Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories

Robert Aldrich

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Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France

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Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France

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Also by Robert Aldrich ECONOMY AND SOCIETY IN BURGUNDY SINCE 1850 AN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF EUROPE, 1890–1939 (with Frank B. Tipton) AN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF EUROPE FROM 1939 TO THE PRESENT (with Frank B. Tipton)

FRANCE’S OVERSEAS FRONTIER: Départements et Territoires d’Outre-Mer (with John Connell) FRANCE AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC SINCE 1940 THE SEDUCTION OF THE MEDITERRANEAN: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy GREATER FRANCE: A History of French Overseas Expansion THE LAST COLONIES (with John Connell) COLONIALISM AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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THE FRENCH PRESENCE IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC, 1842–1940

Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France

Robert Aldrich University of Sydney

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Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories

© Robert Aldrich 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3370–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aldrich, Robert, 1954– Vestiges of the colonial empire in France : monuments, museums, and colonial memories / Robert Aldrich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–3370–7 1. France—Colonies—Historiography. 2. France—Colonies— History. 3. France—Colonies—Public opinion. 4. Public opinion—France. 5. Memorialization—France. I. Title. JV1811.A634 2004 325′.344—dc22 2004052102 10 14

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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Contents vi

List of Illustrations

vii

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Sites of Colonial Memory

1

1 The Colonies in Paris

21

2 The Colonies in the Provinces

76

3 Colonial War Memorials

105

4 Of Men and Monuments

157

5 The Colonies in Museums

196

6 The Colonial Legacy of Non-Western Art in French Museums

245

7 Temporary Exhibitions: Changing Perspectives

291

Conclusion: The Future of the Colonial Past

328

Notes

335

Bibliography

365

Index

377

v

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viii

Preface

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

‘Au Planteur’ Bust of Francis Garnier Colonial War Memorial Entrance to the Palais de la Porte Dorée Notre-Dame des Missions ‘La France Colonisatrice’ Minaret of the Paris mosque Pavilion, Jardin Tropical Plaque honouring protesters Plaque honouring French soldiers Vietnamese ‘temple’ in the Jardin Tropical North African War memorial Monument to the Marchand Mission Montmartre cemetery Ecole Coloniale Former colonial ministry

vi

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24 33 36 37 39 40 53 64 74 108 112 151 161 177 265 309

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List of Illustrations

AEF AOF DOM EFEO FLN FNACA IMA MAAO MAAOA MATP OAS SME TOM

Afrique Equatoriale Française Afrique Occidentale Française Département(s) d’Outre-Mer Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient Front de Libération Nationale Fédération Nationale des Anciens Combattants en Algérie, Maroc et Tunisie Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris) Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (Paris) Musée des Arts Africains, Océaniens et Amérindiens (Marseille) Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (Paris) Organisation de l’Armée Secrète Société des Missions Etrangères Territoire(s) d’Outre-Mer

vii

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List of Abbreviations

This book is about traces of the overseas empire in present-day metropolitan France and how these ‘sites of memory’ reveal French attitudes towards the colonial past. Although monuments and museums may be designed for eternity, they do not last indefinitely. Monuments are created and destroyed, while museums open and close and rearrange their collections. Therefore, the reader should appreciate that this book presents a view of colonial traces in France as seen at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and at the changes that have occurred since around 1990 in museums and monuments that refer to the colonial past. Those who may wish to use it as a guide to colonial sites may find that they will lose their way because of changes that have occurred with regularity. A word on nomenclature: I have used ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ as roughly synonymous, though in both French and English, some historians use these words to label different types of expansion. I have also occasionally used the word ‘natives’ to refer to indigenous populations, and ‘primitive’ for certain types of cultures and artefacts, because these words were current during the colonial period and preserve the mentalités of that time. I have sometimes not placed the words in inverted commas in order to avoid encumbering the text, but of course I am aware of the contested nature of the vocabulary, and by no means accept the colonialist beliefs implied by such language. Researching and writing this book gave me the very pleasant opportunity to visit a number of French cities, and to explore their museums and monuments. A considerable part of this study is based on my own visits and observations about monuments and museums. However, I have not been able to see and study all of the ones that I discuss and, in those cases, I have relied on published catalogues or secondary literature. My aim has not been to complete a comprehensive inventory of colonial sites in France, but I hope to have explored some of the most important of them. I would be grateful to readers who can inform me about ones that I have missed. The Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris provided a treasure trove of material on Paris, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Forney were indispensable in my work. The inter-library loan staff at the Fisher Library of the University of Sydney did wonderful service in borrowing books and obtaining copies of articles. I would like to thank colleagues and friends who put me on the right track to find sites of memory around France and comparative ones in other countries. I regret that space makes it impossible to discuss colonial lieux de mémoire in such countries as viii

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Preface

Britain, the Netherlands, Italy and Portugal, on which I have worked, and I hope to examine other cases elsewhere. Many people – historians, curators, students, fellow flâneurs – have shared their knowledge and insights with me, and I am grateful for their help. Several also kindly read sections of this work, or an earlier version of the manuscript, and their suggestions were most helpful; in particular, I would like to thank Rudolph Binion, Laurence Brown, Eric Jennings and David A. Schalk. Thanks, too, to Nicole Tran Minh for sharing her knowledge about the Jardin Botanique Colonial, to Jean-Jacques Jordi for giving me information on the Mémorial de la France d’Outre-Mer, to Eric Anderson for leads to monuments in Provence, to Michel Coquery and Catherine CoqueryVidrovitch for hints about sites in Paris, and to Pierre Brocheux for insight into Indochinese traces in France. Curators at a number of institutions answered my queries about their collections and provided me with invaluable documentation on their museums, and I would especially like to acknowledge their assistance. A personal word of thanks goes to friends who helped me track down sites; in addition to those above, they include JeanLuc Blanc, Loïc Chatton, Natalie Chatton, Frédéric Cotton, Stephen Cupper, Christophe D’Aniello, Mark Edwards, David Highton, Marie-Aline de Lavau, Isabelle Merle, Mark Seymour and Owen White. Luciana O’Flaherty at Palgrave Macmillan has provided vital encouragement and editorial oversight. I finished writing this book while a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, an extraordinarily beautiful site and idyllic situation in which to read, write and think. Michael Pretina, the director, his staff and other fellows provided a splendid scholarly environment and enjoyable conviviality during my stay; to them I would like to express my warm gratitude. Even in this small Mediterranean port there are traces of colonial history. A maison maure is decorated with Orientalist motifs. The Avenue Ganteaume (in which I lived) is named for a general who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. The monument aux morts in the Place Baragnon pays tribute to French soldiers in Indochina and North Africa, and there is another plaque to soldiers killed in overseas campaigns in the town’s cemetery. The Camargo Foundation has a bust of Albert Schweitzer, the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary made by Jerome Hill, who lived in Cassis and established the foundation. These traces provide a reminder of the way in which France’s overseas ventures left an imprint on towns and villages throughout the country, and on generations of French men and women. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own, as are the photographs.

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Preface ix

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France is a country of powerful symbols. As Roland Barthes famously observed, three of the best known and most beloved buildings in Paris sum up epochs in French history. The cathedral of Notre-Dame bears witness to the medieval power of the church, and to the age of stone and the craftsmen who sculpted it. The Louvre palace is a majestic reminder of the grandeur of the French monarchy before the Revolution. The Tour Eiffel incarnates the age of iron, capitalism and the victorious bourgeoisie.1 Places of symbolic import abound in Paris. The Arc de Triomphe recalls Napoleon’s battles, but also shelters the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a casualty of the Great War. The arch stands on the place named for Charles de Gaulle, who in 1944 memorably marched down the boulevard in a parade celebrating the Liberation. These sites attract dignitaries and tourists, and serve as venues for solemn ceremonies and ebullient celebrations. On the anniversary of the First World War armistice, the president lays a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier; there too veterans commemorate the Algerian ceasefire of 19 March 1962. On the fête nationale, 14 July, troops march down the Avenue des Champs-Elysées as fighter jets roar over the arch; the Foreign Legion contingent, sporting trademark white képis, are particularly popular with on-lookers. For the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989, crowds jammed the avenue to applaud a grand parade, watch groups of European, African and Asian performers choreographed by Jean-Paul Goude, and hear Jessye Norman, draped in a gigantic Tricolour, sing the ‘Marseillaise’. In 1998, hordes flocked to the Champs-Elysées to celebrate France’s victory in football’s World Cup, cheering as the picture of the team star, Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian migrants, was projected on the Arc de Triomphe. The joining of France’s most popular star of the moment and Paris’s iconic monument bespoke sporting fervour, national pride and the multi-ethnic nature of contemporary French society. Sites such as the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysées are not just material traces of France’s past. They provide arenas where political ideologies, 1

