Chapter 1: Tracing Postcolonial Silence in France

Lotem, Itay

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-63719-4_2

Itay Lotem⁴

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

After the shooting at the Charlie Hebdo offices on 7 January 2015, an unsurprising outpouring of commentaries on both sides of the English Channel sought to explain the event that had just unfolded. Alongside the unavoidable discussion of inequality and discrimination in France, a surprising number of English-language commentaries referred specifically to France’s ‘unacknowledged’ colonial past as a central element in the country’s malaise. In France, this focus on the lack of ‘acknowledgment’ of the country’s colonial past had become almost formulaic in political parlance. Far more than reflecting the state of the public debate in France, the level of public interest in colonial history or the visibility of colonial history in French school curriculum, the ubiquity of the demand to ‘acknowledge’ colonial history in the mid-2010s follows a process of the politicisation of colonial history that began in the early 1990s. Popular attention to colonial history rose from the commitment of several groups of activists and historians who vowed to ‘break the silence’ on the excesses of France’s colonial empire, particularly during the Algerian War of Independence. This chapter interrogates what kind of silence these actors sought to break.

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Notes

1.
See especially Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian, 20 January 2015 and Robert Fisk in the Independent, 9 January 2015.
2.
Stora, Benjamin, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la Guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991) and Branche, Raphaëlle, La Guerre d’Algérie: une histoire apaisée? (Paris: Points, 2005).
3.
See Ricoeur, Paul, La Mémoire, l’histoire et l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), p. 580.
4.
On this, see Henry Rousso’s analysis of the contrasting of silence with an earlier sense of presence in Rousso, Henry, Face au passé: Essais sur la mémoire contemporaine (Paris: Belin, 2016), p. 41–9.
5.
Much research has been done on the salience of colonialism in French culture. Much of the drive to do so arose from works such as Stora, Benjamin, Le transfert d’une mémoire: De l’“Algérie française” au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: La Découverte 1999), but mainly the works emanating from the ACHAC group such as Bancel, Nicolas, Blanchard, Pascal and Vergès, Françoise, La République coloniale: Essai sur une utopie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), and Bancel, Nicolas, Blanchard, Pascal and Lemaire, Sandrine (eds.), La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).
6.
See, for example, Lemaire, Sandrine ‘Propager: l’Agence générale des Colonies (1920–1931)’, in: Blanchard, Pascal, Lemaire, Sandrine (eds.) Culture colonial: La France conquise par son empire, 1871–1931 (Paris: Autrement, 2002), pp. 197–206 and L’Agence économique des colonies. Instrument de propagande ou creusent de l’idéologie coloniale en France (1879–1960)?, doctoral thesis (Florence: European University Institute, 2000); Ageron, Charles-Robert, ‘L’exposition coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?’ in: Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 563–91; Sèbe, Berny, ‘Exalting imperial grandeur: the French Empire and its metropolitan public’, in: MacKenzie, John (ed.), European Empires and the People (Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 30–6.
7.
For the best analysis available on the concept of France’s mission civilisatrice , see Conklin, Alice, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa (1895–1930) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
8.
Marshall, D. Bruce, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 170–9.
9.
See Lemaire, 2000.
10.
See Shepard, 2006, pp. 61–2.
11.
The term ‘anachronistic’ began appearing in student mobilisations against the war as of 1960, starting with the speech of the student leader Pierre Gaudez on the first mass student demonstration against the war on 27 October 1960. See Orkibi, Eithan, Les étudiants de France et la guerre d’Algérie: Identité et expression collective de l’UNEF (1954–1962) (Paris: Syllepse, 2012), p. 11.
12.
See Gordon, Daniel, Immigrants and Intellectuals, May ‘68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in France (Merlin, 2012), pp. 33–5.
13.
See La Cause du Peuple, no. 17, 1 February 1972.
14.
