The phrase ‘French imperial and post-colonial historiography’ seems almost a banal way to describe the body of writing about France's relationship with the empire in the twentieth century. Certainly it does not adequately evoke the complexity and richness of the narratives that constitute the French imperial experience in the metropolis and abroad. French interaction with the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa is but one facet of the imperial story, yet that relationship has been conditioned by a dizzying array of factors ranging from the oddities of French colonial administration to the controversial uses of violence and torture during the Algerian War, as well as the troubling predicaments faced by Arab immigrants in France today. On an administrative level, none of the Arab territories of the French empire were ever under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Colonies: Algeria fell to the Ministry of the Interior, while the Levantine mandates as well as the Tunisian and Moroccan protectorates were administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On a socio-political level, Arab communities and nations have been among the chief victims of racial discrimination in France and violent repression abroad, both of which betray fundamental contradictions between the French treatment of non-European populations and the republican values of equality and universal humanism. Moreover, imperialism and its consequences are not a finished chapter in French national history. The question of how Arabs fit into the historiography of French imperialism and post-colonialism is relevant not only to historical scholarship, but also to many contemporary issues facing France and the former colonial territories. To see this one need only consider the parliamentary decree proclaiming the positive legacy of France's imperial projects and the central role of immigrants from former colonies in the suburban rioting in 2005, as well as France's expected, but disappointing, part in contributing to the international forces in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
This review will assess the secondary literature on the period since the First World War, considering works that examine both the French presence overseas and the overseas presence in France. It will situate the analysis of Arab communities and nations within the overall corpus of scholarship that has recently dealt with the French empire and its aftermath. The first section will discuss books that cover the empire as a whole over a long time frame, but limit their focus to a particular theme, in this case the cultural impact of the empire on metropolitan France. The second section tackles studies focused on a particular time frame, notably the interwar years and the Vichy regime. The third section considers two new contributions devoted to Algeria.
Before beginning, it is worth making a few remarks on how historians have constructed the periodization of French imperial and post-imperial history. Although this review is restricted mainly to the period after the First World War, many colonial histories start with the inauguration of the Third Republic in 1871 or the political arrival of Jules Ferry, one of the most widely acknowledged architects of France's colonial civilizing mission, shortly thereafter.Footnote 1 Classic syntheses and monographs, as well as new work by J. P. Daughton and Gregory Mann, take the First World War as a moment of substantial transformation, owing not only to the impact of the post-war settlements and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, but also to the widespread changes sparked by the involvement of overseas troops in defending France.Footnote 2 Recent synthetic overviews of the French empire or, more broadly, France in the international context, see the ‘new imperialism’ of the 1880s, the First World War, the Second World War, and the Algerian War as turning points.Footnote 3 These were undoubtedly landmarks in both the consolidation of empire and its dissolution; however, other scholars minimize the world wars as temporal markers in favour of 1930–1 owing to the unprecedented metropolitan enthusiasm for empire at this time.Footnote 4 The Second World War is generally seen to mark the advent of decolonization and the moment when debates about colonial governance began their metamorphosis into controversies over immigration.Footnote 5 For metropolitan France, the loss of Algeria was unquestionably the most significant moment in the process of decolonization, and scholars rightly place exceptional emphasis on Algerian independence in 1962.
North Africa and the Middle East fit, to some degree, within the periodization schemes that scholars have applied to the empire as a whole. The world wars were determinant landmarks for Syria and Lebanon, which came under French rule after the First World War, and gained their independence over the course of the Second; one hardly need point out the significance of the Algerian War to North Africa. There are, however, other less widely applicable turning points. The mid-1920s saw the Druze uprising in Syria and the Rif war in Morocco. The Popular Front government that came to power in 1936 initiated unprecedented, although ultimately fruitless, reform packages with specific ramifications for Arabs, including the Blum–Violette legislation to give Algerian Muslims greater political rights, and the Franco-Syrian and Franco-Lebanese treaties for independence. The mid-1950s were also significant to France's relationship with the Middle East and North Africa in ways that were less relevant to the rest of the empire. 1956 was a moment of significant realignment in Franco-Arab relations, effected not only by the independence of the North African protectorates, but also by the Suez crisis in which France hoped to topple Nasser owing, not least, to the Egyptian ruler's provision of arms to the Algerian nationalists.