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Introduction: Sites of Colonial Memory

public spectacles and popular sentiments are staged. The Place de la Bastille, the location of the infamous prison attacked on 14 July 1789, still serves as a rallying-point for protesters, and particularly for supporters of the political left. The cry of ‘A la Bastille’ signals a demonstration just as it did more than two centuries ago. Instead of a prison, the square is dominated by the massive Opéra de la Bastille, one of the grands projets of François Mitterrand, a monument to cultural creation and presidential inspiration.2 Across town, the statue of Jeanne d’Arc outside the Jardin des Tuileries attracts protesters from the far right, as the Front National has adopted the warrior maiden as patron for their ultra-nationalist and xenophobic crusade. In the celebration, commemoration and ‘instrumentalisation’ of history, different regimes and groups espouse varying versions of that past, and they embody their versions in monuments. The Bastille prison was demolished by revolutionaries as the symbol of all that was wrong with the ancien régime, but later a chapelle expiatoire was built in memory of the decapitated Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. The Catholic church erected the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur in the early Third Republic in penance for the sins of the Communards, but the Mur des Fédérés in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where thousands of rebels of the 1871 Paris Commune were summarily shot, remained a sacred site for those who have shared their struggle. ‘Aux grands hommes la Patrie reconnaissante’ (To [its] great men [from] a grateful patrie) is emblazoned on the front of the Panthéon, where France’s most esteemed civilian heroes (and some now forgotten worthies) are interred with republican pomp. But those buried form a selective list – Marie Curie is the only woman, and Félix Eboué the only black man whose remains have been ‘pantheonised’. At his installation as President in 1981, Mitterrand placed red roses on the graves of his own heroes in the Panthéon – Victor Schoelcher, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery, Jean Jaurès, the socialist leader, and Jean Moulin, hero of the Résistance – symbolically announcing the sympathies of his administration. Those on the parliamentary right make pilgrimages to de Gaulle’s grave at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises – President Jacques Chirac made a quick visit by helicopter on the morning of his inauguration.3 The monumental and commemorative landscape of France continues to be transformed with changing world developments and political attitudes. In 1998, Chirac unveiled a bronze memorial to French men and women killed in acts of terrorism in France and overseas.4 The next year, the president inaugurated a Centre de la Mémoire at Oradour-sur-Glane, a town in the Haute-Vienne. On 10 June 1944, the Germans had locked up most of the women and children in the Oradour church and set it alight, killing 642 people. The largely destroyed town was left as a permanent war memorial.5 In 2001, Chirac unveiled a plaque honouring the Muslim harkis who fought with the French against nationalists in the Algerian War of independence. The same year, and more controversially, the Paris municipal council put up

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2 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

a plaque near the Seine to commemorate Algerians killed in 1961 while taking part in a demonstration against the Algerian War. In 2002, Chirac inaugurated a Mémorial National des Guerres en Afrique du Nord, a monument to soldiers who died in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. The cult of monuments is as strong as ever, proof of public authorities’ desire to imprint their version of history on the built landscape and on the memory of fellow citizens, evidence too of the public’s need for sites of commemoration and recollection. Several of these recent inaugurations record memories and history in a particularly contested field, France’s colonial past. Such reminders of the age of imperialism, among other traces of colonial history, provide the subject of the present book.

Remembering the empire France conquered and ruled the second largest empire of the modern age. ‘Greater France’ at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s extended to ten million square kilometres and one hundred million citizens and subjects.6 From islands in the West Indies to archipelagos in the South Pacific, from the Maghreb to Indochina, from huge domains in western Africa to small coastal enclaves in India, France held possessions around the globe. That empire was not only territorially vast, but also long-lived. France acquired Martinique and Guadeloupe in the 1630s, and only granted independence to the New Hebrides in 1980; ten overseas outposts remained under French rule.7 Empire played a crucial role in modern French history, and many French men and women were directly touched by imperialism. Explorers pushed back the frontiers of France’s known world, soldiers and sailors fought in wars of conquest and in wars of decolonisation, administrators ruled distant outposts, migrants tried their luck in settler colonies, convicts were deported to tropical penitentiaries, missionaries spread the Christian religion, traders counted profits and pursued development of real or imagined resources, scholars researched colonial flora, fauna and people, artists and writers sought inspiration. All French men and women were indirectly affected by imperialism through the lessons they were taught at school, the imported foods they ate and commodities they used at home, or the taxes they paid. Occasionally colonial questions moved to the centre of national attention: with the controversies about continued expansion in the 1880s, at the time of the colonial exhibition in Paris in 1931, and during the Indochinese and Algerian wars of the 1950s and 1960s. The French empire has receded into the past, but continues to haunt the French consciousness. Many probably see it through the haze of time and distance. Mention of the colonies evokes military figures encountered in school texts, such as Faidherbe, Gallieni and Lyautey, and the poetic-sounding names of alluringly exotic places – Tombouctou, Pondichéry, Louang Prabang – over which the French flag once flew. There are the scratchy recordings of

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Sites of Colonial Memory 3

Josephine Baker’s ‘Ma Petite Tonkinoise’ and Edith Piaf’s ‘Mon Légionnaire’. The sands of the Sahara and the jungle-clad temples of Angkor Wat represent the seduction of the empire, chronicled in old newspapers and faded photographs, a quaint casque colonial or white linen suit. This is the world of Tahitian vahinés, madras-clad West Indian creoles, Vietnamese congaïes and Ouled-Naïl dancers, as well as the tirailleurs sénégalais and the zouaves, the men from Africa, Asia and the Pacific who died on the fields of Flanders. For other present-day French, ‘les colonies’ invoke more personal memories, perhaps of a grandfather who was a colonial official in Indochina or a father who fought in Algeria. In magazines and associations, rallies and publications, descendants of a million pieds-noirs who fled North Africa in 1962 nourish memories of Algérie française. Aged returned soldiers who served in the troupes coloniales or the Légion Etrangère meet to reminiscence and mourn the deaths of comrades. There are, however, other memories of the colonies, ones often hidden or denied, now painfully recovered and debated. The 2000 confession by General Paul Aussaresses that he had personally taken part in the torture of prisoners in Algeria in the 1950s produced intense debate about the ugliest sides of colonialism: electric shock treatments and brutal interrogations, the rape of women and the burning of villages, massacres and mutilations. For specialist historians, and for most observers who paid close attention to reports during the Algerian War, these revelations are not new, although as Benjamin Stora has shown, they were covered by a wall of silence and relegated to ‘oubli’ (oblivion, oversight).8 But the new exposés have forced the French, however reluctantly, to face unpleasant and inglorious memories of colonial exploits, memories – like those of the collaboration and the deportation of Jews under the German Occupation – that were long buried. The ‘Vichy syndrome’, the phenomenon of covering up ignoble French actions during the Second World War,9 found a parallel in the ‘forgetting’ of the Algerian War. In 2001, Le Monde, reporting on Aussaresses’s admissions, queried, ‘Après Vichy, l’Algérie’? (After Vichy, Algeria?) Would the French face up to their colonial past? Would other issues, such as slavery and slave trading, forced labour and the violence of colonialism, now be debated? Does the current recognisance of the Algerian War represent ‘la fin de l’amnésie’ (the end of amnesia)?10

The empire in post-colonial France The history of French colonialism is evident in many forms, foremost in the millions of descendants of the colonial diaspora and the difficult questions that their presence poses about modern-day France and French identity. West Indians, Maghrebins and black Africans have migrated to France in large numbers since the 1950s – there are now 4.5 million Muslims in France, the largest Islamic population in any European country. Most trace their family

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4 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

origins to former French colonies. The colonial and post-colonial exodus was prompted by French desire for cheap labour during the boom of les trente glorieuses, though many hoped that ‘guest workers’ would ultimately return home. In the Caribbean and in Africa, men and women faced with limited employment, struggling economies and pressure on local resources responded to the call. They also were drawn to the bright lights of the big cities in a country whose civilisation had been projected to them in colonial propaganda and broadcast in post-colonial images of modernity, prosperity and liberation from hardship. Anyone who wanders along the Cours Belsunce in Marseille or in the Barbès-Rochechouart neighbourhood in Paris sees a cosmopolitan population, with women in colourful boubous and others in dark veils walking alongside Maghrebins and black Africans in designer fashions, or sweatshirts and jeans. There is the sound of Arabic music, the smell of ‘Oriental’ pastries. Chinatown in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement has streets lined with Asian restaurants, operated by those who arrived from Southeast Asia in another diasporic wave. In Belleville, Catholic and Jewish pieds-noirs, North Africans and Comorians, West Indians and Asians mingle in a post-colonial kaleidoscope. Here, and in the suburban cités that are home to poor migrants, links between France and the old colonies are most visible. Here, too, are enacted the ugly dramas of racist attacks and a delinquency born amidst poverty and marginalisation. Here debates about religion and culture – most recently, the debate on the wearing of such ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols as Muslim head-scarves – are most pertinent.11 In other ways, too, the colonial ties still bind. Maghrebin and African authors, including a new generation of writers that has emerged from the post-war migration, are best-sellers. Film and literature festivals feature works from the French-speaking countries; Paris is the capital of diasporic cultures and refuge for dissident intellectuals from the Francophone world. Tourists flock to destinations made familiar by colonial-era imagery and still served by Air France flights. Couscous, nems and petit punch are now almost as French as boeuf bourguignon, croissants and le gros rouge qui tâche. Raï and zouk are recorded in Paris studios and played in discos around the world. Designers regularly create a fashion for ethnic clothing or ‘colonial’ furniture. The yearly Paris to Dakar motor rally and the yachting route du rhum race follow in the wake of old expeditions. All of these things illustrate the colonial heritage present in France, and are reminders of France’s long and complex colonial history. They provide fascinating and urgent subjects for the study of a rapidly changing France. This book, however, is about a particular type of reminder of the colonies, monuments, memorials and museum collections relating to the overseas empire. It looks at sites connected in a direct and identifiable way with the history of colonialism: street names and public buildings, monuments, statues and memorials (including war memorials), and museums of art and

