In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The past fifteen years have witnessed a profusion of publications with the words France (or French) and empire in their titles. With some notable exceptions, these works attempt to identify what was “imperial” about France at various points in its history.1 They tend to use the word empire in a very casual way—often as synonymous with one or more “colonies.”2 But, as the Jules Michelet quote that begins this essay suggests, this now frequent juxtaposition of words had very little purchase for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 The goal of this essay is to explore this significant absence—the missing concept of “empire” in French political culture—and how it may have impacted the process of decolonization. It will do so by focusing mostly on the constitutional history of the “French colonial empire.” While constitutional texts have a long and rich history dating back to , very few of them defined the concept of empire or even mentioned it. When they did, it was typically to establish a very strong separation between France and its overseas territories and to indicate that the constitution did not apply to the latter. Here they followed the “principle of colonial specialty” or exception (le principe de spécialité coloniale), according to which France per se and its colonies were under different legal regimes and “special laws” applied to the latter. This double absence from political discourse and constitutional texts, I believe, raises some questions about use of the category “empire” by historians. To what extent did it matter that the French state did not “think like an empire”? And how to interpret the absence of a formal inscription of empire in French constitutional texts? Did that make it less “real”? Did this absence of constitutional recognition impact colonial projects in the longue durée, as well as the process of decolonization? These questions call for a truly comparative study of the different valences of the term empire, especially in French and British constitutional histories, rather  The Absent Empire The Colonies in French Constitutions emmanuelle saada England is an Empire; Germany, a country—a race, France is a person. —jules michelet, Tableau de la France,  than the short account I can provide here. In addition, the subfields of constitutional and colonial history have yet to meet in the French case—in contrast to the rich tradition of scholarship on this point in the British and American cases.4 So, this essay cannot pretend to answer all these questions and has a more modest aim: it will describe the political and constitutional trajectory of the term empire in the French case and suggest two hypotheses about its impact on the “eclipse” of the French empire. First, the absence of an imperial constitutional tradition left a large space for experimentation after World War II, at a moment when international and national political changes pressed for a reinvention of colonial politics. One of the options on the table was that of what one might call a “noncolonial empire”—a more egalitarian federation.5 This project failed, but it could have become one of the “metamorphoses” evoked by Alfred McCoy in the introduction to this volume. Second, in the longue durée of French imperialism , legal exception led to the construction of a relatively autonomous sphere of colonial politics, quite untouched by democratic principles. All too often this sphere reproduced itself after the end of French formal sovereignty, especially in West Africa. To some extent, the deep-seated denial of empire facilitated continued imperial domination beyond decolonization. An Empire without a Name The language and representation of empire have been relatively absent in France for most the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here I am not making a claim, à la Bernard Porter, about the low “impact” of colonial projects on metropolitan economy, society, politics, and culture.6 A large body of historical work now exists that convincingly points to the contrary, especially for the long twentieth century, starting in the s. The ideological and economic dimensions of this “feedback effect” have been the object of French historians’ attention for quite some time.7 An abundance of more recent research has made clear that after  French culture—both “high” and “popular”—was impacted by colonization .8 These effects reached the heart of “everyday life” in France, even in the rural working classes.9 In addition to this colonial “impact” literature, the imperial nature of France has also been the object of recent...

Share