I
With this temporal framework in mind, we shall turn to the specific theme of cultural exchange between colonizer and colonized, and in particular the effects of such interaction on metropolitan France. In the last five years scholars have addressed this subject in several edited volumes with a geographically and temporally broad scope. The best of this work breaks down the binary categories, prevalent in earlier scholarship, of active colonial rulers and passive colonized subjects. It illuminates the fluidity of the colonial relationship, the fluctuation in its dynamics of power, and the reciprocity of its influence.Footnote 6
In order to understand where Arabs figure in this scholarship, it is necessary to comment on how historians have approached the theme of reciprocal cultural influence in the empire more generally. Notably, there is a significant divide between the French and Anglophone scholarship on this subject, which arises mainly from the influence of post-colonial theory on the English-language academe. Inspired in particular by Edward Said's Orientalism, a significant body of Anglophone work, variously described as subaltern studies, area studies, and post-colonial studies, considers the importance of culture, language, and knowledge as part of imperial power structures.Footnote 7 This approach has generated useful reinterpretations of the role that local actors played in the colonial experience, both overseas and in the metropolis. Its influence is visible in Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee's 2005 tome France and ‘Indochina’: cultural representations, which takes its theoretical underpinnings from post-colonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, and in Martin Evans's introduction to Empire and culture, which places almost excessive emphasis on Said as the volume's inspiration.Footnote 8 Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur in 2002 described their edited volume, Promoting the colonial idea: propaganda and visions of empire in France, as an effort to bring John MacKenzie's ‘revolution’, which began not least with an examination of how Said's work could be applied in studying British imperialism, to French historiography.Footnote 9 In contrast to studies in English, which have long debated the value of these innovations, French scholarship has been relatively slow to embrace them. Tyler Stovall and Georges Van den Abbeele, as well as Eric Jennings, express frustration at the disciplinary rigidity, binary categorization, and sense of colonial nostalgia that still shapes much French scholarship on the history of empire.Footnote 10
Some French voices too have raised similar concerns. In their 2006 collective essay La république coloniale: essai sur une utopie, Nicholas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès cite the need for a French equivalent of Anglo-Saxon post-colonial studies as a matter of urgency.Footnote 11 This declaration is the most explicit indication of a trend already apparent in the work of Bancel and Blanchard, along with Sandrine Lemaire, which has appeared since 2002. Their trilogy of edited volumes, respectively entitled Culture coloniale: la France conquise par son empire, 1871–1931, Culture impériale: les colonies au cœur de la république, 1931–1961, and Culture post-coloniale: traces et mémoires colonials en France, along with La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l'héritage colonial, place reciprocal cultural influence at the centre of the French colonial experience and examine it as an omnipresent feature of French society.Footnote 12 They argue that a ‘colonial culture’, addressed in the first volume, emerged during the early years of the Third Republic and lasted until 1931, after which it solidified into a more widespread ‘imperial culture’, which provides the focus of the second volume. Post-colonial culture and memory are dealt with both in the final volume of the trilogy and in La fracture coloniale. While not new, a primary objective of their scholarship is to analyse the fundamental contradictions between the benevolent and humanistic French image of colonialism and the actual despotism of colonial administration.Footnote 13
This effort by French academics to engage with the debates in English-language studies of imperialism is welcome. Nevertheless, while drawing attention to the importance of their own contribution, Bancel, Blanchard, and Lemaire recognize that they are offering little that has not already long been discussed in Anglo-Saxon circles.Footnote 14 Moreover, in apparent contradiction with their intentions, they make a point of being vague about the theoretical framework for terms, such as culture imperiale, which appear in the books' titles. The authors decry the lack of engagement with English-language scholarship, yet they make almost no reference to any significant studies and deliberately refuse to situate their work relative to post-colonial theories.Footnote 15 In lieu of definitions, they suggest that the articles themselves serve to delimit this ‘culture’, which can be found in the suburbs, the media, national identity, post-colonial metissage, discrimination, and racism. This vagueness is rationalized by the contention that there are insufficient studies on French colonialism to allow for a fully fledged theoretical framework; the editors are content to suggest avenues of inquiry that open up the debate.Footnote 16
Despite this theoretical ambiguity, it is useful to assess the contribution that these volumes and their English counterparts make to the study of Arabs in the French imperial and post-colonial contexts. Two questions will guide the discussion here. First, what is the importance accorded to Arab people and territories relative to other imperial ethnicities and regions in these volumes? Second, how have current socio-political concerns affected the manner in which Arabs appear in this work?