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Sites of Colonial Memory 5

artefacts. These varied sites share several traits. All are material traces of colonialism designed to commemorate, preserve or display French imperial history.12 They are all public sites – I have not examined private collections, family mementos or edifices that are not situated in public space.13 Furthermore, these monuments were erected, and museum collections assembled, as permanent. Therefore, except for a chapter on special exhibitions with colonial themes since the 1980s, I have not looked at ephemeral manifestations of colonialism – expositions coloniales, political rallies, ceremonies of commemoration – except in relation to edifices that survive today. My choice of monuments (in the broad sense of the term) and museums (both permanent collections and temporary shows) represents a specific subset of colonial traces that exist in present-day France. The aim is not to compile an exhaustive inventory of sites that recall the imperial past. The intention is rather to use these sites to investigate the ways in which the imperial vocation was consciously mapped onto the built landscape, and the ways in which the French collectively have remembered and commemorated their imperial deeds, or sometimes failed to do so. The geographical location of tangible memorials illuminates the position the empire occupied in France in general, in various quartiers of the capital, and in the different regions of the ‘Hexagon’. The iconography provides insight into the ideology of imperialism during the heyday of empire and in subsequent decades. The evolution of sites since the end of the colonies reflects the metamorphosis of perspectives on the past. Recent plans and controversies – for instance, about new war memorials and revamped museums – help to understand current attitudes to the former empire and to the issues that the imperial heritage represents. These traces, in brief, say something about the place that the empire occupied (and occupies) in national identity, and how the French have and have not come to terms with the colonial past. This book is thus about colonial memories and history, viewed through monuments and museums. Maurice Halbwachs in the mid-twentieth century wrote brilliantly about the volatility and diversity of memory. He pointed out that although each person has individual memories, they are imbedded in collective memories, those shared by particular groups – a village, a family, fellow students, work colleagues. There are also national memories, both of events experienced by the present generation, and those passed down through institutions and traditions. Memories can be kept alive, forgotten or repressed, acknowledged or reconstructed. Memories are personal, but also social; autobiographical and historical; active and passive. Some are recent, while others date from long ago, and it is difficult, he added, to say at what point a collective memory disappears. Halbwachs spoke of the way that memories have a spatial dimension, and he alluded to the ‘rapports entre les pierres et les hommes’ (relationships between stones and men).14 By extrapolation, monuments and museums are two ways in which memories are, in a literal sense, built, preserved and displayed.

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6 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

If they say something about remembering, they also imply something about forgetting, as difficult or painful episodes are glossed over, denied or simply ignored. What is not remembered may be as significant as what is remembered: the act of forgetting and sometimes the later recovery of memory.15 Ernest Renan remarked in the nineteenth century that ‘l’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d’une nation’16 (forgetfulness, and I would even say, historical error, are essential factors in the creation of a nation). Marc Augé has pointed out that forgetting and remembering are complementary, and that some people remember all too well events that they would prefer to forget – indeed, he says, it is occasionally important not to forget to forget.17 Perhaps some groups do need to get over tragedies and triumphs in order to get on with life. But the need or obligation to remember, the devoir de mémoire, is also important for individuals and societies. ‘Lest we forget’ is not just a commemorative exclamation but an historical injunction about the necessity of coming to terms with the past, even its most painful moments. Remembering and forgetting take on particular significance in recollection of colonialism. For Antoine Raybaud, the whole experience of colonialism was rejected in French memory after the end of empire, treated as a sort of mirage of false hopes, lost edens and coveted lands that failed to live up to their promise.18 Yet if the French tried to reject the memory of colonialism, it pushes its way to the surface, as events in France and in the former colonies provide unavoidable reminders of memory and of history, and of the frequent gap between the two. Régis Debray, writing on the 2004 centenary of Saint-Domingue’s rebellion against France, and in the midst of renewed chaos in Haiti, noted that ‘Haïti fait partie de notre histoire, mais non de notre mémoire’ (Haiti forms part of our history, but not of our memory). He added that ‘Haïti est . . . malade d’un trop de mémoire, et la France d’un pas assez’ (Haiti suffers from too much memory, and France from not enough). Reflecting on the seventeenth-century history of the ill-fated plantation colony, Debray observed that ‘la face noire des Lumières . . . n’est pas ce que nos compatriotes ont le plus envie de contempler dans leur passé’ (the dark side of the Enlightenment . . . is not what our compatriots are most eager to contemplate in their past). Forgetting might serve some therapeutic purposes, but so must recollection, and the utility of anniversaries is ‘en faisant émerger des souvenirs enfouis, permettre à chacun de faire son deuil de ses humiliations comme des ses triomphes. On peut alors exorciser les fantômes pour affronter les appels de l’avenir, mais en pleine connaissance de cause’19 (that by forcing out buried memories, they allow people to come to terms with both their humiliations and their triumphs. Thus can ghosts be exorcised in order for us to face the challenges of the future in full knowledge of what they entail). Debray’s comments point not to a total whiteout of memory, but to selective recollection. The French celebrated the emancipation of slaves, while forgetting the French practice of slavery. Politicians promoted privileged relationships between France and its former colonies, while sidestepping the

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Sites of Colonial Memory 7

problems created by the heritage of imperialism. Museum-goers marvelled at ‘primitive’ art while taking little notice of the descendants of its creators living in their midst; they admired the craftsmanship but did not bother to consider the provenance of the works and how they ended up in French collections. Tourists and armchair travellers yearned for faraway places, and enjoyed ‘authentic’ experiences and spectacles folkloriques in holiday camps, with little concern for the legacy of colonialism and colonialist ideas. Demagogues raged against the presence of Arabs and Africans in France, while neglecting to remember that they are the very people to whom France once promised to dispense ‘civilisation’. Yet – in a different way – the most ardent critics of colonialism sometimes also half remembered and half forgot. The work of medical practitioners and educators was reduced in anti-colonialist appraisals only to another expression of aggression and cultural dispossession. Art, literature and scholarship were seen solely as handmaidens in conquest and the perpetuation of brutal rule and its racist justifications. The hardships of French men and women who went overseas, not always willingly – transported convicts and political prisoners, foot-soldiers and poor migrants – were subsumed to a narrative of rapacity and profiteering. Colonial soldiers and sailors, including those who believed that they were doing their duty in ‘bad’ wars in Indochina and Algeria, never received the recognition accorded comrades-in-arms in the ‘good’ world wars. The traumatic experiences of many recruits and of rapatriés were sometimes considered the inevitable consequence of opposition to decolonisation. Perhaps ambivalence is the best simple way to describe attitudes to the colonies – a mixture of nostalgia, residual pride, misgivings about the worth of the effort, sometimes shame about what was done, occasional outrage. Examining monuments, museums and other markers of the colonial patrimony is a way of charting and understanding that ambivalence.

Culture and colonialism, monuments and memory This approach draws on several historiographical trends. The culture of imperialism has become a central concern of scholars of empire, analysing not just the deeds of colonialism but the discourse of expansion: ideology and representation.20 Historians such as John Mackenzie have examined how colonialism appeared in the metropole in every artistic medium, from scholarly research to popular music halls, and how colonial propagandists mobilised resources to promote imperial endeavours.21 They have underlined the importance of ‘culture contact’ between Europeans and ‘others’ (as in the discovery of ‘primitive art’), the diffusion of colonial ideas throughout European societies, and the colonialist assumptions that have underlain (and been produced by) perceptions of non-Western civilisations. The importance of the cultural ‘taproots’ of imperialism, and the creation of

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8 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

a veritable colonial culture at home, has been one of the most important developments in recent colonial history. If this work tries to contribute to the history of culture and colonialism, it also connects to the well-established study of symbols and sites of national identity. Maurice Agulhon’s path-breaking 1978 study of ‘statuomanie’ – the propensity of the Third Republic, motivated by admiration for personal achievement and democratic success, to erect statues to its heroes – led the way to his own studies of the republican image of Marianne.22 The publication in the 1980s of Pierre Nora’s magisterial and multi-volume collection on Les Lieux de mémoire represented the creation of a new historical field of study, making ‘sites of memory’ familiar beyond a specialist audience and inspiring a wave of research in other countries.23 Over 125 chapters in Nora’s collection addressed ways in which the French have conceived, formulated and embodied their history and identity, and Nora and his co-authors showed how such sites could be ‘read’ to comprehend both historical and present-day issues. A number of essays in Nora’s books – on street names, statues and monuments, for example – pricked my own curiosity about colonial lieux de mémoire. Only one chapter, Charles-Robert Ageron’s contribution on the Exposition coloniale of 1931, concerned the colonies, a slight treatment of ‘Greater France’ in a work so rich in studies of the components of French life.24 Works on public monuments have proliferated, as scholars such as Sergiusz Michalski have chronicled public art from the late nineteenth century to the present.25 Much attention has focussed on war monuments. The First World War inspired countless monuments aux morts, and almost no French commune is without its monument, whether a simple stele, a statue, or a more elaborate and allegorical sculpture. The building of war memorials was repeated, on a smaller scale, after the Second World War. Historians such as Annette Becker, Serge Barcellini and Annette Wieviorka in France, and Jay Winter, Alex King and K.S. Inglis elsewhere, have analysed the cult of war monuments.26 Other historians have examined memorials to victims of the war, especially Jews killed in the Holocaust.27 There have also been important works on the representation of slavery in American and British memorials.28 The most comprehensive studies on metropolitan memorials to colonies, paradoxically, concern Germany, a country with a relatively small and short-lived empire. Joachim Zeller’s volume on colonial monuments and historical consciousness provides a model analysis of the way that Wilhelmine authorities represented colonial efforts in Africa and the southwest Pacific, the evolution of these sites after Germany lost its empire at the end of the First World War, and the recrudescence of colonial fervour – with hope for recovering lost possessions – in the inter-war years. He shows how monuments continue to play a role in the German ‘culture of remembrance’ and the expression of political sentiments. For instance, one early twentieth-century

