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3. An Uncertain Idea of France
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3 A N U N C E R TA I N I D E A O F F R A N C E L Mais dans tous les camps la vérité et la justice éclatent moins à mon regard que l’erreur et l’injustice: il est injuste d’excuser chez les uns les crimes que vous condamnez chez les autres. (“Paris, dimanche octobre ,” BN II, ) [But on all sides, truth and justice jump out at me less than error and injustice: it is wrong to condone the crimes of some people while condemning the same crimes committed by others.] The Bloc-notes emerged out of the relative obscurity of the rather exclusive literary readership of La Table Ronde and into the national limelight when Mauriac decided to join Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud and the rest of the editorial team of the weekly news magazine L’Express in November . Mauriac strongly supported Pierre Mendès France’s efforts to conduct a peaceful decolonization of Indochina, Morocco, and Tunisia, then went on to speak out forcefully against torture and oppression in Algeria. The colonial conflicts touched his keen sense of national identity by calling into question the underlying notions of civilization and history. We must therefore explain how this moral and ideological crisis engaged both Mauriac’s approach to the past and the national sentiment operative in his editorials. Far from idiosyncratic, Mauriac’s quandary is symptomatic of a larger upheaval: national liberation movements in several colonies challenged France’s self-image and international stature, and the Algerian war drew French intellectuals of all persuasions into fierce polemical battles over what they claimed to be the true values and identity of their nation.1 Raoul Girardet points out that, in the hearts and minds of those on all sides of the debate in France, nationalism heavily influenced both the inception and liquidation of the colonial enterprise that stretched from the regime of Jules Ferry in the s to the signing of the “Accords d’Évian” in .2 Interestingly, Mauriac’s life spans the entire period, whose beginning and end were each characterized by an acute crisis of his country’s national identity and international stature: the France of Jules Ferry was still suffering from the humiliation of , the ensuing civil strife, and the amputation of the Alsace-Lorraine regions , while the France of the s had to confront both the bipolar hegemony of the cold war relegating it to the status of a secondary power and the bloody colonial conflicts leading to the disintegration of its empire. In , the year of Mauriac’s birth, Jules Ferry was exhorting his compatriots to embark on a great enterprise of colonial expansion. Without reviewing the entirety of his often-cited speech before the Chambre des Députés (the national assembly) on July , we should observe that the nationalism infusing Ferry’s exhortation was based on an acute sense of history and national identity, the latter deriving from the former. Simply stated, Ferry expresses the familiar notion of France as the torchbearer of civilization, a beacon of enlightenment, progress, and liberty that he—and he is of course hardly an exception— sees shining throughout France’s illustrious past, legitimating its foreign conquests, and illuminating the path to the future, as France fulfills its “mission civilisatrice” (civilizing mission) and lives up to the grandeur that has always been its trademark. Thus it was obvious, at least to Ferry and doubtless to the great majority of his colleagues, .l.l. qu’on ne pouvait pas proposer à la France un idéal politique conforme à celui des nations comme la libre Belgique et comme la Suisse républicaine; qu’il faut autre chose à la France: qu’elle ne peut pas être seulement un pays libre; qu’elle doit être aussi un grand pays, exerçant A N U N C E R T A I N I D E A O F F R A N C E L . Jean-Pierre Rioux, “La guerre d’Algérie dans l’histoire des intellectuels français,” in La guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français (Paris: Editions Complexes, ), –. . Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France (Paris: La Table Ronde, ), –. [3.15.225.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:20 GMT) sur les destinées de l’Europe toute l’influence qui lui appartient, qu’elle doit répandre cette influence sur le monde, et porter partout où elle le peut sa langue...