French Historical Studies 23.2 (2000) 215-238
Boundaries Unbound:
Teaching French History as Colonial History and Colonial
History as French History
Alice L. Conklin
Teaching National and Regional History in a Global Age
“France enjoys a privileged place in the imagination of educated Britons and
Americans precisely because it is so stubbornly different. They argue that France
must modernize its economy and political system, but they also mourn the passing
of the old France; they [like the French] fear that a new France will be less
French.”1 So writes Alan Riding, the New York Times Paris correspondent
reviewing Jonathan Fenby’s new book, France on the Brink.2 If we believe both
Fenby—an English journalist who has covered France for twenty years and
married there—and Riding, those of us who have always been drawn to France’s
différence should be seriously worried. As fin-de-siècle globalization presumably
levels all cultural particularisms before it, France risks becoming a lot more like
America. Most familiar among the unwelcome transformations already well
underway, we regularly read, are the growth of urban and suburban ghettoes
crowded with Asians and Africans from the former colonies and the attendant
eruption of race riots, xenophobia, and extreme nationalism directed against these
latest immigrants. La grande nation, which long prided itself on its color blindness,
ability to assimilate new peoples, and absence of the race problems that have
plagued the United States, now must confront just what it means to be
multicultural, multiracial, and French at the end of the twentieth century. [End
Page 215]
The ongoing debate on French identity triggered by the most recent immigrant
crisis has often been confusing to American observers. The French Left still seems
locked into a universalist discourse that, by ignoring difference, ironically
obfuscates the everyday practices of racism immigrants encounter. The French
Right claims to respect difference—but only outside of France, where it rightly
belongs. Despite the blind spots evident in this debate, I have found that its
existence, and the globalization ostensibly threatening French identity, have made
the teaching of French history much easier. A country that seemed eternally
associated in the minds of students with berets, cheese, and baguettes can now be
presented to them as a sister republic founded on the same central contradiction as
our own: an inspiring celebration of human rights and freedom in tandem with a
troubled legacy of discrimination on the basis of race (not to mention gender). In
the United States, this discrimination took the form of slavery, imperialist
expansion in Latin America and the Pacific, Jim Crow laws, and the current, more
subtle, forms of racism that continue to haunt our culture. In France, it was
embodied in ongoing overseas colonization efforts that began with Napoléon’s
Egyptian campaign and were followed by two vicious wars of decolonization,
emergence of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, and today’s popular claims that
it is not the French but the immigrants refusing to assimilate who are racist. At the
same time, French identity, which seemed fixed and constantly unfolding, can now
be taught as the unstable product of specific historical forces in which certain
events are consciously forgotten and others are deliberately remembered. The
nature of these forces and the malleability of memory need to be better understood
if today’s integral nationalists—in France or elsewhere—are to be thwarted and a
genuinely color-blind France is to be created in the future.
These two orientations—French history as colonial history and the construction of
the French nation and national identity—have governed my approach to making
French history relevant to today’s undergraduates and preparing them for a world
of dissolving boundaries yet constantly rekindling nationalisms. Neither flattens
the différence between France and America nor dwells excessively on the ugly
underside of French history over the last two centuries. Instead, they each provide
somewhat familiar points of departure for American students to begin exploring
what is unique about the French experience of modernity and its contribution to
today’s and tomorrow’s “global village.” These pedagogical orientations are
certainly not the only responses to teaching modern French history, and I’m still
grappling with how to make [End Page 216] the colonial history approach work
better. Indeed, I developed the second approach in part because teaching French
history as colonial history was much harder than I had anticipated, despite my own
familiarity with the French empire. My goal has always been to avoid focusing a
course exclusively on France’s colonies, because—to my mind—it is the multiple
and uneven exchanges between metropole and colony that have decisively shaped
France and its overseas territories in the modern era. Determining, however, what
to leave out in order to integrate the empire into a survey of modern France has
proven problematic.
My most recent attempt to teach a survey on Modern France—“Revolutionary and
Napoleonic France, 1750–1871,” which I offered in the fall of 1998—provides a
good example of some of the challenges I faced. The first half of the course was
devoted to the Revolution and the second to the period from 1815 to 1871. My
original intention was to include lectures on the sugar plantation economy, the
revolution in Saint-Domingue and the latter’s decisive impact on the abolition
movement, race relations in France, and the shift to empire building in Africa. But
as we embarked on the unfolding drama of the Revolution in France, I never made
the time to discuss these Caribbean issues in any depth. Although I assigned Lynn
Hunt’s excellent document collection on the French Revolution and human rights,
its rich materials on the abolition of slavery were never properly contextualized,
either in my lectures or in the textbook we used.3 Things improved, however, once
we moved into the Napoleonic period. I had the students read Abd al-Rahman AlJabarti’s chronicle of Napoléon in Egypt and followed it up with a classic article
by Melvin Richter analyzing Tocqueville’s views of French governance in
Algeria.4 I also assigned the short story “Ourika” by Claire de Duras (1824), which
offers as compelling a window into contemporary race thinking as it does into the
postrevolutionary backlash against women who dared to speak “in public.”5 These
readings, in conjunction with French worker autobiographies, selections from
Tocqueville’s Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, a short biography of
Napoléon III, and Gay Gullickson’s Unruly Women of Paris, worked well enough
to keep the empire in view for the second half of the course.6 [End Page 217]
How did I come to pick these particular readings? My goal was not just to add
imperialism to the list of -isms to be covered in the course, nor to point out the
unfortunate colonial exception to the gradual extension of political rights. Rather, it
was to consider the ebb and flow, as well as the shifting parameters, of racist and
liberal (and later republican) discourse in relation to each other across the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I therefore looked for texts that either
highlighted the degree to which cultural and political transformations occurring in
France had their echoes overseas or illustrated the empire’s material, cultural, and
even political traces in the metropole—particularly after the conquest of Algeria.
