A View from the South. France in African Eyes: Universalism and Francophonie Reassessed

Abstract

To deal with the ‘French exception’ in regards to African writers and thinkers’ is first and foremost to explore the journey of a discourse in the Other’s imaginary and intellectual territory. Indeed, French exceptionalism, at least at the moment of its inception, was a discourse, but not any kind of discourse. It was (and still is) to a certain extent, a performative discourse, in Austin’s sense (Austin 1975). As such, it aimed at putting into action words whose capacity for being real-ised rests, as Bourdieu shows, on them being uttered within institutions vested with the authority and power to enable them (1991). Even though the notion of French exceptionalism has appeared only in the last 20 years (Godin and Chafer 2005), the idea itself is apparently contemporary with the foundation of the French nation. Already in the late 18th century, authoritative politicians and organic intellectuals of the modern French state like Abbe Gregoire (Sepinwall 2005) and Jules Michelet (Hewlett 2005) sketched out its meaning in their own writings. Only more recently has a body of scholarly research appeared which is less concerned with manufacturing the exceptionalism of France than unveiling the fundamentals on which the purported exceptionalism is built. Some heuristic theoretical propositions have stemmed from this literature.