Of the fifteen chapters in Chafer and Sackur's Promoting the colonial idea, six deal mainly with black Africa, while three cover Indochina, New Caledonia, and Cambodia respectively. The topics range from migration and propaganda for settlers, to indigenous intellectuals, miscegenation, and racial sciences. Only Neil MacMaster's article on Arab architecture, exemplified by the feted Mosquée de Paris in interwar Paris, is specifically devoted to North Africa. Where Arabs figure in the eight remaining articles, they emerge within discussions of France and the empire as a whole. The same can be said for most chapters in Martin Evans's Culture and empire, apart from three contributions specifically devoted to Indochina. Unlike these two volumes, which are historical, French civilization and its discontents is an interdisciplinary collection in four parts, the third of which focuses on North Africa with articles on immigrants in France, the European pied-noir settlers, and the Algerian Jews respectively.Footnote 17
With the exception of Evans's book, the four works by Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire are overall more franco-centric than the volumes just cited. This is particularly so in the first two tomes, which cover the period until 1961. The emphasis on France does lend coherence to these French collections compared to those of Stovall and Abbeele, and Chafer and Sackur, whose effort to map specific points of cultural exchange between France and the periphery results in what might seem a motley collection were it not for the thoughtful introductions that tie them together. The disadvantage of the franco-centric choice for those interested specifically in the Arab world is that the outcome offers comparatively less on the distinctiveness of different imperial lands and peoples. For example, Eric Deroo's article about the impact of colonial soldiers on the French psyche during the First World War points out the different stereotypes associated with Indochinese, Black African, and North African troops, yet does not explore these discrepancies in depth.Footnote 18 Barlet and Blanchard's chapter on colonial cinema offers a somewhat more detailed analysis of how different parts of the empire are depicted, but overall it differentiates between cinematic genres rather than regions. A similar observation could be made of Alain Ruscio's article on song and literature, and Bancel and Blanchard's piece on the invention of the ‘indigène’.Footnote 19 Although this tendency does not necessarily diminish the value of the articles, many of the contributions could go further in deconstructing the categories of colonizer and colonized, and providing a more nuanced picture of ex-colonial peoples such as that in Paul Silverstein's recent work on Kabyles in France.Footnote 20 Specific references to Arabs crop up somewhat more frequently in the volume on the period between 1871 and 1931 but occur rarely in articles addressing the 1930s. In the second volume, specific communities or territories are only dealt with in articles on the period after the Second World War.Footnote 21 The two chapters on North Africa address the issues most commonly associated with Arabs and French imperialism: immigration and the Algerian War. A useful overview, the five-author contribution on immigration is a condensed version of material published in 2003.Footnote 22 Jean-Luc Einaudi's chapter builds on his previous work and demonstrates that violence against immigrant communities within France at this time was primarily anti-Algerian because Algerian immigrants were more politicized than others.Footnote 23
La fracture coloniale and Culture post-coloniale, which look at the period after the Algerian War ended in 1962, offer considerably more to those specializing in the Arab world than the first two volumes. A chief motivation behind these books is the editors' conviction that the challenges in French society require a reshaping of imperial historiography: North Africa appears at the crux of this concern.Footnote 24 The first section of Culture post-coloniale is specifically devoted to the problem of integrating imperialism into France's national history. The disjointedness of France's national historical narrative regarding colonialism is nowhere better illustrated than in Pierre Nora's definitive multi-volume Les lieux de mémoire which makes but scant reference to the colonies and betrays a fundamental denial regarding the colonial chapter of French history, a phenomenon which Dominique Vidal has dubbed the ‘mémoires françaises alzheimerisées’.Footnote 25 This phenomenon can be ascribed to a lack of knowledge about the empire in France, as well as the uneasy duality of imperial memory which necessarily combines nostalgic colonial glory and the trauma of decolonization.Footnote 26 Both nostalgia and trauma affect the memory of Algeria particularly strongly, and this uncomfortable duality explains, in part, why the excesses of the Algerian War remain largely undigested in French memory and why this landmark in twentieth-century France is nevertheless relegated to the periphery of French national history.Footnote 27 Accordingly, the main objective of La fracture coloniale is to evaluate the extent and nature of the disruption in collective memory, a task which the editors first tackled through an inquiry on colonial memory in Toulouse in 2003. Algeria, and the Maghreb more generally, emerged as a central component of this survey, the results of which are published and annotated in two appendices to the volume. The respondents overwhelmingly associated colonialism with Algeria and they were able to identify the date of the Algerian War more readily than any other colonial facts.Footnote 28
