Tanosy region of southern Madagascar, from where these first slaves originated. In her novel L’Aïeule de l’Isle Bourbon, which tells the story of one of the very first female pioneer-settlers, Monique Agénor describes their rudimentary cases as ‘des petites cabanes en bois de bambou, aux toits de latanier, et au sol de terre battue’ [small bamboo huts, with latanierpalm roofs and dirt floors] (1993: 103). Throughout her narrative, the development of the island’s society is mirrored in the evolution of their dwellings – a theme that can be found in much Reunionnese literature. During the eighteenth century, and with the introduction of coffee to Île Bourbon, large numbers of Breton sailors and craftsmen were 5 This is the phrase used on the website of Reunion’s tourist office, to describe the island’s traditional architecture. http://www.reunion.fr/decouvrir/immersionculturelle (consulted on 11 November 2016).

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lured to the island by the Compagnie Française des Indes’ offer of plots of agricultural land. The model of case that developed during this period maintained the earlier rectangular form and use of native plant materials, but was constructed on an open wooden frame, strengthened by supporting cross-beams and panelled with walls of wooden planks or bardeaux (wooden shingles) – a model influenced by the vernacular architecture of the new settlers’ native Brittany, combined with their own boat-building and carpentry techniques. From early on, the use of brick and stone, which required skills, tools and raw materials that were hard to find on the island, was reserved for public buildings, symbolic of European colonial power, and for only the most ostentatious and extravagant of private houses. In the late eighteenth century the seemingly far-off trauma of the French Revolution would also have a profound and enduring influence on the development of Reunion’s vernacular architecture. Fleeing the Terror, aristocratic families sought refuge on the island (thenceforth renamed the more egalitarian ‘Île de la Réunion’ by the post-revolutionary powers), bringing with them the taste for neoclassical architecture that was fashionable across Europe at the time. Again, building on and adapting the pre-existing rectangular wooden-framed structure, the neoclassical ideals – of symmetry, pure lines and balance, with all elements arranged around a central axis – thenceforth became abiding architectural norms for Reunion’s cases créoles. It was also during this period that another ‘incontournable’ of more affluent créole domestic architecture was introduced – the veranda or varangue – imported, along with spices, textiles, furniture and craftsmen, from the French, but formerly Portuguese, comptoir of Pondichery.6 Thenceforth, as Hennequet comments: Le temps s’est arrêté et cette disposition sur un axe […] se lira quasiment partout autour de l’île, de villes en villages jusque dans les propriétés rurales les plus reculées. Cette symétrie est la signature plus ou moins marquée de la topologie des grandes maisons et de leurs plus petites cadettes. (Hennequet, 2001: 96) 6 Another influential import from India to Reunion during the eighteenth century was ‘argamaste’ or ‘argamasse’ – a smooth and water-tight form of concrete, made from lime, sand and a complex mix of organic materials. Perfectly adapted to the island’s humid climate, argamasse was originally used in drying floors, on which coffee and spices were spread in preparation for the long journey to Europe, but was later also incorporated into grander domestic dwellings.

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[Time has stood still and this arrangement around one axis will be visible almost everywhere across the island, from towns to villages to the most remote rural properties. This symmetry is the more or less dominant characteristic of the lay-out of both grand houses and of their most humble relations.]

While the underlying principles of Reunionnese domestic architecture were thus firmly in place by the end of the eighteenth century, it was during the nineteenth century that the more flamboyant, decorative elements of what now constitutes typical creole domestic architecture were first introduced. The fashion for decorative embellishment was made possible at this time by Reunion’s increased prosperity, when, following the Haitian Revolution and ensuing upheaval in the Caribbean, the colonial administration seized the opportunity to establish Reunion as France’s new sugar island, developing a network of large-scale plantations and exploiting slave and, later, indentured labour. Typical decorative features introduced during this period of sugar-fuelled prosperity include the use, on smaller cases, of vibrantly coloured external paintwork, arguably reflecting the African or Indian origins of their occupants as well as the vivid colours of local flora; the addition, in grander cases, of a pavilion or guétali atop the front garden wall, a feature borrowed from Indian gardens; and the use of lambrequins – delicate wooden or tin-work decorative borders, in the form of stylized flowers, vines and leaves, that adorn the edges of roofs and canopies and which had precursors in the Indian provinces of Gujarat and Pondichery. While all of these now characteristic imported features have evident aesthetic appeal, they are, as always, also functional. The canopied guétali (Reunionnese Creole for ‘regarde-là’ [look there]) allowed the household to participate in the activity of the street while remaining sheltered from the sun. The lambrequins, together with often flamboyant guttering and downpipes, help to catch and channel rainwater. Decorative windowframes, columns, borders and cornices, like external paintwork, all protect the wooden buildings from rain and insects. This mixture of the aesthetic and the practical is typical of the ways in which, during Reunion’s three centuries as the trading post of colonial France on the Routes des Indes, the case créole incorporated imported models, features and techniques – including from Madagascar, Portuguese and French India, rural Brittany and aristocratic, pre-revolutionary France – and adapted them to the particular local needs and conditions of the remote Indian Ocean island. The case créole thus crystallizes, in physical form, the accumulative series of events, inter-cultural connections and socio-economic developments

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that have shaped Reunion’s history (Barat, 1993; Gélabert and Leveneur, 1999; Asselin, Hennequet et al, 2001; Leveneur, 2007). In addition, the layout and design of the case créole also reflect – and are a product of – a particular ‘mode d’habiter créole’ [creole way of living] that endured throughout the colonial era but which lives on today only in the memory, rather than the practice, of older members of Reunionnese society. With the case positioned firmly in the centre of its plot, the arrangement of internal and external spaces, and of front and rear gardens (emplacement and cour) mirrors a highly formalized relation between public and private, social and intimate spheres, that is encapsulated in the following description by architectural historian Christian Barat: Petite ou grande, rurale ou urbaine, la villa créole est un ‘théâtre de haute tradition’ dont la hiérarchie des fonctions, hors et dans le bâtiment, est constante. Depuis la rue, à travers le jardin, la demeure et la cour arrière, plusieurs étapes transitoires expriment, suivant un axe central, la progression du plus social au plus privé: le barreau, l’allée dallée du jardin, la varangue, le salon, la salle à manger, et de nouveau une varangue pour déboucher sur la cour domestique cernée de dépendances. (1993: 84) [Small or large, rural or urban, the creole villa is a highly traditional form of ‘theatre’, whose hierarchy of functions, both inside and outside the building, is constant. From the street, through the front garden, the house and then the backyard, several transitional stages plot a progression, along a central axis, from most public to most private: the front gate, the garden’s paved alleyway, the veranda, the living room, the dining room, then another veranda leading out into the domestic courtyard surrounded by outbuildings.]

With the property’s arrangement dictated by its neoclassical symmetry, the front (l’avant) is the social, public space, open onto the road, and is maintained with rigorous care. It is here, on the varangue, that guests and outsiders were received. In contrast, the area at the rear of the property – ‘l’arrière’ – is a more informal, private and disordered space, which traditionally includes an external kitchen (boucan), animal pens, laundry and other outbuildings arranged around a shady cour. This is where the untidy business of daily life was conducted and where close friends and family socialized. The inter-relation between physical and social spaces in the formal layout of traditional cases créoles underlies the following description from Axel Gauvin’s novel Cravate et fils, in which deviations from the norms implicitly alert us to the ‘abnormal’ nature of the house’s occupant:

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Voilà la case de mon Cravate. Le barreau, toujours ouvert, ne paie pas de mine, mais l’allée vaut plus: quoique étroite, elle est belle. Elle commence par deux énormes touffes de palmistes-multipliants, se poursuit par deux haies de pieds-de-foulard. […] Entre ces gourmettes aux chevilles des arbres, au lieu du traditionnel gravier de basalte gris, un mince aplat de gazon des hauts. […] Cette allée fait le tour de la maison – une petite case-pavillon de couleurs vives, haut perchée sur soubassement. La cour arrière – qui n’est pas ce fréquent dépotoir – prend une allure différente: l’allée s’y borde de plantes plus courtes. […] Un petit potager fait la pointe de ce terrain tout biscornu. (1996: 18–19) [Here is my Cravate’s house. The gate, always open, does not look like much, but the alleyway is more special; although narrow, it is beautiful. It starts with two huge tufts of palmistes-multipliant, and continues with two hedges made of pieds-de-foulard. […] Between these decorative chains adorning the trees’ ankles, instead of the traditional grey basalt gravel path, there is a thin strip of mountain grass. […] This alley goes around the back of the house – a small colourful case-pavillon standing high on its stone base. The backyard, – which is not the usual dumping ground – has a different look about it: the plants on both sides of the alley are smaller here. […] A little vegetable garden rounds off this uneven piece of land.]

Likewise, the lowly social standing of the eponymous character in Daniel Lauret’s Monsieur Oscar is indicated by the location in which he is obliged to receive the visit of the local priest: Monsieur Oscar regrettait de ne pas pouvoir lui faire l’honneur d’un salon, cette pièce réservée aux ‘gens de la haute’, aux étrangers et qui ne se laisse traverser que sur patins. Pas question pour autant de le faire asseoir dehors, sous la tonnelle. Il le recevait ‘sans façon’ dans la salle à manger. (2004: 40) [Monsieur Oscar was sorry he could not do him the honour of receiving him in a living room, this room reserved for people from ‘high society’ and foreigners, and which can only be entered if wearing slippers. Still, out of the question to make him sit outside, under the pergola. So, he received him, ‘without fuss’, in the dining room.]

If the architectural arrangement of an individual case créole reflects the formalized nature of social relations in Reunion’s colonial society, so too do differences – in size, position, building materials and decoration – between cases symbolically reveal the unequal, hierarchical distinctions that long structured Reunion’s island society. Some of the socially revealing differences between cases include, most obviously, the size of

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the house and its plot but also, more subtly, the colour of its paintwork – brilliant white for the grand’ cases of the colonial elite, brightly coloured for the case en bois sous tôle of poorer sections of society; the percentage of stone or hard wood used in their construction versus the percentage of straw, thatch, palm fronds or, later, tôle; or the presence or absence of a varangue, a guétali or even, as above, a salon. In both their underlying similarities and their revealing differences, Reunion’s traditional cases créoles eloquently bear witness to a past society that, for all its diverse, multi-cultural influences, was highly stratified, with divisions formally maintained. After all, this was a society whose foundations were built, symbolically and literally, by slave labour. The majority of Reunion’s cases créoles, grand or small, would have been built by unacknowledged slaves, whose own humble shacks have long since disappeared and which were, in any case, always hidden from view à l’arrière of the grand’ case, in the far corners of the plantation, or in remote mountain îlets in the island’s inaccessible interior.7 As both a reflection and a product of a highly formalized and unequal colonial society, and as an accretion of different historical and cultural influences, Reunion’s cases créoles thus epitomize, to a far greater degree than the dominant monuments historiques recognized by the Ministère de la Culture, Nora’s conception of lieux de mémoires as ‘structures that develop over time […] so that they become mirrors of a society or a period’ (Nora and Kritzman, 1996: 18). As a ‘symbolic element of the memorial heritage of [a] community’ (Nora and Kritzman, 1996: xvii), the case créole is also today intimately associated with ‘a deep consciousness of […] threatened countryside, lost traditions, wrecked ways of life’ (xxiii) and with a nostalgic discourse of loss. A key historical moment that is widely seen, in such discourse, as marking the inexorable decline of the traditional case créole was départementalisation in 1946 and the ensuing modernization programmes of successive French governments. The very real need for decent housing and proper sanitation during the post-war period led to the demolition of countless dilapidated and insalubrious cases.8 Yet this was not the end 7 The term îlet is the local term for tiny hamlets, on the site of former marron encampments in the mountainous and inaccessible Cirques of Reunion’s interior. Even today, many of these do not have mains water or electricity and are accessible only on foot. 8 According to a recent study of Reunionnese architecture, ‘au début des années 1960, la plupart des Réunionnais vivent dans des logements insalubres, majoritairement des paillotes sans eau courante ni électricité’ [in the early 60s,

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of the story of the traditional case créole. During the 1960s and 1970s elements of Reunionnese vernacular architecture were incorporated into the design of two of the most popular models of mass-produced social housing – la Case TOMI and la Case SATEC9 – attesting to the enduring appeal, both aesthetic and practical, of the traditional models of domestic dwelling that these were to replace. The single-storey, pre-fabricated Case TOMI, constructed from wood and breeze blocks, maintained the traditional arrangement of cases créoles by including a kitchen (boucan) and bathroom in a separate building at the back of the house. The concrete-built Case SATEC, on the other hand, for the first time incorporated an architectural feature ‘jusque-là réservée aux grandes demeures’ [previously reserved for high-end dwellings] (Leveneur, 2007: 57): the varangue. While such post-war developments certainly contributed to the destruction of numerous original cases, the enduring popularity and democratization of many of their architectural features can also be seen to mark a new stage in the evolution of Reunion’s quintessentially adaptable case créole. In recent decades central state funding from the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication has supported academic studies of Reunion’s rich architectural heritage and has promoted the development of ‘tourisme vert’ [ecotourism], celebrating the island’s natural wonders, its colonial architecture and it distinctive creole way of life. Traditional building materials and techniques, such as thatched roofs and plaited palm-frond wall panels, have been revived in the construction of modern holiday resorts and tourist attractions on the island’s west coast. Given Île de la Réunion’s 350 years of French rule, it is perhaps paradoxical that it should take the external intervention – and gaze – of the former colonial centre to recognize the value of, and so to preserve and promote, the island’s rich local cultural heritage. Such external, arguably neo-colonial interventions certainly help to conserve the fabric – and the superficial aesthetics – of Reunion’s otherwise endangered cases créoles. Yet, such external interventions also run the risk of turning the most Reunionese lived in unsanitary housing, mainly paillotes [shacks] without running water or electricity] (Leveneur, 2007: 56). 9 The ‘Case TOMI’ was so named after the industrialist, Maurice Tomi, whose factory in Le Port made the prefabricated components of these houses. SATEC stands for the Société d’Aide Technique et de Coopération, a state-funded organization, set up in 1961 to support the local building trade and protect local building techniques.

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constantly evolving, adaptive and functional milieu de vivre that was the case créole into a purely symbolic, functionless museum piece, frozen in time for the appreciation of foreign tourists. Works Cited Agénor, Monique. 1993. L’Aïeule de l’Isle Bourbon. Paris: L’Harmattan. Asselin, Corinne, François Hennequet et al., eds. 2001. Cases Créoles de la Réunion. Paris: Plume. Barat, Christian. 1993. Cases Créoles de la Réunion. Paris: Les Éditions du Pacifique. Chane-Kune, Sonia. 1993. Aux Origines de l’identité réunionnaise. Paris: L’Harmattan. Gauvin, Axel. 1996. Cravate et fils. Paris: Seuil. Gélabert, Serge, and Bernard Leveneur. 1999. Reflets d’autrefois: architecture et art de vivre à la Réunion. Saint Denis: Éditions Serge Gélabert. Hennequet, François. 2001. ‘Variations d’un thème’. In Cases Créoles de la Réunion, edited by Corinne Asselin, François Hennequet et al., 74–100. Paris: Plume. Lauret, Daniel. 2004. Monsieur Oscar. Paris: Ibis Rouge Éditions. Leguen, Marcel. 1979. Histoire de l’Île de la Réunion. Paris: L’Harmattan. Leveneur, Bernard. 2007. Petites Histoires de l’architecture réunionnaise. Sainte Clotilde: Éditions du 4 Épices. Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds. 1996–98 [1984–92]. Realms of Memory. The Construction of the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. NewYork: Columbia University Press. Oriola, Gabriel Jonquères d’. 2001. ‘Construire l’espace’. In Cases Créoles de la Réunion, edited by Corinne Asselin, François Hennequet et al., 13–36. Paris: Plume. Vaxelaire, Daniel. 2001. Histoire d’une île: La Réunion. Saint Denis: Orphie.

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Memorials and Museums Robert Aldrich Memorials and Museums

In their efforts to recruit support for overseas ventures and to remind compatriots about the perceived achievements and benefits of the empire, colonial promoters sought to imprint colonialism on the very landscape of the mère-patrie (Aldrich, 2005). Statues hailed brave explorers and war memorials mourned sacrifices in faraway battles. Living and preserved flora and fauna, ethnographic artefacts, ‘native’ arts and crafts, and paintings and sculptures inspired by ‘exotic’ places enriched collections of such institutions as the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and displayed ‘Greater France’ to stay-at-home citizens. Particular buildings embodied the multifaceted dynamics of rule. In Paris, the Ministère des Colonies in the Rue Oudinot served as administrative headquarters of empire, the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer in the Rue La Pérouse collected scholarship on the wider world and the Musée d’Ethnographie in the Place du Trocadéro (and its successor, the Musée de l’Homme, located nearby) displayed the material culture of conquered societies (Conklin, 2013). The motherhouse of the venerable Société des Missions Étrangères in the Rue du Bac enshrined relics of martyrs and evangelists spreading the Christian Gospel, while a mosque, built near the Jardin des Plantes in 1926, honoured Muslim soldiers who fought in the Great War and accommodated the capital’s growing Islamic population. The École Coloniale, adjacent to the Luxembourg Gardens, trained the agents of dominion; with its Moroccan-style architecture and the bombastic library painting of women representing various colonies presenting their bounty to an enthroned figure of France, it no doubt gave dépaysement and encouragement to aspiring officials. The colonial pavilions at expositions universelles and dedicated colonial fairs organized in Paris and the provinces, though many of the

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buildings and displays were temporary, provided the most powerful manifestations of colonialism in the métropole (Geppert, 2010). The biggest exhibition of all was held in Paris in 1931: an imperial panorama with pavilions in the Bois de Vincennes representing each colony, the highlight an illuminated reconstruction of part of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat (see Bancel and Blanchard’s essay in this volume). A gilded statue of ‘La France Colonisatrice’ at the entry to the exhibition led visitors to the ‘permanent museum’ of the colonies, one of the few buildings designed to endure. Its huge exterior bas-reliefs depicted the resources of agriculture, mining and commerce that the colonies gave to France, and a mural in the great hall portrayed the gifts of education, justice, science and development that France offered in return. Parades of colonial soldiers, performances by singers and dancers from around the empire, and an ‘African village’ set up on the shores of Lake Daumesnil brought life to the pageant (Morton, 2000; Grandsart, 2010). The creators of exhibitions and museums intended them to provide entertainment and, more importantly, education about the empire; they served as propaganda for France’s imperial mission and a celebration and monumental memory of its accomplishments. At the time of the 1931 fair, however, the winds of change had already begun to blow. Dissidents organised a smaller anti-colonial exhibition featuring images of exploitation and violence. Anti-colonial nationalist groups were rapidly gaining strength; just the previous year, Ho Chi Minh had founded the Indochinese Communist Party, and there was a mutiny of Vietnamese soldiers at Yen Bay. French forces had only recently been involved in wars of ‘pacification’ in Morocco and Lebanon. Few imagined, however, that within three decades most of the colonies would have gained independence, the empire would be consigned to history and many of the colonial displays would be shunted off to storerooms. The end of empire did not mean the razing of monuments to imperialism in France (though it did in some of the colonies). The new order did mandate changes, however. The names of colonial heroes were sandblasted off the École Coloniale, which was transformed into a training school for bureaucrats of now independent countries. The old ‘Musée Colonial’, its building if not its vocation permanent, became the ‘Musée des Arts africains et océaniens’ (Le Palais des colonies, 2002). Only a few other buildings had survived from the 1931 jamboree – Notre-Dame des Missions, the Catholic church at the fair, had been taken apart and reassembled in Épinay-sur-Seine, and the pavilions of Togo and Cameroon eventually, and curiously, became temples at a

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Buddhist centre, redecorated in Tibetan style. Across from the museum, a monument erected in the 1940s to honour Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand and his African expedition of the 1890s remained standing, but in the 1970s persons unknown dynamited away the statue of Marchand. As France was afflicted with amnesia about its colonial past, other monuments fell into disrepair or were simply ignored. France has more recently begun to recall and confront its colonial history, and various sites have been repurposed (Aldrich, 2012). The transformation continues, with the former African and Oceanic museum now serving as a Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (see Crowley in this volume), its old collections and those of the Musée de l’Homme incorporated into the Musée du Quai Branly. New monuments have risen, including a Paris memorial to French soldiers in North Africa, on whose three concrete stelae with alphanumeric screens the names of those who died scroll past: a postmodern reconfiguration of traditional war memorials. Contested views and public debates about the legacy of colonialism have had their impact on memorials. In 1998 Louis Delgrès, who led a mass suicide of slaves and métis in 1802 in protest against Napoleonic reoccupation of Guadeloupe, was commemorated with a plaque in the Panthéon, where several figures associated with colonialist expansion are entombed. The Socialist mayor of Paris in 2001 unveiled a plaque in memory of those killed in the police repression of a demonstration against the Algerian war on 17 October 1961 (see Laronde in this volume) and, in 2007, outgoing and incoming presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated a memorial in the Luxembourg Gardens to those enslaved and subsequently emancipated by the French. Elsewhere in France private groups have funded memorials to pieds-noirs and even to the violently die-hard defenders of Algérie française. One of the most evocative colonial lieux de mémoire in France is the former Jardin Botanique Colonial, located at the eastern end of the Bois de Vincennes in the municipality of Nogent-sur-Seine (Lévêque, Griffon and Pinon, 2005). Such botanical gardens – Kew in London, similar gardens in Lisbon and Florence, and ones created outside Europe – played an important part in the colonial enterprise. They provided research laboratories for study of plant specimens and for the acclimatisation of species taken from one colony to another, from métropole to colony and from colony to métropole. Introduction of new species was part of ‘green imperialism’ and it aimed at the commercialisation of such profitable tropical products as coffee and rubber (Grove, 1995).

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The Nogent gardens were established in 1899 and carried out their work assiduously, nurturing plants in greenhouses, teaching tropical agronomy to tertiary students, collecting a library of books on the natural world and a xylotheque of tropical woods. The gardens also hosted colonial exhibitions in 1905 and 1907, with several pavilions from an exhibition in Marseille transferred and reused in Paris for the second fair. The Jardin Colonial found a new vocation during the First World War, as its buildings were requisitioned for a hospital for wounded colonial soldiers in France; a small mosque was opened for the Muslims. After the war the gardens seemed an appropriate site for war memorials to colonial soldiers. One for African soldiers is a stela with a sorrowful mother or wife looking towards the grave of her loved one in a distant country; a monument to soldiers from Madagascar features an imposing eagle, the symbol of the island; and that for Cambodians and Laotians is a Buddhist stupa. A more typically European obelisk was favoured for Christian soldiers from Indochina. Near to it, in the midst of a bamboo grove, stood a monument to other Vietnamese, a vermilion-painted dinh, the replica of a communal house, in which were placed rescripts from the Vietnamese emperor honouring the war dead; facing the structure is an ornate screen and a giant urn of the type seen in the imperial citadel in Hué. Each year French military officers, old soldiers and immigrants from the colonies attended ceremonies in Nogent to commemorate those who died for France and its empire (Jennings, 2003). With decolonisation, the colonial agronomy school closed and the numbers gathering for memorial services dwindled. The gardens did not weather well. Hailstorms broke the roofs of greenhouses, the exhibition pavilion of the Congo burned and so, too, did the Vietnamese dinh. Squatters and vandals wreaked havoc. Weeds grew around the monuments, while broken sculptures of ‘natives’ and bits of stone with ‘exotic’ motifs lay forlorn in the undergrowth. A statue of one of the most fervent colonial promoters, Eugène Étienne, looked out over the ruins of his imperial dreams. Few, it seemed, cared greatly about a lieu de mémoire of a defunct empire. Fortunately, authorities finally came to the rescue of the Jardin Colonial, installing a fence to protect it against further depredation. A new, smaller, but still striking red-painted commemorative structure replaced the destroyed dinh. Some conservation work was done on surviving pavilions and greenhouses, and librarians continued to look after the colonial-era collections. The gardens are now home to CIRAD, ‘the French agricultural research and international cooperation

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organization working for the sustainable development of tropical and Mediterranean regions’, its projects covering agro-ecology, climate change, biodiversity, food security and the future of tropical forests. CIRAD trains students and researchers, distributes plant materials and veterinary products to farmers and breeders, and undertakes agricultural and pastoral consultation (http://www.cirad.fr/en). The history of the Nogent gardens illustrates the transformations in France’s relationships with the wider world, but also points to continuities in scientific and research agendas extending over more than a century. The setting, with the greenhouses and disused pavilions, statues and war memorials, library and copse of bamboo – standing quietly near bustling offices, classrooms and laboratories – retains a colonial air, and provides a reminder of the multiple ways in which métropole was connected to empire. Around France many other colonial sites of memory remain. In Marseille, which billed itself as the ‘gateway to the Levant’, there are monuments to colonial soldiers who served in the eastern Mediterranean and to Algerian rapatriés (see Kleppinger in this volume). Another city in the Midi, Fréjus, is particularly rich in reminders of colonial times. The waterfront features a memorial to black African soldiers engraved with a poignant quotation from Léopold Sedar Senghor enjoining passers-by to remember that they fought so that the French could remain free. Numerous colonial soldiers were stationed at Camp Gallieni during the First World War, and the Indochinese soldiers erected a Buddhist temple there in 1917. (Thirteen years later a mosque, made of concrete but modelled on Western African mud-brick architecture, was also constructed in Fréjus.) Next to the pagoda is a monument and small museum dedicated to French soldiers killed in Vietnam, and the cemetery to which the remains of many were finally brought back from Asia in the 1980s. The city also hosts the museum of French Navy troops, the troupes coloniales. In Aubagne there is a museum at the headquarters of the Légion Étrangère, while Lorient boasts a museum dedicated to the history of the French East Indies Company. Marseille has the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, recalling France’s connections to the southern and eastern sides of the sea. (That museum, like the Quai Branly in Paris, has not been immune from criticism that colonialism has been downplayed and that colonialist perspectives have not been fully surmounted (Lebovics, 2014).) In Colmar stands a monument to a nineteenth-century colonialist, Admiral Armand-Joseph Bruat; Albert

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Schweitzer, who grew up in Alsace, credited its figure of an African as inspiration for his vocation, which led to international renown for medical work in Africa. In many smaller towns there are statues of either well-known or now obscure native sons (though less often daughters) whose destinies took them to the colonies. And now, there are virtual monuments on the web: sites and blogs produced by writers and graphic artists of widely varying political views, all with something to recall, celebrate or condemn in the colonial record. France still claims a dozen overseas territories. They possess their own monuments, for instance, in Martinique, an old and now decapitated statue of the Empress Joséphine and a more modern memorial to Africans who drowned when the ship carrying them into slavery was lost at sea (Reinhart, 2006; see Curtius in this volume). In Nouméa, New Caledonia, there is a war memorial with names of French settlers on one side and mention of Kanak on the other; not far away, a statue of the assassinated Jean-Marie Tjibaou, leader of the unsuccessful 1980s independence movement, overlooks a Pacific islands cultural centre named after him (Korson, 2016). The former French colonies, too, have their memorials, although ones like that erected to nationalist martyrs of the war of independence in Algiers recollect opposition to colonial overlordship, not imperialist grandeur; indeed, at the end of the FrancoAlgerian war the French navy repatriated dozens of monuments rather than see them suffer possible destruction. Near Bandiagara, Mali, a diminutive obelisk is dedicated to ‘victims and martyrs’ of colonialism, yet, in Senegal, a representation of a French and an African soldier, colloquially known as Demba and Dupont, shows comrades-in-arms (Ginio, 2006). In Vietnam streets celebrating the French were renamed and statues taken down after independence, though the much-respected Pasteur is still honoured. Many colonial buildings there have found new life as cafés or hotels catering for tourists enjoying the ambiance of Indochine. An observant flâneur can discover countless traces of the colonial empire in France’s landscape, just as the legacies of colonialism remain ever present (but sometimes occluded) in individual and collective memories, and in political debates about migration, multiculturalism and national identity. In France, and its former empire, the patrimoine of colonialism is omnipresent, soliciting reactions from historians, curators, policy-makers, lobbyists and ordinary citizens (Mangin, 2006). Community groups call for the construction of new monuments, although with the danger of ‘statuomania’ and a surfeit of memorials, and little

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consensus about who or what should be monumentalised and in what form. There are also demands for the ‘decolonisation’ of existing sites, though with discord about what that actually means. While the erection of triumphalist markers of empire testified to expansionist actions in the colonial period, and their embarrassed neglect or effacement showed the discomfort of the period of decolonisation, contemporary commemorative politics exemplifies the ambivalences and conflicts of the more recent postcolonial age. Works Cited Aldrich, Robert. 2005. Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories. London: Palgrave Macmillan. — 2012. ‘Commemorating Colonialism in a Post-Colonial World’. E-rea: revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 10, no. 1. https://erea. revues.org/2803. Cirad website. http://www.cirad.fr/en. Conklin, Alice. 2013. In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Geppert, Alexander C.T. 2010. Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-desiècle Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ginio, Ruth. 2006. ‘African Colonial Soldiers between Memory and Forgetfulness: The Case of Post-Colonial Senegal’. Outre-Mer 93, no. 350: 141–55. Grandsart, Didier. 2010. Paris 1931: Revoir l’Exposition coloniale. Saint-Romain: Éditions Van Wilder. Grove, Richard H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jennings, Eric. 2003. ‘Remembering “Other” Losses: The Temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne’. History and Memory 25, no. 1: 5–48. Korson, Cadey. 2016. ‘Nationalism and Reconciliation in Memorial Landscapes: The Commemoration of Jean-Marie Tjibaou in Kanaky/New Caledonia’. Journal of Historical Geography 52: 84–99. Lebovics, Herman. 2014. ‘The Future of the Nation Foretold in its Museums’. French Cultural Studies 25, no. 3–4: 290–98. Lévêque, Isabelle, Michel Griffon and Dominique Pinon. 2005. Le Jardin d’agronomie tropicale: De l’agriculture coloniale au développement durable. Arles: Actes Sud. Mangin, France. 2006. Le Patrimoine indochinois: Hanoi et autres sites. Paris: Éditions Recherches.

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Morton, Patricia A. 2000. Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Le Palais des Colonies: Histoire du Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. 2002. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux. Reinhardt, Catherine A. 2006. Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean. New York: Berghahn.

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Slavery Memorials Anny-Dominique Curtius Slavery Memorials

In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes: Theories of history have a rather limited view of the field of historical production. They grossly underestimate the size, the relevance and the complexity of the overlapping sites where history is produced, notably outside of academia. […] We are all amateur historians with various degrees of awareness about our production. We also learn history from similar amateurs. Universities and university presses are not the only loci of production of the historical narrative. (1995: 19–20)

Memorials and museums in Martinique have long been related to the history of colonization, but for the past twenty years new dynamics have been reconfiguring the memorializing landscape of Martinique. From the renaming of streets and squares in the southern towns of Le Diamant1 and Rivière-Pilote, 2 for example, to memorializing performances or the creation of associations such as Mi Mès Manmay Matinik (AM4)3 [Here are the Traditions of Martinican People], new memorializing initiatives remap collective memory within communities and in urban landscapes. In dialogue with Trouillot’s argument, this essay examines how three memorials encapsulate and commemorate the entangled and traumatic memory of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery while interrogating and challenging the very definition of a memorial, crafting

1 Avenue Aimé-Césaire, Rue Edouard-Glissant, Avenue Nelson-Mandela, Rue Barack-Obama, Rue Derek-Walcott. 2 Rue des Arawaks, Avenue des Anti-Esclavagistes, Rue du marronnage, Rue Che Guevara, Avenue Frantz-Fanon, Rue décembre 1959. 3 http://am4.fr/.

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The beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine, Fort-de-France.

the production of a postcolonial historical narrative and remodelling the cultural heritage and agency of postcontact societies. The three memorials I have chosen to explore are the beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais Tascher de la Pagerie, the Cap 110 Mémoire et Fraternité Memorial in Anse Caffard (both located in Martinique), and the Memorial of the Names of the Abolition initiated by CM 98 (Comité Marche du 23 mai 1998) in Paris.4 This association was founded on 30 November 1999 and bears the name of a silent march that gathered about 40,000 people5 in Paris on 23 May 1998, from Nation to République, to pay homage to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, and demand that slavery be recognized as a crime 4 http://cm98.fr/. 5 Mostly from Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Reunion, and mainland France.

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The beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine, Fort-de-France.

against humanity. The memorial does not have yet a fixed location, and can be considered a ‘travelling memorial’ (Gordien, 2016). In September 1991 the statue of Empress Joséphine in La Savane, the main city park in Fort-de-France, was beheaded. Inscriptions written in red across the explanatory glass panels next to the statue stated in Martinican Creole: ‘Esklavaj Krim Kon limanité’ [slavery crime against humanity] and demanded respect for 22 May 1848 (the day of the abolition of slavery in Martinique). No one has openly claimed responsibility for the beheading and, even though a new head was commissioned by the City of Fort-de-France, the statue has never been fully restored. The inscriptions in Martinican Creole demanding respect for the memory of the slaves and the red paint covering the statue, symbolizing the blood of the violence of slavery and the slave trade, have not been removed either. Numerous speculations constantly feed the obvious question ‘Who cut off Joséphine’s head?’ but ultimately the

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silence surrounding the identity of the perpetrators triggers what really seems to matter most, namely: how does the beheaded statue dialogue with Martinicans, the French government, the city of Fort-de-France, bemused tourists, scholars and artists who now consider the beheaded statue as contemporary art (Curtius, 2015: 10)? Since 1991, the beheading can no longer be approached through the lens of a local news item, as it was originally regarded, but as the locus for the production of a performative historical narrative with clear political agency. Joséphine de Beauharnais Tascher de la Pagerie was born in the town of Trois-Ilets in the south of Martinique on 23 June 1763 and died in Rueil-Malmaison near Paris on 29 May 1814. In 1796 she became the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Empress of the French, but was repudiated in 1809 by Napoleon. Joséphine’s statue was the first to be installed in Fort-de-France, in August 1859, in the middle of La Savane, a public park that faces the ocean. A grandiose inauguration lasted several days and was attended by noteworthy political figures from France and the Caribbean. In 1974 the statue was relocated from the centre of the park to a corner near Rue de la liberté, across from Bibliothèque Schœlcher and half a block from the Préfecture. Among the various features adorning the statue, it is notable that Joséphine holds a medallion that shows Napoleon’s profile, and on the front side of the pedestal a carved section represents Joséphine’s coronation at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1804. To the rear of the pedestal an inscription states that ‘in the year 1858 of Napoléon III’s reign, the Martinican people raised this monument to honour Empress Joséphine, born in this colony’. While some see Joséphine as the pride of the island as Empress of the French, or praise her passion for botany, many remain vehemently critical, and associate her solely with her role in the reinstatement of slavery in 1802. However, no historical text proves that Napoleon re-established slavery in the colonies under pressure from Joséphine, although it seems likely that she would have wished to maintain the slave system and thus preserve the economic power of generations of white colonists to which she herself belonged, as her parents were slave-owners. Nevertheless, Joséphine is caught in the quarrel between official History and the trauma caused by a wounded memory, and she was therefore beheaded by locally produced history. In 1992, one year after the beheading, the French government officially acknowledged the statue as a National Heritage site. This recognition is markedly uncanny because as a site protected by a state procedure on account of its importance to France’s historical and cultural heritage the

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Pedestal of the renovated statue with the name Joséphine erased.

head should have been replaced and the statue shielded from future acts of defacement. In 2010 the statue was renovated, but the decapitated head and the blood-red paint nevertheless remain untouched, as if to permanently actualize the ideological and political message conveyed by the symbolic gesture of defacement and to subvert the full restoration of the memorial. Similarly, through another premeditated ‘act of memory’ (Curtius, 2008) shortly after the renovation, the name Joséphine was erased from the inscription that appears on the pedestal of the freshly renovated monument. The text that now reads: ‘To the empress born in this colony’ originally stated: ‘To the empress Joséphine born in this colony’. With the name Joséphine erased from History by a performative narrative, and with the red paint still covering the chest and the robe of the statue, it becomes essential to question the new status of the allegedly freshly restored statue that still does not have its head.

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Allée Vœu de Champagney.

On 30 March 2012, when the City of Fort-de-France renamed the square surrounding the statue Allée Vœu de Champagney [Champagney Wish Alley], 6 it symbolically reconfigured this historically entangled space, engraved another ideologically charged layer on the palimpsest that constitutes this statue, insightfully dialogued with the beheading and prefaced Sarah Trouche’s performance analysed below. Because the renovated but still beheaded statue, with the name Joséphine erased on the pedestal, is evidently embedded within the traumatic memory of slavery, it becomes a fertile ground for performing artists and anonymous performers who value the palimpsestic subtexts that are etched on and around the statue. Hence, the statue triggers daring speeches and memory performances through which anonymous and visible bodies lay claim to the statue and the nearby park, reconfiguring them as disruptive platforms for acts of memory. The 6 On 19 March 1789, the inhabitants of the town of Champagney in France condemned slavery and called for its abolition in an article that they included in their notebook of grievances to Louis XVI.

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Sarah Trouche flogging the beheaded statue of Joséphine, 17 November 2012.

primary function of the statue, as written on the pedestal, is ‘to honour Empress Joséphine’. Nevertheless, this function has been eroded since 1991, because the official message the statue is supposed to convey is partially erased, threatened with disappearance or forced to compete with an urgent oppositional narrative that appropriates colonial history with the intention of unremittingly deploying entangled meanings. During the Martinique Pool Art Fair (16–18 November 2012), held at the hotel L’Impératrice in Fort-de-France, located opposite La Savane and facing the beheaded statue, French visual and performance artist Sarah Trouche, her naked body covered with red roucou oil, walked from L’Impératrice to the beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine and flogged7 the statue thirty-three times with a whip. Evidently, embedded 7 Trouche’s performance can be watched at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Ivfn0WGFKmM.

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in the intertwining of arts and politics, various layers of subjectivities overlap as Trouche and the viewers of the performance interact. Through her artistic reappropriation of the politically motivated beheading, Trouche dislocates French and Martinican societal debates about Joséphine and proposes tactics that can be devised in order to reject, problematize or nurture a forward-looking co-existence with the statue. Likewise, the viewers’ subjectivities must also process the immediacy of Trouche’s performance and critically dialogue with her desire to shake a customary vision of Joséphine in Fort-de-France and transform the apparent stability and quietness surrounding the beheaded statue on La Savane. Thus, when Trouche declares that her performance ‘must trigger a reconstruction’, as a French female artist who had never visited Martinique prior to her performance and who became aware of the controversy surrounding Joséphine as she arrived in Martinique, she seeks to share a sense of common history with a Martinican community. Trouche reappropriates the roucou oil (extracted from the red seeds of the annatto or achiote tree), originally used by Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean for body painting, hair and skin care, to creatively juxtapose African and Indigenous Caribbean experiences of engineered extermination, bloodshed, suffering, survival and resistance during the post-Columbian conquest and the Middle Passage and on the plantation. Hence, using her body as a live sculpture and a palimpsestic canvas on which several complex layers of agency are etched, her naked, roucoupainted body is a poetics of entangled and polysemic bodies that enters into a dialogue with Joséphine’s body and several other historical modalities. To that extent, Trouche’s reparative performance reminds us of Cuban sculptor, photographer, painter and performance and video artist Ana Mendieta, whose artwork deeply coalesces her own naked body, nature and the land. Trouche flogs the ambiguities, social tensions and political contradictions that Joséphine and her beheaded statue exhibit, and, with the red roucou oil covering her body, she translates the trauma of slavery with all its temporal thickness. Beyond Trouche’s nudity, one might also visualize Joséphine’s body being unclothed and deposed from its highness in order to be symbolically flogged like her own slaves. Likewise, by desacralizing the institutionalized male aesthetics of marble memorials, she advocates for the immediacy and vitality of performing arts and its strong capacity to disrupt historical hegemony, dislocate tensions and interrogate tormented histories in communities of the global South. For Trouche, her body

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is a political and sociological transmitter, and her nudity allows her to offer everything, to be totally in conversation and in close contact with the problems she tackles, and the communities that are deeply involved in socio political tensions. Nudity is the total sincerity and authenticity of the gesture and the action’.8

Trouche’s performance also destroys the neatness of historical monuments and replaces it with a political, spontaneous, ephemeral action. Through these various intertwined layers of actions, Trouche enacts the trauma of slavery. In addition, by carving out an evocative ideological theatre to compensate for the blanks of an erased memory, her ‘repertoire keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning’ (Taylor, 2003: 20). The first 1991 act of memory gives Trouche access to a public space full of tension. By occupying this space, she rekindles several layers of traumatic silences in history, then acts out to repeat this unbearable, dehumanizing punishment of flogging during the times of slavery in front of an audience with a clear historical consciousness of the trauma caused by flogging, and of slavery. As a vicarious, secondary witness to the trauma of slavery, she triggers her own subjectivity, and that of the audience, and seeks to work through a possible dialogue between two communities, one in mainland France and one in Martinique, around an entangled and what seems to be an impossible reflection on the trauma of slavery. This reflection is still at the unresolved stage of noeuds de mémoire, or what may be called a disorder of postcontact memory. As Rothberg observes, ‘sites of memory as noeuds de mémoire are not static conglomerations of heterogeneous elements.’ Quoting James Young, he adds that ‘they require the active agency of individuals and publics that entails recognizing and revealing the production of memory as an ongoing process involving inscription and reinscription, coding and recoding’ (2010: 8). As an artistic intervention that rewrites a social text from a disputed socio-historical context, Trouche’s political, oppositional and eccentric corporeality follows the 1991 perpetrators as well as the subsequent invisible performers that defaced the statue and reminds us that while the presence of the beheaded statue of Joséphine in Fort-de-France looks uncanny, it produces a ground-breaking discourse about dislocating institutional monuments and archives and infusing them with palimpsestic ‘anarchives’ (Derrida, 1995). 8 Trouche’s electronic communication with the author: 17 September–14 October 2014.

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Dissecting Sarah Trouche’s oppositional and reparative corporeality, Serge Chalons, former president of the Comité Devoir de mémoire in Martinique, sent to the media covering the event the following unpublished, spontaneous and incisive reaction to the performance: Que porte cette jeune femme, blanche, mais qu’importe, faisant subir à ‘Joséphine cou coupé’, impératrice des Français, deux siècles après, le châtiment du fouet, sur la place de la Savane qui longe la rue de la Liberté à Fort-de-France … Debout, l’impératrice, figée dans le marbre, du haut de sa grandeur, mais soumise au fouet d’une femme ‘toucouleur’, à ses pieds, dans une extrême nudité … Bouleversant ainsi l’ordre des choses et du temps … . (Chalons, 2012)9 [What is this young woman wearing, a white woman, incidentally, submitting ‘Joséphine with her neck severed’, the Empress of the French, two centuries later, to punishment by flogging, on the Square of La Savane, alongside Liberté Street in Fort-de-France  … The Empress, standing, frozen marble-like, in her greatness, but being flogged by a ‘Toucouleur’ painted woman, at her feet, in extreme nudity  … Thus upsetting the order of things and time … .]

On 3 October 2014 Sarah Trouche performed ‘Action for Resilience’ at Plateforme, a Parisian visual and performing arts gallery.10 This action is a meaningful sequel to the 2012 performance in Fort-de-France insofar as she chooses to flog Joséphine along with her own artwork representing two portraits of the Empress. Hence, using her braided hair as a whip, she flogs and destroys her own artwork, and subsequently embodies, with the red paint dripping over her body, the translation of the trauma of slavery. Likewise, she evidently desacralizes neoclassical portrait painting of royal families. Trouche explained to me that her electronic correspondence with me prompted her to create this second performance, in which she flogs two portraits that convey a dichotomy, but above all the opacities and multiple political and social frictions, through which Joséphine must be perceived. Prior to this 2014 performance, Trouche had imagined that the head of the statue had been found on two distinct beaches in Martinique, a white-sand beach and a volcanic sand beach, which explains the black and brownish colours she chose for each of these sculptures. Ultimately, as an ‘amateur historian’, Trouche complexifies the palimpsestic dynamics 9 Text obtained through email exchange between Serge Chalons, Suzy Landau and the author. 10 This second performance can be viewed at: https://vimeo.com/107992001.

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Sarah Trouche flogging her own paintings of Joséphine, 3 October 2014. Courtesy of Sarah Trouche.

of the beheaded statue and imaginatively positions herself as a surrogate victim while acknowledging that she cannot fully take the victims’ place. In addition, because her nudity allows her to enact an embodied memory in total sincerity and authenticity, she entangles her positionality as both a vicarious and a virtual witness, and muddles Dominick LaCapra’s distinction between these two notions (2004: 125). The wounds of history necessarily trigger a crisis of the representation of a traumatic memory in an overseas French department where, before 1991, the majority of the monuments supported an official colonial narrative. From that perspective, the 1991 beheading and Trouche’s 2012 and 2014 performances profoundly interact with Derek Walcott’s now well- known poetic reconfiguration of the Middle Passage, where the ocean ‘keeps turning blank pages looking for History’ (1979, 25–26).

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Relocating the decapitated head of the statue. Courtesy of Sarah Trouche.

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Cap 110 Mémoire et Fraternité, Anse Caffard, Le Diamant, Martinique.

The Memorial Cap 110 at Anse Caffard in the town of Le Diamant, on the south-western coast of Martinique, displays a different active agency to help turn the ‘blank pages’ of History. Inaugurated in 1998 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, the town of Le Diamant commissioned Martinican artist and sculptor Laurent Valère to conceive this poignant memorial as a tribute to African captives who drowned on the night of 8 April 1830 during the shipwreck of an illegal and unidentified slave ship on the rocky shore of Anse Caffard. Although the slave trade had been abolished in 1817, the ship was illicitly carrying captives to Martinique. Before the ship wrecked itself at Anse Caffard, most of the crew had died during the passage that lasted four months, and many captives who had died of illness had been thrown overboard. As the remaining Africans were shackled together in the ship’s hold, most of them perished near Anse Caffard; however, eighty-six male and female captives were rescued and sheltered on Latournelle Plantation, then entrusted to the Administration of the French Navy. Forty-six bodies were recovered,

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Cap 110 Mémoire et Fraternité.

including those of four white seamen who were offered decent burial in the cemetery of Le Diamant, while the remaining forty-two African captives were buried in a mass grave. This is allegedly the last shipwreck of a slave ship on the coast of Martinique. Faced with the entangled legal status of the survivors, who were shipped illegally and who were neither slaves nor free human beings who could be granted special status, the Conseil Privé of Martinique ruled in May 1830 that they be deported to the colony of Cayenne where the eighty-six African survivors landed in July 1830. The memorial, paying tribute to this harrowing event, is built on the alleged burial ground of the forty-two drowned African captives. It comprises fifteen massive androgynous statues arranged as a triangle (a reference to the Triangular slave trade) and aligned at a 110º angle to the Gulf of Guinea, from where the ship had probably departed. The statues are made out of white concrete reinforced with sand and gravel. Each statue, representing a meditative captive leaning forward, is sealed on a solid base and is approximately eight feet tall, four feet wide, two feet deep and weighs four and a half tons. Located on a gently sloping

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Cap 110 Mémoire et Fraternité.

grassy bluff, the statues overlook the Caribbean Sea, facing Diamond Rock, with their back to the shadowy flanks of Morne Larcher and the nearby Morne Pavillon locally known as Morne L’Afrique. The distinctiveness of the memorial lies in the tragic event that inspired its conception, the significant sense of mourning it evokes and its absolute inclusion in its natural environment. The original white colour of the memorial, symbolizing mourning, has weathered and turned grey. Thus, landscape, weatherscape and seascape stand as intangible witnesses of the historical tragedy, play a significant role in the ageing process of the statues and ultimately remodel the statues, which become an integral part of the natural environment. The symbiosis between nature (sea winds, salty sea sprays, soil, sunlight, rains and hurricanes), the statues and the burial ground tells a historical narrative that visitors need to process as they become immersed in the uniqueness of the memorial. Because the memorial is in the open, visitors can touch the statues, walk around them, be impregnated with the sound of the wind and the pounding surf below and are evidently imbued with a historical denseness. Likewise, the deep connection

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between statues and people evoked in the name of the memorial, ‘Mémoire et fraternité’, is intensified by this sense of close intimacy with the statues. The hunched shoulders and bowed heads of the statues, huddled together, staring out stoically to sea and meditating on the burden of historical wounds, force us to apply a conscious gaze to the seascape and the surrounding scenery. Similarly, the heartrending expression on the face of each statue and the original white colour, framed in the geography of the pounding surf below and the protecting flanks of the mornes, force visitors to feel the deep historical distinctiveness of Cap 110. As Suzanne Césaire (1945) urged us to grasp the profound historical significance of nature, visitors to the Memorial need to develop a ‘total insight’ to carve out a conscious memorial cartography. Visitors also need to excavate from under the beauty of the natural environment surrounding Cap 110 the humanity and history of a landscape and seascape that witnessed the shipwreck and constitute today a sacred burial ground for drowned African captives who were neither slaves nor free human beings. Unlike the beheaded statue of Joséphine, while the memorial ultimately prompts a distinct ‘global memoryscape’ for international visitors (Phillips and Reyes, 2011), Martinicans have taken to illuminating the memorial during All Saints and All Souls Days in memory of the captives allegedly buried on the site, and have elected Cap 110 as the most appropriate location for the 22 May commemorations of the abolition of slavery in Martinique. Similarly, one should note that Edouard Glissant’s funeral ceremony was organized at Cap 110, with his coffin installed next to the statues, thus leading mourners to pay homage simultaneously to the poet of the Tout Monde and to the African captives. In a video posted on Laurent Valère’s website11 Glissant, a part-time resident of the town of Le Diamant who regularly visited the memorial, observes that the location bears the dimension of the ‘unknown’, the ‘unfathomable’. Cap 110, he adds, ‘is the memory of the abyss, the source of the absolutely undecipherable African origin of the Caribbean. Cap 110 has stirred something in the unconscious of the population of Le Diamant and of Martinique.’ Aimé Césaire, another faithful visitor to the memorial, especially toward the end of his life, explains in another video, also posted on Laurent Valère’s website, that Cap 110 ‘reflects a distinctive 11 http://www.laurentvalereartstudio.com/cap-110-1.

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Memorial of the Names of the Abolition, Paris.

Martinican anguish, melancholy, complexity, and resistance’. Césaire adds that: as an uprooted and displaced people, Martinicans need to take root on their land. It is important for Martinicans to have a memorial that reminds them of a past of pain, disaster but also resistance. These phantoms [the statues] have their descendants on the nearby Morne L’Afrique, and they are the living example of resistance. When I descend into myself, when I go deeper than a probe, I find the fundamental Negro and my phantoms, here they are, next to me, and I do not reject them.

In shaping a memorial poetry where the sea is a historical abyss, Césaire and Glissant echo Walcott, who found the ‘monuments’, ‘battles’, ‘martyrs’ of the African diaspora, its ‘tribal memory’, and its ‘Renaissance’ in ‘that grey vault, the Sea [that] has locked them up’ ‘in them sea-sands’ (1979: 25–26). By way of a conclusion and of opening up a reflection on how communities from the French overseas departments dislocate a cartography of remembrance that silences the victims of slavery, one should pay close attention to the Memorial of the Names of the Abolition. In 2008 the association CM 98 created this memorial, which

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is composed of 256 glass panels. It lists the first names, the numbers assigned to slaves and the last names they were arbitrarily given in Guadeloupe and Martinique at the time of the abolition of slavery in 1848. These panels are set up for each town in Guadeloupe and Martinique, with about 70,000 names arranged in alphabetical order. The memorial was inaugurated on 23 May 2008 in the Senate in Paris, then on the square of the Basilique de Saint-Denis. It is considered a travelling memorial because it is installed only in a specific location, and for a limited time, during commemorative events in mainland France. For instance, the Memorial was installed in the gardens of the Ministry of the French overseas territories where the event Limyè Ba yo [A Light for Them] took place on 23 May 2016. According to Emmanuel Gordien,12 president of CM 98, as the main objective of the memorial is to carve out, on a national scale, significant itineraries of recognition and reconciliation, CM 98 seeks to increase the number of panels with names from all the overseas departments and is actively looking for a prestigious and visible location in Paris for the permanent exhibition of the memorial. Therefore, I argue that this memorial can be considered as a post-museum exhibiting slavery anarchives that fill the silences of History and desacralize a conventional archival logic. Other memorials that strive to restore the suppressed memory of slavery were given space in Parisian suburbs with large communities from the French overseas departments.13 La Gardienne de vie [The Protector of Life], which portrays a slave woman shielding her child, was the first memorial to be erected in Sarcelles on 23 May 2006. Subsequently, the towns of Sarcelles and Saint-Denis in 2013, Creil in 2015 and Grigny14 in 2016 have installed steles that bear the names of 213 slaves (the number of years that slavery lasted between 1635 and 1848, according to CM 98). Finally, it is worth mentioning that, in 2006, CM 98 also created a genealogy workshop the objective of which is to ‘look for the slave’ and understand the post-abolition arbitrary creation of families and societies. An archival database with 120,000 names of emancipated Guadeloupean and Martinican slaves is now accessible on the site anchoukaj.15 12 Gordien’s email communication with the author (December 2016). 13 http://www.esclavage-memoire.com/lieux-de-memoire/stele-hommage-auxvictimes-de-l-esclavage-sarcelles-61.html. 14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2B9uwRYmbQ. 15 http://www.anchoukaj.org.

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By disentangling the thick temporality of slavery, these memorials all strive not to make slavery an event that happened too long ago to remember, but to excavate the trauma of slavery and ultimately foster instead a constructive solidarity and awareness of a painful history. Works Cited Césaire, Suzanne. 1945. ‘Le grand camouflage’. Tropiques 13–14: 267–73. Curtius, Anny-Dominique. 2008. ‘À Fort-de-France les statues ne meurent pas’. International Journal of Francophone Studies: Departmentalization at Sixty: The French DOMs and the Paradoxes of the Periphery 11, no. 1: 87–106. — 2015. ‘Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue: Performing Conflicting History in Fort-de-France’. In Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries, edited by Patricia Donatien and Rodolphe Solbiac, 9–30. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Mal d’Archive. Paris: Galilée. Gordien, Emmanuel. 2016. ‘La construction de sites mémoriels avec les noms des esclaves en France Hexagonale, en Guadeloupe et en Afrique’. In La Route de l’esclave. Des itinéraires pour réconcilier histoire et mémoire, edited by Matthieu Dussauge, 415–25. Paris: L’Harmattan. La Capra, Dominick. 2004. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Phillips, Kendall R., and G. Mitchell Reyes, eds. 2011. Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2010. ‘Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire’. In ‘Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture’, edited by Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal and Maxim Silverman, 3–12. Special issue, Yale French Studies Series, 118–19. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Walcott, Derek. 1979. ‘Sea is History’. In The Star-apple Kingdom, 25–28. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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The Memorial ACTe Fabienne Viala The Memorial ACTe

In the French départments d’outre-mer (DOM) postcolonial memory emerged in the public space only two decades ago, after 200 years of institutional amnesia. The bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in 1998 was the pivotal moment when French Antilleans contested and challenged the narrative of schœlcherism and its inscription in the public space (Chivallon, 2012: 32). Named after Victor Schœlcher, the politician to whom French national history attributes the abolition of slavery in 1848, schœlcherism became the mainstream memorial narrative in the DOM after the abolition; the latter was reinforced after the départementalisation in 1946. Based on the glorification of French Republican values, in which enlightened and humanitarian principles are praised for having led to the abolition of slavery, schœlcherism in fact caused the complete erasure from official memory of both the trauma caused by centuries of slavery and the French accountability for such a crime against humanity. Though the Taubira law in 2001 was remarkable in many ways,1 it has never been considered other than symbolic, and, as I write these lines, France still firmly refuses to participate in the reparative justice debate. The emplotment in the public space of the past and its painful stories is a common feature of Caribbean cultural memory. In The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism and Commemorations in 1 This law, named after Christiane Taubira who was then a deputy at the French National Assembly, declared slavery a crime against humanity. Clustered as a ‘memory law’, the Taubira Law, once passed, became a symbolic law, powerless to take legal reparative measures in consequence of the crime committed. No one seems to be accountable for what is qualified (at best) as a ‘regrettable’ moment of history.

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the Caribbean I identified this process as a memorial template that allows the simultaneous retelling of multiple narratives of violence into competing historical plots at key commemorative moments of national history, such as the extermination of the Arawak people, the enslavement of the African people or the exploitation of the human being as the basis of a modern economic system (Viala, 2014). Guilt, shame, pride, hunger for recognition, dignity and equal consideration are the many emotions that collide when it comes to inventing scenarios for developing new forms of postcolonial memorialization in the multi-ethnic and racialized post-plantation societies of the Caribbean. My purpose in this contribution is to examine and evaluate the nature, scope and consequences of the seism of memory since its eruption in 2000 in the French Caribbean. In Guadeloupe it developed into a multifaceted appetite for collective remembrance and took multiple shapes of competing strategies for memorializing in the public space heritages of pains, resistance and pride at the local, national and regional levels. In Operation Urgent Memory, Shalini Puri shows that the repressed memory of the 1983 Grenada revolution has been inscribed in the landscape as submerged, residual or eruptive (Puri, 2014). I borrow Puri’s concept of seismic memory to examine the specific case of Guadeloupe. All the collective efforts of the Guadeloupean people to reappropriate their non-French and non-European heritage on their island have turned into competitive post-traumatic approaches to the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Three main platforms for remembering the ancestors and the trauma of slavery have now emerged in Guadeloupean cultural memory. The first one belongs to the particular kind of eruptive memory that I define as cultural marronage, of which the freshly inaugurated MACTe – Museum of Contemporary Caribbean Art and Memorial for the History of the Slave Trade – is the most achieved expression. Among the postcolonial realms of memory that have newly emerged in Guadeloupe, the MACTe, which opened to the public in July 2015 in the port city of Pointe-à-Pitre, is certainly the most remarkable and architecturally astounding: 7,000 square metres devoted to the history of slavery, with original objects and artworks tracing the histories of the slave trade and acknowledging the sufferings of those who went through the transatlantic middle passage. Built on the site of the sugar factory Darboussier, which was the economic centre of the island from the 1860s, after the abolition of slavery, until 1980, when it closed, the MACTe embodies a memorial palimpsest that has architecturally inscribed the history

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of forced labour in the landscape on the emblematic site that marked the golden age of sugar, the symbol of slavery. In addition to being a memorial and a museum, the MACTe has also been designed to display regular exhibitions of contemporary Caribbean art in a country where there is no museum as such, other than plantation tours praising the beauty of the sugar cane and rum industry. Though the number of visitors points at the MACTe as a successful realm of postcolonial memory, the controversy around the museum was intense among the local population prior to the opening. 2 The reasons for this mistrust are to be found in the very exceptional type of cultural marronage behind the MACTe. First and foremost, the MACTe bypassed all the national rules that come with the political navigation of cultural memory in a département d’outre-mer. Decision-making committees, from the designers to the architects and head curators, were all creoles, either from Guadeloupe or Martinique, with the exception of one African curator. The decisionmakers completely excluded the French administration staff who would normally have controlled and managed the project. 3 Instead, the MACTe proposed to display both a didactic and an emotional history of slavery from the enslaved perspective (and not from the perspective of the 2 The main popular objections were the cost of the Museum, and the fact that it was built on the site of the sugar factory Darboussier, an emblem of the working class memory. About the first objection, it is important to note that the MACTe costed as much as a new hospital or a new school in Guadeloupe, which is an island where those infrastructures already exist and are in good conditions. The money invested in the construction of the MACTe was not at the expenses of health or education budget. The population was not used to having museums on their island, even less a museum of such impressive size. About the second objection, it is actually after a cultural festival organized on the ruins of the Darboussier factory that the idea to build the MACTe on this very site emerged. The inclusion of the history of Darboussier in the MACTe has been the starting point of the architectural competition awarded to the Guadeloupeans Berthelot, Marton, Doré and Mocka-Célestine. 3 In the French system, applicants to positions within the field of heritage need to take a civil-servant examination, delivered only by national heritage institutions such as l’Ecole des Chartes; once they pass the exam, they are assigned to a heritage institution in France, according to their grade (the higher the grade, the more likely you might be to choose the region of France where you want to work). Guadeloupe being part of France, the civil-servant staff who take leading posts in the French Caribbean society are most of the time not at all familiar with Caribbean culture and identity issues.

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abolition, which is the mainstream national approach). The MACTe’s historical narrative chooses to contextualize Caribbean slavery within the wider history of slave trade across the region, not only in Guadeloupe, and in parallel with other forms of slavery, such as Greek and Roman slavery, without softening the unique brutality and dehumanization of the transatlantic slave trade, invented by Europe for the sole purpose of profit. The choice was made to dedicate specific parts of the museum to pay homage to the victims of slavery in Guadeloupe, such as the Morne Mémoire and the genealogy room, where people receive support and access to archives in order to build their genealogical trees and find their ancestors; while other parts of the building clearly adopt a post-traumatic approach to slavery, focusing on its legacies in the contemporary world. Furthermore, in order to deliver an international approach and attract visitors from all over the world, the MACTe also had to bypass the expectations of some local black leaders, who would have preferred a more simplistic and local approach to the history of slavery, opposing black and white people as victims and executioners, in a Manichean version in which Africa would be represented as an idealized epitome of innocence and goodness. The MACTe neither celebrates the abolitions nor praises the idealized story of a perfect Africa. Instead it desacralizes both the national white and the local black narratives of slavery. For the first time in the cultural history of the French Caribbean it proposes an unprecedented and monumental story that puts Guadeloupe – and not France – on the international map of the leading museums for slavery remembrance. Initially, the idea of having a memorial site dedicated to the history of the slave trade in Guadeloupe came from the independence leader Luc Reinette in the late 1990s, when he was the president of the International Society of Black People, the CIPN (Comité International des Peuples Noirs).4 President Chirac unsuccessfully recuperated the idea in 2006 as 4 The CIPN (Comité International pour les Peuples Noirs) is a citizen-led society that belongs to a type of societies called in France associations loi 1901. That type of societies, created in 1901 as its name reveals, allows citizens to create non-profit organizations, financed by the membership fees, devoted to a specific interest, from sport to war veterans. The associations loi 1901 are as diverse as the interests of the people. Those citizen-led societies are, in France as well as in the territories where French law applies like Guadeloupe, the only platforms for the expression of non-French and non-white cultural communities. French law and French cultural identity are indeed based on the notion of assimilation, preventing any representation of identity that would not be considered

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part of a rightwing political national agenda celebrating the universal achievements of France, among which abolitionism was key. 5 The tour de force of the MACTe has been to go beyond both the national and the local memory routes, constantly fighting each other because of the continuing racism and administrative colonial mindset that structures the DOM. In a black country ruled by white people, the creole maroons who piloted the MACTe proposed a third way, despite the fears and criticism coming from all fronts. This is a new type of cultural marronage that I believe will create a precedent for future generations of memory makers. The second pathway for remembering slavery in Guadeloupe comes from a typically French (mis)understanding of the term postcolonial: given that a département is not a free independent nation, ‘postcolonial’, from a French perspective, can only mean ‘after the colonial period’. As a result, the French memory makers based in the DOM have recently been working hard to amend the colonial history of slavery infused by schœlcherism and reform the national narrative of history by bringing it up to standards of scientific accuracy and ethical acknowledgement, for the first time putting the emphasis on the pain caused to black enslaved people. In 2014 Guadeloupe became part of the UNESCO Slave Route (Route de l’esclave) project, created in 1994 to rescue the sites attached to the history of slavery in Africa and the Americas. As a result, eighteen sites were unearthed in Guadeloupe and signalled as part of the visible historical heritage of the island: Habitation Beausoleil, Fort Louis Delgrès, Habitation Vanibel, Habitation La Grivelière, Indigoterie at Anse à la Barque, Cachot d’esclaves at Habitation Belmont, Victor Schœlcher Museum in Pointe-à-Pitre, Fort Fleur d’épée, Monument for the Slavery Abolition, Canal des Rotours, Habitation la Mahaudière, traditionally French. Frenchness is defined as a homogeneous concept, and there is no space for the expression of hyphenated identities in French culture. To be French, you must therefore become oblivious of any cultural trait within yourself that is not shared with the majority of French people. 5 Chirac commissioned Edouard Glissant to imagine a site for remembering slavery in France, through a national lens that would pay homage to the abolitions. The project was abandoned and instead, Glissant wrote in 2007 Mémoires des Esclavages: La Fondation d’un Centre National pour la mémoires des esclavages et de leurs abolitions, prefaced by the prime minister at the time, Dominique de Villepin. Clearly, the need for remembering slavery was in danger of being repossessed by the heirs of those who created the plantation system, the leaders of the French Republic. The MACTe did not let that happen.

