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Foreword The Age of Contempt, or the Legitimization of France’s Civilizing Mission Bruno etienne in these troubled times when the question of memorial laws triggers emotional and polemic responses and when a president of the republic (in this case Jacques Chirac) reclaimed the term “Civilization,” it seems legitimate to examine the anamnesis of a process that for too long has been buried in our subconscious as a result of amnesty laws and our collective amnesia. This process has its origins in our connection to those colonies that, during two centuries, marked our history, and that are today imprinted on all aspects of French society through the multiple legacies of colonial culture. The social relations of an era are simple to judge by transposing them to a contemporary normative grid that, itself, is not spared the duty to examine its own presuppositions. in fact, are our values definitely universal? People are the products of the time in which they live, and it would be a mistake to judge people from bygone eras as if they had at their disposal all that we have learned since. yet some, such as Montaigne or tocqueville, even a traveling painter like Fromentin, understood the abuse of authority. However , what remained unimaginable was that following the “right to colonize,” we would invent the “duty of intervention”: from the secular mission to humanitarianism , the history of our relationship with the world over the last two centuries appears to have been mapped out. Colonization and legitimization indeed, colonization was born from the expansion of capitalism and the development of industries in need of new markets. The part played by the chambers of commerce in the case of algeria is well known, ushering in an era of “modern” colonization for France in 1830. The term “colonization” includes a broad range of diverse realities, in both time and space. But what interests us here is the fact that a discourse emerged very quickly, was constituted as a “culture,” and was used to morally legitimize this project. This morality, if it can be referred to as such, was mostly “on the left” (in the case of France), whereas the actual officers responsible for native affairs traditionally fell “on the right” and had more respect for 455 456 | Etienne the arab than for the colonists.1 Through the example of Karl Marx himself, who preferred the enlightened colonists to these arabs draped in “filth” and “honor” or to the “thieving” and “looting” Bedouins,2 one can measure the complexity of these issues and the difficulty we face in trying to establish straightforward delimitations when it comes to observing this colonial past. Colonization established its legitimacy very early on by embracing the dominant ideals of the day’s metropolitan French society. The example of algeria best illustrates how universalism can reach its own limits.3 it would take the publication of Claude lévi-strauss’s Race and History in 1952 for us to understand that “the barbarian is first and foremost he who believes in barbarism.”4 in fact, as early as las Casas’s testimony—and valladolid’s controversy with sepulveda in 1550—the thesis of “racial inequality” was used as a justification of the superiority of Western Christian civilization. From then on, the colonial model found legitimacy . initially, the “discovered” peoples were qualified as “barbarian,” “wild,” and archaic. Their “atrocious mores” served to justify their destruction. in his essays, published around 1580, Montaigne identified the issue clearly, but his reactions had little impact: “i am not sorry,” he wrote in “of Cannibals,” that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror [this is about anthropophagy] of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own.” in the preface to his Spirit of the Laws (1758), Montesquieu expressed what might very well be considered today a kind of cultural relativism: “i have first of all considered mankind; and the result of my thoughts has been, that amidst such an infinite diversity of laws and manners, they were not solely conducted by the caprice of fancy.” We know that in the case of algeria, the colonials , by declaring it terra nullia, negated the Muslim and customary laws that governed social relations, and particularly real-estate laws. “tribes” could be expelled because they did not manage their land “well.” These positions would justify , for the elites as well as for public opinion, France’s colonial action during the first half...

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