See Gordon, 2012, but also Gordon, Daniel, ‘Reaching out to immigrants in May ‘68: specific or universal appeals?’ in: Jackson, Julian, Milne, Anna-Louise and Williams, James (eds.). May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) pp. 93–108.
15.
La Cause du Peuple, no. 2, 28 June 1968.
16.
See Gastaut, Yvan, ‘Génération antiraciste en France (1960–1990)’, In: Cahiers de la Méditerranée, vol. 61, no. 1, 2000, pp. 289–303.
17.
La Cause du peuple, no. 23, 14.07.1972.
18.
Branche, 2005, p. 21.
19.
See Camus, Jean Yves and Lebourg, Nicolas, Far Right Politics in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 98–151.
20.
Quoted from J.G. Malliarkis, Pour une Jeune Europe, no. 7, Summer 1970.
21.
See, for example, a comment on the book ‘Reprouvés de l’honneur’ by a reader named Cyrille who addresses the ‘hopes, struggles and disappointments’ of the B and ‘brave soldiers with a sad look in their eyes’. See Rivarol, 6 February 1969.
22.
Rivarol, 8 May 1969.
23.
See, for example, Rivarol, 1 January 1969 and 23 March 1972.
24.
See, for example, Rivarol’s special dossier to mark the 10th anniversary of the Evian Agreement, which mainly uses the Algerian example of economic decline to attack contemporaneous Gaullist policies rather than establish a nostalgic memory culture, as would later become the general rule. See Rivarol, 23 March 1972.
25.
See Noiriel, 1988, p. 12 and Interview Marie Poinsot (Cité de l’histoire de l’immigration) with IL, 27 November 2014.
26.
Probably the best-known example of violence against European immigrants was the massacre of Italian workers in Les Aigues mortes in 1896. Other eruptions of violence occurred mainly in the 1930s against Polish and often Jewish workers. See Noiriel, 1988.
27.
See Noiriel, Gérard, Le Creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration XIXe-XXe siècle (Seuil 1988), pp. 10–12.
28.
In the first half of the 1960s, a few press articles addressed ‘graves problèmes sociaux’ of Algerian immigrants (Le Figaro, 4 December 1962 and another on 27 December 1962) or the ‘inquétant exode des Algériens vers la France’ (Paris-Presse-L’Intransigeant, 21 March 1964), but these remained exceptions. The one early instance of an overt connection between the Algerian defeat and Algerian immigration occurred during the attempt of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour to unite the far right and unsuccessfully campaign for the presidency in 1965 with Jean-Marie Le Pen as his right-hand man. In his attempts to appeal to proponents of French Algeria, the campaign often called to ‘dénoncer les prétendues accords d’Evian’ while it deplored the presence of Algerians in France. However, the campaign’s failure in the elections closed the lid on the far right for two decades and ended the use of these overt connections. See Shields, James, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).
29.
See Gastaut, Yvan, L’Opinion et l’immigration en France sous la Ve République (Paris: Seuil, 2000), pp. 7–16 and Hargreaves, Alec, Multi Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 24–32.
30.
See Gastaut, 2000, pp. 37–53 and Gordon, 2012.
31.
See Gordon, 2012, pp. 120–45.
32.
Hargreaves, 2007.
33.
During these seven years, various formations of young, poorly organised and highly violent activists filled the dwindling ranks of far-right movements. The most prominent groupuscule, founded in 1969, was Ordre nouveau, led by the young Alain Robert. See Gastaut, 2000, pp. 127–9 and Albertini and Doucet, 2013, pp. 12–27.
34.
Quote by François Brigneau, a close friend of Le Pen and one of the key figures in the creation of the FN, in Albertini and Doucet, 2013, p. 33.
35.
Ibid., p. 38.
36.
In an article published 40 years later, Le Pen reminisced that immigration in 1973 had ‘pas encore pris le caractère torrentiel qu’elle prendra après le regroupement familial de Chirac et Giscard en 1976’; see Le Monde, 22 October 2012.
37.
Ordre nouveau , invitation, Halte à l’immigration sauvage, June 1973. The term ‘bougnoule’ was a pejorative term for Arabs that came from the Algerian context.
38.
Albertini and Doucet, 2013, p. 42.
39.
See, for example, Rivarol, no. 991, 08.01.1970. The far-right tabloid Minute showed more attention to the Algerian presence in France, as it began complaining of Algerian ‘thugs’ in France (Minute, 25 August 1971) and later chastised the left for ‘feeling sorry’ for Algerian workers instead of helping them (Minute, 16 February 1972). However, these articles were few and far between in this period.
40.
See interview with Franck Timmerman, an FN activist, quoted in Ibid., pp. 60–2.
41.
