France's Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative

Introduction

The Postcolonial Nation

¹

FIONA BARCLAY

We live in an era of commemoration. Thirty years after Pierre Nora made the claim in his magisterial work, Les Lieux de mémoire, it is no less true; indeed, the new millennium may be seen as heralding a high point in memorialisation.² This volume contributes to the debates which continue to be conducted around the place of empire in the contemporary life of the French nation, debates that have been underway since the 1990s and that now reach across public life and society with manifestations in the French parliament, media and universities. Remembrance of the past has come to the fore in France as rarely before, driven by the competing memories of the tumultuous events of the twentieth century in which France played a central role, and on which we now reflect from the vantage point of a new millennium. France’s empire and the gradual process of its loss is one of the defining narratives of the contemporary nation, contributing to the construction of its image on the international stage but also, as critics such as Kristin Ross have shown, in less acknowledged domestic contexts.³ While the imperial period is frequently presented as having ended in the decades following the Second World War, arguably culminating in the end of the Algerian war in 1962, for many scholars of the postcolonial the contested legacies of France’s colonies continue to influence the development of French society. With nothing less than the identity of the nation at stake, the question of why and how to remember colonisation and its aftermath has formed a central element in the so-called ‘memory wars’ that have stretched far beyond the discipline of history to touch almost every aspect of contemporary society. As the controversial presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy itself recedes into history, this book aims to survey and take stock of the memorial practices and discourses which are played out in a range of arenas. What are the narratives of empire which endure in the post-colonial period, and what relation do they bear to historical fact? In what ways are memories of the past instrumentalised to further the interests of particular groups? In a society marked by what Michael Rothberg has called ‘multi-directional memory’, what does it mean to speak of an ‘excess of memory’?⁴ Might it lead, if not to amnesia, then to forgetting by way of memorial fatigue? What place is occupied by justice in the battles between competing memory agendas? In exploring these questions and others, this volume draws on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France.

Although, as Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat–Masson point out, the colonial is one of the many historical periods which have, in recent years, been transformed into the battlefields of the ‘memory wars’, it is arguably the site which, in recent years, has given rise to the most virulent controversy.⁵ Yet, in the period immediately following decolonisation, memories of the French empire rarely found a place within the nation’s concerns, as de Gaulle and his successors focused their energies on shaping the modern nation. The much remarked-upon absence of the empire from Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, the seminal work whose enduring influence has made it the starting point for contemporary studies in cultural memory, is one example of its omission from the national narrative.⁶ Given Nora’s own familiarity with colonial Algeria – in 1961 he had published a work entitled Les Français d’Algérie – the absence is the more striking, and his reasoning, discussed by William Kidd in this volume, that the empire was remembered only as ‘grief’ (‘le deuil’) serves to underscore its shadowy existence as a site of loss within the life of the nation, eliding the lived experiences of the thousands who grew up under its rule, for whom the French empire was an inescapably solid reality.

Histories of the present: debating the colonial

If Nora’s work has reflected the ‘official’ tendency to view the colonial period as irrelevant to present-day France, there are a number of social factors which have forced the subject to the fore, transforming the relationship between France’s past and its present into a matter of fierce debate. The climate of hostility which has long surrounded the issue of immigration and, in particular, immigration from the former colonies of the Maghreb, reached a climax in 2002 when the National Front candidate for the presidency, Jean-Marie Le Pen, reached the second round of the presidential elections. The fears held by a section of the population that French society was under threat from ‘immigrants’, many of whom may have been born in France but who were associated with a different culture, religion and values, were stoked by the 2005 riots, which were interpreted in terms of a failure of social cohesion rather than as the consequences of poor educational outcomes and economic opportunities.⁷ The relative successes of the campaigns of activists representing the interests of groups including the pieds-noirs and the harkis have led to the increasing politicisation of the past, as have the demands of anti-racism groups such as the Mouvement des Indigènes de la République discussed in the chapter by Tom Martin in this volume.⁸ The cacophony of competing voices has raised the spectre of ‘communitarianism’, the social phenomenon often associated with the Anglo-Saxon world which is seen to threaten France’s republican tradition and its emphasis on the relationship between state and individual citizen which guarantees equality before the law regardless of race, religion or gender.⁹ The extent of the French population’s fears and the degree of seriousness with which they have been treated by politicians – although always with an eye to public opinion – can be read in the controversies which have taken place around Islam, first through the long-running headscarf affair (1989–2004), and more recently in the ban instituted on the wearing of the burqa in public places, and in the debates around halal meat.