Al-Jabarti’s account of France’s brief administration of Egypt confirms that
Napoléon’s army saw Egypt through an orientalist lens; but it also demonstrates
the extent to which republican individualist and meritocratic principles influenced
policy making in postrevolutionary France’s first new colony. Assigning “Ourika”
reminded students that in 1824 the French still tolerated slavery, although liberal
opposition to it had not died. Tocqueville’s enthusiastic endorsement of French
colonial rule in Algeria, despite his own first-hand account of its devastating
impact on local populations, provided valuable evidence of the intellectual and
moral support for the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of the French state as a world
power. The reemergence of General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud in the bloody June
Days of 1848 Paris suggests how corrosive colonial conquest can be to liberal
values, while the exile of the quarante-huitards to Algeria is a reminder that the
colony did not exist solely as a repository of exotica (and erotica) for the colonial
imagination of the middle classes.
The above description suggests that there are relatively easy ways to include
overseas France in the history of the nineteenth century without casting aside all
the usual points de repère and starting from scratch. Can the same be said for the
first half of the course, in which France’s overseas interests were, at least in my
rendering, underrepresented? Clearly the answer is yes. We can discuss ideas of
race in the ancien régime, focusing less on events in Paris and giving the
Revolution its proper broader provincial and Caribbean dimensions. But here, I
think an equally viable alternative would be to limit the course chronologically to
the French Revolution itself and to devote half the course to Saint-Domingue and
half to metropolitan France. Indeed, one could do the same thing for a French
history survey covering the period 1830–1960, this time substituting Algeria for
Saint-Domingue. I know, for example, [End Page 218] that David Slavin, a
specialist on modern France and Morocco, has taught just such a course using John
Ruedy’s textbook, Modern Algeria, in conjunction with one of the standard French
history textbooks.7
Yet what is theoretically desirable is not always easy in practice. Most French
historians are trained in one national field only, and moving so decisively beyond it
is no easy task. The history of Haiti is a national field of its own; it is also part of
the larger area scholarship devoted to the Atlantic World, in which the internal
history of France is not necessarily addressed. Similarly, Algerian history has more
often been studied as part of the history of the Middle East, or the history of Islam,
than as part of the history of France. Working through the vast literature on Haiti
or Algeria and identifying those strands of experience that have a direct connection
to France would take us even farther away from the France most of us have spent
our lives researching and teaching—not least because the French have defined
themselves within l’Hexagone, not beyond its borders. Meanwhile, much of the
history of the former colonial territories is being written in a way that deliberately
minimizes the role of the French and gives voice instead to local elites and
conflicts. While this is producing better nationalist and national histories, it makes
it that much harder for nonspecialists to draw the very connections I am
recommending to them. As I have suggested elsewhere, these barriers can perhaps
best be overcome by more collaboration between regional specialists—between
ourselves as French historians, and our colleagues in Latin American, Southern
U.S., and Caribbean history, or in North or West African, Middle Eastern, and
Islamic history.8
I have used one final method of teaching French history as colonial history: as part
of a course on the comparative imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Teaching a course that takes European expansion as its central theme
skirts some of the challenges involved in trying to map closely the connections
between specific turning points in the history of metropolitan France and the
rhythms of colonial expansion, resistance, and mutual accommodation. Such
courses can be structured in any number of ways, because the concept of
imperialism (to the chagrin of many economic historians) has become so [End
Page 219] fluid. I have used the theme of colonial encounters to try to capture the
individual human experiences and culture wars that have attended European
expansion in the modern era. Imperialism is, of course, an economic system; but it
also engendered new administrative elites, vast new bodies of knowledge,
networks of petty traders and poor missionaries, sexualized and racialized
representations of the other, discursive as well as physical forms of violence, and a
global culture of consumption. Taken together, these many different faces of
imperialism provided colonizer and colonized alike with opportunities,
temptations, and dangers that affected individuals on both sides in unpredictable
and contradictory ways. A course on comparative European imperialisms looks for
the similarities that characterized all encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries; yet it also allows local particularisms to emerge, although more
superficially than in a course specifically centered on France and its empire.
I have taught two comparative colonial history courses, each of which draws on
some French sources. One is entitled “Imperialism and the Novel”; the other,
“Colonial Encounters,” is a junior research seminar. Both focus on the French
experiences in Africa, including North Africa, the British in Africa and India, and
the Dutch in Indonesia. In the research course I actually use far fewer French
materials than in the novel course, because none of my undergraduates can do
research in French.9 One advantage of the novel seminar, which is really a noveland-film class, is the ready availability of francophone literature in translation.
That allows me to assign, alternately, a French colonial novel and an African one,
in an attempt to capture both sides of the encounter. As part of the francophone
component I use Camara Laye’s lyrical The Dark Child (set among the Mande in
French Guinea), pairing it with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (set among the
Ibo in British Nigeria) to provide an African perspective on the experience of
colonialism.10 In The Dark Child, as in Things Fall Apart, the colonial intruder as a
character is not developed in any depth. On the [End Page 220] other hand, in
Laye’s hands the French are not the agents of destruction that the British
missionaries and administrators are in Achebe’s novel. The child-hero glances off
the shadowy French presence; the encounter leaves far fewer impressions, despite
his French schooling, than his richly textured memories of his extended family and
Mande rites of initiation. The book challenges the view that colonialism can be
reduced to a single experience, or even constitutes the formative experience in the
history of a particular African people—even though the novel ends with the hero
flying to Paris to continue his studies, with a map of the Métro in his pocket. This
novel can be effectively followed up in the course with a screening of Claire
Denis’s 1988 film, Chocolat, which also looks back through a child’s eyes at the
experience of growing up in French West Africa. This time the child is white and a
girl. The film explores the subtle ways in which colonialist power relations taint
even the innocent friendship between a lonely European child and a male African
servant called Protée. The sexual confusions typical of the colonial household
abound in the film. The girl’s mother finds herself alternately infantilizing Protée
and being aroused by him. He is called a boy, and thus is supposedly desexualized
so that white women can be safely left in his care while Papa Commandant is
away. Yet his physical appeal is all too evident, and the mother lives in a state of
constant tension as she tries to negotiate the proper distance between what she
knows about “the child-like native” and her desire for him.11
Dark Child and Chocolat illustrate the variety of cultural forms that colonial
hegemony, as well as resistance to it, took. Students often assume that brute
violence was the preferred mode of domination and exploitation and fail to
consider the more subtle coercions exercised by colonial forms of knowledge.