Gaucher, Roland, Les nationalistes en France, tome 1: La traversée du désert (1945–1983) (Paris: Roland-Gaucher édition, 1995).
42.
Ibid., pp. 92.
43.
SOFRES, L’état de l’opinion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 200.
44.
Le Monde, 10 March 1984.
45.
These were Jean-Luc Lemouché, Anne-Marie Duranton, Yovonnés Hadddan and Michel Laval; see ibid.
46.
Nouvel Observateur, 30 November 1984.
47.
Stora, 1999.
48.
On the attraction of the FN to younger voters, see, for example, Mayer, Nonna, ‘The front national vote in the plural’, in: Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 32, no. 1, 1998, pp. 3–24.
49.
Anne Tristan began her militant trajectory as a communist activist in the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) in 1980. She became a TV journalist in 1984. In 1986, following her own outrage at the FN’s ascent, she met the left-wing media entrepreneur Edwy Plenel, who suggested she work on a project on the Front national in order to ‘bousiller le FN’. See interview with Anne Tristan: http://www.vacarme.org/article334.html, and Tristan, Anne, Au Front (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
50.
Tristan, 1987, p. 11.
51.
Ibid., p. 53.
52.
Ibid., pp. 39–40.
53.
Ibid., p. 49.
54.
See Giudice, Fausto, Arabicides: Une chronique francaise, 1970–1991 (La Découverte, 1992), p. 11.
55.
See Antenne 2, Journal télévisé, 16 November 1983.
56.
See, for example, Shields, James, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 109–11.
57.
See Gastaut, 2000, p. 412; see also Interview Abderhamen Moumen, Association Génériques, with IL, 1 October 2014.
58.
The expression comes up in many criticisms of the French model by second- and third-generation French citizens; see also Interview Mehdi Bigadèrne with IL, 24 September 2014.
59.
See Gordon, 2012.
60.
Ibid., pp. 58–70.
61.
Ibid., p. 198; also Gordon, Daniel, ‘From Militancy to History: Sans Frontière and Immigrant Memory at the Dawn of the 1980s’, in: Emile Chabal (ed.), France since the 1970s: history, politics and memory in an age of uncertainty (Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 116.
62.
Interview Abderhamen Moumen, Association Génériques, with IL, 1 October 2014.
63.
Gordon, 2015, p. 116.
64.
Ibid., p. 119.
65.
Sans frontière, 5 December 1981 and 1 January 1982.
66.
Ibid., 28 October 1981 and 30 October 1981.
67.
Ibid., 14 February 1981.
68.
Gordon, 2015, p. 124.
69.
For more details about the strikes, see Gastaut, 2000, p. 413; Delorme, Christian, Par amour et par colère (Le Centurion, 1985) and Mathieu, Lilian, La Double peine, une histoire d’une lutte inachevée (La Dispute, 2006).
70.
FR3 Rhone Alpes, Journal télévisé, 3 April 1981.
71.
Reproduced in Plein droit (GISTI, Paris), no. 45, May 2000.
72.
The three of the 17 original marchers who were not of Maghrebi origin were Delorme, Costil and the former Socialist mayor of Dreux, Françoise Gaspard, who gave the event stronger anti-FN credentials. For a list of the marchers, see the memorial webpage of the Marche pour l’égalité: http://marcheegalite1983.wordpress.com/la-marche-de-1983/liste-des-marcheurs-historiques/.
73.
Violence in les Minguettes made national headlines over a long period, with most contributions stressing the aspects of crime and insecurity in this suburb of Lyon. See Antenne 2, Journal télévisé, 20 June 1983; Antenne 2, Midi 2, Minguette, radioscope d’un quartier, 27 June 1983; Antenne 2, Journal télévisé, 10 August 1983.
74.
For the protesters, one frustrating factor was the newly elected Mitterrand government’s short-lived flirtation with concepts comparable to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ multiculturalism through the ‘droit à la difference’ or ‘right for difference’, which were quickly abandoned. See Hargreaves, 2007, pp. 188–90.
75.
Notably, they united the local branch of the Croix-Rouge and the association Mouvement d’action non-violence (MAN). See Gastaut, 2000, p. 411.
76.
If only one person welcomed the marchers in Salon de Provence, a sizeable group of around 1000 waited for them as they entered Lyon. The march then gained further publicity owing to national indignation following the murder of a young Algerian on the train to Bordeaux on 16 November (see Antenne 2, Journal télévisé, 16 November 1983). By the time the group reached Strasbourg on 27 November, 700 left-wing intellectuals had signed a petition of solidarity with the marchers, affirming their support for a ‘France pluriethnique’. See Gastaut, 2000, p. 414.
77.
Libération, 3–4 December1983.
78.
