Post by Bozur on Dec 12, 2005 21:09:29 GMT -5
The French: Married to the Past, and Thinking of Divorce
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
Published: December 11, 2005
PARIS
THE French, the historian Danielle Domergue-Cloarec says, "have always had problems with their history." She should know. She specializes in French colonial history, which her compatriots can't decide whether to love or hate. They feel the same about Napoleon, and this month both problems have been on vivid display.
Robert Grossman
Colonial history figured in a raucous legislative debate over how French history itself should be taught.
Last February, in an effort to please veterans and former colonists, the Socialists and conservatives in Parliament together passed a law that included this passage: "The positive role of the French presence abroad, particularly in North Africa, should be especially recognized."
But after the recent riots in North African neighborhoods, many of the French began to wonder what has gone wrong among their immigrants. For some on the left, French colonial history loomed as a culprit, and they set out to change the law.
One of their arguments is that conditions in France's big housing projects mirror the old colonial world: a white French upper class in city centers lording it over blacks and North African Muslims on the periphery.
In Parliament, Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Socialist whip, denounced the law's phrasing as "an unacceptable slur on the population of the colonized lands."
The Gaullists, on the right, stood by the law. Lionel Lucas expressed outrage that a history book for high school seniors didn't mention a massacre of French colonists in Algeria in 1962. Michel Diefenbacher lamented the omission of a list of awful diseases French physicians had treated in the colonies.
The effort to change the law was voted down, with outraged Socialists hooting, "Negationism!"
But that wasn't the end of it.
Last week, the hard-line interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, postponed a trip to the French West Indies, rather than face an expected protest of the vote. "What is the point," he asked, "in going to Martinique at a time when one cannot work?"
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin then broke with his fellow Gaullists on the issue, saying in a radio interview: "There is no official history in France." Finally, President Jacques Chirac - also a Gaullist - tried to cool tempers by announcing that a scholarly committee of inquiry would "evaluate the actions of Parliament in the fields of memory and history" and report back in three months.
"Like all nations, France has known greatness but also difficult times," the president declared in a statement. "It is a legacy we must assume in its entirety." History, he added, "is the key to a nation's cohesion, but it only takes a little for history to become an agent of division, for passions to inflame and the wounds of the past to reopen."
His conclusion echoed the prime minister's: "The law's job is not to write history. The writing of history is the task of historians."
As all of that was unfolding, France was also trying to figure out what to make of the 200th anniversary of the epic battle of Austerlitz, in which, on Dec. 2, 1805, Napoleon defeated the armies of Austria and Russia at a Czech village now called Slavkov.
The battle was arguably Napoleon's greatest victory. But the French are still at odds about whether the emperor was a genius who fathered the modern French state, or a militarist who led hundreds of thousands of French youths to senseless deaths.
The British feel no such ambiguity about the 200th anniversary of Lord Horatio Nelson's thrashing of Napoleon's fleet at Trafalgar. Joyful and elaborate celebrations of that victory began last summer and are still going on.
The French celebration of Austerlitz, by contrast, was short and tepid.
Some 4,000 re-enactors re-staged the battle in Slavkov last weekend, and some French history fans attended. Napoleon, however, was played not by a Frenchman, but by Mark Schneider, a 36-year-old history buff from Virginia.
And back in France, a new book, "Le Crime de Napoléon," had just been published. In it, the historian Claude Ribbe lambastes Napoleon for setting off a bloodbath in the Caribbean when he revived slavery in the French Empire in 1802.
The presentation is not subtle. On the cover is a photo of Hitler visiting Napoleon's tomb in 1940.
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
Published: December 11, 2005
PARIS
THE French, the historian Danielle Domergue-Cloarec says, "have always had problems with their history." She should know. She specializes in French colonial history, which her compatriots can't decide whether to love or hate. They feel the same about Napoleon, and this month both problems have been on vivid display.
Robert Grossman
Colonial history figured in a raucous legislative debate over how French history itself should be taught.
Last February, in an effort to please veterans and former colonists, the Socialists and conservatives in Parliament together passed a law that included this passage: "The positive role of the French presence abroad, particularly in North Africa, should be especially recognized."
But after the recent riots in North African neighborhoods, many of the French began to wonder what has gone wrong among their immigrants. For some on the left, French colonial history loomed as a culprit, and they set out to change the law.
One of their arguments is that conditions in France's big housing projects mirror the old colonial world: a white French upper class in city centers lording it over blacks and North African Muslims on the periphery.
In Parliament, Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Socialist whip, denounced the law's phrasing as "an unacceptable slur on the population of the colonized lands."
The Gaullists, on the right, stood by the law. Lionel Lucas expressed outrage that a history book for high school seniors didn't mention a massacre of French colonists in Algeria in 1962. Michel Diefenbacher lamented the omission of a list of awful diseases French physicians had treated in the colonies.
The effort to change the law was voted down, with outraged Socialists hooting, "Negationism!"
But that wasn't the end of it.
Last week, the hard-line interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, postponed a trip to the French West Indies, rather than face an expected protest of the vote. "What is the point," he asked, "in going to Martinique at a time when one cannot work?"
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin then broke with his fellow Gaullists on the issue, saying in a radio interview: "There is no official history in France." Finally, President Jacques Chirac - also a Gaullist - tried to cool tempers by announcing that a scholarly committee of inquiry would "evaluate the actions of Parliament in the fields of memory and history" and report back in three months.
"Like all nations, France has known greatness but also difficult times," the president declared in a statement. "It is a legacy we must assume in its entirety." History, he added, "is the key to a nation's cohesion, but it only takes a little for history to become an agent of division, for passions to inflame and the wounds of the past to reopen."
His conclusion echoed the prime minister's: "The law's job is not to write history. The writing of history is the task of historians."
As all of that was unfolding, France was also trying to figure out what to make of the 200th anniversary of the epic battle of Austerlitz, in which, on Dec. 2, 1805, Napoleon defeated the armies of Austria and Russia at a Czech village now called Slavkov.
The battle was arguably Napoleon's greatest victory. But the French are still at odds about whether the emperor was a genius who fathered the modern French state, or a militarist who led hundreds of thousands of French youths to senseless deaths.
The British feel no such ambiguity about the 200th anniversary of Lord Horatio Nelson's thrashing of Napoleon's fleet at Trafalgar. Joyful and elaborate celebrations of that victory began last summer and are still going on.
The French celebration of Austerlitz, by contrast, was short and tepid.
Some 4,000 re-enactors re-staged the battle in Slavkov last weekend, and some French history fans attended. Napoleon, however, was played not by a Frenchman, but by Mark Schneider, a 36-year-old history buff from Virginia.
And back in France, a new book, "Le Crime de Napoléon," had just been published. In it, the historian Claude Ribbe lambastes Napoleon for setting off a bloodbath in the Caribbean when he revived slavery in the French Empire in 1802.
The presentation is not subtle. On the cover is a photo of Hitler visiting Napoleon's tomb in 1940.