With these themes still in mind, I close the course with a selection of readings on
the end of formal empire and the continuation of the colonial mindset in
contemporary France. This time the focus is on Algeria, both as a colony and as the
point of origin for many of the immigrants to France in the 1950s and 1960s. One
of the most difficult novels I assign, yet also one of the most stimulating to discuss,
is Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Calvacade.12 Djebar is a historian by
training as well as a superb storyteller who uses an unconventional narrative style.
The work is conceived as an act of “writing back” to the French by an Algerian
woman who was twice effaced [End Page 221] under colonialism: as an Algerian
and as a female. (Neither were granted respect by the French during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.) The book begins with a rereading of selections from the
corpus of French writing on Algeria, as Djebar attempts to reclaim suppressed
female voices from the narratives of brutal conquest. She reaches out in solidarity
not just to her murdered ancestors but also to the oppressed French women of 1848
who were exiled to Algeria. Djebar intersplices her meditation on the distant past
with narratives of women’s role in Algeria’s 1954–62 war of independence, in
which the nationalist leadership did not always do better by their women than the
French did. Last, but not least, Djebar reflects on her own writing in French: she
cannot hate France because she has internalized its language and its culture. But
then what is her identity, as a French-educated woman in the new Algeria?
Djebar’s beautifully written exploration of her hybrid identity as a feminist
intellectual ironically liberated through the rape of her country by the French can
be contextualized somewhat by showing Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle
of Algiers.13 The film’s frank portrayal of violence is a salutary reminder of the
torture, killings, and oppression that accompanied French rule in Algeria from
beginning to end. I follow this pairing with two other related readings: Albert
Camus’s ambiguous short story “The Guest” and a beur novel, such as Tea in the
Harem by Mehdi Charef.14
“The Guest” is Camus’s only story that alludes directly to the Algerian War, but its
meaning is murky. It describes an encounter between a French schoolteacher and
an unnamed “Arab” caught for murder. The teacher is given responsibility for
turning the unnamed “Arab” into French justice, but after spending a night with the
prisoner and sharing his food, he offers him his freedom. In the end the “Arab”
opts for jail and, presumably, for French civilizing justice. Camus is, of course,
famous for his inability—like Tocqueville before him—to bring his humanist
understanding of right and wrong to bear on the Algerian question. Because
Algeria was also Camus’s country of origin, his petite patrie within Greater
France, the story raises important questions about belonging, responsibility, and
the complex class hierarchies and conflicting ideologies that existed within
colonial communities. It is easy [End Page 222] to condemn colonialism when it
appears in the guise of French paratroopers bombing civilians. But how to judge a
schoolteacher, who has come to Algeria to “help” and has spent years getting to
know the local people? How responsible are individuals for the sins of the system
of which they are a part? Can whites be seen as tragic figures too, in the dialectic
of imperialism? Questions such as these help students get at some of the disturbing
similarities and possible connections between Europe’s long-standing imperial
projects and the banalization of evil and eruption of race wars in the twentieth
century.
After students have read Laye, Djebar, and Camus, I end the course with the recent
history of the aftermath of European empire. Here a novel like Charef’s Tea in the
Harem can be combined with any number of recent films on the plight of
immigrants in contemporary France.15 Charef’s novel is part of a body of what is
now designated beur fiction. Beur (verlan, or backwards slang, for arabe) is the
term used for and by young French citizens of North African origin caught
between two cultures: the North African cultures of their parents and the culture of
France, where they were born but to which they as yet feel no connection. And
why should they? Charef recounts the depressing life of teenagers in the HLMs
(habitations à loyer modéré), where petty thievery, substance abuse,
unemployment, grinding poverty, and sexual, parental, and peer violence are the
norm. Yet the very publication and dissemination of beur fiction is a sign that even
in the squalor of the slums, this generation has found the cultural resilience to
carve out an identity and, presumably, a place for itself in the French nation. What
that place is, however, remains unclear. Indeed, much of the novel seems designed
to reassure the unwelcoming French majority that what separates les bidonvilles
from the mainstream is poverty, not ethnic particularity. There are no foreigners
refusing to become French in Charef’s narrative; there are only down-and-out
French and immigrant men and women struggling together to overcome
circumstances not of their own making. When the people of France stop rendering
class differences as race differences, Charef seems to suggest, some progress might
be made in eliminating urban blight, racially motivated crime, and the appeal of the
National Front.
