I

The reception of post-colonial studies in France has been marked by striking controversy and hostility that is all the more remarkable given the indifference that surrounded the field until recently. Indeed, whilst post-colonial studies emerged and were then gradually institutionalized in the US, Australian, and British academies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in France they were largely ignored. Further, when one considers the close relationship between post-colonial theory and French post-structuralism, as well as its affinity with francophoneFootnote ¹ anti-colonial writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Albert Memmi, such a troubled reception seems puzzling.

The extent of this apparent contradiction should be somewhat tempered. It is true, as Nicolas Bancel points out, that post-colonial studies were never totally absent from the French radar: links were forged between French historians and members of the Subaltern Studies group in the 1970s, and scholars associated with post-colonial studies were received in France between 1996 and 2002 as part of an international research programme.Footnote ²

Further, their general acceptance in the anglophone world does not mean that they did not meet with criticism and opposition here too – as both Dane Kennedy and Berny Sèbe have shown, imperial history (to speak only of this discipline) has proved reticent to engage with post-colonial approaches.Footnote ³ Discussions, whether post-colonial or not, of colonialism and its aftermath have also been slow to take off in other former imperial powers: it is only recently that Germany and Belgium, for example, have begun to reassess their colonial past.Footnote ⁴ In this regard, then, France is clearly not alone.

Despite these caveats, however, there remains a stark contrast between the anglophone academy, in which post-colonial studies have become a feature of the academic landscape, and the French, in which they continue to excite considerable debate and opposition. Further, the French case remains particularly interesting due to both the size of its former empire, second only to Britain's, and the French roots of much post-colonial theory.

Why, then, have post-colonial studies been such an issue of contention in France? What are the institutional, intellectual, and social factors that have made their reception so difficult? How does this reticence relate to the place of empire more generally in French collective memory? Is it that post-colonial studies themselves have not adapted to the particularities of the French context?

In order to understand this troubled reception of post-colonial studies in France, it is important first to understand what such a notion entails. As David Murphy indicates, it is hard to define a specific set of ideas that comprise post-colonialism in the same way that one might for Marxism, post-structuralism, or feminism; indeed, ‘there is no single post-colonial theory to which all postcolonial critics adhere’.Footnote ⁵ Rather, post-colonial studies is a field that draws together ‘feminists, Marxists, poststructuralists, new historicists, amongst others, in an attempt to understand from a wide range of perspectives the connections between colonialism and culture’.Footnote ⁶

Genealogies of post-colonialism tend to trace its origins to the 1978 publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, Footnote ⁷ moving on to Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha's analyses of colonial discourse to form a ‘Holy Trinity’ of post-colonial theory. Yet as Bill Ashcroft points out, these initial studies did not actually use the term ‘post-colonial’, which was first used in literary circles ‘to refer to cultural interactions within colonial societies’.Footnote ⁸ Subsequently, the term has expanded from these literary and theoretical bases (although it remains most strongly established here) and is now used across a range of disciplines to explore the nature of colonialism and its ruination,Footnote ⁹ both in former colonies and former metropoles.

As part of the wider post-modern field, post-colonial studies has focused particularly on the discursive power of colonialism and has challenged Western metanarratives, seeking alternative paradigms through which to view cultural interactions. This is apparent in the work of the Subaltern Studies group – a ‘subfield’, perhaps, of the post-colonial project – which tries to recover the voices of those oppressed by colonialism.Footnote ¹⁰

The significance of the term ‘post’ has provoked much discussion within the field: does it simply mean ‘after’ colonialism, and so deny (neo)colonial vestiges? Does it merely define everything in terms of colonialism and thus reinforce a Eurocentric and teleological view of history?Footnote ¹¹ Does it signify a challenging of previously legitimating narratives, and, if so, does this necessarily make it akin to post-modernism?Footnote ¹² These are questions that cannot be explored here, but that reveal the intensely self-critical nature of the field known as post-colonial studies.

A useful view of the post-colonial is one that takes it ‘both as a chronological marker that has generated a critical reflection on the grand histories of European colonialism, imperialism and globalization, and also as an epistemological opening that retrospectively rereads these narratives…and that unsettles the authority these texts claim for themselves’.Footnote ¹³ Seeing the term in this way allows for an appreciation of post-colonialism both in its exploration of colonialism and its ruins as well as in its more fundamental challenge to Western thought.

Yet whilst this definition suggests the object of study is primarily a literary one, this is not the only concern of a post-colonial approach. Ato Quayson has highlighted the ‘undecidability between an activist engagement with contradictions in the real world and a more distanced participation via analyses of texts, images and discourses’Footnote ¹⁴ that is characteristic of post-colonial studies. Whilst a discursive focus may have dominated much scholarship, in particular in the anglophone world, this is not the exclusive purview of the field. As the French case will demonstrate, the object of study, and consequent form that post-colonialism takes, can vary in different national contexts.

Further, it is pertinent to distinguish between the institutional, academic field of ‘post-colonial studies’ or ‘post-colonialism’, and more subtle transformations relating to the influence of its ideas. Quayson has posited the notion of ‘post-colonializing’, a ‘process of coming-into-being and of struggle against colonialism and its after-effects’, which suggests ‘creative ways of viewing a variety of cultural, political and social realities both in the West and elsewhere via a postcolonial prism of interpretation’.Footnote ¹⁵ This suggests a subtler, more pervasive process of changing ideas, which may not entail an institutional impact of post-colonial studies as an academic school of thought, but which may ultimately be of greater importance; as will be explored, this idea of the post-colonializing process is of particular interest in France. With this in mind, let us turn to the emergence of post-colonial debates there.

On the academic scene, early attempts such as those by Jean-Marc Moura, Jacqueline Bardolph, and the journal Dédale to introduce post-colonial perspectives in the late 1990s went largely unnoticed and had little lasting impact.Footnote ¹⁶ Critics such as Bernard Mouralis also arguably explored post-colonial ideas, but without identifying them as such.Footnote ¹⁷ The Achac research group, composed primarily of historians and at the forefront, perhaps, of introducing post-colonial perspectives in France, began working on questions of colonialism and its representations as early as 1989.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet it was not until the mid-2000s that a consideration of post-colonial studies and the questions it raises really made an impact. The 2005 publication of La fracture coloniale, an edited volume looking at contemporary French society through a colonial lens, was followed by a ‘flurry’ of publishing activity in the following years, primarily in the form of special issues of a number of journals.Footnote ¹⁹ These ranged from the more sympathetic – Mouvements: ‘Who's afraid of postcolonial studies’ – to the more critical – Hérodote: ‘The postcolonial question’, and Labyrinthe: ‘Must one be postcolonial?’ (translated titles).Footnote ²⁰ A number of extremely hostile critiques also appeared in the shape of Romain Bertrand's Mémoires d'empire, Jean-Loup Amselle's L'Occident décroché, and Jean-François Bayart's Les études postcoloniales: un carnaval académique.

