Devoir De Research Articles

Decentring Narratives around Business and Human Rights Instruments: An Example of the French Devoir de Vigilance Law

AbstractThere has been tremendous momentum in adoption of business and human rights regulations, specifically national legislation that mandate human rights due diligence. While these laws have been heralded as the torchbearers of progress, this article approaches national legislation on business and human rights by placing them in context of a North–South divide through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens. It looks at the form of regulation of transnational corporations (national/international) – not the substance – and illustrates the neo-colonial flavour of these laws by diving into the narrative behind the adoption of the French devoir de vigilance law. It illustrates that the French law can also be read as an attempt to universalise European values while reinforcing power hierarchies. The claim of this article is that national legislation cannot be a substitute for a treaty but only a path towards one, because national legislation structurally lacks means to take the Global South participation seriously.

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

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.

Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de Violence in the context of end-less post-colonialism

This paper outlines the problematic relationship between the enduring colonial legacy that persists, both in theories of the postcolonial and geo-political post-colonial state practices. Considering the ambivalent relationship between discourses of postmodern and postcolonial theorists, Yambo Ouologuem's seminal work, Le devoir de violence (1968), serves as a literal roadmap of the complicit power dynamics involved in postcolonial political and discursive practices. The implications of Ouloguem's tactical textual composition underscore a relationship of mutual culpability in a metaphorical chess game in which both sides ultimately compromise for the game to continue. Read in the context of contemporary post-colonial and post-modernist discourses on African literary productions, Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence embodies an aesthetic of ambiguity that not only reveals the extreme violence of colonial encounters, but also the subversive complicity of a sustained violence fundamental to discourses of a post-colonized condition vacillating between liberation and subservience.

The Six Decades of African Film

The Six Decades of African Film Olivier Barlet (bio) We never write just one thing, we write what keeps us awake at night: how to relate history today? Kossi Efoui1 The 1960s: Mandatory Commitment O brothers, if our syntax is not a cog of freedom if our books still weigh on the docker's shoulder if our voice is not a guiding star to railway workers or shepherds if our poems are not the arms of justice in the hands of our people; O let us remain silent! —Jean Sénac2 On May 7, 1954, after eight years of combat in Vietnam, the French army was defeated at Dien Bien Phu. After Ethiopia, Liberia, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, and Guinea, the francophone African states gained independence in 1960, followed by Algeria and the remaining English-speaking states up until 1965. The Portuguese-speaking countries only gained Independence in 1974–1975, after armed struggle against the Salazar regime. Independence was not generously granted, but laboriously conquered through the determination of combative colonial subjects and anti-colonialists, in a combination of unrest, revolt, trade unionism, and the development of nationalist ideas. Writers had prepared the ground as they depicted the African continent's cultural wealth and denounced the colonial system. In 1921, Guianese René Maran denounced the wrongdoings of colonialism in Batouala, but still won the prestigious French Goncourt Literary Award. He did, however, lose his job as administrator in Oubangui-Chari. The 1930s negritude movement led by Senghor, Césaire, and Damas overtly asserted its demands in committed and proselytizing works and in a discourse that sought to extricate the continent [End Page 203] from the margins of history by exalting so-called "negro" values that drew on a spiritual and poetic approach to the world. In the 1950s, Camara Laye (L'Enfant noir / The African Child) introduced autobiographical fiction, while Mongo Beti (Ville cruelle / Cruel City) perpetuated the virulence of his predecessors. A discourse emerged that considered the exaltation of a precolonial Africa, monolithic in its unanimism, as a trap destined to perpetuate the heirs of colonial power. After Independence, Yambo Ouologem (Le Devoir de violence / Bound to Violence) thus opted for a spirit of insolence and highlighted African responsibility, while Ahmadou Kourouma (Les Soleils des indépendances / The Suns of Independence) probed the confrontation between traditional societies and the model of civilization imposed by the West. Until the 1960s, the 1934 decree introduced by Laval, the then Minister of the Colonies, made it obligatory for anyone wanting to shoot images in sub-Saharan francophone Africa to obtain authorization from the authorities. Africans only had access to ideologically loaded images of themselves produced by colonial filmmakers, ethnologists, and missionaries. The first African filmmakers thus had to fight the negation of their selves that these colonial images represented, in which Africans were the backdrop to stories that took place in spite of them, or were the "insects" that Ousmane Sembène and Med Hondo denounced. Their films were militant, but not banner-waving, as they were aware of the need to reach a public not taken in by slogans. Denouncing both obsolete customs and corrupt elites, their aim was to replace "civilization" with "progress," or in other words, to resist manipulation and backwardness. Their cinema aimed to decolonize the gaze and mentalities, reconquer its own space and images, but was also a cultural affirmation. Seeking to reappropriate and transmit the founding values of their new societies, their fictions readily adopted a documentary gaze. The same was the case in North Africa, which sought to eschew cinema's pre-independence Orientalist visions and restore its own sociology and culture. As the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco had, relatively speaking, respected Arab and traditional socio-educative systems, the pioneers' films there were less focused on ending assimilation than films in the former French department that had become Algeria. They all, however, shared the burden of rectifying the general amnesia surrounding colonial history and the liberation struggles. Omar Khlifi thus portrayed the insurrectionist events that led to Tunisian independence in Al Fajr / The Dawn (1966), and Algerian cinema focused on the liberation struggle with Patrouille à l'Est (dir...