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Slave Cemetery at Anse Sainte-Marguerite, Habitation Néron, Habitation Murat, Habitation Roussel-Trianon, Mare au Punch, Indigoteries of Marie-Galante, and Poterie Fidelin. Those sites used to be abandoned plantations (called habitations in Guadeloupe), in some cases destroyed to build hotels and apartment blocks without any mention of why the island’s landscape was dotted with such remnants of the plantation system. The Route de l’esclave project now allows tourists and visitors to the island to learn about the history of Guadeloupe beyond the tropical image of beaches and coconut trees. The logo of the Route de l’esclave, visible on all the preserved sites, clearly represents black people as victims accessing freedom by breaking their chains, a sign that the UNESCO project is working only as a correction of the colonial version of history, but not as an empowering valorization of black culture on the island. As a result, a large number of citizen-led societies have emerged as platforms from which local black people memorialize and recuperate their own history and reconstruct their pride and dignity. While the Route de l’esclave is a form of residual memory, acknowledging and accepting the physical traces/scars of slavery that belong to the island’s landscape from a French perspective, the memorial approach of the citizen-led societies is a submerged one, addressing the ongoing pain of slavery for the current generations of Guadeloupean people. Their agendas are based on the ritualization of mourning, at symbolic sites and with objects and totems that compensate for centuries of oblivion. While some societies are very committed to the independence struggle, it is not political independence but Black identity and the struggle against racism that is the common point of those citizen-led organizations. The society Lanmou Ba Yo (meaning ‘Love for Them’ in creole) is one of the most remarkable in that sense. Based in the town of Moule, the members of Lanmou Ba Yo pay homage to their ancestors, dead on the island without any proper sepulture and without a name. The generations descending from enslaved people need to be able to bond with their ancestors and mourn them – in other words, to love them – despite the fact that they were unbearably erased from their emotional heritage by the French Republican hegemonic memorial narrative. The mainstream cultural narrative behind French national identity states that Antillean people, as French people, are the bearers of a superior civilization (French and white) that they should be grateful to have received as their own. This mainstream belief, at the heart of French Republicanism, is terribly damaging when it comes to acknowledging the accountability of

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France in the crimes committed against the families of slave descendants. It does not leave any healthy space for the representation of non-French heritages, such as African, Indian and Arawak. This is what Lanmou Ba Yo struggles for: offering an embodied ritual for people to come to terms with their past and forgive themselves for having agreed for so long to forget their own ancestors. Each 24 May they gather on the beach of Anse Sainte-Marguerite, where bones of slaves were unearthed by the INRAP (the French National Institute for Preventive Archeology) from 1997 to 2002. As tractors were about to start the construction of a beach hotel bones were spotted, and the local community managed to get the French Institute for Preventive Archeology to examine them. A colonial cemetery was found, with skeletons clearly identified as enslaved people. The bones are still waiting to be examined in depth and are currently stored in a warehouse next to the town of Moule, waiting for approval and funding from France to continue the inquiry. The site of the cemetery became the memorial site of Lanmou Ba Yo. They wrote a chart, close to a prayer, that pays homage to the ancestors, which they sing or proclaim collectively. Lanmou Ba Yo designed their rite as a mourning day and a procession from the cemetery to the warehouse where the bones are stored. But, besides this particular commemorative day, people do also visit and bring flowers or personal objects to the site of Sainte-Marguerite at any time of the year. On the beach, the members of Lanmou Ba Yo erected seven pillars, echoing Père Labat’s view that it takes seven days to turn a man into a slave when he gets off the slave ship.6 This demonstrates that most local memory is an intimate retelling in need of a creative ritualization by the people who feel the pain and strive for memorial repair. The multiple postcolonial realms of memory in Guadeloupe, either constructed anew or unearthed from the landscape and the ground of the island, appear to me an explicit proof that repressed memory erupts in multidirectional ways, according to the perspective with which the scene of the trauma is reconsidered. Guadeloupean society has an urgent desire and an existential need to recover its heritage and origins, not only before colonialism but also outside France’s republican and 6 Père (Father) Labat was a seventeenth-century clergyman and Dominican priest who travelled in the French West Indies. In Guadeloupe and Martinique he created new techniques to manufacture sugar and to export rum. He wrote about the customs of the slaves, whom he used as labour in his own sugar mills and rum factory.

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neocolonial narrative of the past. As early as 1993, twenty years before CARICOM’s formal claim for reparations for slavery, the Martinican lawyer Marcel Manville, leading the Cercle Franz Fanon, brought Christopher Columbus to trial as a weapon against colonialism and neocolonialism. Unreported in France, the trial raised no more than local memory seism among Guadeloupean, Martinican, French Guyanese and Dominican people, united by their political status of French overseas territory or their geographical location as neighbour islands. While the lack of knowledge and interest regarding the Antillean culture in French national culture is still obvious in the twenty-first century, France agreed in the last twenty years to make some space to tell the history of slavery in their national history.7 Renée Ater analysed the case of the United States and said that ‘For Americans, a people who see their history as a freedom story and themselves as defenders of freedom, the integration of slavery into their national narrative is embarrassing and can be guiltproducing and disillusioning’ (Ater, 2010: 20). The same analysis applies to France, as suggested by the fact that the leaders of the Republic refuse to make apologies and dismiss what they call repentance. The residual memory approach in Guadeloupe has amended the colonial version of history and brought slavery to the forefront only very recently. I see eruptive, residual and submerged memories as complementary narratives that can ultimately create the conditions for transcending the scene of the trauma of slavery and go beyond the equation of identity with pain. Whether it is ‘too much memory’, as Chivallon argues (2015), is not for me to say. I rather believe that seismic cultural memory, on a small island such as Guadeloupe, with a unique social and racial structure, cannot be channelled through what one could see as more ‘balanced’ representations of slavery. Volcanic eruptions are violent, spontaneous and organic. When it comes to painful memories, in a society where race and class are still controlling the destiny and the freedom of people to become who they want, there cannot be too much memory. It is our responsibility to ensure that this eruptive memory feeds embodied and efficient realms of resilience.

7 In 2004, France created the Comité National pour la Mémoire et l’Histoire des Esclavages.

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Works Cited Ater, Renée. 2010. ‘Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments’. American Art 24, no. 1 (Spring): 20–23. Chivallon, Christine. 2012. L’Esclavage: Du Souvenir à la Mémoire. Une contribution à une anthropologie de la Caraïbe. Paris: Karthala. — 2015. ‘Representing the Slave Past: The Limits of Museographical and Patrimonial Discourses’. In At the Limits of Memory: Legacies of Slavery in the Francophone World, edited by Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson, 25–48. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Puri, Shalini. 2014. Operation Urgent Memory: The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Viala, Fabienne. 2014. The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism and Commemorations in the Caribbean. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

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The Abolition of Slavery Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune Translated from the French by Andrea Lloyd The Abolition of Slavery

During the night of 24 April 1998 a two-metre-high iron statue of a slave, arms raised towards the sky, breaking free from his/her chains, was erected clandestinely – without legal permits or official authorization – on the Quai de la Fosse in Nantes, the primary French slave port of the eighteenth century. Faced with the local government’s refusal, a few months earlier, to erect a statue commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer association decided, in secret, to commission a sculpture. The monument was inaugurated with great pomp the following day, 25 April, by regional and local authorities. Eight days later, following the initial success of the organization’s hijacking of the inauguration, the statue was toppled and dismembered. Its chains, once broken and hanging from liberated arms, were now encircling the ankles of the slave. The population of Nantes reacted immediately to the vandalism of the sculpture, which became in turn a performative monument, a memorial palimpsest and a centre stage of a symbolic combat where opponents and supporters clashed. When knocked over, it is resurrected. When graffitied, it is cleaned. In exploring the creative process behind the sculpture in light of Michel de Certeau’s theory of performance and his concept of braconnage culturel [cultural appropriation], this contribution reveals the democratic praxis at the heart of the commemoration debate that would push the municipal government to inaugurate the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in 2012. I demonstrate that with both the citizens’ pressure on the political body and the triple practice of diversion, subversion and taking hostage of the (public) space, the association thwarts the

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writing and power strategies of the city of Nantes and its culture of silence. In so doing, Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer resists and subsequently imposes its own version of French history on the whited-out page of France’s colonial narrative, thus reclaiming a past, a story, an identity, by bringing to light existences and testimonies and defining new lieux de parole [places of speech]. On the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1998, Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer sought to make an impact on the collective consciousness of the Nantais during the traditional flower-throwing ceremony in the river – which took place on the quai de la Fosse on 27 April – with the installation of a sculpture. Following Les Anneaux de la Mémoire exposition six years earlier, nothing of significance had been organized in Nantes and no monuments or museums had been erected in the urban space. To highlight the importance of this sesquicentenary and to force attention from the local government, which until then had remained apprehensive of a significant and lasting memorial of Nantes’ historical ties to slavery, the association decided to gain the support of several other organizations (Cestor, 2012). Thus, the Collectif 150 was born. The collective brought together ten associations alongside Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer: MRAP (Movement against Racism), LICRA (International League Against Racism and Antisemitism), LDH (League of the Rights of Man), Nantes-History, AI (Amnesty International), CID (Intercultural Center of Documentation), SOS racisme, the Festival d’Eté, the Olympic, and the FLALA (Federation of Laic Associations of the Loire-Atlantique) (Boislève, 1997: 12). Though the government initially supported the artistic memorial project, it eventually retracted its support in favour of the installation of a commemorative plaque, professing that the city of Nantes was not quite ready to face its slave-trading past (Cestor, 2012). Irritated, Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer reacted vocally, claiming that a mere plaque would be an ‘insult to history’ (Cestor, 2012). The association challenged the mayor, Jean-Marc Ayrault,1 to make a gesture that was both on a larger scale and of greater symbolic value, one that would be more visually striking in the urban environment (Auduc, 1997: 14). However, this would go unanswered. Following the inaction of the mayor, Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer decided to commission from Liza Marcault-Dérouard, a student of the École des Beaux-Arts, a memorial project on its own. At 1 Mayor of Nantes (1989–2012) and both prime minister (2012–2014) and minister of foreign affairs (2016–2017) under French president Francois Hollande.

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this point, as part of a collective, Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer did not fear potential legal or civil action for an illegal sculpture project as it would have if acting alone. As previously mentioned, the sculpture was installed on the night of 24 April 1998 near the Anne de Bretagne bridge, with the façades of eighteenth-century slave-ship-owners’ mansions as a backdrop, without legal authorization from the town council. A handwritten sign that read: ‘1848–1998. The abolition of slavery. Nantes. 150 years’ was placed on one side of the plywood plinth. On the day of the inauguration, 25 April 1998, the mayor and his deputies walked into a fait accompli. They clearly knew the illegal status of the sculpture, not having granted any administrative authorization for its installation. A crowd of about 1,000 people had gathered for the ceremony, unaware of the clandestine nature of the statue. Both local and national press were present (TF1, France 2). The regional prefect, Michel Blanguy, also participated in the unveiling at the request of President Chirac, who sent prefects to attend all sesquicentennial commemorations throughout France. It was a solemn moment. A saxophone solo rang out through the crowd followed by the traditional throwing of flowers, which were, that year, 150 carnations. The moment to unveil the sculpture arrived. Faced with this show of force, the local government was held hostage. With no other option, it inaugurated the sculpture. In fact, it was not until recently that Octave Cestor revealed that the sculpture was erected and inaugurated without governmental authorization. For Octave Cestor, this commemorative action was a ‘militant citizen-led approach where the political followed the civil. It [was] the will of the people and an act of political struggle’ (Cestor, 2012), that pushed the local government, Jean-Marc Ayrault and the representatives of the state to recognize the necessity of a permanent place of commemoration that would take the form of a fully fledged memorial. With this ‘pressure from citizens on the political body’ in and on the urban space, the association circumvented the strategies of the will and power of Nantes in order to resist and develop its own discursive tactics. Reclaiming agency by taking possession of the urban space, the association exerted its ability to braconner [poach] the culture of silence that had been imposed upon it by the municipality. It took the public space, or at least the municipal body, hostage, and thus demonstrated its power of counter-discourse. In his text Dits et écrits, Foucault explains that resistance is in fact an inherent product of power, as power is ontologically diffus [diffused], belonging to no one and capable of being

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exercised by all (340–42). Where there is power there is potential for resistance, as evidenced by the association Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer. Even from its conception, Liza Marcault-Dérouard’s sculpture had crystallized this same notion of resistance, as she also played, throughout the creative process, with the alteration of the space in which she was working in the vein of the perruque of Michel de Certeau. This practice of subverting places, goods or tools is central to Michel de Certeau’s analysis, being part of what he called tactiques, ruses devised by the ‘common people’ oppressed by the stratégies of control imposed by the ‘elites’, which allow for the recalibration of social conditions. The consumer, the worker and, in our case, the sculptor reappropriate the time and space of which they are not generally in control. Liza Marcault-Dérouard’s creative process is an integral part of this manipulation. She knew how to take advantage of the spaces, materials and tools that were in her surroundings but that nonetheless did not belong to her. For Michel de Certeau, the perruque has a personal or collective purpose where the social object is not created for commercial use but meant to be freely shared. Both this focus on self-realization and this notion of creating for a collectivity were paramount to Liza Marcault-Dérouard’s approach. The creation of the sculpture began in autumn 1997. Owing to a tight budget and minimal grants, the choice of materials was limited. Fortunately, Liza Marcault-Dérouard’s aesthetics favoured basic raw materials, namely wire mesh, iron and concrete (Marcault-Dérouard, 2012), which were equally cost effective. However, she quickly encountered two challenges: a lack of experience in welding (training refused by the École des Beaux-Arts) and the lack of space to create her work. To overcome the first obstacle, she solicited help from a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts who agreed to teach her welding during her free time after classes. The two met at the school’s wood–metal workshop without permission. By mid-December, the framework had been welded. The artist then had to tackle her second challenge: finding a space big enough to shelter and continue her creation. She turned to a makeshift workshop used by other artists who had secretly settled in a luxury apartment building under construction, across from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. It was there, in this unauthorized atelier, that she finished her iron and aerated concrete sculpture. Mesh was woven then welded bit by bit around the sculpture’s concrete anchor. Once the silhouette of the slave was fleshed out, the artist affixed a skin of siennapigmented cement, which was turned off-white by the lime. A friend

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brought an iron chain from Brittany that would lie, broken, in the hands of the now-formed slave (Marcault-Dérouard, 2012). Exactly eight days after its installation, on Friday 1 May at around 9.30 p.m., the artist discovered her sculpture demolished. The statue, 2.2 metres high and weighing 120 kilos, was now horizontal, bent 90 degrees at its ankles and attached to its base only by its twisted feet, with the head gazing towards the Loire. The rib cage was distorted, the right forearm ripped off and the left arm, detached at the shoulder, had disappeared, probably thrown into the Loire, a few metres away. Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer called on the deputy mayor directly, demanding a ‘real political investment through the creation of a genuine place of memory’ in the urban landscape of Nantes (Ubertalli, 1999: 15), a lieu de mémoire that the association, as previously mentioned, had requested to mark the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The population of Nantes quickly reacted to the sculpture’s vandalism, both on the ground at the quai de la Fosse and in the press. The newspapers became the central platform of a symbolic struggle in which citizen testimonies and official communications would resonate with and against one another, day after day. On 4 May 1998 the local paper Presse Océan described a ‘near unanimous condemnation’ by the citizens of Nantes, publishing testimonials of readers, onlookers and ‘saddened’ or ‘revolted’ passersby who expressed their ‘shock’, ‘discontent’ and ‘disgust’ in the face of ‘savagery’ and denounced an ‘inadmissible’, ‘monstrous’, ‘scandalous’ and ‘odious’ ‘racist act’ (O.L and J.M.B., 1998: 8). The municipality swiftly reacted to the commotion produced by the vandalism, and on 3 May Claude Seyse, the deputy mayor, declared that it was ‘unacceptable to damage a symbol such as this one’ (‘Saccage de la statue: de multiples réactions’, 1998: 12). In the same vein, Jean-Marc Ayrault also condemned the vandalism as an ‘unspeakable gesture […]. Those who attacked this statue assailed a symbol of values that should be unanimously shared and that should contribute to founding the unity of a nation’ (12). The Communist Party also commented that this cowardly act of intolerance is scandalous. The men and women of Nantes were shocked to see the symbol of the abolition of slavery destroyed in this way […]. [We need to show] support and solidarity to the men and women who, with their association, act to ensure that Nantes does not forget its past. (12)

The Socialist Party in turn explained that this act ‘could only provoke disgust and shame for all those democrats attached to the values of the

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rights of man. The arguments of hate, racism, and the “inequality of races,” always translate into unpardonable actions’ (12). The Collectif 150 felt justified in its initial resolve to erect Liza Marcault-Dérouard’s sculpture and was more determined than ever to force recognition of a history that had been silenced for too long: ‘history is on the move in Nantes. Nothing can stop it’ (M.B., 1998: 15). Finally, on 5 May, four days after the vandalism and eleven days after the illegal installation of the statue, François Preneau, deputy mayor of Youth and Integration, announced the municipality’s plan for the year 2000 to create a ‘monumental work, in the sense that it will leave a trace. It will send a signal to the people of Nantes and to future generations’ (Sayagh, 1998: 10). On 10 May 2010 Jean-Marc Ayrault laid the first stone of the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, the first of its kind in Europe. After fourteen years of waiting, hindered by financial disagreements and controversies, visitors could finally tour the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery for the first time on 24 April 2012. Turning our intention once again to Marcault-Dérouard’s statue in 1998, to avoid another act of vandalism that could completely destroy it the sculpture was taken down and donated to the museum of the Château des Ducs de Bretagne on 22 May, becoming part of its permanent collection on the slave trade. Now preserved in a museum, the statue becomes less of a window into Nantes’ slave history than a mirror reflecting Nantes’ reaction when confronted with its past. Through its museumification, Liza Marcault-Dérouard’s sculpture allows the visitor to understand that any commemorative sculpture installed in the public sphere is a mnemonic means of recalling the past, but also and more importantly a means of understanding contemporary society’s position when faced with representations of this past. With its new museographic life, this version of Liza Marcault-Dérouard’s sculpture now bears witness to two events: slavery and its 1848 abolition, and the statue’s own vandalism on 1 May 1998. To emphasize these double representations and references, a descriptive plaque next to the display explains that the sculpture proves the difficulty of accepting Nantes’ historical ties to the slave trade and the ‘necessary work of historians for the recognition and acceptance of this past’ (‘La difficile acceptation du passé négrier nantais’, 2011). The sculpture symbolized and crystallized the debate of a particular era. In the vein of Meyerhold’s ‘fourth creator’, Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux’s ‘partner spectator’, Anne Ubersfeld and Patrice Pavis’ ‘reader-spectator’ and Rancière’s ‘emancipated spectator’, I introduce

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the notion of the ‘emancipated citizen’. 2 For Rancière, the spectator frees himself from his presumed state of somnolence to impose himself as a creative agent. He thus affirms in Le Spectateur émancipé that being a spectator is not a passive condition that we must change into activity. It is our everyday situation. We learn and we teach, we act and we also recognize as spectators who connect at every moment what they see to what they have seen and said, done and dreamed. We do not need to transform the audience into actors […] every spectator is already an actor. (2008: 23)

Coupling this notion of the ‘emancipated citizen’ with de Certeau’s theory of tactiques, this essay exposes Nantes as a symptomatic place where the citizens are faced with their city’s revived past as a forgotten, almost erased slave trading port. In the case of Liza Marcault-Dérouard’s sculpture, it was first this emancipated citizen, quasi legislator, who sought to incite the memorial discourse through his/her politically and civically engaged approach, which translated into recognizing, marking and hijacking the public space of Nantes. This citizen pressure and provocation succeeded as the city of Nantes decided that same year to construct what would become, fourteen years later, with its inauguration in 2012, the first ever Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery built in metropolitan France. With this show of force exerted by the citizens, we witness here the theft of ‘public authority’, which, as Jürgen Habermas claims, traditionally belongs to the state. ‘The state is the “public authority”. It owes this attribute to its task of promoting the public or common welfare of its rightful members’ (1991: 2). In the case of Nantes, the state was no longer the instigator of its projects memorializing slavery, its efforts deemed to be lacking meaningfulness and stature. The agency is instead held by the ‘emancipated citizen’ of the city who, through his covert commemorative action, coerces the state to [re]act.

2 Each of these theoreticians agrees on the creative nature of the spectator, who, beyond the actor, the author and the director, activates and unites the components that are presented to him in order to create meaning. Régis Debray, Jean Dubuffet and Jacques Rancière, among others, reveal the invisible cognitive dynamism of the spectatorial instance by placing it at the heart of the action. It participates fully in the establishment of the presented text, from there redefining even the unilateral linear schema of traditional communication.

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Works Cited Auduc, Daniel. 1997. ‘Abolition de l’esclavage: l’anniversaire célébré en janvier’. Presse Océan, 5 December 1997: 14. Boislève, Jacques. 1997. ‘Un collectif pour le 150e anniversaire’. Ouest-France, 5 December 1997: 12. De Certeau, Michel. 1990 [1980]. L’invention au quotidien, I: Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard. — 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cestor, Octave, and Sophia Khadraoui. 2012. ‘La Sculpture à l’abolition de l’esclavage de 1998’. Telephone interview, 5 March 2012. ‘La difficile acceptation du passé négrier nantais’. 2011. Informational Plaque, Centre de documentation, Château des Ducs de Bretagne, Nantes, 9 July 2011. Foucault, Michel. 1994. ‘Le sujet et le pouvoir’. Dits et écrits 1954–1988, tome IV (1980–88), 222–43. Paris: Gallimard. — 2000 [1982]. ‘The Subject and Power’. Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. III. Translated by Robert Hurley et al., 326–48. New York: The New Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991 [1962]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcault-Dérouard, Liza. 1998. L’abolition de l’esclavage. Sculpture Châteaux des Ducs de Bretagne, Nantes. Marcault-Dérouard, Liza, and Sophia Khadraoui. 2012. ‘La Sculpture à L’abolition de L’esclavage de 1998’. Telephone interview, 23 March 2012. M.B., J. 1998. ‘Statue saccagée: “l’insulte” faite à la mémoire des esclaves’. Presse Océan, 5 May 1998: 15. Mervant-Roux, Marie-Madeleine. 1998. L’assise du théâtre: pour une étude du spectateur. Paris: CNRS. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. 2001. Ecrits sur le théâtre, tome l (1891–1917). Lausanne: L’Age d’homme. O.L., and J.M.B. 1998. ‘Les Nantais choqués par le saccage de la statue en mémoire de l’esclavage’. Presse Océan, 4 May 1998: 8. Pavis, Patrice. 1996 [1980]. Dictionnaire du théâtre. Paris: Dunod. — 1998. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Translated by Christine Shantz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2008. Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique. ‘Saccage de la statue: de multiples réactions’. 1998. Presse Océan, 8 May 1998: 12. Sayagh, Jacques. 1998. ‘Fosse: sculpture monumentale en projet’. Ouest-France, 5 May 1998: 10.

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Ubersfeld, Anne. 1981. L’école du spectateur: Lire le théâtre 2. Paris: Editions Sociales. — 1999. Reading Theatre. Translated by Frank Collins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ubertalli, Olivier. 1999. ‘En souvenir de l’esclavage’. Ouest-France, 26 January 1999: 15.

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Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration Patrick Crowley Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration

The Musée National de l’Histoire de l’immigration (MNHI) is located within a section of the Palais de la Porte Dorée – a building whose visible form has remained unchanged and explicitly colonial since it opened as the Musée permanent des Colonies in 1931. For some, the presence of the MNHI effects a reversal of the building’s original colonial function, while for others the MNHI is compromised by the colonial carapace that surrounds it. And yet this clash of memories, this juxtaposition of a specific site of exhibited migrant memories within a colonial realm of memory, serves to provoke reflection on how diverse political positions seek to shape how the past is transmitted, understood and naturalized. The Palais de la Porte Dorée is located between Paris’s internal and external périphériques (orbitals or beltways) at the outer edge of the twelfth arrondissement in eastern Paris. When it opened on 5  May 1931 it was to serve as an exhibition space for the Exposition Coloniale, the largest and most spectacular of colonial exhibitions in France, occupying 110 hectares of the Bois de Vincennes and which included a zoo (see Bancel and Blanchard in this volume). Some 1,500 indigènes were dubiously recruited for the ‘exhibitions’ of ‘indigenous’ life. Murphy writes that, unlike indigenous peoples forced to appear in the Human Zoos of nineteenth-century Europe, they were well treated – being paid and housed – but, she acknowledges, required authorization if they wished to go beyond the perimeters of the Exhibition (2007). This was not a view shared by Lebovics (2012), who sees continuities with the earlier practices of the human zoo. A small counter-exhibition,

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organized by the surrealists and the French Communist Party, was held to protest against colonialism and the propagandist nature of the exhibition, and attended by 5,500 visitors (Murphy, 2007: 17). Some eight million attended the Exposition Coloniale. Geometrical in shape, the Palais de la Porte Dorée was to give physical expression to the colonial enterprise. Designed by Albert Laprade, it is composed of six different types of stone drawn from six regions and representing hexagonal France. The raw material was then hewn, shaped and placed to create a building the art deco style of which includes references to the classical past – the columns at the front suggesting a Greek Ionic style – as well as to France’s imperial present in the form of the remarkable bas-relief that appears on three of the exterior walls from base to roof. Organized along geographical lines, the bas-relief to the front features industrious human figures – interlaced with exotic flora and fauna – harvesting fish, rice and other bounties, and represents the peoples of North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and the colonies of Indochina, and the benefits they bring to the metropole. The Oceanic colonies are represented on the eastern wall and the western wall references the colonies of the Americas and includes a long list of names of those who contributed to France’s overseas conquests from the Crusades to the Third Republic. At the centre of the façade to the front, above the entrance, is an allegory of France. This vast bas-relief continues to command the eye. Back in 1931, human activity within the colonies was also represented within the Palais through dioramas and illustrations. The interior was, and is, dominated, by the Salon des Fêtes, with its frescos featuring allegories of a peaceful France, the continents and values such as justice. Exotic fish and reptiles were exhibited in the aquarium in the basement of the building. Two inner courtyards adjoin the aquarium, the walls of which carry graffiti that date from 1931 and were left by unauthorized hawkers of North African and Chinese origin who were held there by the police, who seem to have used it as a holding area for some 39,500 arrests that were made during the exhibition (Murphy, 2007: 37). The courtyard, marked by this encounter between migrants and colonial enterprise, is forgotten. As is, according to Ageron, the exhibition itself. If occasionally revived as a compensatory myth by nationalists on the right, it never penetrated France’s social imaginary or collective memory. It cannot be seen, Ageron continues, as a lieu de mémoire that reflected the values of three French republics (1997 [1984]: 514–15).

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Yet the impressive Palais remains. Closed after the exhibition ended, responsibility for the museum’s future was given to Gaston Palewski, a colonial administrator. Renamed the Musée des Colonies de la France extérieure, it was partially reopened in 1933. Palewski, who wanted the museum to be one based on the ‘science’ of colonialism, was replaced by Ary Leblond, writer and fervent populariser of the colonial project. Three more sections were opened in January 1935, including one titled ‘L’Exotisme dans l’art et la littérature’. In February it was renamed the Musée de la France d’outre-mer, but continued to languish in the backwaters of Paris’s cultural landscape. Attached to the newly formed Ministry of Cultural Affairs, headed by André Malraux, the museum was renamed Musée des Arts africains et océaniens in 1960, at a time when France’s colonies were asserting independence. Throughout the 1970s it attracted few visitors and little attention. In 1990 the museum’s name was tweaked. The new title, the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (MNAAO), emphasized the aesthetic dimension of non-European cultures, yet the museum continued to drift. All of these iterations of the museum laid claim to the entire building, apart from the aquarium in the basement. Beyond the museum, the political climate was changing. A number of events and movements emerged in the 1980s that were to have an impact upon the museum’s policy and, subsequently, its collections. The first was the activism of associations representing minorities in France, culminating in the anti-racist La Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme that ended in Paris on 3 December 1983. Groups and associations, such as Génériques,1 campaigned for greater recognition of the positive impact of immigration on France throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. In addition, the fate of the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie and its closure in 2003 needs to be seen as an epiphenomenon of the creation of the Musée du Quai-Branly (2006), arising from the political will of president Jacques Chirac to have a museum dedicated to the arts and cultures of non-European societies. The collection was to be constituted by works from the Musée de l’Homme and the MNAAO. The result of this strongly supported, and handsomely funded, political project was the near empty Palais de la Porte Dorée, whose doors remained open only for the sake of the aquarium. 1 Génériques was established in 1987 seeking to valorise the histories and memories of migrants. See http://www.generiques.org/ (consulted on 29 August 2016).

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Contemporaneously, Lionel Jospin, prime minister of France (1997–2002), lent his support to the creation of an institutional space that would highlight the contribution of immigration to France’s history and society. To this end, he commissioned the association Génériques to write a report on the creation of a national centre for the history and cultures of immigration. Submitted on 22 November 2001, 2 the report’s conclusion reviewed options for the future centre’s location: outside Paris, at either Marseille or St Denis; or within Paris, either at la Villette or somewhere in the east of Paris. Jospin’s elimination after the first round in the presidential election of 2002 meant that the fate and home of the project were to be determined by Jacques Chirac and Jean-Pierre Raffarin, appointed as prime minister in 2002. Both supported the project, unlike the then minister for the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, who wanted to see the establishment of a Musée de l’Histoire de France. On the political left, memory activists and academics such as Pascal Blanchard sought support for a museum that would present France’s history of colonization. These different political positions on how and what to remember have marked the MNHI. Raffarin outlined the mission, name and location of the new museum on 8 July 2004 in a speech informed by a report drafted by Jacques Toubon. 3 It was to be named the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI) and was intended to be a place for the arts, for debate and for educational conferences. Its mission was not only to challenge stereotypes and highlight the benefits of immigration but also to reinforce ‘la cohésion nationale’. It was to be located in the Palais de la Porte Dorée. This controversial decision provoked sharp debate between 2004 and 2007. Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard were trenchant in their opposition to locating a museum on immigration within a building that so visibly celebrates colonization. Situating the museum within it was not only to contribute to the elision of colonial history but to lead to a ‘confusion grave’ [serious confusion] with regard to the critical distinction between colonial history and the history of immigration. For Bancel and Blanchard ‘S’il y a un lieu de mémoire de l’histoire coloniale 2 The report is available at http://www.generiques.org/wpcontent/uploads/ 2008/01/centre_national_histoire_immigration.pdf (consulted on 5 September 2016). 3 The speech is available at http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/043002182. html (consulted on 4 September 2016).

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en France, c’est bien ce musée’ [If there is a site of memory for France’s colonial history then it is assuredly this museum] (Bancel and Blanchard, 2007: 116).4 Consequently, they argue, it should instead serve as a place within which contemporary France can come to understand ‘le fait colonial’ [the fact of colonization]. In spite of the opposition, the proposal was pursued; the CNHI had only three years and a modest budget to refurbish and modify the Palais and to create a collection that would bear witness to immigrant memory and experience. On the basis of interviews with those involved, Cohen notes that the rationale and protocols informing the choice of objects to be collected and displayed, as well as who was to be interviewed, were not always clear to the associations tasked with helping to constitute the collection (2007: 405). Cohen’s focus is on how the memory of immigration was given political, public shape. A key figure behind the project was career politician and former minister Jacques Toubon, from the political right. He was charged with the task of chairing the steering committee by Raffarin and from 2007 to July 2014 he was president of the museum’s advisory board. Mary Stevens argues that there was a ‘flattening’ of colonial discourse during the CNHI’s design phase as a result of ‘containment, deferral, disciplinary exclusion, and (in a limited sense) censorship’ (2009: 245). The opening of the CNHI was also marked by politics. Nicolas Sarkozy, elected president of France in May 2007, had formed a new ministerial portfolio responsible for immigration, integration, national identity and co-development. His minister, Brice Hortefeux, was given the task of championing the ill-judged debate on national identity. New measures were proposed to reduce immigration and, in protest, seven historians from the CNHI’s steering committee, including Nancy L. Green, Gérard Noiriel and Patrick Weil, resigned. They issued a statement on 18 May 2007 arguing that Sarkozy’s coupling of national identity with immigration in a way that presented the latter as a ‘problem’ for national identity was contrary to the spirit of the new museum. 5 No government representative was present to open the CNHI on 10 October 2007. In his speech at the opening, Dominique Guibert, 4 On the issue of a French national museum of colonial histories, see Gosson (2018). 5 ‘Immigration et identité nationale: une association inacceptable’ available at http://ldh-toulon.net/huit-universitaires-demissionnent.html (consulted on 9 July 2016).

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a member of the national council of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme [League for Human Rights], noted the absence and contrasted it with the opening of the Musée Quai Branly on 20 June 2006 by the then president Jacques Chirac, accompanied by Kofi Annan (UN Secretary General). Nevertheless, Guibert cited with approval the press release, which announced the opening as an occasion on which the French republic finally had its ‘lieu de mémoire de l’immigration’.6 The next decade was to test Guibert’s assertion. If the founding of the CNHI was an attempt to erase the prior text of France’s colonial history and to write the new script of immigrant memory, then this palimpsestic transition was, in many ways, a failure. The allegories outside and within the Palais de la Porte Dorée remain as a colonial narrative writ large, for which the contents of the museum, which do not occupy the building’s central space, serve as corrective glosses. The tension between them can be productive, but the disparity of scale reinforces the colonial message. The site of the museum, on the first and second floors, remains enveloped within a greater realm of colonial memory. This is particularly evident as we enter the building. To the right is the ticket counter and to the left is the information desk with useful booklets that serve as critical prompts for reflection: for example, ‘Traces de l’histoire coloniale dans le 12e arrondissement’, written by historian Gilles Manceron. Between these counters is the impressive entrance to what is now called the Forum, the renamed Salle des Fêtes. This space remains monumental: it covers 900m2 and stretches twentyseven metres from floor to ceiling.7 Its colonial frescos utterly captivate the eye and entry is free. Attempts have been made to contextualize this space – explanatory panels were introduced in 2012 and the mezzanine area provides a reading of the Palais’s colonial history in mobile display units.8 On purchasing a ticket, one can access the MNHI’s permanent exhibition, titled ‘Repères’ [Points of reference], on the second floor. Its rich displays – organized thematically and chronologically9 – of objects, 6 Guibert’s speech is available at http://www.ldh-france.org/10-octobre-2007Immigration/ (consulted on 9 July 2016). 7 Further details and images of the Salle des Fêtes/Forum are available at http:// www.palais-portedoree.fr/fr/decouvrir-le-palais/les-espaces/le-forum-anciennesalle-des-fetes (consulted on 30 June 2016). 8 Further details available at http://www.palais-portedoree.fr/fr/preparer-savisite/visiter-le-palais (consulted on 10 September 2016). 9 See http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/l-exposition-permanente (consulted on 20 September).

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recordings, facts and aesthetic artefacts bring us into immigrant memory without critically engaging in any detail with colonialism or recent French government policies on immigration. In July 2013 the CNHI was renamed the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration10 in the hope that its collections would benefit from a new dynamism associated with the title of ‘museum’ (Sherman, 2016: 457). On 16 December 2014 the MNHI was formally inaugurated, after a hiatus of seven years. In his speech president François Hollande remarked that the history of immigration ‘n’était guère présentée comme une chance pour notre récit national et était souvent ignorée […]. Elle n’avait pas de lieu de mémoire’ [was rarely portrayed as a boon for our national story and was often unknown (…) It had no realm of memory] (2014). His speech suggests that it is the state that has provided the lieu de mémoire and brought immigration into the national narrative.11 Hollande’s speech was significant, yet made no reference to the work of associations in building up the political momentum to have the museum established. And, like Raffarin, he pointed to the importance of national cohesion. The state asserts itself as the author of the script that now appears in a section of the Palais de la Porte Dorée. On 1 August 2014 the historian of Algerian history and migration Benjamin Stora (b. 1950 in Constantine) formally replaced Jacques Toubon as president of the museum’s advisory board. His appointment was seen as heralding a more critical positioning. Certainly, the MNHI actively works in conjunction with other museums and associations throughout France that seek to engage with the issue of immigration (Petitjean, 2016; Arquez-Roth, 2014). And the powerful temporary exhibition ‘Frontières’ (November 2015–July 2016) did serve to invite critical reflection on the broader politics of immigration. But the budget remains limited and critics, such as Blanchard, continue to see the institution as politically hamstrung. Nevertheless, this meeting place of contested memories has witnessed events, a selection of which are described below, that suggest that the confluence of realm and site of memories becomes one that sustains an interrogation of colonial past and multicultural present. 10 Legal text detailing relationship between Porte de la Palais Dorée, MNHI and the Aquarium is available at https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidText e=JORFTEXT000025047132&categorieLien=id (consulted on 20 June 2016). 11 See photograph of François Holland marking the MNHI’s inauguration. Available at http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/la-cite/dernieres-nouvelles/ inauguration-du-musee (consulted on 9 July 2016).

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On 30 March 2009 Xavier Darcos and Eric Besson, respectively minister for education and minister for immigration and national identity, went to the CNHI to officially open the Abdelmalek Sayad Médiathèque, but were prevented from doing so by a group of young sociologists who wanted to protest against the instrumentalization of immigration by Sarkozy’s government. On 7 October 2010 some 500 migrants who were working in France, but whose legal and administrative status had not been processed, occupied the Forum with the support of eleven associations and unions, including the left-wing trade union CGT and the human rights organization Ligue des droits de l’homme.12 They remained until 28 January 2011. During this time their presence was accommodated and the majority of the workers had their paperwork processed. Not all received leave to stay and work in France and the museum closed on Friday 28 January, allowing police to clear the building. On 15 March 2015 Benjamin Stora gave details of slogans pasted to the gates of the MNHI by a far right group, Dissidence Française. The slogans included ‘le multiculturalisme est un échec et mène la France à la guerre civile’ [multiculturalism has failed and will lead to a civil war in France] and ‘Étrangers dehors’ [Foreigners out].13 On its website the group attacked the MNHI as a ‘lieu dédié à la propagande cosmopolite et à la réécriture mondialiste de l’Histoire’ [a place dedicated to cosmopolitan propaganda and globalization’s re-writing of History]. These three events demonstrate, in part, the MNHI’s success – the visibly colonial site has come to be partly invested by migrant and postcolonial memories that provoke tensions across the political spectrum. The Palais is a distinctly colonial realm of memory that seeps into the surrounding area, but within it lies a site of memory which, despite a lack of funding and political will, produces a jarring juxtaposition of texts and signs that haunt France’s present.

12 The press release of the Ligues des droits de l’homme is available at http:// www.ldh-france.org/La-LDH-soutient-l-occupation-de-la/ (consulted on 1 July 2016). See also Monjaret and Roustan, 2017: 231–33. 13 See http://www.europe1.fr/faits-divers/le-musee-de-l-immigration-vandalisepar-un-groupe-d-extreme-droite-2400121 (consulted on 6 September 2016).

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Works Cited Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1997 [1984]. ‘L’Exposition coloniale de 1931’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, edited by Pierre Nora, 493–515. Paris: Gallimard/Quarto. Arquez-Roth, Angès. 2014. ‘La Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration: A Central Venue and National Network – An Ongoing Challenge’. In Migrating Heritage Experiences of Cultural Networks and Cultural Dialogue in Europe, edited by Perla Innocenti, 109–24. Farnham: Ashgate. Bancel, Nicolas, and Pascal Blanchard. 2007. ‘Incompatibilité: la CNHI dans le sanctuaire du colonialisme français’. Hommes et migrations, Special Issue Une Collection en devenir: La Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration 1267 (May–June): 112–27. Cheval, François. 2000. ‘Un projet impérial’. In Du musée colonial au musée des cultures du monde, edited by Dominique Taffin, 35–42. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Cohen, Anouk. 2007. ‘Quelles histoires pour un musée de l’immigration à Paris!’ Ethnologie française 3, no. 37: 401–08. Gosson, Renée K. 2018. ‘“Tous ceux sans qui la France ne serait pas la France”: The case for a French national museum of colonial histories’. French Cultural Studies 29, no. 2: 120–37. Hollande, François. 2014. ‘Discours d’inauguration du Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration’. 16 December 2014. http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/ sites/default/files/musee-numerique/documents/discours-d-inaugurationdu-musee-de-l-histoire-de-l-immigration.pdf. Lebovics, Herman. 2012. ‘Les zoos de l’Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris en 1931’. In Zoos humains et exhibitions coloniales, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Éric Deroo and Sandrine Lemaire, 495–502. Paris: La Découverte. Monjaret, Anne, and Mélanie Roustan. 2017. ‘A palace as legacy: The former French colonial museum – perspectives from the inside’. Journal of Material Culture 22, no. 2: 216–36. Murphy, Maureen. 2007. Un palais pour une cité: du Musée des Colonies à la Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux. Petitjean, Mikaël. 2016. Interview with the author conducted at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’immigration, 29 June 2016. Sherman, Daniel J. 2016. ‘The Perils of Patrimoine: Art, History, and Narrative in the Immigration History Museum, Paris’. Oxford Art Journal 39, no. 3: 457–80.

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Stevens, Mary. 2009. ‘Still the family secret? The representation of colonialism in the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration’. African and Black Diaspora 2, no. 2: 245–55.

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Displacement/Mobility

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Le Bagne Charles Forsdick Le Bagne

In one of the most searing interwar exposés of the abuses associated with the penal colony in French Guiana, Léon-Gontran Damas reflects on the ways in which references to the bagne have entered the bank of various threats deployed by parents to keep their offspring in check: ‘Toi, dira une mère qui souffre de trouver en son fils l’âme d’un dévoyé, tu finiras tes jours à Cayenne’ [You, would say a mother pained to see that her son was being led astray, you will die in Cayenne] (Damas, 2003 [1938]: 66). The extent to which the bagne has – long after its abolition – become engrained in the French popular imagination is reflected much more widely in the other common expressions in which the institution features. ‘Quelle galère!’ (referring to the prison galleys that predated the bagnes portuaires in Brest, Marseille and Toulon) and the later ‘quel bagne!’ are both expressions, still in relatively general usage, alluding to an unusually harsh or challenging situation in which those uttering the exclamations find themselves. One of the explanations for ‘Tonnerre de Brest!’, the curse popularized by Hergé’s creation and Tintin’s close friend Capitaine Haddock, is that it refers to the cannon fired whenever a bagnard escaped from the Breton city’s prison. Another major French republican symbol (and lieu de mémoire in its own right), the bonnet phrygien that epitomizes the Revolution, is itself said to be derived from the red hat worn by bagnards to distinguish them easily from other members of society. Despite this visibility, the bagne itself retains an ambiguous status as a lieu de mémoire, in part because its predominantly extra-metropolitan location means that traces of the institution in France itself are relatively rare, in part because most understandings of the institution rely heavily on representations freighted (and distorted) via popular culture (not

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least Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and its various iterations across different genres). At the same time, the relation of the penal colony to colonial memory requires careful attenuation: in French Guiana and New Caledonia the bagne was a major driver in the attempted mise en valeur of those colonies in the face of varying degrees of resistance to settlement; in addition, these were sites associated with a significant transcolonial mobility that has largely been eclipsed by those representations of the institution that have proliferated since its demise: central to emerging memorial practices, in physical memorials, exhibitions and creative writing, are the forgotten travel stories of, for instance, Kabyle political prisoners deported to New Caledonia following the Al Mokrani rebellion of March 1871 or Algerians convicted of civil crimes condemned to periods of forced labour in French Guiana. Although it does not feature in Nora’s original collection, the bagne was initially a metropolitan site of memory. The Mediterranean galleys powered by convict labourers (commonly known as chiourmes) from the fifteenth century were progressively replaced by penal sites in the port cities of Brest (from 1748), Rochefort (from 1777) and Toulon (from 1784), all three of which continued to function throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The closure of Rochefort and Brest – in 1854 and 1858 respectively – coincided with the inauguration of penal transportation to sites in the French colonial empire, whereas Toulon, the largest of these three bagnes métropolitains, functioned for longer, finally ceasing operation in 1873. Traces of these institutions in all three cities are limited, although a number of buildings constructed with convict labour remain prominent in the urban landscape. To these are to be added the bagnes agricoles, most notably that of Mettray, made famous by its inclusion by Jean Genet in his Miracle de la rose (1946) as well as by its discussion by Michel Foucault in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975). Marcel Carné’s film on the bagne pour adolescents on Belle Ile, La Fleur de l’âge, scripted by Jacques Prévert and starring Arletty, was never completed, and is memorialized now in a series of photographs taken on set by Emile Savitry (Arouet, 2013). As recent work by Ann Laura Stoler (2016), Clare Anderson (2018) and others has revealed, the French penal colonies primarily formed part of a ‘carceral archipelago’ that is now benefiting from increasing scholarly attention from a global perspective. French penal establishments functioned in the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa and Indochina, but the main locations for transportation and deportation were the multiple sites associated with French Guiana and New Caledonia. The colonies

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had been used for the banishment of political prisoners during the French Revolution, when counter-revolutionary opponents of the Republic were sent for the first time to French Guiana. Prominent among these was Louis Ange Pitou, whose lurid Voyage à Cayenne, dans les deux Amériques et chez les anthropophages (published in two volumes in 1807) recounts his incarceration in the South American colony between 1798 and 1801. Pitou’s text inaugurates a long tradition of travel narratives – by bagnards and their warders, as well as by travellers and journalists – that have played a key role in transforming the penal colony of French Guiana and subsequently of New Caledonia into lieux de mémoire. Scrutiny of the content of these texts and its comparison with the actual histories of the bagnes and their afterlives reveal, however, a distinct divergence, especially regarding the place of the penal colony in French colonial expansionism and its transcolonial manifestations. As such, it can be argued that, until recent years, and often with the direct intervention of the authorities, the bagne has operated as more of a postcolonial lieu d’oubli [realm of oblivion] than as a lieu de mémoire. Penal transportation to France’s colonies emerged in the 1850s, within a few decades of the inauguration of the post-revolutionary project of imperial expansionism (for an overview, see Toth, 2006). It was to the ancien régime colony of French Guiana that administrators initially turned, largely as a result – as Damas succinctly claims – of ‘le double avantage qu’offre cette colonie, d’être éloignée et spacieuse’ [the double advantage offered by this colony of being far away and spacious] (2003 [1938], 48). The transformation of a colonial space into a bagne served multiple purposes: it allowed removal from metropolitan France of those considered politically or socially undesirable; it provided, at relatively low cost, the workforce required to develop the infrastructure required for mise en valeur of the empire; and, finally, convicts – during and at the end of their sentences – provided settlers to inhabit places designated as colonie de peuplement, and became as a result central to a policy of settler colonialism. In such a context, the introduction of a foreign (French) population has evident implications for indigenous people, ranging from, on the one hand, intermarriage and the emergence of a creolized population to, on the other, death and depossession. French Guiana exemplifies this logic and these consequences (on the bagne here, see Donet-Vincent, 2003; Sanchez, 2013; and Spieler, 2012). The object of numerous attempts at settlement, most prominently the ill-fated Kourou expedition of 1763, an initial bagne was established in 1852 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte at Cayenne with the principal aim of

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detaining political opponents of the Second Empire. The colony began to receive convicts following the 1854 decree relating to forced labour. Central to this was the principle of doublage or double peine, meaning that those condemned to a sentence of fewer than eight years were obliged to spend the same period in the colony after their sentence was served, and those with longer sentences were transported for life. The conditions in French Guiana were poor, for bagnards and officials alike, and the mortality rate high. The Guianese penal colony was known popularly as the guillotine sèche [dry guillotine] as a result of the diseases and other inhumane conditions with which it was associated. Life expectancy was short, even for those sent to the marginally more salubrious surroundings of the ironically named îles du salut (including the île du diable, where Alfred Dreyfus would be incarcerated). The loss of life was such that, from 1864, metropolitan prisoners were sent to French Guiana in the Pacific, although those from other colonies – most notably in the Caribbean and Algeria – continued to be sent to South America, and, after the definitive suspension of transportation to the bagne in Melanesia in 1897, French Guiana continued to function for another four decades, still receiving civilian transportés, political prisoners or déportés (including, most notably, Dreyfus in 1898, but also a number of dissidents from French Indochina in the 1930s), as well as relégués or recidivists sentenced for multiple petty crimes (whose transportation had begun under the Third Republic in 1885). The decline of the Guianese bagne became apparent, however, in the interwar period, in part as a result of a biting reportage dedicated to it by Albert Londres in the Petit Parisien in 1923, in part because of the inherent failure of the institution (and by extension the wider colony), an argument made by Damas in his banned 1938 essay Retour de Guyane. Despite his own claims, Londres’s intervention led more to reform than to abolition, but it undeniably initiated a process that led Gaston Monnerville, undersecretary of state for the colonies, to abolish deportation in 1938. With the war intervening, the remaining prisoners began to be repatriated from 1946, with the final ones seeking return to France arriving in Marseille in 1953. In 1965 the French government transferred the responsibility for most of the islands associated with the bagne to the Centre Spatial Guyanais, juxtaposing two very different experimental projects, historical and contemporary (Redfield, 2000), and creating an environment that has inevitably impacted on the emergence of memorial practices.

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The logic of developing a second major penal colony in the Pacific was similar to that underpinning the emergence of the bagne of New Caledonia, relating again to the settlement and mise en valeur of a colony otherwise resistant to such processes (Barbançon, 2003; Bullard, 2000). The geographical proximity to Australia situates the Melanesian initiative of New Caledonia in a frame of Anglo-French rivalry (Forster, 1996), however, an aspect that would later have implications for heritage and memorial practices, and the relative success of settler colonialism would here lead to a relatively brief period of operation: around 21,000 bagnards were sent to the colony between the arrival of the first convoy onboard L’Iphigénie in May 1864 and the suppression of transportation in 1897 by the then governor Paul Feillet (who famously described the flow of convicts into the colony as a ‘robinet d’eau sale’ [dirty water tap]). After this date, many convicts remained in New Caledonia, forming a large part of the population of the islands. In a short period, the penal colony had spread from its initial locations around Nouméa, most notably on the île de Nou and the Ducos peninsula, to encompass numerous other sites, including the agricultural colonies around Bourail and the forestry bagne at Prony. The île des pins, now primarily a stopping-off point for luxury cruise ships, is associated in particular with political prisoners, most notably some of those deported following the 1871 Paris Commune, as well as Kabyle rebels incarcerated following the Al Mokrani revolt of the same year and Kanak, detained after the rebellion led by Ataï in 1878. The New Caledonian bagne functioned for only just over three decades, but its impact on this overseas territory are still palpable, particularly in the visible presence of numerous public buildings in Nouméa constructed using convict labour. Memorialization of the institution and its foundational role are, however, recent, and the initial reaction following suppression of the penal colony was a sustained process of silencing, epitomized by the renaming of the île de Nou as Nouville, but also reflected in considerations of renaming the whole archipelago (see Petit-Quencez, 2016). The bagne was progressively limited to the île de Nou until its formal end in 1931. Many buildings were then turned over for civilian use (those in Nouville serve today as a psychiatric hospital and theatre, and also form part of the university); others were demolished or allowed to fall into ruin as part of an effort to create a tabula rasa in the colony. The stationing of US troops in New Caledonia during World War II accelerated processes of modernization, and seemed to distance yet further memories (if not the remaining

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physical traces) of the penal colony. In the 1970s, however, a number of local associations began taking an interest in the history of the penal colony, a process that became increasingly apparent following Mélanésia 2000, a major Kanak cultural festival organized by Jean-Marie Tjibaou in 1975, and was then accelerated following the violence associated with the rise of Kanak nationalism in the 1980s (Chappell, 2013): it was in this context that the Caldoches, or New Caledonian population of European heritage, began themselves to look for roots not in France but in Melanesia itself. Memories of the penal colony have now become a major political issue in the territory. One of the key challenges of considering the penal colony as a lieu de mémoire involves distinguishing between, on the one hand, the singularized phenomenon that the term bagne popularly conjures up in the collective imagination, and, on the other, the multiplication of sites, moments and experiences that the experience of penal servitude and its afterlives entail. Despite the customary emphasis on French Guiana and New Caledonia, there were penal colonies elsewhere in the French empire, most notably in North Africa, where bagnes militaires (or the Biribi) operated from 1818 well into the twentieth century (Kalifa, 2009). (Albert Londres’s exposé of these establishments, Dante n’avait rien vu, was published in 1924, shortly after his reportage on abuses in the penal colonies in the Caribbean.) Major penal colonies existed elsewhere too. In the case of the Poulo Condor bagne (now know as Côn  Đảo Prison), on Côn Sơơn Island in southern Vietnam, a location first used by the French for the incarceration of political prisoners in 1861, the infamous ‘tiger cages’ were subsequently used by the Americans for the torture of captives during the Vietnam War in a striking illustration of the palimpsestic nature of penal heritage sites of this type (Hayward and Tran, 2014). At the same time, 1852, the date customarily given for the inauguration of the bagne, ignores the institution’s complex prehistories, formal and informal: there has been a growing interest in the metropolitan predecessors of the penal colonies in the French empire, as a 2012–13 exhibition at the Musée national de la Marine in Toulon on ‘Le bagne portuaire de Toulon: entre réalités et imaginaire 1748–1873’ [The port bagne of Toulon: between reality and the imagination 1748–1873] illustrates clearly. There is consequently a need to recognize that ‘les vestiges du bagne’ [traces of the penal colony] are not only a phenomenon on the outre-mer: there are few physical traces of the bagnes in Brest and Toulon, destroyed in World War II bombing raids and demolished in the later 1940s respectively,

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but buildings and other infrastructure constructed by those incarcerated in them remain; also in France itself, the locations associated with the transportation of criminals to the colonies from the île de Ré, most notably the citadelle de Saint-Martin-de-Ré, are a striking example of penal heritage sites in France itself juxtaposed with a popular holiday destination: Jean-Marie Renouard (2007) provocatively alludes to the co-existence here of ‘baigneurs et bagnards’ [bathers and bagnards]. The popular iconography of bagnards leaving the île de Ré seen in particular in early twentieth-century postcards tends to perpetuate the racialized myth of the white French convict transported overseas. The specifically colonial dimensions of the bagne understood as a lieu de mémoire relate not just to identity debates among populations of European origin but are to be understood in a more complex transcolonial frame. Representations of the bagne in popular culture often privilege the mythology associated with celebrity convicts or political prisoners, or perpetuate the idea that bagnards were predominantly metropolitan and white. There is a particular interest, for instance, in the deportation of Louise Michel to New Caledonia following the Commune of 1871, or Alfred Dreyfus to French Guiana, with the former featuring in a number of comics and graphic novels that range from the sensationalist Iles des Pins by J.P. Bouquillard and Florenci Clavé (1984) to Bryan and Mary Talbot’s Red Virgin (2016). Albert Londres’s accounts of the Caribbean penal colony have led to an interest in the French anarchist Eugène Dieudonné, author of L’Homme qui s’évada, now the subject also of a bande dessinée (one of a growing number of recent French comics devoted to the bagne); and arguably more visible is Henri Charrière, known under his nickname ‘Papillon’, whose autobiography was popularized in a memorable 1973 film version starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (remade by Michael Noer in 2018). What these widely distributed representations tend to downplay is the presence in the penal colonies of colonial prisoners, convicted of civil offences or deported for political reasons. For the bagne to be understood as a postcolonial lieu de mémoire, it is essential for more attention to be paid to these transcolonial entanglements. Concrete recognition is increasingly apparent in contemporary heritage practices: long left in a state of decay, the camp Crique Anguille in Montsinéry-Tonnegrand (commonly known as the bagne des Annamites), which functioned for Indochinese political prisoners in 1930s French Guiana, has recently been restored and made accessible; perhaps more strikingly, locations

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associated with Algerian prisoners in New Caledonia have been subject to increased attention, most notably those around the town of Bourail, where there is a graveyard known as the cimetière des Arabes in which political and civil prisoners and their descendants are buried. Memorial activity relating to ‘Caledoun’ (the Arabic word for New Caledonia) has increased considerably, with a major exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2011 (Barbançon and Sand, 2013), and local associations have established links with Algeria. A particularly striking example of this is to be found at the cimetière des déportés on the île des pins, a site customarily associated with memorialization of the Paris Commune, as a number of Communards are buried there, but where the presence of Algerian déportés from the same time is now also commemorated, reflecting the entanglement of narratives in these postcolonial lieux de mémoire. The afterlives of these histories have also been explored in literature, a medium that can be seen to have played a vanguard function in transforming the bagne into a site of memory. The Algerian rebels deported to New Caledonia in the 1870s constitute a particularly striking example, with Mehdi Lallaoui’s Kabyles du Pacifique (1994) providing a meticulous reconstruction of their itineraries and stories, and the same subject inspired a play by Kateb Yacine (2004), a short story by Leïla Sebbar (2012) and a novel by Anouar Benmalek (2000). The very different experience of Algerian convicts deported to French Guiana has also attracted fictional attention in Mouloud Akkouche’s Cayenne, mon tombeau (2002), the account by a narrator of French– Algerian heritage of a quest, in the 1980s, to uncover details of his late father’s convict past. Recent developments in contemporary heritage practices relating to the bagnes of the former French empire have been considerable, most notably in French Guiana and New Caledonia. In the former, an emphasis on ecotourism and economic reliance on the European space station eclipsed for many years the development of any active memorialization of the penal colony, although the inauguration of a ‘centre d’interprétation de l’architecture et du patrimoine’ in the Camp de la Transportation at Saint-Laurent du Maroni suggests a renewal of interest in the area. In the latter, where the politics of local identity have more actively foregrounded questions relating to the legacies of the bagne, the heritagization of penal sites is more advanced, although often dependent on the input of community organizations. Fort Teremeba, for example, near Bourail, has been restored and operates as a tourist destination; in Nouméa, the association Témoignage d’un Passé continues to develop

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plans for a permanent Musée du Bagne in the former bakery of the penal establishments in Nouville; but the sites on the île des pins – with the exception of the cimetière des déportés – continue to undergo a steady process of postcolonial ruination. Parallels have been drawn between the French penal establishments in Australia and their French counterparts, and it is clear that there is a complex relationship between the decline of the former and the almost simultaneous rise of the latter (Forster, 1992). In parallel to these historical considerations, however, there is a need to reflect on their relative status as lieux de mémoire in their respective national contexts. Registration of the Australian convict sites on the UNESCO World Heritage list has led to a certain homogenization of memory practices relating to them. This is not yet the case in their French-speaking equivalents, where there is still evidence – in New Caledonia and more notably in French Guiana – of a struggle between the entropic forces of ruination and the desire to recover memories of the past. These tensions are perhaps best articulated in Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne, a photo-essay by Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi, in which there is a rejection of ‘des dizaines d’ouvrages, de chroniques, de témoignages, d’articles célèbres’ [dozens of books, chronicles, testimonies, famous articles] (1994: 23) on which the memory of the penal colony is traditionally seen to rest – and their replacement with an attempt to ‘percevoir ce que les Trace-mémoires nous murmurent’ [perceive what memory-traces whisper to us]. Patrick Chamoiseau’s notion of the ‘trace-mémoire’ developed here engages directly with the ‘lieu de mémoire’ and seeks to illustrate its limitations and to integrate more actively ‘des histoires dominées, des mémoires écrasées’ [subjugated histories, overwritten memories] (Chamoiseau and Hammadi, 1994: 16). Works Cited Akkouche, Mouloud. 2002. Cayenne, mon tombeau. Paris: Flammarion. Anderson, Clare, ed. 2018. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies. London: Bloomsbury. Arouet, Carole. 2013. Emile Savitry: un récit photographique. Paris: Gallimard. Barbançon, Louis-José. 2003. L’Archipel des forçats: histoire du bagne de Nouvelle Calédonie, 1863–1931. Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion.

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Barbançon, Louis-José, and Christophe Sand. 2013. Caledoun: histoire des Arabes et Berbères de Nouvelle-Calédonie. Bourail: Association des Arabes et Amis de Nouvelle-Calédonie. Benmalek, Anouar. 2000. L’Enfant du peuple ancien. Paris: Pauvert. Bullard, Alice. 1990. Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Rodolphe Hammadi. 1994. Guyane: traces-mémoires du bagne. Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites. Chappell, David A. 2013. The Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Damas, Léon Gontran. 2003 [1938]. Retour de Guyane: suivi de Misère noire: et autres écrits journalistiques. Paris: J.-M. Place. Donet-Vincent, Danielle. 2003. De soleil et de silences. Histoire des bagnes de Guyane. Paris: La Boutique de l’Histoire. Forster, Colin. 1996. France and Botany Bay: The Lure of a Penal Colony. Melbourne: Melbourne University Pres. Hayward, Philip, and Giang Thuy Huu Tran. 2014. ‘At the edge: heritage and tourism development in Vietnam’s Con Dao archipelago’. Journal of Marine and Island Cultures 3, no. 2: 113–24. Kalifa, Dominique. 2009. Biribi: les bagnes coloniaux de l’armée française. Paris: Perrin. Kateb, Yacine. 2004. ‘Louise Michel et la Nouvelle Calédonie’. In Parce que c’est une femme, 111–36. Paris: des femmes. Lallaoui, Mehdi. 1994. Kabyles du Pacifique. Bezons: Au nom de la mémoire. Londres, Albert. 2002 [1923]. Au bagne. Paris: Le Serpent à plumes. Petit-Quencez, Blandine. 2016. ‘L’histoire du patrimoine lié au bagne en Nouvelle Calédonie, du non-dit à l’affirmation identitaire’. Criminocorpus blog, 24 June 2016. https://criminocorpus.hypotheses.org/18816. Redfield, Peter. 2000. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press. Renouard, Jean-Marie. 2007. Baigneurs et bagnards: tourismes et prisons dans l’île de Ré. Paris: L’Harmattan. Sanchez, Jean-Lucien. 2013. A perpétuité. relégués au bagne de Guyane. Paris: Vendémiaire. Sebbar, Leïla. 2012. ‘Louisa’. In Ecrivain public: nouvelles, 7–19. Saint-Pourçainsur-Sioule: Bleu autour. Spieler, Miranda Frances. 2012. Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Toth, Stephen A. 2006. Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854–1952. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Rivesaltes Susan Ireland Rivesaltes

Situated about ten kilometres north of Perpignan, the Camp Joffre, commonly known as the Camp de Rivesaltes, has been described as an ‘observatoire de l’histoire du XXe siècle’ [observatory of twentiethcentury history], as it played a role in many of the major conflicts of the period (Lebourg and Moumen, 2015: 5), including the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Algerian war of independence. Originally conceived as a large military base and covering over 600 hectares, the camp was frequently reconfigured and used for diverse purposes, often serving as an internment centre. Because of its complex past, Rivesaltes has become a multidimensional site of memory that bears witness to many layers of history, a situation attested to by the decision to transform part of the camp into an official memorial, which opened in October 2015. As a postcolonial site of memory, Rivesaltes is primarily associated with the harkis, the Algerians who worked for the French during the war of independence and who found themselves isolated in temporary housing camps when they were repatriated to France with their families at the end of the conflict. Emblematic of the housing camps in general, Rivesaltes figures prominently in the community’s collective memories as a symbol of France’s abandonment of the harkis and is integrally linked to their sense of their ‘apartness, marginality, and interstitiality’ (Crapanzano, 2011: 175). As historians Nicolas Lebourg and Abderahmen Moumen have observed, the multifaceted history of the camp at Rivesaltes reflects the ways in which the French state managed the influx of diverse populations over the years (2015: 10). In the early stages of the development of the site, which began at the end of 1939, Spanish Republicans fleeing Franco’s troops were the first to be interned there; many participated in

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the construction of the camp as part of the compagnies des travailleurs espagnols, working alongside other contingents of foreign workers, such as those from Indochina (Lebourg and Moumen, 2015: 14–19). Subsequently, Rivesaltes served several functions during World War II. After being used as a transit camp and training centre for colonial troops and as a camp de regroupement [regroupment centre] for refugees (mostly Spaniards, foreign Jews and gypsies evacuated from the Alsace– Moselle area), it became an interregional centre for the deportation of Jews (August–November 1942), ‘le Drancy de la zone libre’ [the ‘Drancy of the free zone’], as Serge Klarsfeld has called it (2014: 8). Although more than half of the approximately 7,000 Jews interned at Rivesaltes managed to escape, 2,313 were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau via Drancy in nine convoys (Lebourg and Moumen, 2015: 43). The deportations ended when the Germans invaded the free zone and occupied the camp in November 1942, using it as a barracks for their troops. At this point, most of the Jews still in the camp were transferred to Gurs, while the gypsies were moved to Saliers. At the end of the war Rivesaltes was briefly employed as an internment centre for suspected collaborators before becoming a prisonerof-war camp for German, Austrian and Italian soldiers (1944–48); several hundred Soviet refugees as well as some Belgian collaborators and Italian fascists were also detained there (Lebourg and Moumen, 2015: 54). The fact that the camp played a role in the Shoah provided much of the initial impetus for the creation of a memorial at Rivesaltes and its eventual transformation into an official place of memory.1 During the period of decolonization and its aftermath, Rivesaltes was again put to several uses, first serving as a transit centre for troops who were to be posted to Indochina (1946–54). Throughout the Algerian war (1954–62) about 1,500 soldiers passed through the camp every two months before being deployed in North Africa, while Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) militants and sympathizers were imprisoned there in 1962 (Husser, 2014: 70). In addition, a Centre Militaire de Formation Professionnelle for North African conscripts was set up in the camp 1 This role was highlighted by Klarsfeld’s important work on deportations from French camps and by the publication in 1993 of Swiss nurse Friedel Bohmy-Reiter’s Journal de Rivesaltes 1941–1942, her eye-witness account of the experiences of Jews in the camp. Jacqueline Veuve’s 1997 documentary Journal de Rivesaltes 1941–1942, which is based on Bohmy-Reiter’s journal, was shown in Rivesaltes in the 1990s. Alain Monnier’s Rivesaltes: un camp en France (2008) again drew attention to the suffering of Jews interned in the camp.