In order to understand the emergence of this debate and its chronology, it is necessary to appreciate the social context in which it emerged, for the debate surrounding post-colonial studies has been both intimately linked to, and part of, a wider debate surrounding France's colonial past and its implications for contemporary society. In Quayson's terms, academic debates have run parallel to more pervasive processes of ‘post-colonializing’.

The beginnings of this process can perhaps be seen in 1998, emerging as a result of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery: migrants from France's overseas territories (modern-day colonies?) protested the commemoration, which they saw as merely celebrating an emancipatory Republic and ignoring the resistance of slaves themselves.Footnote ²¹ The 2001 ‘Taubira’ law designating slavery as a crime against humanity was passed in response to this ‘failure of official commemoration’,Footnote ²² in turn leading to controversy surrounding the historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau's denial of slavery as a form of genocide. Questions of colonial ruins and their contested meaning were clearly already emerging here, but 2005 was the ‘pivotal year’ in the advent of the post-colonial debate in France.Footnote ²³

January saw the provocative declaration of the ‘Natives of the Republic’ in which a group of activists, later to form a political party, denounced colonial continuities within the French state.Footnote ²⁴ In February, the ‘law of the 23rd of February’ was passed, whose 4th clause stipulated that school curricula would recognize ‘the positive role of the French presence overseas, particularly in North Africa’.Footnote ²⁵ Intense opposition ensured this was eventually removed, but not until 2006 following extensive debate and diplomatic embarrassment. Finally, November saw the French banlieuesFootnote ²⁶ hit by a wave of riots, triggered by the deaths of two young French men, of North and West African descent, electrocuted whilst hiding at an electricity sub-station following a police chase.Footnote ²⁷ From this year onwards, the term ‘postcolonial’ became common in the French lexicon, and lost its older, purely chronological meaning ‘to signal a more complex questioning of contemporary France: that of its place with respect to its former colonies…and that of the hybridization (métissage) of national identity following decolonisation’.Footnote ²⁸

The genesis of the debate surrounding post-colonial studies has, then, been intimately linked to political debates surrounding national identity, immigration, and integration, and the emergence of competing memories of the colonial past in the public domain. These issues were key during Sarkozy's election campaign and presidency, reflected in his infamously colonialist speech in Dakar in 2007, and his creation of a Ministry of National Identity and Immigration (later to be abolished).Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, these have shown themselves to be the most pressing questions addressed by post-colonialism in a French context, and for scholars such as Achille Mbembe and Ann Laura Stoler, are also part of timely debates over ‘radical Islam’ and the threat it poses to national security.Footnote ³⁰ The recent terrorist attacks in Paris, in January and November 2015, have added fuel to the fire and brought to the fore the continued friction between a supposedly inclusive Republic and those who are seen to threaten it. That debate continues to rage over the possible revocation of French citizenship from citizens who have committed acts of terrorism, and the punitive measures enacted in the name of security following November's attacks serve as reminders that issues of post-colonial identity look set to remain heated for some time to come.Footnote ³¹

The post-colonial debate in France has, then, been stimulated by social actors rather than finding its origins in the academic sphere,Footnote ³² and as such the reception of post-colonial studies, and the ultimate form its impact has taken, cannot be separated from this cultural context and key events.Footnote ³³ The nature of these origins has had a number of consequences. As Marie-Claude Smouts observes, this context of social and political crisis surrounding France's colonial ruins and the place of its post-colonial populations meant that post-colonial studies were initially subjected to a process of disqualification, making any considered critique practically impossible:Footnote ³⁴ the acrimony of the debate has led to a conflation of political and intellectual stakes.Footnote ³⁵ Post-colonial studies are consequently homogenized and mischaracterized, seen as ‘politically dangerous’ because they supposedly ‘ethnicize’ social questions and are ‘the vehicle for a culturalist engineering of political domination’.Footnote ³⁶

This context is fundamental to understanding the high stakes and thus the vehemence and controversy that have characterized the reception of post-colonial studies. Yet what is it specifically about the French context that has made it so hard for them to take hold? The institutional and intellectual environment, as well as France's strong Republican ideology, must be considered. Conversely, the form that post-colonialism itself has taken must also be taken into account – its own anglocentrism has undoubtedly played a role in its troubled reception in France. Despite these problems, it is nevertheless possible to outline a specifically ‘French’ form of post-colonial studies emerging – if not yet fully fledged – and thus to ask not only what post-colonial studies has brought to France, but also what France has brought to post-colonial studies.

II

A number of institutional and intellectual factors in France have made the reception of post-colonial studies more troubled there than in the anglophone world. First, as Bancel has shown, colonial history in general has had a weak institutional footing within the French academy, struggling to establish itself as a serious discipline and thus suffering from a lack of funds and prestige. The dearth of professional historians engaged in the subject and its generally descriptive and conservative content left it marginalized within the discipline of history from the late nineteenth century; further, its close relationship with the colonial lobby – primary funder of specialized journals and chaired positions in colonial history – meant their fortunes were closely tied. Once decolonization had begun, colonial history was left tainted by this relationship. Disdain for what was considered an avatar of the colonial period, combined with a growing preference for area studies, meant that colonial history was further marginalized in the reorganization of the social sciences under Fernand Braudel in the late 1950s. Studies of colonial history have thus had a weak institutional grounding in the French academy, making it hard for research in this domain to take off.Footnote ³⁷

Secondly, the French academy is marked by strong institutional rigidity that affects post-colonial studies in two ways. First, ‘the reception of a new domain of investigation does not happen easily’ in France, where disciplines are strictly compartmentalized,Footnote ³⁸ and second, there is a significant ‘disciplinary order’Footnote ³⁹ that leads to post-colonial studies being seen as ‘homeless’ in an academy where interdisciplinary research is ‘more often the exception than the rule’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As both a new (at least in the French context) domain of research and one that transgresses disciplinary boundaries, the field of post-colonial studies is thus doubly disadvantaged.

Literature departments, traditional home of post-colonial studies in the anglophone world, illustrate the strength of such boundaries. The cleavage between ‘French’ and ‘francophone’ literature is well established in France, implying a hierarchy between literatures seen as ‘pure’ and French (although, tellingly, also including non-French authors such as Samuel Beckett), and those considered merely ‘francophone’, i.e. from France's ex-colonies or overseas territories.Footnote ⁴¹ The ‘Manifesto for a “world literature” in French’, published in 2007 in Le Monde Footnote ⁴² by a number of authors wishing to break down this distinction and thus break the subaltern status of ‘francophone’ writers, attests to the emergence of post-colonial approaches in France, yet its failure to have a significant impact highlights the persistence of strict boundaries, even within disciplines.

