After Deaths, After-Lives

Abstract

From the beginning of this century, French public discussions have returned frequently – and with impressive intensity – to questions involving the country's colonial past. Angry political debates, numerous novels, front-page media coverage, films including such landmark features as Rachid Bouchareb's ‘Days of Glory’ (2006) and, most brilliantly, Michael Haneke's ‘Caché’ (2005), and even scholarly productions have contributed to this phenomenon. The ‘events’ of fall 2005 were more significant than any of these, in terms of participation, media echo and political, intellectual and social consequences, leading some English-language newspapers to write of ‘France in Flames’ and others to speak of a ‘French Intifada’, or a ‘Muslim uprising’ in the banlieue, France's housing-project rich (but otherwise dramatically underserved) suburbs. As the keystone of its response, the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin dug up a 1955 law passed during the Algerian War to impose a curfew. It seemed to many that continuities between the present and the colonial past had finally ended what some dub the ‘colonial fracture’: that, is the contemporary French propensity to erase all references to its overseas foundation and, thus, to avoid thinking about the contributions that the sacrifices and suffering of its colonial subjects have made to the country's present.