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Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global AgePublisher:Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Copyright:2004
Pages:xvi + 232
Review:
The cover of Herman Lebovics’s Bringing the Empire Back Home features a startling photograph taken during the 1998 World Cup, won by a French national team largely consisting of players harking from France’s former colonies, overseas territories, and peripheral regions, whose success was hailed as a victory for “French multiculturalism” and “unity-in-diversity” (p. 139). The image juxtaposes a crowd of French fans, their faces painted in the tricolor and riveted to the match, with a “possibly North African” (p. 138) man standing slightly behind them, his face undecorated and showing no evident enthusiasm. The image succinctly encapsulates the “imperial-republican syndrome” (p. 5) that Lebovics explores in this ambitious work: namely, how France—still attempting to “master” a colonial past (pp. 188–189) brought home by immigrants and their French-born children, who are subject to racial and religious discrimination—can “accommodate a respect for multiplicity without violating the egalitarian promise of the Republic” (p. 190). At its base, Lebovics avers, this is quite simply the question “what does it mean to be French” (p. 190).
To get at this question, Lebovics offers a whirlwind tour of the French heritage (patrimoine) industry in the wake of decolonization, in which “new understandings of French regionalism become intertwined with a new history of French colonialism” (p. 7). In each chapter, he presents a different site in which such intertwining has taken place: In one, he considers how the peasant struggles in the early 1970s against the building of a military base in Larzac, which adopted the discourse of the Algerian resistance, served as a space of articulation for the Kanak Liberation Movement in New Caledonia and laid the groundwork for today’s altermondialisme, in which Larzac’s José Bové remains a central figure. In another, he focuses on the repatriation of former African colonial officials (themselves originating from Corsica and other peripheral regions) into André Malraux’s new Ministry of Culture and their battles against the “guerilla ethnology” (p. 91) of burgeoning regionalist movements. A third chapter examines the tentative embrace during the early 1980s of regional decentralization and proimmigrant multiculturalism by the newly elected Socialist Party of François Mitterrand and the later co-optation of this discourse of difference by the xenophobic Far Right. A fourth chapter looks at the current “dance of the museums” (p. 143), in which President Jacques Chirac is reorganizing colonial-era collections into three new institutions devoted to African, American, and Oceanic art (Quai Branly, Paris); Mediterranean civilizations (Marseille); and the history of immigration. If the conclusion requires a certain legerdemain to unite the different fields of inquiry, Lebovics does succeed in demonstrating the longue durée of the imperial predicament of French cultural integration. Bringing the Empire Back Home is the first installment in Duke’s new Radical Perspectives series, which explicitly encourages “politically engaged historical research” (p. xi), and Lebovics intends his book to “contribute to an international project of liberation” (p. xiv). Yet, despite such lofty aims, Lebovics actually tells readers very little about those engaged in such a liberation struggle. The book is primarily an institutional history of the management of French culture, and Lebovics focuses on the professional biographies of great men: ministry officials, intellectuals, and politicians, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Émile Biasini, and Maurice Godelier. In contrast, the everyday actors are, like the “possibly North African man” in the cover image, relegated to an inscrutable background. What may be “radical” is Lebovics’s defiance of conventional academic style and adoption of a voice that directly addresses the reader with a series of asides, winks, and editorial elbows. The reader may agree with any number of his opinions—for instance, that Le Pen is “petty, petulant … and above all stupid” (p. 136)—and some of the asides can be vaguely provocative in their caricature—such as his comparison of French people’s concerns over their patrimoine with Americans’ worries over their pension funds (p. 116)—but others border on ignorance, if not offense, and tend to detract from the analysis. Regarding an Algerian flag-waving spectator who invaded the pitch during the contentious October 2001 France–Algeria football match, Lebovics remarks, “If the young woman had been in the land of her parents, she would not have dared to act so ‘immodestly’ ” (p. 140). But was it not exactly such flag-waving moujahidat who risked their lives for Algerian independence and made it possible for such an international match to be played? And was this woman not, very arguably, actually in the “land of her parents”? That is, after all, why the question “what does it mean to be French” is such a fraught one. [photographs, notes, index.]
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