Teaching comparative colonialism produces a different set of themes and questions
for discussion than a national survey. In my fiction course, the common theme of
discussion throughout is the question of [End Page 223] identity. This was
because many of the novels we used were by intellectuals who wrote in the
language of the colonizer yet were seeking to reroot themselves in the precolonial
cultures of their parents or grandparents. What then, we found ourselves asking
over and over, is the relationship between language and identity, between empire
and nation? Did those who learned French in the colonies consider themselves
French? How did the French view them? What did it mean to be French during the
colonial era, and what does it mean today? Why do the French often appear so
surprised to find former colonial subjects in their midst? These issues and my
simultaneous attempt to incorporate colonialism into my surveys led to a new
course, “The Making of the European Nation-State,” in the spring of 1999. The
point of the course was to explore the process of French identity formation in the
modern era and so find better answers to these questions about how “others” have
historically fit into France’s sense of self, home, and nation.16
“The Making of the European Nation-State” is not a course about empire per se;
rather it is founded on the premise that colonialism was part of a larger pattern of
inclusions and exclusions characteristic of French nation building and national
identity formation, particularly in the period since the Revolution. Uncovering this
pattern—as well as past struggles over identity—is essential to demythologizing
the notion that there is a “true” France that is being threatened for the first time by
former colonial subjects refusing to embrace the sacred patrie. With its deliberate
focus on identity formation as a conflictual process, the course embodies my
second approach to the challenge of keeping the history of France relevant to the
rapidly globalizing world our students will inherit. France can legitimately claim to
be the paradigmatic modern European nation-state. It was longer in gestation and
emerged in its broad outlines earlier than any other on the continent; its stability is
rivaled only by that of Great Britain. Yet as the former Eastern bloc nations and
African colonies struggle, often unsuccessfully, against disintegration, new
questions arise about just how stable and unified even France has been, and about
the price of achieving such unity. A frank look at the making of the French nationstate can provide today’s students with important object lessons on the hidden
dangers of any nationalism that also seeks to be universal.
The course (see the syllabus in the appendix to this essay) was initially designed to
meet the specific needs of certain of my department’s [End Page 224] graduate
students. I taught it as an upper-level seminar, however, and about half the students
were undergraduates. They were expected to do less reading than the graduate
students, who were typically responsible for a book and two articles a week. None
of these graduate students were planning to write a dissertation in French history;
three were Germanists and one was an English historian. I therefore incorporated
some reading on modern Germany, whose alternative trajectory into nationhood
and constant rivalry with France offered up fascinating points of contrast. I also
made an effort to periodically compare French and British developments. But as
there is now an extensive body of high-quality scholarship in English on the very
issues I was interested in teaching in the French context, these readings took up
much of the course.
Three themes guided the order in which we made our way through the readings.
The first was the physical, administrative, and legal development of the French
nation-state from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century. I assigned
readings in a roughly chronological order, to allow students to follow the process
of territorial consolidation and the steady growth of the French state. The second
theme was the gradual emergence, from the Revolution on, of a new political
notion, la nation—defined as a body of citizens who together form the national
community. What form this political nation should take was, of course, deeply
contested, by both those who were at first excluded from it and those who
understood Frenchness in mystical ways. This theme of the contested political
nation overlapped with a third and final theme: the emergence of something we
could legitimately call a French national identity and the many different ways this
identity has been constructed in the past two centuries—in France and in its
colonies. Readings on the last two themes were not always chronologically ordered
but were grouped according to topic. Works on Germany and Great Britain were
interspersed when relevant. I always tried to devote two weeks to any given
general subject and assign books that “talked” to each other during the two-week
period. The meat of the course covered the French Third Republic, which I know
best, and which witnessed the most intense battles over the meaning of the nation.
Some books addressed all three themes at once. This was the case for Boundaries:
The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees by Peter Sahlins, a case study of
national identity formation in a border region between France and Spain (the
Cerdanya valley).17 Boundaries proved [End Page 225] to be a great book for
anchoring the course I had in mind. The book has several strengths. First, it begins
in the early modern period and continues all the way to the nineteenth century.
Second, it gives students at least a passing acquaintance with the intensive statebuilding efforts of the Old Regime and introduces them to the Revolution, which is
the course’s real point of departure. Finally, Sahlins’s work sets out a challenging
theoretical agenda on the meaning and acquisition of national identity—who
determines membership in the nation, how national identity always stigmatizes an
“other,” and how we measure this identity in the first place—that we will grapple
with over the entire semester.
Once the students had encountered the French Revolution in Boundaries, I quickly
moved them into its maelstrom. The Revolution loomed large in the course
because of the two related phenomena it spawned: an aggressive new nationalism
(which in turn called forth new nationalisms in other European countries) and the
idea of a people’s nation. Students had to become aware of how self-consciously
the revolutionaries set out to forge a linguistically homogeneous and politically
equal citizenry within France’s natural frontiers once the monarchy had crumbled.
But I also wanted them to understand that both attempts had Old Regime
antecedents. Together, Sahlins’s article on the monarchy’s eighteenth-century
naturalization of foreigners—especially Jews—and David Bell’s argument that
Catholic and Protestant reformers had long since recognized the unifying value of
a single language laid the groundwork for our subsequent discussion of the
documents contained in The French Revolution and Human Rights, one of the two
document collections I use in the course.18 It superbly illustrates the blind spots of
the revolutionaries and their initial intention to limit political citizenship to
property-owning, white, Catholic males; but it also chronicles the relative triumph
of republican universalism, as Jews, Protestants, men of color, and women
protested their exclusion and (except for the women) gained recognition of their
rights. In this week, too, we explored questions that hovered throughout the
semester. Was France made anew or simply divided in two by the Revolution?
Why were women alone not given political rights, and what precedent did that set?
What is the difference between patriotism and nationalism?