This reticence towards interdisciplinary approaches points to a third factor within the French academy that has affected the reception of post-colonial studies: a general aversion to post-modernism and the perceived imposition of Anglo-Saxon academic models. For Christine Chivallon, the ‘ignorance, if not mistrust’ towards post-colonial studies in France is symptomatic of a feeling that affects ‘all the “posts”’, a prefix that until at least very recently meant ‘ipso facto stigmatisation’.Footnote ⁴³ Given the French provenance of much post-structuralist and post-modern thought, this initially seems puzzling. Yet, as François Cusset has shown, whilst ‘Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida were becoming ubiquitous in the American university, their names were being systematically eclipsed in France’.Footnote ⁴⁴

In fact, the very denomination of ‘French Theory’ was itself an American creation, the product of a certain ‘taxonomic violence’ that ignored the diversity and divergences of these thinkers and one of a number of mediating operations that took place once they reached the shores of the US.Footnote ⁴⁵ Along with this grouping together, key concepts were mobilized into a politically radical academic discourse ‘in which the French authors…did not really recognize themselves’, thus creating a new ‘Americanized’ body of thought.Footnote ⁴⁶ Whilst this took off across the Atlantic, in France there was little discussion of what was seen as the ‘French theorists’’ academic ‘navel gazing’,Footnote ⁴⁷ and pre-eminent figures in the anglophone world, such as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, existed on the margins of French academia for much of their careers.

If the French academy proved unwilling to engage with these initially home-grown theories, it was for Anglo-Saxon thought that French academia saved its ‘fiercest resistance’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Philosophy and comparative literature departments were ‘quite stubborn’ in their resistance to interdisciplinary programmes such as gender and cultural studies that had been developing in the US, and the social sciences ‘often touted the fact that they had repelled the wave of American postmodernism, a category into which they tossed…studies of postcolonialism or pop culture’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Anything ‘redolent of minority studies, the debate on communitarianism [or] theories on sexual identity’ was banned, an attitude symptomatic of a ‘tenacious tradition of intellectual isolationism’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Mbembe has highlighted how this was also linked to efforts in France to ‘disavow inherited traditions of internationalism and anticolonialism and to rid the country of Marxism’, increasingly associated with totalitarianism following the Hungarian revolt and Prague Spring.Footnote ⁵¹

Hostility to what is perceived as an Anglo-Saxon academic invasion inherent in post-colonial studies is clear in recent critiques. Jean-Loup Amselle, for example, has warned of American imperialism's strength in its capacity ‘to use its multicultural positions to extend its domination across the planet, primarily by attracting to its soil the best elements of countries of the South’.Footnote ⁵² Post-colonial studies would seem to be just another way for the US to extend its global hegemony, under the guise of intellectuals from formerly colonized countries co-opted into the American academy's multi-cultural orthodoxy. In its often close relationship to post-structuralism and its predominantly anglophone origins (a point that will be returned to), the field of post-colonial studies has thus been doubly disadvantaged in the French intellectual climate.

This particular academic context is closely related to a further stumbling block: the prevalent conception of history in France, which post-colonial studies challenge in their epistemological critique. Many of the debates surrounding colonial history in general, and post-colonial studies in particular, reveal the strength of a scientific conception of history, closely linked to this general reticence towards post-modernism. This can be seen by the preoccupation of critics such as Philippe Braud to ‘scientifically justify’Footnote ⁵³ the label post-colonial studies, and the concern expressed by Romain Bertrand and Jean-Luc Bonniol regarding the mixing of scientific (academic) and militant registers in this debate, which in Bonniol's eyes can have only ‘unfortunate’Footnote ⁵⁴ results.

Further, reproaches levelled against ‘post-colonial’ scholars for being ‘non-scientific’ on the basis of the institution to which they belong – ‘non-scientific’ here meaning not belonging to a grande université Footnote ⁵⁵  – show how deeply ingrained and unabashed these conceptions can be. It is clear that a strong rational scientific discourse continues to underpin academic research – for Cusset this is symptomatic of the French model of the ‘rational state’, in which science is the ‘raison d’État’ and ‘the ultimate rampart against every form of relativism’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The kinds of epistemological challenges posed by post-colonial studies are, then, a challenge not just to the academic model, but to the model of the French state.

Further, challenging the prevalent conception of history through alternative paradigms is seen as a threat to national identity, since the conception of history is intimately tied to that of the nation. The historical discipline in France was born to ‘build memory [and] preserve the nation’,Footnote ⁵⁷ and it is clear from much of the literature surrounding post-colonial studies that the building of a national memory remains the fundamental aim of history. Indeed, as Bancel points out, there is an ‘implicit consensus within the fundamentally conservative historical establishment that history…should not question “national unity” – a discourse that is genealogically its own, since it serves the initial function of academic history: to “create the nation”’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This consubstantiation of history and the nation undoubtedly plays an important role in the virulent opposition with which post-colonial studies is often confronted, since challenging the prevailing conception of history is tantamount to challenging the integrity of the nation itself. The clear nationalist bent of the most virulent of these debates will be discussed below, but it is worth noting here that the conception of history as creator and defender of the nation seems to remain even in the work of those who have been most active in promoting post-colonial approaches in France, including Bancel himself.

As Grégoire Leménager aptly points out, La fracture coloniale, published in 2005 by the Achac group (to whom Bancel belongs) and considered key to the post-colonial debate in France for its reconsideration of contemporary society through questions relating to the colonial past, shows little concern for theoretical questioning or a fundamental epistemological break with traditional histories, rather seeking to revisit forgotten historical events.Footnote ⁵⁹ The aim of the book seems in fact to be to ‘rebuild another collective memory…common to all, and preserve national cohesion by adding to [the] history manuals of France a few new chapters’ – those of the forgotten victims of colonialism.Footnote ⁶⁰ As such, their attitude would appear to ‘replicate that of the republican ethnocentrism that they are anxious to oppose’ since they ultimately reaffirm a desire to preserve national values and guarantee social cohesion.Footnote ⁶¹ This somewhat paradoxical position, as Leménager rightly states, certainly ‘resonates strangely’,Footnote ⁶² but points to the persistence of traditional historical paradigms as well as to the general lack of theoretical approaches offered by what might be called a ‘French’ post-colonial studies, a point that will be returned to.

A number of institutional and intellectual factors have thus proved hindrances to the acceptance of post-colonial studies in France. Yet alone they cannot explain everything. Significantly, the intellectual environment in France is ‘buttressed’ by a strong Republican ideology; for Mamadou Diouf, it is the challenge it poses to these principles that means the academy ‘cannot not be hostile’ to post-colonialism.Footnote ⁶³ An examination of this Republican ideology is therefore called for.

III

In the words of Forsdick and Murphy, ‘one cannot underestimate the role of Republican ideology in shaping French resistance to post-colonialism’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Far from being ‘merely an invocation, an ideology, or a political resource’, Republicanism is also ‘a more intimate…emotional concept, that touches on the notion of “living together” (vivre ensemble),…in which the theoretical equality of individuals before the…state enables…an ignorance of communitarian, religious, [or] sexual…belonging and so, theoretically, a unique freedom and propensity for tolerance’.Footnote ⁶⁵ It is vital in determining France's national identity and history, where ‘the Republic is identified with the Nation and the Nation is the expression of France’.Footnote ⁶⁶

The French historical narrative is upheld through school curricula that continue to focus on Republican history. Although this has not gone unchallenged, notably by Suzanne Citron in her attempt to provide an accessible alternative to this history of France born under the Third Republic, the extent to which it has remained central in both academic and public life is attested to by her choice of title, The history of France another way (emphasis added).Footnote ⁶⁷

The importance of Republicanism is perhaps hard to appreciate from the British context in which there exists no equivalent national narrative,Footnote ⁶⁸ but the staunch Republican defence characteristic of many of the more hostile critiques of post-colonial studies attests to both its influence and to the threat they are seen to pose to this way of life. Yet although this challenge is overstated and mischaracterized in many of these critiques, post-colonialism does pose a problem for Republican ideals in a number of ways.

