ABSTRACT
By 2005, postcolonial studies had made a thundering entrance in French academic and political debates. A cluster of historians led the movement pointing to what they called a “colonial split” in French contemporary society, and claiming that studying colonial culture would help to mend this split as well as to resume a quite exhausted colonial history, still caught in an enduring hagiographic propensity. This paper argues that this focus on colonial culture was both a reflection of important changes in French research on colonization, in progress from a decade at least, and a caricature of what the cultural history of colonization should be, as colonial culture was indeed reduced to the mere discourse of metropolitan colonial propaganda. Presenting some prospects of this research, booming again in the 1990s and firmly rooted in a rich tradition of critical colonial history from the 1950s on, it pleads for a more comprehensive and reflexive history of colonization as cultural experience.
