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Reviewed by:
  • La Fracture coloniale
  • Pascale De Souza
Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire . La Fracture coloniale. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Pp. i + 311. Price: 20 euros.

As its title indicates, La Fracture coloniale explores the fracture historique that occurred in the early 1960s as France lost most of its colonies and entered the post-colonial era. However, unlike in Great-Britain or the USA where post-colonial studies have emerged as a dynamic field of exploration, the French fracture remains under-explored, especially with respect to its impact on current issues such as the integration of minorities, the concept of francophonie or France's foreign policy. The exploration provided in La Fracture coloniale spans a period from the nineteenth century, with the independence of Haiti and the emergence of a humanist ideal contradicted by the reality of penal settlements and discriminatory laws, to the twenty-first century, as new or revamped museums no longer showcase la France de l'autre but apparently celebrate une autre France. The editors fully live up to their devoir de mémoire as they and their guest contributors help France emerge from its current amnesia or repressed memories.

The first eleven essays gathered under the heading "Histoire coloniale et enjeux de mémoire" explore France and its republican ideals, the independence of Haiti, the war in Algeria, the overseas remnants of French utopia, the genesis and history of the affaire du foulard, the enduring occultation of post-colonial history both in research and high school curricula, the opening of new museums in Paris, the emergence of new debates and the attempts to 'rehabilitate' colonial history through a revision of textbooks. This first part aptly concludes with an interview of the historian Mac Ferro who has through numerous publications challenged some taboos related to suppressed colonial memories.

The second set of eleven essays entitled "République, intégrisme et postcolonialisme" is more focused on contemporary France and its complex identities. Articles explore how France's inability to go from colonial power to cosmopolitanism accounts for some of its most glaring failures in foreign (African) policy, and they analyze the current rifts in French society as the melting-pot of medieval times gives way to the current fragmented mosaic pulling apart along racial lines. The representations of Arab France as divided between the threat of a veiled Marianne and the image of a fully assimilated beur préfet, the enduring discrimination against French people of colonial parentage, the suburban ghettoization, the ongoing need to see the other anew, the divided allegiance of French soccer fans as they root for France… or their country of origin, all these themes point to a need to decolonize imaginary constructs by drawing upon surveys such as the one conducted by the university of Toulouse. As Arnauld Le Brusq concludes in the epilogue, France has progressed from its Palais des Colonies firmly ensconcing colonies into stultified and stupefied stereotypes to its Cité Nationale de l'histoire de la migration, and yet the latter's slogan remains "Leur histoire est notre histoire." Such us-versus-them approaches to French (post-)colonial history remain pervasive… and persuasive, and they call for the publication of other essays exploring La Fracture coloniale.

Pascale De Souza
SAIS–Johns Hopkins University
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