Joshua Cole  (University of Michigan)
Putting the Crise des banlieues into History: Historians and the Contemporary French "Fracture coloniale"

The recent wave of violence in France's troubled banlieues, coming on the heels of an ill-fated law that called upon French schools to emphasize the "postive aspects" of French colonialism in their history curriculum, has brought renewed attention to France's status as a post-colonial nation. While politicians and leading public commentators in France argue about the relevance of the colonial past to France's contemporary crisis, historians in France have begun to debate the relevance of postcolonial perspectives to their discipline. This conjuncture of parallel debates taking place in the headlines of mass circulation newspapers, on television screens in people's living rooms, and within the academic community has produced both confusion and an unusual sense of ouverture, as the urgency of the present situation has led commentators both within and outside of academia to broach topics that had only received limited attention in recent decades. I'd like to propose a paper that examines the various attempts of historians, political activists, and politicians to place the crise des banlieues in a historical context, and suggests ways in which this discussion is closely related to the debates within the French historical community itself.

For the moment, I think there are three basic arguments being made about the historical context of the riots and the government's response: I'll call them the arguments of "return", "rupture" and "continuity" (with apologies to Tocqueville). They are often made in a rather mixed form, but I'll separate them out here for our discussion.

1) the "return" argument: From certain elements on the left (les Indigènes de la République) and the right (Le Pen) one finds an argument that the riots in the banlieues represent a "return" of a long ignored or denied colonial dynamic of power relations. Les Indigènes de la République take from this observation that an older vocabulary of anti-colonial struggle is in order, while the National Front urges the French state to embrace the brutal strategies of exclusion that lead most logically to apartheid. Each side remains largely indebted to the comforting binaries of the past (actually they are disturbing binaries--I mean that they are comforting only in that they are recognizable and do not require one to do much hard thinking about the reasons that the riots took place). It is almost certainly the case that this argument's capacity to reduce the complexity of the contemporary problem to formulaic recapitulations of older narratives is one of the reasons that both sides of this argument have found such a powerful resonance among certain sectors of the population. The government's invocation of the 1955 emergency law is of course an overt reminder of the colonial precedent, and one wonders if Villepin and Sarkozy themselves find the "return" to the colonial dynamic a useful political rallying point as they position themselves for the next presidential election.

2) the "rupture" argument: From other elements on the left one finds the argument that the riots are a "rupture"--a demonstration that the peculiar form of republican citizenship that the French have been so committed to is irrevocably broken. The reasons for its failure have largely to do with its inability to recognize the powerful effects of racial discrimination on French society--the Jacobin model of universalism, in denying the possibility of different kinds of citizens, with different historical relations to the polity, has no vocabulary or tools for dealing with racial exclusion. The proponents of this argument say that a new model of integration must be found that does not deny the expression or existence of difference within the polity--and here the question of the place of the Muslim minority is most urgently posed. The "rupture" argument is expressed quite often by academics, and it leads to all sorts of interesting arguments and comparisons with other countries, especially, of course, the US. It is still largely rejected by mainstream elements of the major parties (from Ségolène Royal among the socialists to Jacques Chirac and his supporters on the right) who remain essentially committed to the older republican and universalist model of citizenship.

3) the "continuity" argument: Emmanuel Todd gave an interview soon after the riots in which he argued, in his customarily contrarian fashion, that the violence in the banlieues should be seen in the larger tradition of French political contestation going back to the revolution. What the kids in the suburbs were rejecting was their own marginalization, and the fact that the government responded a) with minimal brutality (ie, they didn't kill large numbers of people) and b) by restoring funds for public services, support for neighborhood associations, etc. proves that the kids' voices were heard and that they were in fact, relatively successful in calling attention to their plight. In other words, they weren't as marginal as they thought. I haven't heard a lot of other people agreeing with Todd on this--his argument implies that racial discrimination is not as serious a problem as others think it is--but I think those who have compared the kids of 2005 in the suburbs with the kids in the streets in May 1968 are implicitly making the same kind of argument here, that there is a particularly French style of socio-political confrontation, and the recent troubles lie within that tradition.

This story is obviously still unfolding-and any conclusions I make will have reflect the discussion as it continues throughout the time remaining between now and the conference next fall. But I hope to conclude with comments about the successes and failures of a group of younger historians-led by Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire-to import a more theoretically sophisticated colonial history to France, one that acknowledges a debt to the perspectives of post-colonial studies coming from universities in Britain and the United States.