Taken together, these two volumes illustrate the causes and effects of this colonial amnesia on a number of levels, the first of which is academic. Many authors are concerned about why colonial history is so marginalized in French academic institutions. As evidence they cite the reduced number of positions in French imperial history, and the division of social sciences and humanities after 1957 into inter-disciplinary cultural areas (‘aires culturelles’) which are specialized by region and hence do not provide an integrated approach to colonialism.Footnote 29 More important, however, colonial historiography in France has typically been restricted to a study of how the colonizer affected the colonized lands, without considering the reciprocal effects on the metropolis. Such restrictions, the authors argue, have blinded French historians to innovative avenues of inquiry.Footnote 30 Related to this problem in the universities is the fact that much of the writing of colonial history has been dominated by interest groups and independent researchers. As a result, quasi-academic discourse about the former colonies has often been exploited in the service of specialist and national agendas.Footnote 31
On a second level, the disruption in memory extends well beyond the academic environment and produces concrete manifestations in the public sphere. As Bancel, Blanchard, and Lemaire's survey in Toulouse shows, there is a great desire in modern-day France for information about the colonial past, but general discontent with the educational resources presently available.Footnote 32 French government policy regarding collective colonial memory has been peculiarly remiss: France is singular among former imperial powers in its failure to establish public programmes aimed at pushing past the polemical interpretations of imperial history as filtered through the lenses of either anti-colonialism or nostalgic hagiography.Footnote 33 Museums and memorials, established by the state and by associations linked with France's colonial past, provide a vehicle for analysis of the politics of memory.Footnote 34 Contributions by Robert Aldrich and Sarah Frohning Deleporte, as well as a detailed chapter in Hermann Lebovics's Bringing the empire back home, examine how museums, such as the Louvre and the Musée de l'homme as well as the brand new Musée du Quai Branly and the Musée des civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée (Marseilles), have struggled over how to display their collections of colonial artefacts. Debates about whether to place objects in their original cultural contexts and whether to address colonial abuses, represent a microcosm of polemics about colonial memory in French society at large.Footnote 35 Fundamentally, these disputes reveal enduring unease about the multi-culturalism that has impregnated post-colonial French society owing in large measure to immigration from former colonies. To date there has been a striking absence of anti-colonial exhibitions in France, and, although the new Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration has just opened in Paris, a museum of colonial history seems an impossibility. Moreover, far from facing the ugliness of France's colonial past, numerous memorials and museums cater to lobby groups who wish to honour the French colonial presence in North Africa, and more particularly in Algeria, such as Montpellier's planned Museum of the History of France in Algeria. As Aldrich remarks, an exhibition on colonial Algeria that would satisfy a pied-noir, a harki, an FLN militant, an academic specialist, and a tourist is all but inconceivable.Footnote 36
Government regulation of memory has also intruded into the realm of education. References to the 2005 legislation regarding colonial memory are ubiquitous in these volumes. This legislation stipulates that school textbooks recognize the positive role of the French presence overseas, most notably in North Africa. This measure is unique among the former imperial powers in its effort to rehabilitate the French colonial image. For those who deplore the division between colonial history and national history as taught in French schools, this legislated revisionism hardly offers a satisfactory avenue for integrating the empire into France's historical self-perception. As both Grandmaison and Lemaire remark, the Algerian War is the most problematic factor in any attempt at educational reform in the teaching of history. It is this war that is necessarily marginalized by any legislations that praises France's role in Algeria.Footnote 37
This matter is not simply relevant in the abstract realm of memory, but also impinges on socio-political issues, many of which affect predominantly Arab communities in France, including living conditions in the suburbs, public policy regarding the veil for school-girls, terrorism, and philosophies of how to assimilate immigrant communities. The articles in Culture post-coloniale and La fracture trace current manifestations of these problems, many of which affect predominantly Arab communities. Vincent Geisser examines the relationship between the colonial concepts of assimilation and intégration and their extension into the post-colonial period. He points out the present-day islamicization of the post-colonial subjects, the name he gives to immigrants from former colonies, which has led to a quasi-renewal of an imaginary statut personnel that applied to the Muslims in Algeria.Footnote 38 Dominique Vidal addresses the situation in the Parisian suburbs in light of the violent unrest of October and November 2005 and suggests among other reasons for the discontent, the lack of recognition of the abuses of colonialism. He queries the practice of teaching the Holocaust without also addressing the abuses of colonialism, and compares the development and impact of anti-Jewish and anti-Arab racism.