Public opposition to shale gas extraction in Algeria: Potential application of France's ‘Duty of Care Act’

Algeria, a former French Colony, gained independence from France in 1962. It can be argued, however, that the legacy of post-colonialism continues, particularly with respect to the extractive industries. Both France and Algeria have large unconventional shale deposits—France has the second largest shale gas deposits in Europe after Poland and Algeria has the third largest in the world. Proposals to extract shale gas have led to widespread public opposition in both France and Algeria. The protests in France arguably led to the 2011 ban on hydraulic fracturing for shale gas, followed by the 2017 decision to ban all hydrocarbon exploration and extraction (unconventional and conventional) in French territory by 2040. Hydrocarbon company Total S.A., headquartered in France, has given up on operating in France but has now focused on potential development in Algeria, arguably an illustration of the continuation of a post-colonial relationship or NIMBY'ism (Not In My Back Yard). This perspective article aims to briefly highlight issues related to unconventional hydrocarbons in Algeria and introduce an emerging regulatory mechanism that could potentially provide a remedy to protect human and environmental rights and provide a model for future legislation in other countries. France's 2017 Duty of Care Act (Devoir de Vigilance) requires companies headquartered in France of a certain size to develop a ‘plan of care’ that mandates corporate responsibility throughout the supply chain and all subsidiaries, including outside French territory, and moreover provides a mechanism for legal recourse in the event of environmental or human rights harm from business activities.

Comparative Study of Duty of Care (Devoir De Vigilance) in Upstream Petroleum Projects

Present memoire is a comparative study that tries to shed light on the notion of duty of care or as French say, devoir de vigilance of multinationals in their foreign direct investments; it draws a general doctrinal normative map of the duty of care and describes to what extent the two legal systems of France and the United Kingdom resemble or differ in their perspective towards this notion. It explains that notion universally consists of two pillars (or sub-regimes): first the duty to conduct and maintain due diligence in order to address, mitigate and prevent risks of an investment project and second, the obligation to redress and amend damages if the endeavors of due diligence fail. Doing that, it uses typical facts of an upstream petroleum project, as application of the notion of duty of care is, in many aspects, heavily fact-based, including in its assessment of the concept of control that plays a leading role in connecting default and liability of the operating entity and its principal (i.e. the multinational).

She Came from Kasaba

As in Marianne Hirsch’s (2008) notion of ‘devoir de memoire’, this poem-piece, from a new series, uses the role of creation and imagination to strive to ‘re-activate and re-embody’ distant family/historical transcultural spaces and memories within the perspective of a dispersed history of a Middle-Eastern minority, the Sephardi/Jewish community. There is little awareness that Sephardi/Jewish communities were an integral part of the Middle East and North Africa for many centuries before they were driven out of their homes in the second half of the twentieth century. Using a multi-modal approach combining photography and poetry, this photo-poem series has for focus my female lineage. This piece evokes in particular the memory of my grandmother, encapsulating many points in history where persecution and displacement occurred across many social, political and linguistic borders.

