1.

Debates & Opinions

AUSTERLITZ: VILLEPIN "COMES TO TERMS WITH THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY"
By Guillaume Perrault

** The polemic on the re-establishment of slavery by Napoleon had led public authorities to celebrate very modestly the Emperor's most famous victory **

Le Figaro (Paris)
December 3, 2005

http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/20051202.FIG0168.html?070736

Is it necessary to be ashamed of Napoleon ? Yesterday France celebrated in a discreet way the battle of Austerlitz, which has been marked by an unprecedented polemic. A Collective of individuals from the Antilles, French Guiana, La Réunion, and several associations of French citizens living outside metropolitan France called for demonstrations today against the commemorations organized by public authorities.

These protestors think, indeed, that the memory of a man who re-established slavery in French colonies in 1802 cannot be honored. Their spokesperson, Patrick Karam, even calls the bicentenary of the battle of Austerlitz a "textbook case of historical revisionism." Several elected officials from outside metropolitan France, like Victorin Lurel, president of the conseil général de Guadeloupe [NOTE: An elected local council at the departmental level. --Trans.] and a député in alliance with the Socialist Party, concurs in their analysis. An historian, Claude Ribbe, member of the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l'homme [NOTE: 'National Advisory Commission on Human Rights' --Trans.] also supports these groups and compares Napoleon to Hitler. The university professor in fact holds the Emperor of the French to be guilty of "the industrial extermination of a people" and of "racial legislation auguring the Nuremberg laws."

LUMPING TOGETHER

Several historians, however, have forcefully challenged lumping things together in this way. "There goes two and a half centuries of the French past, chucked into the Clio's wastebasket," Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie wrote yesterday in our columns. "And what will remain of Jules Ferry, who was, though, a good teacher?" Max Gallo, for his part, spoke up against "a penitential conception of memory" (see our Nov. 30 number).

Whether as a consequence or by coincidence, the official commemorations of Napoleon's most famous victory are certainly striking in their modesty. A military ceremony, followed by a sound-and-light show, was to take place Friday evening in Paris in the place Vendôme in front of the Vendôme column, made with cannons taken from the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz. Neither the president of the Republic, Jacques Chirac -- who is in Bamako for a Franco-African summit --, nor the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who is traveling in Amiens, attended.

The minister of defense, Michèle Alliot-Marie, for her part, is representing the French government at the international ceremony taking place on the site of the battle, in the Czech Republic.

"A NECESSARY TASK"

Asked by reporters about the discretion shown by public authorities, Dominique de Villepin replied that he had "come to terms with the entire history of our country. I believe we are enriched by all of our country's ordeals, by the ability we have had to overcome them," continued the leader of the government. "It is very important to be able to face up to history. This is a task that is necessary, it belongs to the citizen, and to the historian especially," concluded the prime minister, who has written a book about Napoleon's Hundred Days.

The low profile of the government provoked protests from some UMP deputies. Jean-Jacques Guillet was astounded by this "lack of enthusiasm." The deputy from Hauts-de-Seine thinks that France is more willing to commemorate its defeats than its victories. "Our reserve contrasts with the commemoration of the battle of Trafalgar by the British," argues Jean-Jacques Guillet: "France then thought it quite natural to participate by sending the aircraft carrier Charles-de-Gaulle, the flagship of the fleet." Lionnel Luca (Alpes-Maritimes), who began as a professor of history, thinks it is "ridiculous to judge the past according to present values. Anachronism is a serious mistake in history. Why should the French be condemned to permanent self-flagellation?"

--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Home page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu

2.

Debates and Opinions

COLONIZATION: THE PENITENCE TEMPTATION
By Max Gallo

Le Figaro (Paris)
November 30, 2005

The stakes are high in the history of French colonization. What is in play, in fact, is the history and future of the nation. Albert Camus was already writing in April 1958: "Some French people think that, through its colonial enterprises, France -- and France alone, amidst nations that are holy and pure -- is in a state of historical sin." If this is the case, let it repent! Let it be whipped! Let it be insulted! Let it be hated! And it is through this historical prism of colonization -- or of slavery -- that the France of today will be judged. This is explicitly what is asserted by those who have joined together in an association that calls itself "The Republic's Natives" ('Les indigènes de la République'). The prosecution of colonization is only a means to discriminate based on ethnic origins and to constitute communities that are hostile to the Republic as a function of a colonial past that claims in this way to explain the inequalities that exist among French citizens.

In this context, any debate evaluating colonization becomes a difficult matter. And Article 4 of the law of February 23, 2005, inviting teachers to make known the positive aspects of colonization, has only succeeded in provoking protests. This article is inopportune, non only because of the context, but because of its content. For the historian, it is not acceptable that those who represent the nation dictate "correct history, that which should be taught." Too many laws already -- with good intentions -- have characterized this or that historical event. Then it's the courts that decide. The judge is thus led to decide what history is as determined by law. But it is the mission of the historian to say what history is, as determined by facts.