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(1958–62) in order to reduce the number on active duty and in an effort to prevent their being influenced by the FLN when they were demobilized (Husser, 2014: 69). When the massacre of the harkis began in Algeria in 1962, the Premier Régiment de Tirailleurs Algériens was repatriated to Rivesaltes, followed by many harkis and their families, with the first wave arriving in September 1962. Although the transit camp officially closed in December 1964, about 800 Guinean soldiers and their families were housed at Rivesaltes between 1964 and 1966, as was a small detachment of Vietnamese (Husser, 2014: 74). These were the last colonial troops to pass through the camp. Finally, a Centre de Rétention Administrative [immigration detention centre] was set up at Rivesaltes in 1986 to hold illegal immigrants, usually just for a few days, and operated there until it was moved to Perpignan airport in 2007 (Husser, 2014: 77). As the camp that received the largest number of harkis, Rivesaltes has been described as the ‘épicentre’ of the repatriation process, ‘la capitale des harkis’ (Lebourg and Moumen, 2015: 109). For this reason alone, it occupies an important place in harki collective memory. Altogether, an estimated 22,000 harkis passed through the camp (Husser, 2014: 74), with almost 9,000 housed there at the beginning of December 1962. Indeed, Rivesaltes is referred to in many of the testimonies in Fatima Besnaci-Lancou’s Nos mères, paroles blessées and in twelve of the personal narratives that she features in Treize chibanis harkis; the longest chapter in Des vies: 62 enfants de harkis racontent is also devoted to Rivesaltes. Since the primary role of the camp was that of a sorting centre, families were constantly arriving at and leaving Rivesaltes; while some spent only a few days there, others remained for years. Those who were deemed fit moved to industrial areas in the north and east of France or were sent to one of seventyfive forestry hamlets to work on reforestation projects, mostly in the Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regions. One of these hamlets was situated within the camp at Rivesaltes. Those considered ‘incasables’ [unplaceable] or ‘irrécuperables’ [beyond help], often widows and the elderly or infirm, were for the most part relocated to the Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise camp, where some remained until 1975 (Moumen, 2011: 117–19). When the camp at Rivesaltes was closed in December 1964, a civilian village created on the site in 1963 for harkis employed locally but awaiting housing remained there until March 1965. The last families left the forestry hamlet in 1977 and moved to the Cité de Réart, which had been built in the village of Rivesaltes and was known as the ‘Cité des Harkis’ (Mettay, 2001: 142).

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Paradoxically, the camps became a central element of the community’s collective memories even though about half of the estimated 81,000 harkis who came to France did not spend time in them or were housed there for only a short period (Moumen in Besnaci-Lancou, 2010: 131). This phenomenon can be explained in part by the publication of a significant number of memory works that give a substantial place to life in the camps. These testimonial narratives by first- and second-generation harkis provide a striking picture of the harsh conditions they encountered at Rivesaltes. One of the few first-hand descriptions to be published in the 1960s, the Bachaga Boualam’s foundational Les Harkis au service de la France (1963), emphasizes the pathos and scale of a human tragedy that he clearly views as shameful. In this short, much cited portrait of the camp at Rivesaltes, 2 strong visual images and the accumulation of negative terms portray the harkis – the ‘orphelins d’Evian’ [Evian orphans], ‘ces douze mille malheureux’ [these twelve thousand poor creatures] (1963: 268) – as huddled together in a thousand tents without heat or light in the middle of a desolate, windswept plain where five thousand shivering children play with stones (1963: 268). The depiction of the camp as a ‘monde sans âme’ [soulless world] and as a ‘univers concentrationnaire’ [resembling a concentration camp] ‘caché comme une lèpre’ [hidden like leprosy] (1963: 267, 268) reinforces the impression of isolation and establishes Rivesaltes as an emblem of the harkis’ sense of having been abandoned and of France’s failure to protect them. The narratives written by the children of harkis, which can be characterized as forms of postmemory, provide an in-depth account of what it was like to grow up in camps such as Rivesaltes. Mostly published after 2000, these works constitute an important part of the memory work that followed the second generation’s activism in the political and legal spheres in the 1980s and 1990s. The texts were also published in the context of a period of official memorialization that marked the end of state amnesia regarding the fate of the harkis – an annual Journée d’hommage national aux harkis was established in 2001 and, as one of many regional tributes, a plaque was placed near the entrance to Rivesaltes in 1995 and a stela erected in 2001. Fatima Besnaci-Lancou and Dalila Kerchouche in

2 Jean-Jacques Jordi and Mohand Hamoumou’s Les harkis, une mémoire enfouie, for example, contains a section on ‘Les mille tentes de Rivesaltes ou d’ailleurs’ [The thousand tents of Rivesaltes or elsewhere], which opens with a quotation from the Bachaga Boualam’s description (1999: 49).

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particular have written at length about the camp. 3 Emphasizing that they have turned to writing in order to testify, they highlight the intersections between family stories and national history and document many aspects of life in the camp as a means of giving voice to collective memories. Like the Bachaga Boualam, Kerchouche (Mon père, ce harki) and Besnaci-Lancou (Fille de harki) both depict Rivesaltes as a carceral universe. Besnaci-Lancou, who was eight when her family arrived at Rivesaltes, entitles her chapter on the camp ‘Rivesaltes, derrière les barbelés’ [Rivesaltes, behind the barbed-wire], and explicitly equates the prison-like atmosphere with the crystallization of the impression of abandonment and with the centrality of the camp in harki memories (2005: 80). Although Kerchouche was born after her family had left Rivesaltes, she knew that her parents had terrible memories of the camp, and her own journey there as an adult forms a crucial piece of her ‘quête harkéologique’ (2003: 87), her quest to retrace her parents’ trajectory and bring the harkis’ story to light. Taken together, the two authors’ narratives provide a detailed description of life at Rivesaltes, evoking, for example, never-ending rows of tents on an arid plain, the lack of heat, water and sanitation, the glacial wind, the high child mortality rate, hunger and malnutrition, respiratory diseases and the ‘lent processus de destruction morale et psychologique’ [slow process of moral and psychological destruction] (Kerchouche, 2003: 66) that created ‘une fraternité du malheur’ [a brotherhood of misfortune] (Besnaci-Lancou, 2005: 81) and led to psychological problems, suicide, alcoholism and loss of dignity. In addition, Rivesaltes was run like a military camp, with strict discipline, curfews and flag-raising ceremonies, and both writers draw attention to the persistence of colonial mentalities and hierarchies (Kerchouche, 2003: 64; Besnaci-Lancou, 2005: 72), thus echoing historian Tom Charbit’s contention that the housing camps constituted a remnant of the colonial world that had been transferred to France (2006: 89). Besnaci-Lancou and Kerchouche also depict Rivesaltes as part of an alternative cartography. At the beginning of Des vies: 62 enfants de harkis racontent, a map showing the location of all the housing camps and forestry hamlets in France gives Rivesaltes a prominent position in a network of harki sites of memory. Likewise, the chapter titles in Kerchouche’s Mon père, ce harki, which consist almost exclusively of place names, suggest personal geographical markers, while the subtitles 3 Alice Zeniter’s L’Art de perdre, which was published after this essay was completed, also devotes several pages to Rivesaltes.

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evoke family memories associated with them – ‘Rivesaltes: les ruines de mon passé’ [Rivesaltes, the ruins of my past], for example (2003: 54). Similarly, the reference to the star shape that the camps form on the map of France reinforces the notion of a postcolonial mapping of historical events that reflects the harkis’ experiences. Although there are very few physical traces of the harkis’ past at Rivesaltes, which now resembles a ghost town and has become part of a ‘géographie du néant’ [geography of nothingness] (Kerchouche, 2003: 55, 85), Kerchouche’s recounting of life in the camp puts it back on the map. In order to underscore the hardship the harkis endured at Rivesaltes, Besnaci-Lancou and Kerchouche both mobilize memories from other periods, thus appealing to the ‘multidirectionality of memory’, defined by Michael Rothberg as ‘the interference, overlap, and mutual constitution of seemingly distinct collective memories’ (2006: 162). The fact that Besnaci-Lancou, for example, often thinks of the Spanish refugees and Jews who were detained there (2005: 81) suggests the existence of a chain of suffering that reverberates throughout the century and reminds the reader that, because of its multilayered history, the camp is not only a postcolonial site of memory. Kerchouche, who also mentions the detention of Spaniards and Jews, cites Klarsfeld’s characterization of Rivesaltes as ‘le Drancy de la zone libre’, noting that these earlier images of internment jostle together in her mind as she drives to Rivesaltes (Kerchouche, 2003: 54). In particular, her placement of the highly emotive expression ‘L’horreur absolue …’ (2003: 54) between the quotation from Klarsfeld and a reference to the number of harkis who passed through Rivesaltes creates echoes between the persecution of the Jews and the treatment of the harkis. The commemoration work related to Rivesaltes began in the 1990s with the erection of a stela in memory of the Jews in 1994, followed by ones honoring the harkis in 1995 and the Spanish republicans in 1999; two more were added in homage to the gypsies and those detained as illegal immigrants in 2009 and 2008 respectively. In addition, a memorial museum designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti was opened in October 2015. Surrounded by the ruins of part of the camp, it houses permanent and temporary exhibitions as well as a research centre and an educational unit. In his inauguration speech, then prime minister Manuel Valls acknowledged that Rivesaltes had been a ‘camp d’exclusion’ for all those who had been interned there, and stressed the need for France to face the mistakes it had made in the past, asking his audience to imagine what it would have been like to live in the camp, and referring, for example, to

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the fact that the harkis had found themselves in the middle of nowhere, not understanding why France was abandoning them (Valls, 2015). The instrumentalization of Rivesaltes for political purposes, especially as regards its role as a site of memory for the harkis, was evident before the memorial was completed. As Lebourg and Moumen have pointed out, Nicolas Sarkozy went there to pay tribute to the harkis a week before the first round of the presidential elections in 2012, while Marine Le Pen (then a member of the European Parliament) laid a wreath at the camp on the official day of homage to the harkis in September of the same year (2015: 150–54). Similarly, Valls’s inauguration speech at times had a strong political dimension, and he used the occasion as an opportunity to call for an end to communitarian self-interest and the compartmentalization of memories. Insisting that there should be no competition among the diverse memory carriers – ‘pas d’Histoire à la carte, où chacun ne retiendrait que ce qui le concerne’ [no à la carte History where each group retains only what concerns them] – he emphasized that, in addition to its function as a site of memory, the memorial had an equally important role to play in the transmission of French history and values, evoking in particular his government’s initiative to combat the resurgence of antisemitism and racism (Valls, 2015). What, then, will members of the public take away from their visit to the memorial at Rivesaltes? Although the presence of stelae honouring different communities suggests the existence of interrelated memories, the fact that they simply stand side by side next to the road, several kilometres from the museum, leaves it largely up to the visitor to make connections between them and to see the harkis’ experiences, for example, as part of the broad sweep of history, as Besnaci-Lancou and Kerchouche encourage their readers to do. Indeed, as Lebourg and Moumen observe, the stelae are not placed in chronological order of the events commemorated and are not linked visually by a unifying design, and no explanation is given as to the relationship between them (2015: 149).4 Whether they will be 4 For the two historians, ‘cette difficulté de penser le commun se retrouve dans le projet muséographique’ [this difficulty of discerning what the different constituencies have in common is echoed in the museographic project] (2015: 149). The commentary in the section of the historical exhibit entitled ‘Du camp au lieu de mémoire’ [From Camp to Realm of Memory], for example, acknowledges that the collective memories of the diverse groups who have passed through the camp remain ‘plurielles et singulières’ [plural and singular], while at the same time expressing the hope that the stories of their displacement might pave the way for ‘la possibilité d’un récit commun et d’une mémoire partagée’ [the possibility of a common narrative and shared memories].

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perceived as symbols of parallel, competing memories or rather, as Valls hopes, as emblems of a common past thus remains to be seen. It can be argued, however, that the creation of the memorial, along with the official recognition that Rivesaltes forms an important part of harki collective memories, represents a small but significant step toward countering the widely held idea that the Algerian war and its aftermath is still such a divisive topic that it remains a ‘non lieu-de mémoire’ in France (Derderian, 2002: 30). Works Cited Bachaga Boualam, S. 1963. Les Harkis au service de la France. Paris: France-Empire. Besnaci-Lancou, Fatima. 2005. Fille de harki. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier. —, ed. 2006. Treize chibanis harkis. Paris: Tirésias. —, ed. 2010. Des vies: 62 enfants de harkis racontent. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier. Bohny-Reiter, Friedel. 1993. Journal de Rivesaltes 1941–1942. Geneva: Editions ZOE. Charbit, Tom. 2006. Les Harkis. Paris: La Découverte. Crapanzano, Vincent. 2011. The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derderian, Richard. 2002. ‘Algeria as a Lieu de Mémoire: Ethnic Minority Memory and National Identity in France’. Radical History Review 83: 28–43. Doulut, Alexandre. 2014a. Les Tsiganes au camp de Rivesaltes. Paris: Mémorial du camp de Rivesaltes/Lienart. — 2014b. Les Juifs au camp de Rivesaltes: internement et déportation (1941–1942). Paris: Mémorial du camp de Rivesaltes/Lienart. Husser, Beate. 2014. Histoire du camp militaire Joffre de Rivesaltes. Paris: Mémorial du camp de Rivesaltes/Lienart. Jordi, Jean-Jacques, and Mohand Hamoumou. 1999. Les Harkis, une mémoire enfouie. Paris: Autrement. Kerchouche, Dalila. 2003. Mon père, ce harki. Paris: Seuil. Klarsfeld, Serge. 2014. ‘Préface’. In Les Juifs au camp de Rivesaltes: internement et déportation (1941–1942), Alexandre Doulut, 8–9. Paris: Mémorial du camp de Rivesaltes/Lienart. Lebourg, Nicolas, and Abderahmen Moumen. 2015. Rivesaltes: le camp de la France, 1939 à nos jours. Canet en Roussillon: Editions Trabucaire. Marcos, Violette, and Juanito Marcos. 2009. Les Camps de Rivesaltes: une histoire de l’enfermement (1935–2007). Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières.

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Mettay, Joël. 2001. L’Archipel du mépris: histoire du camp de Rivesaltes de 1939 à nos jours. Canet: Editions Trabucaire. Monnier, Alain. 2008. Rivesaltes: un camp en France. Cahors: La Louve Editions. Moumen, Abderahmen. 2011. ‘Camp de Rivesaltes, camp de Saint-Maurice l’Ardoise: l’accueil et le reclassement des harkis en France’. Les Temps Modernes 666: 105–19. Rothberg, Michael. 2006. ‘Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness’. Critical Inquiry 33: 158–84. Valls, Manuel. 2015. ‘Discours de Manuel Valls, Premier ministre lors de l’inauguration du camp de Rivesaltes’. http://www.memorialcamprivesaltes.eu/69-inauguration-du-memorial-de-rivesaltes.htm. Veuve, Jacqueline. 1997. Journal de Rivesaltes 1941–1942. Aquarius Film Production. Zeniter, Alice. 2017. L’Art de perdre. Paris: Flammarion.

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Ouvéa Pim Higginson Ouvéa

The South Pacific is a vast watery region specked with islands often thousands of miles apart. The ‘discovery’ of this part of the world, much of it by British sea-captain James Cook (1728–1779), drew these micro-nations into the net of Western modernity, where they became waystations facilitating the growing domination of global capital. No place more radically represents this historical evolution than New Caledonia, an archipelago consisting of ‘the big island’ and the smaller Îles Loyauté (Lifou, Maré and Ouvéa), ‘discovered’ by Cook on 4 September 1774 and so named because the landscape he saw reminded him of Scotland. The main island is striking for its tropical north-facing coast, its semi-arid south-facing coast and its interior of long-extinct volcanoes. It is thus a land of contrasts, with a barrier reef second in size only to Australia’s and some of the globe’s largest nickel resources – the mining of which has led to environmental devastation, most notably to the coral ecosystem. The main island, measuring fifty by two hundred miles, has, unlike other Pacific island groups, such as Western Samoa, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga, a quasi-continental feel accentuated by its multiple climates and the backbone of mountains that runs down its centre. These geographical, geological and environmental specificities have all contributed to a unique and often tragic history. This history gained in complexity with New Caledonia’s occupation by France from 1853 through to its current unique status in French territorial nomenclature as a ‘collectivité sui generis’, an ambiguous status confirmed just recently in the referendum on independence of 4 November 2018. New Caledonia is also personal. In 1971 my father took a two-year job at the South Pacific Commission (SPC), a regional version of

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UNESCO based in the capital city, Nouméa.1 As with UNESCO, the SPC was oblivious to its numerous self-contradictions: for example, the Higginson family lived in spacious subsidized housing over their Kanak caretakers, Charles Sr. and Eméliane, who inhabited its windowless earthen-floor basement. Charles Jr. and Jacques, their children, became my close friends and through them I learned of colonialism and the inequities of race and class it inevitably produces. The timing of this budding awareness also attached me to a land simmering with a revolt that over the next decade would become a civil war between white and mixed-race settlers and native people. This sense of colonialism’s destructive force was reinforced when I returned for the first time to New Caledonia in 1987 and tracked down Charles Sr. He brought along Jacques, now a lanky twenty-year-old. From him, I learned that Charles Jr. had dodged his military service and was living in the ‘maquis’ (had gone underground) as an active member of the FLNKS –the Front de Libération National Kanak et Socialiste. The desperation I vaguely sensed at the age of nine was now leading people into open revolt. Indeed, only a year later, in 1988, the ‘grottes d’Ouvéa’ exploded, quite literally, on the world stage. Since that first visit back in 1987, I have followed subsequent events on the island and in 2008 I once again returned to New Caledonia. This time, I was astounded at the proud bearing of the Kanak. It appeared to me that the battle they had fought for their rights to the land and themselves as free subjects had, in keeping with Franz Fanon’s idea that colonialism must be overthrown by force, begun to sweep away two centuries of racial and ethnic propaganda and oppression. What follows recounts one of the most memorable moments – and places – of that fight. Indeed, as I hope to make clear, the Ouvéa caves (or ‘grottes’) constitute a historical site the ideas and memories of which are being layered and refracted through time. These ideas in turn serve as a cornerstone to the sometimes conflicting Kanak conceptions of the postcolonial self. In other words, the grottes d’Ouvéa are an archetypal realm of memory. 1 It should be noted that the SPC, as it was known was founded through an alliance of Australia, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States. This list should suggest the degree to which it was, at first at least, premised in a more-or-less crypto colonial enterprise. Its name was changed to South Pacific Community in 1983 to recognize the growing number of independent nations in the Pacific since the organization’s founding in 1947.

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On 4 May 1989, during a ceremony commemorating the violent death of nineteen anti-colonial fighters exactly a year earlier, Djubelly Wea, himself a militant ‘indépendantiste’, gunned down the great New Caledonian Kanak political leader, Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1936–1989). This ceremony, lifting the period of mourning for those Kanak fighters who had been killed by French special forces at the Ouvéa caves, occurred in the village of Wadrilla at the centre of Ouvéa, where a commemorative marker had been erected. Wea’s motive was Tjibaou’s signing of what became known as the ‘Accords de Matignon’. He held Tjibaou responsible, as leader of the FLNKS (Front de Libération National Kanak et Socialiste), for the loss of life. Djibaou’s death would, in a sense, close the most significant chapter in one of the last great struggles for independence from French imperialism by an indigenous people. It would also seal Ouvéa’s destiny as a postcolonial ‘realm of memory’. The killing of Djibaou underscored the convoluted political situation in New Caledonia, both within the ranks of the indigenous Kanak people and between pro- and anti-colonial forces, arrayed in shifting patterns around the issue of independence. 2 First, however, one also needs to grasp the longer history of the Kanak struggle for independence that led to the episode of the caves and, a year later, to Tjibaou’s assassination. Indeed, 4 May 1988 and, subsequently, 4 May 1989 were the culmination of a series of events representing, in miniaturized form, France’s continued colonial activity despite (or perhaps, because of) the country’s humiliating withdrawal from Algeria thirty years earlier. Like Algeria, New Caledonia was a settler colony, populated first strategically to bolster French global expansion (and accompanied by the usual missionary beach-head), and subsequently by convicts and then various waves of immigrants. In 1864 came the first of the 20,000 déportés, prisoners sent to penal colonies, or bagnes (like the one in Cayenne), set up throughout the island. This group included those convicted of civil offences; more famously, over 4,000 political 2 The political history of the island is too complex to summarize here. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that that the unease that led to the Kanak uprising of the 1980s proceeded from France’s manipulation of the island’s demographics by encouraging migration in a way that put the Kanak in the minority. This process was successful as today they represent less than 40 per cent of the population. As late as the 1970s, they were in the majority. Thus, the 2018 vote that will decide the fate of the island and its relationship to France has already been overdetermined by this earlier French manipulation.

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prisoners from the fall of the Paris commune; many thousands of North Africans accused of civil crimes and/or involved in various insurrectional movements at the end of the nineteenth century; and, finally, Vietnamese prisoners taken from their growing anti-colonial movements of the beginning of the twentieth century. Ironically, despite (and sometimes because of) these various groups’ marginal status and anti-colonial ambitions, many of these same convicts and their descendants would accept land taken by force from the Kanak (who were put on reservations) and would over generations, despite their frequently multi-racial heritage, become the racist right-wing Caldoches most resistant to independence. 3 When the racist policy broadly known as ‘le régime de l’indigénat’ [system of native regulations] (prevalent throughout the French colonial empire until the end of World War II) was officially abolished, the indigenous Kanak gained the right to move off their reservations and no longer faced forced labour. In 1957 the Kanak finally were afforded the right to vote and, as of the 1960s, most institutional racism was outlawed (though more-or-less covert, and too frequently overt, racism persists to this day). In reaction to the eroding of their privileges, the Caldoches began to push back, often with the tacit assistance of the French government. Indeed, as of the 1960s, one of the most significant ways in which the French simultaneously helped the Caldoches politically and benefited France economically was the active recruitment of labourers to work in the nickel mines. France drew from throughout the Pacific basin, most notably from Wallis and Futuna, and between 1969 and 1971 well over 10,000 workers arrived on the island, expanding the population by over 10 per cent. Likewise, a major (albeit failed) push was made to make New Caledonia a retirement and vacation destination for métropolitains in search of the tropical exotic. This deliberate demographic manipulation, designed to offset the growing Kanak population’s power at the polls, fed the desperation, and political purpose, of the island’s original inhabitants. If the Caldoches pushed back against reform, the Kanak responded to them, as did so many other colonial people across the globe during this period, by pushing forward. Accordingly, the Kanak independence movement gained steam in the 1960s and 1970s, and became increasingly 3 The parallels between the Caldoches and the Algerian pieds-noirs are powerful, and indeed, it isn’t surprising that many pieds-noirs (the French white settlers in Algeria) wound up in New Caledonia and aligned themselves with (or became) Caldoches.

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radicalized in the late 1970s. By the early 1980s the FLNKS was engaging in guerilla assaults on ranches held by the so-called Grands Caldoches (the white landowners – as opposed to the more proletarian Petits Caldoches). During these attacks houses were torched and goods taken or destroyed. In response, on 5 December 1984 a group of Caldoches ambushed and murdered in cold blood ten independence activists, including two of Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s brothers, at Hienghène.4 Shortly thereafter, on 12 January 1985, FLNKS leader Éloi Machoro was gunned down by an elite sharpshooter from the French Special Forces, thereby becoming a Kanak martyr to the cause of independence. Things only became more fraught with the acquittal by a jury (devoid of Kanak members) of the seven accused of the Hienghène murders. No longer trusting the political class in Paris and trapped in an ever-more violent struggle in their homeland – a struggle that was increasingly resembling civil war – the FLNKS leadership decided to occupy a series of police stations throughout the territory. Timing this move with the upcoming second round of the French elections that would oppose the right-wing Jacques Chirac and the left-leaning François Mitterrand, the first site to be occupied was to be on the island of Ouvéa. On 22 April a group of activists assaulted the police station at Fayaoué, Ouvéa. During the struggle that ensued three policemen were shot and killed, while the remaining twenty-seven were taken hostage. The resulting group of hostages and assailants would then divide, with half heading to the south of Ouvéa. These hostages were quickly released. The other half took refuge in the secret (and sacred) caves of Ouvéa, deep in the bush at the northern end of the island. What happened next remains somewhat clouded by official reports lacking credibility, rumours, testimonials from the numerous participants and the forensic work of various teams who subsequently examined the victims, and the site, of the battle. The two sides of the story can readily be summed up, on the one hand, by Mathieu Kassovitz’s (of La haine fame) rendering of this story in his polemical L’ordre et la morale (2011), where Kassovitz recounts the military response to the hostage situation, and, on the other, by the polemical response to Kassovitz’s film ‘L’ordre et la morale: les mensonges de Kassovitz’, in which the conservative author Thierry 4 The Hienghène region, and particularly Tjibaou’s birthplace of Tiendenite, was the site of some of the earliest armed resistance to the French beginning in 1916 and where one of Tjibaou’s grandmothers was shot by a French soldier.

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Deransart claims that Kassovitz’s film is full of falsehoods, beginning with its depiction of the hostage takers, whom Deransart (2011) qualifies as a primitive, dissatisfied and barbaric minority. 5 Significantly, Kassovitz made every effort to consult the archives, the conclusions drawn by the Ligue des droits de l’homme (The League of Human Rights) and the medical autopsies and numerous forensic reports that followed the suspect official descriptions of what happened. The archive is clear: local villagers were tortured to extract information about the hostages’ whereabouts; ongoing negotiations which were, by most tallies, proceeding fruitfully were bypassed; the blistering attack on the cave (which would become known as ‘operation Victor’) was conducted anti-constitutionally by French special forces; and a number of the hostage-takers were summarily executed after having been taken prisoner. There are aspects of Kassovitz’s telling that merit suspicion (most notably the role of his main character, Philippe Legorjus, played by Kassovitz himself)6 and parts of the story that remain either simplified or ignored. Among these are the complex role played by the FLNKS leadership, who turned their backs on the hostage-takers and, just as importantly, the strong disagreements, even on the island, between various Kanak communities about how to treat hostage-takers. Nevertheless, the significance of the caves, the tragic and criminal events that took place there and the peculiar attitude towards these brown-skinned French, living so far away from the métropole, all come through. Indeed, perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the film is how it repurposes the visual elements of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to depict a French military strike on its people – a strike that was in clear violation of the French constitution, which forbids using the army against its own citizens. Yet, just as important as the content of the film (and directly connected to it) is how people reacted to its very existence. The owner of Nouméa’s theatres (not surprisingly, a right-wing Caldoche) refused to show it on the island. As Isabelle Leblic notes in her very thoughtful essay on the release of the film: 5 It is important to note that Thierry Deransart, here writing for the conservative Figaro Magazine of which he was also managing editor was, as he points out in the essay, previously the managing editor editor for the very reactionary and anti-independence magazine Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes Hebdo. 6 Much of the debate around the Legorjus character has been summarized by Isabelle Leblic in her article ‘Le film de Mathieu Kassovitz, L’Ordre et la morale. Quand la fiction se confronte à la réalité’ (2012).

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[B]on nombre de critiques faites au film ressortent d’un esprit colonialiste persistant, notamment en Nouvelle-Calédonie (son refus de projection dans les salles commerciales de Nouméa en est un exemple frappant), qui reste encore en ce sens ‘le pays du non-dit’ (Barbançon, 1992). Cela nous rappelle un autre temps, celui de l’après-guerre d’Algérie, lorsque le film La Bataille d’Alger (de Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) fut aussitôt interdit pour n’être autorisé qu’en 1971 tout en étant quasiment privé d’écran jusqu’en 2004. (2012) [A colonial mindset underpins many of the criticisms directed towards the film, especially in New-Caledonia (where the decision to not show it in commercial cinemas is a telling example), which remains ‘the country of the unspoken (Barbançon, 1992). This reminds us of a different context, following the war in Algeria, when the film The Battle of Algiers (Gilles Pontecorvo, 1966) was censored until 1971, and basically not screened until 2004.]

The connection between France’s actions during and after the Algerian war and the subsequent censoring of The Battle of Algiers is apt in the sense that the French wished neither to admit the violent tactics used during the conflict nor to acknowledge the war’s significance as a national trauma. At the same time, less obvious perhaps was a mixed reception among the Kanak that speaks to the divisions and conflicts among the native people on the island. Indeed, why, on 4 May 1989, did Djubelly Wea assassinate Jean-Marie Tjibaou and his second-in-command, Yeiwene Yeiwene? Since Wea was himself one of the organizers of the hostage-taking, and a member of the radical wing of the FLNKS, this act appeared not to make sense. While, as stated at the outset of this chapter, Wea held the leader of the FLNKS responsible for first authorizing and then abandoning the hostage takers, there is more to this story. And, indeed, it is precisely because of the internal tensions, extending back many decades, as Jean Guiart suggests, that no simple narrative gathers together the multiple forces that led to the caves, and the death of Tjibaou and Yeiwene Yeiwene a year later (Guiart, 1997). As with all histories, the colonial enterprise was not and is not a singular project, but rather assembles the accumulated and sometimes conflicting economic, religious, strategic, political and individual interests of numerous actors. To the collected interests of the colonial machine, a correspondingly complex amalgam of responses constituted a resistance that at times coalesced into a unified will, but that, just as frequently, like the occupation it resisted, gave only the momentary appearance of a shared project. Thus, as Eric Waddell discusses at

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length in his biography of Tjibaou (2008), tensions between Catholics and Protestants, regional issues (often connected to different experiences of colonialism), linguistic conflicts and various other divergences all contributed to placing Kanak individuals and communities on different sides of the independence movement, and in various factions within these two sides. Thus, when Tjibaou signed what is now known as the ‘Accords de Matignon’ with the then prime minister Michel Rocard, the compromise it implied and the tentative movement away from France it supposed were likely to anger as many as it satisfied. Tjibaou paid the ultimate price for what amounted to a series of compromises. But in dying on Ouvéa before a memorial for those who died in the caves, he also established this spot as perhaps the final and most eloquent colonial realm of memory – a reminder of the violence and complexity of the colonial relationship and its kinship with radioactivity: while its effects may diminish with time, it functions in half-lives that assure that they never disappear entirely. Works Cited Deransart, Thierry. 2011. ‘L’ordre et la morale: les mensonges de Kassovitz’. Le Figaro: Culture (11 October). http://www.lefigaro.fr/cinema/2011/11/1 2/0300220111112ARTFIG00287-ouvea-les mensonges-de-kassovitz.php. Guiart, Jean. 1997. ‘A drama of ambiguity, Ouvea 1988–89’. The Journal of Pacific History 32, no. 1: 85–102. Leblic, Isabelle. 2012 ‘Le film de Mathieu Kassovitz, L’Ordre et la morale. Quand la fiction se confronte à la réalité’. Journal de la Société des Océanistes 134: 111–20. https://jso.revues.org/6640?lang=en. Waddell, Eric. 2008. Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Kanak Witness to the World: An Intellectual Biography. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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BUMIDOM H. Adlai Murdoch BUMIDOM

The history of factors undergirding and driving French Caribbean mass movement into metropolitan France is relatively unknown, as is the extent to which a large component of this group arrived in the metropole as a direct result of state policy. At the same time, the material result of this state action, which began well over fifty years ago, is today quite visible in day-to-day French life. A look at the demographics of contemporary France shows that there are an estimated 800,000 people of French Caribbean birth or descent presently living on the French mainland. To put this figure – which now includes a fourth generation descended from the original arrivants – into perspective, this is almost twice as many people as the entire population of Guadeloupe and Martinique (with just over 400,000 inhabitants each), with more than 80 per cent of this population residing in Paris – which is thus known in certain quarters as the ‘third island’. This complex trajectory embodies a key aspect of Pierre Nora’s conceptualization of lieux de mémoire; in his view, such moments are crystallized at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn – but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. (1989: 7)

Such a problematization of recent French Caribbean history properly begins with the end of the Second World War and the advent of two events closely situated in time: the inauguration of the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ period of French economic expansion (approximately 1946–75) and the

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departmentalization law of March 1946, which functions as the core lieu de mémoire around which the entire BUMIDOM phenomenon can be structured. On the other hand, colonial economies were undergoing rapid and exponential change at this time. Claude-Valentin Marie explains: L’économie de plantation se meurt. Déjà, les subventions de la France ouvrent aux békés la voie royale de leurs nouveaux profits dans l’importexport […] ces déracinés de la plantation. Ce sont eux qu’il convient d’éloigner en priorité des îles pour y préserver la paix civile et assurer leur mutation économique. La gestion politique de l’émigration antillaise trouve là son origine […] Résultat: le nombre des immigrants antillais qui s’installent durablement dans l’Hexagone va être multiplié par quinze en moins de cinquante ans. (2002: 26–27) [The plantation economy is dying. French subsidies are already paving a voie royale for the white planter class to create new profits in importexport […] for these people uprooted from the plantation. They are the ones who, as a priority, need to be kept away from the islands to preserve civil peace and ensure economic transformation. This is at the core of the political management of Caribbean emigration […] As a result: the number of Caribbean immigrants moving for good to France will multiply by fifteen in less than fifty years.]

The need to respond to postwar labour shortages, and to regulate and stabilize the labour force being brought into France to address these shortages, gave rise to a number of associated state institutions. A law dated 2 November 1945 gave rise to the Office National de l’Immigration, placing under its aegis ‘toutes les opérations de recrutement et d’introduction en France de travailleurs originaires des territoires d’outre-mer et des étrangers, du recrutement en France des travailleurs de toutes nationalités pour l’étranger’ [all of the operations to recruit and introduce into France workers coming from overseas territories as well as foreign workers, and all the recruitment operations in France of workers of any nationality to work abroad] (public-histoire.com). Postwar reconstruction involved all sectors of the French economy, and the ONI furnished vast quantities of labour to advance economic expansion in such areas as agriculture, mines, steel and construction. Although the birth of BUMIDOM itself was an outcome, or offshoot, of this policy, the organization did not come into being as a state agency until early in the Fifth Republic. It was founded by Michel Debré, the first prime minister of the French Fifth Republic under president Charles de Gaulle,

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following a visit they both made to Réunion in 1959. Significantly, for administrative purposes it was placed under the aegis of the Ministry of the DOM-TOM and the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and was meant to combine multiple functions, including family reunification, information and professional training. Overall, BUMIDOM’s goal was to furnish a state-organized and -controlled labour pool. The results of these migratory moments were both transgressive and transformative. While postwar immigration into France was largely driven by massive labour shortages, as it was in most of the rest of Europe, the paradox of the DOMs (départements d’outre-mer) is that their populations were not foreigners seeking entry, but nationals moving from the periphery to the centre of the nation-state. BUMIDOM organized the arrival in the metropole of 70,615 persons between its creation and its ultimate dismantling in December 1981. This figure represents 44.7  per cent of the 157,000 migrants who settled in France during this period. Migration to the metropole – and its attendant social, cultural and linguistic corollaries there, along with the socioeconomic transformation of the DOMs – has probably been the most visible consequence of 1946. Direct recruitment programmes were established, with entrance exams followed by a training period in France, while the anguish of displacement was mitigated by the wholesale organization and sale of reduced-fare tickets on Air France for those migrants wishing to return home on vacation. Indeed, as Alain Anselin points out, both the volume of departmental migration and its distribution in specific sectors of the French economy were a matter of government planning, aimed at construction, metallurgy, the care industry (towards which male emigrants were directed), hospitals, national organizations, and domestic service (towards which female emigrants were directed). As early as 1958 official commissions were studying the installation of the system and setting up the apparatus responsible for recruitment of labour in the overseas departments. (1995: 112)

In addition, many analyses concur that the overall aim of creating BUMIDOM was twofold; its structured movement of people would not only contribute to the ongoing economic reconstruction of the French economy but also also alleviate pressing conditions of unemployment in the periphery, in the quatre vieilles colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Réunion that had become overseas departments immediately after the war’s end. Making this planned population transfer easier was the fact that departmentalization had effectively

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made all inhabitants of the DOMs French citizens, thereby making their displacement a matter of the internal movement of individuals from one part of France to another, comparable to, say, travelling from Rouen to Strasbourg. Still, as Condon and Ogden assert in this regard, ‘That these new arrivals are French, are not considered by the state and its institutions as “immigrants” or “foreigners”, and have been largely ignored by academic and popular commentaries on migration, does not make them any less migrants’ (1991: 505). This definitive conundrum sums up one of the key paradoxes created by BUMIDOM’s creation and work. Between its inauguration in April 1963 and its dissolution eighteen years later, BUMIDOM funneled more than 160,000 migrants from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Réunion onto the French mainland in a radical transformation of both metropole and periphery, as Anselin points out: ‘En vingt ans, de 1962 à 1982, la population antillaise en France a quintuplé’ [In twenty years, from 1962 to 1982, the Caribbean population in France has multiplied by five] (1990: 100). Many of these arrivants sought to escape rising unemployment in their own territories, although French Guiana, much less susceptible to problems of overpopulation and unemployment than its DOM counterparts owing to its substantial size, did not contribute in any meaningful way to BUMIDOM’s population transfers. Given the dual impetus of rising unemployment in the DOMs and European labour shortages, about 5,000 workers a year arrived in the metropole in this way over the twenty-odd years of BUMIDOM’s existence. More specifically, there were 16,562 migrants from Guadeloupe, 16,580 from Martinique and 37,473 from Réunion, meaning that this last territory provided over half the total of arrivants. The agency was finally dissolved in 1981 by the new socialist government in the light of rapidly shifting labour needs and public perspectives, giving way to the ANT, or Agence nationale pour l’insertion et la promotion des travailleurs d’Outre Mer, created in 1983. This nascent community faced a number of challenges, not least among them the adjustment to being an ethnic minority for the first time. Such groups are forced to oscillate between belonging and otherness, undermining France’s cultural paradigm of assimilation and its corollary of conformity: ‘Assimilation has been promised to immigrants’, as David Beriss writes, ‘at the price of abandoning public attachment to their cultures of origin’ (2004: xviii). Ironically, however, it would be their cultural and linguistic difference that these Caribbean departmental migrants would use to assert their cultural distinctiveness, construct Caribbean community groups on the mainland and expose

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the implicit limitations of the racialized French ideal of assimilation, as Beriss continues: ‘As French citizens, Antilleans are cultural insiders, but as dark-skinned postcolonials, they are visibly marked as outsiders’ (2004, xviii). As part and parcel of this process, the experience of many Antillais confirmed Edouard Glissant’s dictum that it is in metropolitan France that many Antilleans confront their antillanité for the first time. Thus their recognition of racialized exclusion emerges here in response to metropolitan challenges of acceptance and integration that are unique in a number of ways, as Beriss points out: ‘In France […] they were challenged to invent an Antillean identity that had never existed in the islands […] to be recognized as culturally distinct, Antilleans used art, social policy, and religion to shape their identity in ways recognizably French in form but Caribbean in substance’ (2004: 21). These acts of contestation highlight one of the key paradoxes of this French Caribbean nexus of departmentalism and citizenship, which is their subjection to an ironic and reductionist pattern of stereotyping as outsiders; it is this perception of marginalization that their valorization of their language and culture is meant to overturn. Generally speaking, then, most analyses of the impact of BUMIDOM concentrate on the demographic impact of its movement of peoples, both within the hexagon and in the DOMs themselves. For example, the DOMs have now become, by one account, the departments with the most advanced average age in France. By the same token, the shape and substance of the ethnic and cultural makeup of France have been drastically transformed over the more than fifty years since BUMIDOM’s inauguration. One result, as I have pointed out elsewhere, was that as these French Caribbean migrant citizens were stereotyped and excluded, increasingly stigmatized in and through their ‘otherness’, they also sought refuge in familiarity. The resulting concentrations of these arrivants on the large public housing estates in the northern and eastern suburbs – Aulnay-sous-Bois, Maisons-Alfort, Garges-les-Gonesse – meant that, in fairly short order, the ethnic and numerical majorities of the French Caribbean islands were re-created in microcosmic communities across the metropolitan landscape, their specific cultural patterns and practices – speech, food, music – slowly but inexorably (re)creolizing – in Édouard Glissant’s geopolitical use of the term – their immediate surroundings as well as the cultural patterns of the metropole at large. (2012: 61–62)

The presence of this multivalent domien diaspora now constitutes over 1  per cent of the total French population and is rapidly transforming

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the cultural and ethnographic makeup of the mainland through the ever-increasing penetration of West Indian-orientated literature, music, radio stations, food, restaurants and films into mainstream French culture. But while BUMIDOM’s effects in the areas of demography and labour are well known, it is only relatively recently that what is perhaps the most scandalous episode in its history has come to light (Marchal, 2016; also see Vergès in this volume).When Michel Debré, the primary sponsor of BUMIDOM, lost his post of prime minister in 1962, he moved to Réunion in April of 1963 and was elected député for Saint-Denis in May of that same year, a position which he held until 1988. As part of the economic policy that he proceeded to implement, itself predicated on planting and spreading the notion that the Réunionnais were principally responsible for the underdevelopment of their island by having too many children, 1,630 children from Réunion were relocated to France, and to the departments of the Creuse and the Tarn in particular, between 1968 and 1982. The purported goal of this population transfer – undertaken under the direct aegis of BUMIDOM – was to alleviate overpopulation and unemployment (at the time hovering around 40  per cent in Réunion) in the periphery, while shoring up an area of France suffering from declining population. Their parents were forced to give up all rights to these children – known today as les enfants de la Creuse – who were named wards of the state and placed in households, put up for adoption, placed in convents or simply hired out as labour across sixty departments (Sabado, 2013). Anny-Dominique Curtius succinctly explains the rationale undergirding his thinking: il faut souligner que l’objectif de Debré via le BUMIDOM est de fournir une main-d’œuvre bon marché à l’économie française, d’enrayer les crises sociales aux Antilles et à la Réunion et d’étouffer les révoltes politiques […] Il faut souligner que pour Debré les Antilles, la Guyane et la Réunion sont la France, et de ce fait, la distance géographique, les spécificités culturelles et ethniques ne doivent en aucun cas créer un écart entre la République et ses colonies. À cet égard, on lui reproche d’avoir voulu étouffer la culture réunionnaise, notamment le maloya, qui constituait selon lui un espace culturel dangereux apte à susciter des sympathies indépendantistes. (2010: 139–40) [It is important to stress that Debré’s aim, with the BUMIDOM, was to provide cheap labour for the French economy, to stem social crisis in the Caribbean and Reunion Island, and to stifle political revolts […] For Debré, the Caribbean, French Guiana and Reunion are part of France and, consequently, geographical distance, cultural and ethnic differences

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should never create a gap between the Republic and its colonies. He was therefore accused of having attempted to stifle Reunionese culture, maloya in particular, which constituted, according to him, a dangerous cultural space that could foster independentist tendencies.]

This sordid affair remained secret for decades across varied and numerous French administrations, but was finally made public in 2002 when one of these children, Jean-Jacques Martial – placed in Creuse in 1966 – sued Debré in court for kidnapping and deportation. In the event, all claims for reparations were denied, as the transfer of the children was deemed to be legal at the time that it occurred. However, a bronze statue commemorating this searing series of events was commissioned and dedicated at Réunion’s Roland-Garros airport on 22 November 2013. Once these domiens arrived in France, low-skilled job opportunities were the norm, with domestic maid service dominating for females and factory and construction jobs and military training for males. BUMIDOM even drew up a labour contract that essentially prohibited workers from leaving jobs assigned to them for one year, while securing decent lodgings proved to be a challenge largely left to the migrants themselves. The other striking ‘BUMIDOM effect’, then, was the extent to which the agency steered these new arrivants into specific, indeed, stereotypical job categories. Overall, the primary emphasis was clearly on the types of labour for which blacks were deemed to be best suited. Felix Germain has explained how women in particular were made subject to this practice: for the most part the BUMIDOM officials guided the migrants toward potential jobs, and as a general rule they believed that domestic labor was most appropriate for the Antillaises. Claiming that the Parisian domestic industry was in ‘crisis’, the BUMIDOM argued that Antillean women could perfectly substitute for the Portuguese and Spanish women increasingly deserting these low-wage positions  … Thus, acting as a placement agency, the BUMIDOM screened the women to place them in French households seeking live-in domestics. (2010: 481)

It is not difficult to discern here the ways in which BUMIDOM’s channelling of these female workers into the domestic sphere echoed and retraced the negative historicity to which blacks had long been subjected. As Germain continues: While offering a ‘good and stable’ job with a housing bonus seemed like a great idea to the BUMIDOM officials, for Antillean women, it was a

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setback. The women equated migration with social uplift, intending to stay away from this type of work, which their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts had often performed for the islands’ privileged mulattoes and békés (white Creoles). (2010: 483)

At bottom, however, state insistence on this practice speaks eloquently to the extent to which the racialized views and stereotypes of the colonial era persisted and maintained this vision of the formerly colonized, despite the advent of departmentalization. Now the immediate goal of BUMIDOM’s settlement policy was that young Caribbean men and women should settle permanently throughout the hexagon, even going so far as to dissuade them in writing from attempting to move to Paris, but the myriad attractions of the capital and its environs proved well-nigh irresistible for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the expanding labour market and a relative relief from provincial racism. The steering of Caribbean migrants, particularly women, toward state-sponsored nursing work – a relatively large number of hospitals had been constructed in the 1960s and 1970s – and domestic service was cemented and confirmed by the establishment of a professional school for Caribbean women migrants, in March 1965, in the village of Crouy-sur-Ourcq, about two hours from Paris. Indeed, the overwhelming role played by Caribbean women in this population transfer should be neither downplayed nor underestimated; Alain Anselin has rightly emphasized ‘l’importance de l’émigration féminine dans la diaspora: sans elle, la communauté antillaise en France n’aurait jamais existé. Il n’y aurait pas eu de troisième île’ [[the importance of female emigration in the diaspora: without it, the Caribbean community in France would never have existed. There would have been no third island] (1990: 13). At the same time, however, many of those who chose to go to France ultimately bemoaned the menial, service-orientated jobs into which they were steered, often with no apparent choice in the matter. Germain explains: The school was established in Crouy- sur- Ourcq, a small village located two hours from Paris […] The workload was also challenging. Emphasizing discipline, the academic program at Crouy-sur-Ourcq sought to create the perfect domestics […] The women attended cooking and cleaning classes, as well as classes on l’entretien du linge. They learned bed-making techniques and different ways to wash, iron, and sew clothes. They also learned the service de table, consisting of arranging tableware with each of the four-course meals served daily, and they memorized an extensive list of wine, cheese, and desserts, which confirms

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that the school catered to middle- and upper-class French families that performed these rituals religiously. (2010: 483–84)

To sum up, then, the inherent strictures of these domestic arrangements not only reinserted them into a domestic framework of service from which they had been trying to escape, it reinforced the difference and exclusion that had become the lot of the domien(ne)s in France. Finally, in an important development, Antoine Léonard-Maestrati and Michel Reinette, a metropolitan director and a Guadeloupean journalist, collaborated to produce the ground-breaking documentary L’Avenir est ailleurs on BUMIDOM and its aftermath in 2007. Curtius sums up its accomplishments: L’Avenir est ailleurs donne aussi la parole à plusieurs générations d’Antillais qui ont été pétris par le BUMIDOM, celle des Antillais qui sont partis travailler en France, puis celle de leurs enfants nés aux Antilles avant le départ des parents pour la France, [et] enfants […] d’une autre génération […] nés en France et souvent affublés de lourdes étiquettes fort significatives telles que négropolitains ou negzagonaux. Si ces termes semblent évoquer une certaine coalescence entre communautés antillaises et métropolitaines, ils semblent aussi suggérer un dénigrement des communautés du BUMIDOM […] Le documentaire décrypte les malaises qui découlent de ces déplacements et des problématiques identitaires qu’ils génèrent. La perception de soi, la mise en scène de soi, le silence, l’invisibilité, la visibilité, la honte, l’injustice, mais aussi l’opportunité, l’épanouissement personnel et professionnel, la construction d’un avenir sont les divers positionnements qui jaillissent constamment de ces témoignages. (2010: 136, 143) [L’Avenir est ailleurs (The Future is Elsewhere) gives a chance for several generations of Caribbean people impacted by the BUMIDOM to speak, that of those who left to go and work in France, then that of the children born in the Caribbean before their parents left for France, and the children of another generation who were born in France and are pejoratively nicknamed négropolitains or negzagonaux. These terms seem to point towards the existence of tight connections between the Caribbean and metropolitan communities, but they also suggest that the communities formed by the BUMIDOM are poorly perceived. The documentary deciphers the tensions that emanate from these crossings and the identity problems they generate. Self-perception, staging of one’s self, silence, invisibility, visibility, shame, injustice, but also opportunity, personal and professional development, the construction of a future are the different themes that keep coming back in these testimonies.]

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In sum, then, the trajectory from the implicit egalitarianisms of the departmental statutes of 1946, through the myriad effects in both centre and periphery of state-run agencies such as ONI and BUMIDOM in the 1950s and 1960s, to the patterns and practices of marginalization and exclusion that have led to the number of activist cultural associations that now dot the Franco-Antillean metropolitan landscape betrays a telling pattern of racialized ostracism that is clearly at odds with the French principle of intégration. In a key way, this diasporic assertion of Antilleans’ cultural distinctiveness and difference is an insistence on the promise of egalitarian acceptance that France makes to its varied subjects. In other words, it is the active contestation of this outsider status that exposes France’s continued immigration restrictions and its narrowing of the criteria of nationness. Works Cited Anselin, Alain. 1990. L’émigration antillaise en France: La troisième Ile. Paris: Karthala. — 1995. ‘West Indians in France’. In French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana Today, edited by Richard D.E. Burton and Fred Reno, 112–18. London: Macmillan Caribbean. Beriss, David. 2004. Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Condon, Stephanie A., and Philip E.  Ogden. 1991. ‘Emigration from the French Caribbean: The Origins of an Organized Migration’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 15, no. 4 (December): 505–23. Curtius, Anny-Dominique. 2010. ‘Utopies du BUMIDOM: Construire l’avenir dans un “là-bas” postcontact’. French Forum 35, nos 2–3 (Spring/Fall): 135–55. Germain, Felix. 2010. ‘Jezebels and Victims: Antillean Women in Postwar France, 1946–1974’. French Historical Studies 33, no. 3 (Summer): 475–95. Léonard-Maestrati, Antoine. 2007. L’Avenir est ailleurs. Cinéma Public Films. Marchal, Manuel. 2016. ‘Enfants de la Creuse: faisons toute la lumière sur la page la plus horrible du BUMIDOM’. Témoignages, 19 February. https://www. temoignages.re/social/droits-humains/enfants-de-la-creuse-faisonstoute-la-lumiere-sur-la-page-la-plus-horrible-du-bumidom,85470. Marie, Claude-Valentin. 2002. ‘Les Antillais en France: une nouvelle donne’. Revue Hommes et Migrations 1237 (May–June): 26–39.

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Murdoch, H. Adlai. 2012. Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nora, Pierre. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’. Representations, Special issue Memory and Counter-Memory, 26 (Spring): 7–24. Public-histoire. http://www.public-histoire.com/Livre-47. Sabado, Elsa. 2013. ‘Quand Debré envoyait des enfants réunionnais dans la Creuse repeupler la France: le cinquantenaire oublié’. Slate.fr, 17 December 2013. http://www.slate.fr/story/81217/pupilles-reunion-creuse.

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Les Sans-papiers Dominic Thomas Les Sans-papiers

The history of immigration in France is tremendously complex and multifaceted, while being further complicated by the legacy of French colonial expansion. This history partially explains the existence today of French Overseas Collectivities, Departments and Regions in such disparate regions of the world as the Caribbean, South America, Indian and Pacific Oceans. As such, it is worth reminding ourselves that the word ‘immigration’, in French at least, pertains simultaneously to the migratory process and to the post-migratory experience as it relates to integration, ethnicity, race and multiculturalism. Indeed, as Étienne Balibar has convincingly illustrated, this ‘capacity to lump together all the dimensions of “social pathology” as effects of a single cause, which is defined with the aid of a series of signifiers derived from race or its more recent equivalents’ (1991: 220) was deployed with equal effectiveness during the colonial period as it was in postcolonial France during the 1990s with what became known as the ‘affaire des sans-papiers’ (Thomas, 2013). Control and selection have been implicit dimensions of this dynamic, shaping and defining the parameters of national identity over centuries. Already, under Napoleon Bonaparte, Blacks were ‘undesirable in the metropole’ (Noël, 2006); in the early 1930s and in the aftermath of the Second World War ‘chosen immigration’ and ‘undesirables’ were summoned to address race-based selection (Noiriel, 2007; Blanchard et al., 2011); a Ministry of Immigration, National Identity, Integration and Co-Development was established in 2007 to tackle these and related matters; and more recently the global migration crisis and terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere have foregrounded these questions while also raising suspicion when it comes to determining the adherence of ethnic minorities and binationals (dual citizens) to Republican ideals and values.

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Lawrence Kritzman has described Pierre Nora’s seven-volume Les Lieux de mémoire as ‘the result of an imaginary process that codifies and condenses a national consciousness of the past’ (1995: 13). However, the tenuous relationship between a reductive model of identity construction and the more expansive collective memory associated with populations for whom memory is also elsewhere remains very much relevant (Thomas, 2007; Blanchard, Bancel and Thomas, 2016). French anthropologist Marc Augé, examining the question of ‘transience’ and memory, wrote that ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (2009: 77). The sans-papiers thus compel us to reckon with a range of cultural, political and sociological elements that individually and collectively contribute to the process of defining a lieu de mémoire, a space very much inscribed in collective memory. This was overwhelmingly confirmed by statements made on the 20th anniversary (23 August 2016) of the police raid on the Saint-Bernard church, such as Aurélie Rossignol’s description of how ‘the moment of shock remains forever engraved in everyone’s memory’ (2016). One’s juridical status in France, and therefore also the European Union – that is, whether or not one is the bearer of legal papers, (un)documented and/or (il)legal – is therefore at the heart of the discussion and to be included in a much longer historical framework. Suffice it to say that ‘from the point at which French immigration policies became more restrictive, they generated irregular entries by foreigners’ (Van Eeckhout, 2007: 44). What distinguishes the sans-papiers, then, is the fact that either because applications for legal residency were subsequently turned down or because they had initially entered the territory through legal channels (work permits or tourist visas) only to see their documents expire or fail to be renewed (Aprile and Dufoix, 2009), ‘Foreigners [have found] themselves in irregular situations’ and categorized as ‘clandestine’, when in reality, as Laetitia Van Eeckhout has argued, ‘Only those that have no administrative track-record fit into that category’ (2007: 45). The sans-papiers context in France is thus multidimensional, connected with work permit requirements and legislation, deportation and expulsion mechanisms, legalization or regularization measures, racial advocacy and solidarity movements, trade union organizations and activism, as well as shifting policy goals, some of which have even impacted labour flows between France and its overseas departments

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and territories (for example, the BUMIDOM initiatives; see Murdoch in this volume). Together, these factors have yielded often unforeseen consequences, such as the new round of Pasqua Laws in 1993 that introduced changes to existing nationality laws and the terms of residency permits along with burdensome administrative rules and regulations, thereby effectively creating a new category of immigrants that were ‘non régularisable, non expulsable’ (that could ‘neither be deported nor legalized’), mutually referred to as the ‘Ni-Ni’ as a way of describing their newfound precariousness (Van Eeckhout, 2007; Hargreaves, 2007). Individuals thus ended up on the wrong side of the law when in fact they had endeavoured only to attain the precise opposite. The very ‘appelation sans-papiers thus contrasts with the abundance of papers they are expected to produce in order to confirm their legal presence in France’ (Aprile and Dufoix, 2009: 342) and, as Achille Mbembe has shown, ‘This surge of legislative and repressive arrangements prevent entry into the country, of course, but each new law also renders ever more precarious the lives of foreigners who are already established in France’ (2011: 92). The fight against immigration as a fight against criminality and illegality has been a feature of government rhetoric for almost fifty years now, juxtaposed with measures geared towards promoting a chosen, controlled and selective apparatus. Closer scrutiny reveals how ‘the vast majority of laws implemented since 1974 have targeted residents that are in good standing, in such a way as to render their status unstable, to destabilize them, and render them precarious’ (Tevanian and Tissot, 2002: 82). The oil crisis and the downturn in the global economy during the 1970s prompted then-president Valérie Giscard d’Estaing to implement a ‘zero immigration’ policy, and since that time successive governments have bemoaned the nefarious influence of immigration on French society and advocated for more restrictive policies aimed at fighting against clandestine immigration (Hargreaves, 2007). The RPR-UDF right coalition’s return to power in 1986 was accompanied by a toughening of legislation that resulted in deportations and expulsions, most notably of 101 Malians on a charter flight to Bamako on 16 October 1986. These actions certainly shaped debates on citizenship during the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, leading to a questioning of France’s commitment to those key foundational values of the Republic at precisely the moment when these were being celebrated. The sans-papiers are thus stigmatized in two (at least) significant ways: firstly because of their irregular status, and secondly because of their undesirability

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on French territory (Chemillier-Gendreau, 1998). These circumstances cannot be easily explained or reduced to a mere question of law, and the coalescence of multiple factors has therefore complicated debates on belonging and identity. Perceived as a menace, immigrants and outsiders ‘are in fact treated as enemies because they have the temerity to invade our national space. It is in fact typical of wartime legislation to intern, expel, or deprive “enemies of the state” of their civil rights’ (Dal Lago, 2009: 57). The authorities must be seen to be reactive and responsive; the logical outcome of this tautology of fear has therefore culminated in what Alexis Spire describes as ‘politicizing the repression of illegal immigration, and transforming a bureaucratic practice into a political objective’ (2008: 91). ‘When it comes to immigration control’, he goes on to demonstrate, ‘the opposition between the “us” and the “them” is strengthened by the sentiment that it embodies the State and its authority before those suspected of threatening its integrity’ (Spire, 2008: 47). In fact, ‘[i]t took the sans-papiers movement for some in the press […] to reform their vocabulary’ (Tevanian and Tissot, 2002: 81), coupled as it was to ‘illicit activities’ (Tevanian and Tissot, 2002: 82) and to a ‘production of illegality aimed at political manipulation’ (Balibar, 2002: 24). The sans-papiers crisis of 1996 was thus a turning point in the history of governmental responses to such matters, a critical conjuncture in the history of immigration in which mass media coverage and documentation of events compelled the general public to ‘regard the pain of others’ (Sontag, 2003), capturing their attention and imagination in the process, while simultaneously subjecting the disquieting representation in official discourse of the sans-papiers to greater scrutiny (Hessel, 1996; Fassin, Morice and Quiminal, 2007; Blin, 2010).1 Several hundred African sans-papiers – mostly from Mali, Mauritania and Senegal – had sought refuge in the Saint-Ambroise church in Paris’ 11th arrondissement on 18 March 1996 while awaiting a decision on their petition for amnesty and legalization. They drew considerable public attention in so doing, subsequently moving on 28 June to occupy the Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle church in the 18th. This site was then stormed by 1,505 heavily armed police officers from different divisions on 23 August 1996, resulting in 220 arrests, of which 210 were actual 1 Several comprehensive websites have been devoted to the history of the sans-papiers in France. See http://www.bok.net/pajol/index2.html and http:// www.noborder.org/without/france.html.

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sans-papiers and were taken to a detention centre in Vincennes. This triggered deportations and case-by-case reviews for amnesty, but above all served to bring tremendous public attention to the plight of this global migrant underclass. Responding to growing public pressure, scrutiny and calls for greater accountability, the government expanded the eligibility criteria for residency and employment in order to include the parents of children born in France, the spouses of French citizens or of residents in possession of legal papers, for health reasons and so forth. In the end, very few sans-papiers were actually deported. Because the process of accounting for and categorizing foreigners and immigrants remains so complex, the final figures remain uncertain, but an estimated one-third were regularized and another 6  per cent deported (Blin, 2010: 110). Nevertheless, the situation remained ambiguous: there was strong sympathy for the sans-papiers but also widespread support for government policies intended to encourage legal paths to immigration and enhance control procedures. But the police raid had provoked outrage and people stopped to find out more about the individuals concerned and attempted to improve their understanding of the specific claims and aspirations that were being made (Diop, 1997; Goussault, 1999; Cissé, 1999) in order to better comprehend how they had found themselves in these circumstances and what explained the motivations of the authorities at this historical moment (Siméant, 1998; Blin, 2005). The French Republic enjoys a further particularity enshrined in the first constitution of 1791, according to which one finds the commitment to protecting the rights of all citizens regardless of ethnicity, religion or other social associations. The sans-papiers challenged this paradigm, much in the same way that the urban riots and uprisings of 2005 would do, by making a calculated decision to relinquish invisibility. Looking back on the events of 1996, one of the figureheads of the sans-papiers movement, Madjiguène Cissé, reaffirmed this very connection and how such a decision threatened foundational notions of indivisibility, declaring that ‘[t]he Republic wanted to flex its muscles, and it did just that’ (Ndiaye and Lepidi, 2016). As Pierre Tevanian and Sylvie Tissot have pointed out, ‘the clandestine is, in principle at least, s/he who hides’ (Tevanian and Tissot, 2002: 81), but the sans-papiers had elected to behave in a manner contrary to expectations, deliberately entering the public domain in order to shed light on their conditions. As Mireille Rosello has highlighted, developments thus operated against the logic of legal invisibility, and the sans-papiers ‘were deliberately fighting the myth of their clandestinity, because they opted for full visibility,

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they also gave up on the illusory freedom conferred upon individuals by the anonymity of huge cities’ (Rosello, 2001: 149–50). The shelter they had sought in Parisian churches and their violent police evacuation provided the impetus for social mobilization, raising awareness in the process and yielding various initiatives such as the establishment on 9 April 1996 of a Collège des médiateurs made up of various well-known personalities (intellectuals, lawyers, scholars, human rights activists and so on) committed to fostering dialogue between the sans-papiers and the authorities. The sans-papiers themselves were also pro-active, publishing the manifesto ‘55,000 noms contre la loi Debré’ (55,000 names against the Debré Law) in Libération on 25 February 1997, in which they wrote: ‘For the most part, we entered French territory legally. We were arbitrarily cast into illegality by the shoring up of successive laws that made it possible for the prefectures to turn down our applications to renew our residency papers and implement additional restrictions to our right of asylum.’ Recourse to the homophone ‘noms’ (names), which sounds like the plural of the French negation ‘non’, constituted a symbolic and collective rejection of the repressive policies. Faced with these new pressures, the sans-papiers renounced a passive positionality, opting to ‘come out of the shadows’, and instead adopted an increasingly vocal mode in order to formulate their demand for employment, social and political rights. Emerging in this way from the dubious safety of legal invisibility, claims were made for more direct public representation and ultimately for regularization, while popular misconceptions and stereotypes concerning their presence and role in French society were countered and attention brought to the legal work they performed, often under the aegis of exploitative or restrictive arrangements contrary to democratic principles and values (Thomas, 2013: 82). The sans-papiers movement is inspired by a shared memory of resistance and political representation, and many points of commonality can be identified with other collective struggles and memorial practices. Many of these (stelae, memorial sites, museums and so forth) are concerned with regaining ideological territory, and postcolonial France has been witness to numerous such ventures (slavery, Algeria, the pieds-noirs, veterans, colonialism), all of which are central to understanding the mechanics of the lieu de mémoire (Bancel and Blanchard, 2016). The unusual nature of the movement, bringing together individuals at odds with a range of administrative instruments that included expired papers, inadequate justification for family reunification, inability to obtain an employment visa and restricted access to

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citizenship or residency, also meant that their cause did not correspond entirely to the concern or focus of racial advocacy organizations or similar entities, such that the catalyst or impetus for mobilization was also to be found in their specific situation, thereby motivating their decision to embrace spokespersons from their own ranks, most notably the Senegalese Ababacar Diop and Madjiguène Cissé. To this end, the sans-papiers launched a series of actions, notably the sans-papières March of the Women on 11 May 1996, thereby managing their fight with partial autonomy, albeit with assistance and support from other groups. Their actions in the closing years of the twentieth century thus culminated in a movement that has become indelibly imprinted on collective memory: an important chapter in the history of activism, while also providing important insights on the perilous relationship between history and memory in France. This was strikingly apparent in the range of commemorative events planned by such organizations as the Union nationale des sans-papiers (UNSP) on the 20th anniversary of the 1996 dramatic police raids. There exists therefore a constant tension between implementing measures aimed at controlling, choosing and selecting immigrants and coordinating such measures in a broader European Union context (Valluy, 2010). The EU may well be founded on the principle that it is ‘a family of democratic European countries’, but evidence increasingly points to the uneven application of democratic principles. One could even speak of a democratic deficit. Likewise, it would appear that those attempts that have been made to promote a sense of shared European identity have, for the most part, been undertaken through recourse to exclusionary mechanisms that have fastened on the non-Europeanness and incompatibility of migrants and refugees with so-called European values (Thomas, 2013). Thus, while French minister Manuel Valls may, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, have alluded to the existence of a ‘territorial, social, and ethnic apartheid’ in France, the EU, rather than broadening the parameters of identity and citizenship, have in fact relied on a renationalization of space, reintroducing considerable ambiguity around notions of race, citizenship and residency, ‘new forms of discrimination’ that are ‘specifically European’ (Balibar, 1999: 108). By extension, because of the imperative to protect the national territory from unwanted invasions and influences, European leaders have promoted greater alignment between national and EU policies. The most convincing example of this is to be found in the French-sponsored 2008 European Pact on Immigration and Asylum, which was designed to

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strengthen a coordinated and harmonized immigration policy (Thomas, 2014). As Serhat Karakayali and Enrica Rigo have shown, [i]f we consider the proliferation of […] camps at the borders of Europe. Rather than stopping the circulation of mobility, detention camps for migrants reinsert a socially commensurable time in the migrants’ movements. They bring ‘illegal’ and clandestine migration back into society by making it visible and compatible with a broad regime of temporal control. (2010: 133)

In fact, as I have argued previously, ‘[a]bundant evidence points to growing insensitivity to migrants, resulting in dehumanization and labeling as economic burdens (immediately scapegoated during downturns in the global economy), factors that have made it easier to expel them and to dissociate such harsh measures from any reference to the migrants’ own experience’ (Thomas, 2013: 84). If, as Pierre Nora argued, ‘[a] lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’ (Nora, 1996: xvii), then the months of sans-papiers mobilization and hunger strikes clearly exceed the confines of a ‘non-lieu de mémoire’ in order to be inscribed in a revised French ‘memorial heritage’ in which the incorporation of shared pasts emerges as the incontrovertible precursor to a shared future. As such, ‘the occupation of the Saint-Bernard church is to be stowed away alongside other political memories’ (Blin, 2010: 109), and the experience has inspired subsequent movements (Andersson, 2014) through the example of collective action. Obvious examples are the refugee camps in Sangatte and Calais, often referred to as the ‘jungle’, located at the north-east perimeter of the Schengen zone, or new policy initiatives that have resulted in an externalization of border control infrastructure, including a range of bilateral agreements such as the EU Strategy for Security and Development, aimed at enlisting African nations in the process of stopping departures. Together, these constitute new lieux de mémoire in African, European and French history. But there have also been unexpected examples, such as the sans-papiers of Chinese heritage who have linked their grievances to the role of Chinese workers in World War I, and the Conseil pour l’intégration des communautés d’origine chinoise en France now arrange an annual rally at the Nolette cemetary in Noyelles-sur-Mer. Miscellaneous sans-papiers movements have, therefore, forced a discussion and consciousness raising, bestowing in the process a

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‘transnational dimension that had been sorely lacking and in so doing opened up the possibility of social transformation and civility in the era of globalization. […] no longer mere victims, they have become agents of political democratization’ (Balibar, 2002: 25). Unfortunately though, control and repression continue to be the order of the day, shaping immigration policy-making and setting target goals and quotas to be fulfilled through round-ups for deportations (Rodier, 2012; 2016). 2 These measures prompted a character in Faïza Guène’s 2006 novel Du rêve pour les oufs (Dreams from the Endz) to link the memory of the Shoah with immigration, stating that ‘[s]ince the decree of 2006 and its aim of expelling 25,000 people a year, it’s like there’s a smell of gas in the queue in front of the immigration office’ (2008: 43). Works Cited Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland: University of California Press. Aprile, Sylvie, and Stéphane Dufoix. 2009. Les Mots de l’immigration. Paris: Belin. Augé, Marc. 2009 [1992]. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. New York: Verso. Balibar, Étienne. 1991. ‘Racism and Crisis’. In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, 217–27. London: Verso. — 1999. ‘Le droit de cité ou l’apartheid’. In Sans-papiers: l’archaïsme fatal, Étienne Balibar, Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, Jacqueline Vosta-Lascoux and Emmanuel Terray, 89–116. Paris: La Découverte. — 2002. Droit de cité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bancel, Nicolas, and Pascal Blanchard. 2016. ‘Une impossible politique muséale pour l’histoire coloniale?’ In Vers la guerre des identités? De la fracture coloniale à la révolution ultranationale, edited by Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Dominic Thomas, 137–52. Paris: La Découverte. Blanchard, Pascal et al. 2011. La France noire. Trois siècles de présences. Paris: La Découverte. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel and Dominic Thomas, eds. 2016. Vers la guerre des identités. De la fracture coloniale à la révolution ultranationale. Paris: La Découverte.

2 See the Ministry of the Interior website for policy updates: http://www. immigration.interieur.gouv.fr.

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Blin, Thierry. 2005. Les Sans-papiers de Saint-Bernard, mouvement social et action organisée. Paris: L’Harmattan. — 2010. L’Invention des sans-papiers. Essai sur la démocratie à l’épreuve du faible. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Chemillier-Gendreau, Monique. 1998. L’Injustifiable: les politiques françaises de l’immigration. Paris: Seuil. Cissé, Madjiguène. 1999. Parole de sans-papiers. Paris: Éditions La Dispute and Sinédit. Dal Lago, Alessandro. 2009. Non-Persons: The Exclusion of Migrants in a Global Society. Translated by Marie Orton. Milan: IPOC Press. Diop, Ababacar. 1997. Dans la peau d’un sans-papiers. Paris: Seuil. Fassin, Didier, Alain Morice and Catherine Quiminal. 2007. Les Lois de l’inhospitalité. Les politiques de l’immigration à l’épreuve des sans-papiers. Paris: La Découverte. Goussault, Bénédicte. 1999. Paroles de sans-papiers. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier and Les Éditions Ouvrières. Guène, Faïza. 2008 [2006]. Dreams from the Endz. Translated by Sarah Adams. London: Chatto & Windus. Hargreaves, Alec G. 2007. Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society. New York: Routledge. Hessel, Stéphane. 1996. ‘Les sans-papiers, victimes pour l’exemple de la politique d’immigration’. Hommes et Migrations 1202: 42–46. Karakayali, Serhat, and Enrica Rigo. 2010. ‘Mapping the European Space of Circulation’. In The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, edited by Nicholas de Genova and Nathalie Peutz, 124–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kritzman, Lawrence D. 1995. ‘Identity Crises: France, Culture and the Idea of the Nation’. SubStance 76/77: 5–20. Mbembe, Achille. 2011. ‘Provincializing France?’ Translated by Janet Roitman. Public Culture 23, no. 1: 85–119. Ndiaye, Amadou, and Pierre Lepidi. 2016. ‘Les sans-papiers de Saint-Bernard, vingt ans après’. Le Monde, 22 August 2016. Noël, Érick. 2006. Être Noir en France au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Tallandier. Noiriel, Gérard. 2007. Immigrations, antisémitisme et racisme en France (XIXe–XXe siècles). Paris: Fayard. Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds. 1996–98 [1984–92]. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. Rodier, Claire. 2012. Xénophobie Business: À quoi servent les contrôles migratoires? Paris: La Découverte. — 2016. Migrants & Réfugiés. Réponses aux indécits, aux inquites et aux réticents. Paris: La Découverte.

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Rosello, Mireille. 2001. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rossignol, Aurélie. 2016. ‘Dans le rétro. Il y a 20 ans, l’expulsion des sans-papiers de l’église Saint-Bernard’. Le Parisien, 23 August 2016. Siméant, Johanna. 1998. La Cause des sans-papiers. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spire, Alexis. 2008. Accueillir ou reconduire. Enquête sur les guichets de l’immigration. Paris: Éditions Raison d’Agir. Tevanian, Pierre, and Sylvie Tissot. 2002. Dictionnaire de la lepénisation des esprits. Paris: L’Esprit frappeur. Thomas, Dominic. 2007. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and Transnationalism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. — 2013. Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration and Racism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. — 2014. ‘Fortress Europe: Identity, race and surveillance’. In Race, Violence, and Biopolitics, edited by Allessandro Corio and Louise Hardwick; International Journal of Francophone Studies 17, nos 3–4: 445–68. Valluy, Jérôme. 2010. ‘L’exportation de la xénophobie de gouvernement. De la politique européenne des frontières à la répression dans les pays limitrophes’. In Les Nouvelles Frontières de la société française, edited by Didier and Éric Fassin, 175–96. Paris: La Découverte. Van Eeckhout, Laetitia. 2007. L’Immigration. Paris: Odile Jacob and La Documentation Française.

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Bodies

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Colonial Exhibitions Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard Translated from the French by Andrea Lloyd Colonial Exhibitions

Colonization profoundly transformed French society during the entire colonial period (beginning in the sixteenth century), but above all from the mid-nineteenth century (1848) up to the independence of Indochina in 1954, Algeria in 1962 and Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar in 1960. In the twenty-first century the ‘old colonies’ of the Antilles, French Guiana, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Mayotte, Reunion and numerous other territories across the four oceans have remained key to its territorial identity. During these decades of colonization France constructed, alongside not only other European nations but also the United States and Japan, a veritable colonial culture (Blanchard, Bancel, Lemaire and Thomas, 2014 [2008]): official propaganda and literature, ethnic spectacles and human zoos, cabarets and theatrical representations, plays and comic strips, colonial exhibitions and World’s Fairs with colonial pavilions were all instruments that profoundly shaped the culture and systems of representation surrounding the colonies and the colonized. We are interested, in this essay, in a specific instrument that extends from the beginning of modern colonization to the interwar period: colonial exhibitions and their precursors, the colonial pavilions in the great World’s Fairs. These exhibitions, which impacted on tens of millions of visitors, were major vectors for the dissemination, via colonial propaganda, of the ‘colonial idea’ and representations of the colonies and the colonized, notably from 1870 to the outbreak of World War II. The question is whether – and to what degree – we can consider these exhibitions to be ‘sites of memory’ as opposed to simple peripheral and

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ephemeral products of the popular culture of the time. In a well-known article published over thirty years ago, Charles-Robert Ageron refuted this idea, considering (and echoing Pierre Nora, creator of the eponymous work on sites of memory) that the 1931 exhibition did not merit this definition (Ageron, 1984). In his 2017 Histoire mondiale de la France, which covers 146 events, Patrick Boucheron dedicates only one article (by Pascale Barthélémy) to the colonial exhibitions and to the great ethnographic or imperial stagings, as well as to the 1931 exhibition, in which the author does not explicitly address the question of its nature as a ‘site of memory’ or as a ‘major moment’ in France’s collective narrative of its relation to world history. Tellingly, in these two key collections published over thirty years apart, not a single article discusses the major phenomena of the human zoos or colonial pavilions in the World’s Fairs, probably considered to be minor and peripheral parentheses of colonial racism. Nor are there any articles that evoke the great colonial exhibition outside Paris, such as the first in Lyon in 1894, or the salons of overseas France of 1935 and 1940 in Paris, or those of Marseille, Bordeaux or elsewhere (as if only the capital counted), nor, finally, is there any link to Christophe Charles’s section on the 1900 World’s Fair, published in Patrick Boucheron’s collection, which calls the colonial pavilions an ‘epiphenomenon’ of the ‘great stage-managing’ of the century. What are the reasons for such a marginalization, at the hands of authors who are so different? No doubt it is that colonial propaganda is still considered to be a secondary element of France’s political and national history. Two profoundly different historiographical approaches – directed by Pierre Nora and Patrick Boucheron – with two distinct views of national history, but with the same marginalization of the colonial fact as regards these ‘great engagements’ that for seventy-five years – from 1867 to 1944, from the Paris World’s Fair to the ‘train colonial’ [colonial train] of the Vichy regime – have nonetheless lulled the French people into an imperial illusion. This state of the sites and this observation allow for a reflection that will re-evaluate the importance and the role of these sites of memory, major ones in our eyes, as Herman Lebovics has previously suggested regarding the 1931 international colonial exhibition (1994). Let us travel back in time. The colonial exhibitions are intimately linked to the propaganda undertaken by the colonial lobby during the last third of the nineteenth century, linking in France the principal economic, military, cultural and political interests of empire: shipowners, presidents of large

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concessionary companies, owners of businesses buying and selling raw materials, senior colonial officers and ‘Empire builders’, academics versed in ‘colonial studies’ and MPs in favour of expansion. The work of this lobby was visible at the 1855 World’s Fair – but still marginal given the organizers’ focus on the Hexagon – with the creation of an exhibition of the colonies at the heart of the fair in imitation of the practices implemented by the British in their own World’s Fair of 1851. The process would continue to develop up to the Paris World’s Fair in 1878 – barely a quarter of a century later – when a colonial building was symbolically constructed to represent Algeria (the linchpin of the colonial French empire under (re)construction) adjacent to the ‘Rue des nations’ (Ageron, 1984), while different colonial territories began to take their place in the great epic narrative of the nation. The Republic, newly reborn after the defeat of 1870, moulded its image around these colonial spaces, sources of power and pride. The Republic (which, after the Second Empire, from 1852 to 1870, engaged in an active colonial politics) henceforth made the colonial narrative its own and featured its empire. From World’s Fair to World’s Fair (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900  …), colonial spaces took on greater and greater importance and constructed France as an imperial nation, frequently referring back all the way to the Crusades in order to root modern colonization in a long (almost immanent) history.1 The colonies also appeared in the great national exhibitions. After 1848 (under the Second Republic), the new departments of Algeria were invited to the National Exhibition of 1849, heralding a discourse that would reach its climax under the Second Empire and then in the Third Republic. Three years later, in 1851, approximately thirty Algerian exhibitors participated at the World’s Fair in London (Ernst, 1998). In 1855, in Paris, Algeria was placed at the heart of the colonial project of the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and its pavilion was four times larger than those of all the other colonies combined, with almost 600 exhibitors (of whom half were ‘indigenous’). The French converged with delight on the long gallery bordering the Seine (the Quai gallery), near the Carré Marigny and Avenue Montaigne, 1 This dimension can be found on one of the bas-reliefs of the Palace of the Colonies constructed for the International Colonial Exhibition in 1931: it is engraved with the date 1099 and the associated name of Godefroy de Bouillon ‘king of Jerusalem’, as though this was the starting point for this ‘thousand-year’ colonial empire.

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where the ‘colonial jewel’ of France was installed. Samples displayed were furnished by local administrations and at times by private individuals (Blanchard, Deroo, El Yazami, Fournie and Manceron, 2003; Bloch and Delort, 1980; Ory, 1982). The public found a Saharan re-enactment composed of six tents with ‘indigenous’ inhabitants. The official album claimed that visitors had a ‘legitimate sympathy for this colony or rather for this province whose inexhaustible fecundity promises such energetic supplements to the works of France  …’ (Schroeder-Gudehus and Rasmusen, 1992). By the time of the second Paris World’s Fair, in 1867, France’s imperial ambitions were much more clearly affirmed than at the 1855 Exhibition. Between a Morocco and a Tunisia anchored in the past, a marvellous and pharaonic Egypt, an Ottoman Empire seeking modernity and an Algeria on the road of ‘colonial progress’, France offered visitors a vision of a world that surrounded it … and that it desired. Eleven million visitors came to discover the exhibition, to visit the camp of camel drivers, to admire the belly dancers, to buy Algerian babouches or Indian shawls, to eat food that was as strange to them as the ‘actors’ preparing it. As for Morocco – which was not yet integrated into the French colonial empire – its section was divided along several themes and remained fairly classical, while Tunisia stood apart thanks to the architecture of Alfred Chapon, with a pavilion bordered by sculpted lions, stylized camels and soldiers carrying banners and miming a fantasia. The year 1867 remained a ‘blueprint’ for future World’s Fairs, in France and elsewhere, a sort of bid that experimented with the place of the colonial in the staging of the nation. This fair inaugurated a genre that would be a great success, notably in 1878, and that presaged productions by following generations. At that time, during the Paris World’s Fair Algeria, the pearl of the empire, was over-represented and became at once the symbol of the empire under construction and of the ‘rebuilding of France’ after the defeat of 1870. The Algerian Palace was the first colonial pavilion to be a permanent construction, while an ‘oriental gallery’ offered visitors to the Trocadero palace a landmark presentation of the arts of Islam. Its architecture, inspired by the minaret of the ancient settlement of Mansourah at Tlemcen, allowed for a veritable staging of the Moorish heritage. A visitor described the scene as picturesque, with nougat and coffee vendors transforming ‘this corner of the Trocadéro into Algerian land’. The ensemble of the North African countries impressed visitors, who came to immerse themselves in an ‘Arab city’ based on Rabat’s Casbah of Ouadaias, with its winding

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streets, bustling crowds, hookah smokers and ‘Moorish’ café (Leprun, 1986). In 1889, a new World’s Fair opened its gates to Paris on the centenary of the French Revolution. Algeria remained omnipresent, while a ‘medievalized’ Morocco had a striking debut with its Moorish café and its ‘Djurdjura’ style house, Tunisia being glorified as the new imperial territory. From this point forward, the Algeria of architects Albert Ballu and Émile Marquette also placed actors on its stage, ‘nonchalantly inhaling large lungfuls of scented smoke from the long red hose of their water pipe’ writes journalist and novelist Camille Debans. Cairo Street, born of Count Delort de Gléon’s imagination – who recreated several Cairene houses and the Kaït-Bey minaret – found success with the fair’s thirty-two million visitors. But the true evolution was the fact that all the colonial spaces were placed in the heart of the fair. Numerous ethnographic villages depicted from then on the African colonies: it was the colonial pavilions of Senegal, the Kanak, the Loangos from Angola and the Fang people of Gabon (with its nine paddlers) that attracted visitors above all (Leprun, 1989; Leprun, 1990): ‘Young and old want to go see the savages’ (L’Exposition de Paris, 1889). Moreover, alongside the four ‘black villages’, twelve tirailleurs sénégalais and ten tirailleurs malgaches, the ‘Sakalaves’ of Diego-Suarez, completed the black exhibit of the exposition. The highlight of this ‘savage spectacle’ would be the Kanak village. It regrouped inhabitants of Grande Terre Island, the Loyalty Islands and the New Hebrides, but the majority of the Kanak at the fair were presented as indigenous peoples from the Canala region of Grande Terre (the same who, during the 1878 revolution, were the ‘faithful allies’ of the French). One can see here the influence of the ethnographic exhibitions present at the Jardin d’acclimatation since 1874, which imposed from that moment onwards their ethnographic model on the official exhibitions. The official colonial propaganda was featured in the Tunisian space, which was presented from that point on as a ‘great French success’ (Tunisia was integrated into the French empire in 1881 as a protectorate). In July 1886 a committee was created to plan a palace inspired by Bardo and a tomb imitating Sidi-ben-Arouz’s Zawiya in Tunis. The exhibition guide (Les Coulisses de l’Exposition) also talks of a ‘merchant, seated, legs crossed, on his mat [who] is on the lookout for the barge’. Clearly, in 1889 (marking the centenary of the French Revolution), the colonies were heavily represented, constituting a first major site of memory, as, at this time, and in the context of this exhibition, we can

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see the fusion of the imperial idea and republican thought. The year 1889 was not neutral in terms of colonial politics, because France established its protectorate in Côte-d’Ivoire and saw its empire expand in West Africa; at the same time the École coloniale was founded in Paris, and in 1890 the Committee of French Africa and the French Colonial Union were created to promote the work of overseas France. This was thus a moment of imperial jubilation, as well as a position that made the French Republic a democracy resting on two pillars: the emancipation of white male citizens in the hexagon and the domination of the indigenous populations in the colonies. With these four World’s Fairs, colonial fever was passed on to the French people, all while being overtly linked to the writing of the ‘national story’ that the Republic elaborated in 1878, but also absorbing the spread of the colonialist discourse under the Second Empire. Between the fairs of 1889 and 1900 – the most grandiose of all the World’s Fairs – it was the turn of the provinces to claim their piece of the empire. Lyon hosted the first large Colonial Exhibition in 1894 – in an extension of those of Amsterdam in 1883 (the first true colonial fair in Europe) and the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London – where the propaganda was much better organized and systematic, notably thanks to a partnership with the Chamber of Commerce. Evidently, following the success of the colonial pavilions, Lyon developed a specific model for an exclusively colonial exhibition that predetermined a global discourse on the empire for its visitors. From this point on, the ‘matière coloniale’ [colonial matter] was heavily influenced by opinion, while these colonial sites of memory responded to a great expectation on the part of republicans, who sought to make them a central pillar of the ‘national identity’. Now, to support the colonies and colonial expansion was to be ‘fully French’; defending the colonial enterprise and the ‘civilizing mission’ was to be engaged in a ‘profoundly’ republican undertaking, as Jules Ferry argued before the French Parliament in 1885 and 1886. Lyon also upheld, in 1894, the model of the ‘negro village’, which would then spread and become a necessary staple of all colonial exhibitions. Lyon thus assembled three ‘negro villages’: the Fellatas and Aïssahouas village, a ‘Senegalese village’ and a ‘Dahomeyan village’, each composed of several families. But there was also an Annamite village with artisans and workers, revealing the racial and imperial hierarchy reproduced by the villages. The Algerian pavilion was at the centre of the imperial edifice next to the Egyptian theatre-café and the

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imposing Sidi-ben-Arous mosque, with its pink minaret, to be found at the centre of the Tunisian pavilion. An Arab restaurant with Kabyle servers, a collection of tents and a souk animated the space, along with an Algerian caravan and twenty or so actors from the Ouled-Sidi-Yaya tribe and 120 Saharans staging battle scenes, songs and belly dancing, marriages and engagements, and an inevitable kidnapping of the bride. The colonial folklore was a success and, after Lyon, Bordeaux in 1895 and Rouen in 1896 dived into the experience and organized their own colonial spaces at the heart of their major national fairs, while once again in 1900 Paris prepared itself for the largest French World’s Fair, which would see more than fifty million visitors. In 1900 Algeria was once again in the spotlight, with ‘a brilliant exhibition, so as to show the exact measure of this African country, with all its color and movement’ (as was argued in Le Figaro illustré), a phrase that was often repeated in the press. The principal façade reproduced the entrance of the mosque of Sultan Bacha in Oran, while a tall minaret, covered in ceramic tiles, was a copy of the celebrated tower of Sidi Boumediene at Tlemcen. The Morocco pavilion was erected on the Champs-de-Mars, to the right of the Eiffel Tower, and grouped together several celebrated examples of Maghrebi architecture. ‘Dahomey’ was over-represented, with a temple of sacrifices, a bush outpost, totems and an indigenous village, while the Congo factory was the only building representing the country, and the Reunion kiosk presented different tropical wood species. Moreover, there was a heavy presence of indigenous soldiers (tirailleurs sénégalais and malgaches) and civilians (fifty Malagasy, including the Tananarive government’s orchestra, Senegalese, Sudanese and artisans from Dahomey), who mingled with the visitors in the streets of the Exhibition. In a few months there would be more Africans in Paris than had ever been seen in the capital. Parallel to these World’s Fairs and the immense staging of 1900, itinerant villages and human zoos travelled throughout the French provinces and thus fixed a hierarchical image of the empire’s populations in the public eye. All of the major cities took part, modelled on Reims, whose Industrial and Commercial Exposition opened its doors on 4 June 1903 and harboured a ‘black village’, nicknamed ‘the African caravan’ and composed of 120 actors from Senegal. This included a ‘Vendor’s Panorama’ with a significant Malagasy section. Three years later the attraction was renewed at Amiens (Bergougniou, 1999), where visitors saw that these ‘primitive peoples are not yet mature enough for our

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habits and luxury utensils’, as stated by the official guide. The success was such that Marseille and Paris planned new events to promote the empire. From 1906 to 1907 four colonial exhibitions glorified the empire once again in Marseille (Blanchard and Boetsch, 2005), Amiens, Paris and, above all, Nogent in 1907: here was an unprecedented imperial staging of the French colonies. In Marseille colonial re-enactments took centre stage and set in motion a new dynamic of propaganda. In Amiens an international exhibition, beginning on 14 May 1906, included a group of Moroccans from the ‘tribe of Sidi Ahmed Moussa’. Another fair took place in the Grand Palais of Paris, also in 1906, and, following the success of this exhibition, another was proposed for the Jardin tropical of Nogent, to take place in the following year, 1907. The exhibitions followed one after another until that of Lyon in 1914, each time presenting the colonies in North Africa, notably in Nancy in 1909 or Roubaix in 1911, alongside the colonial villages in the exhibitions of Toulouse, Angers and Orleans. The colonies were given an exceptional amount of space for a provincial exhibition at the World’s Fair in Roubaix, in the north of France. Yet it was the last great exhibition of Lyon, opened on 22 May 1914, that would most influence the public on the eve of World War I. This last colonial spectacle would not close its doors until the outbreak of the war (Bancel, Bencharif and Blanchard, 2007). For nearly two decades, from 1894 to 1914, nearly all of France was privy to this stage-management of the colonies and of the alterity of their indigenous peoples. Over the course of these same decades, the colonial and world exhibitions, like those of the provinces, were not the only sites to represent colonial universes. Indeed, at the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation in Paris the ethnographic exhibitions also featured colonized peoples and the empire (Gala, 1980), as was the case in more than fifty French towns from 1874 to 1914. This double dynamic, between the official and the private troupes, imbued the French everyday with traces of the distant colonial. In the light of these many examples, one can measure the impact of the colonial lobby as it asserted and structured itself from 1885 to 1905, in relation to and with the support of local governments, chambers of commerce, colonial institutes and different associations created around the Parti colonial. However, at this time, state support and a clear political orientation were still lacking. It was in 1889 – on the eve of the 1900 World’s Fair – that a rupture would occur, with the creation of the

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Colonial Office, which reported directly to the Ministry of the Colonies and was in charge – among other things – of colonial propaganda in France. Propaganda was thus institutionalized and progressively became a state propaganda. Henceforth, the work would take place on multiple fronts, but the universal, international and colonial exhibitions remained the essential vector for the transmission of the ‘colonial idea’ (Girardet, 1990 [1972]), because it was there that a great number of French people would come into contact with reproductions of the colonies and their native populations. In 1906 a National Committee for Colonial Exhibitions was created, which would intervene in all exhibitions – colonial or with a colonial section; French or foreign (for French colonial pavilions) – allowing for the tracking and control of the political message of successive presentations of the empire. The Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906 was the first large fair implicated in this control and policing of colonial propaganda. This fair largely reused the model of Lyon in 1894, while nonetheless seeking to assert more effectively the actions of France in its empire. Jules Charles-Roux, pillar of the colonial lobby – and previously the organizer of the colonial section of the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, in which twenty-five colonial pavilions were placed across six hectares of land – was the chief commissioner. This exhibition was a clear sign of a structural evolution in colonial-themed events. The fair, organized by the National Committee of Colonial Exhibitions, was supported by the municipality, the General Council, the Colonial Office and the Chamber of Commerce (Morando, 2004). All the French colonies had a pavilion – but the ‘old colonies’ were placed in the background – and, at the Palace of Exports, the progress of colonization as well as the exploited or exploitable economic resources of each territory were explicitly highlighted with a great number of brochures, maps and explanatory diagrams (Zimmermann, 1906). The link between economy, geography, raw materials and entertaining ethnographic presentations is evident. Furthermore, the propagandist mission of the fair cannot be understood without taking into consideration the many exoticist features designed to attract the public: the (fantasy) replica of an African ‘Tata’ house, described by the official brochure as being typical of the dwellings of ‘black kings’ (Guide officiel de l’Exposition Coloniale de Marseille, 1906), the reproduction of a ‘negro village’ modelled on the 1894 Lyon exhibition, the ‘Sudanese farm’ housing ‘natives’ and various animals, Indochinese pagodas or the Siamese theatre, and, the highlight of the

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exhibition, a replica of the temple of Angkor Wat. It was an empire in miniature. As in 1894, visitors could eat in colonial restaurants, attend concerts of Annamite or Maghrebi music or watch several shows by Cambodian dancers, ‘African sorcerers’ or a ‘dragon parade’ (Morando, 2004). Here, too, one must read such an exhibition as a national site of memory, as an instant where a page that would become essential to the ‘national story’ was written. Yet historians seem disarmed in the face of what seems to be the repetition of similar mechanisms: they interpret the succession of these exhibitions as simple reiterations, yet each of them was unique and constructed an element of collective identity. The Marseille fair rests structurally on two axes that are intimately linked to the formation of an imperial ideology: the spread of the colonial message – the latter was based on the legitimacy of the civilizing mission and promoted the economic and personal opportunities offered by the empire – and the fascination for exoticism, which one can assume was the ‘consumer appeal’ that allowed for the spread of propaganda messages. Undoubtedly, what arose was a form of colonial entertainment largely inspired in itself by a binary structure – learning and amusement – that was developed by the World’s Fairs. Here, as well, Marseille can be understood as a veritable site of memory for colonial history, but also for the history of the French nation. Immediately following Marseille, in 1907, the Nogent-sur-Marne fair would reach a new stage in the elaboration of a colonial propaganda. The colonial garden of Nogent was initially created in 1899 to experiment with the economic possibilities of colonial plantations and to compile an inventory of colonial agricultural resources. The first exhibition organized in Nogent, in 1905, had been designed to display these resources, divided according to a utilitarian typology of fauna, flora, farm products and agricultural wealth, but it was a dismal failure. The organizers learned from their mistakes, and reworked the organization following the example of Marseille’s 1906 fair. A new exhibition was planned for 1907 in Nogent. It borrowed the model of the Lyon Exhibition (of 1894) and the mechanisms of Marseille (1906): the different colonial pavilions informed the public about the progress attained through colonization – administrative management, infrastructures, hygiene and so on – and about colonial resources, both natural – tropical plants and agriculture, raw materials, industry – and human – with vast ‘ethnographic’ descriptions of the different populations of the empire. As in Lyon, the seductive appeal of the exhibition rested

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on exoticism: visitors were encouraged to explore several ‘indigenous villages’ (with a fabricated rice paddy in the Cambodian village), watch fights between the ‘terrible Touaregs’ riding their camels, or visit full-scale pagodas, without forgetting the now indispensable exotic restaurants. The Republic visibly integrated itself into the symbolism of the fair. President Armand Fallières attended, indicating the new importance accorded to the dissemination of the colonial message. The Colonial Exhibition of Nogent also confirmed the establishment of a model for colonial fairs that would become fully concrete during the interwar period. Significantly, several of the exotic attractions and pavilions at Nogent came from the 1900 World’s Fair and above all from the 1906 Marseille exhibition (like the Congo pavilion). Nogent, whose vestiges are still visible today at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes, is a true site of memory that has been wholly forgotten in contemporary historiography, even though it gives a window into the imaginary of the French people at the turn of the century and into the creation of a modern propaganda, simultaneously methodical and playful. Fifteen years after Nogent, Marseille would benefit from the privilege of organizing the great post-war Colonial Exhibition of 1922, despite the rivalry of several cities who claimed this ‘honour’ – Bordeaux, Strasbourg, La Rochelle, Grenoble, Lyon, Nantes and le Havre (each of which would later organize their own fairs) were also in fact in the running. The structure of the fair was identical to that of 1906, but it integrated Morocco and the territories given to France – Syria, Lebanon, Togo and Cameroon – while also multiplying the popular attractions, sometimes unrelated to the colonies (‘prize draw for a live pig, children’s ball, fencing tournament, music by the Republican Guard, lantern contest, large provincial festivals, flower battles …’ (Morando, 2004)). Once provincial, the exhibition became national, inaugurated by Albert Sarraut and attended by President Alexandre Millerand on 7 May. In the same vein, deals were struck with the PLM company for reduced cost trips, while the entire lodging network of Marseille and the surrounding regions was mobilized. From nearly two million visitors in 1906, attendance grew to more than three and a half million attendees in 1922, with these for the most part coming from all over metropolitan France. Colonial propaganda had achieved a new momentum. Two aspects of the 1922 exhibition must be underlined. On the one hand its popular character, festive and playful, became entirely manifest: it was first and foremost a question of inspiring dreams of the colonies; on the other hand, from here onwards each great provincial exhibition

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became in itself a national event, contributing to the propagation of the colonial message through the national press coverage of the fairs. It is this model that would reappear successively in the four most important colonial exhibitions before the apogee of 1931: Bordeaux in 1923, Strasbourg in 1924, then Grenoble in 1925 and La Rochelle in 1927. This is to say nothing of the colonial villages that toured throughout France, the yearly ‘Colonial Weeks’ of propaganda, the inevitable colonial presence in the context of the 1925 Art Deco Exposition, or the French colonial pavilions in foreign fairs. In these ‘intermediary’ exhibitions that foreshadowed the great Colonial Exhibition of 1931 that would take place in the Bois de Vincennes on the edge of Paris, one finds the same fixtures as in Lyon or Marseille. The 1923 Bordeaux Exhibition was very clearly built in competition with that of Marseille, organized in 1922. The fair was supported by the local government, the General Agency of the Colonies (which replaced the Colonial Office in 1919 and was now furnished with new resources (Lemaire, 2000)), and the Chamber of Commerce. As Cristelle Lozère (2006) notes, the exhibition was organized according to the architectural trend of the colonial pavilion (one pavilion for each colony), with the now classic reproductions of an Indochinese pagoda, an ‘Arab palace’ and North African souks (attached to the Morocco pavilion) (‘Bordeaux colonial de 1850 à 1940’). Dioramas, dance shows and colonial actors guaranteed an exotic spectacle. The exhibition developed a strong economic dimension (in line with the activity of the port at Bordeaux) and committed to a methodical dissemination of propaganda. In Strasbourg in 1924, one could find the same well-honed mechanisms from previous exhibitions: on the one hand, the colonial pavilions displaying riches and the progress of project of ‘civilization’ via extensive scientific and propagandist documentation; on the other, a replica of a mosque and, above all, the multiple spectacles that ensured public interest: ‘indigenous villages’, North African souks, Malagasy dancers and Indochinese theatre. In homage to the Great War, colonial troops were omnipresent, and this glorification on the doorstep of a defeated Germany was also a means of answering the propaganda of nationalist German leagues decrying the presence of ‘black’ troops on their occupied land in the Ruhr. The fair, whose organization committee included all the local notables (newspaper directors, businesses, elected representatives and high-ranking colonial officials), was supported by the municipal government, the department and the General Assembly of the Colonies. It

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was inaugurated by Albert Sarraut, thus consecrating its double national and local status, which was further confirmed by the attendance of over one million visitors, certainly fewer than at Marseille, but understandable owing to the difficulty of finding transportation to the Alsatian capital. Strasbourg, Marseille, Bordeaux and the 1930 centennial of the conquest of Algeria all led up to 1931, the great rendez-vous with the nation. The International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 did not deviate from the norm, and inscribed itself in the tradition first developed in 1894, perfected in 1907 at Nogent and then modernized at Marseille in 1922 and at the 1925 Art Deco Exposition in Paris. It constituted the culmination of the colonial exhibition, in terms of its size – it covered thirty-three hectares – its ‘international’ dimension and its popular success. It was also the symbol of Paris ‘catching up’ with regards to the great provincial exhibitions of Lyon (1894 and 1914) and Marseille (1906 and 1922), as the organizers regretted that only two colonial fairs had been organized in Paris, in 1906 and 1907. After several aborted projects, since Louis Brunet’s 1910 plan for an ‘international colonial exhibition’, Paris had awaited its great colonial fair for nearly twenty years. Scheduled by the law of 7 March 1920 for 1925 (postponed for the Exposition of Decorative Arts), then 1927 (postponed so as to not conflict with the Rochelle fair and because finances were lacking), the project was pushed back to 1930 before being once again rescheduled so as to not overlap the colossal event of the Algeria Centennial, held that year in Paris. Marshal Lyautey was named General Commissioner of the future fair. Lyautey – a fervent nationalist and Catholic (Blanchard, 1994) – agreed to direct operations under two conditions: that Catholic missionaries be heavily represented and that the exhibition be a moment of coming together for the colonial metropoles, notably the European metropoles, Lyautey being convinced that the colonial interests of Europe were capable of countering the geopolitical tensions that were threatening the Old World. If the Catholic missions were effectively represented at the International Colonial Exhibition, his second gamble would prove to be a semi-failure because Great Britain refused to participate (on the pretext that the great British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924–25 had been sufficient for spreading its colonial propaganda) along with Spain, while Germany and Japan were not invited due to international geopolitical tensions. Nonetheless, despite these absences, the Exhibition became a space of exaltation of colonialism (for Europe, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, the

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Netherlands and Portugal were present). Inaugurated on 6 May 1931 by the president of the Republic, Paul Doumergue, and the minister of the colonies, Paul Reynaud, the Exhibition marked the pinnacle of the system of colonial exhibitions and, more generally, the apex of colonial propaganda. This site of memory of France (but also of the Republic) was a continuation of the preceding exhibitions (colonial fairs, and also the colonial pavilions of the preceding decades), but also an extension of the different ethnographic exhibitions (human zoos) and ethnic villages that France had hosted since 1870–75. The year 1931 is a major and popular site of memory, because it was a moment of encounter between the colonial idea and the nation. It was in fact the largest colonial fair ever organized in France; the International Colonial Exhibition of Paris attracted between eight and nine million visitors (thirty-three million tickets were sold, which surpassed, as Lyautey had hoped, the success of the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25). Pinnacle of colonial propaganda, the fair mobilized colossal resources: it required the prolongation of a metro line, spread over 110 hectares, and showcased, in addition to its official sections, several dozen private pavilions and boutiques. The exhibition was divided into four parts for the French section: metropolitan France, the overseas territories, the national pavilions and the Permanent Colonial Museum (one of the few buildings – with the Pavilion of Missions – that was not temporary), and the City of Information (Hodeir and Pierre, 1999; Lemaire, 2004). Large buildings, such as the temple of Angkor Wat or the Djenné mosque, were reproduced to scale (identical), the permanent attractions used several thousand ‘natives’ and supported the promise that visitors could do a ‘journey round the world in one day’. The presentation arrangements of the exhibitions were extremely varied, with two ‘negro villages’ and an ‘Arab camp’ where visitors could enter and encounter ‘natives’, Annamite and Foulah dances, and religious ceremonies at the temple of Laos, while one could also sail on the Daumesnil lake in different types of boats, accompanied or not by Malagasy, Senegalese or Somalian boatmen, or go on a camel ride, directed by a camel-driver. ‘King Behanzin’s procession’ was also replicated, as well as the parade of Malagasy dignitaries of Queen Ranavola III, while every evening there were light and water shows for the public. For the informed public, there were conferences, congresses and colloquia. If the replicas of the Djenné mosque or the temple of Angkor Wat were faithful representations, many of the ‘indigenous’ buildings were

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fantasies, vaguely inspired by the territories they were supposed to represent, but that did not matter to the visitors. Indeed, in this general folklorization of the empire’s cultures, the seduction of exoticism had to serve the traditional messages of the colonial sector and contribute to making the French proud of their empire. Furthermore, the International Colonial Exhibition was not fundamentally different in its organization than the preceding great fairs, but its propagandist ambitions were more intense and systematic (notably with press communication twelve months before its opening, allowing all the major journals to report the construction and create a sense of anticipation) and its dimensions were expanded. Additionally, the Economic Agency of the Colonies, propaganda tool of the Ministry of the Colonies, would spend astronomical sums to finance films, articles, support colonial columns and order studies and books from hundreds of authors. In 1931 France vibrated to the rhythm of the colonies, now omnipresent in public opinion. As in the preceding exhibitions, the foremost ambition of the organizers was to make the empire known and loved by presenting its cultures and populations on the one hand and by valorizing its economic contribution on the other. The second goal was to promote the economic exploitation of the colonies by seducing investors with the promise of rapid profits made possible by such an operation. Finally, the Exhibition hoped to inspire in visitors the desire to visit the colonies, as tourists, and particularly as colonists. The latter ambition was born of Lyautey’s personal apprehension regarding non-European cultures. In his writings, as in his management of Morocco (Rivet, 1988), Lyautey revealed a political intelligence in his approach to native cultures: the International Colonial Exhibition thus needed to ‘respect’ the cultures of the colonized, valorize them, magnify them, to better legitimize colonization. In this respect, the aesthetic success was impressive, as much for the replicas of buildings and sites as for the presentation of the colonial populaces, but it remained very far from an ‘ethnographic’ realism: the exhibition was, as were the others, a theatre of shadows destined to inspire love for the empire and the cultures presented, as though they were fixed in a circular time (Ungar, 2003), in willing contrast to the modernity of the metropolitan section, presenting, in a space of 80,000m2, more than thirty industrial groups and all the recent technological innovations. Can colonial exhibitions – and above all the 1931 fair, which CharlesRobert Ageron (like Pierre Nora) considered to be a ‘myth’ that did

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not truly impact the French people – be considered ‘sites of memory’ marking at once the ‘national story’ and a pivotal moment in the destiny of the nation? In terms of material traces, little remains: at Nogent, for example, one can find only the vestiges of the Indochina pavilion, the wooden ruins of the Reunion pavilion and the recently burned beams of the Congo palace (along with the monuments to the colonial soldiers of the Great War, installed subsequently), while the only legacy of the Exhibition of 1931 is the Colonial Museum, now the National Museum of the History of Immigration, the Togo pavilion at the heart of the bois de Vincennes, and the reconstructed remnants of the zoo. But it would be a mistake to focus, on the one hand, on examining these few remains and, on the other, to measure only the ‘adherence to the empire’ of the French – a devotion that was nonetheless much greater in the 1930s than previously, and reached a peak after World War II. The colonial and postcolonial ‘effects’ – evidently difficult to quantify – that the exhibitions had on the public are in fact of relevance to the collective memory, with its extremely diverse forms that one would be wrong to reduce to the strict conscious ‘devotion’ to the colonial project. The objective of these exhibitions was to insert the colonial idea into the nation, and on this point 1931 does indeed constitute an apogee. Clearly, the experience of the exhibition was complex. It mobilized the senses – sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing – and, in this sense, it was a ‘complete’ experience, that went far beyond the discursive models – that didn’t much interest the public – vaunting the ‘benefits of colonization’ in the colonial pavilions. It impacted on imaginations and helped to establish colonial culture in French society. It was through this experience, as the history of the great colonial exhibitions that we have brought to light here shows, that colonial worlds and peoples, phantasmatic and seductive, were globally imprinted on the national conscience, or rather on its unconscious. This experience suggested ideal types – the African woman pounding millet, the lasciviousness of colonized women (through the spectacles of dances, parades, night-time shows), the childlike and benevolent nature of Africans (in the ‘negro villages’ or during parades of colonial troops), the indomitable and bellicose nature of North Africans (in the fierce negotiations in replica souks, during parades of ‘Arab’ troops), the industrial and phlegmatic virtues of Asians (whose literary civilization – nonetheless outdated – was vaunted). These worlds ultimately implied the superiority of western civilization (and in particular of the Republic), whose technological prowess

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was displayed, forcing a comparison with the folklorist interpretations of the cultures represented in the exhibitions. The colonial fairs thus transmitted, as is indicated by Benoist de l’Estoile (2010), several discourses simultaneously: an ‘evolutionist’ discourse that underlined the alterity of non-European cultures while highlighting their ‘archaic’ nature, and a ‘primitivist’ discourse, valorizing these cultures through an aesthetic of alterity (notably promoted in the pavilions displaying cultural and artistic objects), and whose limitation was precisely this stylized interpretation. In each case, the ‘natives’ were placed on an inferior rung – sometimes temporary, as colonization was supposed to redeem them – which allowed, without making it explicit, visitors to feel their own superiority, all the easier as they adhered to the celebration of colonization and the presentation of the ‘diversity of cultures’. The exhibition was a key moment where ‘national’ and ‘imperial’ sentiment fused. But here, again, this result was achieved not through discursive means, but through entertainment, calling on the senses, on enjoyment, on pleasure. This is evidently difficult to measure, but the long-term persistence of the representations deployed in colonial exhibitions (differentiating sentiments towards ‘Arabs’, ‘Blacks’, ‘Asians’, but propagating the conviction of the superiority of European civilization) is clearly established. The colonial fairs were certainly not the only ones to participate in this construction (we have emphasized it here, but also in the majority of our preceding works (Blanchard, Bancel, Lemaire and Thomas, 2014)): innumerable tools of colonial culture contributed to it as well. Yet it is impossible to deny the power of attraction of these events, which – outside of the World’s Fairs – were the most heavily visited and were responsible for enthusing an ever-larger public up until World War II. The history of relations between people has often been constructed through the development of mechanisms of domination, a pattern to which the colonial exhibitions clearly belong. These mechanisms can take on diverse and complex forms, but the knowledge of the other along with his display are the two most common forms. From time immemorial the ‘Other’ has been the source of questioning, interrogation and astonishment. The exhibition of the Other helps to think about and situate oneself. It is for this reason that the stage-management of ‘exotics’ was at the heart of the colonial exhibitions. The exhibition comprises various degrees: the artist who sets the stage to valorize his prowess, the body displayed in an erotic perspective,

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as in the case of dance; the vanquished or the outsider who is shown to symbolize domination, defeat or a future punishment. When this display becomes the placing at a distance of an entire people (or an ‘exotic’ race), the reflection of an identity or a deformity, or the fusion of both, another dimension of the exhibition is born, that of the construction of alterity. In 1931 France designed an immense imperial spectacle that would definitively merge the colonial idea with that of the nation. It was also another means of showcasing the nation, of building a ‘France that is great’ and of marking a moment, which contributed to making this era a time of ‘grandeur’. This memory contributed to the launch of a nostalgia that today informs the debates on the ‘grandeur’ of the Republic and of France, in part rooted in this myth of the past. However, it would be wrong to focus only on the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition of Vincennes. The national colonial fairs form a historical configuration, each one a site of memory in its own right, but, even more than this, together they constitute the lasting establishment of a site-less colonial memory. This configuration goes beyond the French examples: 1931 is inscribed in a long line of major exhibitions in other countries, including Amsterdam (1883) (Dujardin, 2007), Paris (1889) (BerthoLavenir, 1989), Chicago (1893), Barcelona (1896), Brussels (1897), Osaka (1903) and Wembley (1925). With these fairs, the great powers also bolstered their imperial axes via their exhibitions: Great Britain with India (August, 1985), France with Algeria, Indochina and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Netherlands with the Dutch Indies and, later, Belgium with the Congo, Germany with Togo and Cameroon, Italy with Ethiopia and Portugal with Angola. Through these colonial exhibitions, Europe sought to legitimize and reinforce its world hegemony. In so doing, the metropolitan centres produced complete spectacles that imprinted the imaginaries of their populations. Nonetheless, in face of the immense image-making machines that were the great colonial exhibitions (Leprun, 1989), very few visitors or publicists were critical. There were a few exceptions nonetheless, in France (intellectuals and artists such as the Surrealists, who organized a counter-exhibition in 1931 attracting 5,000 visitors), in the United States (certain religious organizations and impresarios), in Great Britain (anti-colonial movements) and in Germany (impresarios and intellectuals). Critics also came from within: from strikes of colonial actors to genuine protest movements such as that organized by Malagasy participants during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris.

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From the point of view of the visitors, acceptance was the norm. From what we know, sentiments ranged from condescendence or disdain to admiration for the populations on display, and above all a real pride in ‘possessing’ such an empire. At best, a visitor would leave persuaded that France was strong thanks to its empire, on which its destiny depended to a degree. But of greatest importance was the fact that these great displays, through spectacle and via mechanisms that were above all ludic and not discursive, succeeded in impregnating the contemporary imaginary, making the people love and even desire the exalting sentiment of a nation made great by its colonies. To address 1931 and the exhibition is to understand that the colonial is not on the periphery of the nation, but rather at its heart, key to the idea of the nation, and thus a site of memory of the ‘national story’. Works Cited Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1984. ‘L’Exposition colonial de 1931. Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?’. In Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, edited by Pierre Nora, 493–515. Paris: Gallimard. August, Thomas G. 1985. The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890–1940. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bancel, Nicolas, Léla Bencharif and Pascal Blanchard, eds. 2007. Lyon, capitale des outre-mers. Immigration des suds & culture coloniale en Rhône-Alpes & Auvergne. Paris: La Découverte. Bergougniou, Jean-Michel. 1999. ‘Le village sénégalais à l’Exposition internationale d’Amiens 1906’. Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de Picardie, 1er trimestre: 175–208. Bertho-Lavenir, Catherine. 1989. ‘Innovation technique et société du spectacle: le théâtrophone à l’exposition de 1889’. Le Mouvement social 149 (October–December): 59–69. Blanchard, Pascal. 1994. Nationalisme et colonialisme. Idéologie coloniale, discours sur L’Afrique et les Africains de la Droite nationaliste française, des années 30 à la Révolution Nationale. Thèse d’histoire contemporaine. Paris: Université Paris I Sorbonne. Blanchard, Pascal, and Gilles Boetsch, eds. 2005. Marseille, porte Sud. Un siècle d’histoire coloniale et d’immigration. Paris/Marseille: La Découverte/ Jeanne Laffitte. Blanchard, Pascal, Éric Deroo, Driss El Yazami, Pierre Fournie and Gilles Manceron. 2003. Le Paris arabe. Deux siècles de présence des Orientaux et des Maghrébins. Paris: La Découverte.

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Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, Sandrine Lemaire and Dominic Thomas. 2014 [2008]. Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution. Translated by Alexis Pernsteiner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bloch, Jean-Jacques, and Marianne Delort. 1980. Quand Paris allait à l’Expo. Paris: Fayard. Boucheron, Patrick, ed. 2017. Histoire mondiale de la France. Paris: Seuil. Dujardin, Laetitia. 2007. Ethnic and Trade: Photography and the Colonial Exhibitions in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels. Amsterdam: RijksMuseum Studies in Photography. Ernst, Raphaëlle. 1998. Les mondes coloniaux dans les expositions universelles à Paris (1855–1900): Le cas de l’Empire français. Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris X. Gala, Isabelle. 1980. Des sauvages au Jardin. Les exhibitions ethnographiques du Jardin d’Acclimatation de 1877 à 1912. Paris: Bibliothèque du musée des Arts et Traditions populaires. Girardet, Raoul. 1990 [1972]. L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962. Paris: Hachette. Guide officiel de l’Exposition Coloniale de Marseille. 1906. Marseille. Hodeir, Catherine, and Michel Pierre. 1999. 1931. L’exposition coloniale. Paris: Complexe. Lebovics, Herman. 1984. True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lemaire, Sandrine. 2000. L’Agence économique des colonies: Instrument de propagande ou creuset de l’idéologie coloniale en France (1870–1960)? Florence: Institut universitaire européen. — 2004. ‘Promouvoir: fabriquer du colonial’. In Culture impériale 1931–1961, edited by Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, 43–60. Paris: Autrement. Leprun, Sylviane. 1986. Le Théâtre des colonies. Scénographie, acteurs et discours de l’imaginaire dans les expositions (1855–1937). Paris: L’Harmattan. — 1989. ‘Paysages de la France extérieure: la mise en scène des colonies à l’Exposition du centenaire’. Le Mouvement social 149 (October– December): 99–128. — 1990. ‘Exotisme et couleurs’. Ethnologie française 20, no. 4 (October– December): 419–27. L’Estoile, Benoist de. 2010. Le gout des Autres: De l’Exposition coloniale aux Arts premiers. Paris: Flammarion. L’Exposition de Paris. 1889. Édition enrichie de vues, de scènes, de reproductions d’objets d’art, de machines, de dessins et gravures par les meilleurs artistes, tome I. Paris: Librairie illustré. Lozere, Christelle. 2006. ‘Bordeaux colonial de 1850 à 1940’. Études-coloniales, 16 November. http://etudescoloniales.canalblog.com/archives/2006/11/ 16/3089621.html.

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Morando, Laurent. 2004. ‘Les expositions coloniales nationales de Marseille de 1906 et 1922: Manifestations locales ou nationales?’ Provence historique 54, no. 216. http://provence-historique.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/n/2004/Pages/ PH-2004–54216_05.aspx. Ory, Pascal. 1982. Les Expositions universelles de Paris. Paris: Ramsay. Rivet, Daniel. 1988. Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat français au Maroc, 1912–1925. Paris: L’Harmattan. Schroeder-Gudehus, Brigitte, and Anne Rasmusen. 1992. Les Fastes du progrès: le guide des Expositions universelles (1851–1992). Paris: Flammarion. Ungar, Steven. 2003. ‘La France impériale exposée en 1931: une apothéose’. In Culture coloniale 1871–1931, edited by Pascal Blancard and Sandrine Lemaire, 201–11. Paris: Autrement. Zimmermann, Maurice. 1906. ‘L’Exposition coloniale et le Congrès colonial de Marseille’. Annales de Géographie 15, no. 84: 463–68.

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Les Tirailleurs sénégalais David Murphy Les Tirailleurs sénégalais

For much of the past century, packets of the popular Banania powdered chocolate drink have been adorned with the image of a cartoonish, wide-eyed, smiling tirailleur sénégalais [colonial infantryman]. Withdrawn in the era of decolonization, the smiling tirailleur returned to the product’s packaging in 2003: the image still had currency in contemporary France and the ideas sustaining it were very much still alive, albeit in new and complex forms.1 This image is arguably the most important site of French colonial memory, even though many French people today would have difficulty explaining who exactly the tirailleurs sénégalais were: advertising has long been a powerful and insidious method through which racialized types can be propagated and normalized (Bachollet et al., 1992). Mireille Rosello describes the Banania image as ‘an unforgettable cultural icon branded with the same intensity into the minds of white and black French […] people’ (1998: 5). The Banania soldier utters his pidgin French slogan ‘Y a bon’, which is often translated into English as ‘sho’ good’. It is significant that translators have searched for an equivalent in the lexicon of the deep south of the United States of America, as the image can readily be situated within the racial imaginary that informed minstrel shows and other forms of caricatured black ‘comic’ performance. The racialized thinking encoded within the image was all too visible to colonial subjects of the mid-twentieth century. In one of the best-known passages from Peau noire, masques blancs, Frantz Fanon identified ‘Y a bon Banania’ as the most pernicious of the stereotypes discernible in the child’s fearful 1 For a detailed analysis of Banania advertisements over the past century, see Achille (2013).

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gaze upon him as a black man (1952: 90). Even Léopold Sédar Senghor, the great poet of Negritude, whose writing and politics consistently sought to overcome the divide between colonizer and colonized, angrily declared in his ‘Poème liminaire’ (first published in 1948) that ‘Je déchirerai les rires Banania sur tous les murs de France’ [I will tear down the Banania smiles from every wall in France] (Senghor, 2006: 55). The continued use of both image and slogan today – not just on the product packaging for Banania, but on postcards, posters, plates and other forms of memorabilia readily available in virtually every tourist shop in Paris – may seem at first glance to denote a form of postmodern pastiche. However, the ways in which both word and text have in recent times been used with little need for transformation in order to create vicious racist memes circulating on the internet about black public figures, not least (at the time of writing) the former French justice minister Christiane Taubira, a black woman from French Guiana, indicates clearly that familiarity may have dulled their racially charged nature but it clearly has not erased it. As Anne Donadey argued in a seminal article on Banania almost two decades ago: ‘To show colonial stereotypes without providing an explicit critique of these images ultimately reinforces the former colonizer’s sense of subjectivity and negates the subjectivity of former colonized peoples’ (2000: 17). The first tirailleur sénégalais regiments were formed in 1857. They took their name from the original location where they were founded, but would in fact go on to play a key role in the conquest of France’s vast West African empire. 2 Serving the imperial project, the tirailleurs quickly became associated with the excess and the arbitrary nature of colonial violence. With the advent of the First World War, however, the tirailleur would become inextricably linked to the story of metropolitan France. Indeed, in the aftermath of the war the tirailleur sénégalais became an iconic figure in France: his familiar face and colourful uniform – in particular, the bright red chechia hat – featured in drawings, postcards, photographs, posters and other material. As the Banania imagery demonstrates so powerfully, the war saw the tirailleur transformed from savage, colonized other into brave, smiling warrior fighting to defend the imperial homeland. The First World War constituted a major watershed in race relations in the Hexagon (Stovall, 2003): during the war, the French authorities 2 For a comprehensive history of the tirailleurs, see Echenberg (1991). Fogarty (2008) focuses more specifically on the tirailleurs and the First World War.

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brought over half a million soldiers and labourers to the Metropole from its colonies as well as from China. 3 Over 200,000 Sub-Saharan African troops were raised during the war, while approximately 130,000 saw active service in France, with 34,000 killed, many in the latter stages of the conflict from 1916 onwards (Michel, 2003). There is considerable evidence that the tirailleurs were often used as shock troops in that later period when, some historians believe, they were deployed more widely with the unstated aim of sparing white French lives. The bravery shown by the tirailleurs sénégalais in landmark battles at Verdun and elsewhere, as well as the direct human contact between ordinary French people (soldiers and civilians) and tirailleurs stationed in France, soon led to a proliferation of images that has no real equivalent in representations of other sections of the colonial army. The tirailleur found his place in the gallery of French military ‘types’ in official and unofficial military propaganda. Previous images of the savage tirailleur were recycled as celebrations of the mighty warrior fighting on ‘our’ side. Now that the tirailleur was a real person whom one might meet in the streets of Paris or Lyon, or even provincial France, there also emerged series of portraits designed to express his humanity. Perhaps most importantly, in place of the previously dominant image of the bloodthirsty tirailleur, the image spread of the tirailleur as a ‘big child’ who smilingly served France, most infamously in the imagery for Banania but present also, for example, in a wide range of postcards of the period: a common visual trope depicted a smiling, barefoot tirailleur cheerfully charging towards a cowering German soldier. In addition, the period after the war witnessed a proliferation of popular literary representations, both fictional and non-fictional.4 The tirailleur had become an instantly recognizable feature of French culture and society. In their volume 14–18: Vivre et mourir dans les tranchées, historians Rémy Cazals and André Loez trace the diverse reactions of ordinary 3 The idea of countering Germany’s demographic advantage over France, through the creation of an African army drawn from France’s colonies to fight in an anticipated European war, had first been developed by General Charles Mangin in his 1910 volume, La Force noire. 4 Two of the best-known examples are La Randonnée de Samba Diouf (1926) by the best-selling popular authors, the Tharaud brothers, and the very successful episodic novel by Raymond Escholier, based on one of the tirailleurs he encountered, the eponymous Mahmadou Fofana (1928).

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French soldiers to the experience of fighting alongside black troops: ‘The perception of these [colonial soldiers] oscillates between that of the brother in arms and that of the colonizer. The expression of solidarity stands alongside expressions of curiosity or contempt’ (2012: 169). Some French troops were almost as fearful of the ‘savagery’ of their colonized allies as they were of their German enemies – noting their alleged predilection for cutting ‘trophies’ from the bodies of fallen enemies (169) – while others expressed a mix of curiosity and empathy for these men, torn from their West African homeland and obliged to fight in the muddy trenches of northern France/Belgium (170). One of the most valuable sources that we possess regarding the preoccupations and attitudes of tirailleurs sénégalais during the war is Lucie Cousturier’s memoir Des inconnus chez moi, first published in 1920. Cousturier, a minor impressionist painter, knew little about colonialism or Africa until, in the spring of 1916, the French army chose to develop its main metropolitan base for the tirailleurs on the doorstep of her country retreat in the small Mediterranean town of Fréjus. The town had previously housed a minor base but, from 1916 until the end of the war, the tirailleurs were sent there for the duration of the winter, as, although Sub-Saharan African soldiers were generally deemed ‘natural’ warriors, the French army considered that they were unsuited to the rigours of winter warfare in Europe. Initially fearful of these ‘strangers’, Cousturier soon turned her home into an informal school where she taught the largely illiterate soldiers basic literacy in French. Cousturier was in effect playing a variation on the role of a marraine de guerre [war godmother]: marraines were young or middle-aged French women who had volunteered to correspond with soldiers in the French army, including tirailleurs, acting as surrogate sisters or mothers, and some would take these young African men under their wings during periods of leave. However, partnering French women with young African men inevitably led in some instances to more intimate relationships than had been envisaged by either the Church or the army, and support for the scheme quickly cooled. As the war progressed, a more general fear developed regarding the interaction of colonial men and French women. Colonial troops on leave from the front line could socialize with French women, while, in the factories, women occupying industrial posts in the absence of conscripted French men often worked alongside imported labour from l’Indochine française. With very few black women on French soil at that time, interracial relationships became an inevitable

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emotional and sexual reality. 5 The offspring from these relationships is perhaps the most tangible but neglected legacy of the tirailleurs’ time in France. While the vast majority of tirailleurs (and other colonial troops and workers) were quickly repatriated after the war, a small number remained in France, joining the ranks of the urban working class in Paris and major port towns such as Marseille, Bordeaux and Le Havre. In addition, the camp that had been built in Fréjus remained open and, all through the interwar period, thousands of tirailleurs were consistently based there: indeed, if there is one key geographical site of memory of the tirailleur sénégalais in France, then it is Fréjus. As historian Gregory Mann has argued, ‘by 1918, Fréjus was both an African site and a truly “colonial” one’ (2005: 434). Recent research has uncovered the history of Afrique-sur-Seine, but scholars have only scratched the surface of this ‘Africa on the Riviera’. The tirailleurs thus remained a visible presence in Europe during the interwar period and they continued to play a significant role in the highly charged military and political situation. Throughout the early 1920s the French forces occupying the Rhineland were primarily drawn from the Colonial Army, including a large contingent of tirailleurs sénégalais led by General Charles Mangin. This led to a wave of far-right German propaganda denouncing the ‘black shame’ of African troops occupying a European nation, accompanied by claims of widespread rape of German women. Although vigorously denied by the military and civil authorities of the victorious Allied nations, this extremist propaganda found echoes in the press and among some politicians in France and Britain. German ‘revenge’ for the ‘black shame’ arrived soon after the Fall of France in the summer of 1940. The German army entered Paris on 14  June 1940 and, just two days later, they destroyed (on Hitler’s personal orders) a statue of Mangin, which had stood close to the École Militaire, since 1928. For Hitler, Mangin represented the ‘savagery’ of a France willing to unleash its ‘barbaric’ colonial troops against white European soldiers, actions compounded by the ‘black shame’ of the Rhineland occupation. A monument to the ‘Heroes of the Black Army’ in Reims, a city defended by the tirailleurs against a German onslaught in 1918, was also destroyed by the Nazis in September 1940. The destruction of these memorials sought to efface visible traces of the tirailleurs from the public realm in France, while other acts 5 For more on the sexual politics surrounding the tirailleurs, see Stovall (2003).

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of violence constituted a far more brutal revenge against them. As French troops were captured by the advancing German army, there are many recorded instances where tirailleurs were taken aside and summarily executed: it is estimated that 1,500–2,000 tirailleurs were killed in this fashion. While captured metropolitan French troops were imprisoned in Germany, colonial soldiers were sent to Frontstalags in occupied France: by early 1941 there were 70,000 colonial troops in twenty-two Frontstalags across the occupied north of the country and some remained imprisoned there until the liberation. The historian Armelle Mabon has traced the close relationships that were forged between colonial soldiers and the local communities around the camps – for example, the marraine de guerre system was dusted down and used to maintain the morale of the soldiers – and she identifies the ‘persistence of the memory’ (96) of the tirailleurs in these areas. As had occurred after the First World War, the French authorities sought after the liberation to remove the tirailleurs from metropolitan France as soon as possible, and they were once again subjected to discriminatory treatment as regards pensions and money owed for their time spent in captivity. This discrimination led to the traumatic events at the Thiaroye demobilization camp outside Dakar, where at least thirty-five tirailleurs sénégalais were massacred by the colonial army: in the military cover-up that followed, the massacre was presented as the suppression of a mutiny rather than legitimate protests demanding equal treatment. Recent research by Mabon (2010) indicates that the number of tirailleurs killed in this incident is almost definitely far higher than earlier estimates had allowed (the number could be as many as 300–400). In December 2014, on the 70th anniversary of the massacre, then French president François Hollande symbolically ‘returned’ French archives on the events at Thiaroye to the Senegalese government. Although this gesture appeared to offer the full truth behind the events, the documents released were already known to scholars and they failed to reveal the site of the mass grave where the tirailleurs are buried. Thiaroye thus remains to this day an extremely powerful site of colonial memory, encapsulating so much of the troubled relationship between France and its colonial troops.6 In France’s wars of decolonization that followed the Second World War – not least in French Indochina and Algeria – the tirailleurs 6 Thiaroye was not the only incident of this kind to emerge from the Second World War: see, for example, the 1946 Cayenne revolt (Alexandre, 1995).

