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France
Seminar Presentation at CERC, 23 May 2006
© Ian Coller, History Department, University of Melbourne
icoller@unimelb.edu.au
presented for the first time in front of a French audience the research for my
doctoral thesis. The conference dealt with travel and mobility in early
nineteenth century France, and I spoke about a community which had been
France after the evacuation of Napoleon’s army from Egypt and Syria, and
which continued to grow across the decades from 1801. The paper was
generally well received, but many of the French academics in the audience
expressed concerns with the use of the word “community.” Some of these
concerns were justified – the word community is a very vague one – one
definition of the term, and that was in 1955! I had myself been struggling with
and had found it very difficult to establish definitive criteria for determining
general way their concerns about my use of the word “Community.” And it
was at stake, but real anxieties about the political implications of a word
which generally passes in the Anglophone context without too much demur.
Indeed, one might well say that the term “community” in the Anglophone
This is not the case in French. And the distinction does not arise from a mere
question of translation, but from a more serious difference in the way that
received book on the slave trade, for which he received the French Senate’s
prize for a History Book for 2005. This book had been the subject of a recent
his university, and lose the prize he had been awarded. This action led to a
slave trade derive from Islam which prevented Muslims from enslaving
others of their faith. The abolition of the trade was achieved by “White
protestant philanthropists.” The first to practice the slave trade were Africans.
These theories don’t seem very explosive. But the author went on to draw
connections between his book and another “affaire” in France, that of French-
“accusation against the Jews” derived from the “American community” in the
clarify this point – and from the loi Taubira through which the French
Holocaust, and proceeded to insist that slavery was not genocide. He then
slaves
That identity is the result of a choice, not of the reality. The Antillais, for example, were
emancipated in 1848. But if we go further back, to Africa, we can also say that their
ancestors were either free men, slaves, or slave traders. To claim to be the descendents
of slaves is to choose between those ancestors. It’s also creating an immediacy between
past and present. Descendents of slaves is an expression we should use with extreme
care.
1
12 June 2005
The anxiety expressed by historians, that history was being politicised by its
subject matter of his book, but rather to the wider political debates in France.
A few months earlier, in late October 2005, two youths, one of Malian
and the other of Tunisian origin, were killed in the commune of Clichy-sous-
where the majority of inhabitants are from immigrant backgrounds, were the
spark for several nights of protest and rioting. The interior minister, Nicolas
Sarkozy, declared a “zero tolerance” policy toward the rioters, and sent in
battalions of riot police. Greeted with boos and insults on a visit to Argenteuil
a few days later, Sarkozy responded by shouting that “You’ve had enough of
this scum, haven’t you? We’re going to get rid of them for you.” This use of
the loaded and highly insulting term “racaille” inflamed the situation further,
and the riots spread to other areas around Paris over the following days.
Over twenty days of rioting, which spread across France and even into
neighbouring countries, over 270 towns were affected, almost 9000 cars
burned, close to 3000 arrests were made, 126 police were injured and one
national state of emergency, using a law from 1955 which had only been
applied previously during the Algerian war and during the Kanak uprising of
I had spent a year in Paris in 2003, doing the research for my thesis. I
lived with friends in the suburbs: not in the high-density cités but nearby.
In Paris there seemed to be an invisible barrier between the two worlds – one
Franco-French, the other Arab drawn from all backgrounds. Of course, this
reality, but it gave me a particularly intense interest in the riots when they
began to dominate the French news. The internet made it possible to follow
most of the media coverage, including the very long and loud debates which
affected. It was only with evident discomfort that the presenters invited those
actually living in the suburbs to speak. When they did, the result was very
attempted to explain the reasons behind the violence. But he was continually
shouted down by other guests, and even by the presenter, who insisted that
he should make a direct demand to the rioters to return home. When the
young man refused to make such a demand, the presenter and the other
guests shrugged in triumph, as though they had proved that “there was no
for responses to the riots. There was an air of confusion and incomprehension
never travelled outside the centre of Paris, except to leave via Roissy-Charles-
de-Gaulle. I felt the need to express my divided responses to the violence and
five page essay, and it provoked a flood of replies from the Anglophone
seemed to me too easy to criticize France’s social model from the outside,
with no similarly critical view of one’s own society, and one’s own blind
spots. I thought of the riots in the Sydney suburb of Redfern a year or more
earlier, triggered by a very similar incident of the death of a young man while
values” which was being vaunted in its place. France had always represented
citizenship. But one French academic had insisted to me that the French
Year of China which had lit the Eiffel Tower red on New Year’s Day, just
before I left. This was something which I had loved, and will always love
about Paris, and it is a feature of other French cities and towns also.