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Sites of Colonial Memory 9

Hamburg monument to German expansion in what is now Namibia was rededicated, in 1980, as a monument to anti-colonialism. With Ulrich van der Heyden, Zeller has also explored remaining colonial sites in Berlin, including a few buildings, graves and statues that survived the end of empire and the vagaries of Germany’s twentieth-century history.29 Scholarly material on other countries is more scattered. Colonial exhibitions in Belgium and Portugal have been the subjects of recent studies – and of an interesting centenary exhibition at the former Belgian colonial museum, which recreated some of the original displays and reflected on the history of the institution.30 The four hundredth anniversary of the Dutch East India Company in 2002 produced a round of exhibitions in the Netherlands, and publications included both catalogues and critical appraisals of the Dutch celebrations.31 There are several works on the former colonial museums,32 including the grandiose museum in Amsterdam, now the Tropenmuseum.33 Scholars have produced studies as well on British museums with colonial collections, ranging from the venerable India Institute and Imperial Institute to the post-1945 Commonwealth Institute; the new British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol is too recently established to have stimulated scholarly analysis.34 Because of the importance of imperialism in Britain, works on institutions such as Kew Gardens, the British Museum and the Royal Geographical Society abound. Jonathan Schneer has written vividly of colonial life in London in 1900, though his main subject is not the ‘monumentalisation’ of imperialism, but John Mackenzie has looked at colonial sites in Glasgow, and Christine Chivallon has examined monuments and memories of slavery in Bristol.35 Volumes on monuments inventory statues to colonial figures, but only Ewald Vanvugt has devoted a full study to colonial monuments in a major city. His investigation of Amsterdam shows the particularly strong imprint left by the Dutch East India Company, and later Dutch imperialism in Southeast Asia, including controversies surrounding a statue of the conqueror of Aceh, General van Heutsz.36 Nicola Labanca has looked at modern colonial sites in Italy.37 Particular attention has been given to the Axum column, taken by Mussolini from Ethiopia in 1935 to decorate his Ministry of Colonies; only in 2004, after various agreements, postponements, arguments (and great damage when the column was struck by lightning) was it slated to be sent back to Africa.38 Each of these studies illustrates how politicians and imperial promoters, and the urbanists, architects and artists who worked for them, used monuments to affirm their countries’ colonial vocations, and how such monuments have provided points for post-colonial controversies. Relatively little attention39 has been paid to French memorials that concern colonialism.40 Directories of monuments include statues of figures associated with the colonies, or such other commemorations as plaques on houses, but often with few details and little analysis. Volumes on war memorials make some reference to colonial monuments in France, yet

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10 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

seldom dwell on the particular ways in which colonial soldiers are commemorated, and there is little literature on commemoration of the dead of the Indochinese and Algerian wars. A very few scholars stand out for their exceptional work. David A. Schalk has written perceptively on France’s difficult coming to terms with the Algerian and Indochinese Wars, with examples of the war memorials in Paris and Fréjus, and the late William Cohen completed a survey of France’s Algerian War memories and memorial sites, while Eric Jennings has written about a war monument to Indochinese soldiers in France. Lack of attention to memorials linked to colonialism is surprising, given the great growth of interest in imperial iconography – films, photographs, art, postcards and advertising.41 One particular area that has stimulated scholars, however, is the exhibition of colonial conquests, wares and people. Colonial pavilions featured at many national and international exhibitions.42 The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a fad for expositions coloniales, culminating in the grandiose 1931 fair in Paris (and a simultaneous anti-colonial exhibition), which has been analysed by Ageron, Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, Panivong Norindr, Herman Lebovics and, most recently, Patricia A. Morton.43 The displays of ‘natives’ imported from the colonies as part of the world fairs and colonial exhibitions has also been scrutinised.44 Study of exhibitions is part of a substantial corpus on what is often, rather simplistically, referred to as Orientalism. Although Orientalism and colonialism are not synonymous, much artistic influence from overseas occurred during the period of European conquest and rule, and the various examples resonate with stereotypes and perspectives that reflected and formed the colonialist mentalité.45 Orientalist and colonialist artworks are now displayed in French museums, and the ‘new museology’ (influenced by post-modern and post-colonial theory) has been accompanied by growing research on museums and collecting.46 There has also been great debate, among both museologists and anthropologists, about collections of ‘native’ art and artefacts in European museums, the way that these collections have been acquired, and how they are displayed.47 Finally, a study of colonial lieux de mémoire in France connects with burgeoning discussion on the role of the past in contemporary society. Robert Gildea has written about the powerful role of the past in contemporary France – the legacy of the monarchy, the Revolution, religious and social disputes. Raphael Samuel has explored how memories of historical events are formed, preserved and actualised, while David Lowenthal has looked at the issue of heritage and the preservation of historical sites. While not measuring itself against these important works representing different approaches to various ‘uses’ of history, this book seeks to consider the history of French imperialism as an area for investigation of how specific groups and the French nation come to terms with the past.48

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12 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

This study looks closely at colonial vestiges scattered around metropolitan France, although it does not encompass the DOM and TOM. The memorial landscape in the outre-mer is at least as fascinating and takes on a particularly complex significance because of the continued attachment of these old colonial possessions to the French Republic, as the works of Laurence Brown, Richard Burton, Christine Chivallon and Eric Jennings, among others, have shown in the case of the Antilles.49 Monuments in the DOM and TOM, and in the former colonies, will be examined further in another forum.50 Remaining in metropolitan France, this volume pauses to consider statues and think about the names of streets, reads the labels on artefacts in museums, seeks out memorials and monuments, questions the interpretation of colonial history that they implicitly or intentionally offer. Some of the monuments and museums are prominent, others are almost hidden away, and often overlooked. These markers of the colonial past represent an intentional effort by colonial authorities and promoters to imprint the empire on the French landscape. They named streets and put up commemorative plaques, they erected statues and constructed memorials, they opened museums and organised exhibitions. They wanted to make the empire a visible presence to compatriots who were initially half-hearted in their support of the colonial mission. Monument-builders and museum curators in the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, not surprisingly, hid episodes of colonialism that tarnished the heroic builders of ‘Greater France’ – slavery, forced labour, massacres – and later ones only belatedly paid attention to the wars of decolonisation. Occasionally, after the empire ended, they tried, quite literally, to efface memories of the colonies by sand-blasting names of imperial heroes from buildings, putting up plasterboard to hide colonialist murals, or closing galleries that vaunted the merits of empire. They agonised about what to do with collections of colonialist and ethnographic art, postponed the creation of memorials and aborted plans for commemorations. Certain patterns emerge from this imperial heritage. Colonial ‘traces’ are far more evident in France than might first be thought. In a country with countless monuments, those that commemorate the colonies are overwhelmed by allegories of Liberty and the Republic, monuments aux morts, statues of provincial notables and sites linked to the country’s turbulent and long European history. However, the ones with colonial allusions are surprisingly widespread and numerous, from great public buildings in Paris to small monuments in villages. Colonialism is inscribed on plaques and carved in stone. If colonialism seems the major theme of very few of France’s eight thousand museums, yet a large number contain some colonial treasure – a painting with a colonial subject, ethnographic art and artefacts, preserved natural specimens, items that came into collections through the inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness of French colonials. Traces of colonialism are omnipresent.

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Colonial lieux de mémoire

There is nevertheless no unitary memory of the empire; different groups remember the colonies in varying ways. Veterans recall wars of decolonisation in terms of soldierly solidarity and the deaths of comrades, sometimes with resentment at hopeless campaigns, lost battles and the retreat from empire. Opponents of the wars in Indochina and Algeria recollect support for movements of national liberation. Many pieds-noirs express nostalgia for Algérie française, and bitterness at the ‘abandonment’ of the land they claimed. The descendents of colonised people living in France also have very personal perspectives of colonial rule. They include West Indians and Réunionnais whose ancestors were transported to the New World as slaves, and who themselves migrated from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, those who left Indochina in 1954 or who came from Vietnam to France as ‘boat people’ in 1975, migrants from the Maghreb and black Africa who have moved to France in large numbers ever since the 1950s, harkis who fled in 1962. Some of these people are underrepresented in monuments; there is, for example, no national monument commemorating slavery or emancipation (as there is, for instance, in Amsterdam), or a monument to African immigration. Nor is there yet a museum on slavery or immigration. The lack of monuments or museums, however, does not erase either history or memories. Some are more apt to remember and commemorate the imperial age than are others. Perhaps the group with the most vivid recollections is the military, and in military museums and memorials, the empire is most visibly, and proudly, presented. Missionaries, too, have a long memory, paying tribute to those who died for their faith, celebrating the spread of the Gospel, and treasuring relics from the colonies. By contrast, administrators appear less forthcoming in commemorating their colleagues, and the business community, except in a few chamber of commerce collections generally integrated into municipal museums, is silent on the history of the imperial economy. Museums of fine arts display the works of painters and sculptors who borrowed ‘exotic’ themes, though often showing them as masterpieces of art rather than as tokens of imperial endeavours. Ethnographic museums hold enormous collections of objects from Africa, Asia and Oceania, but until recently, have been reticent about exploring the colonial past of the works in their keeping. A concentration on certain types of colonialism can be discerned from the following chapters. Across France, the early years of empire – the saga of explorers, acts of conquest, the sacrifices of the First World War – are more often recorded than the final decades. The ‘great men’ of the long colonial age, the explorers Bougainville and La Pérouse, and proconsuls such as Faidherbe, Gallieni and Lyautey, are often acknowledged. Marshal Lyautey – officer in Indochina, administrator in Madagascar, virtual ruler of Morocco, organiser of the 1931 exhibition – is the most often encountered colonialist, buried in the Invalides, memorialised in statues and street names, and recalled in his manor, now a museum. Of the figures involved in the empire

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Sites of Colonial Memory 13

after the middle of the twentieth century, only Félix Eboué, the Guyanais who ‘rallied’ to de Gaulle in 1940, Albert Schweitzer and possibly Jean de Lattre de Tassigny are put forward as colonial heroes. Those who pursued a humanitarian mission – notably Victor Schoelcher, who campaigned for the emancipation of slaves – are, not surprisingly, more remembered than colonial villains. European women are confined to certain roles in imperial commemoration, visible largely as grieving widows on war memorials, or pictured in photographs or paintings as nurses, nuns or settlers. ‘Natives’ appear most often in colonialist painting and in ethnographic exhibitions, but are often present, usually as loyal soldiers, muscular workers and nubile women, in other colonialist décors. Military, historical and fine arts museums display images and documents referring to indigenous leaders, but generally they are the ones defeated or subdued by the French. The Algerian Abd el-Kader is remembered in a more positive fashion because the old enemy rallied to the French. Monumental tributes to non-Western personalities, even such figures as Léopold Sedar Senghor – poet, member of the Académie Française, minister in Fourth Republic governments and president of independent Senegal – are almost impossible to find. Anti-colonialists and colonial nationalists are notable by their absence – there is, for instance, no monument to Ho Chi Minh. Colonialists are memorialised in France, whereas anti-colonial nationalists are commemorated in their own, now independent, countries. A temporal pattern can also be discerned in lieux de mémoire. The first overseas empire, the French colonies of the Americas and West Indies, have left relatively few monuments in France, despite the importance of transAtlantic trade and settlement from the 1600s through the 1700s, though allegories of the continents and images of plantation colonies sometimes appear. By the late 1700s, they are overshadowed by a general fashion for chinoiserie, a fascination with the Far East that continued throughout the nineteenth century, episodically connected to French incursions in Asia. (French interventions in China in the 1840s and in Southeast Asia in the 1860s prompted renewed interest in the Orient.) Of great monumental importance at the end of the 1700s was Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, which inspired countless sphinxes and pharaohs in Paris, gave names of battles and marshals to a whole quartier, and filled the Louvre with mummies. In the 1830s, the arrival of an obelisk for the Place de la Concorde prolonged ‘Egyptomania’.51 The Napoleonic expedition created a scholarly interest in ancient Egypt that became the science of Egyptology, and a political concern that led to the French engineering of the Suez Canal. Another part of the world also riveted interest from the 1760s to the 1820s, the South Pacific. The voyages of Bougainville, who ‘discovered’ Tahiti, his ill-fated successor La Pérouse, Bruni d’Entrecasteaux sent to search for La Pérouse, then Baudin, dispatched by Napoleon: a fascination with Oceania was current long before France took over Tahiti in 1842 and New Caledonia a decade later.

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14 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

Commemoration of the ‘new’ empire quickly accompanied the conquest of new outposts. The takeover of Algiers in 1830, and the sending of a diplomatic mission to Morocco soon afterwards – one member was Eugène Delacroix – helped create a long-lasting fascination with the Arabo-Islamic world. Names of Algerian battles were given to Paris streets, Orientalists painted North African scenes, museums collected Maghrebin artefacts. The penetration of sub-Saharan Africa is mirrored in monuments to explorers and the popularity of ‘savage’ motifs, such as statues of lions, as well as of ‘primitive’ art – the ethnographic museum that opened in Paris in 1878 displayed the first fruits of conquests in black Africa, and later provided the venue for Picasso’s discovery of tribal art. ‘Monumentalisation’ and ‘museumification’ followed the flag. Imperial memorialisation reached an apogee, as did the overseas empire, in the years after the First World War. Commemoration combined homage to the colonial soldiers of the Great War with efforts to stimulate colonial enthusiasm. This period, a key stage in the formation of modern French identity and its representation in museums and monuments,52 saw the zenith of the colonial vogue. Street names, monuments, exhibitions and villages noirs, the Musée des Colonies and Musée de l’Homme in Paris: these sites testified to the way that colonialism infused French society in the early twentieth century. The years after the Second World War, however, were marked by a more technocratic approach to colonial governance and economic development, efforts less amenable to being ‘statuified’. In any case, the Third Republic fad for erecting statues and building memorials was falling out of fashion. No more grand expositions coloniales were held, and no one wanted monuments to a dying empire. Even the efforts of soldiers in Indochina and Algeria (to the consternation of anciens combattants) were memorialised discreetly, if at all. So ended, too, the intentional ‘marking’ of France with a colonial (and colonialist) imprint. Imperial withdrawal hardly lent itself to new street names, statues or displays. From the early 1960s, with the end of the Algerian War, until the 1980s, the French were hardly eager to recall an empire that had disappeared. As Agulhon remarks, the ‘myth’ of a colonial France, so carefully constructed from 1900 until about 1950, was replaced by a new myth of an anti-colonial France, Gaullist-sponsored tiers-mondisme.53 The old coloniser portrayed itself as the promoter of independent countries, a privileged interlocutor between the developed and developing world, and an alternative patron to the superpowers – a stance that did not keep Paris from intervening politically, economically and militarily in its former colonies. In the mid-nineteenth century, France’s colonial self-image had altered. A country proud of rich sugar plantations dependent on slave labour changed into one that proclaimed itself the liberator of slaves, emancipating them in its old colonies and wiping out slavery in Africa through new colonial

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Sites of Colonial Memory 15

conquests. In 1900, France was a boastful colonial power, carrying out a mission civilisatrice around the world, pursuing the mise en valeur of colonial resources that brought profits to the metropole. A half-century or so later, after painful decolonisation, France’s persona metamorphosed again. No longer was France the centre of an empire fifty times the size of the metropole. France, in its self-image, had fully incorporated its vieilles colonies into the Republic in 1946,54 fostered the return to sovereignty of the Moroccan and Tunisian protectorates a decade later, and granted independence to its colonies in sub-Saharan Africa in 1960. France (and, personally, de Gaulle) could even now pose as having ‘given’ independence to Algeria. Aid and trade succeeded programmes for colonial ‘development’, and the rayonnement of French culture replaced the mission civilisatrice. Imperialism and colonialism became taboo – despite accusations of ‘neo-colonialism’ – and reminiscences of the colonial era were less than welcome. In this context, new uses had to be found for old colonial buildings, such as the ex-Ecole Coloniale and the ex-Musée Colonial – an attempted ‘decolonisation’ of the very buildings of empire so arduously and ardently created only a generation before. Names were changed, new mission statements written. Metropolitan colonial sites such as the Jardin Botanique Colonial were neglected, even though the navy ‘repatriated’ tens of monuments aux morts from North Africa. Museum collections grew dusty, exhibition labels yellowed, colonialist art was shifted to storerooms. Recollection of empire was the province of specialist historians, amateurs of nostalgia, diehard colonialists or dilettantes of the exotic in a France resolutely trying to be hyper-modern. Foreign Legionnaires and ‘petites Tonkinoises’ had fallen into disrepute, pith helmets went out of fashion. Anthropologists turned away from the study of ‘artefacts’, politicians tried to forge links of co-opération with the Third World states, economists talked about new international economic orders. From the mid-1980s, however, there was a reawakening of interest in the colonies. The study of colonial history experienced a renewal.55 Stacks of memoirs and albums were published. Books such as Marguerite Duras’s memoir of her childhood in Indochina, L’Amant (1984), Erik Orsenna’s Goncourt Prize-winning saga, L’Exposition coloniale (1984), and Albert Camus’s posthumously published fictionalised autobiography about his early life in Algiers, Le Premier homme (1994), became best-sellers among many other works with colonial themes. Readers again turned to the writings of such colonial-era travelers as Isabelle Eberhardt, Alexandra David-Néel and Paul Morand, and a host of colonial-era authors – Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen and Claude Farrère – attracted a new generation of book-buyers. Orientalist and colonial art too was rediscovered, and by the 1990s, there were almost yearly exhibitions of art and photography inspired by the empire. Régis Wargnier’s ‘Indochine’, Pierre Schoendoerffer’s ‘Dien Bien Phu’ and Claire Denis’s ‘Chocolat’ brought the colonies back to the silver screen. ‘Ethnic’ design and

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16 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

