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 Massacre and Restoration On the night of  June , an angry mob surged through the streets of Marseille baying for Egyptian blood. The pogrom had begun as a settling of political scores with the Bonapartists, who had dominated this royalist stronghold under the Empire, and again during the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return to power from his exile on Elba. But it rapidly took on a racial cast. Intoxicated by violence, the crowd accompanying the royalist militias began to focus their fury upon easier targets, those whose color or dress marked them out as guilty. Within hours, dozens lay butchered in the streets and in the sea at the edge of the town. The killing lasted for more than a day, taking on the rhythm of systematic destruction. The Egyptian village of the cours Gouffé was burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt. If events seemed to be moving too fast for the authorities to control, this pogrom, like so many others throughout modern history, could not have unfolded without their collaboration, passive or active. When Marseille fell quiet at last, the new regime sought to efface the nasty memory of its violent beginnings by blaming the victims. The town authorities incarcerated hundreds “for their own protection,” while leaving the murderers to walk free in the streets. If, in the years that followed, the events of the massacre gained some notoriety as a political weapon used by Bonapartists against the restored Bourbon monarchy, when the opposition acceded to power once again this uncomfortable memory of racial violence in France passed into silence, becoming nothing more than a footnote in official history. The period that unfolded from the beginning of  was an extraordinarily difficult one for many people in France. In April, the military failure of the Napoleonic regime became evident, and the emperor abdicated, leaving the way  open for a British-backed restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The later months of  saw the initial mise en place of the new Restoration regime under Louis XVIII, governed by a relatively hastily assembled charter whose status— whether it was a true constitution or a benevolent dispensation by the monarch— was never fully clear for the next decade and a half.1 But the exile of Napoleon to the island of Elba, intended to minimize the divisions in France, left him in a position to exploit the failure of the monarchy to consolidate its support across the country. Napoleon’s landing on the Mediterranean coast in March  led to a period of one hundred days that would destabilize the political structure of the nation. Many of those who had initially pledged themselves to the reestablished “legitimacy” of the Bourbons, including many of the liberals who were seduced by Napoleon’s apparent enthusiasm for ideas he had previously proscribed, now changed camps for the second time.2 But the “liberal Empire” turned out to be a short-lived illusion, and the defeat at Waterloo saw Bonaparte the “usurper” exiled more securely to Saint Helena, where he died in . The problem of the Restoration, as many historians have observed, was primarily one of forgetting. The Charter of  forbade all “investigation into opinions or votes given prior to the Restoration.”3 But the rapid changes of allegiance over the months that followed made such mandated forgetting impossible and opened just the space of recriminatory violence the first Restoration had hoped to forestall . As Alan Spitzer has observed, “In no era in modern French history, save possibly the post-Vichy era, have past political commitments been recollected with such ferocious intensity.”4 Those who changed allegiance with dizzying rapidity were satirized as girouettes, or weathervanes, that pointed wherever the prevailing wind was blowing. In the frontispiece of César Proisy d’Eppe’s Dictionnaire des girouettes, a figure decorated with the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix SaintLouis , the tricolor rosette and the Bourbon insignia, was shown signing up to a rotating windmill of political commitments. Below this figure, a proverb from a Persian poet, Saahdi, declared cynically: “If the plague gave pensions, the plague too would have its toadies and flatterers.”5 This piece of “Oriental” wisdom could not have been more applicable to the position of the Arab population in France. Relying on state pensions for their survival, they were indissolubly bound to the center of power as its “toadies and flatterers.” At the same time, the Arab presence in France was inevitably connected to a single regime, even to a single man...

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