ICFFS-Cultural Memory Program

    In October 1924, Georges-Marie Haardt and Louis Audoin-Dubreuil set off in Citroën halftrack automobiles [autochenilles] on the Expédition Centre-Afrique, a 12,500-mile journey across the African continent that is remembered as La croisière noire--the title of Léon Poirier’s film and Haardt’s memoir. La croisière noire was not only an extraordinary expedition, but also a vast public relations enterprise. André Citroën framed the expedition as a national project, involving French authorities at every level. He conceived of the mission not only as a demonstration of the superiority of the French automobile industry, but also as a means of publicizing France’s African colonies in the metropole. The plan worked. The travellers’ progress was reported in newspapers and radio reports, and they returned to France to considerable fanfare and numerous public receptions. The film, released in 1926, was one of the few documentary films of the period to draw huge audiences. It is frequently cited as one of the major events in the development of the popular passion for things African in 1920s France.

    This paper examines La croisière noire (both the expedition and the film) as cultural icons from the 1920s to the present. Unlike most of the colonial propaganda films of the interwar period, La croisière noire has not been swept under some metaphorical rug; rather, it continues to flourish in different contexts. The film was shown in 1995 at the festival of silent film and music at the Musée d’Orsay and also, in the same year, at the Fespaco in Ouagadougou; it was shown again at the 1996 Cinéma du réel festival at the Centre Pompidou; Iacovleff’s paintings of the expedition are exhibited in the Musée des années 30, opened in 1998; and Jacques Wolgensinger published a 2002 monograph on the expedition and the film.

    Based on archival research (papers of Georges-Marie Haardt, correspondence of expedition leaders with French authorities, schoolchildren’s cahiers de classe on the expedition, newspaper and magazine articles), my paper uses the story of this expedition and film to ask how and why colonial imagery has been used and reused to negotiate colonial memory. I analyze the film as a vehicle for commodification and rationalization of the empire in the 1920s, and I examine the implications of the truths being peddled through the revival of this kind of document. Through this analysis, I hope to draw broader conclusions about the status of cultural objects as agents of memory, as well as about the state of French colonial memory today.




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