Charles Forsdick  (University of Liverpool)
Colonial history, postcolonial memory: contemporary perspectives

It is now a commonplace criticism of Pierre Nora's Lieux de mémoire that the essays making up his collection pay little if any attention to French colonial history. Perry Anderson's recent commentary on contemporary French thought in La Pensée tiède reiterates the comment, to which Nora himself reacts in the volume's postface. The paper takes this blindspot as its starting point, and considers the extent to which French national historiography in the late twentieth century might be seen to have been resistant to postcolonial approaches to understandings of the past. The aim, however, is to contrast such a construction of a self-sufficiently Hexagonal history (according to which decolonization is presented as a clean-break) with the more complex situation that has emerged in an early twentieth-first century France, in which colonial history and postcolonial memory have become fields of controversy and genuine debate. From Claude Ribbe's polemical indictment of Napoleon as a genocidal dictator (Le Crime de Napoléon) to the more subtle range of analyses included in La Fracture coloniale, there is a growing awareness that postcoloniality is a matter of continuity as well as discontinuity, that the colonial past continues to play a role in the postcolonial present. Recent efforts to transform such an awareness into some form of consensus of commemoration (especially the now notorious Article 4 of the 'Loi du 23 février 2005', and the projected 'mémorial de la France d'outre-mer' in Marseilles) have merely served to heighten controversy and intensify debate. The paper asks whether such a climate will - as the work of a number of historians and social scientists currently suggests - permit the open 'postcolonial turn' witnessed in much of the English-speaking world, or whether - as 'Liberté pour l'histoire', a text signed by leading historians including Nora, demanding the retraction of all 'lois "mémorielles"' - a French republican exceptionalism in this area is likely to persist.