First, in their reassessment of colonial history, post-colonial studies necessarily challenge this French national narrative by exposing the complicity of French Republicanism in the colonial enterprise. The historical narrative of the French nation leaves no place for a consideration of empire or the challenges it poses to the core Republican values of (universal) liberty, equality, and fraternity. In reinterpreting the colonial past, post-colonial studies challenge this narrative by exposing the ‘Republican paradox’: that it was inventor of human rights and proponent of universal equality on the one hand, yet on the other proponent of exclusion and denier of these rights, both in its colonies and indeed on French soil.Footnote ⁶⁹

National memory ‘has trouble understanding that the founders of the Republic…were convinced partisans of colonial expansion’:Footnote ⁷⁰ the majority of France's colonial expansion took place under the Third Republic, and it was the Republicans who pushed for colonization in the heated parliamentary debates on the issue in the 1880s. Jules Ferry himself, founder of the state education system and celebrated Republican figure, was also one of the fiercest proponents of colonization.Footnote ⁷¹

Further, the very idea of France was in many ways constituted by the experience of colonialism, since the development of colonial ideology and that of French nationalism were co-existent throughout the nineteenth century and until the middle of the twentieth.Footnote ⁷² The idea of ‘la Plus Grande France’ and colonial expansion were used to deflect attention from the loss of Alsace and Lorraine and unite France into a coherent nation-state, thereafter serving as a reminder of its greatness.Footnote ⁷³ As such, it was ‘through the empire that French national feeling was made’,Footnote ⁷⁴ and the universal Republic built on colonial exclusion.

The justification of colonial expansion through the ‘civilizing mission’ was also fraught with contradictions, as Joan Scott has shown. Although ‘the notion of a “mission” implied that assimilation was possible’, the colonial venture was simultaneously justified by racist characterizations of ‘backwards’ populations which ‘called into question the very possibility of the civilising project’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The characteristics that meant colonized populations needed ‘civilizing’ in the first place were the very things that precluded this ‘civilization’ ever being achieved. Indeed, ‘the stated goal was to civilize (to assimilate) those who finally could not be civilized’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Laurent Dubois has argued that these contradictions were in fact the product of ‘contestation through which the colonized confronted and transformed the language of rights and forced colonial powers to reformulate their own discourses’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The very possibility of including colonized subjects in Republican universalism, he argues, came from ‘slave insurgents claiming Republican citizenship and racial equality during the early 1790s’, who ‘ultimately expanded – and “universalized” – the idea of rights’.Footnote ⁷⁸ They ‘outran the political imagination of the metropole, transforming the possibilities embodied in the idea of citizenship’,Footnote ⁷⁹ even if these possibilities would ultimately be cut short due to Republican racism, and the economic necessities of indentured labour in plantation economies.

It was not, however, just in relation to its colonies that the Republic was exclusionary, and it was not just the Third Republic that somehow corrupted the universal values of the Revolution. As Gary Wilder deftly shows, the French state was always an ‘imperial nation state’ and disjunctions between territories, forms of government, and populations were ‘intrinsic features of the national-republican past rather than…obstacles to national-republican ideals’.Footnote ⁸⁰

The Declaration of the Rights of Man, founding Republican text, comprised an inherent antinomy between universalism – all men are born with equal rights – and particularism – that sovereignty rests with the nation. This inherent contradiction was embodied in citizenship, which marked a fundamental distinction between nationals and foreigners and institutionalized the distinction between those endowed with humanity and those who were not. Thus, ‘new forms of inequality were…entwined with republican principles; they expressed rather than violated the new political universalism’.Footnote ⁸¹ As Patrick Weil has shown, the importance of defining nationality continues: debates surrounding those born of Algerian parents were particularly heated during the 1980s and 1890s, and it is noteworthy that France has changed its nationality laws more than any other democratic nation.Footnote ⁸² The current debates on the revocation of citizenship mentioned above highlight France's continued preoccupation with the definition of French nationality.

More than just excluding non-nationals through the institution of citizenship, the notion of abstract individuals itself, at the heart of Republican ideology, could also be exclusionary. In order to establish a fundamental human sameness and thus ensure theoretical equality for all, the abstract individual had to be singularly defined, embodying an essence of common humanity. Yet precisely because it was a ‘singular type’ possessing certain defined characteristics, it could also function to exclude ‘those who were thought not to possess the requisite traits’, ‘by defining as nonindividuals, or less than individuals, those who were different from the singular figure of the human’.Footnote ⁸³ In this way, individuality was defined in both racial and gendered terms, embodying the white Western man;Footnote ⁸⁴ women and racially inferior men were not privy to the universal equality reserved for these ‘individuals’.

The ‘Republican paradox’ was not, then, as some suggest,Footnote ⁸⁵ the result of some particular distorted view of Republican ideology promoted under the Third Republic. Rather, it was inherent in its very founding, working to exclude both certain sections of the population at home (namely women) and colonized populations. In exploring the genealogies and working of colonialism and colonial discourse, post-colonial studies threaten to expose this reality and thus disturb the deeply ingrained national narrative.

Secondly, the epistemological challenge that post-colonial studies pose to Western thought is also a challenge to Republican ideals. The ‘Republican paradox’ is, of course, not merely a French one, but part of a wider contradictory relationship in which Western Europe's interaction with the rest of the world has been at odds with its own humanist principles.Footnote ⁸⁶ As mentioned in the introduction, post-colonial scholars such as Chakrabarty and the Subaltern Studies group endeavour to decentre these Enlightenment ideals in seeking new paradigms through which to examine the colonial past. As such, they question not merely the practice of the Republic and its formation, but the very philosophical principles on which it rests. Although this attack is not one specifically levied against France, the strength of the Republican narrative gives it greater resonance there, due to the importance of the Enlightenment in national history. The challenge that post-colonial studies pose is not merely a narrative one, but one that questions the very philosophical basis on which this narrative was constructed.

The third and perhaps most important way in which post-colonial studies challenge the Republic is in the bearing they have on the French model of integration, yet this challenge is often misrepresented by (Republican) critics of post-colonial studies. Closely tied to the colonial concept of assimilation, this model is based on the erasure of difference, on the refusal to recognize specific communities, and on the (supposed) equality of all in the public domain. Due to post-colonial studies' aversion to prescriptive universalizing assumptions, their favouring of multiple perspectives, and their appreciation of cultural difference, many critics see them as anti-Republican, threatening this cherished model with an encroaching American multi-culturalism.Footnote ⁸⁷ Apart from another manifestation of the anglophobia and anti-post-modernism already explored in the academic context, what is evident here is the fact that the post-colonial debate in France ‘cannot be isolated from its political stakes’Footnote ⁸⁸ and coincides with discussions of the ‘crisis’ of the French model of integration.

