ABSTRACT
Memory and empire are contested topics in France’s national narrative. For France’s first colonial empire, the most contentious arena of memory is slavery and abolition. This early modern empire has left important traces in the memory of modern France and the Acadian francophone population in Canada’s Maritime Provinces as well. This chapter considers the critical use of France’s early empire in three explorations of memory, public history, and community identity: the commemoration of slavery and abolition in the French Antilles and metropolitan France, the evolution of Canadian Acadian identity, and the Third Republic’s return to early modern empire to construct its arguments for Republican Empire.