With the origins of the modern French nation now established in our minds, we
spent the next two weeks taking a broader view of nationalism [End Page 226]
and nation building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ernest Renan’s 1882
lecture “What Is a Nation?” was indispensable reading at this point as the classic
statement of the consensual and constructed nature of the French political nation.19
Peter Alter’s Nationalism is a lucid and very helpful survey and periodization of
the two competing nationalisms that emerged in Europe in the modern era:
Risorgimento (or liberal) nationalism and integral nationalism.20 George Mosse’s
provocative Nationalism and Sexuality covers much the same period as Alter’s
work and introduced the concept of “body politics” into our discussion of nation
building for the first time.21 The article by Karen Hagemann was a useful
corrective to many of Mosse’s more speculative conclusions about the relations
between the cult of manly valor, respectability, and racism on the one hand and
nationalism on the other; Ann Laura Stoler’s essay underscored how by the end of
the nineteenth century pure white women’s bodies were perceived as critical to the
preservation of the nation overseas.22 Together, these readings were designed to
move us from the Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, when nation
building and national sentiment again acquired new urgency in France and, more
generally, in Europe.
When the republicans came to power in the 1870s, did they consciously embark on
a process of internal colonization to make peasants into Frenchmen? Or was the
spread of the French language, French law, military conscription, and urban
consumption patterns between 1870 and 1914 simply the culmination of a
centuries-long process of modernization and state building? Eugen Weber never
quite answers these questions, nor does he reflect on what “Frenchness” meant to
the peasants whose dying cultures he so painstakingly documents.23 Assigning
Weber at this point in the course ensured a lively discussion on where to look for
evidence of national consciousness, pace Sahlins. Coupling Weber with Jacques
and Mona Ozouf’s essay on Bruno’s Tour de la France par deux enfants and with
Pierre Nora’s essay on Ernest Lavisse’s use of history in republican schools
brought the republican nationalist agenda more clearly into view. Finally, all three
readings moved us firmly into [End Page 227] the Third Republic, with its
commitment to restore and complete the political nation inaugurated in 1793.24
At this point, however, another question arose. The early Third Republic coincided
with the first large wave of modern immigrants into France; they were drawn to the
industrial jobs a declining population determined to stay on the land would not
take. Were these immigrants—whose labor allowed France to industrialize, though
their contribution to the construction of the national community has been
completely suppressed—made into Frenchmen and Frenchwomen as well? We
approached this question by taking a closer look at the legal as well as cultural
construction of Third Republic citizenship and nationhood with reference to
foreigners. I assigned two books that take a long view of the question: Rogers
Brubaker’s Citizenship and Nationhood and Gerard Noiriel’s French Melting
Pot.25 Brubaker argues that since the Revolution citizenship in France, unlike that
in Germany, has been based on consent, not descent; republican assimilationism,
coupled with a desire to universalize conscription, led the French in 1889 to
naturalize any foreigner born on French soil who resided there at majority. The
racial, ethnic, and religious identities of these new citizens, he contends, continued
to be individual private matters beyond the purview of the state. Noiriel’s
pathbreaking social, intellectual, and cultural history of French immigration
provides a more nuanced view of the situation. Yes, as Brubaker argues, the
children of immigrants were naturalized and assimilated; but he fails to discuss two
additional measures: a decree of 1888 and the law of 1893, which legally identified
first-generation or transient foreigners as such and excluded them from the best
jobs and from the welfare benefits received by French workers.26
This record of systematic legal exclusion of immigrants, even at the most liberal
phase of the Third Republic, bore heavily on the readings for the next four weeks.
From France’s contradictory record on the treatment of foreigners, we moved first
to the ambiguities that had underpinned French feminism since the Revolution—
which was itself caught in the original contradiction within liberalism’s sexist
definition of citizenship. Joan Scott has explored these contradictions fully in her
[End Page 228] most recent book, Only Paradoxes to Offer.27 One of the insidious
side effects of the continued exclusion of women from full political rights on the
basis of their “natural” difference and aptitude for serving the nation in more
biological ways is the near-impossibility of defeating this logic rhetorically. To
fight constructions of difference means calling attention to differences, which in
turn constantly reinvents them. I found Scott’s insight on why certain gender
discriminations persist very useful for understanding a third characteristic
exclusion of modern French nationalism, one more often associated with the Right
than with the republican Left and Center: anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism was, of course, a decisive part of two central crises in the history of
modern France associated with the New Right: the Dreyfus affair and Vichy. Yet
in neither case were republicans immune to it, arguably because they too had a
long history of defining their national selves against others in their midst. In taking
up at this juncture in the course the theme of anti-Semitism, the development of
integral nationalism, and the response of republicans to this new threat on its right,
I had two goals in mind: first, to suggest how divided the nation still was, one
hundred years after the Revolution; and second, to contextualize the anti-Semitism
of Dreyfus and Vichy sufficiently to avoid facile conclusions about an “eternally
anti-Semitic” (and racist) France from 1898 on to the present. Michael Burns’s
short history of the Dreyfus affair is in the same series as Lynn Hunt’s, but it is put
together differently.28 Far fewer documents are interspersed in a continuous
narrative, making the slim volume a page-turner. It provides ample evidence of the
pervasiveness of anti-Semitic sentiment among a vast spectrum of French people
and lucidly explains the particular causes of its ugly eruption in the 1890s.
Nevertheless, Burns’s documents do not illuminate as well as I would like the
different ideals of the nation—Catholic, essentialist, traditionalist versus secular,
republican, modern—that were at stake in the confrontation.
Pairing Shanny Peer’s study of the 1937 World’s Fair, France on Display with
several chapters of Gene Lebovics’s True France, on the other hand, helped
highlight the same differences that reemerged thirty years later.29 Peer and
Lebovics agree that the combined disasters of World War I and the Depression led
to a rearticulation of national identity [End Page 229] in the interwar years, one in
which images of rural France, regionalism, and folklore figured prominently. They
disagree about who controlled these images and their cultural meanings: for
Lebovics it was the Right, which defined “True France” in terms of an eternal rural
essence that no Jew, foreigner, or person of color could ever share. Peer, however,
argues for the successful appropriation of these same references by the Left under
the Popular Front; peasants themselves also had a say in crafting France’s national
specificity in this period. These two works usefully reminded us, first, that national
identity is always a process and is always in process and, second, that in the crisis
atmosphere of the 1930s French republicans did not simply succumb to the hatreds
of their political enemies. It took the added shock of military defeat, dissolution of
the Republic, and the coming to power of Pétain for these hatreds to reach their
tragic culmination in Vichy.