Indeed, despite its pretensions to universality, the assimiliationist model of integration has in fact engendered widespread discrimination and presents much continuity with the colonial period.Footnote ⁸⁹ Françoise Lorcerie has identified a ‘national primordialism’ prevalent in France, frequently politically mobilized but never recognized, and that manifests itself through agents of the state.Footnote ⁹⁰ As a result, France suffers from institutional racism and ethnic bias in schools, hospitals, and the labour market: to cite but one example of many, those born of immigrant parents are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than those born of French parents.Footnote ⁹¹ Reactions against such discrimination have, paradoxically, taken the form of increasingly communitarian expressions such as the creation of the Representative Council of France's Black AssociationsFootnote ⁹² or, as mentioned, the formation of the ‘Natives of the Republic’. As such, it appears that the model whose very basis is a rejection of communitarian affiliations has in fact engendered a resurgence of these. As previously stated, the coincidence of this crisis with debates surrounding post-colonial studies has led to a conflation of the two issues and the consequent assumption that a post-colonial perspective is necessarily a communitarian one.

In reality, however, a post-colonial approach in no way assumes the acceptance of communitarianism, and these reactions are symptomatic of the way in which post-colonial studies have been misinterpreted and misrepresented in the French debate. Leaving aside the vastly heterogeneous nature of post-colonial studies and thus the inherently problematic nature of such generalizations, it is unclear why post-colonial approaches should automatically mean adopting a communitarian stance. For Mbembe, the ‘post-colonial problem’ is not one of opposition between universalism (Republican values) and communitarianism (read: multi-culturalism), but rather between universalism and cosmopolitanism – ‘the idea of a shared world, a common humanity, a mutual history and future’.Footnote ⁹³ A post-colonial approach is one that insists on a ‘humanity-to-come, that which must be born once the colonial figures of inhumanity and of racial difference have been abolished’, and not on the (re)claiming of (colonially determined) ‘communitarian’ identities.Footnote ⁹⁴

Further, Robert Young's exploration of post-colonialism as tricontinentalism suggests that far from being a communitarian critique, it is one that builds on a rich anti-colonial heritage from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. It ‘operates out of a knowledge…formed through’ the material realities of ‘injustice, inequality…exploitation [and] poverty’ that many continue to experience daily, and its ‘politics of power-knowledge asserts the will to change them’Footnote ⁹⁵  – a far cry from a mere reassertion of communitarian identity politics. Work by scholars such as Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, which seeks to open a dialogue between Marxism and post-colonialism, further complicates this simplified critique advanced by many French commentators.Footnote ⁹⁶

For the Achac historians, a French post-colonial perspective rejects any form of methodological communitarianism, rather seeking to explore ‘the processes of the creation of difference, and what were and are the stakes and the contexts that privilege one form of difference over another’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The ‘poverty’ of the anti-communitarian accusations, whose proponents are primarily concerned with ideology, is not a reflection of what post-colonial studies seek to achieve, but rather reveals ‘the crisis hitting French political society in its principles and its values, from the conception of national integration to the nature of citizenship’.Footnote ⁹⁸

Whilst these accusations of communitarianism are, then, problematic, the fundamental problem that post-colonial studies do pose for the Republic is the question of ‘alterity, of difference, and of its place in the community’.Footnote ⁹⁹ As Bancel has shown, the global discrediting of racial theories after the Second World War, a response to the horrors of the Holocaust and influenced by UNESCO's publication of the ‘Statement on Race’ in 1950,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ led to a ‘profound, systematic refusal’ of the term ‘race’ in France, which extended to the social sciences and thus ignored it even as a constructed category of analysis.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Despite some official recognition of racism directed towards ‘Muslim French citizens from Algeria’ after the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954, with defeat in 1962 references to racism were erased, along with ‘any historical analysis of why specific groups were “in need”’.Footnote ¹⁰² As such, the dream of universal equality and the refusal to recognize race that had long been part of the Republic's ‘political baggage’ was upheld at the expense of recognizing and dealing with problems of racism.Footnote ¹⁰³

For Mbembe, it is the inability of the Republican model to conceive of difference or alterity, stemming from this refusal to recognize ‘race’ in any form, that explains the hostile reaction to post-colonial studies in France.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This refusal, for him, has led to a ‘political, intellectual and cultural narcissism’ that has collided with post-colonial approaches.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ France has continued ‘as if the post-colonial critique of universalism…had never occurred’ and, as such, ‘French universalist phraseology, in its militant abstraction, serves more than anything as a screen to cover an ethno-racial nationalism that refuses to state its real name’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

This is undoubtedly a strong formulation that risks reducing France to mere xenophobia. Yet whilst the absolute refusal of the concept of ‘race’ may have ‘condemned political racism to the margins’, it has not been able to prevent the persistence of ‘implicit hierarchies and discriminatory representations’ within French society:Footnote ¹⁰⁷ that 30 per cent of respondents in a 2007 survey openly declared themselves as ‘racist’ is certainly cause for concern.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Despite recent concessions to ‘race’ as a social construction, and consequent moves to combat racism more effectively,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ it is clear that post-colonialism's exploration of such categories remains relatively challenging to the assimilationist foundations of Republican identity.

IV

Post-colonial studies, then, pose a challenge to the Republic both in their revision of its national narrative and in their epistemological challenge to Western thought. Fundamentally, they also pose the question of race and difference, which challenges the basis of universal equality, founded on the negation of difference, on which Republican identity is based. This is made more acute by the emergence of post-colonial debates in a context of profound social crisis, reflected in the hostility of many critiques. Yet perhaps what these debates, and indeed the social crisis itself, really point to is the peculiar place that empire occupies in French public and intellectual life.

France has been marked by a striking historical amnesia when it comes to its colonial history. Following the bloody ‘trauma’Footnote ¹¹⁰ of decolonization, there emerged a fierce refusal either to confront or even to acknowledge the colonial past. This profound silence extended into literature, art, and cinema,Footnote ¹¹¹ affecting individuals from both sides of the colonial divide.Footnote ¹¹² National history was ‘amputated’Footnote ¹¹³ of its colonial contingent, and the history of Algeria, so central to the French colonial and post-colonial experience, was relegated to (at best) a peripheral status.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The extent of this amnesia is remarkable: the Algerian War of Independence, in which over 20,000 French troops and civilians and more than 169,000 Algerians lost their lives, was only recognized as a war by the French state in 1999.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The bloody nature of this decolonization, and specifically the violence of the Algerian War, must help explain this stubborn refusal to acknowledge the colonial past in France. Indeed, for Benjamin Stora, it was the traumatic experience of Algeria's decolonization in particular, experienced like ‘a brutal and definitive ending’, that led to the ‘loss of memory’ regarding the colonial past.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Further, Stephen Howe has tentatively suggested that abuses by French colonial security forces may have been ‘more numerous and perhaps more symptomatic’ than in the British empire.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The controversy that emerged surrounding Louisette Ighalatriz's testimony in Le Monde detailing abuse by French officials in Algeria, and former general Paul Aussaresses's subsequent unapologetic defence of the use of torture, certainly point to an alarming normalization of violence in French colonial policy.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Regardless of comparisons, it is clear that the violent nature of French colonialism has proved difficult to come to terms with.