‘world’ music became the fashion. Travel agencies promoted tours to fabled places over which France had ruled. Colonial-era memorabilia – banknotes and medals, pith helmets and pictures – fetched record prices. There were new compilations of colonial songs.56 Colonialism, at least as theme and image, once again was à la mode. As museums re-examined the history of colonialism, they tried to ‘decolonise’ the presentation of arts no longer called ‘primitive’. Marseille opened a new museum of African, Oceanic and pre-Columbian American art (incorporating collections of the city’s old colonial museums); the Lyon Musée Africain reorganised its displays; the Musée Guimet, the national museum of Asian art, reopened after a top-to-bottom renovation. The monumental landscape also gradually began to reflect the revived interest. A monument aux morts to the Indochinese War was opened in Fréjus in 1983, joined a decade later by a necropolis for the repatriated remains of soldiers killed in Vietnam. Fréjus also unveiled a monument to African soldiers who served in the First World War. In the late 1990s and in the first years of the new century, the president unveiled a plaque to harkis, a monument to those who served in Algeria and a North African War memorial. This renewed vogue for museum exhibitions and for monuments was not just a rediscovery of the colonies. Colonial history and France’s presence in the outre-mer were contested sites in the 1980s. The calls by independence movements for the ‘liberation’ of France’s remaining overseas outposts (and Corsica) led to intense controversy that spilled over into violence in some of the French islands and produced a conflict in New Caledonia that threatened to become a replay of the Algerian War. Political figures tried to stake out territory in culture as well as politics. Mitterrand’s Socialists in the mid-1980s seemed ready to accord ‘independence in association’ to New Caledonia, a plan that came to naught because of the hostility of anti-independence groups in the Pacific territory and the metropole. They also promoted Kanak culture: an exhibition of Kanak art and artefacts in Paris, then the building of the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre (named for the assassinated independence leader) in Nouméa. In the Mitterrand years, too, an exhibition in Nantes provided the first in-depth survey of slavery in the French plantation colonies, and one in Paris investigated the métis cultures engendered by colonialism. The conservatives, led by Jacques Chirac, resolutely opposed independence for the DOM and TOM, and since becoming president in 1995, Chirac has made a sustained effort to commemorate French soldiers, harkis and rapatriés from Algeria, and has celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the départementalisation of the vieilles colonies. The cleavage between political left and right is not absolute, of course, and under Chirac’s presidency the ‘Année de l’Algérie’ provided some of the most incisive exhibitions of French colonialism yet held. During his administration, the parliament adopted a resolution in 1999 labelling slavery a ‘crime against humanity’ and in 2001 recognised

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Sites of Colonial Memory 17

the Algerian conflict as a ‘war’. A favourite project of the president is the construction of a Musées des Arts Premiers in Paris, and the state has given its support to the creation of a Mémorial National de l’Outre-Mer in Marseille. Those museums will provide further insight into the French perspectives on the empire and on the societies that France conquered. To what extent will the history, monumental commemoration and exhibition of colonialism be ‘decolonised’? To sum up: Monuments and museums reveal three stages in France’s production of a material patrimony of colonialism. From 1890 through the 1940s, particularly during the inter-war years, colonialists – state authorities such as the Ministère des Colonies, private organisations like the Ligue Maritime et Coloniale and the Société des Missions étrangères, and even individuals – marked the French built landscape with mementos of colonialist fervour. From the 1960s, after France fought unsuccessful wars to maintain empire and retreated from most of its possessions, through the 1980s, empire was forgotten: monuments became dilapidated, paintings were shifted into reserves, ethnographic and non-Western collections gathered dust, museums searched for new vocations. During the 1980s, several gestures heralded renewed fascination with the colonies. Since the 1990s, there has been a boom in colonial interest: exhibitions, memorials, public debate, the adoption of laws, new museum projects. These phases relate to lived experiences: the triumphalist apogee of colonialism in the 1930s, the painful decolonisation of the 1950s and early 1960s, a rediscovery of the colonies in the 1990s. They also exemplify three stages of the workings of memory. In the colonial age, museums and monuments created memories. In the period of decolonisation and its aftermath, memories were forgotten, repressed or denied. In the contemporary moment, memories are being recalled. In the phase of colonial rule, colonies were proudly presented: the spectacle of colonialism. In the years of decolonisation and tiers-mondisme, they were embarrassedly hidden away. Now they are on show again, but increasingly colonialism is problematised, imperial rule is viewed critically, colonialism is being categorically interrogated. The presuppositions underlying colonialism are being re-examined, and the way in which colonial ideologies underpinned collecting and exhibition of art is being analysed. Material vestiges of colonialism remain, though they mean different things than when they were created. For example, zoos were built, at least in part, to indicate to the public how Europeans had triumphed over nature and subdued the savage, literally bringing wild beasts home and confining them in cages. Now zoos aim to develop environmental awareness and alert visitors to the possibilities of extinction that face endangered species and fragile ecosystems. The first ethnographic museums were designed to display curios, fetishes and idols produced by primitive societies to which European colonisers were bringing progress and modernity. Now they

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18 Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

highlight the complexity, diversity and achievements of non-Western societies, and the detrimental impacts of globalisation on culture. In art museums, Orientalist paintings and photographs were a documentary rendering of daily life in far-away places, an invitation to thrill at exotic beauty, to shiver at native barbarity and to acclaim the imperial enterprise. Now viewers gaze at the same paintings more to fathom European fantasies and stereotypes of Africa, Asia or Oceania than to learn about ‘real life’ on other continents. Statues, street names and other commemorations meant to honour the ‘great and good’ of the colonial world can provoke reconsideration of their accomplishments. A tombstone honouring an officer for putting down a slave rebellion is now not a record of imperial duty well done but a commentary on the shame of slavery. A Paris street named for a slave trader prompted a successful campaign to rename it in honour of a Guadeloupean composer. Memory and monuments can change. The variety of traces of the empire in France – the colonial patrimony – will be evident throughout this book. So will the evolution in sites, the perception of them, their ‘instrumentalisation’ for political purposes, and the metamorphosis of colonial memories. The first two chapters present a guided tour of the remainders and reminders of empire in Paris and the provinces. Next come examinations of two types of commemoration: statues and monuments to the imperial heroes, then monuments aux morts for colonial soldiers killed in France, and metropolitan soldiers who died in the colonies. The remaining chapters visit museums: colonial art and artefacts in French collections, especially in fine arts and military museums, then African, Oceanic and Asian art in French museums and, finally, temporary exhibitions held in recent years on colonial themes. As this book was going to press, I became aware of two things which sum up its themes. First I discovered a grand colonial monument that was never built. In 1909, La Dépêche coloniale illustrée, a weekly Paris journal that reported on colonial events and attempted to stimulate imperialist fervour, reported on plans to build a monument in Paris to celebrate the colonial glories of the Third Republic. Eugène Etienne, député from Oran and leader of the colonial lobby in Parliament, lamented the absence of such a monument. ‘France’s colonial empire is in the eyes of the whole world eloquent proof of our energy and our national vitality’ and, in only half a century, France had created a colonial empire of fifty million inhabitants. However, the empire had ‘neglected to affirm itself by one of those public demonstrations that are the visible and lasting consecrations of the fertile ideas to which a country owes its prosperity and greatness’. Etienne listed great men to whom France owed thanks for its empire, among them Ferry, Brazza, Garnier and Gallieni: ‘It does not suffice for this gratitude to be expressed in the minds of those who think about and reflect on [this achievement]. It must be shown in a material fashion, especially to the masses whose education is accomplished through images. It must be translated into a monument that

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Sites of Colonial Memory 19

will attest to the nobility and utility of this gigantic effort. In order to fill a gap that must not remain empty, and that defies logic and justice, in this Paris where granite, marble and bronze commemorate often dubious glories, a monument must be erected, in all its grandeur, to glorify this magnificent Colonial Expansion of which France must not just profit but be proud, and which is worthy of a too belated homage’.57 The monument proposed for Paris was designed by Jean-Baptiste Belloc, the Ministry of Colonies’ official sculptor. It comprised a huge assembly of sculptures, the central one a pedestal topped by a triumphant allegory of France, her hand raised in greeting or benediction; below her, grouped on three levels, stood metropolitan and colonial figures. Despite Etienne’s enthusiasm, nothing apparently was done to erect the monument. In 1913, La Dépéche coloniale illustrée relaunched the campaign, covering two pages with the names of supporters of a monument, a veritable who’s who of colonial sympathisers headed by the President of the Republic. A new model, again by Belloc, showed a simplified structure: an enthroned France backed by a billowing flag, towards whom a bare-chested African, a turban-wearing Arab and a lissom woman look in devotion, one holding a basket no doubt containing colonial largesse.58 The First World War intervened before the monument could be built, perhaps, at least from an aesthetic point of view, just as well. These efforts to erect a colonial monument in Paris nevertheless give evidence both to the vogue for commemorative statues and monuments in the Third Republic, and to the promotion of the overseas empire in early twentieth-century France. On 26 May 2004, the Paris city council renamed a square in the Latin Quarter the Place Maurice Audin, described on the street sign as a ‘mathematician, member of the Algerian Communist Party and anticolonial militant’. Audin was a brilliant young mathematician who taught at the University of Algiers and was a supporter of the Algerian indépendantistes. He died, after being tortured and killed at the hands of French authorities, at the age of twenty-five, on 21 June 1957 in the midst of the ‘Battle of Algiers’. His body has never been recovered, and the government has denied responsibility for the assassination. Audin was arrested just a day before Henri Alleg, whose La Question revealed officially sponsored torture by French soldiers. Many years later, Alleg was present at the inauguration of the Place Maurice Audin by Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, who paid tribute to ‘women and men who refuse to resign themselves to the forgetting and faking of history’. Audin, he added, ‘was an activist [inspired by] values that history has recognised as pertinent, [if only] decades later, deaths later and tortures later’.59 The words, and the gesture of giving the name of a figure from the age of imperialism to a Paris square, confirmed the continuing significance of the commemorative and monumental tradition and the rediscovery of France’s colonial – and anticolonial – history.