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continued to serve the empire and they did so right up until the wave of independences across Francophone Africa in 1960. The remaining African troops serving in the French Army were transferred, in 1964, to a single African battalion at the base in Fréjus, from where they were discharged and returned to their newly independent homelands. Francophone African countries continue to send prospective army officers to France for training, and the area around Fréjus is still home to several military bases that regularly receive African soldiers. As in so many other areas of French life, the formal end of empire constituted less a rupture with the past than a change in the specific shape and form of practices that had endured for decades and sometimes centuries. The centenary of the First World War has led to various projects commemorating the role of the tirailleurs sénégalais in the defence of France: from bandes dessinées to exhibitions to television series. African troops returned to the streets of Paris in 2010, when thirteen Francophone African countries responded positively to President Sarkozy’s invitation for them to open France’s annual Bastille Day military parade to mark the 50th anniversary of their independence. This French recognition of the African military contribution on behalf of France was celebrated in some quarters but decried in others, where it was seen as a sign of the ongoing imbalance in power relations between the two parties. A monument to the Heroes of the Black Army was unveiled in Fréjus in 1994 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Provence landings, in which colonial troops played a central role, while the monument to the tirailleurs in Reims, which had been destroyed by the Nazis, was replaced by a new, more modest monument in 1960, before a bronze copy of the original imposing granite edifice was commissioned in time for the centenary of the Great War and officially inaugurated by President Macron in November 2018. Although these official sites of memory to the tirailleurs across the Hexagon signal a form of commemoration fostered by the state, in which equality is the leitmotif, it is the smiling face of Banania that remains the most powerful lieu de mémoire: its re-emergence in 2003 and continued popularity today reinforce Donadey’s warning almost two decades ago that we are still living ‘[i]n a postcolonial context ripe with French colonial nostalgia’ (29).

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Works Cited Achille, Etienne. 2013. ‘A l’approche des cent ans de Banania, le retour du tirailleur’. Contemporary French Civilization 38, no. 2: 201–16. Alexandre, Raphaël. 1995. La Révolte des tirailleurs sénégalais à Cayenne: 24–25 février 1946. Paris: L’Harmattan. Bachollet, Raymond, et al. 1992. Négripub: l’image des noirs dans la publicité. Paris: Somogy. Cazals, Rémy, and André Loez. 2012. 14–18: Vivre et mourir dans les tranchées. Paris: Tallandier. Cousturier, Lucie. 2001 [1920]. Des inconnus chez moi. Edited by Roger Little. Collection ‘Autrement mêmes’. Paris: L’Harmattan. Donadey, Anne. 2000. ‘“Y’ a bon Banania”: ethics and cultural criticism in the colonial context’. French Cultural Studies 11, no. 1: 9–29. Echenberg, Myron J. 1991. Colonial Conscripts: The ‘Tirailleurs Sénégalais’ in French West Africa, 1857–1960. Oxford: James Currey; Portsmouth: Heinemann. Escholier, Raymond. 2013 [1928]. Mahmadou Fofana. Collection ‘Autrement mêmes’. Paris: L’Harmattan. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. Fogarty, Richard S. 2008. Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Mabon, Armelle. 2010. Prisonniers de guerre ‘indigènes’: visages oubliés de la France occupée. Paris: La Découverte. Mangin, Charles. 2011 [1910]. La Force noire. Edited by Antoine Champeaux. Collection ‘Autrement Mêmes’. Paris: L’Harmattan. Mann, Gregory. 2005. ‘Locating Colonial Histories: between Africa and France’. American Historical Review 110, no. 2: 409–34. Michel, Marc. 2003. Les Africains et la grande guerre: l’appel à l’Afrique (1914–1918). Paris: Karthala. Rosello, Mireille. 1998. Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 2006 [1948]. Œuvre Poétique. Paris: Seuil. Stovall, Tyler. 2003. ‘Love, Labor and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France during the Great War’. In French Civilization and its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, edited by Tyler Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele, 297–31. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Tharaud, Jean, and Jerôme Tharaud. 1922. La Randonnée de Samba Diouf. Paris: Plon.

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Colonial Heroes Berny Sèbe Colonial Heroes

As cultural constructions deeply embedded in the mechanisms of power and symbolism associated with organized human groups, heroic reputations reverberate with the dominant concepts and beliefs of the polity within which they emerge. Taken in the context of nineteenthcentury Europe, these reputations can be described as a site of collective memory, cementing in part the ‘imagined community’ of the nation to which they belong (Anderson, 1983). Hero-making is closely linked to dominant worldviews and therefore open to constant contestation and negotiation (Cubitt and Warren, 2001). Whereas national heroes have been a long-standing feature of organized states, colonial heroes appear as a relatively recent development in the French historiographical context. Yet they are a useful prism through which the country’s colonial dimension, especially in the wake of the late nineteenth-century episode of ‘New Imperialism’, can be gauged and fleshed out – often quite literally. With the advent of the mass media at the end of the nineteenth century, the development of heroic reputations became increasingly reliant on a range of cultural outputs that contributed to their persistence in popular culture. The celebration of their exploits in the press and a variety of printed materials, such as hagiographical books, magazines and other forms of memorabilia, could promptly turn them into household names. Yet, this first level of celebration generally proved ephemeral. To survive the test of time, it needed to be consolidated through the physical inscription of the hero’s towering figure in public space. This was the moment when heroes became physical sites of memory, dotted through the constituencies where their appeal resounded and offering a physical rendering of the exploits, above and beyond the call of duty, which had made them worthy of praise in the first place.

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Colonial heroes were archetypal of what may be seen as a quintessentially modern multimedia site of memory, combining as they did various promotional channels which, by working concurrently at different junctures of the development of their reputations, acquired the ability to turn them into fully fledged sites of collective memory, both symbolically and physically in the public space. The ‘New Imperialism’ of the nineteenth century coincided with the emergence of journalistic practices that often foregrounded the individual figures who embodied this renewed quest for colonial possessions. The fame of imperial heroes rose against the backdrop of the race for a ‘place in the sun’ that pitted Western European countries one against another, compounding the appeal of imperial heroes through the combination of geographical exoticism and nationalistic self-satisfaction. Successful heroes, or even those who had failed in their quest but whose ending was deemed to exemplify a morally superior behaviour, were swiftly embraced as the standard-bearers of the ‘civilizing mission’, used to justify the annexation of non-European lands. Thus late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France saw the rise of popular celebrations of figures reflecting various activities related to the colonial conquest. The archetype of the explorer, best illustrated by the early reputation of René Caillié and later by Henri Duveyrier and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, was celebrated for his ability to overcome difficult and often hostile conditions in order to gather scientific knowledge and also, occasionally, to pave the way for the colonial conquest of territories previously unknown to Europeans. The conqueror, such as Francis Garnier in Indochina, Thomas Robert Bugeaud in Algeria, Jean-Baptiste Marchand in Central and Eastern Africa or Joseph Gallieni in Madagascar and the French Sudan, were lionized when news of their conquests reached the metropole. The religious figure, proselytizing (Charles Lavigerie) or seeking redemption in the colonial context (Charles de Foucauld), enjoyed a strong appeal among Catholic circles, for whom France, as the eldest daughter of the Church, had a duty to promote the Christian faith around the world. To their Catholic supporters, such heroes palliated the effects of the secularization implemented by the Third Republic. Finally, the administrator, best embodied by François-Henry Laperrine in the Sahara or Hubert Lyautey in Morocco, was the perfect incarnation of the ‘civilising mission’, bringing order (in its colonial form) to overseas territories. These figures initially rose to prominence among the French public through the press, which turned them into heroes on paper. Reports

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about their exploits were widely featured in the press, and eminently symbolic representations of heroic deeds taking place in the context of colonial activity were regularly splashed across the front covers of illustrated newspaper supplements, such as Le Petit Journal or Le Petit Parisien. The mass media played the role of makers or breakers of reputations as a result of the combination of print runs of unprecedented magnitude (often more than a million copies per day) and the meteoric rise of literacy among the population, which dramatically increased readership. At a time when the radio, let alone the television, was still to be invented, making newspapers more influential than ever, this outbreak of media interest was complemented by a range of products with a longer shelf-life, the availability of which had been significantly enhanced by the ongoing revolution in the cultural industries. Publishers eager to cash in on new themes produced in swift succession works celebrating the achievements of this new generation of heroes: between February 1900 and June 1901 no fewer than 67,600 copies of a serialized account of Major Marchand’s crossing of Africa, and his encounter with the Anglo-Egyptian army in Fashoda, were released on the French market. A few years later an account of the Marchand Mission, by its secondin-command Captain Baratier, was also commercially successful, with almost 50,000 copies sold (Sèbe, 2013: 78, 81). A variety of memorabilia appeared in subsequent years, ranging from postcards and ornamented plates or ashtrays to collectible postcards produced by leading companies of the time (Cémoi chocolates, Félix Potin shops and so on). Imperial heroes entered public imagination durably through such repetitive processes, which carved up a specific space for them in the national pantheon. Intergenerational transmission was the next stage in this process, which involved locating imperial heroes within a national grand narrative. School textbooks exemplified this trend, at a time when the French state made strenuous efforts to grant universal access to primary education: as the Third Republic became more decidedly colonial, history and geography syllabi inevitably featured key moments in the country’s colonial experience and frequently conveyed them through a highly mythologized representation of acts undertaken by imperial heroes. Brazza liberating slaves or Bugeaud and Christophe de Lamoricière conquering Algeria thus became familiar staples in Third Republic school textbooks, including the most famous of them, produced by Ernest Lavisse. The empire entered public consciousness through the

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mediation of the Republican school, which made use of imperial heroes as exemplary figures transmitted to the next generation. Imperial heroes also benefited from media developments, such as the increasing place granted to images in the press (offering the opportunity to provide a vivid rendering of their overseas exploits) and the appearance of the cinema. The interwar years film director Léon Poirier appears as a major visual hero-maker of the period, with two major films dedicated to the promotion of colonial heroic reputations. Charles de Foucauld ou l’Appel du Silence (1936) was a blockbuster of the time, with ten million viewers in eight months, ensuring that it achieved second place in French annual box-office receipts that year, and it was rewarded with the Grand prix du cinéma français. While its career was somewhat cut short by the Second World War, Brazza ou l’Epopée du Congo (1939) remains one of the most symbolically charged representations of Brazza’s role as a ‘peaceful conqueror of the Congo’ for its adoptive motherland. Taken as a whole, this production created a new régime of truth, embedding the exploits of imperial heroes into French national consciousness. Imperial heroes populated the French cultural frame of reference and therefore, to borrow Maurice Halbwachs’s concept, contributed to ‘collective national consciousness’ from the late nineteenth century onwards. While the first phase of the heroization of leading figures linked to the French colonial experience was undeniably mediated through printed cultural production, the second stage in the building of a heroic memory of empire involved a process of physical memorialization. The ‘heroes on paper’ we saw above were swiftly turned into heroes of metal and stone, their names ornamenting streets and their moustaches and kepis cast as parts of numerous equestrian statues. Statues and street names have been identified from the outset as meaningful sites of memory by Pierre Nora’s team of historians (viz. contributions by June Hargrove and Daniel Milo in the original collection of Lieux de mémoire), but their relevance to an exploration of France’s colonial dimensions has remained below the radar for a long time. Yet both are replete with imperial connections in today’s France (Aldrich, 2002). This applies equally to imperial heroes. Their reputations benefited not only from popular enthusiasm, which triggered commemorative efforts at municipal level, but also from the urban development of late nineteenth-century France, which offered numerous opportunities to celebrate heroes through the naming of new streets, avenues, squares and even major facilities (viz. the ‘Port

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Marchand’ in Toulon, which does not refer to the merchant navy but to the ‘hero of Fashoda’). The place of imperial heroes in the French public space was thus secured in just a few decades. It was strengthened by the christening of colonial settlements after imperial heroes all around the empire (ranging from isolated military fortresses such as Fort Gouraud to entire cities such as Bugeaud in Algeria, Brazzaville in the Congo or Lyauteyville in Morocco), a process which was significantly echoed in the metropole through the maps of the empire displayed in all schools, and on which schoolchildren could visualise the symbolic inscription of imperial heroes around the globe. In addition to the appearance of imperial figures in the everyday lives of many town dwellers, their status was reinforced through numerous statues, often in their birthplaces or in locations that glorified any form of passing or permanent association with them. Marchand’s birthplace, Thoissey, celebrated its local hero through a statue located in the aptly named Parc municipal Général Marchand. Much more significant at the national level are the statues of three major imperial heroes in the immediate vicinity of the Hôtel des Invalides, featuring Marshal Lyautey, Marshal Gallieni and General Mangin. In addition, Lyautey’s final resting place (since 1961) at the heart of one of France’s most prestigious commemorative buildings, the Hôtel des Invalides, with his sarcophagus being the only one rivalling that of its founder Napoleon, demonstrates the centrality of colonial heroes in the Third (and subsequent) Republic’s celebratory landscape for more than a century. As symbolically charged figures embodying the success of the ‘civilizing mission’, imperial heroes featured regularly on the occasion of colonial exhibitions. Marshal Lyautey presided over the proceedings of the 1931 Vincennes exposition coloniale, which included a pavilion where heroes of colonialism were celebrated. The area where the colonial exhibition took place still bears the mark of the imperial hero-mania that surrounded the event, with half a dozen streets named after colonial figures in the vicinity of the ex-Musée de la France d’Outre-mer (which had been first called the Musée des Colonies and is now the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration; see Crowley in this volume). Official buildings, such as libraries or schools, were also an effective way of inscribing heroes into the nation’s system of honorific currency, and they were used liberally as a result. Because of their extensive coverage of the territory, primary and secondary schools have up to the present day remained notable vectors of heroic reputations linked to the colonial empire. Manifestations of national recognition thus led to the gradual

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metamorphosis of imperial heroes into physical lieux de mémoire, endowed with the long-lasting message of imperial activity. With the paradigmatic shift brought about by the ‘invention of decolonization’ (Shepard, 2006), the socio-cultural significance, and even the future, of imperial heroes was clearly under threat, as France saw its empire melt away and the justification of its colonial objectives questioned more and more openly. Statues already in place in the metropole remained untouched, even if they were becoming increasingly out of date. They were soon joined by those that had to be repatriated from the now ex-colonies, often eager to dispose of unwelcome reminders of their colonial past. Paradoxically, the decolonization moment meant a densification of the celebratory apparatus of empire in mainland France (Aldrich, 2005): numerous colonial memorials were dismantled and shipped to France, where they were relocated at a varying rate, following a process that saw the majority of the celebratory apparatus of French Algeria re-exported wholesale to the metropole (Amato, 1979). Culturally, imperial heroes clearly lost part of their relevance in a country that had no choice but to turn its sights towards Europe instead of overseas ventures. This was reflected in a slower output of celebratory material and a relative marginalization of colonial heroes in the mainstream culture of postcolonial France. The meaning of the obelisk commemorating the Flatters Mission in Parc Montsouris was lost to many, and colonial commemorations were no longer in tune with the dominant feeling of the population after most of the French colonies had become independent. Yet this was not entirely the end of the story of imperial heroes in the metropole. Some still appealed to specific constituencies: Charles de Foucauld remained a leading Catholic figure through the congregations of the little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus, which perpetuated his spiritual heritage; and its beatification process, which reached a positive conclusion in 2005 with his being qualified a Bienheureux, kept levels of interest in his spiritual example high. His colonial credentials remained somewhat subdued, however. This was in stark contrast with other figures who re-emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, building upon nostalgia for the time when France was a leading imperial power. Fort Saganne (1984), directed by Alain Corneau with Gérard Depardieu in the leading role, and based on a novel by Louis Gardel rewarded by the Grand prix du Roman de l’Académie française, brought to the attention of the public the conquest of the Sahara through a figure respected for his ethnographic observations before the Great War, but who had remained

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a minor hero in the grand scheme of French imperial heroism. Both the novel and the film engaged critically with the fundamental inequalities brought about by the colonial relationship. Whilst imperial heroes had not entirely disappeared from the French cinematic landscape, the time of one-sided hagiographies was clearly past, and more nuanced characters were needed at a time when the self-assurance of the ‘civilizing mission’ had evaporated, often replaced by feelings of guilt towards superiority complexes and colonial violence. In the ex-colonies, the decolonization moment saw a radical reorganization of the memorial landscape. Many postcolonial regimes sought to consolidate their legitimacy through new symbolic systems, in which statues and street names were used to celebrate fighters who had defended national emancipation from the colonial yoke. This required a clean break with the past, which involved taking down statues and renaming streets and cities. The phenomenon was particularly swift in Algeria, where the symbolic currency of colonial heroes was immediately challenged, whilst street names were promptly changed to celebrate fallen heroes of the War of Liberation. These efforts were often mirrored in the cultural realm: colonial heroes were ignored in Francophone postcolonial African literature and cinema. When French figures did appear, they were used to demonstrate the evil nature of colonialism, as when the Nigerien author Abdoulaye Mamani placed the horrors of the Voulet–Chanoine mission at the heart of Sarraounia (1980), turned into a film by Mauritanian film-maker Med Hondo, released in 1986. In fact, neither Paul Voulet nor Julien Chanoine had ever been seen as heroes in France, since their memory had been hastily buried through the renaming of their mission following the horrors it had unleashed in its path, and had become known to posterity under the much more polished branding of the ‘JoallandMeynier mission’. Yet, in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa the process of cultural challenge of heroic figures inherited from the colonial period often proved more nuanced. Many avenues of major Francophone capital cities, such as Brazzaville or Dakar, still celebrate their past colonial masters. In some cases, old and rusty statues have been given a new lease of life, as happened in Ségou (Mali) when the statue of its colonial conqueror, Louis Archinard, was restored and placed on a brand new plinth on the banks of the Niger. Further south, in Bamako, the history professor and Malian president Alpha Omar Konare chose to invest in the development of a ‘square of the Explorers’ and a ‘square

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of the Governors’ near his presidential compound, in which many French heroic figures were featured, as a way of reconciling his country with its colonial past. In Brazzaville, president Denis Sassou Nguesso has decided that the cultural life of the capital will be centred on a neo-classical memorial to Brazza, complete with a crypt containing the ashes of the explorer and his family, a statue eight metres tall and bas-reliefs and frescoes celebrating his life and role as the founder of the colony – and, as a result, of the modern state of the Congo (Sèbe, 2014). Paradoxically, some countries in Francophone Africa seem to be spearheading the rebirth of the reputations of certain colonial heroes whose action is deemed compatible with a national narrative reconciling the colonial past and the postcolonial present, while helping the central government overcome potential cultural divisions. Any postcolonial reading of the material responsible for the spread of imperial heroic reputations reveals highly biased perceptions, reflecting a strong superiority complex and conveying views about indigenous populations that were distorted by colonial prejudice. They also highlight a blatant gender imbalance, with colonial heroes being uniformly male. Yet they remain a valid historical prism to trace a cultural map of France’s relationship with its (ex-) colonies, much more nuanced than has often been acknowledged: they offer a welcome corrective to Flaubert’s (Flaubert, 1913) famous judgement in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues: ‘Colonies (nos): s’en attrister quand on en parle’. For all their shortcomings, colonial figures are a useful case study to which may be applied several of Pierre Nora’s key concepts relating to colonial lieux de mémoire: that of the cultural construction of the past, which he exemplified through his own chapter on Ernest Lavisse interpreted as a ‘national schoolteacher’, but also more physical processes, amply illustrated through the volumes of Realms of Memory. In addition, imperial heroes are at the crossroads of Republican symbolism, pedagogical strategies and commemorative efforts, and are even in some instances at the heart of ‘counter-memory’ movements. Early twenty-first-century scholarship has demonstrated the sheer scale of the influence of the colonial experience on French metropolitan culture and imagination. Imperial heroes provide ample evidence that the link between Republican and colonial memories is more complex than has been previously acknowledged, and that it has even survived in many forms into the postcolonial period – some of these in entirely unpredictable ways, as in Francophone Africa from the early 2000s onwards. Far from witnessing any movement equivalent to the Rhodes

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Must Fall campaign, the Francophone world seems sometimes to have nurtured a more consensual relationship with its colonial pantheon: can that be another, if unexpected, facet of the exception culturelle? Works Cited Aldrich, Robert. 2002. ‘Putting the Colonies on the map: Colonial names in Paris Streets’. In Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, edited by Amanda Sackur and Tony Chafer, 211–23. Basingstoke: Palgrave. — 2005. Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories. Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan. Amato, Alain. 1979. Monuments en exil. Paris: Editions de l’Atlanthrope. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Cubitt, Geoffrey, and Allen Warren, eds. 2001. Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Flaubert, Gustave. 1913. Dictionnaire des idées recues. Paris: Éditions Conard. Sèbe, Berny. 2013. Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. — 2014. ‘From Post-Colonialism to Cosmopolitan Nation-Building? British and French Imperial Heroes in Twenty-First- Century Africa’. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 5: 936–68. Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization. The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Jeanne Duval Mireille Rosello Jeanne Duval

I must warn you, reader, I am a strange site of memory. I have made a concerted effort to tell you who I am today, and who I was when I was alive in the nineteenth century, but I would rather you did not assume that I am telling the truth. I cannot even promise that my story will be more accurate than all the myths that already circulate in your memory or on your world-wide web. I was a woman. My skin was not white because my mother was black and my father a white man who did not have to care. My life was short. My lover and I contracted syphilis early on and, although he took care of me at the end, I died young, ill and poor. I was never famous except as Charles Baudelaire’s mistress, and even that was a problem: I was an irritation to his rich mother and I wonder if our relationship was one of the reasons why he was disinherited. You see that a whole collection of reasons explains why I am rarely invited to speak as a site of memory, except of course when postcolonial feminist scholars are struck by a sense of injustice. I applaud their concern but, please, let us not get off on the wrong foot: don’t read on if you are looking for a role model or a black foremother. I was not an exemplary woman and I will not be an exemplary monument. I’d rather be a self-contradictory, unreliable site, a place where you can come and wonder, not learn or worship. And if you find my story funny or beautiful, frivolous or irrelevant, it will be up to you to decide whether all these adjectives clash, or not, with your definition of a proper memorial. My monument is not set in stone but made up of much more fragile and vulnerable material. One of my favorite biographers begins his beautiful volume with a rather ominous remark: there is ‘nothing left’ of me he says, at least nothing ‘serious’ except half a page in the Collected Works of Charles

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Baudelaire (Richon, 1999: 7). But not everything about a site of memory has to be ‘serious’ or at least academic. I don’t mind starting from scratch every time someone asks me who I was because there is no accumulation of knowledge when it comes to bodies like mine: before writing this, I went back and read all the books I could think of that talk about me. Do check for yourself, there are quite a few: stories written by Angela Carter (1986), Bernard Henry-Lévi (1988), Fabienne Pasquet (1996), Elvire Maurouard (2005), Nalo Hopkinson (2006), Michaël Prazan (2007) or James McManus (2013). But Richon is right, they all have to make things up or repeat what others have said without a shred of evidence. You will find no official documents proving that my real name was Jeanne Duval. Or Lemer. Or Prosper. And, sometimes, I went by Berthe. Serious people keep speculating about my place and date of birth. But there is no evidence that I was from Haiti or from Ile de France or from Nantes. And no one can find a record of when and where I died. Does that mean I did not exist? Or rather that you should rethink what it means to be so obsessed with documenting humans? Just because we cannot remember exactly does not mean encounters did not happen. Look at Nadar, who was not yet a famous photographer when we had an affair. He can’t remember when he first saw me. In his memoirs, he writes that it was around 1839–40. Honestly, I am pretty sure it was earlier, because in 1848, when the French finally abolished slavery for good, I remember thinking that I had been an actress for ten years and I thought of that role I had in a play where I was a maid who helped her mistress take revenge on her husband. But I really can’t be sure anymore. Charles Pichois thinks that it was in 1838 and he is probably right: he was a finicky researcher (1955: 193). He was, anyway, much more interested in Charles, my great love, my only love. We were together, on and off, for twenty years. People say I was his muse and, for the longest time, it was considered an honour for a woman to be a muse. I have my views about that, but I must admit that I am proud that scholars have identified some of Charles’ most beautiful love poems in the Flowers of Evil and put them together as the ‘Black Venus cycle’. Don’t misunderstand me: when I say he was my only love I am not talking about romantic love. Romanticism is not a luxury I could afford. I was what they called a ‘lorette’, a kept woman who had more than one male friend. But what we had was special and it did not stop when I lost my beauty to illness and age. When he met me and wrote these poems about me, he was, after all, a

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very young man. Twenty years later, he felt ancient. He wrote in one of his poems that he had more memories than if he were one thousand years old. He was not healthy anymore. Still, for twenty years we had wonderful fights, which does not mean that he did not like me or disliked women in general. So many scholars think that Charles hated women (Clements, 1985: 155), or was afraid of them (Sheehan, 2013: 59) or was terrified of his own feminine side (Bersani, 1977: 66). To be honest, I did not finish those books. I found these references in the work of a critic who charmed me because she was sceptical of all that nonsense (Chatterjee, 2016). That said, I understand why they call him a misogynist. It is easy to be fooled by his attention-seeking pronouncements. Everyone keeps repeating (and I apologize for joining the chorus) the supposedly profound aphorisms with which he peppered My Heart Laid Bare: ‘Woman is natural, that is abominable. She is always vulgar, i.e. the opposite of the Dandy’ (Baudelaire I, 1975: 677; my translation). Sometimes I would grumble: ‘Don’t you think your provocations are a bit childish?’ Once I asked: ‘What if I went around declaring that prostitution is a form of art or that married women are unpaid prostitutes?’ But he did not have much of a sense of humour, my poet. He looked at me, dead serious, and said ‘Oh but that’s very good Jeanne, very good indeed, I would not put it quite like that but what a good idea!’ And when you read Rockets, you find pearls like ‘Love is a taste for prostitution. There is not even one noble pleasure that does not boil down to prostitution […] What is art? Prostitution’ (Baudelaire I, 1975: 189; my translation). You see what I mean: if you don’t take his verbal antics with a grain of salt, you could be forgiven for thinking that he was a horrible man. I remember those evenings when he would come to my place and everyone liked to imagine that we were having diabolical sex. Mostly, he wanted to show me his poems. But if I got angry he accused me of not understanding. In the short story written by Angela Carter she makes him read ‘The Dancing Serpent’ out loud to me, and when I point out that it is absurd to compare me to a snake dancing at the end of a stick (Snakes have no legs and, besides, I am sure he had never seen a snake in his life [Carter, 1986: 14]), he calls me an idiot. But really, that day, we were in a good mood. There were worse rows, believe me. Have you recently reread ‘Her Hair’ (Baudelaire I, 1975: 27)? I hate and love that poem. It is beautiful but I find it offensive too, because I know he is talking about me. Listen to this: ‘For a long time, for ever, my hand will sow ruby, pearl and sapphire in your mane so that you may never be

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deaf to my desire’ (my translation). Call me stupid (and many do),1 but I would have had to be a sophisticated postmodern deconstructionist to like being told that I only loved him because he gave me money. I know he does not say that, exactly. If I look at each of the words he chose and if I forget that other people use them, a beautiful vision emerges. He says he will ‘sow’ rubies and sapphires in my hair (not give them to me, for example), which makes me imagine that the precious stones are seeds, and that they start growing in my hair like the strings of beads that African women sometimes wear in their braids. But then I look at ‘crinière’ [mane] and I get upset again: ‘Are you going to stop calling me an animal?’ I said to him, ‘this is such a cliché.’ And he replied, impatiently: ‘since when is being called an animal not a compliment? Animals know everything about synesthesia.’ I told him it might be so but that we lived in a time when scientists thought that black people were apes. And why didn’t he ask Saartje Baartman how she liked being exhibited like a stuffed animal after her death?2 He may have believed that animals and humans were all poets and that he was an Albatross, but, then, he was hundreds of years ahead of his time. I knew that all his readers would understand that I was a wild and beautiful African female animal. By then, I would be furious and accuse him of calling me a whore. And then he would be hurt and say, sadly: ‘when did I ever treat you like a whore? Besides, I am a whore too.’ And I would say: ‘Ah no, don’t you dare call yourself a whore again, especially since you stole that idea from me and never told anyone. Do you know what they call that? Plagiarism!’ 1 One of Charles’s biographers calls me ‘a common slut, totally uncultivated and extremely stupid’, another one talks about my greed and my stupidity. No, I will not tell you who they are, why should I? If you really want to know, I can tell you that a few critics mention them in books that I find more interesting, and not only because they don’t call me stupid. Maggie Tonkin quotes them both but only to suggest that they were only parroting Charles or his friends’ prejudiced views (Tonkin, 2012: 111). 2 When I realize that they called her the ‘Hottentot Venus’ I no longer know if I am pleased or scandalized to be remembered as the Black Venus. I have the impression that all the voyeurs who were in awe of her body were laughing when they compared her to their white Venuses. Charles was not like that, I know that he would have wanted slavery to be abolished (Lionnet, 2008: 726) but still, now I wish that he had known that it would be a cruel choice for me to accept that dubious title, if only to not repudiate the other unfortunate South African Venus (Gilman, 1985: 223–61).

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I admit, our relationship was not exactly harmonious. And our friends were never sure whether we were together or not. And they never knew how to deal with it and it is clearly the same with art critics, who struggle with my biography to this day. Do you remember the huge painting that Edouart Manet called Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining? All you can see at first is a massive white crinoline and my foot sticking out, and also an enormous right hand. I was half paralysed by then – I had had a stroke, and maybe that’s why I was hanging onto the couch, but I am not sure why Manet got my hand so wrong. And frankly I don’t remember posing for him. But I get impatient when scholars explain that it cannot be me in the painting because by 1862 Charles and I had already broken up for good (Dolan, 1997: 611; Pollock, 1999: 272). Perhaps the date of the painting is wrong. Besides, between what Charles did and what he wrote about us breaking up, especially to his Mother, there was enough space to fill novels. And, between you and me, why would I insist that I was Manet’s model of Baudelaire’s mistress? Why would I only want to be remembered as his mistress? What if I would rather, then, disappear on my own terms? Do you remember Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio? I am sure you have heard the story: Courbet put me into the painting, and then erased me. Sometimes, I sneak into the Orsay Museum in Paris and try to discern the traces of my presence behind Charles. Today, if you look closely right above the place where my poet reads, you can see that something was erased. That was me at some point. Everyone repeats that Courbet erased me because Charles asked him to do so (Bowness, 1977: 198). But he did so because I told him that I was scandalized by the way Courbet painted me. You should have seen that picture; I was admiring myself in the mirror, coquettishly, as if nothing else mattered but myself and my appearance. Ironic, really, when that painting is all about Courbet being the centre of the universe. Look at him: he is the artist at work, right in the middle of the frame. He has ordered society according to how useful people are to him. On the right, he has put serious figures whom he wants, I suppose, to flatter: there are a philosopher, one of his sponsors, and an art critic. And there is also my poet, wrapped up in a book, sulking on the edge of a chair. Then, on the left side of the canvas, he painted a whole universe of miserable little people, the world of realism that he claims he wanted to represent. At least in theory, because there is no one on the canvas that he is currently finishing. You have to wonder why the tall white woman next to him has to be naked, since he is painting a landscape. But the important thing is that she is

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mesmerized, in awe of his genius. Art critics have, of course, said that she is the muse. I think she is evidence of Courbet’s narcissism. So I had no desire to be yet another of Courbet’s creatures. I would rather not be there, I would rather be silent and invisible. I say ‘I’ today because I am addressing twenty-first century readers: I know that you like what you call agency and that you are aware of the paradoxes of postcolonial situated knowledge. Yes, before you ask, I am familiar with situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), with the subaltern and the native informant (Spivak, 2010; 1999). And I think, reader, that, no matter what, you and I are trapped in the history that we are trying to rewrite. If you want to listen to me, to give me back my voice, you will have to make me speak in a way that only exposes your own predilection for appearance, your bias in favour of visibility and recognition. Aimé Césaire’s beautiful promise moved me to tears when he wrote: ‘My mouth will be the mouth of those griefs which have no mouth.’ But I am not a Martinican man who studied in France before returning to his tiny island to tell his magnificent miserable people that they were a miserable magnificent people. I did have a mouth but I was happy to keep quiet. Charles called me the ‘great taciturn’ (Baudelaire I, 1975: 27). I am not speaking for anyone, I am a weird, a queer textual object, some Odradek that you keep bumping into when you least expect it. Perhaps you would prefer it if I said that I enjoyed being like a toy abandoned by my poet’s cat on his Persian rug, but I don’t care if you find it implausible that I have read Kafka (1971). Perhaps I don’t want to talk to you. In fact, I would like you to forget me, and then remember that you have forgotten me, so that you would realize that you had and that you have to relearn how to remember me all over again. Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. 1975 and 1976. Œuvres complètes. 1 and 2. Edited by Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade. Bersani, Leo. 1977. Baudelaire and Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bowness, Alan. 1977. ‘Courbet and Baudelaire’. Gazette des Beaux-Arts 90 (December): 189–99. Carter, Angela. 1986. ‘Black Venus’. In Black Venus, 7–24. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd. Chatterjee, Ronjaunee. 2016. ‘Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity’. French Studies 70, no. 1: 17–32.

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Clements, Patricia. 1985. Baudelaire and the English Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dolan, Therese. 1997. ‘Skirting the Issue: Manet’s Portrait of Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining’. The Art Bulletin 79, no. 4: 611–29. Gilman, Sander. 1985. ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature’. In Race, Writing and Difference, edited by Henry Gates, 223–61. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives’. Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn): 575–99. Henry-Lévi, Bernard. 1988. Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire. Paris: Grasset. Hopkinson, Nalo. 2006. The Salt Roads. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Kafka, Franz. 1971. ‘The Cares of a Family Man’. In The Complete Stories, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, 427–29. New York: Schocken. Lionnet, Françoise. 2008. ‘“The Indies”: Baudelaire’s Colonial World’. PMLA 123, no.3 (May): 723–36. McManus, James. 2013. Black Venus. New York: Saint Martin’s. Maurouard, Elvire. 2005. Les Beautés noires de Baudelaire. Paris: Karthala. Pasquet, Fabienne. 1996. L’Ombre de Baudelaire. Arles: Actes Sud. Pichois, Claude. 1955. ‘A Propos d’un poème de Baudelaire: Du nouveau sur Jeanne Duval’. Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 55, no. 2 (AprilJune): 191–205. Pollock, Griselda. 1999. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. New York & London: Routledge. Prazan, Michaël. 2007. La Maîtresse de Charles Baudelaire. Paris: Plon. Richon, Emmanuel. 1999. Jeanne Duval et Charles Baudelaire: belle d’abandon. Paris: L’Harmattan. Sheehan, Paul. 2013. Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — 2010. ‘“Can the Subaltern Speak?”: Revised Edition, from the “History” Chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason’. In Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalind Morris, 21–78. New York: Columbia University Press. Tonkin, Maggie. 2012. Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/ Fictional Critiques. New York: Palgrave.

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Women’s Rights Françoise Vergès Women’s Rights

On 23 February 1971 thirty women were seen arriving at the Tribunal of Saint-Denis, the capital of Réunion, a French overseas department. They were the plaintiffs in the trial of six doctors, all men, five of them white and French and one of Moroccan origin, and of a male nurse, a Reunionnese of Indian descent, all accused of having performed abortions and sterilizations on thousands of Reunionnese women without their consent. The General Confederation of Workers, the most important union on the island, was also a plaintiff. The magistrates were all white men who had been sent by the French state to deliver justice in this overseas department; the lawyers of the defence and the prosecution were also all men and white. This embodied Réunion at the time, a society divided along class, gender and racial lines. Even lawyers for the defendants were men; there were no female lawyers yet. The defendants, who had all gone to the judge making the inquiry, showed high levels of courage. In a context of strong anti-communism and repression of any attempt to defy the postcolonial republican order, in a society still heavily controlled by the caste of descendants of slaves’ owners and directors of sugar factories, by the Catholic Church and the French administration, poor and racialized women agreed to have their testimonies published in the communist daily Témoignages and to publicly denounce white men in positions of power. The trial was the outcome of a scandal that had emerged a year earlier. In June 1970 a doctor was called to the bedside of a seventeen-year-old woman in a small, poor village of Réunion. She was bleeding profusely following a botched abortion. For more than a year the newspapers of the Communist Party and of the Catholic Church had reported rumours about a clinic owned by a powerful man of Réunion’s white elite, where

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thousands of illegal abortions were performed. To no avail. This time, since the doctor had called the police, an inquiry was ordered. The police learned that every year since 1966, in a clinic owned by Dr Moreau, 6,000 to 8,000 women were victims of abortions without their consent. They entered Dr Moreau’s clinic three to seven months pregnant and left after having their pregnancies aborted without their consent. Quite a few were also sterilized without consent. They were sent to the clinic by governmental institutions of birth control and pre-natal care. Moreau, who was born a ‘blanc sale’, had become a member of the local white elite thanks to his marriage to the daughter of a very wealthy man who owned a dozen sugar cane factories on the island. Soon the wealthy owner of stores, resorts and clinics on the island, he was an active member of the local anticommunist and pro-colonial conservatives. Elected mayor of the city where he had opened his clinic in 1952 with 98  per cent of the vote, he was a supporter of Michel Debré, a former prime minister of the Fifth Republic who fiercely opposed Algerian independence and women’s rights, and had come to Réunion in 1962 to ‘save’ the island from communism and decolonization. A judge who had not yet understood that this kind of scandal should be buried launched an inquiry. He learned that, at a clinic owned by a Reunionnese man in power, thousands of Reunionnese women, poor and racialized, had had their pregnancies aborted and had been sterilized without their consent. Some of the women were seven to eight months’ pregnant and none were informed that the procedures of abortion and sterilization would be performed. In their testimonies, they denounced the racial and class contempt of nurses and doctors; they were mocked because they spoke Creole, they were brutally dismissed when they asked questions; they learned of the surgical procedures when they woke up. The judge also confirmed what the communist daily had already denounced: that the doctors were each receiving thousands of francs of reimbursement from social security – the latter was required by law to cover the cost of medical acts for poor people, and the public fund came from withdrawals from workers’ salaries. Doctors had made hundreds of thousands of francs in this way – some had even become millionaires – and the clinic where abortions were carried out had made incredible profits by claiming reimbursement. The trial ended with very minor sanctions. The Moroccan doctor was the only one to be forbidden to practice for a certain number of years and the Reunionnese male nurse was the only one to be definitely banned from practising his profession. One cannot help but link these punishments to the racial identity of the

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accused. The owner of the clinic, who was responsible for stealing public money, was never put on trial. The women never received reparation. To put into perspective how minor the punishments were, let us remember that abortion was still criminalized in France and those convicted of helping women to abort were heavily punished with imprisonment, loss of jobs and social exclusion. In Réunion, the post-colonial power could not indict Moreau. He was a powerful white businessman, a pillar of the local conservative party. Moreau was never investigated and his political career was not affected. He was even elected at the end of 1970 to the island’s General Council with 100 per cent of the vote and remained its vice-president for twenty-three years. Why choose this moment as a site of memory? In which ways do the mutilated bodies of Reunionnese women transform the notion of a site of memory, disturb its frame? First, feminist struggles for women’s control over their bodies constitute a site of memory. They bring together issues of class, gender, race and age and conceptions of sexuality, masculinity and femininity in the colonies, the colonized nation and the postcolonial state. They bring together national and international policies about women. Second, the scandal in Réunion shows the process through which bodies and territories are forgotten in the current French Republic. It helps us understand why and how colonialism contaminated European social movements. It shows why it is important to study the contextualized terrain of the struggle for women’s rights. It shows how Republican postcoloniality was gendered and racialized. It helps us understand the ways in which state policies connected a small French overseas department to national and global policies on birth control. It allows us to analyse the connection between birth control and the gendered colour line in the organization of a global and mobile workforce by tracing through slave trade, slavery and colonialism the ways in which imperial powers organized the racialized reproduction of a workforce. Finally, it contributes to an understanding of how we moved from a Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s to a discourse on women’s rights that has been serving imperialism, corporate capitalism and national patriarchy. The mutilation of thousands of bodies of Reunionnese women does not appear in any narratives of the French Women’s Liberation Movement as an event of primary importance. In the 1970s, in their campaign for the liberalization of abortion and contraception, French women argued that one million women were dying every year because of botched abortions. The number was striking, as was the fact that women had to hide and

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to lie, and were harshly punished for what was a legitimate right. The complicity of the state, the Church and the medical authorities was glaring; women were seen as wombs for the state. My point is not to oppose one million deaths to thousands of forced abortions and sterilizations, but to argue that, by analyzing these two facts together, a racialized cartography of state patriarchy and policies appears. Both facts show that the history of birth control is racialized, that it was not a contradiction that the same state criminalized abortion and contraception in France and encouraged them in French overseas territories, but the result of political choices. Indeed, as the 1962 law authorizing the use of contraceptive was sparingly applied in France, special regulations were set out for its application in the overseas departments: contraceptives were freely distributed; IUDs could be fitted to fifteen-year-old girls without parental consent; contraceptives could be given to a thirteen-year-old on the order of a doctor and without parental consent. Depo-Provera was largely used. Offices of birth control opened everywhere. In other words, one cannot separate the death of one million French women from the policies of forced abortion and sterilization in other parts of the Republic. As we grasp that this apparent contradiction is the result of a political choice – deciding who would have children and who would not – we uncover the long history of the racialized control of women’s wombs, visible in the regime of birth under slavery and post-slavery colonization. Such an understanding of geographically separated, but politically and culturally linked, policies contributes to the analysis of the process of fabrication of racial identities and female white privilege. This connection shows that the struggle for women’s control over their own bodies is never the same everywhere; it must integrate a political history in which race plays a central role. Indeed, the feminists who argue that women are the victims of the same kind of patriarchy everywhere wish to ignore the reality that patriarchy is not a universal concept that takes similar forms everywhere. Patriarchy is racialized. Slavery, colonialism and imperialism have instituted a colour line in patriarchy. Racialized men did not have the same access to the signs of patriarchal power as did white men – private property, paternity rights, civic rights, being magistrates, being officers in the army, being elected to national institutions  …  . They could reign supreme in their homes (and, for male slaves, there was no ‘home’), but in the public space they had to bow to white male (and female) privilege. The privileges of masculinity were not equally distributed. What happened in Réunion in 1971 also shows the reconfiguration of the French Republic’s space undertaken in the late 1950s, when a part of

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the French governing classes started to consider defeat in Algeria. A first reconfiguration had occurred just after the war, when the French state had to redraw the borders of its space in a context of universal condemnation of racism, decolonization, the Cold War, US hegemony, the creation of the European Community and the reordering of capitalism in the new global order. Then, what was at stake was the protection of French interests in the colonial empire while acknowledging the condemnation of racism and the aspiration to independence.1 In that reconfiguration, overseas territories (in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, Caribbean and South America) started to become marginalized: they were no longer colonies, but were to remain economically and politically dependent. Hence, the demand of 1946, defended by Aimé Césaire, for the anti-colonial movements at the National Assembly – equality of social rights for the ‘old’ colonies, as the Antilles, Guiana and Réunion were known – was hindered and dependency reinforced. With the Algerian war, those in power grasped a new necessity: writing a new constitution and proposing a new republican cartography, tracing the space of Frenchness within Europe, defining again who was truly French and who was not. They did this in the context of the ‘invention of decolonization’, described by Todd Shepard (2006) as the process whereby the French state suddenly forgot that it had claimed for centuries that Algeria was French, as well as the context of the organized arrival of thousands of workers from former colonies to work in France. According to this view, France had to become more ‘European’ and forget how its society had been shaped by centuries of colonialism – slavery and post-slavery – by redrawing its borders in Europe. France marginalized not only the role of its former colonies in its making but the role of its overseas territories in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean and South America. The process was slow; if in the 1950s and 1960s the overseas territories were still embodying among social movements the French state’s coloniality of power, by the late 1970s they were starting to disappear from political consciousness as demonstrating the continuing coloniality of power in the French Republic and the role of racialization. Republican postcoloniality presented a mutilated cartography, ignoring not only the colonial past and the postcolonial present but also their boomerang effect, which had been so well described by Aimé Césaire in his Discours sur le colonialisme (1950). With the notion of the boomerang 1 The French State proposed the ‘French Union’: integration in a larger frame, some autonomy to former colonies, extension of civic rights, abolition of the ‘Code de l’indigénat’ but as the preamble said, France remained the ‘guide’ of the Union.

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effect, or what could also be called ‘reverse-shock’, Césaire demonstrated how racial thinking had contaminated European progressive thought: one cannot colonize innocently, without impunity. The ugliness will come back, the arrangements with principles, the corruption of democracy. Césaire showed how revered figures of French republicanism had become ‘naturally’ racist and xenophobic. The most visible boomerang effect had been, Césaire wrote, the return of colonial genocidal and racist politics in the heart of Europe with Nazism. Nobody should have been surprised: camps, genocide, deportation, looting, grabbing resources, property and lands had been legitimate and encouraged practices in the colonies, so how could Europeans think they would be protected from this poison? In 1956, in his letter of resignation from the Communist Party, Césaire went back to this idea of the boomerang effect through his denunciation of the French Left’s paternalism, here of communists. He wrote: There is a veritable Copernican revolution to be imposed here, so ingrained in Europe (from the extreme right to the extreme left) is the habit of doing for us, arranging for us, thinking for us – in short, the habit of challenging our possession of this right to initiative of which I have just spoken, which is, at the end of the day, the right to personality. (1956)

In other words, the critique of a historical paternalistic tradition on the Left and in social movements was available. Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Antillean movements for independence, Réunion’s communists, and the Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou had pursued Césaire’s analysis. Decolonization had challenged French social movements: what are you doing about race and about your own complicity with white privileges? The movements of decolonization also rejected French leadership, claiming that they did not need guidance and that they would find their own ways of emancipation. It was a radical moment. This is why it is remarkable that, despite their debt to the movement of decolonization, post-1968 social movements adopted the mutilated cartography of republican postcoloniality. On the one hand, they did not reflect on the ways in which they had been contaminated by paternalistic and racist practices, discourses and representations. On the other hand, for the most part, they soon forgot that the coloniality of power continued to shape the French Republic. Though their political matrix had been decolonization, Leftist movements and the Women’s Liberation Movement did not understand that it also meant that they had to undergo their own decolonization. When, in their first published

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texts, groups in the Women’s Liberation Movement claimed that they had read Frantz Fanon and other classics of decolonization, that they were reading African-American feminism, they did not seem to fully grasp one of their lessons: there was not a ‘here’ and ‘there’, but the ‘there’ was also ‘here’. Gender, sexuality and race had been intimately linked; they had ‘intersected’ as soon as Europeans had organized their colonial expansion. What it was to be ‘a woman’ and ‘a man’ in Europe – white, naturally endowed with rights and beauty – was built on what it was not: non-white, backwards, waiting to be civilized. The politics of othering were gendered and racialized. Dispossession, enslavement, the justification of torture, of genocide, of making human beings into objects to buy, sell and traffic, the right to murder, plunder and loot were racialized. Though the fabrication of a mutilated and racialized cartography was not a new phenomenon, the one traced by the Fifth Republic has weighed heavily on the ways in which current debates have been framed, notably around the veil, Islam and Blackness. It is thus no surprise that some French feminists who often appeared in the media to comment on the veil, Islam, gender and race have adopted a postcolonial republican cartography. If they can claim to be the inheritors of the Women’s Liberation, it is because the latter was not strong enough on the issue of race and French coloniality and did not analyse the ways in which the struggle for women’s liberation – for social justice, against imperialism, capitalism and racial patriarchy – could become the struggle for women’s rights as individual rights. This is why returning to the 1971 trial in Réunion is helpful. It brings together post-Algerian war republican postcoloniality and race, gender, class, white supremacy and masculinity; it brings to light tensions within local and national white supremacist forces and shows that reactionary local forces must be taken into account; finally, it contributes to the understanding of why women’s rights could become, in the 2000s, a tool in the hands of imperialism, global capitalism and patriarchy insofar as they were devoid of the objectives of social justice, the end to imperialism and racial capitalism, why a national-feminism could emerge in the defence of women’s rights. In narrating the history of Réunion women’s mutilated bodies, my aim is not to integrate a forgotten chapter in the French feminist narrative. Integration is not decolonization. Rather, I seek to suggest a methodology for decolonial narration and to contribute to the development of decolonial feminism. The politics of birth control bring together gender, race, sexuality, postcolonial politics, medical power and class in a post-colonial French

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department and remind us of the importance of crossing the analysis of the local with the national, with the global. On the local level, it shows a racialized politics of birth control contemporary with a new division of labour and new politics of migration. On the national level, it shows two policies: at home, encouraging fertility and large families; in the overseas territories, encouraging contraception and abortion. On the global level, it belongs to the politics that, in the second half of the twentieth century, saw international institutions pay close attention to fertility in Third World countries. Fertility became the most studied aspect of women’s lives in the Third World. The link made between poverty and birth rate was central to national and global policies that did not address the woman’s right to exercise control over her sexuality, but rather sought to enforce the power of the state or international institutions to impose programmes of birth control. Soon, on the global level, the birthrate in the Third World was connected to world security, under-development and threats to the environment. World Congresses on Population brought together UN agencies on migration, labour and the environment. The bodies and sexualities of women of the global South became an issue of importance, analysed by feminists. French politics of birth control in the overseas territories were not foreign to this ideology. As early as 1945 French experts declared that the most important threat to the development of the overseas departments was their birthrate. Whereas, before World War II, local notables had lamented the lack of inhabitants owing to high infant mortality and the absence of public health, a few years later it was overpopulation that had become the issue. The French national economic plan had no room for local economies – French state capitalism no longer needed their exotic products but was seeking to transform them into sites of consumption for French manufactured products. Thus, the reproduction of a local workforce was no longer necessary, whereas France would soon require bodies for low-paid jobs in hospitals and other state services. By the 1960s, the state finally implemented what 1945 experts had defended: an aggressive campaign of birth control and organized emigration. Politics of birth control went along with a series of ­governmental policies with cultural, social, political and psychic impacts: • Between 1963 and 1982, the deportation of 1,630 babies and young children from poor and non-white families taken by social services in Réunion without the full consent of their families and sent to poor regions of France to contribute to their ‘repopulation’ (see Murdoch in this volume);

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• The closure of sugar factories in the Antilles and Réunion; the struggle for better conditions of work in sugar and banana plantations; the brutal repression of strikes, in which women played an important role; • The creation of a governmental institution to organize the massive migration of women and men from the Antilles and Réunion to continental France to work in low-paid positions in public services or factories; what Césaire would call ‘a genocide by substitution’. In France, white men and women aspired to be promoted and lower-paid positions in hospitals, post offices and customs were filled by men and women from the Antilles and Réunion. The care industry became racialized and gendered; • A series of repressive measures designed to censor and silence local voices of dissent; • The imprisonment of activists; the unpunished murders of activists in 1959 in Fort-de-France, 1967 in Pointe-à-Pitre, and in Réunion between 1958 and 1978.

The story of French policies of abortion and contraception in overseas territories brings a corrective to the feminist history of abortion and contraception that goes thus: a courageous struggle of French feminists against patriarchy and misogyny. It is important to recall some of its landmarks. Shortly after the trial for forced abortions opened in Réunion in January 1971, on 5 April the ‘Manifesto of the 343 sluts’ was published, in which 343 French women declared publicly that they had had an abortion, signing a text written by Simone de Beauvoir. In October and November of 1972 the ‘Bobigny Trial’ became a landmark case for the right to abortion: a minor who had been raped and had an abortion was on trial with her mother and another woman. Gisèle Halimi, who had defended Algerian nationalists (among them tortured women), was their lawyer. Simone de Beauvoir, known for her opposition to the Algerian war, was among her supporters. In the 1970s feminist demonstrations for the liberalization of abortion and contraception were held in France; testimonies of women who had aborted or of doctors and nurses who had helped them were published, defying the law; abortions were performed in public. The mobilization led to the adoption in January 1975 of a law that decriminalized abortion and repealed the penalty for voluntarily terminating a pregnancy during the first ten weeks. In this narrative, the situation of poor and non-white women in overseas territories was ignored because it did not fit the narrative of a

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universal patriarchy that treated women in a similar way despite their race, ethnicity, age, ability, sexuality and class. The struggles of overseas feminist movements were also ignored because they did not fit the narrative of European women’s struggle for emancipation: they insisted too much on colonialism and anti-racism. Why and how non-white women had been made into an object of repressive public policy was not considered. The crime against women occurred in France. Yet, the logic of universal patriarchy could not explain the kind of social subjection visited by the French state on poor and non-white women. The ‘forgetfulness’ of feminist struggles in overseas territories, of forced abortions and sterilizations, could be analysed as the Western symptom of political ignorance and self-absorption. There is certainly some of this. The epistemology of ignorance is a form of privilege. But I want to add to this the ‘politics of forgetfulness’ the politics that consciously carve out forgotten territories and people. These politics are fought by social and political movements that understand the role of forgetfulness in politics – masking its necessity for the ways in which the nation-state is conceived, here the French Republic – and how capitalism works: organizing racialized inequalities and asymmetries. Decolonial feminism analyses these processes, showing their logic or the ways in which a series of disparate elements coalesce to reinforce racialized inequalities. Decolonial feminism does not seek to fill the gaps and absences of a hegemonic narrative; it wants to denationalize feminism, to trace the itineraries of solidarity and to deconstruct the view that patriarchy is the same everywhere. It wants to bring back the idea of liberation rather than promoting women’s rights when the latter are instrumentalized to serve imperialism or corporate business. For decolonial feminists, the intangible memories of the 1971 forced abortions and sterilizations in Réunion are not an isolated incident but a site of memory that contributes to the struggle for post-racist social justice. Works Cited Césaire, Aimé. 1950. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Réclame. — 1956. ‘Lettre à Maurice Thorez’. ‘Les mots sont importants’, http://lmsi.net/ Lettre-a-Maurice-Thorez. Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Words and Images

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French Language Cécile Van den Avenne French Language

In 2005, in a highly polemical atmosphere, a law was passed in France (but then rapidly abrogated) acknowledging the benefits of colonization. Among the ‘positive effects’ of colonization, teaching French language and teaching in French were implicitly referenced in the legislation, especially in the parliamentary debates that preceded the vote (Bertrand, 2006). Indeed, the spread overseas of the French language is a clear legacy of French colonial expansion, even though that legacy is unequally shared. At the same time, the French language may be claimed as a ‘butin de guerre’ [war booty], a term coined by Algerian novelist Kateb Yacine. Legacy or booty, French took a new course and its use, especially in Africa (where the highest percentage of French-speaking people in the world are located), has become a postcolonial issue. In Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, French as a language is principally addressed in two entries: ‘Le génie de la langue française’ by Marc Fumaroli and ‘L’Histoire de la langue française de Ferdinand Brunot’ by Jean-Claude Chevalier. The formula ‘le génie de la langue française’ refers to the idea of an inherent clarity of the French language that would give it a vocation to universality. Dated back to the classical eighteenth century, that idea of French as a universal language has been partly superseded, since the French Revolution, by another one, which persists to today: French as a national language, and in a way as guarantor of the French nation. Indeed, French republican linguistic ideology makes a strong link between language and national identity. And this ideology clearly underlies Ferdinand Brunot’s ‘Histoire de la langue française’, a ‘monument de la langue française’, as Jean-Claude Chevalier described it, which in eleven large volumes relates the history of the French language from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. ‘Une

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amplitude de rédaction à la mesure d’une langue exceptionnelle’ [an editorial magnitude commensurate with an exceptional language], wrote Jean-Claude Chevalier enthusiastically. However, at the same time, the idea of French as a universal language remains, and a ‘dual mythology’ about the French language emerges (Pinhas, 2008). The supposed universality of the French language converges with the supposed universality of the French republican model and, in that perspective, French becomes the ideal medium for the transmission of human rights and Republican values. This ‘imperialism of universality’, as Pierre Bourdieu (1992) calls it, concerned both the French national territory and the conquered territories of the French colonial empire beginning in the second part of the nineteenth century. It does not mean that the French language was widely propagated throughout the empire. Indeed, teaching French and in French in the colonies was limited and was not aimed at widespread political and cultural assimilation. The purpose of education in the colonies was to train effective auxiliaries for the French administration, and there was no need for more than competence in a usual and functional form of French. Only a very small part of the population, called the ‘élite indigène’, had access to the fullness of the French language. French colonial linguistic policy was paradoxical: the spread of the French national language was a political consensus, because it was the medium of the ‘mission civilisatrice’, but locally French was scarcely taught. As Goheneix-Polanski (2012) states, the promotion of the French language in the colonies was limited to maintain the singularity of the metropolitan community beside the colonized populations. The colonizers played the role of ‘language-keeper’, by maintaining separate uses (simplified French, for example) and/or by restraining access to the language. The colonial situation produced a variety of pidginized French (called ‘petit-nègre’, a metonymic and clearly racist designation), which was used in unequal interactions between Europeans and Africans. And linguistic ideologies, as conveyed by the ‘colonial library’ (Mudimbe), impacted linguistic practices. In colonial novels and travelogues Africans were always depicted speaking ‘in telegraphic style’ (Delafosse, 1909: 18; Van den Avenne, 2007a). Colonial writer André Demaison, on the other hand, was criticized because he depicted African people speaking ‘comme des Académiciens’ (Tharaud and Tharaud, 1922: 4). During colonial times, French was the language in which the voice of the natives could be heard by the colonizers. However, speaking in French was subject to a double stigma. Clumsy speech was denigrated for lack

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of competence; too accurate, and it was denigrated for pretentious hypercorrection. To be heard, the African native had to be wary of two pitfalls: ‘petit-nègre’, which exposes him to laughter, and ‘verbalisme’ or ‘pédantisme’ (words used in a primary school handbook, Davesne and Gouin, 2008 [1939]), which was irritating. The simple use of French was a social injunction: to know one’s place. In the ‘Old’ colonies (that is, in French Guyana, the French Antilles and Réunion), slavery-based colonization gave birth to Creole languages, which were used in daily interactions between slaves of African descent and masters of European descent. Until the abolition of slavery (1848), schooling was insignificant; at best, slaves of African descent may have had a basic religious instruction. And even for the ‘hommes libres de couleur’ [‘free coloured men’], a strongly segregationist regime maintained them apart from the education system in French until the nineteenth century. From the abolition of slavery onwards the rapid progress of education and schooling in French led to a small, educated middle-class of African descent. Fernand Césaire (1868–1896), Aimé Césaire’s grandfather, for example, was one of the first Black teachers in Martinique and was trained in mainland France at the École Normale Supérieure de Saint Cloud (created in 1882, with the goal of educating a working-class elite). In 1946, through a process of ‘départementalisation’, French Guyana, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Réunion fully became part of the French nation (see Murdoch in this volume). The language policy and school system were the same as in mainland France: completely monolingual, ousting Creole from institutional arenas and reinforcing a diglossic situation. Mastering French became a necessity for social and economic promotion. The predominant place of the French language stifled the development of literacy practices in Creole, even though Creole had been written since the eighteenth century (Hazaël-Massieux, 2008). Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire wrote exclusively in French and argued that he could not have conceived his written work in Creole because of its incomplete scripturalization at the time. In Sub-Saharan Africa, at the time of independence, French was chosen as an official language and language of education in the majority of the former French colonies in Africa (apart from Guinea). This decision was the result of both economic imperatives and the sociological characteristics of African political elites. Indeed, those elites were educated in French, most of them pursued their studies in France, and they owed their social position to that education. Léopold Sédar Senghor,

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first president of an independent Senegal, was a fervent advocate of Francophonie. His career is exemplary: first African agrégé of the University of Paris in 1935, he became a member of the parliament as a representative of Senegal in 1945. He was then state secretary (1955–56) and minister–counsellor at the beginning of Fifth Republic (1959). In an article Senghor wrote in 1962, entitled ‘Le français, langue de culture’, he compared the French language and African languages, and stated that the French language epitomizes clarity and rationality. With this kind of statement, he continued the work of the essentialisation of the French language. Beginning in the 1960s, French spread more widely in the different social groups of African populations. However, French is not spoken in the same proportions in every country of the former empire: in some of them (Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, for example), it is spoken by less than 17  per cent of the population, but in Congo it is spoken by 58  per cent of the population. The access to literacy in French is also unequal: speaking French does not mean being able to read or write it. Besides, the position of the French language is different from one country to another, according to the global sociolinguistic situation in each of them. Most Sub-Saharan countries are widely multilingual. In the cases where no African language is used as a vehicular language for crosslinguistic or inter-ethnic communication, French can assume this role, as in the Ivory Coast, and it is therefore spoken in every social level of the population. But in other countries where an African language is used as a vehicular language, such as Wolof in Senegal or Bamanan in Mali, French remains a formal language, used only in formal situations (for schooling and education, in administration and so on). Local varieties of French have emerged, especially in the countries where French was used as a vehicle. In the Ivory Coast, for example, the French language has been largely appropriated to the extent that an indigenous variety emerged as the norm (Boutin, 2003). There is a general agreement among the speakers to use this Ivorian variety of French, and it also became an issue of identity. Speaking French with a standard French accent can be stigmatized as chocobi – that is, snobby. Congolese novelist Sony Labou Tansi said: ‘Nous sommes les locataires de la langue française. Nous payons régulièrement notre loyer. Mieux même: nous contribuons aux travaux d’aménagement dans la baraque; nous sommes en partance pour une aventure de “copropriation”’ [We are the tenants of the French language. We regularly pay our rent. And even better: we contribute to the maintenance work in the shack; we are

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about to leave for an adventure of ‘co-propriation’]1 (Labou Tansi, 1989). Postcolonial French-speaking writers largely use the indigenization of the French language as a stylistic strategy. The ‘relexification’ of French (Zabus, 2007 [1991]) – that is, using a variety of French worked/ influenced by local languages – is one of these strategies, exemplified by the well-known ‘malinkization’ of French by Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma. However, as Zabus argues (1991), French-speaking African writers have tended to be less audacious in their linguistic experimentations than their English-speaking counterparts. And, as pidginized French was largely used in colonial novels to ridicule African characters, it aroused suspicion for a long time (Van den Avenne, 2013). It is still hardly found in African novels written in French, while elaborate pidgins of Nigeria or Ghana, which mix English with local languages, acquired a literary status long ago. Furthermore, relexification, Zabus argues, can be seen as an ambivalent strategy for, while it may allow the postcolonial writer to subvert the dominant colonial language, it can also contribute to the revitalization of the French language ‘in a perversely neocolonial fashion’ at the expense of the African one (Zabus, 2007 [1991], 171). Creolist activists used the same arguments to criticize the creation of a creolized French by French Caribbean novelists (such as Patrick Chamoiseau): ‘Si l’on peut lire une œuvre en français qui donne l’illusion du créole, jamais le peuple antillais ne va se fatiguer à lire du créole’ [If one can read a book in French that gives the illusion of Creole, the French West Indian people will never make the effort to read in Creole] (Jean Bernabé in Perret, 2001: 24). Using that variety of French was seen as a threat against the production of a Creole written literature (Van den Avenne, 2007a). In Sub-Saharan Africa, French is by no means a threat to the vitality of local languages, but, playing a prominent role as the major (and in some cases sole) language of literacy, it restrained the uses of the local languages, maintaining the diglossic situation created by colonial language policy. But, undoubtedly, linguistic innovation in French comes mostly from the periphery. Even though the French language may no longer claim an exclusive link with the French nation, this idea remains, as illustrated by the distinction established between French literature and Francophone literature in publishing as well as academic institutions in France. French literature means literature produced in French by French writers, while 1 ‘Copropriation’ is a coinage playing on two words: appropriation (as in cultural appropriation) and co-propriété (co-ownership).