Aspects of Vichy, like those of the Holocaust, will always defy our best efforts to
understand. By the time we turned to the readings on Vichy and the Jews, however,
the students had sufficient information to account for at least some of the passive
acceptance of anti-Semitic policies by many French people. Vicki Caron’s essay
reconstructs the slippery slope the republican elites were already on in the late
1930s, when they introduced two-tiered citizenship to protect French professionals
from recently arrived Jewish refugees. Having read Noiriel, students found this
revelation all too unsurprising.30 The late Third Republic was not yet Vichy, but it
had a legacy of legal discrimination against foreigners at home (not to mention
those in the colonies) that stretched back to its founding decades. Robert Paxton
and Michael Marrus’s chilling account of the bureaucratization of evil before and
during the German Occupation makes clear all over again how malleable—and this
time how deadly—definitions of Frenchness (and lack of it) could be.31 And the
remarkable postwar suppression of the memory of Vichy was proof of Ernest
Renan’s dictum that nation-feeling often can only continue when everyone agrees
about what to forget.
Are the shattering of the myth of the Resistance and the confrontation with the
Vichy past over the last twenty-five years a sign that a certain idea of France—and
a certain French reality—are passing away? Is the return of the empire, this time
within France itself, the beginning of a new, multicultural France? But when has
France ever been new, or other than new? Has it not always been multicultural and
multiracial [End Page 230] in the private sphere? In search of answers to these
questions, we turned in the last week of the course to the introduction of Pierre
Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, his article on commemoration, and some of the essays in
the concluding section of the postcolonial, post-Communist reader on nationalism,
Becoming National. Les Lieux de mémoire stands out as one of the most
sophisticated and innovative approaches to the study of national identity written in
any language in the last twenty years.32 Its investigation of the constantly changing
symbolic reality of the French nation has influenced scholars interested in issues of
identity, memory, and history in every national field. Particularly striking in Nora’s
introduction, then, is his own patent nostalgia for the founding myths of the Third
Republic, which today have lost their (supposed) former ability to bind together the
nation. As David Morley and Kevin Robins point out, it is such nostalgias that are
reinscribing the boundaries and exclusions of national pasts on the fragmenting
nations of today.33 What tomorrow’s nations will look like remains an open
question, but as the seminar ended we felt confident that French différence would
remain with us in some form.
“The Making of the European Nation-State” did not bring the empire into full
view. France overseas stood outside the course but not, in our careful scrutiny of
how the nation was put together, outside the spectrum of its exclusions over the
past two centuries. In the context of France’s ambiguous treatment of immigrants,
its inconsistent assimilation and exclusion of Jews, and the extraordinarily late
enfranchisement of women, the more systematic legal oppression of colonial
subjects now assumed a certain consistency in students’ minds. There is certainly
plenty of room as the course now stands to substitute more readings on the empire,
or to make the course more European and less predominantly French. I was very
much aware that the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century were given short
shrift; and during the course I realized that we needed a reading on the nationalism
of the new citizen army, particularly under Napoléon. As in any seminar, it was up
to the students to make the many different possible connections between the
readings from week to week. Overall I was pleased at how many different themes
came through clearly, often in ways I had not anticipated.
The field of French colonial history is renewing itself dramatically at the moment.
Although there has been a dearth of easily available [End Page 231] texts by
historians, particularly on the culture of colonialism, numerous historical studies of
the many linkages between France and its overseas territories are in progress. My
own experiences of teaching French history reflect a need to make do with less,
which perhaps explains why I have ranged so widely—first in African history and
more recently in Jewish and immigration history—in search of a better
understanding of France’s place in a global society. Ranging beyond Europe’s
traditional borders has been exhilarating, sometimes frustratingly superficial, but
never dull. I recommend that all French historians try it.
Appendix
Syllabus of “The Making of the European Nation-State”
Course Description
The focus of this course will be the rise of the nation in Western Europe as a territorial, political, and economic unit,
but especially as a cultural unit. Nationalism has turned out to be one of the most murderous and tenacious
ideologies of the twentieth century, fueling imperialism, world war, genocide and—most recently—anti-immigrant
racism. We will consider the central problems of national identity and its construction, the meaning of citizenship,
and the processes of inclusion and exclusion that nation building entails. Particular attention will be paid to France,
Europe’s first paradigmatic nation-state. Our readings will include both general works on nationalism and particular
case studies of key moments in the forging of national consciousness: the reign of Louis XIV, the French
Revolution, the rise of bourgeois respectability, the birth of the Third Republic, the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy
regime, and postcolonial immigration.
Schedule
Jan. 14: Organizational Meeting
Jan. 21: The Local and the National
Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley, Calif., 1989.
Recommended
David A. Bell, “Recent Works on Early Modern French National Identity,” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996):
84–113.
Jan. 28: The Birth of the Nation? The French Revolution
Peter Sahlins, “Fictions of a Catholic France: The Naturalization of Foreigners, 1685–1787,” Representations 47
(1994): 85–110.
Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History. Boston, 1996.
David A. Bell, “Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion, and the Origins of French Revolutionary
Nationalism,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1403–37.
Recommended
Marc Fumaroli, “The Genius of the French Language.” In Symbols, vol. 3 of Realms of Memory: Rethinking the
French Past, ed. Pierre Nora, 555–608. New York, 1997.
Reports: Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven, 1992.
Carlton Hayes, Essays on Nationalism. New York, 1926.
