Reconceptualizing the Republic: Diversity and Education in France, 1945-2008

Since the nineteenth century, France, not unlike the United States, has experienced signicant immigration and, as a result, great flux. Yet, the French public discourse and policy instruments concerned with ethnic and racial diversities evolved in sharp contrast to those in the United States. Whereas U.S. nationbuilding incorporated the recognition of ethnoracial identities, with all of its trials and tribulations, the French nation's trajectory assumed a unitary form. Recent developments, however, point to changes in the Republic's projection of its identity and its citizenry. An analysis of school teaching finds that the Republic is now re-envisioned as open and tolerant of diversity, though more from a universalistic, normative perspective—increasingly indexed at the transnational level—than from a perspective that privileges France's immigrant and colonial past.