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Francophone literature means literature produced in France by writers from the periphery, those who are not French, but African, Caribbean, Haitian and so on. Francophone writers may be published in France in specific collections, and sometimes obtain specific literary prizes. The dichotomy between a national and a non-national literature is very specific and does not exist to the same extent in literature written in English, for example. In 2007, around forty French and Francophone writers signed a manifesto, published in the French daily newspaper Le Monde, against that artificial separation. Those writers proclaimed the concept of a ‘littérature-monde’ in French liberated from its ‘exclusive pact with the Nation’. Signed by cosmopolitan writers characterized by their transnational trajectories, that manifesto had little impact among more locally established writers (Ducournau, 2012: 477–541). Is there a need to specify that the presence of the French language outside France is not only a postcolonial issue? In Belgium, Switzerland and Canada the use and status of the French language have very little to do with the history of French colonialism (even if the presence of French in North America is a reminder of a history of imperialism). Nevertheless, from a very Franco-centric point of view, those countries may sometimes be described as part of a ‘francophonie périphérique’. In Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, the French language is also addressed in a third entry, ‘Les Trésors de la langue’ by Alain Rey. This deals with the history of dictionaries in France, which are seen to have contributed to the stabilization and spread of a centralized prescriptive linguistic norm. French spoken and written at the periphery challenges the French normative, monocentric and monolingual ideology. And it certainly protects the French language from an ossifying monumentalization. Works Cited Bertrand, Romain. 2006. Mémoires d’empire, La controverse autour du ‘fait colonial’. Broissieux: Éditions du Croquant. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. ‘Deux impérialismes de l’universel’. In L’Amérique des Français, edited by Christine Fauré and Tom Bishop, 149–55. Paris: François Bourin. Boutin, Béatrice Akissi. 2003. ‘La norme endogène du français de Côte d’Ivoire’. Sudlangues 2: 33–46. Davesne, André, and Jean Gouin. 2008 [1939]. Mamadou et Bineta sont devenus grands: Livre de français à l’usage des cours moyens et supérieurs des écoles de l’Afrique Noire. EDICEF.

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Delafosse, Maurice. 1909. Broussard ou Les états d’âme d’un colonial. Paris: Publication du comité de l’Afrique française. Ducournau, Claire. 2012. Ecrire, lire, élire l’Afrique. Les mécanismes de réception et de consécration d’écrivains contemporains originaires de pays francophones d’Afrique subsaharienne, PhD thesis, EHESS. Fonkoua, Romuald. 2010. Aimé Césaire. Paris: Perrin. Goheneix-Polanski, Alice. 2008. ‘Les élites africaines et la langue française: une appropriation controversée’. Documents pour l’histoire du français langue étrangère ou seconde 40/41. http://dhfles.revues.org/117. — 2012. ‘Stratification linguistique et ségrégation politique dans l’empire français: l’exemple de l’AOF (1903–1945)’. Glottopol 20 (July). http:// glottopol.univ-rouen.fr/telecharger/numero_20/gpl20_06goheneix.pdf. Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-Christine. 2008. Textes anciens en créole français de la Caraïbe: histoire et analyse. Paris: Publibook. Kouadio N’Guessan, Jérémie. 2008. ‘Le français en Côte d’Ivoire: de l’imposition à l’appropriation décomplexée d’une langue exogène’. Documents pour l’histoire du français langue étrangère ou seconde 40/41. http://dhfles. revues.org/125. Labou Tansi, Sony. 1989. ‘Locataires de la même maison’. Interview recorded by Michèle Zalessky. Diagonales 9. Perret, Delphine. 2001. La créolité. Espace de création. Petit-Bourg: Ibis Rouge. Pinhas, Luc. 2008. ‘La francophonie, le français, son génie et son déclin’. Documents pour l’histoire du français langue étrangère ou seconde 40/41. http://dhfles.revues.org/101. Tharaud, Jérôme and Jean Tharaud. 1922. La randonnée de Samba Diouf. Paris: Plon. Van den Avenne, Cécile. 2007a. ‘Petit-nègre et bambara. La langue de l’indigène dans quelques œuvres d’écrivains coloniaux en Afrique occidentale française’. In Citer la langue de l’autre. Mots étrangers dans le roman: de Proust à W.G. Sebald, edited by C. Queffélec and D. Perrot, 77–95. Lyon: P.U.L. — 2007b. ‘“Donner en français l’illusion du créole” – Mélanges de langues et frontières linguistiques – Positions de linguistes sur l’écriture littéraire’. In Mondes créoles et francophones, Mélanges offerts à Robert Chaudenson, edited by P. Brasseur and D. Véronique, 41–50. Paris: L’Harmattan. — 2013. ‘Reprise et détournement d’un stéréotype linguistique: Les enjeux coloniaux et postcoloniaux de l’usage du “petit-nègre” dans la littérature africaine’. In Parodies, pastiches, réécritures. La question des modèles dans les littératures francophones, edited by Lise Gauvin, Cécile Van den Avenne, Véronique Corinus and Ching Selao, 263–75. Lyon: ENS éditions. Zabus, Chantal. 2007 [1991]. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, 2nd enlarged edition. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.

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Anti-colonialism David Murphy Anti-colonialism

On 14 February 2017 the centrist French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron appeared on Algerian television and acknowledged that France had committed ‘crimes against humanity’ during its 132-year colonization of Algeria. Macron’s words were widely reported at home and abroad, for the starkness of his portrayal of colonial violence seemed genuinely ground-breaking or shocking, depending on one’s political standpoint. The seemingly inevitable backlash that Macron’s statement provoked in certain parts of the media, from the political parties of the centre and far right and, in particular, from pied-noir groups, illustrates the profound colonial nostalgia that has become increasingly visible in France since the dawn of the twenty-first century: for instance, François Fillon, Macron’s centre-right rival for the presidency, delivered campaign speeches in which colonialism was recast as France ‘sharing its culture’. Just as prevalent, but far less remarked upon, however, is a popular form of anti-colonialism that is as old as colonialism itself. In this essay, I situate Macron’s statement within this long but neglected history of anti-colonialism (focusing on opposition to France’s nineteenth-century empire). I do so not to herald Macron as a contemporary champion of anti-colonialism – as the storm raged after his comments, he beat something of a rhetorical retreat, and subsequent comments on African women following his election tell a rather different story – but rather to illustrate that the triumphalist celebration of empire has never been the sole response to colonialism in France. In many instances, it is not colonialism per se that has been opposed by French anti-colonialists but rather its violent excesses; that is, anti-colonialism has emerged as an indignant response to what is seen as the Republic’s failure to live up

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to its ideals, with Republican Universalism invoked as a principle to be upheld rather than critiqued (Murphy, 2005). One can see such a stance in the words and actions of the Socialist president François Hollande (2012–17), who went further than any previous head of state in acknowledging the violence of French colonialism: for example, at Thiaroye in Senegal, site of the massacre in December 1944 of at least thirty-five (and probably far more) tirailleurs sénégalais (see Murphy on the tirailleurs in this volume); or at Sétif and Guelma in Algeria, where, in the summer of 1945, tens of thousands were murdered by the French army in brutal reprisals after violence accompanied VE Day celebrations. A more radical and sustained critique of empire, mainly but not solely the work of French colonial subjects (or their descendants) – for instance, the Indigènes de la République, launched in 2005, or the now annual Semaine anticoloniale et antiraciste, which has close connections to many left-wing intellectuals associated with the PCF – has denounced imperialism as inherently violent and incapable of being reformed, and it has castigated Republican Universalism as an ethnocentrism that dare not speak its name.1 This contribution will trace both lineages of French/Francophone anti-colonialism. In one of the first histories of the French anti-colonial tradition, Charles-Robert Ageron (1973) traces the surprising range of anti-colonial voices that emerged in the period from the creation of the Third Republic to the First World War – that is, at the very same time as the Republic was setting out to conquer its vast empire in Africa and Indochina. 2 These included figures from across the political spectrum: economic liberals, pacifists, radical Republicans (including the future wartime prime minister Georges Clemenceau), conservatives and nationalists, socialists (not least, the highly influential Jean Jaurès), anarchists and syndicalists, Catholics and some high-profile authors (including Anatole France). Although later largely forgotten, the existence of such anti-colonial critiques should come as no surprise as, in democratic societies, there is rarely unanimity about overseas military adventures. Once the conquest has taken place, however, opposition often retreats to the margins: with ‘our boys’ militarily engaged on the ground, to support the anti-colonial cause can be deemed tantamount to treason. 1 La Semaine anticoloniale et antiraciste: ‘Sortir du colonialisme’: http://www. anticolonial.net/; Les Indigènes de la République: http://indigenes-republique.fr/. 2 Ageron’s text was the first in a series of histories of anti-colonialism; see also Biondi (1992).

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The most prominent and most violently polemical anti-colonialist of this period was Paul-Etienne Vigné, who wrote under the pen name P. Vigné d’Octon. Originally a committed colonialist, Vigné served as a military doctor accompanying French troops on punitive expeditions in Senegal and Guinea; horrified by what he saw there, he resigned his army commission and launched a career as an anti-colonial writer. From 1893 to 1906 he served as a Radical deputy to the French parliament, where he railed against military excesses in Madagascar and West Africa, reserving particular ire for the infamous Voulet–Chanoine mission, recently fictionalized in the graphic novel La Colonne (Dumontheuil and Dabitch, 2013–14). The mission set off from Senegal to what is today Chad in order to confirm the borders of France’s colonies in central Africa. Instructed by the Ministry for the Colonies to ‘live off the land’, the two French junior officers led their ‘infernal column’ across the African interior, carrying out numerous massacres and destroying entire villages. Like Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Voulet and Chanoine appear to have ‘gone rogue’, even murdering a French colonel sent to put an end to their carnage. Vigné d’Octon writes in La Gloire du sabre, however, that, far from being exceptional, their extreme violence was made possible by the very nature of the conquest of Africa. During the interwar period European colonialism generally appeared unassailable: the 1931 Exposition Coloniale – famously the sole site of colonial memory in Nora’s Lieux de mémoire – celebrated France’s vast empire and attracted over thirty million visitors over the course of its six-month run. Opposition to the event was minimal, although the Surrealists published a tract entitled ‘Ne Visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale’ [Don’t Visit the Colonial Exhibition] in May 1931, and in September opened an anti-colonial exhibition, ‘La Vérité sur les colonies’ [The Truth about the Colonies], with the support of the French Communist Party (Palermo, 2009). Compared to the millions of visitors to the Exposition Coloniale, an estimated 6,000 visited the Surrealists’ counter-exhibition, a fact often used to illustrate the weakness of the anti-colonial movements of the period. Marginalized though they may have been, these movements forged alliances between the colonized and French nationals that continued to shape Third-Worldist and anti-globalization activism in the postcolonial period: chief among these alliances was that between anti-colonialism and communism. The creation of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) at the Congrès de Tours in December 1920 launched a new front in the opposition to empire, as the Communist International (Comintern) committed its

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affiliated national parties to a resolutely anti-imperialist stance. Nguyen ai Quoc, the future Ho Chi Minh, delivered a stirring critique of empire in Tours, although, tellingly, he was the only colonial subject whose voice was heard. 3 A few months later the PCF created L’Union Intercoloniale (UIC), with the aim of providing a forum in which a broad transcolonial front against empire might develop. In 1924–25 the PCF carried out its most sustained anti-colonial campaign when it organised resistance to the colonial war in the Rif Mountains of Morocco. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the Rif campaign saw French communists and colonized activists, in particular Lamine Senghor, the Senegalese veteran of the First World War, work closely together and some rallies (including one at Luna Park) drew thousands of militants in defence of the anti-colonial cause. Anti-colonialism and communism enjoyed a turbulent relationship for much of the mid-part of the twentieth century: Aimé Césaire’s Lettre à Maurice Thorez (1956) captures the frustrations of black/colonial minorities that their cause always remained subordinate to the demands of the central metropolitan party. The PCF has suffered a steep decline in support over the past three decades, but its annual Fête de l’Humanité in the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve offers a clear reminder of the anti-colonial politics that were central to Communist discourse (if not always actions) throughout the twentieth century: for example, Cuba – at the heart of so many anti-colonial struggles in the 1960s and 1970s – has retained a special place in the sympathies of far-left anti-colonialists. The interwar period also witnessed uneasy alliances between anti-colonial nationalists and French socialists, many of them associated with the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Félicien Challaye’s Un livre noir du colonialisme (1935) is a compelling account of the excesses of colonial rule. Challaye and others like him were reformers: they were anti-colonial in the sense that they were against colonialism as it was actually practised. What they wanted was for France to truly fulfil its civilizing mission and deliver on the promise of assimilation. Similar denunciations of colonial violence occurred in various written forms in this period. When the investigative journalist Albert Londres attacked colonial practices in Africa in Terre d’ébène (1929) he was following hard on the heels of the novelist André Gide, who had just published his Voyage au Congo, which depicted the abuse meted out by certain colonial officials to the indigenous populations (similar ground is covered 3 During his time in France, Ho Chi Minh would author the seminal anti-colonial text Le Procès de la colonisation française (1925).

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within the fictional narrative of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit). Although Gide never proposed any systematic critique of colonialism, his book provoked a harsh reaction from right-wing nationalist critics, for whom the empire must always be defended as evidence of France’s greatness (a stance still clearly visible today in the response to Macron’s comments cited above). The period after the Second World War was the highpoint of French anti-colonialism, as the ‘vieilles colonies’ of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean became full departments of France and the newer colonies of Africa and Asia pushed for their independence – violently in the cases of l’Indochine française and Algeria. In the writings of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Edouard Glissant, among others, there emerged an enduring tradition of anti-colonial discourse (Forsdick and Murphy, 2009): Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) and Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961) have become globally recognised as canonical works of opposition to empire. The Algerian war of independence was understandably at the heart of the most heated anti-colonial debates. Shocked at the levels of violence unleashed by the French state, figures such as Henri Alleg stepped forward to denounce the military’s systematic use of torture. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre went further, lending his (intellectual) support to the Algerian cause and arguing in the essay ‘Colonialism is a system’ (2006 [1956]) that the liberation of empire would also lead to the liberation of Europe from the ‘racist humanism’ that had informed its encounters with the colonised world over the preceding centuries of European expansion. Others associated with Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes went still further and actively supported the FLN: Francis Jeanson created a network of ‘porteurs de valises’ who transported suitcases full of money on behalf of the Algerian resistance. The principal members of the Réseau Jeanson were captured and tried in September 1960: their actions were defended in the Manifeste des 121, a wide-ranging manifesto signed by 121 French intellectuals, academics and artists criticising France’s conduct in Algeria and declaring the cause of the Algerian people to be the cause of humanity. Anti-colonialism has not solely been centred on the relationship between France and its external empire, however, as French regionalist movements often ‘proclaim solidarity with, and draw inspiration from’ their Francophone (post)colonial counterparts (Williams, 2003: 102). The dominant national narrative recalls the educational policies of the Third Republic as the spread of the universal ideas of the Republic – liberty,

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equality, fraternity and secularism – to the backward, Church-ridden provinces of Brittany, Provence and other peripheral regions. It was the Third Republic that made French the language of the entire Hexagon: in 1870, it was estimated that approximately 20  per cent of the French population did not speak French at all, while a further 30 per cent spoke French only as a second language. Understandably, a quite different memory of this process has survived among a significant minority in these regions, which emphasises the profound sense of linguistic and cultural dislocation it occasioned. The Algerian war played a central role in stirring up a profound prise de conscience in France’s regionalist movements, and the term ‘internal colonialism’ was coined to describe their relationship to the French state. They turned to the writings of Césaire, Fanon and Memmi to theorise their own position and they found clear connections between certain colonial practices and educational policies in the regions, not least the shaming of schoolchildren for speaking their native language within the space of the Republican school. Where regionalism had previously been perceived as a right-wing, reactionary force, opposing the social gains of the French Revolution, the transformative period of the 1960s led to the creation of a militant left-wing regionalist movement through groups such as the Comité Occitan d’Etudes et d’Action and the Front de Libération de la Bretagne. The practical fruits of this mix of anti-colonialism and regionalism are visible today in the presence of regional languages on bilingual road signs as well as in a significant number of bilingual schools. Herman Lebovics provides a compelling account of the tangled relationship between French regionalism and the anti-colonial, Third Worldist politics of the early 1970s. In August 1974, on the Larzac Plateau in the Massif Central, activists held a Festival of the Third World that mobilized people around a mix of local and global issues. Their placards said ‘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’ (Lebovics, 2004: 13). This was the jumbled beginning of what would become today’s ecological and anti-globalisation movements, and it was no coincidence that the Larzac protest movement was the training ground for José Bové, who would in 1999 lead an infamous protest to dismantle a McDonald’s restaurant under construction in Millau in the Aveyron region. The Larzac protests would also create a concrete link between the new regionalism and ongoing anti-colonial struggles in the remains of the French empire. The Larzac protestors had symbolically offered a

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piece of land to the Kanak people in New Caledonia and, in June 1988, the leader of the Kanak independence movement, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, came to Larzac to formally accept it on behalf of his people. Political upheaval in New Caledonia – in particular, the violence that erupted in the mid-1980s – led to the Nouméa Accord of 1998, which brought peace and a promise of an independence referendum to be held by 2018 (see Higginson’s essay in this volume). The ability of the Kanak movement to force the Fifth Republic to cede autonomy to the islands is, as Charles Forsdick argues, ‘a clear indication of the cracks increasingly apparent in the myths of singular identity underpinning French republicanism’ (2010: 182). It also reveals that anti-colonialism can have a contemporary rather than a solely historical relevance. The long history of Kanak resistance against French rule has been the subject of a number of recent popular fictions, in particular Cannibale (1996) by Didier Daeninckx (see McKinney’s essay in this volume). In the 1980s Daeninckx had written a detective novel, Meurtres pour mémoire (1983), set against the backdrop of 17 October 1961, when several hundred peaceful Algerian demonstrators were brutally murdered by the French police, many of them beaten and thrown into the Seine. The events of 17 October 1961 have been the subject of numerous fictional accounts; from Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005) to Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge (2009). These works provide a clear link to the anti-colonialism of the interwar period in their denunciation of the violence of colonialism. Indeed, in many ways, 17 October 1961 has become the emblematic site of anti-colonial memory: for instance, the renowned Franco-Algerian artist Kader Attia chose 17 October 2016 as the symbolic date on which to open the playfully titled La Colonie, a new arts space in Paris.4 After decades of amnesia, there is now official French commemoration of 17 October 1961, although municipal rather than state authorities have been most active on this front. A small plaque stands on the Pont Saint-Michel in central Paris to commemorate those killed there on 17 October 1961. It was unveiled forty years after that tragic night by the Socialist-controlled Paris town hall, while in 2007 two similar plaques on the Pont de la Gare in nearby Saint-Denis (bodies from the 4 In this context, one might also cite the massacre of nine peaceful demonstrators killed at the Charonne metro station in Paris on 8 February 1962 during a demonstration against the Organisation Armée Secrète (O.A.S.). Its memory was long suppressed officially but finally commemorated by Paris town hall in 2007.

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massacre were found in the Canal de Saint-Denis) were unveiled by the Communist mayor. These examples constitute clear illustrations of a still vibrant anti-colonial tradition in France, which might, at first, appear to emerge solely from the centre-left and radical left-wing groups, but I would suggest that the response to Macron’s comments on colonialism in Algeria reveals that a critique of colonialism may express more widely held views than is often imagined. For a fascinating but little reported outcome of the Macron episode was an IFOP opinion poll that found that 52  per cent of those polled agreed with Macron’s statement regarding the ‘crimes against humanity’ committed in Algeria, including 35  per cent of those planning to vote for the Front National in the upcoming presidential elections (Smith, 2017). In recent decades, the defence of colonialism has become a keystone of even the moderate right, while the left have been associated with the critique of empire. Could it be, however, that Macron gave voice to an anti-colonialism that is in fact now widely shared in France? Works Cited Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1973. L’Anticolonialisme en France, de 1871–1914. Paris: PUF. Biondi, Jean-Pierre. 1992. Les Anticolonialistes, 1881–1962. Paris: Robert Laffont. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. 1972 [1932]. Voyage au bout de la nuit. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio’. Césaire, Aimé. 1950. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine. — 1956. Lettre à Maurice Thorez. Paris: Présence Africaine. Challaye, Félicien. 2003 [1935]. Un livre noir du colonialisme: souvenirs sur la colonisation. Paris: Les nuits rouges. Daeninckx, Didier. 1983. Meurtres pour mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. — 1996. Cannibale. Paris: Verdier. Dumontheuil, Nicolas, and Christophe Dabitch. 2013–14. La Colonne, Tomes 1–2. Paris: Futuropolis. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: Seuil. Forsdick, Charles. 2010. ‘Siting Postcolonial Memory: Remembering New Caledonia in the Work of Didier Daeninckx’. Modern and Contemporary France 18, no. 2: 175–92. Forsdick, Charles, and David Murphy. 2009. ‘The Rise of the Francophone Postcolonial Intellectual: the emergence of a tradition’. Modern and Contemporary France 17, no. 2: 163–75.

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Gide, André. 1995 [1928]. Voyage au Congo. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio’. Ho Chi Minh. 2012 [1925]. Le Procès de la colonisation française et autres textes de jeunesse, edited by Alain Ruscio. Paris: Le Temps des Cerises. Lebovics, Herman. 2004. Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Londres, Albert. 2008 [1929]. Terre d’ébène. Paris: Arléa. Murphy, David. 2005. ‘The Power of Reason: Universality and Truth in the Anti-Colonial Essai’. In The Modern Essay in French: Movement, Instability, Performance, edited by Charles Forsdick and Andrew Stafford, 259–71. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Palermo, Lynn E. 2009. ‘L’Exposition anticoloniale: political or aesthetic protest?’ French Cultural Studies 20, no. 1: 27–46. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2006 [1956]. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism. Translated by Azzedine Haddour. London: Routledge. Sebbar, Leïla. 2009. La Seine était rouge. Paris: Babel. Smith, Paul. 2017. ‘No party and not much policy, but Emmanuel Macron is still on a roll’. The Conversation, 28 February. http://theconversation. com/no-party-and-not-much-policy-but-emmanuel-macron-is-still-ona-roll-73775. Vigné d’Octon, Paul. 1984 [1900]. La Gloire du sabre. Paris: Quintette. Williams, Heather. 2003. ‘“Séparianisme”, or internal colonialism’. In Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, edited by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, 102–11. London: Arnold.

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Children’s Literature Philip Dine Children’s Literature

The primary agency for the propagation of imperialist ideology in France was undoubtedly the education system. School history and geography lessons were thus central to a state-sponsored project of didacticism mediated by everything from illustrated magazines to picture postcards. This broader educational process was throughout buttressed by popular fiction, especially the imperial adventure stories consumed in large quantities by the young, thereby facilitating the internalization of preferred images of empire. The appearance of colonial narratives aimed at a juvenile audience underlined the importance of reading as a primary recreation of the young in an age of rapidly expanding literacy, and thus as a formative influence on children’s imaginations (Glénisson, 1990). Of particular importance in this connection is a writer beloved of generations of readers around the world: Jules Verne. While Verne is today remembered for his Voyages extraordinaires dans les mondes connus et inconnus, he was also the producer of several popular works of non-fiction, including his Géographie illustrée de la France et de ses colonies (1868). Moreover, it was a fictional account of imperial audacity that set him on the way to fame as a writer of science-inspired adventure fiction. Cinq semaines en ballon (1862), the tale of a balloon flight from Zanzibar to the Senegalese coast, was Verne’s first major novel, the success of which would henceforth allow its author to devote himself full-time to writing. For Verne, Africa was as much terra incognita, to be peopled by Europeans and European fantasies, as the Earth’s core or the moon. Published in Hetzel’s Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation series, Cinq semaines en ballon was subtitled Voyage de découvertes en Afrique par trois Anglais. The exploratory zeal of France’s hereditary enemy and principal colonial rival thus provides the focus for a series of

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African adventures, as Dr Samuel Fergusson and his faithful companions apply Victorian technology – the balloon itself is named ‘Victoria’ – to rise above, rather than to follow in, the footsteps of Burton, Speke and Livingstone. Much of the narrative is a predictable catalogue of lovingly recounted technical challenges and formulaic confrontations with wild animals and savage natives. Indeed, the region’s flora, fauna and indigenous inhabitants are evoked in similarly biological terms and with the same blend of curiosity and caution. The overt racism of Verne’s novel reflects views current at that time, particularly those championed by Comte Arthur de Gobineau in his pseudoscientific Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (four volumes, 1853–55). Such was the hold of this work on the French pedagogic imagination that Gobineau’s theory was repackaged for juvenile consumption by Dr Louis Figuier in his Races humaines (1872). It also informed the monumentally important schoolbook of the Third Republic, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877), to which historians Jacques and Mona Ozouf devoted an important chapter in Nora’s original collection. Written by Augustine Fouillée (under the pseudonym G. Bruno), this elementary school reader sold three million copies in its first ten years of publication, with sales doubling to six million by 1901. A major site for the collective memory of the French nation (Ozouf and Ozouf, 1984), this work contains among its many illustrations a depiction of ‘the four races of man’, the ‘most perfect’ of which is, predictably, the white one, with the black equivalent being placed firmly at the foot of the evolutionary ladder. The undifferentiated savages of Cinq semaines en ballon – ape-like, stupid, bloodthirsty, cowardly and lazy to a not-quite-man – conform precisely to the ‘scientific’ model of racial inferiority proposed by Gobineau and illustrated for the benefit of enquiring young minds by Figuier. As such, they become a part of the untamed landscape, providing a ‘natural’ backdrop as Dr Samuel Fergusson, the novel’s authoritative central figure, voices the author’s speculations on ‘the future of the African continent’, characterized elsewhere in the novel as ‘these barbarous regions’. Verne thereby presents his contemporary readership with a blueprint for the European mise en valeur of a supposedly dormant Africa. Verne’s nuanced Anglophilia may be contrasted with the popular literary expression of a deep-rooted Anglophobia, for ‘perfidious Albion’ remained an important figure of national discourse at this time. Indeed, ‘twentieth-century anglophobes, such as Henri Béraud or Louis-Ferdinand Céline, lived their formative years in an age in which feuilletons and pulp adventure stories were a prime source of adolescent

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distraction’ (Cornick, 1995: 20). Such best-selling and much reprinted works as Alfred Assolant’s paradigmatic Aventures merveilleuses, mais authentiques, du Capitaine Corcoran (1867) and Paul d’Ivoi’s Le Sergent Simplet à travers les colonies françaises (1895) share a picaresque narrative structure that follows their protagonists as they travel the world in search of adventure, glory and riches. However, like many other Verne-inspired yarns, they also voice sustained criticism of the colonial machinations of France’s principal rival and are thus properly regarded as contributions to the intense contemporary debate regarding British imperial power. Armand Dubarry is another prolific author who may be situated within this tradition. His output included historical studies and adultorientated exotica/erotica in the Orientalist mould of Pierre Loti, as well as adolescent adventure fiction placed in a colonial setting. One such novel was inspired by French attempts to extend the country’s influence in the face of British competition. Les Colons du Tanganîka (1884), published in Firmin-Didot’s Bibliothèque des jeunes gens series, focuses on a territory that was to be hotly disputed during the imperial sabrerattling that preceded the Great War. The narrative follows a small group of Europeans making painfully slow progress on the standard trek from Zanzibar into the interior. As they cross swamps, ravines and mountains they risk both injury and illness, and are also in constant danger of attack from hostile natives. Finally arriving on the banks of Lake Tanganyika, these privately financed colonists immediately recognize the vast potential of their chosen site, while the text’s depiction of the appalling existence endured by the indigenous inhabitants – characterized by superstition, cruelty and even cannibalism – offers an implicit justification of the colonial project. This Gallic inflection of Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’ brings the would-be settlers into conflict with the British in Tanganyika, which enables Dubarry to highlight the contrast between the methods employed by the two nations, stressing France’s freedom from anything resembling a colonial profit motive. Louis Boussenard, whose work marks the shift from the geographical and scientific novel to the ‘vulgaire feuilleton’ (Trigon, 1950: 106), shared no such humanitarian illusions. Instead, his prolific output of pulp serials – subsequently repackaged as novels – sets great store by the traditional theme of fortune-hunting, as in his text Le Secret de l’or (1892). Nor was Boussenard above using the appeal of another writer’s work to sell his own, as exemplified by his Les Robinsons de la Guyane (1882). Rather more original was a feuilleton published in book form

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in 1880 (and again in 1894), Le Tour du monde d’un gamin de Paris. The title obviously sought to capitalize on the recent success of both Jules Verne’s novel Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873) and Augustine Fouillée’s school reader Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877). Originally published in the fortnightly paper Voyages illustrés, this tale is characterized by a combination of narrative naivety and graphic gore. The picaresque adventures of ‘Friquet, the little Parisian’ move from French Equatorial Africa via Oceania to Australia but remain constant in their insistence on the need for regular, and very bloody, confrontations with assorted wild animals and savage natives. Reflecting his country’s wider preoccupations in the period 1870–1914, the patriotic Friquet will often come into conflict with the Germans – rather than the British – in his zealous defence of French interests overseas, work for which he will, in a classic happy ending, be rewarded with a medal by a grateful president of the Republic. In his determined extermination of troublesome natives, he will also reveal a sound grasp of the harsh mechanics of colonial repression. Typical of the imperial adventures to be found in the journaux d’un sou of this period, Friquet’s luridly illustrated adventures may also be regarded as a forerunner of the comic strips that would appear in France in the early twentieth century. In contrast, the stories of Emile Driant, better known as ‘le captaine Danrit’, continued to present Britain as France’s principal opponent overseas, as exemplified by this author’s Guerre maritime et sous-marine (1908), a reworking of his La Guerre fatale, France-Angleterre (1902). Of particular interest here is L’Invasion jaune (1909), which, like Driant’s earlier novel, L’Invasion noire (1894), offers a prophetic vision of indigenous revolt in France’s colonies. A substantial illustrated text, L’Invasion jaune centres, as its title suggests, on a combined Sino-Japanese mobilization against the West. A reaction initially to British expansionism in the Far East, the fictional revolt is fomented by a secret society known as the Devouring Dragon, an organization determined to destroy European civilization, the centre of which is, predictably, deemed to be Paris. As the novel comes to its gloomy close, with rampaging oriental hordes reaching the Arc de Triomphe, Driant’s young readership is informed that the ‘yellow army’ has been aided and abetted in its mission of destruction by the moral decline of France and the age-old treachery of the British, who look on in anticipation of the spoils of war. A highly pessimistic work ending with the occupation of the whole of continental Europe, the novel is primarily remarkable as an early expression of European fears about the so-called ‘yellow peril’,

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a term actually used by Driant. However, all is not lost even at this late stage, as the work’s epilogue makes clear. French North Africa, retained in spite of a holy war against the colonial power by Islamic militants, is reinforced by the fleeing population of the mother country, thus becoming ‘a new France’. Driant’s paranoid fictions would shortly be overtaken by the factual horrors of the Great War. Yet the experience of this conflict would only serve to confirm the empire’s literary defenders in their fear of native revolt. Norbert Sevestre, another prolific producer of juvenile fiction whose output included the very significantly titled Blancs contre Noirs (1913), showed that such disquiet was by no means limited to obsessive Anglophobes like Driant. Sevestre’s Loup-Blanc (1915) is an adolescent adventure novel also remarkable for the ambiguity of its treatment of the colonial rebel. The novel is set in and around Yen-Bay, in Frenchcontrolled Tonkin, towards the end of the nineteenth century; the action of the illustrated narrative concerns the adventures, in the midst of alternately comical and vaguely threatening natives, of the two children of the resident colonial administrator. However, the inherently dangerous nature of the colonized populations becomes more apparent as the novel progresses, and the children move from formulaic adventures in exotic markets and opium dens, via the odd skirmish with bandits, to a general uprising; this revolt is represented as the product of an undifferentiated hatred of the white race, rather than as a nationalist rejection of colonial rule. Among other ironies, it was precisely in the historic Yên Bái, on 10 February 1930, that a mutiny by locally recruited troops would first highlight the fragility of the French hold on Indo-China. Indeed, while this work’s dénouement may seem to reassert the prevailing orthodoxies of racial type and imperial might – as Nguyen dies like ‘a hunted wild beast’ with a Foreign Legionnaire’s bayonet stuck between his shoulder blades – real doubt remains as regards the colonial power’s ability to stamp out indigenous opposition. More broadly, and in common with their British and German counterparts, French children were mobilized in support of the national war effort between 1914 and 1918 (Audoin-Rouzeau, 1993). Established childhood favourites were pressed into service, for instance in Edmond Chollet’s Les Robinsons de Sambre-et-Meuse (1917), as was the first weekly comic targeted at girls, La Semaine de Suzette. Founded in 1905, the paper had introduced the much-loved figure of Bécassine, who was jointly created by the writer Caumery [Maurice Languereau] and the artist Joseph-Porphyre Pinchon. This naive but good-hearted peasant girl was

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to become the star of the first bande dessinée album in 1913 (on the comic strip as a colonial lieu de mémoire, see McKinney in this volume). The character rapidly became a juvenile favourite and as such was exploited for propaganda purposes between 1914 and 1918 in titles such as Bécassine pendant la guerre (1916), Bécassine chez les Alliés (1917) and Bécassine mobilisée (1918). With the rapid development of bandes dessinées in the inter-war period, Bécassine and her masculine counterpart, Hergé’s similarly cherished Tintin, would emerge as powerful advocates for the colonial project. This was an ideological function that French comics would maintain from the heyday of the empire right through to decolonization, and even beyond (McKinney, 2011). Created in 1929 by the francophone Belgian cartoonist Georges Rémi (whose famous pseudonym was derived by reversing his initials), Tintin has long been perceived as a quintessentially French hero. The adventures recounted in Tintin au Congo (1930) may thus be taken to refer either to the Belgian Congo or to the French colony of the same name. Originally published in 1930 in Le Petit Vingtième, a weekly supplement to the Brussels Catholic daily Le Vingtième Siècle, Hergé’s Tintin au Congo was one of the first, and is still one of the most widely read, of the boy reporter’s adventures. Released simultaneously in album form, this primitive version of the bande dessinée, produced in blackand-white and remarkable for the simplicity of its artwork, was to be entirely redrawn by the author a decade later for subsequent distribution as a lavishly produced colour album. If anything, the Congo of Tintin au Congo becomes more obviously French in the 1946 edition than in the original, itself produced against the backdrop of preparations for the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931. Yet the narrative differences between the original text and the familiar modern edition are minimal, and the album is thus primarily remarkable today for its continuities rather than its changes. Most obviously, the racist stereotyping of Tintin au Congo has remained clearly visible from 1930 to the present. Cowardly, superstitious and expressing themselves in the pidgin French made familiar by the tirailleur sénégalais in the celebrated ‘Y’a bon Banania!’ advertisement (1915; see Murphy in this volume), the child-like natives of Tintin au Congo are contrasted both with the hero and such smiling stalwarts of the colonial order as the missionary and the local military commander. Although they share in the caricatural irreality of the Russians in Hergé’s very first Tintin adventure, Tintin au pays des Soviets (1929), and, indeed, of the Americans in Tintin en Amérique (1931), the

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black inhabitants of Hergé’s Congo primarily resemble the only slightly dumber animals that Tintin subjects to various forms of comic violence. The overwhelming force used against aggressive animals may thus be understood as the vicarious expression of a desire to deal conclusively with nascent political unrest in France’s overseas territories. At this time, when the explosion of nationalism triggered by the First World War could no longer be ignored, Tintin’s adventures in a land of lions and witchdoctors offered a reassuring image of colonial stability to their young audience. The physically and behaviourally undifferentiated natives of Tintin au Congo thus continued to argue implicitly for the European mise en valeur of Africa. By the same token, Caumery and Pinchon’s Bécassine en croisière (1936) proposes a comfortingly familiar representation of the French empire at its apogee. Here again, the emerging format of the comic strip album employs caricatures as old as colonialism itself. Interestingly, the basic conceit of the whole Bécassine series turns on the comic juxtaposition of old and new: that is, the adventures of a peasant girl who, in her simple attitudes just as in her traditional costume, represents rural values in the midst of social and especially technological modernity. Having seen service in the First World War, this representative of national durability amid international upheaval goes on to tackle the new challenge of defending the French empire. Although depicted in an unassuming and even charming style that mirrors her generous nature, Bécassine experiences adventures on a tropical cruise that provide ample material for the author’s colonial advocacy. From her first contact with a stereotypically troublesome Arab on the quayside in Marseille, through her contrasting encounters with cheerfully subordinate ‘good negroes’, Bécassine’s cruise takes her from France’s Mediterranean hub, via Port Said and Djibouti, to the paradise island of Nossi-Bé. Here, Caumery and Pinchon’s young readers are presented with an image of colonial order, of tree-lined avenues and neatly ordered houses, which has only been made possible because of the French determination to get things done in spite of the indolence of the indigenous population. Moreover, it is made clear that European scientific expertise underpins the entire imperial edifice, notably in freeing the island from the archetypal colonial scourge of malaria. Thus, even the naive figure of Bécassine must be looked up to by the colonized. Her humble but determined expressions of patriotism make plain that she is an incarnation of the pioneering spirit of France in the 1930s, including particularly its self-imposed mission civilisatrice.

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In the wake of the Second World War the literary inheritance of Bécassine and Tintin would be appealed to once again as the decolonizing winds of change began to blow through the French empire. However, as successive reverses in Indo-China and Algeria brought home the impossibility of maintaining France’s overseas possessions, the commitment to pro-colonial promotion of youth-orientated publishing houses such as Alsatia, in its Rubans noirs and Signe de piste collections, and, to a lesser extent, of comics such as Pilote, le grand magazine illustré des jeunes, became increasingly problematic. It thus fell to a new generation of writers, and to a hard-hitting and historically accurate brand of juvenile fiction, to lay the ghost of French imperialism. Pioneering works in this now substantial field include Virginie Buisson’s challenging novel L’Algérie ou la mort des autres (1978) and Guy Vidal and Alain Bignon’s Une Éducation algérienne (1982), the first album in an ongoing bande dessinée engagement with the French wars of decolonization (McKinney, 2013). Given the increasing openness in France to colonial memories and post-colonial identities, it seems likely that this process will continue to inform writing for younger audiences for the foreseeable future. Works Cited Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane. 1993. La Guerre des enfants, 1914–1918: Essai d’histoire culturelle. Paris: Armand Colin. Cornick, Martyn. 1995. ‘The Myth of “Perfidious Albion” and French National Identity’. In Statecraft and Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: Essays Presented to P.M.H. Bell, edited by David Dutton, 7–33. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Glénisson, Jean. 1990. ‘Le livre pour la jeunesse’. In Histoire de l’édition française: T.3, Le Temps des éditeurs: Du romantisme à la Belle Epoque, edited by Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, 461–95. Paris: Fayard. McKinney, Mark. 2011. The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. — 2013. Redrawing French Empire in Comics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ozouf, Jacques, and Mona Ozouf. 1984. ‘Le Tour de la France par deux enfants. Le petit livre rouge de la République’. In Les Lieux de mémoire: I. La République, edited by Pierre Nora, 291–321. Paris: Gallimard. Trigon, Jean de. 1950. Histoire de la littérature enfantine: de la Mère l’Oye au Roi Babar. Paris: Hachette.

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Post and the Postage Stamp David Scott Post and the Postage Stamp

Although a specific essay on the postage stamp was envisaged by Pierre Nora as a living and memorial aspect of the French Republic, a chapter on it never featured in the volumes that constitute Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92). I set out to rectify this deficit (as Pierre Nora himself has acknowledged in correspondence with me) in some of my research in the area of the semiotics of the stamp, colonial or metropolitan (Scott, 1995; 1996; 1997; 2002a; 2002b), and in that of the lieu de mémoire itself (Scott, 2002b), with the postage stamp taken as an exemplary form. This leads me within the framework of the current study to ask the question: what is its status in ‘postcolonial’ guise? Is there such a thing and, if so, to what extent has the stamp been able to free itself from the framing devices (formal and thematic) that governed it in its colonial guise? Or is it, both as place of memory and as instrumental device, condemned to operate in the same way? This essay argues that there can be no ‘post-’ used as a prefix to Post. The Post, itself a pre-colonial invention, was transformed in its operations – and in its power – by the invention in Britain in 1840 of the adhesive postage stamp, a model adopted by the French in 1849. In the decades that followed, which coincided with the radical expansion of European colonization (notably British and French), empire very quickly came to instrumentalize the postage stamp. In doing so, it continued to observe the formal conventions of European and other metropolitan post offices as they were agreed after the establishment in 1874 of the Universal Postal Union (UPU). However, despite independence from the 1960s onwards, former British and French colonies continued to observe the (essentially European) forms and conventions of the postage stamp, which were in many cases still being designed by British and French

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artists and printed in London or Paris. This was because Post in the post-colonial world continued to operate in the same way, and postage stamps continued to observe the formats, themes and sometimes even language of the former colonial powers. So, when the empire wrote back, it sent its messages in the same way, using the same envelopes and forms of legitimization as in colonial times. In this sense, the post-colonial becomes synonymous with ‘universal’ and its stamps continue to appear following UPU conventions. The scope for subversion of these internationally agreed practices, largely defined by western powers, is limited to the stamp’s thematic and design sphere, which sometimes, by playing with the signs that conventionally signify ‘place of memory’, marks a certain irony or signals a critique of the stamp as sign of imposed power or violence. This contribution aims to investigate examples of such practice, with primary reference to the French sphere but also, at the end, in comparison with former British colonies. In clarifying the nature of lieux de mémoire, Nora adopts a tripartite structural model that interestingly parallels the triadic models at the heart of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics of representation (Peirce, 1960–66). The parallel is worth briefly pursuing here in that Peirce’s model lends itself with special pertinence to the analysis of postage stamps. For Nora, lieux de mémoire constitute places in three senses of the word: material, symbolic and functional (1984, 1: xxxiv). They are material in the sense that they are objects, places or events in the real world that can be seen, heard, felt or touched; they are symbolic in that they represent or stand for meanings of cultural, social, political or historical import. Finally, they are functional in that they impact on the mental conceptions – memory, association, experience – of their perceiver or receiver. Lieux de mémoire are thus of a triadic semiotic structure, similar to that conceived by Peirce in his Semiotic, according to which, the representamen links the object to the interpretant, thus creating the possibility of the production of meaning or semiosis. It is interesting to note indeed how the term lieux de mémoire itself embodies the three aspects of the semiotic triad – lieu (object or place); mémoire (activity of the interpretant), the totality of the phrase – lieux de mémoire – constituting the sign aspect of the triangle. By the same token, Nora’s concept of the lieu de mémoire also shares the triadic structure of the sign as theorized by Peirce, in that it is conceived as having iconic, indexical and symbolic potential. The lieu de mémoire is iconic in that it is a sign that resembles what it stands

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for, very often incorporating a pictorial or other visually representative aspect; it is indexical in that it points to an historical event, conception or object, being sometimes in a contiguous relation with it; finally, it is symbolic in that it becomes a conventional sign of what it refers to, generally recognized by the community a part of whose history it expresses. What the lieu de mémoire also shares with Peirce’s concept of the sign is a certain mobility and complexity: as well as embodying a triadic structure, it can mobilize the potentialities of the triad’s internal constituent elements – iconic, indexical, symbolic – in various ways. The postage stamp, when viewed as a sign within a Peircian frame of reference, exactly fulfills the requirements of Nora’s concept of place of memory. For the stamp, as a sign, also has a double function: as an icon, it both records or commemorates history and is itself a sign of history; as an index, it points both to the objects it encloses and to the place from which the mail to which it is attached has been posted. As a symbol, it is a sign of the Post in general (as a social service) and of post as it comes through the letter-box. It has also, in the last half century, become itself a sign as well as a vehicle of commemoration; no significant anniversary within the national history or consciousness is let pass without a stamp marking the event. What I investigate in what follows is the extent to which the stamp’s role as a lieu de mémoire, a site of cultural memory both in what it records and in the way it has imposed itself as a recorder of national events, is complicated or problematized in the colonial and the postcolonial worlds. I will do this by analyzing a small but representative corpus of colonial and postcolonial stamps issued by countries that were formerly French colonies, focusing on the way they may be construed as places of memory – authentic or inauthentic – within the respective colonial and post-colonial periods. A couple of examples of postcolonial British stamps will also be referred to by way of comparison. An omnibus edition of French colonial stamps issued for the Quinzaine Impériale in 1942 by Maréchal Pétain’s government offers an exemplary illustration of the perversion of the postage’s stamp’s potential as a place of memory. These stamps, identical except for the name of the colony engraved at the bottom, were issued by Vichy France for a number of French colonies in the West Indies, South America, India, the Pacific and Africa (that for Dahomey is illustrated in Figure 1), and appeared in part as a riposte to the stamps General de Gaulle, while exiled in London in the early 1940s, had commissioned the Anglo-French graphic artist Edmond/Edmund Dulac to design for the Free French Colonies (Scott:

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1995; 2002a). Entitled ‘Vocation’, the function of the Pétain stamps was to express the idea of a historic French pre-eminence in the world of exploration and colonial development, one that continued despite the current occupation (1940–44) of half of France by Hitler’s Germany. These stamps constitute places of memory only, however, in the perverse sense that, far from representing the history or native traditions of the countries for which they were ostensibly issued, they are nothing but propaganda for the French imperialist cause in its supposed ‘mission civilisatrice’. This perversion of the image as place of memory is exemplified in the stamp in question (Figure 1) through a process of substitution and superimposition. First, the central figure, who may be construed to be a newly educated native African male, is presented with skin whitened, hair cropped and oiled in the European fashion, and clothed in what seems to be a western sports shirt. The young man’s face has been Aryanised and he stands in a domineering pose with hands purposefully placed on the map of Africa placed on the desk in front of him. The vaguely tropical scene sketched behind him, with its approaching steamer and palm-fringed shore, has superimposed on it two sets of names: famous French explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Jean Ango, Jacques Cartier and Pierre-André de Suffren) and, more strictly to the point, two major French colonial Figure 1 administrators of the French imperial period in Africa (Joseph Gallieni (1849–1916) and Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934)). These proper names float above the globe and pile of books (representing European knowledge and scientific discovery) placed on the right-hand side of the desk, contributing to the establishment of the stamp’s message that France’s historic scientific and civilizing mission in the world (and more specifically Africa) will be continued by natives of the regions it has colonized – such as the young African male depicted – as well as by great men from the mother country that advanced such colonization. The gradual education of the native black African to play a constructive role in the ‘modern’ world is a theme that runs through many French

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colonial stamps of the later imperial period (1945–60). Figures 2, 3 and 4 offer a synoptic visual history of this with their focus on the way time-honoured functions in relation to agriculture and communications (the Post, the plough) become adapted to modern technological developments. A Togo airmail stamp of 1947 (Figure 2) shows a native post-boy sprinting through the jungle with a letter slotted into a forked stick, glancing up as he runs to watch an Air France airliner flying overhead: tradition and modern technology are here juxtaposed, the ‘place of memory’ aspect of the postman being enhanced by his juxtaposition with the Figure 2 aircraft. The enduring role of the Post and the postman is spelled out even more clearly in a Côte d’Ivoire stamp commemorating the ‘Journée du timbre’ of 1961 (Figure 3). This stamp, issued by the République de Côte d’Ivoire, which gained its independence in 1960, marks (in theory, at least) both the end of Figure 3 the colonial period and yet the continuation of time-honoured institutions such as the Post, the stamp itself being celebrated through the ‘Journée du timbre’ as a lieu de mémoire – in Africa, as in France. So, on the right, the contemporary postman in his smart uniform, with his moped to speed up mail delivery and set against the shining new Figure 4 central post office, is juxtaposed with the image on the left of the native postal runner sprinting through the jungle, the two images being divided or united through the centrally placed caption ‘Journée du timbre 1961’. Finally, in an Afrique Equatoriale

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Française airmail stamp of 1954 (Figure 4), the young black agricultural technician has stepped out of the studious scenario of the 1942 Dahomey stamp into the practical world of modern industry in which he drives his tractor across fertile farmland against a backdrop of modern urban industrial development, with its electric pylons and aircraft: here the African landscape is transformed into something indistinguishable from what one might encounter in Europe. The role of stamps within the French tradition to record and celebrate monuments, sites and historic figures as places of memory was first adapted by French colonial stamps in the period immediately after World War II, in which the positive contribution of soldiers from the free French colonies towards the Allied Victory was recognized. This led to native African military leaders and colonial administrators such as Félix Eboué (1884–1944) being honoured and respected as much as their native French equivalents. After his death in 1944, Eboué was the first Black hero to have his ashes placed in the Panthéon (that archetypal lieu de mémoire), in unambiguous recognition of the equality of respect accorded to Blacks and Whites who supported the Patrie. The omnibus stamp issued in 1945 to commemorate his death in 1944 appeared in all the free French colonial post offices (Figure 5 shows the Madagascar version) and Figure 5 follows the standard pattern of French commemorative stamps celebrating ‘grands hommes’: the head-and-shoulders portrait in a circular frame garnished with olive and/or laurel branches symbolizing peace and victory. The ultimate appropriation of the French lieu de mémoire into a postcolonial context is perhaps best illustrated by the stamp celebrating the ‘Fête de l’Indépendence’ of the Republic of Senegal in 1961. For this stamp appropriates the symbolism of French Republicanism – the fasces, the laurel wreath and, above all, the female figure of Liberty – and incorporates it into an African context by giving the Marianne figure a black skin. So, whereas the 1942 Pétain issue had set out to whiten the black face, the Senegal stamp of twenty years later blackens the white allegorical figure, creating a new symbol, a Marianne noire who continues to provide maternal protection to the peace-loving olivebranch-clutching child Africa that she holds in her left hand. This stamp, engraved by the most celebrated of all French stamp designers,

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Pierre Gandon (1899–1990), whose definitive Marianne stamp of 1945 (based on a portrait of his wife) constituted this figure’s exemplary manifestation, observes in every respect the conventions of French philatelic representation: commemorative format, fine engraving, crisp lettering. It thus Figure 6 perfectly demonstrates the continuity of use of conventions of commemorative representation from the colonial to the post-colonial period while at the same time subtly renewing them through a radical adaptation of standard symbolic motifs. By way of conclusion and as a point of comparison, it is striking to note briefly the way some British post-colonial stamps from the late 1950s and early 1960s further transform the representation of places of memory that we have seen in the postcolonial French stamps. This radically modern transformation was facilitated by the use of the colour photogravure process (as opposed to the line engraving maintained in French post-colonial stamps), itself pioneered by Edmund Dulac in his Free French colonial stamp designs of the early 1940s. This process enabled Dulac’s successor in the 1960s, Michael Goaman, to adopt a subtler and more textually minimalist approach (Figures 7, 8 and 9) than is evident in French post-colonial stamp design. So in the Goaman stamps we see African national heroes or figureheads still presented in a telling historical or cultural context, but one articulated in a commemorative message of minimal textual accompaniment. If, for example, we compare the Felix Eboué stamp of 1945 with a 1964 Kenya stamp (Figure 7), marking the declaration of the new Republic with an unnamed portrait of its first president, Jomo Kenyatta, we see how the commemorative message is communicated almost entirely through a subtle superimposition of visual images: the fussy textual components of the Eboué stamp are eliminated in a design which has Kenyatta’s massive shoulders filling the bottom part of the stamp, balanced above by the towering Mount Kenya, the profile of which forms the backdrop to Kenyatta’s head. The president’s dress combines a modern western suit with a Figure 7

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traditional African headdress, conveying a message of continuity within modernity. Here it is the images as much as the text that do the talking. Similarly, a comparison of the 1961 Côte d’Ivoire stamp (Figure 3) with one issued by the newly independent Malawi in 1965, commemorating the opposition of John Chilembwe (1871–1915) to British colonialism in what was formerly Nyasaland (Figure 8), shows how the latter stamp more effectively dramatizes the mise en scène of the lieu de mémoire. Here, the balance of text and image is configured to maximize the image’s impact: on the left, the country’s new name in capitals – MALAWI – is matched by the large church beneath (Chilembwe was a Baptist pastor), while the text on the upper right articulating the stamp’s message (the 1915 uprising) is balanced by the rioting figures on the lower right, led by Chilembwe himself, whose identity is made clear by the superimposition of his name Figure 8 across his torso. Finally, and most tellingly, a comparison between the 1942 Quinzaine impériale stamp (Figure 1) and a 1959 Ghana stamp commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln (Figure  9) shows how far image transformation is taken in the post-colonial world, one that continues, however, to represent lieux de mémoire. Avoiding the arbitrary scattering of textual messages across the visual image evident in the 1942 Dahomey issue, Goaman’s Ghana stamp adheres to an altogether more Figure 9 rigorous design economy: the ostensible place of memory is the monumental statue of Lincoln, champion of the abolition of slavery, but the (almost literal) incorporation into the image of it of the newly independent state of Ghana as represented by its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, enables Ghana itself to symbolize the liberty and democracy of which the former American president is a figurehead. The stamp’s definitive message – the country’s new name Ghana – is superimposed on its current president (Nkrumah) in order to show, in an almost textless graphic shorthand, the

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way the modern state, while affirming its historic difference, can at the same time inscribe itself within the aegis of the universal, liberal values of western democracy in a postcolonial world. In all three Goaman stamps (Figures 7, 8 and 9) the head-andshoulders profile of the leading native figure is brought right to the edge of the stamp, creating the effect of its being brought to edge of representation, as though it were about to emerge from symbolization into the real world beyond the frame, while at the same time bearing the weight of symbolization it carries. In order to express its postcolonial status, the former colonial state is thus obliged to continue to observe the conventions of the Post, as an official institution and as an international service, and of the postage stamp as an official expression of a country’s sovereignty and its right to express its cultural patrimony and allegiances. All limitations within human culture, however, permit a degree of creative potential – often disproportionate to the leeway given – for it is as much through playful or ironic variation (and even inclusion) as through aggressive iconoclasm (or attempted exclusion) that identities – at a personal, national or racial level – find their richest expression. So it is with many postcolonial stamps. Works Cited Nora, Pierre. 1984. Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. I La République. Paris: Gallimard. Peirce, Charles S. 1960–66. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols. Volumes 1–6 edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and. A.W. Burks. Volumes 7 and 8 edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott, David. 1995. European Stamp Design: a semiotic approach to designing messages. London: Academy Editions. — 1996. ‘Marianne et Britannia se rencontrent: les icônes nationales et la structure sémiotique du timbre-poste français et anglais’. L’Image 2: 140–56. — 1997. ‘La sémiotique du timbre-poste’. Communication et langages 120: 81–93. — 2002a. ‘L’image ethnographique: le timbre-poste colonial français de 1920 à 1950’. Protée 30, no. 2: 45–54. — 2002b. ‘Lieux de mémoire: the postage stamp as site of cultural memory’. Semiotica 142, no. 1: 107–24.

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Colonial Photography Xavier Guégan Colonial Photography

The succession of political regimes in post-1848 France was similarly experienced in post-conquest Algeria. The political, social and cultural ideologies that emerged during this period were mirrored in the North African départements, and therefore it is perhaps not that surprising that connected events happened simultaneously in the métropole and Algeria. This connection that was built on and created through the second half of the nineteenth century would eventually give the illusion of an Algeria that was truly part of France, beyond just its colonial status. It was nevertheless not only through its common events and political principles that the Algerian territories became French, but also as a result of the emergence of new cultural mediums and cultural political attitudes. Taking and viewing photographs thus enhanced both the new French paradigm of the modern nation, and its identity construction and interconnection with Algeria. Up to the beginning of World War I there were two moments that connected the photographic visual imagery of Algeria as part of the creation of lieux de mémoire within the Second Empire and Third Republic regimes; the 1850s, with its ‘cataloguing’ of the newly established French Algeria, and the 1880s–1900s, with their portraiture of ‘consumptions and ideologies’ of a French Republican Algeria.1 The French photographer Félix Jacques Antoine Moulin’s (1802–75) representation of Algeria in the years 1856–57 became among the well-known imagery of the colony. First installed in the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, Paris, at the end of 1840, Moulin began his 1 The archives consulted for this research come from the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (via Gallica).

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career producing nude photographs (daguerreotypes prints on paper and stereoscopic views), which led him to be charged in 1851 for trade of obscene images. He then presented his nudes within the new convention of Etude d’après Nature, and therefore, when he left Paris for Algeria in March 1856, it was as a more ‘respectable’ photographer. Moulin was provided with a letter of recommendation from the Minister of War, which, in addition to the warm welcome he received from the Governor General of Algiers, Marshal Comte Randon, facilitated his travel in the country and especially the production of numerous portraits of the religious authorities and French military as well as the indigenous chiefs (Rosenthal, 2008: 945–47). This was a journey of nearly a year and a half across the three provinces of Oran, Algiers and Constantine. Moulin produced 300 shots that were published on his return as the catalogue Souvenirs d’Algérie ou L’Algérie photographiée: Province d’Alger (1857). He commented that his publication intended to ‘popularize’ Algeria and had been greeted favourably by Napoleon III, who indeed dedicated the work. It was therefore an officially authorized visualization of one of the most important French colonies, in which the portraiture of officials alternates with picturesque local monuments and the marks of the French presence, with its new buildings, public education and archaeological excavations. The captions often mention the recent revolts that had bloodied the country, indicating the merits or the reversal of fortune of the indigenous leaders. The so-called conquest of Algeria took nearly thirty years (1827–57), but by the beginning of the Second Empire most of the territory was secured and the French government wanted to show partnership with local chiefs in order to protect its French interests and the establishment of European migrants as settlers. A bylaw of the Minister of War on 1  February 1844 created the Arab bureaux, and they were considered to be useful middlemen in between the local populations and French authorities, directors of those bureaux are, for the heads of the colony, well-informed agents, essential assistants and are for the Arabs, respected masters, impartial arbitrators, often friends and men provided wise advice. However, those good results are more attributable to the choice of men running them rather than to the institution itself. […] The danger is all the more important that the powers of the Arab bureaux are largely extensive: jurisdiction, police, omnipotence regarding the distribution of taxes, political influence, everything is gathered in the hands of the representatives of the supreme authority, who are fully in charge of the

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local population’s money, position and life. (Report on the Arab bureaux, unsigned document, 23 July 1847, Author’s translation of the document FR CAOM F80/1676 (ANOM archives))

Moreover, some cadis (judges responsible for the application of Islamic law) were responsible for tribes, while others were responsible for the Arab bureaux. As the cadi was appointed by the general governor of Algeria, opinions from the various authorities were considered: that of the medjelès, a sort of court of appeal whose members attached their official seals, or the opinions from the French colonial head of the Arab Bureau, which were essential. Part of civil territory since the decree of 8 August 1854, the ‘natives’ were attached to administrative districts that were managed by the mayors, but political surveillance was undertaken by a departmental Arab Bureau, a civil office of the prefecture. 2 The French government wanted to show that the bureaux could be successful and a symbol of Franco-Algerian cooperation. This perceived cooperation was used as propaganda both in Algeria and France to emphasise the successful establishment of the French colony (and, from 1848, Départements). Particularly in France, this was visually publicized by photographic portraits of French army officers and chiefs from the bureaux. In his Souvenirs d’Algérie Moulin thus established via many group portraits the visual categorization and promotion of the bureaux’ members. For instance, in ‘Arab Bureau in Tlemcen, Captain Cérès’ (1856), Moulin portrayed Captain Jean-Baptiste Cérès, who had replaced Captain Doineau at the head of the Arab Bureau in Tlemcen and was later to become General, sitting at a table with one of the chiefs. Another picture (c.1856) shows a chaouch (sergeant-at-arms) from the Arab Bureau receiving a message delivered by a mkazni sent by the caïd from Oudja (Morocco). These portraits, and many others, follow the same staging – all the French and Algerian characters are communicating with each other and seemingly busy dealing with official matters – and the same visual rhetoric, with the apparent signification of cooperation and stability in the colony. However, this representation of a well-organised new order, such as in ‘The Brigadier General de Beaufort d’Hautpoul, subdivision commander in Tlemcen, captain of staff, Séguier’ (Moulin, c.1856) – another of those group portraits – was a construction not always true to the general feelings of all the Algerian population. Indeed, General Charles-Marie-Napoléon de 2 These services were officially removed in 1868 and disappeared in 1870.

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Beaufort d’Hautpoul (1804–1890), Subdivision Commander in Tlemcen from 1845 to 1857 and in charge in 1860 of the expedition sent to Syria by Napoleon III, informed the Major General leading the province of Oran in correspondence of September 1856 that there had been an attack led by unidentified horse riders against members of a tribe from the subdivision. General Cousin of Montauban then commented that he was ‘very unhappy with the way the Arab Bureau in Tlemcen runs its police forces. […] The members of the bureau should react as those murders that terrorise the country have to stop.’ During his trip in 1856 Moulin photographed the heads of the Subdivision as well as the Bureau, and it was only shortly after the Captain Doineau Affair, which incriminated Doineau (then Head of the Bureau of Tlemcen) in the assassination of the agha of Beni Snousi on 12 September 1856, one of the main scandals that affected the Arab bureaux. Yet, Moulin’s pictures of the bureau only represent tranquillity, partnership and order. In Souvenirs d’Algérie there were also depictions of new colonial buildings and of the transformation of indigenous monuments into colonial ones. These images documented the institutionalisation of the colonial administration. Moulin’s photograph La Jenina, ancien palais des Deys (1856) shows this Ottoman palace – previously a palace of the Deys – now used by the French administration, first for administrative services and then as a military depot. A fire broke out in 1844 and the building was demolished in 1856. Moulin’s picture was taken in the same year, just before La Jenina was dismantled. Here the photograph is the testimony of both the pre-colonial rule and the beginning of colonisation, but now also of a time of change, as this emblematic building has disappeared. The photograph established a link between this recent destroyed past and the history of a colonial–colonised nation under formation. This ‘new’ nation had also to be perceived as progressive, which was emphasised via the establishment of schools and the new French principles on education, which included schooling girls. Although the reality in Algeria was still far from the ideology of the development of ‘modern’ education for all – which was developed more fully under the Third Republic, but nonetheless proved to a partial failure for the education of the local population – showing the success of the creation of some schools was crucial for the French rhetoric of modernisation. Moulin’s portraits of a school in Algiers for Moorish girls run by Mrs Luce (1856) served this purpose. Many pictures were taken, and drawings were copied from the pictures for the newspapers. All the portraits followed the same pattern: in one of these photographs

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we see a classroom with walls covered with cloth and Mrs Luce sitting next to her pupils (a class of twenty Moorish girls of different ages, from childhood to adolescence), looking at a blackboard with writing in French: ‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom’, and behind it a map showing the Algerian coast, the Mediterranean Sea and the south of France. The composition shows the principles of the ‘civilizing mission’, infused with the teaching of Christian morals and religion and with modern science, indicated by the contemporary map. When Moulin returned to France, the cousin of the emperor, Prince Napoléon-Jérôme, had just been made minister for Algeria and the colonies, which added a further contemporary interest to these images. The three volumes richly produced for the emperor contain the major part of his work and focus, with captions printed and stuck to the bottom of the commercial prints. They were given to the library of the château de Fontainebleau by the empress as early as June 1858 through the Department of the House of the Emperor. Even if Moulin’s work was not rare in the French public collections, this gift brought together the most complete accomplishment of his Algerian expedition and showed the wish to create a sense of permanence regarding the colony and its lasting connection to France. The tourism industry as a modern phenomenon appeared in the mid-nineteenth century with the modernisation of transportation and communication and the building of new empires, which connected this global economic activity to emerging tourists from different social classes. In 1849 the Algiers French Municipal Council cited the city’s climate and striking setting as reasons to believe that two recent projects – a new theatre and a promenade through the hills above the city – could provide recreation not only for the local population but also for a growing number of seasonal visitors. Thus did a tourist infrastructure emerge, and with it a surge in the number of visitors who made the years until 1914 an era of continuous touristic development (Perkins, 2013: 217–19). A stay in Algiers figured in the itinerary of many European travellers, who went to the French Algerian départements to experience different kinds of site, such as the lands of antiquity and the mountain and desert landscapes that were the other main sources for their impressions of the country beyond the ‘modern’ French Algerian cities. The French developed in Algeria a tourist market around souvenirs, and Rebecca DeRoo observes that at the turn of the century ‘postcards became mass media of communication and collectible objects for the first time in French history’, and that a ‘significant portion of

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the millions of postcards produced yearly in France displayed Algerian tourist sites and ethnic types’ (DeRoo, 2002: 159). The sons of the photographer Jean César Neurdein, the brothers Neurdein – Étienne Neurdein (1832–1918) and Louis-Antonin Neurdein (1846–1914) – opened a photography studio in Paris in 1863. Each had their role: Étienne was responsible for the administration of the studio and taking commercial portraits, while Louis-Antonin travelled and photographed monuments, buildings and landscapes. The Maison Neurdein therefore offered portraits of historical characters and celebrities of the day, as well as broadcasting views of France, Belgium, Algeria and Canada (Rosenthal, 2008: 991–92). They also edited several postcards under the brands ‘ND’ and ‘X’. One of their main types of postcard showed city landscapes and architecture. The streets, squares and monuments of the Frenchification of the large cities such as Algiers, on the model of the newly redesigned Paris, were key in the development of their trade. The representation of modern urbanisation made it clear that Algeria was entirely part of France and its modern and global project. By then, the aim was no longer to provide convincing visual evidence of the collaboration within a French Algeria, but instead the full acknowledgment of a territory that was part of the Greater France. Yet the constant reaffirmation of past and current visual sites seemed to be necessary to guarantee the perennial French presence. Thus, photography was fully part of the memorialisation – and the growing memorabilia consumption culture – of the established power, with the remembering and celebration of the time of French conquest and the annihilation of signs of the Ottoman past. Celebrations of the conqueror mainly took the form of sculptures in honour of military officers and heads of state in France. Postcards of the statue of Marshal Mac-Mahon (1808–93) in Algiers soon formed part of a canon of images of sites dedicated to this officer and politician, who symbolically connected the histories of Algeria and France throughout most of the century. 3 The name Mac-Mahon was also given to streets in several 3 Mac-Mahon first gained celebrity through his campaigns in Algeria (1830–54), then through the Crimean War and the Second Italian War of Independence. He served as Governor-General of Algeria (1864–70), then went back to France to command an army unit during the Franco-Prussian War. He afterwards became chief of state of France (1873–75) and the first president of the Third Republic (1875–79).