K. Kohn, Prelude to Nation-States: The French and the German Experience, 1789–1815. Princeton, N.J., 1967.
Feb. 4: Theories of Nationalism
Peter Alter, Nationalism. London, 1994.
Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” and Anthony D. Smith, “The Origins of Nations.” In Becoming National, ed.
Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, 42–55, 106–30. Oxford, 1996.
Recommended
Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, “Introduction,” and Tom Nairn, “Scotland and Europe.” In Eley and Suny,
Becoming National, 3–38, 79–104.
Reports: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London,
1991.
Ernest Gellner Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, N.Y., 1983.
Elie Kedourie, Nationalism. Oxford, 1993.
Feb. 11: Bourgeois Respectability and the Expanding Nation-State
George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York,
1985.
Karen Hagemann, “Of Manly Valor and German Honor: Nation, War, and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian
Uprising against Napoleon,” Central European History 30 (1997): 187–220.
Ann L. Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in
Colonial Southeast Asia.” In Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 286–324.
Recommended
Andrew Parker et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities. London, 1991. (Peruse the essays.)
Reports: Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880.
Cambridge, 1981.
Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. Oxford, 1993.
Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.
Feb. 18: Modernization, Assimilation, and Republicanization
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, Calif., 1979.
Jacques and Mona Ozouf, “Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: The Little Red Book of the Republic,” and Pierre
Nora, “Lavisse, The Nation’s Teacher.” In Traditions, vol. 2 of Nora, Realms of Memory, 125–50, 151–87.
Recommended
Uffe Ostergard, “Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture.” In Eley and Suny,
Becoming National, 179–202.
Reports: Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany.
Princeton, N.J., 1993.
Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley, Calif., 1990.
Feb. 25: The Construction of Citizenship
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.
Lora Wildenthal, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial
Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 263–86. Berkeley, Calif., 1997.
Susan Pedersen, “Gender, Welfare, and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War,” American Historical Review
95 (1990): 983–1006.
Recommended
Alice L. Conklin, “Redefining Frenchness: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and
West Africa, 1914–1940.” In Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch
Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, 43–64. Charlottesville, Va.
Reports: Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck, 1763–1867.
Cambridge, 1991.
Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era. Ithaca, N.Y., 1997.
March 4: France and Its Other Others
Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity. Minneapolis, Minn., 1996.
Recommended
Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa 1895–1930.
Stanford, Calif., 1997.
Reports: Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian
Britain. Berkeley, Calif., 1998.
Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago, 1991.
Gary Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New Laboring Class. Philadelphia, 1983.
Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Lights. Boston, 1996.
March 18: Gendering the Nation
Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, Mass., 1996.
Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89
(1984): 648–76.
Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Nationalism, Gender, and Race.” In Eley and Suny, Becoming
National, 260–85.
Recommended
Keith McClelland, “Rational and Respectable Men: Gender, the Working Class, and Citizenship in Britain, 1850–
1867.” In Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Laura L. Frader and Sonya A. Rose, 280–93. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.
Reports: Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York, 1987.
Victoria de Grazia, When Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945. Berkeley, Calif., 1992.
March 25: The Nation Divided
Michael Burns, ed., France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History. Boston, 1999.
Pierre Birnbaum, “Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy, and the Rue Copernic: Jews at the Heart of French History.” In
Conflicts and Divisions, vol. 1 of Nora, Realms of Memory, 379–426.
Recommended
Norman L. Kleeblatt, The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice. Berkeley, Calif., 1987.
Nancy Fitch, “Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern Anti-Semitism,” American Historical Review
97 (1992): 55–95.
Reports: Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner. Princeton, N.J., 1990.
Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe. London, 1974.
George Mosse, ed. Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism. Hanover, N.H., 1993.
Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century
Europe. Cambridge, 1992.
Pierre Birnbaum, The Jews of the Republic. Stanford, Calif., 1996.
April 1: French Identity in the Interwar Years
Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. Albany,
N.Y., 1998.
Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945. Ithaca, N.Y., 1992. Introduction,
chaps. 1, 3–4, conclusion.
Recommended
Pascal Ory, “Gastronomy.” In Traditions, vol. 2 of Nora, Realms of Memory, 443–68.
Lebovics, True France. Chap. 2.
Reports: Richard Cobb, French and Germans, Germans and French: A Personal Interpretation of France under
Two Occupations. Hanover, N.H., 1983. Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: “Les Anciens Combattants” and
French Society, 1914–1939. Providence, R.I., 1992.
Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939. New Haven, 1995.
Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago,
1994.
April 8: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism
Michael M. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford, Calif., 1995.
Vicki Caron, “The ‘Jewish Question’ from Dreyfus to Vichy,” in French History since Napoleon, ed. Martin S.
Alexander, 172–202. London, 1999.
Recommended
Lebovics, True France. Chap. 5.
Philippe Burrin, “Vichy.” In Conflicts and Divisions, vol. 1 of Nora, Realms of Memory, 181–202.
Reports: Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the
German Monist League. London, 1971.
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York,
1992.
Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945.
Cambridge, 1989.
April 15: World War II, Memory, and National Identity
Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity. Film.
Henri Russo, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, Mass., 1991: 1–59, 98–
167, 251–71.
Recommended
Russo, The Vichy Syndrome. Remaining chapters.
Reports: Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1994 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Berkeley,
Calif., 1999.
Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, Mass.,
1988.
Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity. New York, 1992.
April 22: The Death of the European Nation-State?
David Held, “The Decline of the Nation State”; David Morley and Kevin Robins, “No Place like Heimat”; Jeffrey
M. Peck, “Rac(e)ing the Nation”; Lauren Berlant, “The Theory of Infantile Citizenship.” In Eley and Suny,
Becoming National, 407–17, 456–508.
Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History.” In Conflicts and Divisions, vol. 1 of Nora,
Realms of Memory, 1–20.
