Colonial Past, Post-Colonial Present History Wars French-Style

Abstract

The spectre of colonialism haunts post-colonial France. From revelations about torture in colonial Algeria to disputes about the wearing of ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols by Muslim students in present-day France, from political movements by the descendants of colonial migrants to urban riots, France is being forced to re-examine its colonial past and the legacy it left. The passing of a law, in February 2005, mandating the teaching of the ‘positive role’ of colonialism provoked great controversy involving historians, politicians in France and Algeria, and members of the public. A sign of renewed concern with colonial history and with collective memories of colonialism, it also represented an episode in French-style history wars with parallels in other countries.This article has been peer-reviewed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.