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32 The impossible revision of France’s History (1968–2006) suzanne Citron acollaborative book published in 2005, La Fracture coloniale, emphasized the role of the “national narrative” in the French reluctance to recognize alterity.1 The debates surroundingthelawofFebruary23,2005,whichhighlighted the “positive ” role of French colonization, resulted in a media frenzy regarding the issues at stake and their implication for the national narrative, what it says and what it does not say, in other words its very transmission. Will the memorial brouhaha and the uproar of historians finally end with a rereading of our past? a Pluralistic France or a Gallic France? after the algerian War, pedagogical trends were developed under the influence of a generation of policy makers and educators who had lived through the occupation , liberation, and anticolonial struggles, and who were critical of the scholastic institution and the knowledge it promoted. Therefore, at the now forgotten national conference of amiens in 1968, an educational goal consisting of “accepting the other as other” was developed, along with the idea that the crisis of educating the young was a “national crisis.”2 in the wake of May 1968, cultural alterity became an important rallying point. in the words of Morvan lebesque, himself a Breton: “When a Breton demands even the slightest cultural recognition for his region, he encounters the argument that this would be a return to tribalism, a specifically colonialist term which assimilates barbarians into a structured and civilized country—a historic country.”3 He is outraged by the fact that lobotomized by official History, millions of little Bretons, Basques, occitans, Catalans—and for a time, africans, algerians, indochinese—were transformed into one block of adopted children, with Clovis as their grandfather and Jeanne d’arc as their older sister. [ . . . ] My ancestors were not your Gauls; but they would have me born of vercingétorix, and crying over alésia; one fictional lineage after another, from Merovingians to Carolingians, from Capetians to valois. [ . . . ] i patiently recited a genealogy that was not my own.4 at the same time, robert laffont, fighting for true regionalism, published an Histoire d’Occitanie with andré armangaud, which soon went out of circulation. The 411 412 | Citron linguistic imperialism of the revolution was also brought to light in a publication that commented on the relationship between the abbé Grégoire and the French revolution and patois.5 educators at the university of Paris 7 held an amorphous group of debates known as the Forum histoire, at which they broached the topic of the crisis of “history at school” and the effects of the algerian War. However, in the decades that followed, the issue of colonialism as an integral part of France’s history—and thus inseparable from the construction of this history—was never seriously considered by political entities (on the right or the left), nor by historians in any of their places of influence, not excepting the proponents of “new history.” a new society, a sacrosanct national narrative during this era, society continued to change, and in ways that led to questions about its present and future. The dramatic arrival of pieds-noirs and the families of Harkis on metropolitan soil, the immigration of north africans and africans, and the arrival of West indians, engendered a new visibility of ethnic and cultural differences. a generation of children—descendents of formerly colonized parents—born in France began to emerge, thanks to immigration policies promoting family reunification. a new word was even coined to symbolize them their status “between” two worlds: beurs.6 The summer of 1981 rang from the shock of joyrides and burnt cars in dilapidated ZuP housing projects like the lyon suburb of Minguettes. The electoral success of the Front national, which culminated in 1984, could be seen as a xenophobic reaction to these events. Meanwhile, traditional antiracist movements, like sos racisme, which had recently appeared in high schools, and the league of teachers debated the new diversity in French society and the meaning of intercultural secularism. in the 1990s, sociologists and political scientists explored racist France and the France of foreigners, and questioned the limits and potential of multiculturalism for France. and history? The sacrosanct national narrative, which the Front national exploited in its rhetoric— the Français de souche (those of pure French stock), Gallic ancestry, Charles Martel , the Crusades, and the like—remained resistant to criticism.7 However, the blatant contradictions between France’s “mythological” history, as illustrated in schoolbooks that continued to base themselves on the Third...

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