The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence. By Itay Lotem

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, an ever-growing number of publications have now made it commonplace to identify France as an example of a poorly managed colonial hangover. By contrast, whilst many signs tended to indicate that there was possibly also in Britain a ‘passé qui ne passe pas’, discussions of the imperial past and colonial memory were never framed as a meaningful tool for making sense of what was happening, despite all the racial, historical, and socio-political ramifications of the situation. It is therefore highly satisfying to see a book implicitly (at least in terms of its structure and chronological articulation) using the French trajectory to examine what has remained for a long time an unspoken aspect of British cultural and political life: the memory of the Empire, and how it emerged gradually as a meaningful discussion. Such an intervention is deeply needed at a time when British politicians can often exploit the benefits of uncritical engagement with the Empire, as exemplified by Boris Johnson arguing in 2014 that ‘The UK has bonds of history, language, law, family and customs across the world and we would be foolish not to make more of these at this time of profound global economic revival’ (Foreword to Tim Hewish, How to Solve a Problem like a Visa: The Unhappy State of Commonwealth Migration in the UK (Commonwealth Exchange)). How does this compare with the French context, where Itay Lotem rightly notes that both devoir de mémoire (Chapter 3) and the use of ‘memory as Republican critique’ (Chapter 4) have prevailed, opening spaces for debates which have been unheard of in the UK, notably under the convenient cover of a ‘convivial multiculturalism’ (Chapter 7)? Lotem’s book offers a fascinating overview of the profoundly different trajectories followed by the countries that built and ran the two largest colonial empires of the contemporary period when it came to engaging with, and reflecting upon, the cultural, political, and socio-cultural legacies of their attempt to create what they often called ‘Greater Britain’ or ‘la plus grande France’. At the heart of the book is the fundamental difference between what ‘silence’ means on each side of the English Channel. This is a matter of tradition as much as political circumstances, and is associated with the socio-cultural perception of what the imperial experience achieved, itself linked to how decolonization is remembered. Lotem articulates convincingly how each country has placed a different emphasis on the weight and significance of their colonial past, with memory appearing much more closely associated to political affiliation in the French case, as opposed to Britain where empire was first de-prioritized (Chapter 6), before the ‘tale of the imperial balance sheet’ (Chapter 10) took precedence. The book encompasses a wide range of sources to engage with this Protean, and exceptionally complex, question: interviews and engagement with media sources are a useful complement to the wide range of secondary material that appears in the bibliography. The careful charting of the processes through which empire came back to the fore in public discourse — and under different terms — represents a major contribution to our understanding of how French and British societies have grappled with their imperial past, now that they can no longer rely on their colonies to claim great power status.