A further factor in the environment of hostility towards colonial memories has been the suspicion with which anglophone postcolonial theory has been greeted by much of the French academy.¹⁰ Despite the fact that postcolonialism draws heavily on French poststructuralist theory, and on the work of francophone writers such as Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, the writings of its central proponents – Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha – have exercised comparatively little influence in the French academy. In part this is because it is only comparatively recently that the work of these English-language theorists has become available in translation, an absence which may have contributed to the general suspicion in France that postcolonialism was nothing more than another manifestation of the Anglo-Saxon tendency towards ‘le politiquement correct’. Such suspicion again raised fears of a latent communitarianism which would privilege ethnicity over the French principles of universalism, here as a consequence of the discipline’s interest in recovering the experiences of colonised peoples. The postcolonial approach has been characterised by its opponents as reinforcing the trend towards an obsession with the putative guilt about the past, a masochistic and impotent state characterised as ‘repentance’.¹¹ Although generally unnamed, the targets include the members of the prolific historical group ACHAC (Association pour la Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine), whose writings seek to engage with France’s past from a postcolonial perspective that would reinstate the range of narratives absent from the historiography, and who argue that, despite the neat chronological division suggested by the nomenclature of the ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ periods, France’s colonising project continues to reverberate in the present.¹² The year 2005 saw what Charles Forsdick has referred to as the ‘postcolonial turn’ in France, with a growing awareness of and interest in issues of postcoloniality.¹³ However, it was followed by the publication of a number of texts openly hostile to the reappraisal of the colonial past, amongst them works by Pascal Bruckner, Daniel Lefeuvre, Max Gallo, Paul-François Paoli and Jean-Pierre Rioux.¹⁴ The titles of some of these – Bruckner’s La tyrannie de la pénitence: Essai sur le masochisme occidental and Paul-François Paoli’s Nous ne sommes pas coupables: Assez de repentances – reveal the self-flagellating nature of the sentiments which the authors believe lie at the heart of the so-called ‘duty to remember’ (‘devoir de mémoire’), at least where it concerns colonialism.

While a number of these writings brought their authors’ names to a wide public, their success might have been much less considerable and the matter remained something of an academic spat had it not been for the pronouncements of the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The reference in his inauguration speech to a singular French identity (‘la France a une identité’) demonstrated the continuation of his hostility towards attempts to recover the alternative readings of the narratives which constitute contemporary France.¹⁵ Shortly before his election, he set out his position:

repentance is a detestable fashion. I do not accept that we should ask sons to atone for the sins of the fathers. I do not accept that the past should be judged through the present’s prejudices. I do not accept that a moralising good consciousness should rewrite history only to accuse the nation. I do not accept the systematic changing of the nation, which is the ultimate form of self-hatred. For a French person, to hate France is to hate oneself . . .¹⁶

Sarkozy’s speech highlights a number of elements germane to the dispute around ‘repentance’. While he, as individual and as president, refuses to accept that the past be judged by contemporary standards, most scholars of cultural memory are clear that our understanding of the past is dependent on the situational factors active in the present.¹⁷ Our memories of the past – what we choose to remember and the narratives we construct – are shaped by our interpretation of present realities. Individuals and collectivities seek to avoid dissonance between their comprehension of the present, with its values and priorities, and their image of the past. In this respect, nations are no different; indeed, the notion that there is what Blanchard refers to as the ‘national paradigm’ is crucial to the construction of a coherent historical narrative.¹⁸ Sarkozy himself hints at this truth in his assertion that, for the French, ‘to hate France is to hate oneself’, which picks up on an earlier reference to Ernest Renan’s speech ‘What is a Nation?’. In it, Renan set out a particular understanding of the French nation, famously declaring that its existence was based on a ‘daily plebiscite’, and describing it as ‘a soul, a spiritual principle’ (the latter expression reprised by Sarkozy).¹⁹ In short, France exists only by virtue of the ongoing accord of the participating citizenry: the people ‘are’ France.