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cities and even to a town in Algeria (in the Constantinois County). The conquerors were not only the rulers but also the officers on the fields of conquest. Marshal Bugeaud (1784–1849), for instance, was famous for his campaigns in Algeria, which lasted from the early 1830s – when he fought local villagers and the national hero Abd-el-Kader (1808–1883) – until his appointment to the office of governor-general of Algeria (1840–48). He eventually acquired the nickname ‘Père Bugeaud’. In colonial cities such as Algiers, main squares were given the names of such conquerors and statues were erected to honour them. Photographs of this commemoration of ‘glory’ were taken; Place Bugeaud (unknown, Algiers, 1880s) depicts the modernity of the Haussmannian buildings surrounding the square and the statue, the fences around it – a common feature of most of these statues – and the indigenous population, marking a sharp contrast with this environment and the representation of Bugeaud.4 Another famous name of the conquest, the duke of Orleans, also featured as a statue in one of the main squares of Algiers. A. Beglet’s image Statue du Duc d’Orléans et la Mosquée Djemaa-Djeded (or Alger, la Place du Gouvernement) (1890) depicts the equestrian statue with the mosque in the background. The relationship between those statues and the buildings where political and administrative decisions were made is clear: the conqueror is exhibited, magnified and directly connected visually to the colonial powerhouse. The Battle of Mazagran (1840) became famous among the French in the mid-nineteenth century. Newspapers related the news of the battle; paintings, lithographs, novels, history books and poems were published; and all kinds of merchandise – including medals – were produced to commemorate the event. Photographs formed part of the creation of a trauma propaganda about indigenous violence. Félix Jacques Antoine Moulin’s Cachrou, bureau d’Abd-el-Kader (ruines du château) (cercle de Mascara) (1856) shows the battlefields and ruins of strategic places formally held by colonial rebels. Moulin’s Monument érigé en l’honneur de Saint-Augustin sur les ruines de l’ancienne église d’Hippône près de Bône (1856) depicts the sites of massacres, but only a few years after the pacification process and the building of memorials. 4 Since the nineteenth century, two new sites of memory have been created. In 1962 the statue of Bugeaud was brought back to France and erected in 1967 in Excideuil. In 1999 Arnaud Le Guay (in charge of culture of the city of Périgueux) created ‘l’année Bugeaud’, a commemoration year around the nineteenth-century ‘agricultural’ man.

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These pictures recorded the locations of horrible episodes, but they were consumed amidst the reassuring colonial message that, by the time the photographs were taken, civilised colonisers had already restored order, peace and progress to formerly troublesome native societies. Some of those memorials were built to commemorate the bravery and loss of French men during rebels’ victories, and continued to be depicted all way through the period, as with the postcard Monument Sidi Brahim, Oran (unknown, postcard, 1900s). 5 Often statues were erected to commemorate French army officers who gained military honours from their exploits in the field or had died in battles that gained them the status of colonial ‘hero’. This tendency of erecting numerous statues in cities and towns of all sizes was directly linked to a fashion that was increasingly popular in mid-nineteenth-century France. Le Capitaine Lelièvre, Mazagran (unknown, postcard, 1890s), 6 Statue du Sergent Blandan, Boufarik (unknown, postcard, 1887) and Statue du Sergent Blandan, Lyon (unknown, postcard, 1887) all fall into this category.7 Statues in honour of Blandan and Lelièvre were erected in both the metropole and the colonial periphery. Their metropolitan monuments often linked these men to their local backgrounds, which highlight the imbrications of the French nation-making and the colonial discourse (Guégan, 2015: 32). Alexandre Leroux (1836–1912) started his professional career in Algeria in 1876 by buying his first studio from Claude-Joseph Portier.8

5 The Battle of Sidi-Brahim (1845) was unplanned and poorly commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel de Montagnac, and within a few days the French were circled by Abd-el-Kader. Many French soldiers – including de Montagnac – died, rather than surrender. The monument was built on the main square of Oran and inaugurated in 1898. After Algerian independence it was repatriated to Périssac. 6 Lelièvre (unknown, 1851) went to Algeria in 1832 and was part of the conquest. Several visual representations (mainly paintings) of him during the Battle of Mazagran (1840) were made during that period. Because of his involvement in this battle, he was promoted captain in 1840 and received the Légion d’Honneur. 7 Jean Pierre Hippolyte Blandan (1819–1842). Involved in the conquest of Algeria from 1837 at the young age of seventeen, he was promoted corporal in 1839 and sergeant in 1842. He resisted against a surprise attack, fought and won, but then died of his wounds at the age of twenty-three. Because of his heroism and young age, he was given a posthumous Légion d’Honneur. The statue at Boufarik was repatriated to Nancy after the Algerian Independence. 8 Claude-Joseph Portier (1841–1910) was also a famous photographer established in Algeria, who participated in the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867.

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He provided coverage of the anti-Semitic manifestations of 1898 and the funeral of Cardinal Lavigerie, and took many photographs of Algiers, Biskra and its oasis, Algerian people, the so-called ‘pacification’ of Kabylia in 1895 (including portraits of rebel leaders) and the establishment of schools in this region (Durand-Evrard and Martini, 2003: 210–22). In 1904 he was in Figuig, photographing the trip of Governor-General Charles Jonnart after the military campaign that had been made there. He reproduced on postcards various brief visual news stories and social events, such as the marriage in 1904 of the former king of Annam, Ham Nghi (Prince Ung Lich) to the daughter of the president of the court of appeal in Algiers, Marcelle Laloé. Leroux also edited postcards and sold pictures taken by others; he used the services of amateur photographers and editors in rural communities to disseminate his images as postcards. Ceremonials connected to the Republic and colonial administrators became more and more common from the 1880s. Festivities were organised to honour the Republican administrations of Algerian towns and cities such as the mayor of Bône, M. Jonnart, Gouverneur Général prononce son discours (unknown, 1907). Photographs of these events show massive crowds in public spaces. Jonnart’s tour in Algeria was also portrayed via caricatures, as in the Charivari Algérien (the French Algerian version of a French satirical newspaper) on 14 October 1906, where Jonnart, depicted covered with a burnous and being greeted by an Algerian Muslim, passes in front of a native infirmary and a madrasa (Islamic school). Jonnart was indeed nicknamed ‘Jonnart the Arab’, as he built three madrasas in Algiers, Constantine and Tlemcen. Alexandre Leroux photographed one of those schools, portraying a male Muslim teacher in an oriental yard with a blackboard and thirteen young boys sitting and listening. The meaning of these types of portraiture were ambiguous: on the one hand, they showed French governmental attempts to be more tolerant towards religious teaching in Algeria while France itself was becoming more politically secular; on the other hand, they made sure that exotic and orientalized representations endured. All the way through the nineteenth century Franco-Algerian political life (mainly concerning the French population) was very intense, and particularly in the larger cities; for instance, Algiers, like Paris and Marseille, had a Commune in 1871. Following violent antisemitic unrest, which shook several cities in Algeria (Oran, Algiers and Blida) in 1897 and 1898, Édouard Drumont (a famous French journalist, antisemitic writer and editor of the Libre Parole [an antisemitic political newspaper]),

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who did not have any particular ties with Algeria, disembarked in Algiers, where he was triumphantly elected deputy in the first district. Alexandre Leroux photographically documented the troubles in Algiers in 1898. The antisemitic and separatist unrest lasted several months, being marked by the ransacking of Jewish shops, the tearing down of the railings of the synagogue in rue de Dijon and military attacks. Leroux’s photograph of the anti-Jewish demonstration in front of the governor’s house, in rue de la Lyre and place Malakoff on 31 March 1898 shows a crowd that was mainly composed of Europeans, although some Muslims appear in the picture. Yet, in the ‘Riots in Algiers’ (Sunday 6 February 1898), in the weekly illustrated supplement of Le Petit Journal, the drawing shows the looting of Jewish houses and shops by the Muslim population, with an article emphasising that they were worked up by the Crémieux decree, which had given Algerian Jews French citizenship in October 1870: ‘there [in Algeria] the Jews are not liked, they are accused of handling their money  … indiscreetly; in fact the Arab Muslims show mistrust for them, and above all a hatred which has accumulated and increased one hundredfold since the famous Crémieux decree’. However, we know that this antisemitic outburst was partly connected to the Dreyfus Affair in France – but only partly, as the French army and colons had an inherent distrust of the Jewish population right from the beginning of the conquest of the territory. Therefore, we see here a divergence between traditional visual mediums of representation and their m ­ isrepresentation, and a more political depiction via documentary photography. Nineteenth-century photograph albums and postcards brought together the ceremonial and political with tourism. From its discovery, photography was an important lieu that was becoming more common, used and consumed by the end of the century. It developed into a crucial means of connecting France visually with its Algerian départements, and thus played a role in the identity formation of an Algerian Frenchness. The building and use of a rhetoric of a ‘modern’ France from 1850 right up to World War I, although France experienced three different regimes during that period, shows the continuity of shared themes. The trend of similar themes and subjects, from Félix Jacques Antoine Moulin’s albums depicting Napoleon III’s Second Empire and Algeria, to the frères Neurdein’s albums and postcards of local peoples and modern architecture, to the Third Republic postcards of similar statues erected in Algeria and in France, and postcards of political gatherings and their connection to what happened in the Métropole, show enduring visual

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tropes that became understood by the European population. In Algeria, they represented – or were meant to embody – a similar Frenchness that was being defined in France, a visual identity that was merging different times and spaces into one national lieu. The discourse that connected ‘pacification’ and the ‘civilizing mission’ or westernization to the representation and materialization of ‘modern’ civic identity and obedience hence became a recurrent trope to embody a perceived stable process. All of this, however, was to be challenged later in the following century. Works Cited DeRoo, Rebecca. 2002. ‘Colonial Collecting, French women and Algerian cartes postales’. In Colonialist Photography, Imag(in)ing race and place, edited by Gary D. Sampson and Eleanor M. Hight, 159–71. London: Routledge. Durand-Evrard, Françoise, and Lucienne Martini, eds. 2003. Archives d’Algérie, 1830–1960. Paris: Editions Hazan. Guégan, Xavier. 2015. ‘Transmissible Sites: Monuments, memorials and their visibility on the metropole and periphery’. In Sites of Imperial Memory: Commemorating colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, edited by Frank Müller and Daniel Gepper, 21–38. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Perkins, Kenneth J. 2013. ‘So Near and Yet So Far: British Tourism in Algiers, 1860–1914’. In The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 Travellers and Tourists, edited by Martin Farr and Xavier Guégan, 217–35. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosenthal, Donald. 2008. ‘MOULIN, FÉLIX-JACQUES-ANTOINE’ and ‘NEURDEIN FRÈRES’. In Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, edited by John Hannavy, 945–47; 991–92. New York: Taylor & Francis Group.

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The Everyday

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Vine and Wine Jacqueline Dutton Vine and Wine

Wine is an iconic marker of French identity. Although originally an import via Phoenician trading routes, before becoming a symbol of the Roman colonization of Gaul, wine, like gastronomy, is synonymous with French culture: its savoir-faire, its art de vivre. Through winemaking, France effectively colonized not just its own empire but the entire world of wines. French terminology, ranging from terroir to dosage, specific viticultural and oenological methods, and fundamental principles of production and consumption are ubiquitous in global wine theories and practices (Negro, 2012). And yet, once the wine world was fully compliant with French codes, offering ‘champagne’ made in Australia, ‘bordeaux’ in California and ‘burgundy’ in New Zealand, such honorific emulation became an impediment, encroaching on France’s market share. Protectionist policies relating to appellations and terroir have now ensured France’s claims to names in the industry. Critics and rankings continue to benchmark ‘New World’ production against ‘Old World’, especially French wines, although it is debatable whether the historical memory and traditions of France can really rival New World estates that have even older (pre-phylloxera) vines.1 Georges Durand’s entry on ‘Vine and Wine’ in Les Lieux de mémoire opens with a lyrical evocation of the practice of drinking wine at memorable occasions, immediately proposing French wine as a global

1 France’s vineyards were almost entirely uprooted in the late nineteenth century, when the phylloxera infestation decimated the vines. Replanting on American rootstock saved the industry in the long term; colonial vineyards in Algeria saved it in the shorter term.

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marker of memory by citing an obscure stanza written by Bernard Douilly, who worked in publicity services for French wine in the 1970s: France, with its Wines, Immortalized the History of the World. For, throughout the World, at each historic event A French wine was always present. (Durand, 2009: 193)

The choice of this quote confirms at least two fundamental pre/misconceptions about France and wine. Firstly, even if the western world privileges French wines for celebrating historic events, they are not necessarily known, desired or drunk in the wider world, and certainly not in many non-western cultures. Secondly, the idea that France can continue to proclaim its domination of the world wine industry via publicity and propaganda is flawed and indeed forbidden by French law. 2 The perceptions promoted by Durand and Douilly can be refuted in an instant, but there is no doubt that they persist in both French and global cultures. Understanding the powerful stereotypes about French wine that have dominated discourses around the drink over the past five centuries serves only to magnify the issues surrounding recognition of wines made in France’s own former colonies and in French overseas departments and territories. When ancient wine-producing countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece struggle against French hegemony in the wine industry, one might ask what hope exists for Vietnam, Reunion Island or Canada to receive any acknowledgment for their contributions to vine and wine. Wine production in its colonies is one aspect of France’s imprint in postcolonial realms of memory. The role of viticulture and oenology in French colonial expansionist ideology is therefore an important factor to consider. Wine consumption is equally significant, being an indication of French identity and belonging: it is an element of the civilizing mission, but excessive or improper consumption is a sign of the uncivilized manners of the colonized. The development of indigenous wine industries in postcolonial cultures repudiates received wisdom about the hierarchy of terroir and climate that placed France at the centre of Old World wines and excluded tropical or arid regions from viticulture. Evidence now exists to demonstrate that the French were not always right in their assessment of vines and wines in colonial contexts. 2 The Loi Evin (1991) is one of the world’s most stringent laws on alcohol (and tobacco) advertising in a non-muslim country.

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Durand’s entry in Les Lieux de mémoire divides vine and wine into intimate, national and cultural memories, foregrounding time in the form of season and vintage, the history of the national product and the religious, social, literary and artistic expressions that structure wine’s place in French culture. As a complement, this entry considers the subject according to hegemonic (imperial), consuming (colonial) and progressive (postcolonial) memories, focusing on wine production as a model for civilization, wine consumption as a measure of conquest and wine experimentation as a symbol of emancipation. This journey through the vines and wines of the Francophone postcolonial world includes a range of different historical, geographical and cultural examples to illustrate instances from the first and second waves of French imperial expansion and more recent experimentation over the past century. As they travelled in search of lands to extend their empire during the Renaissance period, the French were perturbed by the lack of two essential symbols of their civilisation and religion: bread and wine. The solutions were to import or set up colonial production, and both methods were adopted, with varying degrees of success in terms of wine. La Nouvelle France, or Canada, was one of the first colonies in which native grape vines (vitis labrusca) were discovered. Early northern European travellers such as Leif Eriksson, who arrived around 1000 BCE, named the area at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River ‘Vinland’ because of the abundance of wild grape vines, yet no evidence of indigenous fermented alcoholic drinks was found (Phillips, 2017: 7–8). On Jacques Cartier’s second voyage to La Nouvelle France (1535–36) he observed abundant vines on what is now known as the island of Orléans: ‘nous y trouvâmes force vignes, ce que nous n’avions pas vu auparavant dans tout le pays, et pour cela nous la nommâmes l’île de Bacchus’ [we found many vines there, which we had not seen so far in the rest of the country, and as a result we called it Bacchus island] (Cartier, 1992: 181–82). Further exploration up the Saint-Laurent River revealed more grapes, described as smaller and sweeter than those of France. His third voyage, in 1541, provided sightings and tastings along the southern coast of grapes more like blackberries than French varieties. Subsequent visits around sixty years later by Samuel de Champlain, Marc Lescarbot and Pierre Boucher both confirm and contest Cartier’s observations, suggesting that several different grape varieties may have been growing, including some that resembled the grapes of Burgundy (Ferland, 2004: 4). Missionaries of the Recollet and Jesuit orders were the first to make wine in Canada from the beginning of the seventeenth century, when

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their ecclesiastical imports ran dry. They harvested grapes by shaking the trees in which the vines were enlaced, pressing grapes in a wooden mortar, straining the juice through sheets and fermenting it in a bark bucket (Sagard, 1866: 218). Though not perceived as being up to the standard of French wines, and requiring much foraging and improvising, the first Canadian wine was passable and even improved with age if kept in cool conditions. Just as the French missionaries and colonists worked to civilize indigenous peoples with their culture, they reasoned that indigenous vines could also be cultivated ‘à la française’ to make more civilized wines through viticulture. Pruning techniques and covering vines during the freezing winters were, however, unsuccessful, so French vines (vitis vinifera) were imported and introduced to the new terroir. With great care and persistence, the plants survived and produced wine of reasonable quality, but the report in 1687 by the governor, Jacques Denonville, of his doubts that wine would succeed there and the lack of evidence in archives and letters suggests that Canadian wine did not become a fixture of settler society (Ferland, 2004: 7). The failure to produce Canadian wine translated as a perceived failure to civilize and tame the wild Canadian lands – a betrayal of the imperial project and an abdication to ‘savagery’ (Ferland, 2004: 8). To supply the demand for wine in La Nouvelle France La Rochelle provided mainly white wines in the seventeenth century, but was overtaken by Bordeaux, with its red wines, in the eighteenth century. The Dutch had been sending Bordeaux’s ‘black’ wines, often from Bergerac and Cahors, to their colonies since the early sixteenth century, which was especially successful after Dutch merchants discovered that burning a candle in a barrel prior to filling it with wine produced enough sulphur to prevent the wine from spoiling, so allowing it to survive the long sea journeys. The French in Canada followed suit, importing about 130,000 litres of wine from Bordeaux yearly between 1699 and 1716, which represented 60–70 per cent of ships’ cargoes (Huetz de Lemps, 1975: 122, 133). The insistence on importing such large quantities of wine from France may reflect colonists’ need to maintain access to the symbols of French civilization and religion when faced with overwhelming nature and people. The British conquest of La Nouvelle France in 1760 diminished French wine imports dramatically: wine was replaced by whisky, gin and rum. Initial enthusiasm aside, French imperial expansion through viticulture was ultimately unsuccessful in Canada. The ‘acknowledged father of Canadian wine’ is a German migrant, Johann Schiller, who made wine in

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1811 in the greater Toronto area (Phillips, 2017: 14). It was not until the 1970s that winemakers began planting European varieties of grape vines in Quebec, as well as Ontario, British Colombia and Nova Scotia, and are now producing excellent wines in over 700 wineries, alongside Canada’s own climate-adapted speciality: icewine. At the other end of the climactic scale, Reunion Island has an equally long and surprisingly successful history of viticulture. Reunion did not have indigenous grape varieties, amd the first colonists brought vines from France at around the same time that Canada was performing its winemaking experiments, in the 1660s. Etienne Regnault settled on the Ile Bourbon in 1665 with twenty men who planted vines around Saint-Denis and Saint-Paul. According to André Boureau Deslandes, writer aboard the Vautour who landed on the island between 3 and 27 July 1676, the results were reasonably successful: Le raisin y vient très bien. Ils ont cueilli cette année quatre ou cinq barriques de vin, et ils espéraient à la première mousson en cueillir davantage. Il est vrai qu’ils disent qu’il ne se conserve pas longtemps, mais apparemment que cela vient de ce que la vigne n’est peut être pas bien coupée et qu’ils ne savent pas bien faire le vin. (Boureau-Deslandes, 1992) [Grapes grow well there. This year they picked enough to make four or five barrels of wine, and they were hoping to pick more after the first monsoon. It is true that they say they cannot keep it for long, but apparently it is due to the fact that the vine is not well cut and they do not know very well how to make wine.]

Vines did not extend beyond the first settlements until around 1860, when the hardy North American vitis labrusca (Isabella) vines were introduced to areas such as the cirque of Cilaos, with volcanic soil and a drier climate at an altitude of 600–1300m. While phylloxera was ravaging French vineyards, leading to a ban on the import of French vines into Reunion, Isabella vines were producing plentiful grapes, mainly for eating. Wine was also made and sold on the roadside and at grocery stores, but had the reputation for sending people mad, as it contained high levels of methanol owing to the grape variety and vinification techniques. In 1975 making wine from Isabella grapes was formally forbidden and French grape varieties were selected, trialled and introduced by the IRFA (now CIRAD – Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement), with good results from Malbec, Chenin and Pinot Noir in the Cilaos region. In the late 1980s, about ten producers united their winemaking efforts

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to form the cooperative Le Chai de Cilaos in 1992. 3 Now covering over fifteen hectares, the vines produce small quantities of ‘respectable red and white from French varieties’ (Robinson, 2015: 2200). Taking the prize for the highest vineyards in France, and the first French wine of the year’s vintage, le vin des cyclones was accredited as ‘vin de pays’ in 2004 and the Cilaos region was granted IGP (indication géographique protégée) status in 2014. The cultivation of vines in both Canada and Reunion Island was clearly an imperial project, designed to satisfy the need for civilized and religious consumption of wine and to promote French identity in the new colonies. In spite of challenging beginnings, and the impediment of indigenous or American vines, both regions have become recognised producers of wine that reflect the imperialism of French wine varieties yet display distinct features in their taste of place and their marketing. Algeria, annexed by France in 1830, during the second wave of French colonization, was a colony that would prove to be a major asset in combatting the decline in French wine production during the phylloxera crisis of the late nineteenth century. Algeria had been producing wine from wild grape vines and participating in the Carthaginian wine trade since the first century BCE, but under Arab rule, with alcohol consumption forbidden by the Koran, viticulture was not encouraged (Meloni and Swinnen, 2014: 5). After the arrival of the French colonists, who considered wine a safer drink than local water and therefore a potential cure for cholera (Birebent, 2007: 67), grape vines were planted, but winemaking efforts were unsuccessful owing to a lack of expertise in managing fermentation under such hot conditions (Meloni and Swinnen, 2014: 5). In the early years much of the wine consumed by French colonists was imported into Algeria (Isnard and Labadie, 1959), but, by the 1880s, when Pasteur’s theories of the role of yeast in alcohol fermentation led to progress in cold fermentation, and phylloxera had crippled French wine production, the tables were turned and France began to import Algerian wine not just for its own market but to export globally. As French winemakers flocked to Algeria to continue their trade, vines replaced wheat as the principal cultivation, increasing from 20,000 hectares in 1880 to over 100,000 hectares in 1890 (Meloni and Swinnen, 2014: 11). Production soared from 25,000 hectolitres (hl) in 1854 to 200,000 hl in 1872, one million hl in 1885, five million hl in 1900 and ten million hl in 1915 (Meloni and Swinnen, 2014: 11). 3 http://chaidecilaos.reunion.fr/.

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As domestic consumption was extremely limited, because of the mainly Islamic population, most Algerian wine was exported to France and beyond, with Algeria becoming the largest exporter of wine in the world in the early 1960s (Meloni and Swinnen, 2014). The exponential rise in production and export proved problematic for French winemakers, especially those in the largest producing wine region in the world, the Languedoc, whose marginally more expensive wines were no longer required for blending or exporting from France. ‘Quality’ wine producers from Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne lobbied the French government for higher import tariffs to stop Algerian wine devaluing the reputation of French wine. The ‘Leakey’ affair, in which Charles Jonnart, French governor general of Algeria, contracted 50,000 hl of Algerian wine to English businessman James Leakey, who advertised it as ‘French’ wine (Strachan, 2007), contributed to introducing the first iteration of the Appellations Law (Loi du 1er août 1905), designed to combat fraud and falsification regarding the provenance of wines. When the Loi Capus regulating appellations was introduced in 1935, Algerian wine production had reached an all-time high of 400,000 hectares, producing almost nineteen million hl (Sutton, 1990: 4). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whether they knew it or not, many consumers of French wine would have developed a taste for Algerian wine, in a kind of postcolonial conquest of the French palate. And today’s strict appellation laws in France and Europe emerge from a refusal to consider colonial vineyards in Algeria as part of France. Yet there is another dilemma at work in this context: the cultural inappropriateness of wine production in an Islamic culture and the impact of decolonisation on Algeria’s wine-dependent economy (Sutton, 1990). Viticulture quickly became the hierarchical structure upon which Algerian society was based, in both economic and geographical terms. Europeans owned most of the vineyards and had political and economic power; non-Europeans worked in the vineyards and were therefore economically dependent on Europeans. In 1955 69 per cent of vineyards were located in the westernized Oranais region, whereas the more Islamicized region of Eastern Constantinois held only 5  per cent (Sutton, 1990: 4). Accounting for more than half of the export economy, one-fifth of total employment in agriculture (two-thirds of salaried employment in modern agriculture), and over 50 per cent of land use in certain regions, such as the Mitidja Plain and Oranais, viticulture was dominating Algeria’s economy and geography in the years leading up to independence. In 1962 the cultural inappropriateness of a Muslim

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country’s economy relying so heavily on wine production clashed with ideals of independence, and the departure of European expertise exacerbated issues in the industry (Sutton, 1990: 5). In addition, France had been the principal export market for Algerian wines, which were used for raising the alcohol content and body of weaker French wines: the wine industries of both countries suffered from severing this import– export chain. Over the past fifty years production has plummeted from nineteen million hl to around 0.6 million hl, but replanting programmes have begun (Robinson, 2015: 248). When Vietnam was annexed by France in the nineteenth century to form part of French Indochina in 1887, French vitis vinifera vines were planted in the highlands of the Ba Vi Mountain west of Hanoi (Bois and Pérard, 2009: 77). Winemaking was simply for domestic consumption, never reaching production levels suitable for commerce or export, although trellised vines remained a feature of Vietnamese gardens in the highlands. There was little reason to attempt to convert Vietnamese tastes to French grape wines, as rice wine was a much more lucrative industry already in place. The French took over and monopolized the industry, selling the rice wine back to the Vietnamese at inflated prices and importing grape wine for their own consumption. It was not until a century later that Vietnam launched its first commercial winery, the Thien Thai Winery, on the steamy southern coastal plain Phan Rang in Ninh Thuan province, where grape vines had been successfully planted – for fruit rather than wine (Robinson, 2015: 2772–73). Thien Thai Winery’s first still and sparkling wines, made from the Cardinal variety of vitis vinifera, were released in 1995, but production ceased in 2002. More recently, wine grape production has moved to Dalat, closer to the Central Highlands, and Vang Dalat is the largest grape wine producer in Vietnam, starting in 1999. The main varieties are Cardinal and Chambourcin, with Shiraz and Sauvignon Blanc also planted. Reports range from five to fifteen wineries currently operating in Vietnam, with other large companies being Halico and Thang Long liquor company. Prospects for export and growth are positive, according to Liz Thach MW, owing to the huge population of ninety-one million Vietnamese and the possibility of marketing its French heritage in Asia and beyond (Thach, 2015). Interestingly, only 9 per cent of vineyards are on the initial site of Ba Vi chosen by French colonists, with 90 per cent being in Ninh Thuan and the rest scattered across the highlands (Bois and Pérard, 2009: 77). Like many other Francophone postcolonial wine regions, Vietnam has progressed in its own way, marketing its unique

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wine to the visiting French and tourists of all nationalities, following the somewhat subversive practices of winemakers in other tropical postcolonial countries, such as Myanmar (Dutton, 2016). France’s imprint on vines and wines in Francophone postcolonial realms of memory is foundational, extensive, practical and cultural. This statement may well be true for most New World winegrowing regions of the world, with exceptional parcels of German-, Italian- and Spanish-dominated traditions. What is particularly interesting about these four examples is that the French actually failed to transplant their winemaking expertise and consequently their wine-consuming identity in three of the four regions at the time of colonization – it was not until later in the twentieth century that winemaking resumed in Canada, Reunion Island and Vietnam. In the case of Algeria, the French were so ‘successful’ that their own wine’s identity was compromised by Algerian imports and, in turn, their revenue and relationship was lost at the time of decolonization. There are different stories for each of the Francophone postcolonial winemaking regions, from Tunisia and Morocco to Lebanon, Madagascar and Tahiti. Vine and wine are inherently imperial, but can be subversively harnessed for emancipation through experimentation. Works Cited Birebent, Paul. 2007. Hommes, vignes et vins de l’Algérie française: 1830–1962. Nice: Editions Jacques Gandini. Bois, Benjamin, and Jocelyne Pérard. 2009. ‘Climat et viticulture au Vietnam: Evaluations et perspectives’. Climatologie 6: 75–88. Boureau-Deslandes, André. 1992. ‘Voyages de France aux Indes par mer dans le navire le Vautour’ 1676. In Sous la signe de la tortue: Voyages anciens à l’île Bourbon (1611–1725), edited by Albert Lougnon, 137–42. Saint-Denis de la Réunion: Azalées Editions, 4th edition. Cartier, Jacques. 1992. Voyages au Canada: avec les relations des voyages en Amérique de Gonneville, Verrazzano et Robertval. Paris: La Découverte. Durand, Georges. 2009. ‘Vine and Wine’. In Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3, edited by Pierre Nora and David P. Jordan, 192–231. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dutton, Jacqueline. 2016. ‘From Liquid Ferment to Political Foment? European Winemakers in Myanmar’. The Aristologist 6: 27–48. Ferland, Catherine. 2004. ‘La Saga du vin au Canada à l’époque de la Nouvelle France’. Anthropology of Food 3 (December). http://aof.revues.org/245.

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Huetz de Lemps, Christian. 1975. Géographie du commerce de Bordeaux à la fin du règne de Louis XIV. Paris: Mouton. Isnard, H., and J.H. Labadie. 1959. ‘Vineyards and Social Structure in Algeria’. Diogenes 7: 63–81. http://dio.sagepub.com/content/7/27/63.citation/. Meloni, Giulia, and Johan Swinnen. 2014. ‘The Rise and Fall of the World’s Largest Wine Exporter – And Its Institutional Legacy’. Journal of Wine Economics 9, no. 1: 3–33. Negro, Isabel. 2012. ‘Wine Discourse in the French Language’. Revista Electronica de Linguistica Aplicada 11: 1–12. Phillips, Rod. 2017. The Wines of Canada. Oxford: Infinite Ideas Classic Wine Library. Robinson, Jancis, ed. 2015. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sagard, Gabriel. 1866. Histoire du Canada et voyages que les frères mineurs recollects y ont faits pour la conversion des infidels: depuis l’an 1615. Paris: Librairie Tross. Strachan, John. 2007. ‘The Colonial Identity of Wine: The Leakey Affair and the Franco-Algerian Order of Things’. Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 21, no. 2: 118–37. Sutton, Keith. 1990. ‘Algeria’s vineyards: An Islamic dilemma and a problem of Decolonization’. Journal of Wine Research 1, no. 2: 101–21. Thach, Liz. 2015. ‘Wine From Vietnam: Pervasive Yet Eclipsed by Beer’. 29 July. https://www.winebusiness.com/news/?go=getArticle&dataid=155297.

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Couscous Sylvie Durmelat Couscous

What is left of colonization once it has officially ended? Where and how are colonial legacies and leftovers embodied, reproduced and transformed? This essay argues that culinary specialties constitute a significant yet overlooked edible site of memory. Far from being neutral preparations, they are the product of history, dominant ideologies and related power structures (Gupta, 2012). Shifting the focus onto the trajectory of specific dishes, rather than gastronomy (Ory, 1992), makes the exclusions and hierarchy generated by gastronomy, as a discourse of national cohesion, superiority and specificity, more visible. In this regard, the North African specialty of couscous holds a particularly central, if ambiguous, place in the French culinary pantheon. This satisfying blend of couscous grains – semolina rolled into small pasta – vegetables, broth and various meats combines Mediterranean flavours and fragrant spices that evoke images of authentic slow-cooked feasts. Since 2004 the dish has consistently ranked among the French’s top favourite food in national polls. It is a ubiquitous offering, not just in ethnic restaurants but also in cafeteria, collective catering, fast food outlets, supermarkets and even bakeries. Notably, by the end of the twentieth century, France was the leading producer and consumer of couscous in Europe (Barriol and Grange, 2010), and French production topped that of any single North African country, its region of origin (Cahier du CEPI, 2003). However familiar its presence, couscous did not just ‘naturally’ become one of France’s top favourite dishes, and few eaters are aware of the colonial history of the dish. Yet, its ascent to fame is a direct result of the (de)colonization of North Africa. In the 1950s pasta manufacturers in Algeria, most of them European settlers, mechanized the commercial

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production of couscous grains, which until then had been hand-rolled by native female workers. Following the upheavals of the Algerian war of independence (1954–62), manufacturers resettled in France, where the industrial process was further refined with the development of sophisticated, fully automated production lines. The first production standards for this now industrial good were finalized in France in the 1990s. Since then, the food industry has continued to develop new formats and preparations to gain market share. Couscous has become an instant side dish, prepared with boiling water instead of steaming, and even a summer salad with various flavours known as taboulé. It comes in cans and microwavable or frozen trays. Tellingly, Picard, the popular frozen food chain, offers two types of prepared couscous, at once convenient and exotic: a ‘Couscous Express’, available in single servings, and a more sophisticated ‘Couscous royal’, that comes with a variety of meats and can serve four as part of its ‘Cuisine Evasion’ line. Notwithstanding its North African origin, couscous has ostensibly become part of daily French consumption habits. However, even after the military conquest of Algeria, the dish remained a marginal offering in France during most of the colonial period (Oubahli, 2008: 28). In culinary journals and gastronomic literature during the interwar period, couscous, like many dishes from the colonies, appeared ‘nearly exclusively in gastronomic curiosity pieces’, placed outside the boundaries of French (culinary) identity as colonized other (Janes, 2016: 216). And, indeed, couscous is ironically absent from a special issue of La Table française et les produits coloniaux dedicated to ‘L’Algérie et ses produits alimentaires’ (Gasser, 1933). This short-lived publication was launched after the colonial exhibition of 1931 to encourage the consumption of colonial foodstuff, and was produced by ‘Colonies-France’, the ‘Association de propagande et de vulgarisation des produits coloniaux français’ [The Association for the Advertisement and Popularization of French Colonial Goods], which planned and reported on regular banquets for elected officials, civil servants and business representatives. Couscous is not featured in the write-up of the dinner given to celebrate the foodstuffs of Algeria, and there is no mention of couscous either in the related recipe section at the end of that issue. The only incidental indication, on the inside front cover, is a short advertisement for Ricci couscous, an established pasta and couscous manufacturer from Blida, Algeria. This absence is in part due to the fact that couscous, unlike wheat, palm, citrus fruit or vegetables, is not a commodity crop that could

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be refined and transformed in Europe, or a raw ingredient that could easily be integrated in a pre-existing culinary grammar. Rather, it is an elaborate, hand-rolled, culinary artefact, a product that is already the result of a transformation. It is also a dish that requires culinary techniques and expertise, such as hand-rolling and steaming, and utensils such as a two-piece steamer or couscoussier, that were not part of French cooking practices at the time. Most of all, adopting couscous would have required the acknowledgement that the colonized had some degree of culinary sophistication. In this respect, couscous is not unlike ‘what Sidney Mintz calls “fringe” foods: tasty, enjoyable but not too substantial (Mintz 1994) […], their production and distribution has historically been inextricable from systems of domination and exploitation, whether local and interpersonal, regional and ecological, or transnational and imperial’ (Freiberg, 2003: 6). And indeed, the fringe culinary status of couscous for most of the twentieth century is part of a colonial eating order solidified by the institution of gastronomy, a discourse of national superiority that spread at the same time the French expanded their colonial empire, constituting a ‘culinary civilizing mission’ of sorts (Durmelat, 2015: 119). A similar neglect of colonial specialties is expressed in colonial North Africa itself. As noted by Stephen Harp, the assumption in the 1930 Michelin guide to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia was that French tourists visiting these places would ‘be looking at sights rather than experiencing the cuisine, a marked contrast to interwar norms of touring in the metropole. The guide assumed that French tourists would not be seeking couscous or other North African specialties, so it offered no such lists of local cuisine’; rather, it recommended places serving French food (2002: 207). A civil servant in the colonial administration and Algérianiste author Robert Randau, born and raised in Algiers, deplored this state of affairs: ‘Que ce brave homme [un touriste européen] s’en vienne à Alger, il se laissera conduire, toujours par snobisme, chez un traiteur tunisien ou égyptien, picorera, en s’amusant de la sauvagerie du mets, une assiette de couscous qu’il mangera avec du pain et n’y reviendra de sa vie!’ [If this good man (a European tourist) comes to Algiers, he will let himself be taken, because of his snobbery, to a Tunisian or Egyptian caterer, will pick at, amused by the dish’s savagery, a plate of couscous that he will eat with bread and will never come back again!] Ridiculing the French habit of eating everything, including couscous, with bread, Randau refuses couscous’s characterization as savage and promotes the cuisine of Algeria: ‘Nous

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possédons en Algérie un art culinaire original constitué par les apports de cinq ou six races; il appartient à l’Ofalac [Office algérien d’action économique et touristique] d’en convaincre nos hôtes et nos hôteliers’ [In Algeria we possess an original culinary art to which five or six races have contributed. It is the Ofalac’s role (Algerian Office for economic and touristic promotion) to convince our guests and hoteliers about it] (1936: 217). To prove it, he cites L’Algérie gourmande (1912), a cookbook published in Oran by renowned chef and hotel owner in Mascara, Léon Isnard, later expanded and republished as La Gastronomie africaine by Albin Michel in 1930, in time for the centennial of French Algeria. According to Mohamed Oubahli, we owe Isnard the first recipe for couscous ever printed in a cookbook in the metropole (2008: 28). Originally published in Algeria, a shortened version of his detailed and thorough recipe for ‘couscouss’1 was reissued sometime between 1912 and 1922 in J.-B. Reboul’s highly popular La cuisinière provençale, regularly republished since 1897, following ‘la demande qui nous a été maintes fois formulée de voir figurer dans notre livre ce plat exotique’ [the request, articulated many times, to see this exotic dish included in our book] (69). 2 Isnard was also the first to literally put couscous on the map, with the creation of a unique illustrated gastronomic map of North Africa, ‘L’Atlas Gastronomique. Afrique du Nord’, in the 1927 edition of his second cookbook, L’Afrique gourmande, first published in 1922. Among a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, farm animals, game and fish, as well as oils, wines and anisette liquor, three illustrations feature couscous and its fabrication by hand. The map serves a clear propagandist agenda, for it is meant to ‘frapper l’imagination des jeunes élèves, par une nouvelle manière d’apprendre la géographie, en désignant les villes non par leur nom, mais par les spécialités et les produits alimentaires qu’elles produisent’ [spark young students’ imagination, by means of a new way of learning 1 The unstable spelling of the word – kouscouss, kouskous, cousscouss, couscoussou, couscouss, couscous, etc. – indicates the perceived novelty of the dish and its limited initial circulation in the French lexicon. 2 Oubahli (2008: 28) estimates that the recipe was added to Reboul’s cookbook sometime before 1922, based on the existing issues. On 4 December 1912 L’Echo d’Alger announced the publication of L’Algérie gourmande, which is not referenced in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s catalogue. Therefore, the recipe for ‘couscouss’ was probably printed in Reboul’s cookbook between 1912 and 1922.

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geography, by designating cities not by their name but by the specialties and foodstuffs they produce]. With his visually appealing inventory of Algeria’s foodstuff (fruits and oil jars are represented with eyes and mouth), Isnard’s objective is to further assimilate and shape colonial North Africa as a province of France, following the model of gastronomic regional guides that were being developed for the nascent automobile tourist industry: ‘Les touristes et les gourmets auront beaucoup à gagner à connaître cette carte culinaire qui leur fera apprécier les richesses gastronomiques et la diversité de la cuisine Nord Africaine’ [tourists and gourmets will benefit tremendously from knowing this culinary map that will introduce them to North African cuisine’s gastronomic wealth and diversity]. Isnard’s amusing and educative map presents colonial Algeria as consumable, yet it also elevates it as gastronomic territory and constitutes a rare attempt to present couscous as an expression of terroir, acknowledging the savoir-faire it involves and recognizing its historical roots and artisanal qualities. Despite his efforts, couscous remained an oddity, reserved for special sets of eaters such as colonial troops or served at extraordinary events and locations such as cafés maures during exhibitions. As shown by Gilbert Meynier, North African troops were the subject of special care during World War I. ‘Dès le début de la guerre, le mulud et l’aid el sabir sont promus jours fériés et, pour les fêtes musulmanes, les instructions sont d’améliorer l’ordinaire, de prévoir du couscous et du mouton’ [As soon as the war started, mulud and aid el sabir became national holidays and, for Muslim celebrations, the instructions are to improve ordinary meals, to have couscous and mutton on those days] (1984: 1161). The army even published an actual Algerian cookbook for its ‘corps indigène’ (1162). Taking into account the cultural and religious appropriateness of food supplies for colonial soldiers was good politics as a display of cultural sensitivity as well as a form of soft control and surveillance over the troops (1166–70). Grima, a couscous manufacturer from Blida, made no mistake about it and sent unsolicited samples of couscous to the army supply office. The product was prepared and tested by an ‘indigenous troop’ and in 1916 the army ordered a regular supply for its colonial soldiers (Llosa, 2015: 105). Clearly couscous, unlike other foreign ingredients or sauces, was not francisé and assimilated directly into French haute cuisine (Saillard, 2007: 762; Ferguson, 2004: 71–75; Ory, 1992: 836). The trajectory of the dish is inflected by the history of the military conquest of Algeria. Couscous is the dish of the vanquished, the bearer of a degraded

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exoticism, as is reflected in a number of lowbrow cultural productions. The foreign consonance of the word and its musicality are used as a comical device in a number of popular songs and tunes, as part of a genre that could be called the colonial burlesque. One such tune is ‘Viens dans ma Casbah’ (1933) by Alibert, a singer from Marseille popular in the 1930s, who also toured North Africa. The song belongs to the genre of ‘la chanson sabir’ (Miliani, 2008: 92), popularized during a period of heightened colonial propaganda that corresponded to the Colonial exhibition in Paris. In ‘Viens dans ma casbah’, couscous is sexualized and ridiculed. The female character, a lowlife native prostitute for soldiers, ‘était adroite de ses mains pour faire Harbi Loubia Couscous Barka’ [was skilled with her hands to make Harbi Loubia Couscous Barka], a hodgepodge of familiar Arabic words and dish names such as Loubia, a bean stew, and couscous, which, when combined, suggest an undefined sexual act. The association of couscous with dance, vaudeville and comedy reflects a lasting legacy of colonial burlesque and downgraded exoticism that persists to this day, in the many ‘couscous dansants’ organized by local associations and municipalities, 3 and in the melodic impact of the ‘Oriental yéyé’ musical hit, ‘Fais-moi du couscous chéri’ (Bob Azzam, 1961),4 which inspired an equally striking and memorable TV advertisement for canned Saupiquet couscous in 1983, featuring an Orientalist musical couscous feast in a harem, titled ‘Saupiquet couscous: les 1001 nuits’. 5 Advertising and the circulation of commodities it promotes provide a significant point of entry between the consumers’ domestic and public lives. A vehicle of imperial ideology, it served to expand empires through trade (McClintock, 1995: 211). Conversely, TV advertisements recirculated elements of colonial racism attached to couscous through domestic everyday consumption, whether it be food or images. As Kristin Ross suggested for 1960s France, ‘the colonies are in some sense replaced, and the effort that went into maintaining and disciplining a colonial people and situation becomes instead concentrated on a particular level of metropolitan existence: everyday life’ (1995: 77). 3 See here for an example of a poster: http://www.spectable.com/repas-dansantcouscous-festidanse-perigueux-le-samedi-24-nov/198741/253192. 4 See Durmelat (2017) for an analysis of this song and its significance. 5 See http://www.ina.fr/video/PUB3249402018/saupiquet-couscous-les-1001nuits-video.html.

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And, indeed, the ‘formation de colonies arabes dans la métropole’ (1938), as Paul Messerschmitt, director of the Algiers School of Business, called the economic and political migration of Algerian workers and their families, laid the foundations for an emerging French market for couscous. As Léon Isnard notes in 1930, ‘nombreuses sont aujourd’hui les fabriques de pâtes qui font du couscous de premier choix, dont la cuisson s’opère à la vapeur d’eau ou de bouillon’ [today many pasta makers produce high quality couscous, which can be steamed over water or broth] (24). In the absence of women who could roll couscous from durum wheat semolina, pre-rolled and pre-cooked couscous became a welcome option for North Africans in the metropole. This nascent metropolitan market was consolidated during the war of Independence. Between 1954 and 1962 about two million French soldiers fought in Algeria (Stora, 1991: 7) and, during that same period, the number of Algerian immigrants in France doubled, from 211,000 to up to 436,000 (Stora, 1993: 40). About 800,000 European colonists and Algerian Jews were ‘repatriated’ to France in 1962. This sizeable portion of the population, compared to the forty-eight million inhabitants in France at the time, brought with them a taste for couscous, and food entrepreneurs such as Garbit who claims to have launched the first canned couscous in 1962 started to cater to this new niche of consumers. Ferico, the leading French couscous manufacturer, was founded in Algiers in 1907 by a couple of Italian immigrants, the Ferreros; the company resettled in Vitrolles in the south of France in 1964, and merged with Ricci, another well-known Algerian company, ten years later, before being bought by Panzani, a famous French pasta brand, now in the hands of the Spanish conglomerate Ebro Foods. Industrialization transformed the dish into an easily consumable preparation available without rolling, steaming or cooking altogether. In 1970s and 1980s television advertisements for canned couscous, jovial and stereotypical pieds-noirs characters emerged as taste setters and authentic interpreters of couscous for French consumers, while undefined Maghrebi natives were located beyond the kitchen and locked outside of modernity. Garbit’s well-known slogan ‘C’est bon comme là-bas, dis!’ [It is as good as over there/back home, I say!] continued to conjure up colonial Algeria, a country that no longer existed, with the typical geographical euphemism ‘là-bas’, served with a strong pied-noir accent and the familiar interjection ‘Dis!’ Noticeably absent from these advertisements, Maghrebi immigrants and their French descendants were completely erased and denied culinary citizenship.

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By contrast, couscous becomes a crucial metaphor for the North African immigrant diaspora in Abdellatif Kechiche’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful film La Graine et le mulet (2007), whose very title refers to fish couscous. Kechiche reclaims the dish to depict the intimacy and struggles of an extended immigrant Tunisian–French family who tries, and fails, to launch a couscous restaurant, using the mother’s culinary savoir faire as economic capital. Would-be restaurateur and retired shipyard worker Slimane Béchi faces administrative obstacles and local officials’ barely disguised racism. Symbolically located on a refurbished boat moored in Sètes, France, the floating couscous restaurant clearly puts to rest any lingering nostalgia for the country of origins, yet it symbolizes the vulnerable place of the immigrant community in France. Turning couscous, an intimate food, into a commodity for culinary tourism is part of the family’s strategic and uneasy resort to self-exoticization, set against the transformation of Sètes from an industrial fishing port into a marina. Kechiche’s cinematic use of food pornography, belly dance and the raw attraction of bodies in close-up shots underlines the compromises, akin to prostitution, faced by migrants and their family as they attempt to go up the social ladder (Durmelat, 2015). Slimane’s death and the probable failure of his couscous restaurant allowed the film to avoid ‘commercial sop’ (Higbee, 2011: 214) and secured Kechiche’s standing in ‘French auteur cinema’ (Vincendeau, 2011: 350). Ten years later, in Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (2018), Kechiche, who by then had won the 2013 Palme d’Or in Cannes, made amends for this symbolic sacrifice and cleverly namechecked La Graine et le mulet by portraying the thriving couscous restaurant of an economically successful Tunisian–French family in Sètes. In the latest campaign for Garbit (2016), 6 the divisive colloquialism ‘dis’ has been dropped, so that ‘là-bas’ can also include the country of origins of Maghrebi–French consumers. A self-confident young woman with long, bouncing black hair and long earrings has replaced the pieds-noirs tasters. She could be from anywhere or represent new generations of Maghrebi descent with increased spending power. She storms into a kitchen and indignantly asks the female chef what she has changed in the traditional recipe. Instead of undefined ‘spices’, ‘un mélange subtil de cumin et de coriandre’ is now mentioned, with oriental music in the background. No longer considered as potentially 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCSl8CXexdc.

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off-putting, these specific spices are dosed to appeal to so-called ethnic consumers, or at least refresh the slightly stale exotic capital of the dish. Because couscous has the potential to crystallize anxieties about racial, national and sexual identities, immigration and colonial legacies, it is often brandished as proof of one’s tolerance for so-called ethnic others. When countering accusations of racism in 2012, staunch supporter of then president Nicolas Sarkozy Nadine Morano tried to exculpate herself by proclaiming her love of couscous as guarantee of her anti-racist convictions: ‘J’adore le couscous et les bricks à l’œuf.’ 7 Morano’s statements were promptly condemned. A satirical photomontage even ridiculed her by representing her as a skimpily dressed Oriental dancer on a box of couscous, 8 thus recirculating the old sexist colonial imagery about the dish. Her declaration echoes a 1978 cartoon strip by comic artist Farid Boudejellal, the creator of the Algerian immigrant Slimani family. Abdullah, an archetypal Maghrebi immigrant, recounts exchanges with an unnamed, racist yet somewhat close interlocutor. In a sequence of three close-up frames, Abdullah tells his story: ‘Les Français ils aiment pas les Arabes, je lui ai dit  … Les Français ils aiment pas tout ce qui est arabe !  …’, ‘Alors il a dit: “Tu déconnes Abdullah, j’adore le couscous !”’ [The French don’t like the Arabs, I told him … The French like nothing that’s Arab! … So he said: ‘Are you kidding Abdullah, I love couscous!’] (1995: inside cover). More than thirty years apart, these two instances tout the potentially ecumenical property of the dish and its promises of conviviality, all the while showing that its status remains ambivalent. As an ingestible ‘postcolonial settler’ embedded in everyday practices (Gilroy, 2004: 154), it is considered as ‘cosmopolitan’ 9 and somewhat exotic, yet reassuringly comforting – industrial yet authentic, homey yet eroticized. As such, it remains a site for memories that do not quite meet.

7 http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/rue89-politique/zapnet/2012/06/27/nadinemorano-jadore-le-couscous-et-les-bricks-loeuf-233367. 8 http://a136.idata.over-blog.com/4 /16/26/23/Papyrodies-2012/Morano_ couscous.jpg. 9 http://www.tns-sofres.com/sites/default/files/2011.10.21-plats.pdf.

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Works Cited Barriol, Florence, and Henri Grange. 2010. ‘Le marché de la graine de couscous en Europe’. In Couscous, Boulgour, Polenta Transformer, consommer les céréales dans le monde, edited by Hélène Franconie, Monique Chastanet and François Sigaut, 83–90. Paris: Editions Khartala. Boudjellal, Farid. 1995. L’Oud, la trilogie. Toulon: Soleil. Cahier du CEPI. 2003. ‘Etude de positionnement stratégique de la branche pâtes alimentaires et couscous’. No. 23. www.tunisianindustry.nat.tn. Durmelat, Sylvie. 2015. ‘Tasting Displacement: Couscous and Culinary Citizenship in Maghrebi-French Dasporic Cinema’. Food and Foodways 23, no. 1–2: 104–26. —. 2017. ‘Making couscous French? Digesting the loss of empire’. Contemporary French Civilization 42, no. 3–4 (December): 391–407. ‘Etude de positionnement stratégique de la branche “pâtes alimentaires et couscous”’. 2003. Cahier du CEPI 23. http://www.tunisianindustry.nat. tn/fr/doc.asp?docid=670&mcat=13&mrub=140. Ferguson, Priscilla. 2004. Accounting for Taste: the Triumph of French Cuisine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Freidberg, Susan. 2003. ‘Editorial: Not all sweetness and light: new cultural geographies of food’. Social and Cultural Geographies 4, no. 1: 3–6. Gasser, M. Le Docteur. 1933. ‘L’Algérie et ses produits alimentaires’. La Table Francaise et les Produits Coloniaux Francais, no. 1 (October). Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London and New York: Routledge. Gupta, Akil. 2012. ‘A different history of the present: The movement of crops, cuisines, and globalization’. In Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia, edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas, 29–48. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harp, Stephen L. 2002. ‘The Michelin Red Guides: Social Differentiation in Early-Twentieth-Century French Tourism’. In Histories of Leisure, edited by Rudy Koshar. 191–214. New York: Berg. Higbee, Will. 2011. ‘Of Spaces and Difference in La Graine et le Mulet (2007): A Dialogue with Carrie Tarr’. In Studies in French Cinema: UK Perspectives, 1985–2010, edited by Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy, 215–29. Bristol: Intellect. Isnard, Léon. 1927. L’Afrique gourmande. Oran: Fouques. —. 1930. La Gastronomie africaine. Paris: Albin Michel. Janes, Lauren. 2016. Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire. London, New York: Bloomsbury. Kechiche, Abdellatif. 1997. Dir. La Graine et le mulet. — 2018. Dir. Mektoub, my love: Canto uno.

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Llosa, Marie. 2015. ‘Produire des vivres de reserve pour l’armée en temps de guerre, les entreprises alimentaires, des industries de guerre?’ In Manger et boire entre 1914 et 1918, edited by Caroline Poulain, 101–09. Dijon: Snoeck. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York, London: Routledge. Messerschmitt, Paul. 1938. ‘L’industrialisation de l’Algérie’. Supplément économique de la Revue Algéria 13 (February): 35–37. Meynier, Gilbert. 1984. L’Algérie révélée: la guerre de 1914–1918 et le 1er quart du XXe siècle. Lille: A.N.R.T. Miliani, Hadj. 2008. ‘Présence des musiques arabes en France: Immigrations, diasporas, et musiques du monde’. Migrance 32: 91–99. Ory, Pascal. 1992. ‘La Gastronomie’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3, edited by Pierre Nora, 822–53. Paris: Gallimard. Oubahli, Mohamed. 2008. ‘Une histoire de pâtes en Méditerranée occidentale. Des pâtes arabo-berbères et de leur diffusion en Europe latine au Moyen-Age (Partie II): La France et le monde italique’. Horizons Maghrébins-le droit à la mémoire 59 ‘Manger au Maghreb-Partie II’: 14–29. Randau, Robert. 1936. ‘La bonne mangeaille’. Annales africaines: revue hebdomadaire de l’Afrique du Nord 19–20 (October): 271–72. Reboul, Jean-Baptiste. 1970. La Cuisinière Provençale, 23rd edn. Marseille: Tacussel. Ross, Kristin. 1995. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Saillard, Denis. 2007. ‘La Cuisine’. In Dictionnaire de la France Coloniale, edited by Jean-Pierre Rioux, 759–64. Paris: Flammarion. Stora, Benjamin. 1991. La gangrène et l’oubli. La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: La Découverte. — 1993. Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962). Paris: La Découverte. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2011. ‘The Frenchness of French cinema: The language of national identity from the regional to the transnational’. In Studies in French Cinema: UK Perspectives, 1985–2010, edited by Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy, 338–52. Bristol: Intellect.

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Toys Elizabeth Heath Toys

In Black Skin, White Masks Franz Fanon recounts the case of Mlle. B., a young woman traumatized by the beat of the tom-tom drum. For the girl, the drum’s sound invoked vivid hallucinations of a fantastical colonial scene replete with native chiefs, cannibals and ‘half-naked men and women dancing in frightening ways’ (Fanon, 1967 [1952]: 205). In Mlle. B’s imagination, Fanon writes, the French empire was a space of danger, fear and black bodies, and thus terrifying. For many other children in Greater France, however, the empire’s promise of fearsome spectacles, unknown dangers, ‘savage’ populations and wild adventure evoked excitement rather than terror. The empire was, for these children, a space where young imaginations armed with mythical white suits, pith helmets and Berthier rifles could conquer and civilize natives, tame exotic flora and fauna, dance to rhythmic beats and dabble in diverse customs. Popular stories, images d’Épinal, colonial exhibitions and movies certainly inspired many young minds, but this empire of the imagination was equally sustained by daily dramas, impromptu games and heroic actions acted out with imperially themed toys. Tom-tom drums, toy soldiers and figurines, stuffed animals, dolls, sticker albums, games and costumes provided the material stuff with which the colonial imagination and the colonial attitude took root in the hearts and minds of metropolitan children. In the late nineteenth century colonial toys emerged as a small, but distinct sub-genre of children’s toys in France. This sub-genre expanded throughout the early twentieth century as the French empire was incorporated into French popular culture and transformed into la plus grande France (Schenider, 1982). Colonial-themed toys took a variety of forms, many of which were explicitly gendered. Those created

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for boys, for example, were inspired by ideas of the empire as a place of military conquest, exploration and safaris. Toy soldiers were a particular mainstay of little boys’ toy chests. In the early days of pacification, metal toy soldiers in French regimental garb might spar against figurines of African warriors and exotic animals. After the First World War, figures of North African zouaves and Senegalese tirailleurs gained popularity and joined French troops in battle against a common enemy. Paper soldiers rounded out these miniature battalions. Likewise, toy guns and other weapons as well as pith helmets and képis were aimed at young boys who wished to act out military conquests, imperial adventures and hunting trips in the savannas and forests of the empire. Board and card games with colonial themes, such as the government-issued ‘Le jeu des échanges France-Colonies’ (Figure 1), might also prepare boys to become colonial agents and officers. In contrast, stuffed animals, dolls and paper dolls situated in domestic colonial scenes like the diorama distributed by Cacao Barry (Figure 2) were generally the preserve of young girls. These objects provided girls with an opportunity to practise their future roles as wife, mother and nurse, thereby honing their affective skills in preparation for a life of cultivating the domestic sphere, tending home fires and caring for dependents. A final set of toys and games – animal figures, puppets, mechanical toys, musical instruments (tambourines, drums, ouds, etc), stickers and sticker books, and puzzles – were not explicitly gendered, although colour, illustrations or other features could serve as discreet markers to signal their ‘appropriateness’ for girls or boys to the discerning eye. As Philip Dine’s contribution to this volume reveals, a growing children’s literature complemented this expanding realm of colonialthemed toys. Children’s tales stimulated young imaginations through narratives and images of the empire and provided the backdrop for colonial play. In the early Third Republic, colonial stories such as Gaston Bonnefont’s 1888 Deux petits touristes en Algérie and de Nizerolles’s 1910 Les voyages aériens d’un petit parisien à travers le monde mixed entertaining tales of adventure and discovery with justifications for France’s civilizing mission (Jallat, 2007). In addition, a wide range of children’s magazines – L’Épatant, La Semaine de Suzette, Cri-Cri and L’Intrépide – emerged during the early twentieth century, providing children with a constant source of new tales of adventure within colonial settings (Tirefort, 2001–02: 106). The First World War, which drew upon colonial troops and workers, generated its own war-themed books that depicted colonial troops in a heroic

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Trading game France-Colonies, Office de publicité et d’impression, 1941. Image from the ACHAC collection, courtesy of The Getty Research Institute.

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Toys

Louis Gougeon, Cacao ‘Barry’, c.1930s. Image from the ACHAC collection, courtesy of The Getty Research Institute.

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light (Fogarty, 2008; Stovall, 2003). After the war, children’s literature flourished. The empire appeared in a variety of works ranging from A. Davesne and J. Gouin’s compendium of African folktales Contes de la brousse et de la forêt to Jean de Brunhoff’s stories of Babar, an elephant king and beloved emissary of France’s civilizing mission (Malarte-Feldman and Yeager, 1998). Colonial stories and journals provided the imaginative backdrop and narrative structure with which children organized the games and adventures they acted out with their toys. In addition, colonial tales provided a rationale and ideology that naturalized ideas of French ‘superiority’. These ideas reinforced forms of play in which metropolitan children subdued unruly natives and taught colonial subjects the civilized manners that they themselves were in the process of mastering. Toys played a role complementary to but different from that of books in cultivating the colonial mindset in children. Stories inspired a child’s mind and imagination, providing highly stylized images of the colonial context through words and pictures. Toys united these thoughts, stories, images and forms of imagination with bodily actions. These actions were not mere child’s play, but rather the foundation of a cognitive framework and worldview that children would carry with them into adulthood. The idea that toys play an important role in child development is, of course, not novel. Many lay observers, such as Baudelaire, have commented on the fact that ‘[i]n their games [with toys] children give evidence of their great capacity for abstraction and their high imaginative power’ (Baudelaire, 1964 [1863]: 198). In the early twentieth century child psychologists provided scientific weight to this view of the importance of toys and play in the development of subjectivity and concepts of self in children (e.g., Piaget and Inhelder, 1972 [1967]; Vygotsky, 1978). Part of the developmental power of toys derives from the fact that toys, like other material objects, appear as ‘active agents’ that invite, even compel, children to engage with them in particular ways (e.g., Appadurai, 1986; Auslander, 2005; Miller, 2010). A folkloric version of this claim is found in the idea that toys have lives and souls of their own. Author Anatole France, for example, granted toys a spiritual element that, he argued, induced children to ‘worship their toys. They ask of their toys what men have always asked of the gods: joy and forgetfulness, the revelation of mysterious harmonies, the secret of being’ (France, 1914: 12–13). Tales of toys coming alive (often while children sleep) to pursue their own dramas and activities can be found worldwide. Toy ‘agency’, though, does not disappear entirely when children awake. Rather, toys continue

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to act in the world by stimulating their owners towards certain kinds of play and activity. In this regard, toys assume an almost supernatural power over their child guardians. Indeed, as Mlle. B well knew, even the most innocent of objects – a tom-tom drum – could conjure visions and transport otherwise sensible bodies and rational minds to imaginary lands that seemed utterly real. In the imperial nation-state, the role that toys played in cognitive development blended indiscriminately with the important work that toys performed in developing a colonial worldview that naturalized colonialism and racial and civilization hierarchies. Colonial toys brought empire into the inner experience of the child and shaped the way young minds thought about and ordered their world (Hamlin, 2003). There is, perhaps, no better illustration of how colonial toys simultaneously facilitated cognitive development and a colonial mindset than the example found in Marie Maréchal’s 1873 La Dette de Ben-Aïssa, a story that explicitly blurs the very boundaries separating toys and humans. In the story, a young girl, Diane, awaits the return of her brother, a colonial officer in Algeria, and the exotic presents she expects to receive from him. Far surpassing her wildest hopes, Diana’s brother gives her a ‘toy’ in the form of a Kabyle boy named Ben-Aïssa. In the narrative that follows, Diane assumed the duties imposed by her ‘doll’, and sets about caring for and civilizing the young Kabyle boy. It is significant that Diane’s other toys, namely her white dolls, aid in the difficult process of civilizing and educating her new ward. In the end Diane is successful; Ben-Aïssa gradually learns the manners of French civilization and converts to Christianity, at which point he is transformed from a plaything to a person in his own right (Schreier, 2015: 123). He eventually trains as a soldier and dies sacrificing his life to save Diane’s fiancé in the Franco-Prussian war. Caring for her ‘toy’ prepares Diane to perform the duties of a Republican mother and wife whose metropolitan household is closely connected to and, indeed, indebted to the French empire. For most French metropolitan children, of course, colonial toys merely assumed a lifelike appearance but were not in fact alive. Nonetheless, toys exercised their power over young boys and girls by inspiring forms of play that mimicked and mirrored colonial activities. In this way, toys exercised their own ‘civilizing’ mission over children’s bodies, training them to act out the physical behaviors and, ultimately, the thought processes constitutive of acceptable behaviour of adult women and men within a colonial system. They offered what Barthes once described as a

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‘microcosm of the adult world’ (1972 [1957], 53). ‘That French toys’, he continued literally prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all, by constituting for him, even before he can think about it, the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual.

