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33 national History and Colonial History Parallel Histories (1961–2006) sandrine lemaire “the colonies. A French debate.” This was the title of Le Monde 2’s special edition on this “French malaise,” which featured five articles alongside older material : an interview with Pierre nora, “la France est malade de sa mémoire” (France suffers from Memory illness), an interview with Éric deroo, “l’image des colonies a tenu lieu de réalité” (The image of the Colonies Has taken the Place of reality ), an old spread on “la question noire posée à la France” (The Black Question Posed in/of France), a survey—taken for the special issue—on “le palais de toutes les mémoires” (The Palace for all Memories), and my own article on “la colonisation racontée aux enfants” (Colonization as told to Children). Why the special issue? Why provide a space in which “memories” and “histories” would overlap? Because times have changed, and the “social demand” has become quite strong: a few years earlier and such a project would have appeared iconoclastic or unimaginable. For that matter, the editors of the special issue emphasized in the foreword the pedagogical value of such content: “let us imagine a teacher giving a class on the history of the colonies in a French middle-school. Who are her or his students? one is the grandson of a Harki, another the descendent of a former algerian settler. The grandfather of another is an algerian immigrant living in France, once a militant independentist during the algerian War. others come from a West indian background. some are the descendants of slaves. still others of Bretons, Corsicans . . . there are also French youth with senegalese or vietnamese backgrounds. How is the educator to broach the question of slavery’s history, or those of colonization and decolonization?” The writer is frank: it is the current context, that of this “diverse presence,” that has made this debate resurface . and the educator has a front-row seat. How to teach? The school teacher was also at the center of the law of February 2005, which made reference to “academic programs,” and which was subsequently abrogated after eleven months of heated debate. Though this was most likely the catalyst for a “national debate” on the historic and memory-related stakes of the issue, the condi420 National History and Colonial History | 421 tions of the debate are themselves worthy of discussion. in 2004, Benoït Falaize and laurence Corbel published a study, “l’enseignement de l’histoire et les mémoires douloureuses du XXe siècle” (teaching history and the painful memories of the twentieth century), in which they outlined a framework in which the teaching of the colonial past ought to occur, particularly in terms of addressing the complexity of the “colonial issue,” a complex and polemical one of course especially when it comes to considering educational policy and the colonial past.1 indeed , education finds itself embroiled in the conflictual debate, and it is as though it were the only branch of society capable of acting upon this issue. However, it is but one element in a much larger memorial debate. today, colonial history is perceived as an important issue for educators; however , it is just as much so for those whom education targets: the students. in fact, on the ground—according to a survey i took in 2003 in toulouse—one sees a lack of understanding (or a very vague understanding) of colonial or migratory history .2 and yet, a real need has been expressed to better study (or simply study more of)—and thus to better know—these aspects of history, in order to better understand current events.3 There are multiple reasons for this gap. For a long time it was assumed that it was due to the small amount of space dedicated to colonial issues in the curriculum. This explanation will no longer suffice; the curriculum has undergone major overhauls over the past twenty years, and today—as in the case of textbooks—there are “good” materials for teaching this past. However, this is not the case for some issues, namely, the history of the slave trade and its abolition , or the two centuries of migratory movement from overseas. Meanwhile, the reciprocal influence of colonization—the formation of a colonial culture in France during the nineteenth century—is almost never mentioned. While the history of immigration is effectively absent from the curriculum up through secondary school, the histories of colonization and decolonization have...

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