Sarkozy’s ideological framework highlights the Gallic specificity of the debate, which essentially concerns attempts to appropriate the character of contemporary France. The notion that the nation consists of individuals united by shared values, rather than by blood or ethnicity, belongs to the republican tradition whose roots lie in the Revolution of 1789. Whilst the Revolution is popularly associated with notions such as universalism, assimilationism and secularism, the reality is that such terms were often retrospective inventions, part of a revisionist ideology criticised by historians such as Frederick Cooper, which has seen the creation of a modern grand narrative of the French nation.²⁰ The same tradition is also credited with the ideology of France’s ‘civilising mission’ which was used to justify the colonial project. Significantly, however, the importance of the civilising mission is minimised in contemporary debates, precisely in order to downplay the demands of the population whose origins lie in France’s former colonies, and the calls for the acknowledgement of their contribution to the national history. Rather, as in Sarkozy’s speech at Caen, emphasis is placed on the Gaullist myth of ‘eternal France’ (‘la France éternelle’) which stresses the unity and destiny of the nation in the face of the many historical upheavals which it has faced and overcome. This ideology formed the context for Nicolas Sarkozy’s extended and much criticised ‘national debate’ on the nature of French national identity, following his controversial creation of a government Ministry for Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development (2007–10).

The anti-repentants’ rejection of the postcolonial is predicated on a similar interpretation of history that preserves national unity, and the myth that the judicial process of decolonisation concluded the business of the colonial period. Drawing selectively on historical data, writers such as Lefeuvre deny the contribution made by the colonies, in either economic or cultural terms.²¹ A key figure in the debates around memory, Lefeuvre bases his assessment on a relativisation of France’s conduct: whilst admitting that colonial atrocities took place, contributing to the disappearance of 875,000 Algerians during the forty years that followed the conquest of 1830, he argues that they differed little from the violence, including torture, that was perpetrated against French peasants and other Europeans, a position which ignores the lasting influence on France’s popular memory of the torture associated with the colonial wars.²² Moreover, in emphasising the economic shortcomings of colonialism in Algeria, a fact that Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch reminds us has been generally accepted since the publication of Henri Brunschwig’s Mythes et réalités de l’impérialisme français in 1960, Lefeuvre dismisses the contribution made by France’s empire to its international prestige, and the affective attachment of sections of the French population, to French Algeria in particular, which ensured the longevity of colonialism.²³

Based on a simplified interpretation of the data, Lefeuvre’s overarching argument denies the significance of the empire: since the colonies contributed nothing to the eternal French nation, the Hexagon lost nothing and was barely affected by the act of decolonisation. From this perspective, opposed by writers as diverse as Arjun Appadurai and Kristin Ross, decolonisation ceases to be a process and is reduced to a single judicial act, the stroke of a pen by which any minor colonial influence felt by metropolitan France was definitively swept away.²⁴ The signal moment in this paradigm is the Evian Accords which concluded the Algerian war and brought to an end France’s colonial aspirations, putatively allowing de Gaulle to turn the page on the chapter of empire in favour of a new Eurocentric future. The historical significance of the end of the Algerian war – Frederick Cooper has identified it as the moment at which France ‘became a nation-state . . ., when it gave up its attempt to keep Algeria French, and tried for a time to redefine itself as a singular citizenry in a single territory’ – is such that a section of this volume is devoted to its examination.²⁵ The consequent vision was of a Hexagon whose geographical borders constituted a closed and bounded space, separated from the colonies whose history traced a parallel trajectory.²⁶ Interpreting the Evian Accords as a moment of rupture has allowed the anti-repentants to reject any suggestion of a colonial legacy identifiable in contemporary France, despite the presence of millions of French citizens whose origins lie in the colonies. To speak of loss in connection with the colonies is, therefore, as meaningless as is the notion of repentance for deeds committed during the colonial period.