But I felt very strongly that there was something wrong with this
the Semaine des Cultures Etrangeres, which declared “Je t’aime… de loin.”
One of the strangest things for me in Paris was to feel that it would not be
possible to speak freely to the Arab, African and Asian travellers on the RER
train I took every day. It was strange to find that their languages were not
what they wore on their head could become such a central issue for the state,
that in fact they did not quite occupy the same space of citizenship which I –
though a foreigner on a tourist passport – could so easily borrow for the time
I was there.
France I had partly lived and partly imagined, and I expected to receive some
stringent replies. But the responses surprised me. Instead of dealing in any
substantive sense with the issues I had raised, the response from a French
could dare to compare the indigenous people of Australia with the rioters:
How can he compare the revolt of "indigenous Australians" (his words) , who are in
their ancestors' country (the Europeans being settlers who established their authority
there by the force of arms with countless massacres) with that of people who came from
outside France for whatever reason, but on their own consent (unlike impounded
slaves)? I remember seeing "America, love it or leave it" on many cars in the United
While this individual response may have been a little eccentric, I think it
points to the larger difficulties which clearly confronted this historian as much
as the other members of the French intellectual elite I had seen on television
the televised debates, like the one on Mots croisés, revealed the extreme
within their vision of the Republic. Most of those invited to speak were
politicians of the Right and the Left, and sociologists – one presenter called
little doubt that most French cities, and Paris above all, tend to be separated
by a kind of de facto urban apartheid. The large housing projects were built
close to industrial developments in the 60s and 70s, huge walls of apartments
sometimes containing 3 or 4000 units. The shifting global economy of the 80s
and 90s meant that the factories where these cités were built closed down,
moved out, new immigrants moved in, compounding the problems with
other issues of race and social exclusion. These conglomerations are often far
from the central city both spatially and culturally: those who work in Paris,
for example, had to travel for well over an hour, by train and bus, to travel
transport system made life close to impossible. The police and other
another world. The current UMP government closed down the “police de
arrest offenders who were thereby prevented (in theory) from proceeding to
greater infractions. The global anxieties about terror combined with incidents
insecurity among the French middle classes, focused on the highly mediatised
evidence supported their arguments, from the simple fact of the riots’s
Clichy-sous-Bois, for example), and the statements of many young men when
new employees under the age of 26 after a two-year trial without needing to
justify their decision. This law was greeted by massive protests across France
the opportunity for looting and destruction. Finally, on April 10 this year, the
The difference of these protests (the word riots was rarely used to
describe them) was that they were understood in a political sense rather than
economic model, it was not primarily a matter for sociological study. Instead,
it was viewed from one side as a triumph of the French tradition of popular
protest, from 1789 through 1968. The fact that the protesters were insisting on
their right to security of employment, and not any wider social issue, did not
the protests in the same way, only in the negative sense of a return of
jacqueries, the terrible history of popular unrest and violence from the Terror
of 1793 to the Maoists of 68. Others, on both right and left, resisting the
wherever France may be going, it is not lagging behind but dashing ahead.
Pfaff offered France the role of “coal miner’s canary of modern society,
reacting to political and social forces before anyone else.”2 Echoing a French
March 2006 are the first to bring into the streets the plurality of possible
In this perspective, what in France seems a sterile popular defense of an obsolete social
humane successor to an economic model that considers labor a commodity and extends
price competition for that commodity to the entire world. The apparently reactionary or
There is a big difference, then, between the events of November and those of
history and quite possibly even the beginning of a new world. One was
2
May 11, 2006, p. 42.
government in the face of mass protest. The retraction of the CPE, which was
the major factor in the urban violence of November, can only serve to
But the very different ways of understanding these two protests can
tell us a lot more about the nature of contemporary France than either of
them individually. I want to suggest that both of these events were deeply
property and against the police – and both continued over a long period, and
spread across the whole nation, suggesting that they were more than simply
trade unions, political parties. There is little evidence that the riots of
November were organized, and they did not have a leadership ready to
articulate clear political positions. But this should not be taken to mean that
they were not political, or that they had no significance in relation to France’s
which mandated the recognition of the services of French men and women,
and colonial French citizens, in the “French overseas achievements.” This law
a million Europeans left the former colonies for mainland France. The pieds
history of French colonial rule. For some eighty years, Algeria had been an
integral part of France, among its many overseas departments. These Harkis
– from the Arabic word for the “party” of the French – were treated with
bring the memory of both pieds noirs and harkis into national recognition.