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Mon doux Georges, viens voir une ménagerie Quelconque, chez Buffon, au cirque, n’importe où; Sans sortir de Lutèce allons en Assyrie, Et sans quitter Paris partons pour Tombouctou. Victor Hugo1 In 1877, Victor Hugo, France’s most celebrated poet, took his grandchildren Georges and Jeanne to visit the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes. They marvelled at the wild beasts kept in the heart of Paris – the five-year-old confused lions with wolves, his sister warned that a monkey would steal his hat and said that an elephant was an animal with horns in its mouth. Hugo, too, was much taken with the animals from ‘Afrique aux plis infranchissables, / O gouffre d’horizons sinistres, mer des sables, / Sahara, Dahomey, lac Nagaïn, Darfour’ (Africa, with its unyielding folds, / O abyss of sinister horizons, sea of sands, / Sahara, Dahomey, Lake Nagain, Darfur). His poem paid respects to Buffon, the eighteenth-century scientist who helped establish this ‘Paris un peu tigré’ (mottled Paris) which Hugo called ‘du vaste univers un raccouri complet’ (of the vast universe a thorough digest). Hugo meditated on God and his creation of such strange creatures, listing for the pleasure of the words the names of weird beasts and the no less exotic-sounding places from which they came. He watched contemplatively at the encounter between his laughing grandchildren and the roaring, chirping, shrieking animals. Yet he discerned the anger and humiliation of animals captured and brought to France to satisfy a yearning for foreign places: ‘On ne sait quel noir monde étonné nous regarde / Et songe, et sous un joug, trop souvent odieux, / Nous courbons l’humble monstre et la brute hagarde / Qui, nous voyant démons, nous prennent pour des dieux’ (We know not what startled dark world watches us / And think how, under a too often odious yoke, / We subdue the humble monster and the haggard brute / Which see us as demons, but take us for gods).2 21

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The Colonies in Paris

Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

Hugo did not specifically address imperialism in the poems inspired by the botanical gardens and zoo, although Frenchmen at the time ruled over Algiers and Saigon and Papeete. Yet his verses offer a poetic metaphor for the colonies and the wider world come home to Paris, the animals gathered in the Jardin des Plantes for the enjoyment of children, the edification of adults, the glory of France. These foreign animals testified in their wordless way to the subjugation and domination of overseas countries by Europeans engaged in conquest and the self-appointed mission civilisatrice. The colonial epoch marked France in a myriad of ways, leaving numerous material vestiges of the outre-mer. Sites of memory include buildings and statues, street names and plaques, museums and churches, even unmarked sites that preserve some connection with the colonial past. The present and following chapters, which provide a colonial tour of Paris and the provinces, aim to show the variety of these traces of empire. They suggest how their placement in different neighbourhoods of Paris or particular cities and regions gives an indication of colonial military exploits, administration, evangelisation, trade and cultural interest. They show how inscribing the colonies on France’s landscape functioned as colonialist propaganda, and how the survival (and evolution) of these sites evidence the persistence of the colonial legacy, just as they chart changing attitudes towards the colonial past and the colonial patrimony.

Colonial Paris The French capital was also the capital of the empire, though Paris was never architecturally or monumentally ‘remade’ fully to reflect the fact. ‘Imperial’ Paris resulted from Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal programme, meant to reflect the glory of Emperor Napoleon III and to modernise Paris for the nineteenth century at a time when France’s colonial ambition was not yet clear.3 Later developments, however, endowed Paris with many sites with a colonial connection, and by the 1930s and the International Colonial Exhibition a concerted and intentional effort was made to mark Paris with representations of the overseas empire. To most visitors and residents, the colonial imprint on the landscape is not immediately apparent, though the multicultural character of the city’s population is increasingly so. In the dix-huitième arrondissement, around the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro station, they enter the neighbourhood of Maghrebin and black African Parisians. Shops display brightly coloured African textiles. North African raï music or the tones of the kora or balafon drift out of music emporia. Restaurants serve mafé, yassa and the ubiquitous couscous. The sounds of Arabic, Wolof and other African languages fill the streets. In Chinatown in the trezième arrondissement streets are lined with Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants, and markets overflow with the products of the Orient. In Belleville, in the dix-neuvième arrondissement, North

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Africans, black Africans, Asians and ethnically European Frenchmen rub shoulders in one of Paris’s most mixed quartiers. Tourists may or may not connect this population with an enormous and long-standing migration from former colonies in Africa and Asia (and from the remaining outposts in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean): living proof of the ties that France wove with overseas countries and that survived decolonisation. Flâneurs with sharp eyes may notice other reminders of empire, even in shop names and specialities. In the Rue Jacob, the Librairie Outremer sells books on ships, sailing and exploration, and Michèle Dhennequin in the Rue du Cherche-Midi specialises in rare and second-hand books on the colonies. In the flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt, colonial képis and pith helmets feature in one stall. Poussières d’Empire, a little shop in the quinzième arrondissement, sells old colonial medals and decorations. In the Place Saint-Sulpice, the Maison de l’Indochine comprises a tearoom and a Southeast Asian travel agency, and holds lectures on Asian subjects. The Compagnie Française d’Extrême-Orient in the Boulevard Saint-Germain sells furniture and decorations from the Far East, and the Au Bon Marché department store has a line of ‘colonial’ furniture, La Maison Coloniale, created ‘dans l’esprit des grands voyageurs qui empruntèrent jadis la légendaire route d’Orient’ (in the spirit of the great travellers who in olden times struck out on the legendary road to the East) and which ‘perpétue la tradition et ramène de ces contrées aux noms magiques, des meubles rares, des objets précieux’ (keep alive the tradition of bringing back rare furnishings and precious objects from countries with magic names).4 In the Boulevard Sébastopol, Mildécor sells chairs and rugs made of coconut fibre and sisal, what its awning advertises as ‘décors coloniaux’ (colonial décors). Le Caïd has sold tobacco products in the Latin Quarter since 1878. As L’Orientale – an evocative name in the Palais-Royal – hints, tobacco (like tea) was traditionally associated with the distant overseas. At Marriages Frères in the Rue du Bourg-Tibourg, blends of tea recall France’s old Indian outposts of Pondichéry and Chandernagor, and specialist grocers stock teas marketed since 1848 by the Compagnie Coloniale. Through the 1990s, shoppers could stock up on coffee and tea at the Maison des Colonies in the Rue Vieille du Temple. The names (and décors) of restaurants provide a foretaste of foods from around the world: Le Souk with a reconstruction of a North African market at the entry, Le Maroc with an extravagantly tiled Moorish exterior, La Créole, styled like a West Indian plantation house, and for less familiar cuisine, Le Banga de Mayotte. A floating restaurant boat in the Seine is called simply Le Colonial. In the Boulevard Saint-Germain, La Rhumerie has been serving petits punchs since the 1950s. One of the grand dining rooms nearby is the Restaurant Lapérouse, named for a Pacific explorer, and it has a ‘salon des singes’ (monkey room) with antique wallpaper of monkeys gamboling in a tropical forest – a curious motif since Lapérouse explored islands with no monkeys. Patrons can sip coffee at cafés named Le Jean Bart for an eighteenth-century corsair, or

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Colonies in Paris

Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

Le Brazza, recalling the explorer of the Congo. Those whose appetites are whetted can book tours in Les Orientalistes travel agency, or at the Maison de Tahiti et des Iles. Shops, however, come and go – the Restaurant Indochine, which promised the ‘raffinement de l’Extrême-Orient’ (refinement of the Far East) in the Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, disappeared several years ago, as did the Librairie du Pacifique in Rue Monsieur-le-Prince. Also gone, though it too survived through the 1990s, is a clothier called Croisières-Safari, which sold ‘vêtements pour pays chauds’ (clothing for hot countries). Such names suggest that at least a vague recollection of the colonial world exists in the collective memory of Parisians, no doubt a romanticised and idealised view of colonial life, perhaps a nostalgia for the adventures and luxuries of faraway lands. Allusions to the ‘good old days’ of the colonies, and vestiges of the French imperium, sometimes remain visible in unmistakeable images. In the Rue Montorgueil a large wall mosaic, ‘Au Bon Planteur’, shows a young black man serving a drink to a Frenchman nattily attired in colonial whites sitting in the midst of tropical luxuriance. And in the Rue Mouffetard, there is an enseigne for another long gone shop, probably a café, called ‘Au Nègre Joyeux’: a black man in livery serving refreshments to a gentlewoman. The difference between exoticism and colonialism is not always clear, either in the Paris landscape or in French history. The way one phenomenon

Photo 1 ‘Au Planteur’. This mural in the Rue Montorgueil shows the use of ‘exotic’ themes in public spaces, and is a reminder of France’s plantation colonies.

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segues into another can be seen in animal sculptures. Lions, of course, have been used for millenia as symbols of strength and majesty, often as heraldic emblems for monarchs. Some of Paris’s lions have no colonial traits – the splendid lion in the Place Denfert-Rochereau commemorates Belfort’s resistance to invading Prussians in 1870. ‘Le Lion de Nubie et sa proie’ (1870) in the Luxembourg Gardens is more obviously an ‘action’ figure of a real beast. It was sculpted at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, the loss of which would stimulate France’s overseas interests in an endeavour to win leverage against newly unified Germany. In the Place Cambronne, another lion lords it over his human prey. Henri Fouques sculpted ‘Le Drame du désert’ in 1892 at the height of the ‘scramble for Africa’. Located in the Parc Montsouris, the lion’s dead body is borne away by African porters – adventure and danger brought from the wilds of the dark continent to a Paris park.5 The mixture of general exoticism and explicit colonialism appears best in Paris’s Egyptian monuments. Napoleon’s 1798 campaign in Egypt formed part of an imperialistic effort to extend French influence in the eastern Mediterranean – his battles are inscribed among other victories on the Arc de Triomphe. Napoleon was accompanied by a bevy of scientists, writers and artists. Their return with accounts of the land of the pharaohs – a Description de l’Egypte of ten volumes of texts and twelve of illustrations, published between 1809 and 1828 – inaugurated a vogue for things Egyptian lasting for much of the nineteenth century and that was revived by the building of the Suez Canal in 1869. Champollion began deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, and the Louvre opened an exhibition of mummies five years later. ‘Egyptomania’ left many monuments and motifs, including countless sphinxes – the first had appeared on the Hôtel de Fieubet on the Quai des Célestins in 1680, foreshadowing Napoleon’s tour by more than a century – carvings, pyramids, statues and obelisks. The First Empire obelisk in the Place du Châtelet is one of the grandest; in the mid-1850s, the square was redesigned and copies of sphinxes in Luxor were added to the fountain. Paris’s most famous obelisk stands in the Place de la Concorde. Given to the French king by the Egyptian ruler Mehmet Ali in 1831, it was moved to Paris with great effort by the French navy. Other antique works – either real or mock ones – underline France’s continuing fascination and involvement with Egypt. The ‘Fontaine du Fellah’, placed in the Rue de Sèvres in 1816, was one of fifteen (six with Egyptian motifs) built by Napoleon, the water-carrier representing Antinous, the handsome young Bithynian who was the lover of the Spanish-born Roman Emperor Hadrian. The Paris statue is modelled on an Egyptian-style Roman statue Napoleon had souvenired from the Campidoglio in Rome (and which is now in the Louvre).6 An eagle alludes to Napoleon and his expedition. The multi-layered monument thus neatly symbolises Roman imperialism in the Black Sea, French incursions into Egypt, and Napoleon’s booty from Italy.7