The word ‘beur’ is Verlan for ‘Arabe’. Verlan is the name of a new form of slang created mainly in the banlieues of Paris in the 1980s, which consists of pronouncing French words a l’envers. Here, Libération was the first to use the word ‘beur’ to denominate the entre marche after the marchers’ arrival in Strasbourg: Libération, 28 November 1983.
79.
Libération, 3–4 December 1983.
80.
Le Matin, 5 December 1983.
81.
Le Monde, 6 December 1983.
82.
See Bouzid, La Marche (Sindbad, 1984).
83.
Cordeiro, Albano, ‘Convergence 84: Retour sur un échec’, in: Plein droit, no. 65–66 (GISTI, 2005), p. 60. Also, see Bouamama, Said, Dix ans de marche des beurs (Desclée de Brouwer, 1994).
84.
Libération, 20 February 1985.
85.
In May 1985, an open letter from Christian Delorme deplored the fact that ‘SOS tend à devenir hégémonique et à éclipser les autres acteurs organisés de la résistance au racisme et à la ségrégation’. See Le Monde, 3 May 1985.
86.
Nouvel Observateur, 21 June 1985.
87.
Juhem, Philippe, SOS Racisme, histoire d’une mobilisation ‘apolitique’. Contribution à uneanalyse des transformations des représentations politiques après 1981 (Université de Nanterre - Paris X, 1998), p. 25.
88.
This definition comes from Amar, Marianne and Milza, Pierre, L’immigration en France au XX^e siècle (Armand Colin, 1990), p. 294.
89.
See Gastaut, 2000, p. 187 and Juhem, 1998, pp. 29–44.
90.
Sayad was an Algerian-born sociologist who was the first academic to draw interest to the structures of immigration and the constitution of immigrant communities in France. See, for example, Sayad, Abdelmalek, Les Usages sociaux de la culture des immigrés (CIEMI, 1979), or ‘Qu’est ce qu’un immigré?’ in: Peuples méditerranéens, no. 7, April–June, 1979, pp. 3–23.
91.
See, for example, Taboada-Leonetti, Isabel, ‘Identité nationale et lien avec le pays d’origine’, in: Malewska-Peyre, Hanna et al. (eds.) Crise d’identité et deviance chez les jeunes immigrés (La documentation française, 1982), pp. 205–47; Wihtol de Wenden, Catherine, Citoyenneté, nationalité et immigration (Ancantere, 1987) or Les Immigrés et la politique (Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988).
92.
See Milza, Pierre, Francais et Italiens a la fin du XIXe siecle (Ecole francaise de Rome, 1981), but also Ponty, Jeanine, Les Travailleurs polonais en France (Larousse, 1988) or Schor, Ralph, L’Opinion française et les étrangers en France (1919–1939) (Université Paris I, 1985).
93.
Lequin, Yves (ed.), La Mosaique France (Larousse, 1988).
94.
See Noiriel, 1988.
95.
Interview Abderhamen Moumen, association Génériques, with IL, Paris, 1 October 2014.
96.
http://www.generiques.org/presentation/ (last accessed 15 November 2014).
97.
Interview Abderhamen Moumen with IL, 1 October 2014.
98.
See Interview Marie Poinsot, diréctrice département des publications, cité national de l’histoire de l’immigration, with IL, Paris, 27 November 2015.
99.
Presentation of the Cité de l’immigration: http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/la-cite/historique-du-projet (last accessed 18 November 2014).
100.
Raffarin, Jean-Pierre, Discours du premier ministre, Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, 8 July 2004.
101.
Ibid.
102.
On the history of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, see Aldrich, Robert, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 40–3.
103.
Raffarin, 2004.
104.
Interview Marie Poinsot with IL, 27 November 2014.
105.
Le Figaro, 14 January 2005.
106.
Repères, exposition permanente, parcours de visite (Paris, Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, 2012).
107.
Interview Marie Poinsot with IL, 27 November 2014.
108.
These impressions are based on two visits, the first on 2 October 2014 and the second on 3 October 2014.
109.
Interview Marie Poinsot with IL, 27 November 2014; see also http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/2012/1/vies-d-exil-1954-1962-des-algeriens-en-france-pendant-la-guerre-d-algerie (last accessed 1 March 2017).
110.
Interview Marie Poinsot with IL, 27 November 2014.
111.
Interview Marie Poinsot with IL, 27 November 2014.
112.
Ibid. See also Conversation Benjamin Stora with IL, Asnières, 9 June 2014.
113.
In 2014, Benjamin Stora was appointed the new director of the Cité, suggesting a change of strategy towards a higher visibility of colonial history.

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Lotem, I. (2021). Chapter 1: Tracing Postcolonial Silence in France. In: The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63719-4_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63719-4_2
Published: 13 March 2021
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