Colonial toys such as sticker books, paper dolls, games and toy soldiers drew metropolitan children into the empire through mimetic actions and activities (Taussig, 1992; Bhabha, 1994). The repetitive nature of children’s play facilitated this colonial framework. Life-like dolls encouraged girls to play the role of Diane to her Ben-Aïssa and civilize their ‘natives’. Paper dolls and dioramas, such as the one distributed by Cacao Barry, further encouraged girls to learn to manage and order colonial populations, thereby mimicking the actions of colonial teachers and missionaries. The diorama required young girls (or their mothers) to cut out the figures and to arrange them according to codes, resulting a static panorama of colonial life. Through this configuration, young girls learned to order the colonial household and, presumably, compare it to their own homes. In ‘Le jeu des échanges France-Colonies’, by contrast, young boys acquired knowledge of the mechanics of colonial development and the civilizing mission. Before a colony could be considered settled, the player had to create hospitals, schools, missions and other modernizing infrastructure. Only after a colony had been ‘civilized’ and productivized could it be considered truly ‘developed’ and trade (the key to winning) permitted (Heath, 2014: 79–82). Toy soldiers and toy guns drew young boys into more physical activities that mimicked the action of ordering battalions and launching colonial campaigns. Even toys with no particular link to the empire could become requisitioned by little adventurers hunting imaginary tigers or fabled treasures. Through physical actions great and small, toys and colonial play routinized ways of acting and thinking that provided the foundation for a colonial habitus (Bourdieu, 1972 [1972]). Examining colonial toys offers the possibility of delving into the imaginaries of metropolitan boys and girls as they practised and adopted their future roles in la plus grande France and embraced the ideas that sustained the French imperial nation-state. These structures of thought, first formed through fantastical imaginings and play-acting, served as the cognitive foundation of an imperial identity. The colonial lessons

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taught by toys and games were not accidental or incidental, especially during the interwar years. Rather, these toys and games were part of a much larger effort by the French Third Republic, colonial businesses and toy companies to draw children and consumers to the colonial project and promote the empire from below, or at least from knee’s height. At stake was a generation of future imperialists, colonial agents, educators, tourists and consumers who could be expected to perform their imperial duty to preserve and promote the empire through daily actions (e.g., Manceron, 2014; Heath, 2014; Pomfret, 2015). The meanings associated with colonial-themed toys did not, of course, disappear with decolonization. Like a favourite blanket, colonial toys have retained the memories and residues of colonial childhoods and alongside them the material foundation for another kind of colonial imaginary: imperialist nostalgia (Rosaldo, 1989). Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auslander, Leora. 2005. ‘Beyond Words’. American Historical Review 100, no. 4: 1015–45. Barthes, Roland. 1972 [1957]. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudelaire, Charles. 1964 [1863]. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. New York: Da Capo Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. Routledge: New York. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fanon, Franz. 1967 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Fogarty, Richard. 2008. Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. France, Anatole. 1914. ‘Children’s Playthings’. In The Works of Anatole France in an English Translation, vol. 25, edited by F. Chapman and J. May, 10–16. John Lane: London. Hamlin, David. 2003. ‘The Structures of Toy Consumption: Bourgeois Domesticity and Demand for Toys in Nineteenth-Century Germany’. Journal of Social History 36, no. 4: 857–69.

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Heath, Elizabeth. 2014. ‘Apprendre l’Empire, un jeu d’enfants? (premier XXe siècle)’. CLIO: Femmes, Genre, Histoire 40: 69–87. Jallat, Denis. 2007. ‘La littérature pour jeunes, “l’innocence” au service de l’idéologie coloniale’. Outre-mers 94, nos 356–57: 235–64. Malarte-Feldman, Claire-Lise, and Jack Yeager. 1998. ‘Babar and the French Connection: Teaching the Politics of Superiority and Exclusion’. In Critical Perspectives on Postcolonial African Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by M. Khorana, 69–77. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Manceron, Gilles. 2014. ‘School, Pedagogy, and Colonies (1870–1914)’. In Colonial Culture in France Since the Revolution, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel and Dominic Thomas, 124–31. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, Daniel. 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity. Piaget, Jean, and Bärbel Inhelder. 1972 [1966]. The Psychology of the Child. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Basic Books. Pomfret, David. 2015. Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’. Representations 26: 107–22. Schneider, William. 1982. An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870–1900. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Schreier, Lise. 2015. ‘“A Toy in the White Man’s Hands”: Child-gifting, African Civilizability, and the Construction of French National Identity in Marie Maréchal’s La Dette de Ben-Aïssa’. Children’s Literature 43: 108–38. Stovall, Tyler. 2003. ‘National Identity and Shifting Imperial Frontiers: Whiteness and the Exclusion of Colonial Labor after World War I’. Representations 84: 52–72. Taussig, Michael. 1992. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge: New York. Tirefort, Alain. 2001–02. ‘Les petites Suzettes aux colonies: La Semaine de Suzette et la culture coloniale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres’. Afrika Zamani 9–10: 102–35. Vygotsky, L.S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bande dessinée Mark McKinney Bande dessinée

In Racines de papier: Essai sur l’expression littéraire de l’identité Pieds-Noirs, Lucienne Martini (1997) argued that pied-noir publications, including the comics of Jacques Ferrandez on French Algeria, provide a lieu de mémoire that substitutes for a lost homeland (cf. McKinney, 2001). In The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (2011) I analysed a long tradition of French colonial exhibitions and exhibitions in colonialera comics, and in post-colonial comics too, where they have become a lieu de mémoire. However, one of the most compelling comics about the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale in Paris appeared too late for me to discuss it in that volume: Cannibale, Emmanuel Reuzé’s 2009 adaptation of a novel that Didier Daeninckx first published in 1998 (in 2012 Reuzé also published an adaptation of Daeninckx’s sequel, Le Retour d’Ataï). Charles Forsdick (2010) has analysed Daeninckx’s New Caledonian cycle of texts, including Cannibale, as postcolonial lieux de mémoire. He also critiques an essay by Charles-Robert Ageron (1923–2008) on the Exhibition. As Forsdick points out, the Exhibition is infamously the sole colonial lieu de mémoire to which an essay is devoted in Pierre Nora’s anthology. There, Ageron (1984), an eminent historian specializing in French colonial history, argued that – for several reasons – the Exhibition was not a republican lieu de mémoire, and that the 1946 vote granting citizenship to the colonized should be one instead. In Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution (Blanchard, Lemaire, Bancel and Thomas, 2014), historians argue that the 1931 event was part of a republican colonial culture. Today the Exhibition remains a potent and contested symbol of French colonialism. Through a reading of Reuzé’s Cannibale, I explore here the specific potential of comics to contribute to

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(post)colonial memorializing. My understanding of the formal resources of comics is indebted to the insights of theoreticians including Thierry Groensteen (1999), Ann Miller (2007) and Benoît Peeters (2002). The front cover image of the album dramatically symbolizes the essence of the story. Someone’s right arm and hand extend out from the lower left of the cover, aiming a handgun at the central figure, Badimoin, a Kanak man shot as he was trying to run toward or past the shooter (and the reader), and now stumbling. Badimoin is just behind and left of Gocéné, the Kanak narrator of the story, who is looking at the shooter as he tries to run past the drawn gun, on the right. The two Kanak, both dressed in western clothes, are being pursued from behind by four French policemen carrying batons and running toward us, away from a reproduction of Angkor Wat, the architectural highlight of the Exhibition. The page is in black and shades of blue, suggesting night time. By offering readers a central viewing position just next to the shooter, the image invites us to witness a historical crime of the French state against the colonized, and reflect upon our relation to the event. However, that becomes apparent only through a reading of the following comic-book narrative. The liminal, eerie night-time scene raises questions that call for elucidation through reading: who just fired the gun, at whom, where and why? The cover image is inaccurate in fact, though not in spirit, both with respect to history and to the fictional story inside, which is also itself historically inaccurate in key ways. To begin with, no such assassination happened at the 1931 event. Instead, it allows Reuzé (and Daeninckx) to allude symbolically (Miller, 2007: 78–82), in the centre of French empire, to the murder of many colonized who resisted French violence in colonies far away from the propagandistic Parisian Exhibition, itself designed to demonstrate French benevolence toward, and superiority over, the colonized. The fictional killing within the story occurs in a very different locale, next to the Haut Commissariat [Office of the High Commissioner], and in daytime (Daeninckx, 2002 [1998]: 87–88; Reuzé and Daeninckx, 2009: 49–50). There, the police officer shoots Badimoin from behind while the Kanak is running away from him, instead of toward him. The cover image therefore dramatizes a (hi)story through a second-level fiction. At the same time, Reuzé’s spectral, nighttime representation of the Angkor Wat reproduction on the front cover replays and, through the murder committed in front of it, contests the monument’s role as a lieu de mémoire within colonial propaganda (it also appears repeatedly in the story; Reuzé

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and Daeninckx, 2009: 10, 16, 24). It was a recurring icon at successive colonial exhibitions because it dramatized France’s imperialist claim to be the legitimate heir in Indochina of the illustrious, ancient Khmer civilization that produced it, and was popular with French crowds (Morton, 2000: 234–51; Norindr, 1996: 25–28). Postcolonial gazing is at stake in the viewing position that Reuzé offers readers on the front cover. He there encourages us to begin to reflect on our implication in historical, colonial violence and its effects on the present. The cover image sets up the primary visual dialogue of the story, between the gazes of the colonizer and the colonized. As the book’s title and the image of Angkor Wat on the front cover suggest together, the ideological connotations of language and image in colonial propaganda are central to Reuzé’s postcolonial dialogue. The title, ‘Cannibale’, refers to representations of the colonized as less than human, with, in this fictional case, Kanak displayed as cannibals in an encaged exhibition space at the Exhibition, in the Vincennes zoo. Here again, Daeninckx and Reuzé have changed key facts to condemn colonial practice and propaganda more effectively. The Kanak were brought to Paris to play the role of cannibals, but not by the Exhibition’s organizers in Paris or to be displayed in that manner on the Exhibition grounds. Instead, as historian Joël Dauphiné (1998) explains, they were first exhibited by a semi-official colonial group at the Jardin d’acclimatation [Acclimatization Garden] of the Bois de Boulogne [Boulogne Woods], on the other side of Paris, to earn money for former colonial personnel and their children. Central government authorities intervened after an outcry was raised, in part by a right-wing journalist in Paris who, having been born in New Caledonia, knew one of the Kanak personally, having met him in a print shop in Nouméa (Hodeir and Pierre, 1991: 98–100; Dauphiné, 1998: 58–59, 87–89, 99). The journalist, religious authorities and others were scandalized that the Kanak were being exhibited as cannibals and improperly treated in other ways. The organizers of the cannibal exhibit also sent some Kanak to Germany, again to participate in a type of anthropozoological display. Daeninckx and, following him, Reuzé transfer direct responsibility for the mistreatment of the Kanak from the colonial organization to government Exhibition authorities, and relocate their display as cannibals from the Garden to the Exhibition. These and other historical changes to the fiction sharpen its critique of the French colonial administration and its propaganda. Connecting two historical events linking the French mainland to New Caledonia – the Kanak revolt of 1984 frames the return through memory

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to the 1931 Exhibition – also promotes reflection on the continuity and recurrence of colonial violence and responses to it (Forsdick, 2010: 184). Daeninckx and Reuzé explicitly raise the spectre of (counter-)violence by the colonized. Armed young Kanak, with dreadlocks and wearing t-shirts suggesting revolutionary leanings, stop Gocéné and Francis Caroz, his white friend, from driving down the road leading to Gocéné’s home, forcing the aged Kanak to dismount and continue his journey alone on foot (Reuzé and Daeninckx, 2009: 4–5). Gocéné’s life story, whose recounting is invited by the curiosity of the young men about why the old Kanak would be the friend of a white man (Forsdick, 2010: 186), begins with the representation of an edenic New Caledonian childhood (Reuzé and Daeninckx, 2009: 6). However, the narrative quickly moves to a confrontation with colonial ideology and imagery. The first appearance within the story of the bluish hues from the disturbing cover image is in a frame where Gocéné and the other young Kanak who have been designated as participants in the Exhibition are staying for several days in a dockside warehouse at the Nouméa port while they await departure to Paris (7.4). The juxtaposition of Kanak with crates of fruit, no doubt destined for export, begins to outline visually a colonial economy that subjugates native peoples while it extracts indigenous natural wealth. Several Kanak, including a man who may be Gocéné, are staring at the crates, highlighting the importance of the look of the colonized, and of their critical, creative consciousness, which are intimately joined in this work, beginning with the frame narrative. There we first see Gocéné daydreaming (3.2–4), his eyes closed and textual narration transmitting his thoughts, and later looking thoughtfully at the young Kanak in a three-panel zoom-in ending with Gocéné’s left eye and surrounding face filling the entire frame under the speech balloon (5.8–10). So, by the time that Gocéné begins recounting his Exhibition story, the cartoonist has already established the look – along with the critical consciousness – of the colonized (especially Gocéné) as the central narrative agent. The comic book continues to take apart the language and imagery of colonial propaganda on the following page, where an aide to French colonial governor Joseph Guyon tells the assembled Kanak that they will represent New Caledonia at the Exhibition. His short speech includes a modified excerpt from a text that Maréchal Lyautey, the colonial military officer and General Commissioner of the Exhibition, sent to L’Illustration – a large-format magazine lavishly illustrated with photographs, engravings and drawings – in thanks for the special coverage that it published on the Exhibition (the French government

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also financially subsidized colonial propaganda for the event in the press): ‘Coloniser, ce n’est pas uniquement, en effet, construire des quais, des usines ou des voies ferrées; c’est aussi gagner à la douceur humaine les coeurs farouches de la savane ou du désert’ [Colonizing is not solely, in fact, building docks, factories or railroads; it is also winning over to human gentleness the wild hearts of the savannah or the desert] (Lyautey, 1931: n.p.). Daeninckx (2002 [1998]: 16) slightly modified the quotation from Lyautey and set it within a rhetorical framework that summons the Kanak to participate, in a subservient position, in France’s colonial project. The official insultingly suggests that the Kanak – as well as Africans, Asians and Americans (no doubt the First Nations) – are ‘en voie de civilisation’ [in the process of being civilized] and examples of ‘coeurs farouches’ [wild hearts] won over to human gentleness (‘gagner à la douceur humaine’) by France’s civilizing effort: that is, being transformed from savages into true humans by the French. In his version, Reuzé (Reuzé and Daeninckx, 2009: 8–9) effectively uses several graphic-novel resources on two facing pages to dramatize and critique republican colonial discourse and practice. The official speaks from a balcony over whose railing the French flag drapes (p. 8). The first four frames zoom in on the speaker and then the flag, designating his speech as national, republican ideology justifying what follows, done in France’s name. The first frame visually (pre-)figures the unequal relationship that the speech will express, by showing the well-lit speaker up above the Kanak listeners, standing down below in the bluish shadow. He is literally talking down to them. The last two frames, one set inside the other (Groensteen, 1999: 100–06), abruptly give a reverse shot, showing us some of the Kanak from the visual perspective of the speaker. However, the inset panel then zooms in on Gocéné and Minoé, his fiancé, individualizing them. Just below them, the narrator textually reports that the response of the Kanak to the speech was mistrust. Together, the inset image and voice-over narration signal the beginning of a critical anticolonial perspective on the Exhibition. The following, facing page (9) recounts the difficult ocean crossing and the overland travel to the Exhibition over nine symmetrical frames, the last of which (9.9) depicts Gocéné looking over his shoulder, toward the reader, as the Kanak are shut away behind bars at the New Caledonian exhibit. The page’s following, final panel (9.10) breaks the preceding pattern: although its vertical dimension is the same, it occupies an entire strip. Just as importantly, it ‘braids’ (Groensteen, 1999: 173–86), or is a ‘visual rhyme’ of (Peeters, 2002: 33–34), the first panels of the preceding,

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facing page. To the vertical bars of the balcony on the upper left of the ‘double page’ (Groensteen, 1999: 44–8), over which the French flag was draped and on whose railing the official placed his hand, correspond, on the lower right of the double page, the vertical bars of the fence that shuts away the Kanak at the Exhibition, and to which a sign is affixed, designating them as ‘Hommes anthropophages de Nouvelle-Calédonie’ [Cannibals of New Caledonia]. To the lone figure of the government official looking out from the balcony over the Kanak and at the viewer on the upper left of the two-page sequence corresponds, on the lower right, a lone Kanak man holding the much taller bars of the fence as he stares through it, beyond the viewer, to the surrounding Exhibition landscape. The visual rhyme ironically contradicts the official’s claim about the trip to Paris: ‘Ce voyage c’est la chance de votre vie’ [This voyage is your chance of a lifetime] (8.1). The following double page represents the production of the Exhibition as an (anti)colonial lieu de mémoire through a growing critical perspective on colonial propaganda, both image and word. On the upper left (10.1–2), Gocéné-as-narrator appears in an inset panel as he recalls looking at old issues of L’illustration and thinking about the Exhibition after it ended (cf. Daeninckx, 2002 [1998]: 23). His final comment, concluding the double page, explains his obsession with the news magazine: ‘pour comprendre ce que l’on avait fait de ma vie et de celle des miens’ [to understand what had been done to the lives of me and mine] (11.4). Viewing, reading and thinking about the magazine issues is, therefore, a way for him to regain agency for himself and his people. On the bottom half of each facing side of the double page (10.3, 11.4) are two large panels showing us lavishly illustrated pages of the magazine held and contemplated by Gocéné: we see his hands and the printed material as though we were looking through his eyes. Across the album Reuzé uses ‘ocularization’ (Miller, 2007: 91–94), as here, and various other subjective viewpoints (including shot-countershot sequences, over-theshoulder perspectives and close ups [Miller, 2007: 119–20]) to encourage the reader to empathize with Gocéné and his fellow Kanak. In fact, some of these images may have come from other colonial-era sources too, including the Livre d’or de l’Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931 [Golden Book of the International Colonial Exhibition of Paris, 1931]. However, by redrawing and rewriting visual–textual colonial propaganda within his comic-book narrative in this manner, Reuzé both generally acknowledges it as a primary visual source for his drawn reconstruction of this colonial lieu de mémoire and distinguishes

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his narrative from it. Christopher L. Miller (1998: 55–117) argues that the Exhibition was a hallucinatory event, and that official photographs of it are strikingly empty of people, especially French colonial subjects. Reuzé populates the event-space with them and shows it to us through their critical perspective. The comic-book construction of the Exhibition as an anticolonial lieu de mémoire, or an alternative one (Forsdick, 2010: 183), through Gocéné’s retrospective visual-textual narration, is therefore radically different from the original design of colonial officials. Reuzé represents the Exhibition as colonial propaganda that humiliated colonized performers at the event, and most of all the Kanak, to glorify a self-serving French colonial project. The remainder of the volume contains numerous passages showing us the Exhibition – its repulsive ideology and practice – through the eyes of its victims, the colonized, in order to build empathy for them, from the deconstruction of demeaning colonial jokes (Reuzé and Daeninckx, 2009: 20, 24, 36–37, 51) to the murder of Badimoin (49–50). Reuzé also depicts solidarity between members of different colonized groups (40–43) and between ordinary individuals from among the colonizers and colonized – especially Francis Caroz and Gocéné (51–52). Although Reuzé eliminated much excellent material from Daeninckx’s prose original – for example, his critical references to colonial songs (Daeninckx, 2002 [1998]: 19–20, 35–36, 48, 74, 78, 82) – the cartoonist’s adaptation provides an excellent example of how postcolonial comics can provide an anticolonial perspective on colonial lieux de mémoire. Works Cited Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1984. ‘L’exposition coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?’. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1: La République, edited by Pierre Nora, 561–91. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchard, Pascal, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel and Dominic Thomas, eds. 2014. Colonial Culture in France Since the Revolution. Translated by Alexis Pernsteiner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Daeninckx, Didier. 2001. Le Retour d’Ataï. Lagrasse: Verdier. — 2002 [1998]. Cannibale. Lagrasse: Verdier. Dauphiné, Joël. 1998. Canaques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie à Paris en 1931: De la case au zoo. Paris: L’Harmattan. Forsdick, Charles. 2010. ‘Siting postcolonial memory: remembering New Caledonia in the work of Didier Daeninckx’. Modern and Contemporary France 18, no. 2 (May): 175–92.

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Groensteen, Thierry. 1999. Système de la bande dessinée. Paris: PUF. Hodeir, Catherine, and Michel Pierre. 1991. L’Exposition coloniale. Brussels: Complexe. Lyautey, Maréchal. 1931. ‘L’exposition coloniale internationale de Paris: Le sens d’un grand effort’. L’Exposition coloniale. Special issue of L’Illustration (July): n.p. McKinney, Mark. 2001. ‘“Tout cela, je ne voulais pas le laisser perdre”: colonial lieux de mémoire in the comic books of Jacques Ferrandez’. Modern and Contemporary France 9, no. 1: 43–53. — 2011. The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Martini, Lucienne. 1997. Racines de papier: Essai sur l’expression littéraire de l’identité Pieds-Noirs. Preface by Jean-Robert Henry. Paris: Publisud. Miller, Ann. 2007. Reading Bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to FrenchLanguage Comic Strip. Bristol: Intellect. Miller, Christopher L. 1998. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Morton, Patricia A. 2000. Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Norindr, Panivong. 1996. Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peeters, Benoît. 2002. Lire la bande dessinée. Paris: Flammarion. Reuzé, Emmanuel, and Didier Daeninckx. 2009. Cannibale. Paris: Emmanuel Proust. — 2012. Le Retour d’Ataï. Paris: Emmanuel Proust.

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Sport Philip Dine Sport

From the emergence of today’s major athletic sports in the later nineteenth century, the global advance of ‘sportization’ was throughout imbricated with the rise of European colonialism, with Great Britain to the fore in these overlapping processes. While neither physical education nor organized games ever attained the centrality in the French imperial project that they did in the British context, the Republic’s self-proclaimed mission civilisatrice remained susceptible to expression through sports. The founder of the modern Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was as committed an imperialist as he was an evangelist for the pacific internationalism of sporting competition. Having launched his reinvented Games in Athens in 1896, he brought them to Paris in 1900 and again in 1924, seeing the so-called ‘English sports’ as a natural breeding ground for empire-builders and campaigning throughout his life for their mobilization for French colonial advance. His projects included an African Games, which he unsuccessfully planned for Algiers in 1925, and which would eventually take place in Brazzaville in 1965. It is consequently striking that sport should scarcely be better served by Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92) than the former colonies. For, just as Charles-Robert Ageron’s discussion of the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931 is the single essay in that monumental survey that is devoted to the colonial imaginary, so Georges Vigarello’s analysis of the Tour de France constitutes its sole engagement with sport-related commemoration. This is all the more ironic in that one of the most controversial aspects of the 1931 Exhibition was precisely the participation of ‘native’ sportsmen brought from the colonies to the capital (Deville-Danthu, 1992). So, while sport does, undoubtedly, function as a

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postcolonial realm of memory in France, it is just as frequently a site of forgetfulness. As writer Didier Daeninckx discovered when researching his novella Cannibale (1998), the human exhibits brought to Paris in 1931 included Willy Karembeu, a Kanak from New Caledonia. This forgotten figure was the great-grandfather of Christian Karembeu, a member of the French team that won the 1998 football World Cup, in what remains the country’s most striking example of a sport-inflected postcolonial realm of memory (Dubois, 2010). In 1998 France was not only the host nation for this global mega-event but also the country that had originally created both the Fédération Internationale de Football Association in 1904 and its premier tournament in 1930. However, a French side had never previously won the competition, coming closest with losing appearances in the semi-finals in 1958 and 1986; in both cases, intriguingly, thanks to teams with significant immigrant and/or ethnic minority representation. The spontaneous jubilation that followed France’s victory, just two days before the national day on 14 July, served to transform a sporting success into a durably significant event. The 3–0 win over tournament favourites Brazil took place at the purpose-built Stade de France – itself located in the immigrant-dominated suburb of Saint-Denis – and was experienced as a national psychodrama focusing attention on the country’s ethnic minority populations (Mignon, 2010). In the euphoria of unexpected sporting success, the culturally diverse French side seemed to point the way forward to a reinvigorated and genuinely inclusive Republic. The team’s undoubted star and most talismanic figure was Zinedine Zidane, whose Algerian family heritage and extraordinary technical skills combined to transform him into the preeminent representative of this dynamic and multicultural France. In the event, a combination of sporting disappointments and political inertia would conspire to dash the hopes inspired by 1998. Nevertheless, the triumph of the so-called Black–Blanc–Beur [Black–White–Arab] side retains its affective force. The event’s memorial weight was reinforced by the dramatic finale to Zidane’s international career, eight years later in 2006, in what was only France’s second appearance in a World Cup final. The Berlin Olympiastadion, originally built for the Nazi Games of 1936, was the setting for Zidane’s final appearance in a French shirt, which ended prematurely with his sending-off for an astonishing coup de boule [head-butt] on the Italian defender Marco Materazzi, seemingly prompted by racist and sexually aggressive remarks about the star’s mother and sister. This parting shot is now enshrined in the

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popular imagination, rather than the national sporting defeat to which it almost certainly contributed (Rowe, 2010). However, the much-loved ‘Zizou’ is by no means an isolated figure, and we must return to France’s former territories in North Africa to understand why, for reasons of both geography and history, the Maghreb has made a particularly lasting contribution to French sporting achievements and commemorations. The practicalities of military transportation provide the earliest examples of ludic investment in Algeria, where French cavalry officers looked to horse racing as both an agreeable diversion and a mechanism for the assimilation of the local tribes ‘pacified’ by the war of occupation waged between 1830 and 1847 (Dine, 2011). The contribution made by the eventually defeated leader of the indigenous resistance, the Emir Abd el-Kader, to General Eugène Daumas’s study of Les Chevaux du Sahara (1851) is a remarkable testament to the effectiveness of this strategic appeal to shared equestrian values on the part of the French and Algerian military elites. With the consolidation of colonial power in the Maghreb after the First World War, and the closely associated rise of the internal combustion engine, motor sport enthusiasts would similarly look to the desert as both a privileged sporting space and a testing-ground for the new technologies (Dine, 2010: 107–11). The 1920s saw a rash of automobile missions and raids, militarily led but commercially sponsored expeditions intended to advertise the companies involved, while simultaneously mapping the French empire for the popular imagination. Central to this process was the rivalry between the leading industrialists André Citroën and Louis Renault, the founders of businesses that would become household names. Citroën’s first motorized crossing of the Sahara in 1922 was followed by a series of croisières [overland ‘cruises’], which were colour-coded according to their destination, including La Croisière noire (Sub-Saharan Africa, 1924–25) and La Croisière jaune (Central Asia and China, 1931–32). Images from Léon Poirier’s 1926 film of the former expedition are used to this day in the company’s advertising, while the trace of such motorized exploits is also to be found in the best-selling comic-book adventures of Tintin au Congo (1931). These quasi-military precursors were followed by more consciously ludic Saharan randonnées [motorized excursions] and rallyes, including notably the 1930 ‘Rallye du Centenaire’, which was an important part of the extensive sporting calendar organized to celebrate the centenary of the French presence in Algeria. After independence, this colonial sporting tradition was successfully reinvented by Thierry Sabine in the form of

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the Paris–Dakar Rally, which was launched in 1978. The race pursued various African itineraries for three decades until mounting security concerns finally led to its cancellation in 2008, followed by its apparently definitive relocation to South America in 2009. Nevertheless, with its distinctive ‘Tuareg’ logo, and managed since 1992 by the Amaury Sports Organisation, which also runs the Tour de France, the event remains an important realm of postcolonial sporting memory (Hassan and O’Kane, 2011) – as does, albeit less controversially, the Marathon des Sables, an extreme cross-country running race held annually in the Moroccan desert since 1985. Similar traces of the colonial past are to be found in ocean yacht racing, including particularly the Route du Rhum solo trans-Atlantic race, inaugurated in 1978, which every four years links Saint-Malo in Brittany and Pointe-à-Pitre in the overseas department of Guadeloupe, a key location in the triangular trade in sugar, slaves and manufactured goods that once provided the economic rationale for the French presence in the Caribbean. The foregoing mention of the Tour de France draws our attention to the race’s pre-eminence as a site for the construction of sporting memories not only within the métropole but also across the empire. As articulated by the colonial press in North Africa, the Tour was an important vehicle for the communication of pro-French sentiment in the interwar years and again in the decades following the Second World War (Gosnell, 2002: 95). It also provided a model for ludic imitation: the Tour du Maroc was run for the first time in the 1924–25 season and was then revived in 1937; while the inaugural Tour d’Algérie took place in 1929, and was itself relaunched in 1949 (Dine, 2010: 112–16). However, it is the achievements of the racially integrated North African team in the 1950 Tour de France that are most noteworthy here. Unlike its modern incarnation, the race in this period was organized on the basis of national and regional teams, including a North African selection made up of four ‘Europeans’ and two ‘Muslims’. Few today would remember the successive stage wins achieved by Marcel Molinès and Custodio Dos Reis; in contrast, the misadventures of their teammate Abdelkader Zaaf have become part of the event’s légende. The Algerian rider’s abortive breakaway on the Perpignan–Nîmes stage saw him collapse beside the road, where he was assisted by local spectators. Dehydrated, and quite possibly sun-struck, Zaaf was seemingly given local wine to drink rather than water. He recovered sufficiently to remount his machine, but cycled off in the wrong direction, then collapsed again and was finally transported to Nîmes by ambulance (Marseille, 2002: 202). This

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incident has also been revisited imaginatively by Didier Daeninckx in his novella La Grande échappée (2014), where he connects it symbolically to the war for Algerian independence that began just four years after this tragi-comic episode. The revolutionary struggle waged by the Front de Libération Nationale between 1954 and 1962 itself included the mobilization of sport against the colonial power. This was possible only thanks to a broader North African contribution to French football that had begun in the 1930s and was epitomized by Moroccan star Larbi Ben Barek, who played with distinction for the French national side between 1938 and 1954, thus leading the way for other migrant professionals. During the Algerian conflict, football stadiums would be targeted by nationalist bombers, most notably on 10 February 1957, as part of the Battle of Algiers. In addition, Bachaga Mohammed Ali Chekkal, former vice-president of the Algerian Assembly, was assassinated at the Colombes stadium on 26 May 1957, during the French cup final, as recounted in Rachid Boudjedra’s novel Le Vainqueur de coupe (1981). However, it was the FLN’s successful appeal in April 1958 to leading Algerian professionals based in France, including Rachid Mekhloufi and Mustapha Zitouni, who had previously played for the French national side, to join the nationalists’ own team based in exile in Tunis that marked the highpoint of this campaign of sporting mobilization (Yahi, 2010). In contrast, athletics was used in this same period to bolster support for the empire, most obviously through the achievements of its best-remembered sportsman, the Algerian distance runner Alain Mimoun. Born Ali Mimoun Ould Kacha, the runner was voted ‘athlète français du siècle’ by the readers of Athlétisme magazine in 1999 (Belal, 2000). Mimoun is still cherished today, both for his outstanding achievements on the track and his resolutely pro-French stance off it, particularly during the 1954–62 conflict in the land of his birth. His greatest triumph came in the 1956 (Melbourne) Olympics, when, competing in his first marathon, he took the gold medal ahead of the renowned Czech athlete Emil Zatopek, a victory that has been variously celebrated ever since. Marcel Couchaux’s bande dessinée account of this sporting rivalry, Zatopek: Les années Mimoun (2006), is thus to be added to a long list of lieux de mémoire that includes some fifty stadiums, fifteen streets and various other public buildings throughout the diminutive runner’s adopted homeland (Belal, 2000: 44). However, the widespread commemoration of Mimoun’s authentically glittering career conceals a number of memorial omissions, including the generally overlooked success

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– although, significantly, it was never forgotten by Mimoun himself – at the 1928 (Amsterdam) Olympics and also, in the marathon, of Algerian runner Ahmed Boughera El Ouafi, in what was both the first ever win by an indigenous African competitor and France’s only athletics gold medal at those Games (Delsahut, 2004: 53–57). Similarly, the career of the Constantine-born Jewish swimmer Alfred Nakache is not widely remembered, although several municipal pools across France do today bear his name. Nakache was a member of the French team that competed in the 1936 (Berlin) Olympics, before being stripped of his nationality by the Vichy regime and deported to Auschwitz in 1943 with his wife and daughter, both of whom perished. Miraculously, the swimmer not only survived but returned to competition, representing France at the 1948 (London) Games. His story was finally told in Christian Meunier’s documentary Alfred Nakache, le nageur d’Auschwitz (2001). By the same token, the careers of three Jewish boxing champions from North Africa would nowadays be remembered by few French sports fans. Tunisian-born Victor ‘Young’ Perez, who became world flyweight champion in 1931, was also stripped of his French citizenship by Vichy before being sent to his death in Buchenwald in 1942. In an overdue tribute, his story was recounted by Jacques Ouaniche’s feature film Victor ‘Young’ Perez (2013). Although less tragic, the reigns as bantamweight champions of the world of Robert Cohen (1954–56) and Alphonse Halimi (1957–59) have also been eclipsed by the popular memory of ‘the Moroccan Bomber’, Marcel Cerdan, who was not only middleweight champion of the world (1948–49) but also the lover of the singer Édith Piaf. Born in Sidi-Bel-Abbès in Algeria, the spiritual home of the French Foreign Legion, Cerdan became a star in Casablanca and Paris before travelling to the United States for his greatest triumph. His death in 1949, when his trans-Atlantic flight crashed in the Azores, was commemorated by Piaf in her hit recording Hymne à l’amour (1950), as the final act of a love story that continues to fascinate the French public (Duret and Tétart, 2007: 351). Cerdan’s sporting fairytale has also featured on screen in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) and Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en rose (2007). Cerdan’s successful title bid against the American Tony Zale in Jersey City in 1948 was read at the time as a symbolic revenge for the crushing defeat of French heavyweight challenger Georges Carpentier by world champion Jack Dempsey at the same venue in 1921, an interpretation underlined by the presence of the two older fighters at

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the ringside. Like Cerdan after the Second World War, the decorated ancien combattant Carpentier served as a symbol of national resilience following the 1914–18 conflict and is today commemorated by sports facilities bearing his name in Paris, as well as in his native Lens. While he may be remembered with affection for his victories, and even his much lamented 1921 defeat by the fearsome ‘Manassa Mauler’, Carpentier’s loss the following year to the Senegalese fighter Louis Mbarick Fall (or Phall), better known as ‘Battling Siki’, is almost wholly forgotten. In their bout for the light-heavyweight championship of the world, held in Paris on 24 September 1922, Fall’s sixth-round knock-out of Carpentier initially resulted in his disqualification by the referee, before the ringside judges overturned the decision, making him Africa’s first professional boxing champion. However, a campaign of vilification followed in the sporting press that prompted the withdrawal of his licence by the French boxing federation, leading in turn to his being stripped of the world title by the International Boxing Union (Deville-Danthu, 1997: 71–72). In an ironic reversal of the liberating migration to France undertaken by the celebrated Jack Johnson and his African American contemporaries in the decade preceding the First World War, ‘Battling Siki’ sought an alternative outlet for his undoubted talents across the Atlantic, only to be murdered in New York in 1925 by the criminal elements then controlling the sport (Jobert, 2006). Since the accession to independence of the former colonies, sport in France has continued to be strongly marked by both migration and multiculturalism, as well as by broader processes of globalization. The iconic case of the 1998 football World Cup has already been highlighted. The subsequent pitch invasion that led to the first full match between France and Algeria being abandoned at the Stade de France in October 2001 is also of significance in this regard, as is the ‘quotas’ affair of 2011, which embroiled the then national manager, Laurent Blanc, in a polemic about the ethnic composition of French junior squads. Lilian Thuram, Blanc’s former teammate from the 1998 side, who went on to become a prominent anti-racism campaigner, was also active in this debate. Equally worthy of note is the fact that the Algerian sides that performed with distinction at both the 2010 and 2014 World Cup finals were made up of players more than two-thirds of whom were French-born (Kessous, 2010). More recently, the Black–Blanc–Beur narrative of French sporting achievement was given new life by the victory of Les Bleus at the 2018 World Cup finals in Russia. Central to the team’s success was Kylian Mbappé, the nineteen-year-old son of a footballing father from

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Cameroon and a handball-playing mother from Algeria, whose stunning performances saw him named as the event’s Best Young Player. In athletics, French distance running continues to benefit from the talents of athletes of Maghrebi heritage, as well as more recently naturalized competitors from North Africa. Meanwhile, in the sprint events, and particularly in women’s competitions, a key role has long been played by athletes from the Caribbean, and especially from Guadeloupe, as epitomized by France’s biggest female star, Marie-José Pérec (Kilcline, 2014). This département d’outre-mer has even been prominent in the quintessentially French sport of fencing, as evidenced by the five Olympic medals, including two golds, won by Laura Flessel-Colovic between 1996 and 2004. Other prominent sporting islands include La Réunion and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. In a remarkable move comparable with that of the FLN football team in Algeria, rugby was mobilized by anticolonial forces in Madagascar in the 1950s as part of the territory’s struggle for independence; while La Réunion, taking a contrasting route as a fully integrated department of the Republic, has durably established itself as a major force in world handball. While sports fans would typically be familiar with the latter connection – thanks particularly to Jackson Richardson, who captained the French team to a bronze medal at the 1992 (Barcelona) Olympic Games and then to two world championships in 1995 and 2001 – Malagasy rugby’s anticolonial credentials would only be remembered by a handful of specialists. These contrasting memorial responses highlight the processes of selection involved in the postcolonial sporting sphere, as in so many others. Works Cited Belal, Karim. 2000. ‘Alain Mimoun: tout pour la France!’ Hommes et Migrations 1226: 44–49. Delsahut, Fabrice. 2004. Les Hommes libres et l’Olympe: Les sportifs oubliés de l’histoire des Jeux Olympiques. Paris: L’Harmattan. Deville-Danthu, Bernadette. 1992. ‘La participation des sportifs indigènes à l’Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris: polémique autour du rôle du sport aux colonies’. Sport et Histoire 2 (new series): 9–26. — 1997. Le Sport en noir et blanc: Du sport colonial au sport africain dans les anciens territoires français d’Afrique occidentale (1920–1965). Paris: L’Harmattan.

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Dine, Philip. 2010. ‘Dresser la carte sportive de “l’Algérie française”: vitesse technologique et appropriation de l’espace’. In L’Empire des sports, edited by Pierre Singaravélou and Julien Sorez, 105–16. Paris: Belin. — 2011. ‘Nation et narration dans la diffusion sportive: l’exemple des courses de chevaux dans l’Algérie coloniale’. Ethnologie française 41, no. 4: 625–32. Dubois, Laurent. 2010. Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duret, Pascal, and Philippe Tétart. 2007. ‘Des “héros” nationaux aux “stars”: la figure du champion depuis l’après-guerre’. In Histoire du sport en France: Tome II, De la Libération à nos jours, edited by Philippe Tétart, 337–67. Paris: Vuibert. Gosnell, Jonathan. 2002. The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria, 1930–1954. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Hassan, David, and Philip O’Kane. 2011. ‘The Great Race Across the Sahara: A History of the Paris to Dakar Rally and its Impact on the Development of Corporate Social Responsibility within Motor Sport’. International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 2: 268–80. Jobert, Timothée. 2006. ‘Siki, j’accuse!’ In Champions noirs, racisme blanc: La métropole et les sportifs noirs en contexte colonial (1901–1944), 115–56. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble. Kessous, Mustapha. 2010. ‘L’Algérie, l’autre équipe de France’. Le Monde, 18 June 2010. Kilcline, Cathal. 2014. ‘Constructing and Contesting the (Post-)national Sporting Hero: Media, Money, Mobility and Marie-José Pérec’. French Cultural Studies 25, no. 1: 82–100. Marseille, Jacques. 2002. ‘Une drôle de tournée’. In France et Algérie: Journal d’une passion, 203. Paris: Larousse. Mignon, Patrick. 2010. ‘Le psychodrame du football français’. Esprit 8 (August– September): 6–22. Rowe, David. 2010. ‘Stages of the global: Media, sport, racialization and the last temptation of Zinedine Zidane’. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45, no. 3: 355–71. Yahi, Naïma. 2010. ‘Le “onze du FLN”, un lieu de mémoire’. In Allez la France!: Football et Immigration, edited by Claude Boli, Yvan Gastaut and Fabrice Grognet, 105–08. Paris: Gallimard/Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration/Musée National du Sport.

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Index

Abderrezak, Hakim 95 Académie française 64, 65, 67, 69 Académie Goncourt 64 ACHAC (Association Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine) 6 Achille, Louis-Thomas 56, 57, 60 Achille, Louise 58 Adjani, Isabelle 88 Agénor, Monique 151 Ageron, Charles-Robert 5, 7, 78, 205, 270, 283–84, 335, 403, 411 Agulhon, Maurice 7 Akkouche, Mouloud 224 Aldrich, Robert 74, 77 Algeria 17 October 1961 15–16, 31, 109–18, 340–41 culinary legacy in France 383–93 French colonization 130–31, 334–42 photographic imagery 360–70 postcolonial studies 6–7, 15–16 war of independence 15–16, 31, 109–18, 227 Allouache, Merzak 94–95, 96–97 Anderson, Clare 218–19 Anderson, Perry, La Pensée tiède 5 Ango, Jean 354 Annan, Kofi 209 Anselin, Alain 246, 247, 251 Archinard, Louis 304 archival studies 23–33

Index

conflict between state memory and personal memory 28–29 critique of postcolonial archives 24–27 exclusionary structures of state involvement 27–28 selective and mediated versions of history 29–30 Asselin, Corinne 150 Assolant, Alfred 345 Ater, Renée 193 Attia, Kader 340 Augé, Marc 256 Aynard, Edouard 74 Ayrault, Jean-Marc 80–81, 196, 197, 199, 200 Bâ, Amadou Hampâté 47 Baartman, Saartje 310n2 bagne (French penal colony) 217–26 Baldwin, James 47 Balibar, Étienne 85–86, 91, 110–11, 255 Ballu, Albert 273 Bancel, Nicolas 6, 27, 101, 207–08 bande dessinée, representations of colonialism 403–10 banlieues 101–08, 125–26 as sites of memory 101–02 Barat, Christian 154 Barney, Natalie 57 Barrès, Maurice 64, 68–69 Barthélémy, Pascale 270 Baudelaire, Charles 307–12

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422

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Bauer, Barcha 79, 80, 81 Béchi, Slimane 390 Bemba, Sylvain 68 Ben Barek, Larbi 415 Ben Jelloun, Tahar 65 Bendjebbar, André 79, 81 Benguigui, Yamina 94 Benjamin, Walter 104–05 Benmalek, Anouar 224 Béraud, Henri 344–45 Beriss, David 247–48 Bernault, Florence 107 Besnaci-Lancou, Fatima 229, 230–32, 233 Besson, Éric 91–92, 211 Beti, Mongo 68 Beyala, Calixthe 68 Bignon, Alain 350 Blanc, Laurent 417 Blanchard, Pascal 6, 207–08, 210 Blanguy, Michel 197 Boehmer, Elleke 64 Boni, Nazi, Crépuscule des temps anciens 30 Bonnefont, Gaston 395 Boualam, Bachaga 230, 231 Bouchareb, Rachid 94 Boucher, Pierre 375 Boucheron, Patrick 270 Histoire mondiale de la France 15 Boudejellal, Farid 391 Boudjelal, Bruno 95 Bouquillard, J.P. 223 Bouraoui, Nina 65 Bourdieu, Pierre 39, 49, 328 Boussenard, Louis 345–46 Braudel, Fernand 128–29 Brazza, Pierre Savorgnan de 299, 300, 301, 305 Bruat, Armand-Joseph 162–64 Brunet, Louis 281 Bugeaud, Thomas Robert 299, 300 Buisson, Ferdinand 34–35 Buisson, Virginie 350

BUMIDOM (French state agency for migrant workers) 244–54, 256–57 Caillié, René 299 Camus, Albert 65, 66 Cantet, Laurent, Entre les murs 34, 36 Caprara, Giovanni Battista 10 Carné, Marcel 218 Caroz, Francis 409 Carpentier, Georges 416–17 Carpignano, Jonas 95 Carter, Angela 308, 309 Cartier, Jacques 354, 375 case créole architecture 148–58 Caumery (Languereau, Maurice) 347–48, 349 Cazals, Rémy 292–93 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 344–45 Cerdan, Marcel 416–17 Césaire, Aimé 12, 47, 58, 60, 67, 68–69, 140–41, 183, 312, 318–19, 338, 339 Lettre à Maurice Thorez 337 Césaire, Fernand 329 Césaire, Suzanne 182 Cestor, Octave 197 Challaye, Félicien, Un livre noir du colonialisme 337 Chalons, Serge 176 Chambers, Iain 129 Chamoiseau, Patrick 65, 69, 75, 225, 331 Texaco 31 Champlain, Samuel de 375 Chanoine, Julien 304, 336 Chapon, Alfred 272 Charbit, Tom 231 Charles, Christophe 270 Charles-Roux, Jules 74, 277 Charrière, Henri 223 Chaulet-Achour, Christiane 68 Chevalier, Jean-Claude 327–28 Chilembwe, John 358 Chirac, Jacques 11, 129, 133, 144–45, 206, 207, 209, 240

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Index Chivallon, Christine 193 Chollet, Edmond, Les Robinsons de Sambre-et-Meuse 347 Chouinard, Denis 94 Cissé, Madjiguène 259, 261 Clamart salon 55–62 Clancy-Smith, Julia 130 Clavé, Florenci 223 Clemenceau, Georges 335 Cohen, Anouk 208 Cohen, Robert 416 Condé, Maryse 68 Ségou 30 Condon, Stephanie A. 247 Condorcet, Nicolas de 11, 37–38 Cook, James 236 Cooper, Anna Julia 57 Corbett, Robert 148n3 Corneau, Alain, Fort Saganne 303–04 Courbet, Gustave 311–12 Cousturier, Lucie, Des inconnus chez moi 293 Coutant, Isabelle, Délit de jeunesse 102 Crouzillat, Hélène 95 Curtius, Anny-Dominique 249–50, 252 Daeninckx, Didier 403, 404–05, 407–09, 411–12 Cannibale 340, 403–05, 411–12 Meurtres pour mémoire 31 Damas, Léon-Gontran 58, 60, 68, 217, 219, 220 Darcos, Xavier 211 Dauphiné, Joël 405 de Beauvoir, Simone 322 de Certeau, Michel 195, 201 de Gaulle, Charles 124 de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Geneviève 11 Debans, Camille 273 Debré, Michel 245–46, 249–50, 315 Defferre, Gaston 124, 125 Delafosse, Maurice 59 Delanoë, Bertrand 109, 110 Delgrès, Louis 161 Demaison, André 328

423

Dempsey, Jack 416–17 Depestre, René 65 Deransart, Thierry 240–41 DeRoo, Rebecca 364–65 Derrida, Jacques 27, 28 Deslandes, André Boureau 377 d’Estaing, Valérie Giscard 257 Dia, Mamadou 47 Dieudonné, Eugène 223 Dine, Philip 395 Diome, Fatou 93 Diop, Ababacar 261 Diop, Alioune 47 Diop, Cheikh Anta 46–47, 48–50n4, 52 Disraeli, Benjamin 131–32 d’Ivoi, Paul 345 Djebar, Assia 65–66 Donadey, Anne 291, 296 d’Oriola, Jonquères 151 Douilly, Bernard 373–74 Doumergue, Paul 282 Dreyfus, Alfred 220, 223 Driant, Emile 346–47 Drumont, Édouard 368–69 Dubarry, Armand 345 Dubet, François 37, 40 Dulac, Edmund 353–54, 357 Dumas, Alexandre 11, 69 Durand, Georges 373–74, 375 Duval, Jeanne 307–12 Duveyrier, Henri 299 Eboué, Félix 12, 356, 357 Eder, Klaus 87, 91 Edwards, Brent Hayes 10 Eriksson, Leif 375 Étienne, Eugène 162 Fall, Louis Mbarick 417 Fallières, Armand 279 Fanon, Frantz 47, 64–65, 237, 290–91, 319, 320, 338, 339 Black Skin, White Masks 58–59, 394 Fassin, Didier 91

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424

Postcolonial Realms of Memory

Feillet, Paul 221 Ferrandez, Jacques 403 Ferry, Jules 39, 131 Field, Karen, Black Bordeaux 61 Figuier, Louis, Races humaines 344 Fillon, François 334 Flessel-Colovic, Laura 418 FLNKS (Front de Libération National Kanak et Socialiste) 237, 238, 240 Fonkoua, Romuald 46 Forsdick, Charles 340, 403 Fort de Joux 139–47 Foucauld, Charles de 299, 301, 303 Foucault, Michel 29, 197–98, 218 Fouillée, Augustine 344, 346 France abolition of slavery 139–47 anti-colonialism 334–42 archives and literature as sites of national memory 23–33 border spaces 85–100 BUMIDOM (French state agency for migrant workers) 244–54 centrality of Paris to postcolonial history 10–11 challenges to republican model from ethnic minorities 34–43, 259–60 children’s literature 343–50, 395–98 collective memory and national identity 1–2, 6–7, 9–10, 13–14, 159–66 colonial contribution to sport 411–19 colonial cultural exhibitions 269–89 colonial photography 360–70 colonial toys 394–402 commemoration of French Revolution 3, 11, 257–58 culinary legacy of colonies 383–93 departmentalization 246–47 education system and national identity 34–43

feminist struggles in Reunion Island 314–23 French language as universal language 327–33 hybridization 1–2, 6–7, 9–10 literary canon 63–69 Mediterranean territory politics 128–36 memorialization of colonial heroes 298–306 memorials and museums of colonialism 159–66 memorials to slave history 167–85, 186–94 migration and les sans-papiers 255–65 Panthéon 10–12, 161 penal colonies 217–26 progress of studies of postcolonialism 1–19 provincial relationships with colonies 73–84, 109–26 racialized stereotypes in advertising 290–91 racialized stereotypes in literature and textbooks 348–49 ‘regional’ identities 75–77 remapping of postcolonial geography 13 republican education reform 34–43 salon culture 55–57 winemaking as marker of French culture 373–82 French Guiana 217–18, 219 penal colony 217, 218, 219–20, 223–24 Frobenius, Leo 59 Front National 5 Fumaroli, Marc 61, 327 Gafaiti, Hafid 88 Gallieni, Joseph 299, 302, 354 Galmot, Jean 79 Gandon, Pierre 356–57 Gardel, Louis 303

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Index Garnier, Francis 299 Garvey, Marcus 145 Gatlif, Tony 96 Gaudin, Jean-Claude 119 Gauvin, Axel 154–55 Gaye, Dyana 97–98 Genet, Jean 218 Germain, Felix 250–52 Gide, André 64–65, 337–38 Voyage au Congo 57, 64, 337–38 Gilroy, Paul 10, 60, 92 Girardet, Raoul 8 Glissant, Édouard 24, 47, 65, 69, 140–41, 146, 182, 183, 190n5, 248, 338 Goaman, Michael 357, 358–59 Gobineau, Comte Arthur de 344 Goheneix-Polanski, Alice 328 Goldhammer, Arthur 4 Goodman, Dena 56–57 Gordien, Emmanuel 184 Green, Nancy 89, 208 Grégoire, Abbé 11, 143 Griaule, Marcel 44 Groensteen, Thierry 404 Guène, Faïza, Du rêve pour les oufs 263 Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira 104 Guiart, Jean 242 Guibert, Dominique 208–09 Guyon, Joseph 406 Habermas, Jürgen 201 Haby, René 40 Haiti, revolution 139–40, 153 Halbwachs, Maurice 301 Halimi, Alphonse 416 Halimi, Gisèle 322 Hammadi, Rodolphe 225 Haneke, Michael, Caché 340 Hargrove, June 301 harkis 227 Haroun, Mahamat-Saleh 97 Harp, Stephen 385 Hazoumé, Paul, Doguicimi 30

425

Hennequet, François 150, 152–53 Henry, Jean-Robert 133 Henry-Lévi, Bernard 308 Himelfarb, Hélène 7 Hollande, François 111–12, 210, 295, 335 Hopkinson, Nalo 308 Hortefeux, Brice 208 Hughes, Langston 47 Hugo, Victor 64 Les Misérables 217–18 immigration 4–5 Isnard, Léon 386–87, 389 Jaurès, Jean 11–12, 335 Jeanneney, Jean-Noël 11 Jeanson, Francis 338 Jenni, Alexis, L’Art français de la guerre 31 Johnson, Jack 417 Jonnart, Charles 379 Jordan, David P. 4 Jordi, Jean-Jacques 119 Jospin, Lionel 111, 207 Jovouhey, Anne-Marie 143 Joyaux, Evelyne 119 Kagan, Elie 116 Karakayali, Serhar 262 Karembeu, Christian 13–14, 412 Karembeu, Willy 412 Karone, Yodi 68 Kassovitz, Mathieu, L’ordre et la morale 240–41 Kaurismäki, Aki 94 Kechiche, Abdellatif 390 Kenyatta, Jomo 357–58 Kerchouche, Dalila 230–32, 233 Khatibi, Abdelkébir 338 Klarsfeld, Serge 228, 232 Konare, Alpha Omar 304–05 Kourouma, Ahmadou 65, 331 Les Soleils des indépendances 67 Kritzman, Lawrence 3–4, 256

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426

Postcolonial Realms of Memory

La Bourdonnais, François Mahé de 148n2 La Serve, Nicole Robert de 148n4 Labou-Tansi, Sony 69, 330–31 LaCapra, Dominick 177 Laferrière, Dany 65, 69 Laffey, John F. 73–74 Lahens, Yanick 65 Lallaoui, Mehdi, Kabyles du Pacifique 224 Lamoricière, Christophe de 300 Laperrine, François-Henry 299 Lapeyronnie, Didier 102 Laprade, Albert 205 Larousse, Pierre 34–35 Lauret, Daniel, Monsieur Oscar 155 Lavigerie, Charles 299 Lavisse, Ernest 34–35, 300, 305 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 13–14 Le Pen, Marine 233 Le Point 1–2 Leakey, James 379 Lebas, Clotilde 113, 116 Leblic, Isabelle 241–42 Leblond, Ary 206 Lebourg, Nicolas 227–28, 233–34 Lebovics, Herman 204–05, 270, 339 Legrand, Louis, Pour un collège démocratique 40–42 Legzouli, Hassan 96 Lemaire, Sandrine 6 Léonard-Maestrati, Antoine 252 Leroux, Alexandre 367–68, 369 Lescarbot, Marc 375 l’Estoile, Benoist de 285 Lioret, Philippe 96 literary prestige attainment of 63–69 demarcation of colonial work 66–67, 66–69 integration into educational curricula 67–68 Locke, Alain 57 Loez, André 292–93 Lojkine, Boris 95

Londres, Albert 220, 222, 337 Loshitzsky, Yosefa 93 Loti, Pierre 64, 345 Louverture, Toussaint 11 imprisonment in Fort Joux 139–47 Lozère, Cristelle 280 Lumumba, Patrice 145 Lyautey, Marshal Hubert 281–82, 283, 299, 302, 354, 406–07 Maalouf, Amin 65 Mabanckou, Alain 65, 68 Mabon, Armelle 295 Machoro, Eloi 240 McManus, James 308 Macron, Emmanuel 334, 341 Malcolm X 145 Malraux, André 66, 206 Mamani, Abdoulaye, Sarraounia 304 Manceron, Gilles 80–81, 209 Mandela, Nelson 145–46 Manet, Edouart 311 Mangin, General Charles 294, 302 Mann, Gregory 294 Manville, Marcel 193 Maran, René 57, 65, 66 Marcault-Dérouard, Liza 196, 198–200, 201 Marchand, Jean-Baptiste 299, 300 Maréchal, Marie 399 Marelli, Joëlle 106 Mareschal, Patrick 79–80 Marie, Claude-Valentin 245 Marquette, Émile 273 Marseille 119–26 Martial, Jean-Jacques 250 Martini, Lucienne 403 Martinique beheaded statue of Empress Josephine 168, 169–78 Cap 110 Mémoire et Fraternité memorial 168, 179–83 memorials 167–85 Masset-Depasse, Oliver 97 Materazzi, Marco 412–13

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Index Maurel, Emile 74 Maurouard, Elvire 308 Mayeur, Jean-Marie 7 Mbappé, Kylian 417–18 Mbembe, Achille 52, 102–03, 257 Mediterranean territory politics 128–36 migration crisis 134–35 Mekhloufi, Rachid 415 Melgar, Fernand 97 Memmi, Albert 64–65, 319, 338, 339 Memorial ACTe (Museum of Contemporary Caribbean Art and Memorial for the History of the Slave Trade) 186–94 memory national and colonial 3–4 tourism 3–4 Mendieta, Ana 174 Mervant-Roux, Marie-Madeleine 200–01 Messerschmitt, Paul 389 Metellus, Jean 145 Meunier, Christian 416 Meybeck, Jean-Benoit 93 Meynier, Gilbert 387 Mezzadra, Sandro 86 Miano, Léonora 65, 69 Michel, Louise 223 Miller, Ann 404 Miller, Christopher L. 409 Millerand, Alexandre 279 Milner, Jean-Claude, De l’école 41–42 Milo, Daniel 301 Mimoun, Alain 415–16 Mintz, Sidney 385 Mitterrand, François 133, 240 Mollat du Jourdin, Michel 7 Monénembo, Tierno 65 Le Roi de Kahel 30–31 Monge, Gaspard 11 Moniot, Henri 4 Monnerville, Gaston 11–12, 220 Montaigne, Michel de 44–45, 51 Morano, Nadine 391

427

Moulin, Félix Jacques Antoine 360–64, 366, 369–70 Moumen, Abderahmen 227–28, 233–34 Murphy, Maureen 204 Nakache, Alfred 416 Nantes, memorial to abolition of slavery 195–203 Nardal, Andrée 10, 55–62 Nardal, Jane 10, 55–62 Nardal, Paul 58 Nardal, Paulette 10, 55–62 N’Dongo, Mamadou Mahmoud, El Hadj 105–06 Necker, Suzanne 57 Négritude 58–60 Neurdein, Étienne 365 Neurdein, Jean César 365 Neurdein, Louis-Antonin 365 New Caledonia 218, 219, 339–40 French penal colony 218, 221–22, 238–39 Kanak Revolution (1984) 405–09 Ouvéa 236–43 sites of memory 224–25 Nguesso, Denis Sassou 305 Niane, Djibril Tamsir, Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue 30 Nkrumah, Kwame 358–59 Nogent gardens 161–63, 278, 284 Noiriel, Gérard 88, 208 Nora, Pierre 45, 75–76, 149, 156, 270, 301, 305, 352–53 archival studies 23 Les Français d’Algérie 6 Les Lieux de mémoire 1–19, 23, 34–35, 60–61, 63–64, 101, 218, 256, 262, 327, 351 Ogden, Philip E. 247 Ory, Pascal 15 Oubahli, Mohamed 386 Ouologuem, Yambo 65, 66 Ousmane, Sembène 68

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428

Postcolonial Realms of Memory

Ozouf, Jacques 344 Ozouf, Mona 8, 10, 11, 344 Palewski, Gaston 206 Papon, Maurice 31, 109 Paris Memorial of the Names of the Abolition 168–69, 183–84 MNHI (Musée National de l’Histoire de l’immigration) 204–12 Palais de la Porte Dorée 204, 205 Pasquet, Fabienne 308 Passeron, Jean-Claude 39 Pavis, Patrice 200–01 Peeters, Benoît 404 Peirce, Charles Sanders 352 Pérec, Marie-José 418 Peren, Maggie 95 Perez, Victor ‘Young’ 416 Perse, Saint-John 65, 66 Pétain, Maréchal 353 Piaget, Jean 40–41 Pichois, Charles 308 Pila, Ulysse 73–74, 81–82 Pinchon, Joseph-Porphyre 347–48, 349 Pitou, Louis Ange 219 Place, Jean-Michel 56 Poirier, Léon 301, 413 Pomian, Krzysztof archival studies 23–33 Portier, Claude-Joseph 367n8 post and postage stamps 351–59 Pratt, Mary Louise 86 Prazan, Michaël 308 Preneau, François 200 Prost, Antoine 8 Puri, Shalini 187 Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Jean-Paul 37–38 Rabelais, François 46 Raffarin, Jean-Pierre 207, 208, 210 Rancière, Jacques 200–01 Randau, Robert 385–86

Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past 3–4 Reboul, J.-B. 386 Regnault, Etienne 377 Reinette, Michel 252 Rémi, Georges 348 Renan, Ernest 38–39 Renouard, Jean-Marie 223 Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire 4 Reunion Island domestic architecture 148–58 winemaking 377 women’s rights 314–23 Reuzé, Emmanuel 403, 404–05, 406 Revel, Jacques 76 Rey, Alain 332 Reynaud, Paul 282 Ricciotti, Rudy 232 Richardson, Jackson 418 Richon, Emmanuel 308 Rigo, Enrica 262 Rivesaltes 227–35 harkis settlements 229–32 internment of Jews 227, 228, 232 multidimensional site of memory 227–35 Robeson, Essie 55 Rocard, Michel 243 Roncayolo, Marcel, ‘Le paysage du savant’ 7 Rosello, Mireille 259–60 Ross, Kristin 388 Rossignol, Aurélie 256 Rothberg, Michael 175, 232 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 10 Sabine, Thierry 413–14 Said, Edward 64, 78 Sarkozy, Nicolas 12, 80, 91–92, 101, 129, 133, 207, 208, 233 Dakar speech (2007) 7, 67 Sarraut, Albert 279, 280–81 Sartre, Jean-Paul 64–65, 338 Savary, Alain 40

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Index Savitry, Emile 218 Schœlcher, Victor 11–12, 59, 143, 186 Schweitzer, Albert 163–64 Sebbar, Leïla 224 La Seine était rouge 31, 340 Senegal, tirailleurs sénégalais 290–97, 335 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 44–54, 58, 60, 64–65, 67, 163, 291, 329–30 Sevestre, Norbert, Loup-Blanc 347 Seyse, Claude 199 Shepard, Clara 55 Shepard, Todd 318 Siegfried, Jules 74 Silverstein, Paul 103–04 Slimani, Leïla 65 Smith, Charles D. 130 Sorbon, Robert de 46 La Sorbonne 44–54 Soustelle, Jacques 67 Spire, Alexis 258 Stein, Gertrude 57 Stevens, Mary 208 Stoler, Ann Laura 6–7, 218–19 Stora, Benjamin 15, 29n3, 107, 115, 119–20, 210, 211 Suffren, Pierre-André de 354 Talbot, Bryan 223 Talbot, Mary 223 Taubira, Christiane 91, 186n1 Téchiné, André 94 Témime, Émile 122 Tetreault, Chantal 103–04 Tévanian, Pierre 106, 259 Tharaud, Jean 68–69 Tharaud, Jérôme 68–69 Thébaud, Léon R. 144 Thomas, Dominic, Black France 13 Thompson, Robert F. 60 Thuram, Lilian 417 Tillion, Germaine 11 tirailleurs sénégalais 290–97, 335 Tissot, Sylvie 259

Tjibaou, Jean-Marie 222, 238, 240, 242, 319, 339–40 Tonkin, Maggie 310n1 Toubon, Jacques 207, 208, 210 Touré, Moussa 94–95 Tréfaut, Sérgio 97 Trouche, Sarah 173–78 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 167–68 Silencing the Past 167 Tura, Laetitia 95 Ubersfeld, Anne 200–01 Valère, Laurent 179, 182–83 Valls, Manuel 232–34, 261 Van Eeckhout, Laetitia 256 Verne, Jules 343–44, 346 Vidal, Guy 350 Vigarello, Georges 411 Vigné, Paul-Etienne 336 Voulet, Paul 304, 336 wa Thiong’o, Ngugi 47–48 Waddell, Eric 242–43 Wadimoff, Nicolas 94 Walcott, Derek 177, 183 Wea, Djubelly 238, 242 Weber, Eugen ‘L’Hexagone’ 7 Weil, François 89 Weil, Patrick 89, 208 Williams, James S. 93 Winock, Michel 15 Wright, Richard 47 Yacine, Kateb 224, 327 Nedjma 67 Yade, Rama 144 Young, James 175 Zabus, Chantal 331 Zale, Tony 416–17 Zapotek, Emile 415 Zidane, Zinedine 412–13 Zitouni, Mustapha 415

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429

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