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Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial

Memories

Robert Aldrich

Palgrave, 2005

Reviewed by Ian Coller, History Department, University of Melbourne

 Nations have notoriously poor memories for the less appetizing elements of their 

 past, and the story of colonial memory in France is a case in point. From an almostuniversal and sometimes hysterical enthusiasm about France’s self-appointed ‘civilizing

mission’ during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this topic was suddenly

 plunged into near-total obscurity after decolonization. It is only recently that this memory

has been made to speak again in the work of historians such as Benjamin Stora, YvesBenot and Alice Conklin. But historians illuminating the more disturbing elements of this

history have met fierce opposition: most recently in new legislation approved by the

French parliament this year which mandated a more ‘positive’ view of French

colonialism. In a France mixing millions of postcolonial migrants with repatriatedsettlers, these statements have the highest political resonance. This conjuncture makes

Robert Aldrich’s Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France, as the first major work tochart the landscape of colonial memory on the French mainland, all the more timely.

France, as Aldrich points out , never succeeded in founding the large settler 

colonies which made British imperialism so irreversible in North America and the

Pacific. Most of the French settlers in Africa, the Maghreb and Indochina were‘repatriated’ to France, leaving only the small French colony on New Caledonia as a

 permanent settler society. Yet this apparently ‘clean’ decolonization is – rather like the

“resistancialist” myth which once dominated both official and popular understandings of the Vichy period – a convenient fiction written over far more messy, painful and

unresolved memories. Aldrich is the author of the most comprehensive recent account of French colonial history in English: now he takes this history back to the metropole,exhaustively cataloguing the monuments, museums and other traces of the colonial past

in contemporary France. He inventories an unexpectedly rich variety of colonial traces:

Parisian street names and architectural debris from colonial exhibitions; the chic newmuseums of arts premiers and the statues resettled from North Africa into provincial

towns along with thousands of  pieds noirs.

The opening chapters of Aldrich’s book provide snapshots of Paris and the

 provinces, followed by thematic chapters on war memorials; colonial statuary; museums;and permanent and temporary exhibitions. The book’s greatest strength is in gradually

 building a picture of the fantastic multiplicity and variety of these traces of the colonial

 past, comprehensively refuting any sense that colonialism can be considered outside themainstream of French historical experience. It shows just how imbricated the colonial

was in everyday life from the eighteenth-century onwards, from the slave-trading

economies of western France and the Mediterranean commerce of the Midi, through tothe colonial troops who fought in French wars from the Crimea to the Liberation of 1944.

If these descriptions occasionally overwhelm in their sheer volume, it is worth persisting

for the indelible scenes which emerge: François Mitterand placing a rose on the tomb of 

the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher; the return of statues from Algeria daubed with FLN

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slogans; the remains of the Jardin Colonial rotting on the outskirts of Paris; French and

Algerian comments in the visitors’ book at the new museum of the Mediterranean in

Marseille. Aldrich’s descriptions are very concrete (though illustrations are regrettablyfew), but he articulates very effectively the gaps and silences of museums and cityscapes,

as well as the critical contestation of these spaces. At a crucial moment in French colonial

memory, this is an essential text for those who wish to negotiate a question of French - asof Australian - history which will just not go away.