II
To complement scholarship on the specific theme of culture, other recent studies have taken a thematically broad approach to illuminate the distinctiveness of a particular time period or regime. Gary Wilder and Martin Thomas, for example, have studied the interwar years as a distinct unit: both authors ask questions about how this period can be construed as a useful analytical unit.Footnote 39 Thomas inquires into the significance of these years as a precursor to decolonization after the Second World War, an especially interesting question since the interwar years are often considered the apogee of French imperialism as illustrated by the hugely popular Colonial Exposition in 1931. Studies focusing on particular regimes include a volume edited by Jacques Cantier and Eric Jennings on empire and the French government during the Second World War, along with the collection of essays on the Middle Eastern mandates edited by Nadine Méouchy and Peter Sluglett.Footnote 40 In these cases, an overarching objective is to examine the specificities of those particular regimes: the Vichy dictatorship and mandatory rule. Although disparate in approach, much of this work reveals how the Arab world is significant to discussions of French imperialism.
Of all the publications cited here, Martin Thomas's book is singular because it integrates both the Levant and North Africa in its examination of topics ranging from colonial administration and military control to education and culture. Its central contention that the French empire was in decline throughout these years runs counter-current to widespread interpretations which consider the interwar years as the summit of French enthusiasm for empire in the metropolis. The manner in which Thomas constructs his synthesis demonstrates the richness of the French colonial experience arising from both its congruities and its inconsistencies, and he deftly draws together strands from around the globe to illuminate commonality and divergence across the empire.
The book is divided by themes which fit roughly into a chronological structure. Its three parts respectively tackle politics and colonial administration after the First World War, empire and the masses as seen through economics, society and popular imperialism, and finally the problems of opposition, revolt, and war. Because of its scope, much of this volume is necessarily based on secondary sources, yet Thomas utilizes primary research on numerous themes. Although the primary sources in the sections on labour, taxation, education, and missionaries pertain more to sub-Saharan Africa and Indochina than to the Arab world, Thomas effectively uses these topics to place North Africa and the Levant in a comparative imperial perspective that is often lacking in the secondary literature.Footnote 41 His treatment of urban development and the status of women relate mainly to Arab territories, and Morocco emerges as a particular focus in his examination of military control and colonial expansion during and just after the First World War.Footnote 42 He illustrates many of his arguments through specific case studies, in which he juxtaposes obviously similar cases, such as the Levantine and African mandates which shared their origins in the settlements after the First World War, as well as less evidently related regions such as Morocco and Indochina which he employs to demonstrate how the concept of associationism affected colonial administration.Footnote 43
One of the most original sections of the book consists of four chapters addressing anti-colonial unrest and the largely failed attempts at political reform by the Popular Front government in 1936. The first of these chapters is devoted to revolts in the empire, and contrasts four anti-French uprisings that occurred in the 1920s and early 1930s: the Rif war in northern Morocco, the Syrian revolt, the Yen Bay mutiny and its aftermath in Annam and Tonkin, and finally the ‘Kongo Wara’ in French Equatorial Africa. Thomas relates these insurrections to more general problems in the French imperial system, including assumptions about France's special relationship with Islam, communist challenges, and metropolitan indifference. Ultimately he uses these very different