The question of whether France has an obligation to ‘repent’ (whatever that may signify) acquires a hard-edged significance in the context of the introduction of a series of so-called ‘memorial laws’. Beginning in 1998, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery drew attention to what Charles Forsdick has called the ‘inadequacy’ of national narratives of the colonial past.²⁷ In May 2001, the Taubira Law, designating slavery as a ‘crime against humanity’, was approved. As Nicola Frith discusses in the final chapter, it proved to be an indication of the state’s growing interest in influencing the representation of historical narrative, and a forerunner to the controversial fourth clause of the 23 February 2005 law, which set out the responsibility of teachers to present ‘the positive role of the French presence in its overseas territories, particularly in North Africa’.²⁸ Although the latter clause was later retracted, the two cases demonstrate the danger, voiced by Claude Liauzu, of an official trend away from academic debate and towards the judicialisation of history, resulting in a monolithic narrative of the past which denies the possibility that history might be seen from the multiple perspectives of French citizens of varying origins.²⁹

The creation by Sarkozy of a Ministry for Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development – an act which resulted in widespread protest and the resignation of eight members of the Conseil Scientifique of the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI) – appeared to offer confirmation. However, as the final section of this book reveals, Sarkozy’s policies regarding history have been less consistent and more opportunistic than his apparently clear-cut statements on the undesirability of ‘repentance’ would indicate. Two initiatives launched early in his presidency appeared to contradict his rejection of moves to recuperate aspects of the past; both, however, were received as partisan and generated a storm of criticism, with the directive, at the outset of his presidency, that the final letter of seventeen-year-old résistant Guy Môquet be read annually at the start of the school year proving only marginally less controversial than his suggestion in February 2008 that ten-year-olds be entrusted with the memory of one of the 11,000 French Jewish children who died following deportation.³⁰ In both cases, he was accused, not unreasonably, of the instrumentalisation of history for political ends.³¹ It is an accusation against which Sarkozy’s successor, François Hollande, has been careful to guard. In his most direct intervention to date, a speech delivered to the Algerian parliament on 20 December 2012 as part of the commemorations surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, he was at pains to distance himself from any suggestion of ‘repentance’ or ‘excuses’, instead recognising the sufferings inflicted by the colonial system, and emphasising the importance of ‘la verité’. Yet, despite its apparent emphasis on objectivity, Hollande’s speech included an implicit challenge to the established narratives of both the French left and the Algerian authorities: as Eric Conan noted, the usual anti-colonial references of Sartre and Fanon were overlooked in favour of figures including Georges Clémenceau, André Mandouze and Germaine Tillion, whilst his invocation of Messali Hadj as the father of Algerian nationalism might also be read as provocative.³² Whilst understandably focused on treading a path between the battlelines in the memory wars, Hollande’s intervention indicates an openness – literal, in his call for access to historical archives – to looking beyond the established historical narrative which may mark a depart ure from the instrumentalisation of the Sarkozy years.