Yet the violence of colonialism is perhaps not the only reason for this amnesia, or rather is perhaps indicative of more a complex repression. Antoine Raybaud has cautiously emphasized the exceedingly complex nature of the French colonial enterprise whose ‘goals and actions cannot be reduced to a policy of dispossession and extermination, even if a logic and practice of dispossession and extermination were at play’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This amnesia may have been more related to the inherent contradictions of the French empire, and thus its awkward place in collective memory, than to do with its violence per se.

As already noted, Republican colonialism was inherently paradoxical, not least in its granting of suffrage to colonial populations in French elections whilst at the same time perpetuating their unequal status.Footnote ¹²⁰ The fundamental goal of empire was to transform colonial populations into Frenchmen and assimilate them into a greater France, yet this could never really be achieved: the message was that ‘you can become French, but you can't really’.Footnote ¹²¹ Yet this impossibility was nevertheless accompanied by a strong belief in, and attachment to, the mission civilisatrice, a belief that stayed with many throughout and after empire.Footnote ¹²²

This belief in the civilizing mission was perhaps what gave the French empire its peculiarly intimate nature,Footnote ¹²³ a feature not unimportant in considering the place of empire in the French imagination today. Although traditional oppositions between British ‘indirect rule’ and the more involved nature of French colonial governance have been nuanced,Footnote ¹²⁴ the goal of assimilation, despite its ultimate impossibility, did lead to a closer, more direct involvement by French colonial administrators than by the British.Footnote ¹²⁵ The strength of the paternalism underlying the civilizing mission, yet at the same time exceptional brutality of French colonialism, created a ‘perverse and terrifying intimacy’ reflected in the use of torture during the Algerian War.Footnote ¹²⁶ As Joshua Cole has shown, the uncomfortable parallels in levels of intimacy between torture and rape on the one hand, and love on the other, attest to the complex and disturbing nature of these ‘intense and…intimate’ colonial relationships.Footnote ¹²⁷ The tendency to speak of relationships between the French and formerly colonized peoples ‘in terms of familial relationships that have somehow gone awry’Footnote ¹²⁸ further highlights the deeply contradictory nature of French imperialism and the traumatic nature of its loss for the French.

The trauma of decolonization and the complexities of colonial relationships and identity were experienced perhaps most vividly for repatriated settlers, namely the million pieds noirs expelled from Algeria following independence and forced to make the painful return ‘home’ to a metropole that did not recognize them. Despite the rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice and its dream of ‘an army of [Republican] missionaries’ to go forth and civilize, the colonial Republic in fact largely entrusted this task to ‘undesirables’:Footnote ¹²⁹ the marginalized, prisoners, and revolutionaries – ‘individuals expelled from the Nation because they represented a danger for the body of the Nation’.Footnote ¹³⁰ This use of the empire as an outlet for its ‘outlaw’Footnote ¹³¹ elements meant that returning settlers could not be accepted by the metropole since it had only ever seen them as ‘other to its own’.Footnote ¹³² The pieds noirs were not really French, but neither were they Algerian. Here again the hugely fraught nature of colonial relationships comes to the fore, and must be remembered when considering what confronting the French colonial past entails.

One final aspect of France's particularly intimate relationship with its empire may be considered in its close post-colonial ties with its former colonies. The concept of la francophonie, signifying a common culture based on the French language but also a political community linking France and its former colonies, has played a significant role in French foreign policy, particularly with respect to Africa. This has been characterized by a strong tradition of interventionism, the presence of French military bases, and the ‘emasculation of [former colonies'] monetary sovereignty’ through economic measures such as the Franc zone.Footnote ¹³³ The colonial genesis of the term francophonie, coined when French was declared the sole language of instruction throughout the empire,Footnote ¹³⁴ and the dubious nature of many of France's political dealings with African leaders have led to widespread accusations of neo-colonialism, most notably in the use of the term la FrançAfrique to refer to these close ties.Footnote ¹³⁵ Although the extent of French cultural influence in Africa has declined over the past two decades,Footnote ¹³⁶ this continuity in French–African relations further shows a difficulty in confronting and abandoning the colonial past.

These complexities of French colonialism and its ruins undoubtedly contribute to the difficult place that France's colonial past occupies in public and intellectual debate. The striking amnesia that has only recently begun to lift and the competing communitarian memories of colonialism that have emerged attest to the divisive and contentious nature of revisiting the colonial past. The troubled reception of post-colonial studies must, then, be seen in the more general context of denial of the history of a hugely contradictory empire. Their rejection can be seen as symptomatic of the unsettled relationship that France retains with its own history and the consequences of it in contemporary French society: a ‘harder coming to terms with the colonial past…seem[s]…to remain on the future agenda for historians of France and a wider public there’.Footnote ¹³⁷

Going further, Ann Laura Stoler suggests that France's complex relationship with its colonial past, more than just a question of amnesia, is one of ‘aphasia’. More than just ‘forgetting’, the notion of ‘aphasia’ emphasizes ‘both loss of access and active dissociation’, a ‘dismembering, a difficulty speaking’ rather than merely an issue of ‘ignorance or absence’.Footnote ¹³⁸ In exploring why certain subjects (the colonial past, in this instance) become ‘safe’ for debate at certain times, she invites us to question the very processes by which certain areas of knowledge are privileged over others, suggesting that it is through this process that we can better understand how certain colonial processes inform exclusions and violence that persist today.Footnote ¹³⁹

For Mbembe, the whole dispute over post-colonial studies, and over questions of national identity and the place of Islam in French culture, is fundamentally symptomatic of this aphasia and a ‘direct consequence of the French dis-ease of colonization’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ More than just a reconciliation with the colonial past, then, a fundamental questioning of the conventions of knowledge production that have made colonial history so marginal in French academic discourse is necessary. Until then, until some working out of this colonial aphasia is achieved, post-colonial studies may well continue to have trouble establishing themselves firmly in France: that many of their most hostile critics see them as a form of ‘colonial repentance’ certainly suggests so.Footnote ¹⁴¹

V

If all this has made for a particularly hostile reaction to post-colonial studies, this hostility should not mask the fact that alongside it a number of French scholars have engaged in more considered critiques. Many criticisms coming from France in fact mirror criticisms that have been widely debated in the anglophone world, many of them within the field of post-colonial studies itself.Footnote ¹⁴² Whilst the scope of this discussion does not allow for a detailed exploration of these critiques, it is true that despite their generally illuminating and positive nature, post-colonial studies undoubtedly suffer from a number of theoretical and conceptual weaknesses. Given the vastly heterogeneous nature of the field and its intensely self-critical and self-reflexive nature, however, it is unclear whether such weaknesses can explain the blockage towards post-colonial approaches in France.