revolts to demonstrate the fragility of French control, especially insofar as each required overwhelming military force to quell, and betrayed anti-French sentiments that remained strong after the physical clashes ended.Footnote 44 Thomas fills out the picture of anti-colonial opposition in the following chapter, which sets these rebellions against the activism in Tunisia and Algeria, where nationalists coalesced around political organizations and unions which flourished locally and among immigrants in France. Finally Syria, Lebanon, and Algeria rightly emerge at the forefront of his treatment of the Popular Front's unsuccessful reform projects, which primarily concerned Levantine independence and Algerian political representation.Footnote 45
If a chief strength of Thomas's work is its original pan-imperial synthesis, other scholarship has recently supplied a different comparative perspective on Arab nations under French imperial rule. The most important volumes on the French Levant since Elizabeth Thompson's Colonial citizens: republican rights, paternal privilege and gender in Syria and Lebanon are two sets of conference proceedings which arose from meetings held in Damascus and Aix-en-Provence respectively.Footnote 46 The first of these, edited by Nadine Méouchy, builds on Thompson's useful conception of a ‘colonial civic order’, shunning any supposed polar dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, and seeking instead to discover how different parties wielded and mediated power within the mandate system.Footnote 47 Wider in scope than the works by Thompson and Méouchy, the most recent volume, published in 2004, contrasts the British and the French experiences in the Middle East during the mandate period, providing a comparative perspective that has never been explored in any depth. Indeed, a juxtaposition of French and British imperialism is no less significant for the Middle East than for other regions which have been much more widely discussed.Footnote 48 D. K. Fieldhouse's new book has also contributed to the comparative study of the mandates; however, without wishing to diminish its considerable value as a synthetic resource for students and the general reader for whom it is intended, its thoughtful theoretical framework for comparative analysis is restricted primarily to a short conclusion, which evaluates the successes and failures of the mandate administration in determining the subsequent political fate of the Middle Eastern states.Footnote 49
Méouchy and Sluglett's objectives are ambitious and their book is undoubtedly a tremendous resource to scholars of Middle Eastern history and of Franco-British imperialism. Running to 743 pages, it contains over thirty articles. It is divided into four parts dealing respectively with sources on the mandates; political administration and cultural perspectives; political, economic, and technical elites and their role in nation building; and finally local resistance in rural and urban contexts. Rashid Khalidi suggests in his conclusion to the volume that this publication might inaugurate a new field called ‘mandate studies’.Footnote 50 Its chief weakness is that it does not exploit the comparative potential of the British and French mandates as much as one might wish. Apart from the very helpful introductory and concluding sections, only the articles by Peter Sluglett on British Iraq and French Syria, by Dominique Trimbur on French ties to Palestinians and Zionists, and by Nelida Fuccaro on the Kurds in Syria and Iraq actually address both British and French territories. Moreover, the selection of articles is disproportionately weighted toward the French mandates: only six contributions address the British mandates. Khalidi readily recognizes this absence of comparative articles, and suggests subjects for future comparative study, including the individuals and political parties that operated across borders, such as Sati ‘al-Husri, George Antonius, the Hizb al-Istiqlal, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the scout movement. In such cases, the mandates collectively serve as a more illuminating unit of analysis than one lone state, especially given the artificially drawn boundaries of these political entities.