“Ce Noir qui aurait pu être mon frère”: Race and Fraternité in Marie NDiaye’s Fiction

Marie NDiaye’s novels engage with race and identity in profound, if elusive, ways. In this article, I contend that NDiaye uses allegory to suggest what cannot be stated directly. In a Benjaminian fashion, she uses literary and artistic fragments to both draw connections and expose fissures between the Départements d’Outre-Mer (D.O.M.) and the metropole, between the era of the French slave trade and the present, and between black and white French citizens. I show that the politics of NDiaye’s works come into sharper relief when considered within the particular political moment of their publication. On May 23, 1998, forty thousand people descended on the streets of Paris in the name of memory to demand that France recognize the slave trade as a crime against humanity. Their call was answered on May 10, 2001 when the “Loi Taubira” passed the Senate.1 Between the march and the passing of the Loi Taubira, NDiaye published two works haunted by the slave trade: her 1999 novella, La Naufragée, and her 2001 novel, Rosie Carpe. La Naufragée and Rosie Carpe engage with the memory of the slave trade and the devoir de mémoire through an essential question of fraternité. They are books that ask, “Who counts as my brother, my equal, my fellow man?”

L’elezione di un prete cattolico a Rettore dell’Università di Strasburgo: “une tempête dans un verre d’eau”?

SOMMARIO: 1. La vicenda - 2. Gli argomenti pro e contro l’elezione di un sacerdote a Rettore di una universita pubblica - 3. Le incompatibilita dei ministri di culto - 4. La possibile incidenza dei principi riguardanti la c.d. “ laicite d’apparence ” - 5. L’intervento dei giudici amministrativi - 6. Conclusioni: l’irrilevanza dell’ordinazione non accompagnata dall’esercizio di funzioni ministeriali. The election of a Catholic priest as Rector of the University of Strasbourg: “Much ado about nothing”? ABSTRACT: This study examines the question of compatibility between the principle of neutrality of public services in force in French law and the election of a minister of the Catholic religion as Rector of a public university. The Author rules out the existence of any form of incapacity. However, since the duty of discretion of the public official (“devoir de reserve”) operates even outside the exercise of his functions, it may limit the freedom to exercise pastoral ministry in specific cases, as well as the performance of the most typical tasks that are inherent in the status of minister of worship, due to the inevitable repercussions on the image of the university.

Corporate Social Responsibility in der Lieferkette: Governance und Verantwortlichkeiten

ZusammenfassungDieser Beitrag analysiert den sich entwickelnden rechtlichen Rahmen für CSR in der Lieferkette. Der Aufsatz ist eingebettet in interdisziplinäre Literatur zur Governance von globalen Lieferketten. Der Beitrag diskutiert vier nationale Gesetze, die Auswirkungen auf die Lieferketten-Governance haben: Der UK Modern Slavery Act 2015, die nationale Umsetzung der CSR-Richtlinie in Deutschland 2017, das französische devoir de vigilance Gesetz 2017 und der UK Bribery Act 2010. Die möglichen Folgen dieser Gesetze auf die Lieferketten-Governance werden dargestellt. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass sich momentan ein Trend zu hybriden Regelungsmechanismen in globalen Lieferketten abzeichnet, in dem nationales Recht eine wichtige Rolle spielt.

