Towards a Postcolonial Nineteenth Century: Introduction

This special issue of French Studies explores the feasibility of—and need for—new work at the intersection of nineteenth-century French studies and postcolonial studies. Researchers have for some time explored ‘postcolonial’ approaches to the nineteenth century in France and the wider French-speaking world, so that this can no longer be seen as a missed cross-disciplinary rendezvous. To say merely that the further development of such a project remains timely would, however, be to underestimate quite how strange it is that this topic has not received specific and sustained attention from within the field of French studies, given the centrality of the nineteenth century both in colonial history and in the genesis of postcolonial theory itself. Already, in pioneering work in the 1930s, African-American academic Mercer Cook challenged the ‘whiteness’ of the nineteenth-century French studies curriculum, but beyond several focused studies in the intervening period, the full implications of his interventions have yet to be fully explored.¹

Recent years have, meanwhile, seen the extension of postcolonial approaches to earlier periods of literary history. Notably, the ‘Postcolonial Enlightenment’, and exoticism in the eighteenth century, have been explored in edited volumes and special issues.² Approaches to the medieval period have also been renewed by recent attempts at ‘worlding’ that revisit medieval texts from the perspectives of postcolonialism and world history.³ Individual authors and movements from the nineteenth-century English literary canon have been approached from a postcolonial perspective;⁴ and there is an ongoing tradition of (often imagological) studies of exoticism in French literature. But there has been no concerted or sustained attempt to address the relevance of postcolonialism to our understanding of nineteenth-century French literary history. One of the foundations of postcolonial theory was, however, Edward Said’s landmark publication of Orientalism in 1978, and it is an often forgotten fact that Said’s disciplinary expertise was initially in comparative literature, with nineteenth-century French literature as his main point of comparison with the English-language tradition; moreover, following a number of translations of his work, with studies such as Yves Clavaron’s Edward Said: l’Intifada de la culture and Fred Poché’s Edward W. Said, l’humaniste radical: aux sources de la pensée postcoloniale, Said is increasingly attracting attention as a critic in France itself.⁵ Though rarely recognized explicitly as such, it can be argued that the French nineteenth century was thus at the heart of postcolonial thinking from the outset.

The development of postcolonial approaches to the French nineteenth century has however been hampered by several factors, of which we will outline three briefly here: historiographic, terminological, and disciplinary. The first arises from a reading of French history that sees most of the nineteenth century as a lull between colonial periods, following the loss of France’s first (seventeenth- and eighteenth-century) colonial empire, and preceding the rise of a truly popular ‘colonial culture’ of the Third Republic from the 1880s onwards, with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 often seen as the formalization of New Imperialism.⁶ Recent work such as David Todd’s article ‘A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870’ encourages scrutiny of this assumption and of the ways in which it deflects attention away from the imperialist culture of the ‘long’ nineteenth century,⁷ despite France’s ongoing political control of parts of its earlier empire (for example in Senegal and the Caribbean), the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801), the conquest of Algeria from 1830 onwards, as well as the history of slavery up to 1848 and its enduring legacy afterwards (including the introduction of indentured labour). The idea of a ‘lull’ between colonial empires also reflects a single model for colonial culture, based on the idea of a monolithically pro-colonial, expansionist attitude. French colonial culture in the nineteenth century presents an altogether messier picture, including not simply direct colonial dominion, but expansionist policies of indirect control through economic or intellectual influence, and the hesitations and contestations that attended such policies. It includes stirrings of anti-colonial ambivalence, an exoticist valorization of the ‘other’ over the...