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17 Colonizing, educating, Guiding A Republican Duty Françoise vergès it is easy to mock colonial propaganda from today’s perspective. For us, who are accustomed to integrationist discourse, who have been taught to reject racial rhetoric, it seems easy to reject the system of signs—the images, the modes of representation, the discourse—from the colonial empire. only those nostalgic for the colonial past—those whom we openly ridicule and stigmatize—persist in using terms from a dated lexicon, in which nostalgia and resentment, regret and rancor come together. However, one would have to be blind to think that colonial discourse had not deeply penetrated French society and culture. as we know, memory, be it that of groups or of individuals, is not linear; it does not strictly respect the chronology of events; rather, it gives them a more complex meaning, a higher density of signs. History is not simply a distant object for our interpretation , a thing to which we give meaning, but is intimately linked to the lived experiences of groups and individuals whose destinies intertwine. The memories of groups and individuals confront each other; they get layered over one another. The past reasserts itself; it becomes a polemical issue in the unveiling of traumatic events. The algerian War erupted onto the political, juridical, and historic scene, and thereby upset the order of a hegemonic narrative—and this was for the better . However, it is worth asking to what extent the attention given this war serves to mask the realities of colonialism itself. to what extent does it contribute to a general amnesia about that violence and marginalize the issue concerning the desire to make this territory “an extension of France,” a land destined “to be populated by europeans?”1 What remains of the Colonies? Could the empire, such as it was depicted for years to children and adults, have disappeared, have been miraculously erased by simple decree? are we to believe that the notion of a “civilizing mission” died on a night in March 1962, when the last French colonial war came to an end? Can we seriously believe that the rhetoric and the image of the civilizing mission now have no effect on our mentality, on our 250 Colonizing, Educating, Guiding | 251 ways of understanding the world?2 it is difficult, but we must work to understand how, though indirectly and without our having any immediate contact with colonization , colonial ideology has shaped dispositions, mentalities. We must work to understand why this ideology was so easily accepted, so “banal.” Why it was so easy to sweep the crimes of colonization off to the margins of history, to the depths of our conscience. and we must especially delve into the ways in which the rhetoric of the civilizing mission continues to have an influence over the present. When the past reasserts itself into the present, we must be able to understand it in all its density, all its complexity. Without moralizing judgment, nor with any slack when it comes to moral and political responsibility, nor with undue relativizing. to review the notion of the “civilizing mission,” which was at the heart of colonial thought, is not simply a historical exercise. let us recall victor Hugo, a republican figure par excellence, a hero of revolutionary ideals, a man staked against the usurper napoleon iii. in 1841, victor Hugo, writing on the conquest of algeria , proclaimed: “it is civilization winning out over barbarism. it is an enlightened people finding another people in darkness. We are the Greeks of the world; it is our duty to enlighten the world.” The statement is unambiguously commensurate with colonial republican discourse: civilization against barbarism, the enlightenment against obscurantism. France’s generosity had set forth a clear mission. The republic thus gave its adherents a mission to accomplish: that of propagating the good word. The civilizing mission was multifaceted in nature: it was thought to be humanitarian, it had an ideology of assimilation, it justified colonial intervention . Colonial conquest was undertaken in the very name of republican principles . The republic and nostalgia it is, of course, impossible to speak of a logical continuity between colonial France and contemporary France. However, the trace, the echo, of the colonial saga remains present today. it would be foolish to believe that embittered racists and old colonials were the only ones affected. The impact of the colonial can take other forms than regret for lost grandeur. one sees it in the role that France has come...

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