But the law went further, to mandate the teaching of the “positive aspects of
This law was passed with almost no debate. In the months that
former colonies began to protest this law which, while not explicitly
planned treaty of friendship with France in the face of this legislated revision
of the memory of colonial occupation. But a survey indicated that in fact 60%
of French men and women supported the law, and many intellectuals argued
that its provisions were essentially fair, even if the law was not the instrument
in January 2006. But the underlying substance of the disagreement was hardly
debated at all. What the law indicated was just how shallow the
Elizabeth Badinter insisted that it was “undeniable” that the French presence
overseas had positive aspects. She argued that the only truly negative aspect
of this colonial history was the 8-year war through which France had sought
to deny the Algerians independence. This war was only recognized officially
war at all – one student wrote to me to thank me for opening his eyes on a
“taboo subject” in France. But the war is in fact the best-covered of topics on
French colonialism – a rapid scan of any French bookstore will show that for
every ten books on the war, there is only one on the century of colonialism
But the response to the law showed a new and assertive consciousness
among those whose histories are inseparable from French colonialism – from
arising from colonial and postcolonial migrations. Far from simply looking
for the repeal of the law, groups within France have begun to challenge key
glorification of the figure who had reinstated slavery in 1804 was therefore
biographer of Napoleon, did not attend the ceremony, which passed with
little fanfare.
This was claimed as a victory by the CollectifDom and the author
Semitic, racist, fascist, anti-republican despot” and “butcher of the blacks” and
slaves during the war in Haiti. The historical basis for these wilder claims is
very questionable, but what they point to is the effect of the long absence of
guard action against the attempts to find an equivalence between slavery and
genocide. These are France’s own “History Wars” – but just as the scope and
effect of the industrial protests was very different from the Australian
nature of this struggle over history is revealing itself in quite different ways in
France.
The struggle has taken shape over the past year or so as a struggle
between the defenders of the universal values of the Republic, and the
on the use of the word “Communautarisme.” The dread incited by this term
the detriment of integration.” The word did not appear in the Robert until
2003, and has not yet appeared in some other dictionaries. The author Pierre-
André Taguieff claimed that it dates back to the 1980s, others have dated it
from the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989. But it is only in this century
that the use of the word has become common, with a whole series of books
taking it as a theme.
States) will reveal the array of suspects of this crime against the Republic.
Under particularly careful observation are the gay and lesbian “militants”
who have been called “Khmers Roses” by the association, the Breton activists
an official and absolute equality between citizens. Where such equality fails, it
is the transcendental principle which should be upheld rather than the reality
rightist site (witness the story on the “digital secession” of Alsace in changing
its URL from .fr to .eu) but many of its principles – and particularly the dread
Finkielkraut).
In response to this reaction, we have of course another reaction
word itself seems to gesture Lévy very incisively underlines that this spectre
exists without the need for anyone actually to subscribe to the idea: no-one
anti-colonialism.”
which many of the real violences and injustices of France’s history are lost.
We may think of Michael Haneke’s recent film Caché, Hidden, for one of the
terms with the past. Like the couple in Caché, the conversation among the
French elite tends to turn endlessly over the same questions which exclude
the possibility of new ones. There is something specifically French about this,
often makes principles more important than the realities they attempt to
history can be more helpful than the circularities of either the sociological or
the political debate. It is not enough to oppose the interference of
begin carefully dismantling some of the basic assumptions which have served
We need a history that helps us address the central reality of our time: that all western
societies are increasingly pluralistic. Young people must understand how and why
they are living together, caught in the inescapable and contradictory machinery of
prejudices and ideologies exploited by intellectuals calling for the West’s moral
peculiarly French problem. But since the Cronulla riots in Sydney it seems to
was in France, I looked at the clothes people were wearing, which seemed
conservatism and conformism even among the young. Now the same clothes
are appearing in our stores – the cardigans and scarves which seem to refer
and idiosyncratic character. I wish I had begun to think about this before my
begin this analysis, as a central part of understanding our own society and the