However, this is not to say there is nothing about post-colonialism itself that may have rendered it unfavourable to the French environment. Its most important weakness in this context is ‘its (often unacknowledged) focus on the British colonial experience’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Given the differences between British and French colonial models and the particularly fraught place that empire occupies in French collective memory, the generally British focus of post-colonial studies may make it harder to transpose to France. Indeed, recent comparative approaches highlight the limitations of a post-colonial approach in a now globalized world, suggesting that the critical tools reaped from post-colonialism should now be used in a wider, ‘transcolonial’ project that takes into account imperial rivalries and the relationships between empires.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Further, post-colonial theory has had a tendency towards ‘linguistic parochialism’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ that may come from its early emergence as a coherent field of enquiry: as Michael Syrotinski and Celia Britton have pointed out, by establishing post-colonial studies within an English Studies framework, such as Ashcroft et al. did in The empire writes back, non-English material was automatically excluded.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Although they acknowledged that their approaches were applicable to other post-colonial contexts, and underlined the field's strength as coming from a ‘comparative methodology and the hybridised and syncretic view of the modern world which this implies’,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ they nevertheless focused exclusively on ‘writing by those peoples formerly colonised by Britain’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In so doing, the anglophone colonial and post-colonial experience was outlined as the primary remit of post-colonial studies, a bias no doubt compounded by the seminal status that the book came to enjoy within the field. Although more recent endeavours, cited in this article, by scholars such as Forsdick and Murphy, Murdoch and Donadey, Syrotinski, and Britton have sought to break out of this anglocentric bias, it remains a feature of the early establishment and development of the field, and one that no doubt has influenced, and continues to influence, its perception in France.

This perception is no doubt linked to the delay in translations of key works of post-colonial theory, which has also been a hindrance to the establishment of post-colonial studies in France: Spivak's seminal 1985 essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ only appeared in French translation in 2006, and Bhabha's 1994 The location of culture in 2007.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Such delays have not only resulted in ‘a relative lack of awareness of key critical works and thinkers’,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ but has also meant that when scholarship does reach France, it is often an ‘inaccurate reflection of the current state of the field’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Indeed, a belated engagement with deconstructionist texts such as those of Spivak and Bhabha ‘risks confusing postcolonial studies in their totality with what certain key writers…were doing fifteen years ago’.Footnote ¹⁵² As such, and as mentioned, many criticisms coming from France end up ‘repeating criticisms already made within the field of postcolonial studies itself’.Footnote ¹⁵³

Further, although the focus of post-colonial studies may have greatly expanded since its origins in the literary sphere, the ‘time lag’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ in the debate in France means that they continue to be characterized as having a primarily literary and cultural focus. It may be that this particular form of post-colonial studies, whether perceived or true, remains somewhat aloof to the public and political immediacy of post-colonial questions in France. This is not to dismiss cultural and literary analyses, nor to suggest that theorizing even of the ‘highest’ kind is not important: even if one disagrees that the subaltern cannot speak, surely reflecting upon the issue can still be illuminating. Yet in the French context in which post-colonial discriminations remain particularly acute,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ it may be that a certain strand of post-colonial studies' preoccupation with more discursive and intangible realmsFootnote ¹⁵⁶ leads them to be seen as somewhat frivolous.

If the belated nature of translations of many works into French has influenced their reception in France, so has the process of translation itself. Translating a text from one language to another ‘is to transform its material identity’,Footnote ¹⁵⁷ and in the process of translation, important elements of the original meaning and context are necessarily lost or changed.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Yet whilst the process necessarily has its pitfalls, these should not serve to eclipse the positive aspects of translation, and the potential for ‘travelling theories’,Footnote ¹⁵⁹ as post-colonialism itself can in fact be seen, to take on different forms and new meanings in different contexts.

Indeed, the way in which the concept of the post-colonial has changed and adapted in its translation and transposition between anglophone and francophone contexts is one of the most important aspects of its establishment in France: as already noted, it has moved away from a more academic meaning to take on a more immediately political significance. If a certain anglocentric bias to post-colonial studies, compounded by the delay of important translations, has played its role in their difficult reception, that is not to say that the broader concepts behind them have not found a footing, albeit in their own, distinctly French ways.

VI

Drawing attention to a certain anglocentrism in post-colonial studies is not to say that they are irrelevant to the French context. Despite their weaknesses, a constructive engagement with them might bring a lot to France, helping it not only reconsider its long neglected colonial history, but to do so in such a manner as to address its lingering effects in French society today. Further, it might also help France cast a critical eye on its assimilationist ideology, thus helping to question ‘naturalized and homogenized views of Frenchness that were created historically in opposition to France's constructed “others” and that still enjoy wide currency today’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

It would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of such benefits in the present continuous, however, for many of these insights have in fact already established themselves in France, albeit amid controversy. Yet although an anglophone post-colonial studies has made a notable contribution to furthering the debate over France's colonial ruins, the post-colonial debates there should not merely be dismissed as ‘pale imitations of their anglophone counterparts’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Indeed, despite the controversies discussed, a distinctly ‘French’ style of post-colonialism has been developing across the Channel over the past decade or more. Failing to acknowledge this and merely seeking to transpose an essentially anglophone post-colonial studies to the French context will simply perpetuate its linguistic and cultural biases and risks ignoring the benefits of a cross-cultural dialogue.

The emergence of post-colonialism as an academic approach in France has been driven from within the humanities and social sciences. A new French post-colonialism is most closely associated with the Achac research group, founded on three propositions: that colonialism is an integral part of France's contemporary history, that colonial domination profoundly affected not only colonized societies but also former metropoles, and that to maintain its national unity, France must confront its colonial past and recognize the traces that remain of it.Footnote ¹⁶² A prolific group, they see the central question of a post-colonial approach as ‘that of the tension between new identities and those intertwined with colonialism’.Footnote ¹⁶³

For them, post-colonialism is a body of thought that ‘opens research perspectives enabling the burning questions of the banlieues, the nation, citizenship or of immigration to be posed in a different way’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ As such, this ‘French post-colonial studies’ is concerned primarily with urgent political questions that have an immediate bearing on society: ‘the idea is more than anything to insist on changing social configuration’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ It is perhaps in this respect that it departs most from the more literarily and culturally focused anglophone post-colonial studies, whose work certainly has deeper roots but is more confined to the academic sphere. In this sense, the process of ‘post-colonializing’ identified by Quayson is well under way in France.

As touched upon previously, this ‘French post-colonial studies’ does not seem to propose an epistemological critique of the kind espoused in the anglophone context. It is unclear what exactly to make of this: is it a sign that such a critique is not possible within the confines of the French academy until post-modernism and its associates lose their stigma? If so, are the institutional barriers simply too high? Or might it be that the groundwork for such a critique must first be laid in the reconsideration of historical events? Will a ‘French’ post-colonial approach ultimately dismiss the more post-structuralist variants of post-colonialism and reconcile its challenges within a more conventional historical paradigm? Perhaps only time will tell.

