France's Lost Empires Fragmentation, Nostalgia, and la fracture coloniale

by Marsh, Kate; Frith, Nicola; Chabal, Emile; Courteaux, Olivier; Dale, Kathryn; Eldridge, Claire; Kwon, Yun Kyoung; Mukhopadhyay, Indra N.; Strachan, John; Watt, Sophie; Yechury, Akhila

• ISBN13: 9780739148839
• ISBN10: 0739148834
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-12-28
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

France's Lost Empires brings together ten essays that collectively investigate the historical, cultural, and political legacies of French colonialism and, specifically, the endings of the French empire(s). Combining analyses of three 'lost' territories (Canada, India, and Saint Dominique) of the 'first' French colonial empire, that of the Ancien Regime, with investigations of the decolonization of the 'new' colonies of the 'second' French overseas empire (specifically in Borth Africa), the essays presented here investigate the ways in whicih colonial loss has been absorbed and narrativized within French culture and society, and how nostalgia for that past has played a fundamental role in shaping French colonial discourses and memories. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution and its historicization during the 1820s and ending with an examination of the 'postcolonial' republic at the end of the twentieth century, the chronological structure of the volume serves to reveal the extent to which the memories of territorial loss have been sustained throughout French colonial history and remain evident in current metropolitan representations and memories of empire. In analyzing the longevity of these tropes of loss and nostalgia, and their importance in shaping France's identity as a colonial power both during and after periods of colonization, France's Lost Empires reveals a basic premise: it is not simply successful conquest which creates a self-validating colonial discourse; failure can do so too. Indeed, the pervasive and tenacious nostalgia for past colonial glories, variously identified by the contributors to this volume, suggests that, for some, the emotional attachment to France's colonies has not waned and remians today as it was in nineteenth-century France.

Author Biography

Kate Marsh is senior lecturer in French at the School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies at the University of Liverpool. Nicola Frith is lecturer in French at the School of Modern Languages at Bangor University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: Territorial Loss and the Construction of French Colonial Identities, 1763-1962	p. 1
Nostalgic Reflections on France's First Overseas Empire
"Remember Saint Domingue": Accounts of the Haitian Revolution by Refugee Planters in Paris and Colonial Debates under the Restoration, 1814-1825	p. 17
A Celebration of Empire: Nostalgic Representations of l'Inde française in Chocolat Suchard's Colonial Collecting Cards of the 1930s	p. 31
De Gaulle and the "Debt of Louis XV": How Nostalgia Shaped de Gaulle's North American Foreign Policy in the 1960s	p. 43
Narratives of Loss: Decolonization under the Fourth and Fifth Republics
Between History, Memory, and Mythology: The Algerian Education of Albert Camus	p. 55
Alexandre Arcady and the Rewriting of French Colonial History in Algeria	p. 69
L'Inde perdue: France and Colonial Loss
Compensating for l'Inde perdue: Narrating a "Special Relationship" between France and India in Romanticized Tales of the Indian Uprisings (1857-1858)	p. 83
L'Inde retrouvée: Loss and Sovereignty in French Calicut, 1867-1868	p. 97
Alexandre Dumas's and Jules Verne's India: The French Republic of Letters Discusses Imperial Historiography	p. 111
Memories of French Colonialism in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries
"Le symbole de l'Afrique perdue": Carnoux-en-Provence and the piednoir Community	p. 125
La République postcoloniale? Making the Nation in Late Twentieth-Century France	p. 137
Bibliography	p. 153
Index	p. 169
About the Contributors	p. 173
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