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Colonies in Paris

Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

One quartier in Paris, constructed right at the end of the 1700s on land seized from a convent during the Revolution, was called the ‘Foire du Caire’. Street names commemorated Napoleon’s battles at Aboukir, Nil and Alexandrie – and such officers as Damiette. The developers of the precinct, the Caisse des Rentiers, decided that a monument to Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign would be too costly. But they added medaillons with heads of Egyptian figures – the goddess Hathor is recognisable by her characteristic cow’s ears – to a building in the Passage du Caire, and there is a narrow bas-relief frieze in Egyptian style. A contemporary, Amédée de Kermel, however, was surprised that the ‘Egyptian’ quartier did not contain more exoticism or a more dignified tribute to Napoleon: ‘Il n’y a ni reflets, ni souvenirs, ni témoignages de ce que pouvait la main de celui qui immortalisa le nom du Caire. Je ne vois là ni les richesses d’Egypte, ni ses parfums, ni ses enfants, ni le grandiose de ses monuments, ni la profondeur de ses pensées. . . . Profanantion des mots! Le Caire dans cet infect caravansérail, le Caire dans ce carrefour humide, le Caire argenté et resplendissant, dans cette amosphère froide!.’8 (There are no allusions to or recollections of the very man who immortalised the name of Cairo. I do not see here the richness of Egypt, its perfumes and its children, neither the grandeur of its monuments nor the profundity of its thought. . . . What a profanation – Cairo reduced to this ignoble market, this damp street corner, silvery and splendid Cairo in such a cold climate!) Exotic motifs and buildings are legion in Paris – one inventory lists sixty buildings with exotic ornamentation constructed between 1850 and 1900, three-fifths of which have disappeared. Orientalist design was particularly popular for cafés and public baths, and for such private constructions as smoking rooms.9 The ‘retour d’Egypte’ style lasted for over a hundred years – the Grand Palais, constructed for the world’s fair of 1900, has a frieze of Egyptian art, and in 1912 a Masonic lodge was built in Egyptian style in the Rue Jules-Breton. Egyptian motifs are not the only ones pointing to overseas fantasies. A house in the Avenue de l’Observatoire is ornamented with elephant and lion heads. The former Palace Hotel (now the CCF bank) in the Champs-Elysées sports heads representing, somewhat fancifully, China, Persia, Spain, Algeria, Russia and Australia – a handy compilation of what the fin-de-siècle considered exotic. Several Asian-inspired buildings date from the colonial period. The Ba-ta-clan, a café-concert, built as a Chinese palace in the Boulevard Voltaire in 1864, retains a few vestiges of Asian ornamentation. In the Place du Pérou, C.T. Loo in 1908 constructed the ‘Pagode Rouge’, still a private house and antique shop. In the Rue de Babylone another building in Asian style (with Japanese gardens), now the Pagode cinema, was constructed as a residence in 1896. Orientalist influences also appear in buildings decorated with mosaics and outrepassé arches, and in churches modelled on Bzyantine basilicas.10

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Colonies in Paris

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Street names are an obvious way of imprinting a nation’s self-image, ambitions and memories on the map. Changes in political regime often lead to ‘rebaptising’ of streets, and development of new quartiers provides opportunities for giving names to new streets. The origins of some names are lost in the past, many medieval streets honour saints or crafts, and simply preserve the names of local land-owners. However, other names were given by municipal authorities to honour a famous man (less often a famous woman), commemorate a battle, recall an historic association, or embody such concepts as liberty or the republic. Passers-by may not know much about the figures or events behind the names of streets where they walk – although plaques sometimes provide succinct identifications – but they are nevertheless one way in which collective memory is recorded.11 Some 275 streets (of about 5400 in the twenty arrondissements) make explicit colonial references.12 A few recall the first overseas empire, as well as French exploits in Mexico, the Middle East and other areas. Names commemorate explorers – Champlain, Cartier, Cavelier de la Salle, Brazza, Foureau, Gentil, Flatters and Caillié – and such colonial soldiers as Bugeaud and Lyautey, and Admirals Cloué and Courbet as well as heroes of the world wars. There are also streets named for colonial military units: the Bataillon du Pacifique and the Légion Etrangère. Missionaries and bishops, for instance, Lavigerie and Foucauld, are commemorated. So too are writers linked to the colonies from Loti to Camus. Most of the well-known figures associated with imperialism have their streets, as do many little-known ones. An example of the latter is Antoine Mizon, who travelled with Brazza, explored central Africa, served as a French Resident in Madagascar and Mayotte, then died in a shipwreck in 1899 just after he had been appointed governor of Djibouti. Street names provide a gazetteer of colonial places: countries – Annam, Cambodge, Madagascar, Soudan – and cities – Alger, Constantine, Tunis – and regions – Kabylie, Atlas. Indeed, most of the major colonies (and some of the minor ones) are commemorated, and names honour some obscure sites of battles or settlement, such as Saïdak and Laghouat. Names were sometimes given soon after conquest in immediate recognition of expansion: the Rue d’Alger in 1832, the Rue d’Annam in the 1870s, the Rue de Casablanca in 1913. Other streets were given colonial place names later in a seeming effort to include colonies that had been overlooked. In the last few decades, several streets have been named – Rue Port-au-Prince in 1961 and the Place d’Acadie in 1984 – in gestures of solidarity with Haitians and French Canadians, and the Place des Antilles was denominated in the 1980s in recognition of Paris’s large West Indian population. A vague logic marks the timing and location of street naming. Egyptian names appeared after Napoleon’s expedition in a quartier redeveloped at the time. Since streets generally were not named for living people, the death of

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The colonial map of Paris

Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France

a worthy figure could prompt the rebadging of a street. Many names from African and Asian colonialism appeared in the early 1930s in streets around the Exposition Coloniale in the Bois de Vincennes. Several reflect local buildings or at least seem fortuitous: the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer is located on the Rue La Pérouse. More seem haphazardly situated in the Paris landscape. A few are misleading: the Rue de la Colonie was named for a ‘colony’ of rag-pickers, the Rue Négrier does not honour a slave-trader but a general in Algeria, and the Rue Joséphine was not named after Napoleon’s creole empress. There is, by design or happenstance, a plethora of names recalling explorers in the chic seizième arrondissement, while colonial place names converge in working-class north-central and northeastern arrondissements, where many migrants from former colonies live. The Place des Combattants en Indochine is the official name of a square outside the old colonial museum, but no residents use it as an address since surrounding streets have different names. The Place des Combattants en Afrique du Nord is even more of a backhanded recollection of the Algerian War: an ugly and traffic-clogged square outside the Gare de Lyon (from which many soldiers, including conscripts, were dispatched to Algeria). Only a lone street sign, lost in the busy mêlée of the square, notes the name. The half-hearted nature of recognition of France’s campaigns against independence in Indochina and Algeria is obvious. Names of Métro stations are among the most familiar, if banal, landmarks of Paris. The Babylone of Sèvres-Babylone, like the street, comes from the titular see of a seventeenth-century missionary in partibus infidelium. Dupleix is named after the leading French officer in the Indian Ocean in the 1700s. The Dugommier station recalls a Creole from Guadeloupe who commanded the Garde Nationale in the Antilles in 1790, was elected a député, became a general in the Armée d’Italie and served during the siege of Toulon. Armand Barbès, a republican and député in 1848, also born in Guadeloupe, is remembered in the Barbès-Rochechouart station. The Kléber station is named after one of Napoleon’s generals in Egypt, and Kléber’s aide-de-camp gave his name to La Tour-Maubourg; Pyramides commemorates a battle near Cairo. Generals Faidherbe and Gallieni, important in adding western Africa, Indochina and Madagascar to the empire, have stations. Bir-Hakeim comes from a 1942 battle in North Africa. The second part of the Daumesnil-Félix Eboué name honours a Guyanais-born colonial governor. Part of the Nation station is subtitled Place des Antilles.13 Colonies are thus, quite literally, inscribed on the street and underground map of Paris. Plaques affixed to buildings where famous people lived or worked are reminders of links between colonials and the capital. Statues of a dozen or so figures known for their colonial work stand in squares, and there are several memorials to overseas expeditions.14 Probably most Parisians give only a passing glance at such plaques and monuments, and care little about the origin of often obscure names. Yet these markers testify to a desire by

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