Abstract
Representations of the French nation, and the development of national identity and culture, have occupied a large place in the historiography of France in the late twentieth century. Among the images of the French nation in Republican France, be it in monuments, literature, film, festivals, building and street names, advertising for French products or in history manuals (official or unofficial), can almost always be found a selection which have their origin in, or draw upon, the French colonial empire.1 What is striking is that while an absence of colonial images in any area of national representation is rare, it is equally rare for them to occupy a central or even prominent place in any dimension of the national or Republican discourse. The primary purpose of this chapter is to examine the place of the French colonial empire in the images and identity of the French nation, and to come to terms with this paradox of their omnipresence and marginality. It will begin by examining the imperial or colonial policies of the Republic, and then attempt to place them in the context of other Republican policies, particularly those of the building of the Republican nation and the assimilation of the regions. It will examine similarities and differences in the intention of the architects of the policies, in the practical results they achieved, and in the way in which historical analysis has coloured our perception of what they thought they were doing. It will also consider the influence the two policies may have had upon one another, including the way they have been perceived, and then go on to look specifically at a selection of images drawn from the colonial empire in order to analyse their place in the overall image and identity of the French nation.
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Notes and References
Specific discussion of colonial images has been a topic of growing interest in recent years: see, for example, the remainder of this volume; Dina Sherzer (ed.), Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone World ( Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996 );
Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994 );
Pascale Blanchard and Armelle Chatelier (eds), Images et colonies (Paris, 1993);
Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp.234–65
Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (eds), Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996 ).
See Jean Bouvier, René Girault and Jacques Thobie, L’impérialisme à la française 1914–1960 (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1986) for a comparison of British, German and French styles of colonialism.
Jules Ferry, speech to the Chamber of Deputies, 28 July, 1885, reproduced in Guy Pervillé, De l’Empire Français à la décolonisation ( Paris: Hachette, 1991 ), pp. 47–8.
See also Jean Ganiage, L’expansion coloniale de la France sous la Troisième République (1871–1914) ( Paris: Payot, 1968 ), p. 47.
For a contemporary rationalization of France’s colonial policy of expansion, see Paul Gaffarel, Les Colonies Françaises (Paris: Librarie Germer Bailliere, 1880), pp.1–16
And for a comparison of the colonial myth with the Republican national myth see D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic ( New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1973 ), pp. 4–6.
For more detailed descriptions of the Republican’s policies of national integration, see Brian Jenkins, Nationalism in France: Class and Nation since 1789 ( London: Routledge, 1990 ).
D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 2nd edn ( London and New York: Routledge, 1991 ), pp. 18–19.
Jacques Thobie and Gilbert Meynier, Histoire de la France coloniale. II L’apogée ( Paris: Armand Colin, 1991 ), p. 302.
Alfred Rambaud, La France coloniale (1886) quoted in Charles-Robert Ageron, France coloniale ou parti coloniale? ( Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978 ), p. 194.
Jean Brunhes, ‘manuel scolaire’, classe de seconde’, quoted in Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France (Paris: la Table Ronde, 1972), p.186, but see pp.185–95 for more on the affirmation of colonial or imperial images.
See Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘L’Exposition coloniale de 1931: mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 1997), p.493 for more about the colonies in school manuals.
François Nicol, La politique coloniale français, Rapport au VIte congrès national de la paix à Clermont-Ferrand (1911), p.2.
On the assimilation-association debate, see Ageron, France coloniale ou parti coloniale?, and Raymond Betts, Tricouleur: The French Overseas Empire (London and New York: Gordon & Cremonesi, 1978 ). The number of proponents of association as a model increased during the twentieth century.
Quoted in Robert Tombs, France 1815–1914 ( London: Longman, 1996 ), p. 204.
See Jacques Binoche-Guerda, La France d’outre-mer 1815–1962 ( Paris: Masson, 1992 ), pp. 65–71.
Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993 ).
Marshal Philippe Pétain, ‘Appel du 25 juin, 1940’, La France Nouvelle: Principes de la communauté, appels et messages ( Paris: Fasquelle, 1941 ), p. 23.
For descriptions of the post-war constitutional negotiations see ibid., and Jacques Thobie, Gilbert Meynier, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de La France Coloniale 1914–1990 ( Paris: Armand Colin, 1990 ), pp. 355–71.
Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994), and Nora Les Lieux de Mémoire. The one article is Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘L’Exposition coloniale de 1931’, vol. I, pp.493–513.
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Baycroft, T. (2004). The Empire and the Nation: The Place of Colonial Images in the Republican Visions of the French Nation. In: Evans, M. (eds) Empire and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000681_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000681_10
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