Pierre Nora, “The Era of Commemoration.” In Symbols, vol. 3 of Nora, Realms of Memory, 609–37.
Recommended
Panivong Norindr, “La Plus Grande France: French Cultural Identity and Nation Building under Mitterand.” In
Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley, 233–58.
Minneapolis, Minn., 1996.
Reports: Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism. London, 1981.
Alice L. Conklin is associate professor of history at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y. She is the author
of Alice L. Conklin, “Redefining Frenchness: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France
and West Africa, 1914–1940.” In Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch
Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, 43–64. Charlottesville, Va.
A Mission to Civilize: The French Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (1997) and has
recently coedited with Ian Christopher Fletcher, European Imperialism, 1830–1930: Climax and Contradictions
(1998), a reader on modern colonialism. She is currently researching the emergence of a new discourse of cultural
relativism in colonial and metropolitan France in the interwar years, particularly as manifested in the 1937 opening
of the Musée de l’Homme.
Notes
1. Alan Riding, “Where Are the Beret Factories of Yesteryear?” New York Times, 1 Aug. 1999.
2. Jonathan Fenby, France on the Brink (New York, 1999).
3. Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston, 1996).
4. Robert L. Tignor, ed., Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798 (Princeton,
N.J., 1993); Melvin Richter, “Tocqueville on Algeria,” Review of Politics 25 (1963): 362–93.
5. Claire de Duras, Ourika, An English Translation, trans. John Fowles (New York, 1994).
6. Mark Traugott, ed., The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era (Berkeley, 1993); Alexis
de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr (New Brunswick,
N.J., 1990); James F. Macmillan, Napoleon III (London, 1991); Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images
of the Commune (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996).
7. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington, Ind., 1992). David Slavin
currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University. Julia Clancy-Smith, a Middle Eastern historian at the University of
Arizona, has also taught a course entitled “Encounters: East meets West,” which focuses on the Middle East/North
Africa and Europe in the modern era. The terms of the title could be reversed and the course just as easily taught by
a Europeanist.
8. Alice L. Conklin, “From World-Systems to Post-Coloniality: Teaching the History of European Imperial
Encounters in the Modern Age,” Radical History Review 71 (1998): 150–63.
9. Three secondary sources on European colonialism generally that include excellent material on France accessible
to students are Scott B. Cook, Colonial Encounters in the Age of High Imperialism (New York, 1996); Julia ClancySmith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch
Colonialism (Charlottesville, Va., 1998); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial
Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Calif., 1997). Two helpful surveys of the French empire are Robert
Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (New York, 1996), and Patrick Manning,
Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 1880–1985, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1988).
10. Camara Laye, The Dark Child (New York, 1994). For an excellent discussion of the novel, which first appeared
in 1953, see Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa
(Chicago, 1990), chap. 4; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 2d ed. (New York, 1994).
11. For discussion of this film as well as others one could show, see Dina Sherzer, ed., Cinema, Colonialism,
Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds (Austin, Tex., 1996).
12. Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Calvacade (Portsmouth, N.H., 1985). Another possibility for exploring
some, but not all, of the same themes is Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Reading,
Mass., 1995).
13. For an analysis of the gendered construction of national identity in the movie, see Norma Claire Moruzzi,
“Veiled Agents: Feminine Agency and Masquerade in The Battle of Algiers,” in Negotiating at the Margins, ed. Sue
Fisher and Kathy Davis (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993), 255–77.
14. Albert Camus, “The Guest,” in Exile and the Kingdom (New York, 1957), 85–109. For an excellent analysis of
the story’s ambiguities, see Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954–1992 (Oxford,
1994), 89–108. Mehdi Charef, Tea in the Harem (London, 1989).
15. For titles and descriptions of these movies, see Mireille Rosello, Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and
Representation in French Cultures (Hanover, N.H., 1998).
16. My thinking about this course also owes a debt to Sheryl Kroen of the University of Florida. A couple of years
ago she shared with me her syllabus for a seminar entitled “Forging the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Europe: A
Comparative Perspective.”
17. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).
18. Idem, “Fictions of a Catholic France: The Naturalization of Foreigners, 1685–1787,” Representations 47 (1994):
85–110; David A. Bell, “Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion, and the Origins of French Revolutionary
Nationalism,” AHR 100 (1995): 1403–37.
19. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny
(Oxford, 1996), 42–55.
20. Peter Alter, Nationalism (London, 1994).
21. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New
York, 1985).
22. Karen Hagemann, “Of Manly Valor and German Honor: Nation, War, and Masculinity in the Age of the
Prussian Uprising against Napoleon,” Central European History 30 (1997): 187–220; Ann L. Stoler, “Sexual
Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast
Asia,” in Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 286–324.
23. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif.,
1979).
24. Jacques and Mona Ozouf, “Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: The Little Red Book of the Republic”; Pierre
Nora, “Lavisse, The Nation’s Teacher,” in Traditions, vol. 2 of Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French
Past, ed. Pierre Nora (New York, 1997), 125–50, 151–87.
25. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis, Minn.,
1996); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
26. On this point, see Clifford Rosenberg, “Beyond the Melting Pot?” Contemporary European History 7 (1998):
421–29.
27. Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
28. Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (Boston, 1999).
29. Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (Albany,
N.Y., 1998); Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992).
30. Vicki Caron, “The ‘Jewish Question’ from Dreyfus to Vichy,” in French History since Napoleon, ed. Martin S.
Alexander (London, 1999), 172–202.
31. Michael M. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford, Calif., 1995).
32. Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Conflicts and Divisions, vol. 1 of Nora,
Realms of Memory, 1–20; idem, “The Era of Commemoration,” in Symbols, vol. 3 of Nora, Realms of Memory, 609–
37.
33. David Morley and Kevin Robins, “No Place like Heimat: Images of the Home(land) in European Culture,” in
Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 456–80.