Given the politically charged nature of post-colonialism's reception, Smouts has warned that unless these perspectives are able to anchor themselves in academic institutions they will have amounted to no more than ‘a media bubble, a futureless franco-French psychodrama’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Whilst the Achac historians have certainly made their mark, it must be recognized that such approaches are by no means institutionalized, and as a group they remain on the fringes of French academia: Bancel is based in Switzerland, Lemaire works as a secondary school teacher, and Blanchard does not hold a university position. Further, opposition to post-colonial studies remains vehement: Bayart's highly critical Les études postcoloniales: un carnaval académique was published in the same year (2010) as their last major collective volume Ruptures postcoloniales.

Perhaps it is too soon to tell whether these debates will go further than a ‘process of national catharsis’Footnote ¹⁶⁷ and have a significant impact on the academy. In a sense, though, this maybe does not matter. As Forsdick and Murphy point out, post-colonialism à la française has an effect on political life and the public domain and as such ‘exceeds by far the impact it can have in the anglophone world’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Whilst the academic field of post-colonial studies may never truly find a firm footing in France, the debates and approaches developing there may yet succeed in making France truly ‘post-colonialized’, a point of greater importance, perhaps, than that of anchoring themselves in an institutional apparatus.

VII

Whilst post-colonial analyses have already proved beneficial to France, then, the French context can also bring counter-benefits to post-colonial studies. First, the immediate political significance and high stakes of French post-colonial debates can perhaps help to bring post-colonial studies out of the ivory towers in which, for many, they seem to remain. If a common criticism of post-colonial studies is that their frequent textual focus and at times impenetrable jargon leave them inaccessible to all but a select few,Footnote ¹⁶⁹ the perspectives emerging in France might provide an alternative, more accessible paradigm for post-colonial analyses. By examining pressing social questions of immigration and integration through a post-colonial lens, as the Achac historians have done,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ post-colonial studies could broaden the appeal and reach of their valuable theoretical insights.

Further, paying closer attention to the French context may also yield valuable insights into the specificities of empires and their ruination. Critics have also attacked post-colonial studies for their seeming essentializing of colonialism,Footnote ¹⁷¹ for ignoring the heterogeneity that existed within and between empires. Greater attention to the French context may help draw attention to particularities in its colonial experience and in so doing provide a fruitful point of comparison for studies of the British, or indeed any other, empire and its afterlives.

Further, a greater engagement with French texts and debates would prove a valuable contribution towards what Sèbe has called ‘an “histoire croisée” or “entangled history” of European imperialisms’Footnote ¹⁷²  – a transnational approach that would ‘consider the horizontal questions that could be asked across European countries’ and ‘explore the “in-between”, the manifold instances of reciprocal…influence that contributed to shaping these empires as much as internal forces’.Footnote ¹⁷³ Such a truly ‘cosmopolitan’ history would acknowledge the trans-European nature of empire, and reflect ‘the common experience of international power loss, increased racial diversity and the corresponding renegotiation of national identities’ which decolonization entailed.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

Recent work by Joubert et al. seeks to take such a project even further, through a comparative approach between both disciplines and languages. By proposing to ‘engage a postcolonial critique in a transcolonial dimension’, it seeks to expand post-colonialism's field of study to interrogate contemporary issues of globalization. By suggesting a move from an ‘India model’, in which the relationships between one former colony and its former metropole were interrogated, to a ‘Caribbean’ or even ‘Americas model’, in which the inter-relationships between numerous colonies, metropoles, societies, and languages can be explored, it seeks both to ‘enlarge’ and to ‘deepen’ the purview of post-colonial history.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Further, it proposes to harness the differences between languages ‘by extending the critical force…that was mobilized by researchers of anglophone colonial discourse analysis’ and ‘to multiply by the difference of languages’ the effects of this discursive criticism.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Such a project highlights both the continuing critical utility of post-colonial approaches, and the benefits of building on these to see new connections and histories behind our current ‘globalized’ world. By incorporating not just French contexts and histories, but those of other former imperial powers, former colonies, and international movements, the post-colonial project becomes stronger and more inclusive.

There has undoubtedly been increased interest in francophone texts and contexts over the past decade or so, attested to by the increasing prominence of writers such as Édouard Glissant in post-colonial analyses and courses. The emergence and gradual establishment of a ‘Francophone Postcolonial Studies’ is also undoubtedly a positive move in this direction – in seeking to redress both the restrictive monolingualism of post-colonial studies and the strict geographical boundaries of French studies, it hopes to allow a ‘fuller articulation of the postcolonial project’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Yet it must also be noted that these moves remain largely within an anglophone framework,Footnote ¹⁷⁸ and have engaged only to a limited extent with the distinctly ‘French’ post-colonial studies just identified. Although increasingly taking French-speaking writers into account, these growing comparative perspectives continue to have a primarily academic focus and it is unclear whether the forms that post-colonialism has taken in the specific French context have been incorporated into this more ‘inclusive’ post-colonialism. Perhaps it is the case that while in the anglophone world post-colonial studies as an academic field continues to flourish, the more pervasive process of ‘post-colonializing’, so tangible in the French context, has yet really to take hold. Despite some recent moves towards a truly comparative approach, then,Footnote ¹⁷⁹ there remains much work to be done in moving towards one that would not only take on board French insights but also include other former imperial powers, as well as non-European languages and perspectives.

VIII

The controversy that has surrounded post-colonial studies in France at first sight sits oddly with the francophone anti-colonial and post-structuralist bases of much post-colonial theory. Yet after delving into the complexities of the French academic and public spheres, the reasons for this heated debate are clear. This puzzling contradiction becomes intelligible when one understands that the ‘French Theorists’ had to cross the Atlantic in order to gain fame and be formed into a coherent body of thought; knowing this also makes it easier to appreciate the institutional rigidity that has undoubtedly been an important factor in the troubled reception of post-colonial studies.

The strength of France's Republican ideology also presents an impasse to the development of post-colonial studies, even if not in the way that it is so commonly accused of doing. The coincidence of a crisis in the French model of integration and of highly charged public debates surrounding colonial memories has led to a false conflation between post-colonialism and communitarianism, which reflects the polemical nature and high stakes of such questions. Yet if they do not actually represent a ‘communitarian’ challenge to the Republic, the reading of difference proposed by post-colonial studies does find a stumbling block in the principles of universalism and assimilation on which the Republic is based.

Despite these decidedly French factors, the hindrances to its reception in France come from both sides: post-colonialism suffers from an anglocentric bias, compounded by delays in translating key post-colonial works into French. These difficulties notwithstanding, it is possible to characterize an emerging ‘French post-colonial studies’ that not only brings post-colonial insights to France, but also French insights to the post-colonial field. However, there remains considerable work to be done in moving towards a truly comparative and inclusive post-colonial studies.

Discussion of these debates illuminates features particular to both the French academic and public context, and to post-colonial studies as a field. Yet it may also serve as a reminder of the importance of empire and its ruins. The hostility that post-colonial studies have faced in France attests to the continuing difficulties of reconciling colonial history and contemporary society. It is surely for this reason, if not for any other, that we must continue with a post-colonial approach – in all its many forms.