Recognition and Repentance in Canadian Multicultural Heritage: The Community Historical Recognition Program and Italian Canadian Memorializing

In this article, we examine the multiculturalization of Canadian heritage, and, in particular, the shift to a politics of repentance that has emerged in the past few decades, recognizing specific instances of violence and exclusion that occurred in the nation’s past. Understood in relation to a duty to remember (devoir de mémoire) and a growing global discourse of reconciliation, as well as locally specific demands for redress, this shift has occurred through a convergence of institutional and grassroots activities, and it is exemplified by the Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP). To explore the implications of this shift, we analyze heritage projects, including both CHRP-funded and independently developed exhibitions and memorials, created in recognition of the discrimination and internment experienced by Italian Canadians during the Second World War. While these can be read as institutionalizing traumatic memories and promoting a legitimizing narrative of the Canadian settler nation-state, they also serve to enable communities to inscribe their own narratives in Canadian history.

La réception du témoignage à l’épreuve du silence. L’aîné des orphelins de Tierno Monénembo

From the perspective of the reader-response criticism, this article underlines the ethical and esthetical tension between the duty of memory and the unspeakable in the context of the project « Rwanda : écrire par devoir de mémoire » and specificly in the novel L’aîné des orphelins by Tierno Monénembo. Although the « horizon » of expectations typical to the commitment toward the duty of memory is reinforced by the peritext (Genette, 1987), Monembo’s novel challenges the reader’s expectations by silencing and delaying the personnal story of young narrator-survivor Faustin.This stepback from direct violence allows the novel to focus on structual forms of violence (Galtung 2010) and urges the public to question his responsability in the testimonial reception.

Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse

Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse

Shadows of life, death and survival in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide

Various writers and survivors have offered literary responses to the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. In 1998, a group of African intellectuals, mostly non-Rwandans, of whom two were female authors, participated in a collective writing project, Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire, tasked to tell the story of the genocide. Genocide survivor, sociologist and psychotherapist, Esther Mujawayo, has since narrated her own story. Although critics have explored the portrayal of trauma in literature in other texts and contexts, a comparative study between these three texts of female authors; one survivor and two intellectuals, focusing on the experience of female survivors and in particular that of being raped has not yet been conducted. This article examines how trauma is made visible to the reader by exploring the characteristics of the ‘death experience’ and their mediated form, as offered by the three authors. This comparative study furthermore highlights the elements in the lives of survivors which influence their ability to move from a position of mere survival to that of embracing life after the genocide.

La transmission littéraire et cinématographique du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda par Virginie Brinker

Reviews 249 allowed Saint-Simon to increase his sphere of political influence until he became advisor to the Regent, Philippe d’Orléans. In this critical position, Saint-Simon tactically balanced his friendship with the Prince against the necessity of principled counsel. Saint-Simon steadily endeavored to block the Duke of Maine’s faction and succeeded in diminishing the rank of Louis XIV’s illegitimate children vis-à-vis dukes and peers—his greatest triumph was likely the lit de justice that he helped to convene in 1718. However, as this study shows in detail, Saint-Simon’s politics were also much more varied and subtle, blending idealism with extensive practical experience, realpolitik, and what Blanquie frequently calls Saint-Simon’s erudition, which included a comparative study of the role of grandees in Spain versus dukes and peers in France. The Mémoires reread as a political document deepen our understanding of SaintSimon . His close and often contentious work with financial reformer John Law, for example, attests to a technical understanding of the monarchy’s finances. With the death of Philippe d’Orléans in 1723, Saint-Simon lost his position at the center of power and saw the dissolution of government by councils along with the return of ministers. Far from being exiled and idle, however, Saint-Simon continually focused on his provincial governorships until his death in 1755. This study shows convincingly that Saint-Simon possessed not just strong convictions regarding the rank of dukes and peers, not just an unusual penchant for observation, but also a coherent and nuanced political vision based on concrete practice. University of Iowa Roland Racevskis Brinker, Virginie. La transmission littéraire et cinématographique du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-3254-5. Pp. 481. 39 a. In 1998, four years after the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda during which the government army and local militias slaughtered approximately 800,000 people, a group of Francophone African writers travelled to the country. These writers participated in a project, “Écrire par devoir de mémoire,” organized by the literary festival Fest’Africa to create an African response to the genocide. One of the project’s goals was to correct widespread public misunderstandings of the events, which the media had represented as a “tribal war” rather than as a state-sponsored genocide. Brinker’s book focuses on the corpus of eight texts published under the aegis of the Fest’Africa project, but she also analyzes thirty or so thematically related novels, plays, essays, works of young adult fiction, graphic novels, fictional films, and documentaries. As Brinker writes, the theme of visual media and their capacity to convey or to mask the horror of the genocide pervades these works. The pervasiveness of television imagery about the genocide and its aftermath raises the question: In what sense is literature about mass violence able to compete with images, which “possède[nt] un redoutable pouvoir: celui de s’imprimer dans les esprits?”(429). Thus, for writers about Rwanda, media images are “la source de l’écriture et ce contre quoi elle s’insurge” (21). By framing the question in this way, Brinker not only identifies a central theme of many of the works, but also constructs a theoretical apparatus useful for analyzing other contemporary works about mass violence. Brinker roots her analysis in theoretical work on literature of the Holocaust, giving a useful and detailed summary of many themes that recur in texts about Rwanda: the notion of the unspeakable, the authority of survivor testimony, the role of the intermediary witness, the limitations of realism, and the morally questionable role of fiction. In the second part of the work, Brinker argues that, in an effort to create and transmit a collective memory of the genocide more accurate and complete than the one disseminated by the media, writers about Rwanda sought what she calls “un style iconique.” The characteristics of this literary style include the use of analogy (particularly to the Holocaust); figuration through monster-figures, hypotyposis, and metonymy (wherein images of machetes, roadblocks , or dogs stand in for the horror); and transfiguration of the events by allegory. The specificity of these...