It is true that the history of colonization has often been glorified, sweetened. But at the same time the French historical and geographical school was constituting a colonial history and geography, above all suspicion. The chair of the history of colonization at the Sorbonne was, in the 1960s, held by Charles-André Julien, historian of North Africa and a Socialist to boot, a friend of Blum. One incident: the French Socialists, from 1905 to the 1940s, were often the advocates of colonization, in the name of the civilizing mission of the Republic. Their amnesia on this subject -- on this one hundredth anniversary of their party -- eloquently expresses the ambiguities of the present time confronted with a colonial history that formed, between 1880 and the middle of the 20th century, a considerable part of the national imagination, with its dreams, its distant, bewitching horizons, and its heroes and mythified peoples, like the Tuaregs. [NOTE: The Tuaregs or Touraregs, today numbering around 2 million, are Berbers of the Sahara Desert who have long resisted European conquest and hegemony. --Trans.]

Given this important element of the contemporary history of France, we cannot allow colonization to be treated in simplistic terms; this is all the more true in that, if colonized peoples continue to bear the wounds of the colonial period, metropolitan France -- the pieds noirs especially -- also feel keenly an open wound: from mourning comes the feeling that an injustice has been done. And the discourse on colonization should take into account complex historical realities. The Algerians evoke -- in terms that are, moreover, unacceptable -- the Sétif massacres, in 1945. The people of Oran remember hundreds of their fellow citizens in 1962. It is not a question of establishing an equivalence, some sinister balance sheet, but to grasp that everything that is real must be taken into account. The prison of Poulo Condor in Indochina and the Saigon Pasteur Institute... Forced labor imposed by the colonist and the forbidding of slavery... The destruction of the indigenous culture and French educational institutions -- whether secular or missionary -- opening to the world... The inferior status of the native and the promotion of the best, the constitution of an elite (Senghor is its model)... You don't weigh the one against the other, the positive and the negative, for this is an absurd way to understand history. What you do is show that the threads are all mixed together, interwoven. That everything has to be said. And that any univocal history is a manipulation, a political exploitation, full of dangers for the today's national community, of what was the concrete and contradictory reality of colonization, which both an oppression and an opening.

That said, who is trying to show that complexity is at the heart of the matter? We must remember that colonization has always been an enterprise of military conquest, causing therefore resistance and bringing in its wake repression, all the more so in that was carried out against peoples often judged to be inferior. And, always, weak. For what can an assegai do against a machine gun? What can a single-shot rifle do against a cannon? So the conquest succeeded, but resistance has never ceased, and no colony has been totally pacified. Once the fire was extinguished there, it started up elsewhere: the Algerian insurrection in 1870, the Rif War in Morocco in the 1920s, the garrison attack in Indochina in the 1930s, and, everywhere, crimes that are the revenge of the weak and the humiliated. Charles de Foucault was assassinated by the Tuaregs. And one of the first victims, in November 1954, of the Algerian uprising, was a couple of 20-year-old teachers, just married -- the Monnerots -- on their way to take up their jobs in an Aurès school. Understanding supposes that one hide nothing. Not cities that were built, nor mechtas that were burned.

Still, this historical approach -- which is also a moral stance as well as an intellectual requirement -- supposes that one not commit anachronism, that sin against reason. One has the right and even the duty to take a stand at the level of universal principles, and to decree that colonization, because it is a conquest, is a criminal enterprise. But this is to flout historical reality. Yes, the history of colonization is full of blood and cruelty. But there are no "holy and pure nations." And as far as I know, the new nations born of colonization, once their independence was acquired, have not had a peaceful history. The more than 100,000 dead in the war between the Algerian state and the Islamists shows this clearly enough. Not to mention sub-Saharan Africa... History is violence. And the only way to try to master it, is first of all to write it while respecting the facts, all the facts.

Let us remember, for example, that in 1939, Albert Camus described forthrightly the famine that Kabylia was suffering from, in tough reports published in Alger Républicain. But the same Camus, nineteen years later, wrote: "It is vain to condemn several centuries of European expansion, absurd to include in the same curse Christopher Columbus and Lyautey. The time of colonialisms is over, we just need to know this and look to the consequences."

The history of the relation of peoples who have fought and mixed is a complex alchemy. It can be a life-giving spring or else a poison that stirs up tensions. For history is always grappling with the future. To oppose as contemporary categories natives and former colonizers is to revive frustration, humiliation, and hatred. France is dragged into the dock. How could anyone love someone so cruel? We need to meditate upon Camus: "It is good for a nation to find in its tradition and its sense of honor enough strength to find the courage to denounce its own errors. But it should not forget the reasons it may have for continued self-esteem. It is, in any case, dangerous to ask it to confess that it alone is guilty and to dedicate to perpetual penitence."

--Max Gallo, a writer, is author of L'Empire (3 vols.).

--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Home page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu