L' «Empire palimpseste»: L'exemple des annees trente dans le Limousin

This study of the colonial idea in Limousin was inspired by the pioneering work of Raoul Girardet in 1972. Yet as the product of another time, influenced by micro-history and cultural history as well, it focuses on the circulation and appropriation of the colonial idea in a particular French province. Close attention to local conditions of reception, material and ideological, together with a chronological focus on the 1930s, makes it possible to see the sometimes conflicting nature of imperial and regional goals; this contradiction tended to be obscured in earlier French colonial historiography, which presented only the viewpoint from Paris.