Magazine / History / Narrating the Nation / Article | 06/05/2008

Colonialism in the European memory, by Andreas Eckert

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The end of amnesia

The debates about the war in Algeria, which occasionally have taken place with great furore, but which recently seem to have subsided again, point to the fatal legacy of the French colonial system, and its violent end in an Algeria which is still today riven by civil conflict. Above all, however, these discussions - which in the meantime are by no means limited to the single case of Algeria – concentrate on the effects on France itself.[1] For in France, for some time now, the Empire has been striking back. This is attested to not only by the outbreaks of violence in the Paris suburbs. Barely three years ago, a law passed in the National Assembly aroused strong protests because it sought to raise the apparently "positive role” of French colonialism to the level of a legally established and thereby incontrovertible historical truth. In the face of the strong reaction, Jacques Chirac decided a year later to delete the relevant passage from the statute book. In the eyes of numerous critics, a transfigured and uncritical picture of the colonial past prevails in France, as confirmed by the newly opened Musée Quai Branly, whose exhibitions, they say, continue to be informed by a colonial point of view.[2]

The Elysée Palace acted in a more politically correct manner on another ticklish subject. In 2001, France was the first state to recognise slavery as a crime against humanity, by means of a law introduced by Christine Taubira, a Member of the French Parliament: every 10th May, the country now commemorates the abolition of slavery. However, this field of memory policy is also the subject of occasionally bitter public disputes.[3] The high point so far was reached by the controversy two years ago when a group from the West Indies, French Guyana and the Island of Réunion (the so-called Collectif des Antillais, Guyanais, Réunionnais) took the historian, Oliver Pétré-Grenouilleau, to court. In his book, Les Traites négrières. Essai d'histoire globale, he had referred to fact, which is actually well known, that the slave trade had been possible only as a result of the willing participation African helpers. In a newspaper interview, moreover, he refused to characterise the slave trade as genocide. He said that the purpose had not been to destroy a people: "The slave was a commodity who possessed a commercial value and who was supposed to work as much as possible.”[4]

These statements infuriated Caribbean intellectuals, who saw them as an insult to the victims of the slave trade and their descendants. Pétré-Grenouilleau was equated with the Holocaust deniers of the Front national, and defamed as a brazen falsifier of history. In response to this campaign, nineteen well-known historians, including Pierre Nora, drew up a petition in which they deplored the constant political and legal intervention in the interpretation of the past. In a dramatic and radical gesture, they called for all laws to be rescinded which sought to impose state regulation on memory. The laws attacked by Nora and his colleagues in fact vary in their intentions: one lays down a positive picture of colonialism, another condemns slavery, a third recognises the Turkish mass murder of Armenians as genocide. But all of them, according to the signatories of the petition, limit the freedom of historians and handicap historical research and reflection. Not surprisingly, this petition itself provoked opposition. For instance, the historian of migration, Gérard Noiriel, said that it was absurd to hope that by abolishing certain laws current controversies would disappear. Nonetheless, the legal suit against Pétré-Grenouilleau was withdrawn.[5]

In spite of its highly repressive policy in the 20th century against non-European immigrants, France has always been influenced by the presence of important black artists and intellectuals. The works of this group have become a part of global culture.[6] At the same time, one can see in France how globalisation is accompanied by exclusion and demarcation. Capital transfers may operate without borders, but migrants with dark skin find themselves confronted by more and more new borders.[7]

The present generation of immigrants is admittedly not the first to feel that the holy motto, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is practised only seldom in social reality. The numerous African soldiers (tirailleurs) had to experience the same thing when they fought and died for France in two world wars. Many of today's surviving African war veterans are convinced that France has never adequately recognised their achievements and sacrifice, let alone compensated them financially. The figure of the African ex-tirailleurs is still an important one in the sphere of post-imperial France. The memories of soldiers continue to provoke fundamental questions about history, duty and political community in the wake of the French colonial empire. These issues allow the Africans to project a picture of the colonial period in which they or their forefathers were not just victims. They enable veterans, immigrants and others to make demands on the French state, and to evoke a common history of the struggle for the liberation of France from fascism.[8]

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