Khalidi goes beyond this and also encourages comparisons with wider colonial phenomena such as the status of European settlers and indigenous minorities including Jews, Christians, Armenians, and Kurds.Footnote 51 He proposes three broad paths of exploration. He calls the first a ‘comparative study of revolutions, uprisings, and episodes of massive public unrest’, citing the Indian influence on the 1919 revolution in Egypt as an example. A second category is the ‘comparative study of colonial repression’, and in particular the use of technology in this domain. The third category consists of responses to colonialism among different sectors of the population. To these areas we might add an analysis of how the Middle Eastern mandates fit into paradigms of overseas cultural expansion, both through international diplomacy and through colonial rule. Parallels with French cultural policy in the Middle East can be found not only in other Arab and colonial environments, but also in non-colonial contexts such as North and South America. Such parallels bring out the continuities in French cultural influence across the diplomatic and colonial spheres, including for example the contradictory French government policies toward French missionaries at home and abroad.Footnote 52
Temporally speaking, Cantier and Jennings's book on the Second World War and Vichy's National Revolution in the empire picks up where the above studies leave off. Unlike most scholarship on French colonialism which seeks, at some level, to understand the troubling contrast between repressive colonial rule and French democratic republicanism, this work highlights a period in which metropolitan French politics became dictatorial and hence resembled non-democratic imperial administration. Cantier, Jennings, and their collaborators, from both Anglo-Saxon and French academic milieus, draw on work that began during the 1990s and move beyond an analysis of top-down politics in order to understand the social implantation of the Vichy regime abroad.Footnote 53 Geographically the authors consciously give the ‘periphery’ greater weight than it has previously enjoyed; while not a theoretically or methodologically new innovation in general terms, this is a welcome venture in an area that has not yet seen any such synthetic work. At its most basic level, this volume demonstrates the existence of a ‘réalité vichiste’ in the empire.Footnote 54
The book is divided into three parts, the first of which looks at administrative measures used to extend Vichy's grip over the colonies. The second part turns to the manner in which Vichy power manifested itself among the population through propaganda and other forms of interaction with the public. The third section focuses on the particularly repressive sides of the regime, and the fourth part examines how the European and local elites sought to safeguard their interests, with particular emphasis on French West Africa. The chapters are evenly balanced between those that deal with a specific region, such as the contributions by Jennings, Laurent Jalabert, and Pierre Ramognino on individual officials in Indochina, the Antilles, and West Africa respectively, and those that take a geographically broader approach, such as Ruth Ginio on Vichy propaganda or Jacques Cantier on youth in the empire.
From the perspective of those interested in the Arab parts of the empire, the volume is rich in its coverage of North Africa, with contributions on anti-Semitic policies, internment camps, and the Catholic church in Tunisia. Scholars looking for material on the Levant will not find a great deal, which is not an uncommon lacuna in works on French imperialism. Here the omission can be explained not least by the fact that the Levant was occupied by Allied forces in June 1941 and hence came under Vichy rule for one year only. Notwithstanding the brevity of Vichy tenure in the Levant, comparisons between the Middle East and North Africa would be fruitful. One potential topic, evoked persuasively by Jacques Cantier for sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and East Asia, is the scout movement and other forms of youth organization, whose manifestations in the Levant receive no attention in spite of their reputation among French officials as a conduit for fascism. Cantier's argument that scouting caught the attention of local populations wishing to appropriate new methods to fight the colonial ruler applies equally to Syria and Lebanon.Footnote 55
A second arena in which comparison would be beneficial concerns the status and activities of Jews and Christians in North Africa and the Levant. J. P. Daughton's new work has revisited classic interpretations of colonialism as a predominantly secular republican affair, emphasizing the anti-clerical legislation passed in France in the early 1900s.Footnote 56 Notwithstanding Daughton's compelling case for the continued role of missionaries in the colonial enterprise, tensions undeniably persisted throughout the interwar years between the missionaries and the French republic over the church's role in the empire. This tension disappeared when Pétain, with his programme based on the three pillars of Travail, Famille, and Patrie, came to power. As Serge La Barbera shows, the Catholic church in Tunisia embraced Vichy rule.Footnote 57 The same patterns emerged in the Levant among missionary orders such as the Society of Jesus which were all the more important as they wielded substantial power in buttressing French political control.
