A French Ellis Island? Museums, Memory and History in France and the United States

Can a museum save the suburbs? When the poor neighbourhoods of the French banlieues, peopled by immigrants and their children (French-born, French citizens), erupted in riots in November 2005, the planners of the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (CNHI), could well ask the question. If one of the purposes of the projected national museum of immigration history is to solidify the social contract, or, as the Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres said recently, to play 'un rôle de tout premier plan . . . pour maintenir et faire vivre le pacte qui unit nos concitoyens entre eux', this may be a tall order.¹ Besides the political agenda behind the project, to which I will return, the pertinent question for historians seems to be why now? After two centuries of immigration to France, three decades of historiography on the subject and twenty years of museum projects, at a time when the impoverished suburbs have erupted, when the sans-papiers (undocumented immigrants) continue to make headline news and when debates over history and memory and France's colonial past have surged, why have the French decided to commemorate their immigrant ancestors now? More generally, why do questions of memory arise at certain moments and not at others? History, historiography, and memory are not identical; each has its own timeline. But they are not entirely disconnected.

Ellis Island has at times been invoked in France as a museum to emulate. A very early French 'mission' of historians went there to investigate.² I would like to take up the Franco-American comparison here, both with regard to history and especially to its representation through museums. The French frequently compare their country to the United States, often lamenting a French lag with regard to things American. In a rhetoric of comparison from Tocqueville to the present, 'America' has been called upon as an example to follow – or to avoid at all costs. American immigration history more generally has been pointed to as proof that the history of immigration can and should be part of France's history, as in the United States. I have argued elsewhere that the French invocation of American immigration history has frequently 'flattened' the latter, assuming erroneously that immigration has been a constant of American history, historiography and memory, and remaining impervious to the great oscillations of its periods of welcome and those of rejection.³ However, the 'use' of another model is produced by and for those using it. I explore the Ellis Island and CNHI projects here not so much to question the (limited) rhetorical value of the former for the latter but as a way of examining issues of history, memory, and amnesia through an exploration of the choices taken in museum-making.

Ellis Island, from Gulls and Oysters to Tourists⁴

The history of Ellis Island, whether as entry-point for twelve million immigrants to the United States between 1892 and 1954,⁵ or as a new port of entry for the memory of migration in the United States today, is little known in France. And I daresay the link between the island's history and its memorialization is also less linear than most visitors to the Ellis Island museum suspect. Ellis-the-Island is a classic example of changing use over time and the ever-changing relationship of memory to history. The story of its opening, its closing, and its reopening as a museum is that of a multitude of decisions – political, economic – that mark changing perceptions about immigration, ranging from praise to indifference to political calculations to nostalgia.

The first owners of the island were of course Native American Indians, who called it Kioshk or Gull Island after its principal visitors. When the Dutch settled in New Amsterdam, it was used for picnics and renamed Oyster Island. After the English in turn chased away the Dutch it became known as Gibbet Island, since pirates were hanged there. The island ultimately became private property, and its first recorded owner, in the late eighteenth century, was a Mr Samuel Ellis...