The UNGPs — Five Years on

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were endorsed in 2011 by the UN Human Rights Council. Since then they have become a normative platform and have led to widespread convergence of national and international regulatory initiatives. Focusing on Europe, this articles shows that the consensus reached, in particular on human rights due diligence, has been a driving force behind the influence the Principles have had on public regulation of business and human rights. One example is offered by the EU's approach to integrating UNGPs into legal and policy instruments, including the 2011 Communication on CSR and the EU Directive no. 2014/95 on non-financial reporting. But this has been accompanied by recent developments in EU Member States' public regulation of business and human rights, including the UK Modern Slavery Act and the French bill on ‘devoir de vigilance’. The article concludes that, despite the emergence of a piecemeal regulatory approach, coherence in the public regulation of business violations of human rights is urgently needed in Europe. It further shows that, if properly led, this process could entail reinforcement of the EU's commitment to the UNGPs' implementation.

<i>Ubuntu</i> and the journey of listening to the Rwandan genocide story

In the face of collective trauma such as genocide, apartheid, mass killings and xenophobia,ubuntu requires of us to show solidarity with our fellow human beings. To my mind, one of the highest forms of doing so is to open up spaces of authentic listening to the stories of those who have experienced these atrocities. In the genocide narratives of the commemorative project Rwanda: �crire par devoir de m�moire (Rwanda: Writing as a duty to memory), travelling and writing become a mode of listening and transformation. However, this theme is articulated very differently in the many texts which form part of the project. This article concentrates on one such representation of the transformative voyage that the writers propose, namely the highly symbolic work of Koulsy Lamko.

Between mother tongue and ‘ceremonial tongue’: Boubacar Boris Diop and the self-translation of Doomi Golo

This article is a case study focusing on the not-so-common experience of writing and publishing in French as well as in an African language. Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop decided to switch from French to his mother tongue, Wolof, after a stay in Rwanda as part of the ‘Rwanda, écrire par devoir de mémoire’ project. This study focuses specifically on the novel Doomi Golo and on Diop’s self-translation of the text into French. What is at stake in the translation from Wolof to French? How has Boubacar Boris Diop managed to translate or transpose his text for different audiences? To what extent have traditional literary patterns influenced the writing of the text? These are a few of the questions raised and discussed in this contribution. Cette contribution se présente sous forme d’une étude de cas et s’intéresse à une expérience encore relativement marginale dans le champ des littératures francophones: celle de l’écrivain sénégalais Boubacar Boris Diop. Représentant important de la littérature francophone durant les années 1980–2000, celui-ci a en effet décidé d’effectuer un retour vers sa langue maternelle, le wolof, après un séjour au Rwanda dans le cadre de la résidence d’écriture ‘Rwanda, écrire par devoir de mémoire’. La présente contribution s’intéresse en particulier à l’expérience d’auto-traduction que son premier roman en Wolof, Doomi Golo, a fait naître. Que se joue-t-il dans le travail de traduction entre Wolof et Français? Quelles nécessaires adaptations / transpositions se font jour? Comment les traditions littéraires (génériques et de réceptions) influencent-elles le texte même? Voici quelques-unes des questions abordées au long de cette contribution.

