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  • Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age
  • Sophie Meunier
Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age. By Herman Lebovics (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004) 240 pp. $29.95

The reasons why France has made headlines in recent years in the United States may seem incomprehensible to many Americans. How could a sheep-farmer who destroyed a McDonalds become a national hero? Why, if not out of ungratefulness, would the French government lead an international cabal to undermine American foreign policy? How could a democratic state forbid its citizens from wearing religious displays, if this is what their faith demands? All of these apparently disjointed French peculiarities stem from the central question of Lebovics' [End Page 113] lively new book: What does it mean to be French today and what constitutes France's shared national heritage?

The book proceeds to answer these questions by examining sequentially five ways in which the nature of French national identity has been challenged in recent decades. The interesting first chapter, "Gardarem lo Larzac!", examines the birth of the antiglobalization movement in France avant la lettre by focusing on the struggle of ecologists, pacifists, and urban leftists in the early 1970s to promote regionalism in a highly centralized country and to link their regional struggle with the anti-imperialist decolonization movements of the 1960s. The second chapter delves more deeply into that link by exploring how France implemented an activist cultural policy in response to the erosion of its colonial empire. Through a fascinating focus on a Corsican civil servant named Emile Biasini, Lebovics recounts how successive governments used cultural instruments in order to pursue the country's mission civilisatrice within the borders of continental France.

In the third chapter, the author develops the idea of patrimoine—a word difficult to translate with precision—conveying the sense of a shared national legacy, by focusing on internal conflicts and reforms within the field of ethnology. Chapter 4 examines the effect of multiculturalism on the traditional concepts of an indivisible republic and universal rights, and it questions whether France's culture and polity have been updated to become pluralistic. The last chapter focuses on the recent "dance of the museums" to approach the question of what is distinct about France—what the French like to refer to as their national exceptionalism.

Bringing the Empire Back Home is, in a way, a tour de force. Through its lively narrative, it succeeds in painting a complex portrait of contemporary French identity and of the tools that socially and politically construct it. The book is particularly strong in showing how the current struggle to contest globalization arose from the interplay between French cultural policy and decolonization, and from the fact that the French centralized model manifests itself in all walks of life—from controlling academic curricula to deciding on the content of museums' collections.

Yet Lebovics' methodology, based on a juxtaposed narrative of five different challenges to French identity, leaves something to be desired. First, the focus of certain chapters on individuals and others on institutions seems to lack any underlying logic. Why not, for instance, pick an important actor in each of these five areas to illustrate the evolution of French identity? This consistency might facilitate the analytical leap from narrative to explanation, as well as to political implications, which introduces a second weakness of this book. Some of the paradoxical developments in contemporary French politics are not foreshadowed by the recent history as told by Lebovics: Why is the moderate right increasingly gaining the favor of the immigrants and the beurs (a variation of the French term, arabe)? Why is Jacobin republicanism a value of the [End Page 114] left, preventing the emergence of affirmative action and "positive discrimination"? Why has President Chirac, a conservative, become a national and international herald of anti-globalization, at least in rhetoric?

The strongest reservation about this otherwise interesting book is that it does not discuss the construction and constant reactive reconstruction of French national identity. What it means to be French is also partly defined by what it means not to be French. France's exceptionalism emerges largely in opposition to the perceived flaws...

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