Remembering the past: pitfalls and obligations

But if history should not be instrumentalised or judicialised, how should the past be remembered? The complexity of the field is such that it calls for a continued self-awareness from those engaged in its analysis. In the post-colonial context, history has bequeathed us what Ann Stoler calls ‘imperial debris’, a reference to the persistent traces of the colonial period which continue to underpin many of the structures of thought of the putative postcolonial present.³³ The charge that Stoler levels at postcolonial studies, which she regards as guilty of a certain smug self-congratulation based on the assumption that the nature of colonial governance is now a given, is to some degree the flipside of Lefeuvre’s approach to the past: his work shares what is in Stoler’s view a simplified and conflating approach to the complexities of colonialism and its afterlives, in which the conclusions about a particular historical circumstance are sometimes generalised and transferred to quite different geographical or temporal situations. Stoler is critical of the productiveness of rubrics such as ‘colonial legacy’, seeing them as failing to capture the evasiveness of imperial formations past and present, and the practices in which different peoples are forced to engage in an effort to extricate themselves from a maleficent influence. While, as its title might suggest, this volume is more sympathetic to the notion of colonial legacies, particularly in a context in which, as we have seen, a concerted effort has been made to deny the existence of any such legacy, it acknowledges nonetheless the need to engage with the historical specificities of colonial policy and context which have led to the construction of particular narratives of the past, memorial processes which in turn continue to shape and limit the lived experiences of individuals and groups decades after the end of empire. Without an understanding of the complex and intersecting variables that constitute our narratives of the past, this volume argues, we are poorly placed to discern their lasting effects.

Discussion of the roots of historical narrative brings us to the contested ground between history and memory.³⁴ If many historians are adamant that the past should not be alchemised into state monolith, the proliferation of voices from minority groups has been widely regarded with concern. There are a number of factors that have contributed to the increase in memory work. As Benjamin Stora has argued, and as Henry Rousso’s work on Vichy has taught us, after a period of dramatic social upheaval a period of silence must elapse before the stories and wounds of the past can be faced.³⁵ Aided by elements such as laws of amnesty, this silence easily tips into amnesia and the construction of myths that bear little relation to the events which occurred, but that veil the rawness of lived experiences. Since the publication of Rousso’s Le Syndrome de Vichy, the question of the amnesia and repression surrounding traumatic aspects of the past has been a central element of discussions of national memory, inspiring numerous studies of which Anne Donadey’s work on the afterlives of the Algerian war is one of the most influential.³⁶ While, as Joanna Warson argues in her chapter in this book, colonial amnesia persists in certain domains, there are grounds to believe that the era of repression is nearing its end. The trials of individuals such as Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier and, of particular relevance to the colonial period, Maurice Papon have had the effect of uncovering episodes conveniently forgotten, as did the pronouncements about the use of torture in Algeria by Jacques Massu and Paul Aussaresses. The popularity of testimonial narratives over the last two decades is testament to the fact that many of the actors who played a role in the major events of the twentieth century are approaching old age, and so feel a heightened sense of urgency in recording and communicating their experiences. The increasing number of memoirs written by the conscripts who served in Algeria serves to illustrate the way in which the expression of hitherto uncommunicated individual memories now segues into historical narrative. Moreover, the evolution from interrupted mourning, through repression and amnesia to an eventual state of obsession has been accelerated by the development of broadcast and ‘new’ media. The proliferation of television documentaries and, increasingly, Internet sites dedicated to overlooked aspects of the past has rendered amnesia about the past almost impossible. Nonetheless, as the chapters by Iain Mossman and Jenny Mullen demonstrate with regard to France and Algeria respectively, the presence and influence of discourses around colonial events guarantees nothing of their veracity; as Etienne Balibar has noted, the developing tendency towards discussion of colonial history does not necessarily lead to recovery from it, but may simply mark a masked process of recolonisation.³⁷

The recovery of memory may be a necessary first step in rethinking our relationship to the past, but Tzvetan Todorov, amongst others, has emphasised the much greater importance of the use to which that memory is put. He warns against the tendency towards the judicialisation of the past, claiming that if legislation is used to construct a wall between us and those guilty of evil – in other words, as a means of cleansing society by removing from it the source of contagion – we are prevented from confronting past evils because they are construed as something outside of ourselves, as fundamentally inhuman rather than as a perversion of human nature.³⁸ Instead, we are encouraged to identify with the heroes and innocent victims, rather than to acknowledge that, given suitable circumstances, the potential for evil is an intrinsic part of our humanity. For him, to fail to examine the circumstances and motivations which give rise to evil acts, and to acknowledge that they are committed by unexceptional human beings rather than monsters, is to open the way for a cycle of repetition.

