Abstract
In an article that appeared in Les lieux de memoires (1997), the historian Eugen Weber explained that it was not until the early 1960s that the term ‘the Hexagon’ became widely used by French writers to describe France, notably by those in the human sciences. It is somewhat difficult to convince informed observers that the seemingly self-evident description is so recent. The country does, after all, have six sides, as any map of Europe that includes political boundaries makes clear. Weber’s argument comes more sharply into view when he dates its emergence to around 1962. Although he does not directly link it to the end of French Algeria in that year, the date reminds readers that the territorial boundaries of modern France were never just European, although in 1962 the percentage of its territory outside of Europe shrunk from more than 50 percent to far less than 20 percent (with almost all of that in sparsely populated French Guiana). In 1848, the French constitution had declared that Algeria’s territory was part of France. ‘From empire to hexagon’ was how a 1981 study evoked the result of ‘decolonization’.1
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Notes
Eugen Weber, ‘L’Hexagone’, in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1997), 3:1171–90;
Georges Spillmann, De l’empire à l’hexagone (Paris, 1981).
Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset français: histoire de l’immigration (19ème–20ème siècles) (Paris, 1988), chapter 1.
On this turn, see esp. Gary Wilder, ‘From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic Turns’, The American Historical Review, 117(3) (2012): 723–45.
Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989).
See Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976), chapter 29;
Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, ‘Introduction: Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule’, American Ethnologist, 16(4) (1989): 609–21.
See Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 1991),
and also, for example, Alec Hargreaves, ed., Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (Lanham, 2005);
Brigitte Gaïti, ‘Les ratés de l’histoire: une manifestation sans suites: le 17 octobre 1961 à Paris’, Sociétés contemporaines, 20 (1994): 11–37;
and John E. Talbott, The War without a Name: France in Algeria, 1954–1962 (New York, 1980).
For an analysis of the film, see E. Cardonne-Arlyck, ‘Espaces muets et intimité perverse: de Muriel (Resnais, 1962) à Caché (Haneke, 2005)’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 12(2) (2008): 265–75.
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, 2nd edn, 2008).
Sylvie Thénault, Histoire de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (Paris, 2005).
See Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor (New York, 1971).
On these developments, see Todd Shepard, ‘Decolonization and the Republic’, in Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson, eds, The French Republic (Ithaca, 2011), 252–61.
See, for example, Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005).
See Todd Shepard, ‘Algeria, France, Mexico, UNESCO: A Transnational History of Anti-Racism and Empire, 1932–1962’, Journal of Global History, 6(2) (2011): 273–97.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York, 2000).
Martin Thomas, The French Empire at War, 1940–1945 (Manchester, 2007).
K. H. Adler, ‘Indigènes after Indigènes: Post-War France and its North African Troops’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 20(3) (2013): 463–78.
Marc Michel, ‘L’empire colonial dans les débats parlementaires’, in Serge Berstein and Pierre Milza, eds, L’Année 1947 (Paris, 2000), 189–217.
Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘La survivance d’un mythe: la puissance par l’empire colonial (1944–1947)’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 72(269) (1985): 387–403, here 388.
From article 9 of the Atlantic Charter; for the text of this treaty, see Samuel Rosenman, ed., Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 10: The Call to Battle Stations 1941 (New York, 1950), 314.
Marika Sherwood, ‘“Diplomatic Platitudes”: The Atlantic Charter, The United Nations and Colonial Independence’, Immigrants & Minorities, 15(2) (1996): 135–50.
The quoted translation of the United Nations Charter is from Louis Rolland and Pierre Lampué, Précis de droit des pays d’outre-mer, territories, départements, états associés (Paris, 2nd edn, 1952), 25.
John Kent, The Internationalization of Colonialism: Britain, France, and Black Africa, 1939–1956 (Oxford, 1992), 287.
Max Beloff, ‘The Federal Solution in Its Application to Europe, Asia, and Africa’, Political Studies, 1(2) (1953): 114–31;
René Capitant, Démocratie et participation politique dans les institutions françaises, de 1875 à nos jours (Paris, 1972).
Paul-Emile Viard, Les caractères politiques et le régime législatif de l’Algérie (Paris, 1949), 10–16, argues that it was legally part of the metropole; Pierre Lampué in Rolland and Lampué, Précis de droit des pays outre-mer, that it was distinct.
Clotaire Bée, ‘La doctrine d’intégration’, Recueil Penant, 2 (1946): 27–48, here 33.
On Capitant’s federalism, see Nicolas Wahl, ‘Aux origines de la nouvelle constitution’, Revue française de science politique, 9(1) (1959): 51–2;
René Capitant, Pour une constitution fédérale (Strasbourg, 1946); on the role of federalism for Charles de Gaulle at the beginning of the Fourth Republic, see, for example,
Wilfried Loth, ‘De Gaulle et la construction: la révision d’un mythe’, Francia, 20(3) (1993): 61–72.
For an extended analysis, see Todd Shepard, ‘A l’heure des “grands ensembles” et de la guerre d’Algérie: L’“État-nation” en question’, Monde(s): Revue d’histoire transnationale, 1 (2012): 113–34.
Alfred Grosser, La IVe République et sa politique étrangère (Paris, 1961), 248–51.
Jacques Soustelle, Aimée et souffrante Algérie (Paris, 1956), 36; ‘Entretien: Jacques Soustelle’; Shepard, ‘Algeria, France, Mexico, UNESCO’, 290–5.
Anon., ‘Note relative à un projet de loi-cadre pour l’Algérie’, 3 August 1957, 1, CARAN, 4AG/532. On the connections between these reforms and latter metropolitan-focused regionalization, see Romain Pasquier, La capacité politique des régions: une comparaison France/Espagne (Rennes, 2004).
For a clear indication of how much contemporary analysis of the Constitution of October 1958 focused on the redefining of links between the metropole and outre-mer, see Nicole Richard and Claude Jourdan, ‘Eléménts de bibliographie sur la Constitution de 1958’, Revue française de science politique, 9(1) (1959): 212–28.
See Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996);
Seti Y. Gableame Gbedemah, ‘L’échec de la politique française d’intégration au Togo sous tutelle’, in Nicoué Lodjou Gayibor, ed., Les Togolais face à la colonisation (Lomé, 1994), 111–47.
Jean Fremigacci, ‘Les parlementaires africains face à la construction européenne, 1953–1957’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 77(1) (2005), 5–16.
François Borella, L’évolution politique et juridique de l’union française depuis 1946 (Paris, 1958); see Cooper, Decolonization and African Society.
Gérard Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France (XIXe-XXe siècle) (Paris, 2007), 438 and 552–3;
see Léo Bogart, ‘Les Algériens en France, adaptation réussie et non réussie’, in Alain Girard and Jean Stoetzel, eds, Français et immigrés, Vol. II: Nouveaux documents sur l’adaptation: Algériens, Italiens, Polonais; le service social d’aide aux immigrants (Paris, 1954), 17–93.
Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘Mai 1945 en Algérie. Enjeu de mémoire et histoire’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 39 (1995): 52–6.
Benjamin Stora, Le transfert d’une mémoire: de l’Algérie française au racisme anti-arabe (Paris, 1999).
Guy Mollet, Edgar Faure, and Michel Debré, ‘Trois anciens chefs du gouvernement s’expliquent sur le référendum’, Paris-Match, 704, 6 October 1962: 58.
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Shepard, T. (2016). The Birth of the Hexagon: 1962 and the Erasure of France’s Supranational History. In: Borutta, M., Jansen, J.C. (eds) Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137508416_3
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