ABSTRACT
Competing memories Museum practices are a good indicator of the crosscurrents of colonial memory in France, their conflictual dimensions as well as the importance of memory in the formation of a collective identity and in marking a political territory.1 For decades after the end of the Algerian War in 1962, colonial history remained the forgotten continent of French history. For a nation that cultivates the myth of its grandeur and that regards teaching history to children as central to the transmission of this mythology, the collapse of the French Empire had no place in the ‘national narrative’. Practically inexistent in textbooks until the late 1980s and confined as it was to a few specialists in the academic world, colonial history did not seem to represent a major issue. But collective memories cannot be abolished by decree. Inevitably they resurface, and they do so from unexpected directions. At the origin of this memory trend, three social groups can be identified, all of them ‘heirs to colonization’ and all of which directly or laterally partook in the history of the Empire. The first group is constituted of the 800,000 French and European Algerians repatriated to France after the French defeat, the majority of whom live in the south of France. The second group consists of the immigrant workers from Algeria, but also from Morocco and Tunisia, and then those from former French Africa. Finally, there are the Harkis – the Muslim Algerians who served as Auxiliaries in the French army – who were repatriated to France or massacred in Algeria after March 1962. The potential conflict between these diverging memories, suppressed until the early 1990s, was soon to return to the surface, delineating the contours of a guerre de memoires, or a ‘war of memories’. Until then, following the example of General de Gaulle’s ‘will to forget’, the French government chose not to encourage initiatives that could put colonial history on the agenda of public debates. Yet in the 1990s, a new process began that pushed colonial history to the centre of controversy. The process was the result of a new culture of commemoration that came in the wake of the French government’s belated acknowledgment of its involvement in the deportation of the Jews of France during the Second World War. The pioneering research on the Shoah by Raoul Hilberg
(1961), published in France in the 1970s, Robert Paxton’s book on Vichy France (1973), Serge Klarsfeld’s (1978) efforts to keep alive the memory of the Jewish victims of Occupied France, and finally the opening in 1979 of the Institute of Present Day History (Institut d’histoire du temps présent, IHTP), devoted in part to France during the Second World War – all these worked together to break through the wall of apathy to the scale of what happened during the ‘dark years’ and of French compromises with Germany. So a shift took place in the 1980s from commemorating those ‘who died for France’ to commemorating also and at the same time those ‘who died because of France’ (Barcellini, 2008).2 This expansion of the historical narrative came with a multiplication of commemorations, tributes, inaugurations, projects and monuments preserving the memory of the Shoah and the deportation of the Jews of France.3 It wasn’t until 1995 and then-President Chirac’s declaration on the participation of France in the deportation of the Jews, that the French government recognized its responsibility in these historic events, having placed the blame until then on the ‘illegitimate Vichy regime’ alone. Nonetheless the memory of the deportation and the growing body of historical knowledge documenting the participation of entire sectors of the administration and of civil society at large –greatly exceeding the ‘small group of collaborators’ designated until then – opened the door to a less binary understanding of this tragic period. This state of affairs is fundamental for the understanding of the context in which, between 1990 and 1995, the French public rediscovered the Algerian War and the torture committed at the time, and began questioning the colonial past and examining the history of slavery and its abolitions. The new memorial spaces dedicated to preserving the memory of the deportation amplify this major shift of the post-war period (Gilzmer, 2009), thus heralding the memorial spaces commemorating the deportation of homosexuals and Romas (the one in Berlin on a European scale and the one in Saliers near Arles), but also focusing on the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 (in Lyon and Marseille4) or paying homage to the Harkis (museum project in Rivesaltes and ceremony in Perpignan in 2007), or commemorating the victims of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery (notably on the docks of Nantes with Les Anneaux – The Rings; in the 17th arrondissement of Paris with ‘Les Fers’ in tribute to General Dumas and in remembrance of slavery; or through the dedicated rooms in Nantes’ historical museum Château des Ducs de Bretagne as well as the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux). Whereas debates focused on the colonial period emerged as part of this great post-Communist memorial movement, dominated by tributes to the ‘victims of history’, museums still disregarded the colonial period, except – as we shall see in a moment – from a ‘nostalgic’ standpoint. An official monument, as Serge Barcellini (2008) has observed, is at once a memorial tool for those who use it and a reflection of the ideological intentions of the institution that puts it up. When it comes to colonialism, the initial silence of public authorities gradually gave way to an uncritical (and sometimes even nostalgic) attitude. The issues around the colonial past are weighty. On the one
hand, the heirs of this period are divided, as we have seen, and the views they hold are incompatible (although no group can be said to be internally homogeneous, of course). Whereas groups of repatriates tend to have a rosy, nostalgic view of the colonial period (in Algeria, in particular), immigrants from the colonial and postcolonial periods and their descendants have a much more critical view. All of the groups suffer from the lack of recognition of colonial history as an integral component of French history, for this alone can impart meaning to the narratives they carry. Colonial memory has thus become a dividing line in French society, one that systematically, albeit unconsciously, raises the (loaded) question of national identity and, by collateral effect, of the presence of colonial and postcolonial immigrants. To understand this situation, let us look at an article entitled ‘Pieds-noirs, a French wound’ that appeared in the conservative weekly Valeurs actuelles in October 2009; it summarizes the symbolic stakes around the colonial past (Folch, 2009). The article criticizes Rachid Bouchareb’s film Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi), sequel to his 2006 success Days of Glory (Indigènes), which it describes as a biased ‘official version’ of the Algerian War that refuses to show the ‘truth’ about the pieds-noirs and even ‘demonizes’ them. The logical conclusion of the film, according to the article, is that the ‘victims’ are not so much the colonized as the ‘repatriates’ (and Harkis). The president of the pieds-noirs organization Cercle algérianiste is quoted as saying: ‘Twice we were victims: first when we became orphans of Algeria and then when we were not adopted by France’ (Folch, 2009). The article ends with a review of the state of affairs in the ‘memory war’. On the one hand, there are several reasons for satisfaction: the bill adopted by the French Assembly in February 2005 encouraging textbooks to include the ‘positive aspects’ of colonialism (an act that was partially repealed, as we will see); the historian Jacques Marseille’s demonstration that the colonies cost more than they profited France; the many books and films paying tribute to the ‘true history’ of colonialism;5 as well as memorials erected in Southern France (notably the one in Perpignan to which the magazine elsewhere devoted two pages). But in spite of these ‘positive signs’ there is an impending storm. Not only did the state finance 15 per cent of Rachid Bouchareb’s film, but Nicolas Sarkozy all too quickly forgot his speech in Toulon in 2007, in which he praised the colonial enterprise and reasserted his refusal to ‘repent’, and maintained diplomatic ties with Bouteflika’s Algeria.6 In this newly mapped perspective, the role of ‘victim’ is reversed: speaking ‘ill’ of the past or speaking of repentance amounts to ‘falsifying’ history and betraying France.7 It is on this context that we will be focusing in this chapter in an attempt to highlight the issues revolving around colonial memory with which the country has been grappling over the past two decades (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2009).