Comparison between North Africa and the Levant states would also be instructive with regard to the status of Jews and Vichy's anti-Semitic policies. These measures, including professional exclusions, the appropriation of property, and the expulsion of Jewish children from the schools, were not in practice applied everywhere with the same energy. Colette Zytnicki describes how such regulations were implemented harshly in North Africa relative to other territories where Vichy's power was attenuated by factors such as the lower degree of colonial control, the duration of Vichy's administration, and the number of Jews within minority French settler populations.Footnote 58 For North Africa, Zytnicki contends that measures against Jews were applied with less severity in the protectorates than in Algeria. Without diminishing the divergences between the protectorates and the mandates, two important factors unite these territories: they had long-established indigenous Jewish communities and were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, not the Ministry of Colonies. While the Ministry of Colonies zealously spread the National Revolution, the Foreign Ministry seems to have been less enthusiastic in implementing Pétain's vision.Footnote 59 Studies to date suggest that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs attenuated the effect of anti-Semitic laws in the Levant through lenient application and the active protection of the Alliance Israélite Universelle which educated Jewish children throughout the Middle East and North Africa.Footnote 60
III
In the historiography of French imperialism, by far the most significant commentary on the Arab world is reserved for Algeria. In their respective books, Todd Shepard and James McDougall explore the concept of decolonization in France, and the cultural history of nationalism in Algeria. Both authors, while focusing on the specificities of Algeria, place the notions of decolonization and nationalism in the wider imperial context, evoking models of colonial modernity that apply throughout ex-colonial lands. Although different in focus and method, Shepherd and McDougall transcend stereotypical formulations of the two most widely used, even clichéd, terms in imperial and post-colonial historiography: decolonization and nationalism. What ties these two works together is that they provide alternatives to prevailing narratives of Algerian history or Franco-Algerian relations centred on violence and trauma. Shepard eschews typical approaches to the trauma of the Algerian War between 1954 and 1961, and opts rather to focus on legal institutions and practices, constructing them as modes of representation that condition people and their debates. McDougall brings out the voice of Islamic reformers as a necessary alternative to the ‘monolithic and endlessly reinvoked ancestral violence’ prevalent in many tellings of Algerian history.Footnote 61
Both authors also take memory and a sense of collective history as the starting point for their investigation. This leads Shepard to study how the decolonization of Algeria moulded post-colonial France, especially in light of French discomfort with its colonial past. He shows how the category of ‘decolonization’ emerged as part of the public and political discourse on race, and what its implications have been for policy-making. In particular, he explores how the concept has effectively been used to hide from policy-makers and from the general public the psychological volte-face entailed in granting independence to Algeria in 1962. The ‘invention of decolonization’, he claims, enabled the French politically and psychologically to assimilate the experience of losing the empire without actually facing the injustice and abusiveness of the imperial system. What French leaders and the French public had previously resisted – decolonization – was subsequently psychologically reinvented as a step in the progress toward an enlightened society, much as colonization itself had been conceived as the mission of a superior civilization. ‘Decolonization’ thus became a term that buttressed the values of republican France and its government, rather than instigating a re-evaluation of the contradictions between colonial practices and republican values. This erasure subsequently had a profound impact on the legal and political structures that defined the relationship between Algerians and the French Republic.
McDougall focuses on Algeria rather than France, and his book encompasses the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He looks in particular at the significance of historical imagination and cultural authority in forming Algerian nationalism. Islamic teachers and writers, the ulama, are at the heart of his analysis, which seeks to decompose what has often been a totalizing national narrative of Algerian history. In so doing he debunks the mythologies that have undermined, even eradicated, the distinct and often contradictory discourses within the wider construction of nationalist conceptions. Centred on the salafiyya reform movement, which came together in the 1920s and sought to reinvigorate Islam by returning to an earlier state of purity, his analysis brings out the hitherto unrecognized ways in which reformed Sunni Islam contributed to political culture and memory in Algeria.
From this cursory survey it should be apparent that scholarship on the French empire continues apace. Clearly, too, Arab communities and nations will remain a central component of the discussion. While far from comprehensive, this review covers secondary sources respectively defined by theme, time period, and region. The broadly conceived concept of culture still attracts much attention. Collectively, the English and French language volumes evoked above on this theme deal with most areas of the former empire, from East Asia to the Americas. Although the division between French and Anglophone secondary literature persists insofar as the latter is more engaged with post-colonial theory, the contributions dealing specifically with Arab communities are overall inspired by current socio-political issues in France, such as racism, violence, and immigration. The histories of the interwar years and the Vichy regime also offer much to researchers looking at the Arab world, and make plain the need for comparative specialist monographs to complement syntheses of French imperial history that fully integrate both North Africa and the Levant. Finally, the two works on Algeria both have wider implications for Arab and other ex-colonial lands, especially in that they suggest novel avenues for deconstructing the well-worn and often politically charged concepts of decolonization and nationalism.