La Beauté de la haine. Essais de misologie littéraire

Jan Miernowski. La Beaute de haine. Essais de misologie litteraire. Geneva: Droz, 2014. Pp. 280. La Beaute de haine turns critical attention away from the causes of hatred towards the noyau dur de l'odieux, haine plus pure qui echappe a nos tentatives de rationalisation (9). Under study here is thus not the hatred addressed by, for example, the social sciences or politics, a hatred that can be analyzed and as if explained away, but a hatred that is defined by its autosuffisance, by being autotelique, and which becomes principe de creation esthetique (10) and a moteur du discours (11). Miernowski makes his focus clear by turning to Aristotle who distinguishes anger (which exists and can be negotiated in discourse) from hatred (which is irrecuperable [13]). The book's chapters thus set out to examine this passion that, in its seeming exclusion from rhetoric, ends up turning against itself and against the texts that express it, resulting in the opposite of philology, i.e. misologie ou art d'abhorrer litterature elle-meme (10). This is a wide-ranging study, chronologically and methodologically, ranging from Renaissance love poetry to the writings of contemporary authors such as Amelie Nothomb. The following summary surely cannot do it justice. The first chapter asks how the culture [...] erocentrique and the philo-logues of Renaissance France might also give voice to hatred. The initial proposal is expressed via a comparison: hatred haunts Renaissance harmonies like the anamorphic skull in Holbein's famous Ambassadors--La haine y constitue une dechirure qui met en question les proportions harmonieuses de cette civilisation de l'amour (23). Miernowski explores this hypothesis most notably in the period's love poetry (Eros, Anteros, Anti-Eros, etc.) and in the Wars of Religion. Chapter two turns attention to the seventeenth century and la haine tragique (75), offering close readings in particular of Corneille's Rodogune (whose Cleopatra Corneille himself calls tres mechante), Medee (Je ferai par haine), and Racine's Thebaide. Miernowski argues that le vrai heros [cornelien] is incapable d'assumer un pretendu devoir de haine, allowing him to revendiquer son identite ethique (91) and concludes that unlike Renaissance literature, seventeenth-century texts aim especially to donner du plaisir, un plaisir d'autant plus intense qu'il est nourri d'admiration et qu'il peut etre assaisonne d'une douce culpabilite (124). …

Memory and Forgiveness: Addressing the Legacy of the Dark Years in Contemporary French Politics

On July 16, 1995, Jacques Chirac became the first president to publicly acknowledge the French Republic’s shared responsibility in the persecution and deportation of thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Speaking at the anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, Chirac issued a public apology for the French state’s complicit role in the deportation and extermination of Jews, while emphasizing that the errors committed during the war were a ‘faute collective’ and thus the blame for the deportations had to be shouldered collectively by the French nation. In the years following Chirac's groundbreaking speech, France as a nation has grappled with the notion of a devoir de memoire within the political and cultural frame of contemporary memory of French complicity during the war. However, with this heightened public interest in the French obligation to remember its wartime past, the tension between memory and history has become increasingly palpable and a growing debate on the problematic nature of the call for remembrance has ensued. This essay will examine the ongoing debate surrounding collective memory and history in contemporary French politics as well as the underlying question of whether forgiveness of the French Republic for its actions against Jews during the Dark Years can truly be achieved. By concluding with an examination of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the aporia of forgiveness, I hope to further explore the symbiotic relationship between political discourse and collective memory and how this affects the reconciliation process in postwar France.