The propensity for legislation to promote self-identification as victims works against attempts to derive a constructive understanding of the ‘devoir de mémoire’. Whilst remembering the past may be vital if reparations, symbolic or material, are to be obtained for past injustices, it nonetheless risks seguing into a range of what Todorov calls ‘abuses of memory’. In her chapter Jenny Mullen discusses the case of contemporary Algeria, in which a particular narrative of the Algerian war has been fashioned and presented as the official historiography of the nation, developing certain discourses, such as the ‘martyrdom’ of those who died for Algeria, which have been instrumentalised for political gain and, in the process, silencing competing or conflicting memories of the war, so that what remains is a highly stylised, ideologically driven version of the past. Under different circumstances, groups struggling for acknowledgement and recognition of their experiences under colonialism can become caught and fixed in their self-defined role as victims, with past suffering serving to unite them in their shared identity yet preventing them from moving on into a productive future.³⁹ William Kidd’s chapter on the pieds-noirs is exemplary in this regard. As a consequence, the recollections of controversial events can be viewed as a diverse mosaic of conflicting and contradictory memories that, rather than enabling the construction of a common or shared narrative, serve only to stifle dialogue and maintain old and entrenched divisions.

When memory becomes an arena of competing interests, little movement is possible. For this reason, Todorov warns against an excess of memory in which a monolithic narrative – it may be fashioned and imposed by officialdom, or relentlessly propounded by a minority group desperate to have its voice heard – is put forward to the exclusion of all other narratives. Consequently, individual negotiations with the past become trapped in what becomes a sterile cycle of repetition, one which offers no promise of progress or redemption and which condemns subjects to perpetual victim-hood or to eternal attempts at reparations. Instead, he calls for a model of ‘exemplary memory’, in which memories of the past are applied to develop an understanding of new circumstances, in a move which he claims is ‘potentially liberating’.⁴⁰ Paul Ricoeur shares his perspective, emphasising the unevenness of the memorial landscape, which contains ‘an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses of memory – and of forgetting’.⁴¹ His admonition that ‘[t]he duty of memory is the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self’ highlights the need, voiced also by Jacques Derrida, to approach episodes of the past not as a victim seeking redress for personal wrongs but with the aim of universal justice in mind.⁴² In each the sense of a ‘duty to remember’ is extended to an ethical obligation to find a proper relation to traumatic memory.

A view on the memorial landscape

This is the context which frames this volume and shapes its focus. Against the cacophony of conflicting views, it aims to reflect the fundamental unevenness of the memorial landscape, for if the various perspectives sketched above lead us to believe that there is a ‘proper’ way of relating to the imperial past and its injustices, the metaphor, however unfortunate, of the ‘memory wars’ reminds us that battles are rarely one sided, and that progress is subject to setbacks, with ground being gained and lost while other previously ignored terrain becomes the focus of violent exchanges. If the power of Rousso’s hugely influential four-step model of remembrance of Vichy – a process in which initial mourning gives way to repression and amnesia, followed by the return of the repressed and finally obsession – has sometimes encouraged us to view the debates about memory as a teleological project, close analysis of memorial practices reminds us that advances do not occur in a linear fashion: if amnesia has now given way to what some term ‘obsession’, in the case of the Algerian war for instance, other areas of France’s colonial activities remain frustratingly absent from the historiography.⁴³ Even in the case of Algeria, where the work of historians such as Benjamin Stora has succeeded in reinstating ‘les événements’ into national history, the official account chooses not to dwell on the more painful aspects of the past, as Pierre Assouline’s discussion of the controversy over the recent government censorship of Guy Pervillé indicates.⁴⁴ Meanwhile, the stymied campaigns of certain lobby groups, shouting ever louder in a bid to have their voices heard, contrast with the more conciliatory voices of a new generation,