The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence

By Itay Lotem

This book explores national attitudes to remembering colonialism in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Examining memory through the stories of people who incited public conversation on colonialism: activists; politicians; journalists; and professional historians, this book argues that these actors mobilised the colonial past to make sense of national identity, race and belonging in the present. In focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicised public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors’ goals and priorities. A thought-provoking and powerful read that explores the divisive legacies of colonialism through oral history, this book will appeal to those researching imperialism, collective memory and cultural identity. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030637194

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Part IFrance

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

I. LotemThe Memory of Colonialism in Britain and FranceCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63719-4_2

Chapter 1: Tracing Postcolonial Silence in France

Itay Lotem¹  

(1)

School of Humanities, University of Westminster, London, UK

Itay Lotem

Email: [e-mail]

After the shooting at the Charlie Hebdo offices on 7 January 2015, an unsurprising outpouring of commentaries on both sides of the English Channel sought to explain the event that had just unfolded. Alongside the unavoidable discussion of inequality and discrimination in France, a surprising number of English-language commentaries referred specifically to France’s ‘unacknowledged’ colonial past as a central element in the country’s malaise.¹ In France, this focus on the lack of ‘acknowledgment’ of the country’s colonial past had become almost formulaic in political parlance. Far more than reflecting the state of the public debate in France, the level of public interest in colonial history or the visibility of colonial history in French school curriculum, the ubiquity of the demand to ‘acknowledge’ colonial history in the mid-2010s follows a process of the politicisation of colonial history that began in the early 1990s. Popular attention to colonial history rose from the commitment of several groups of activists and historians who vowed to ‘break the silence’ on the excesses of France’s colonial empire, particularly during the Algerian War of Independence. This chapter interrogates what kind of silence these actors sought to break.

The French context makes terms like ‘silence’ or ‘forgetfulness’ problematic at best. As Chap. 2 will demonstrate, the Algerian War of Independence never quite ‘went away’ and continuously haunted the public debate in France. However, as this chapter discusses, the idea of a public silence that needed to be broken became increasingly potent. In the 1990s, a growing number of historians and activists began focusing their attention on the ‘taboos’ induced by decades of inability to ‘come to terms’ with an ‘unassumed’ colonial past. Nonetheless, none of them—whether Benjamin Stora in his 1991 book La gangrène et l’oubli or Raphaëlle Branche in her 2005 work La guerre d’Algerie: une histoire apaisée?—claimed this silence was complete and all encompassing.² They acknowledged the presence of the Algerian War of Independence in the French public debate, but deplored the absence of a sustained state engagement with—and recognition of—the meaning of having fought and lost not just any war, but a war of decolonisation, losing France’s status as a world power.

In this vein, examining ‘silence’ here does not automatically embrace the caricature according to which France’s colonial history fell into a black hole after decolonisation, nobody ever mentioned it and every individual repressed their own memory of empire. Far more interesting is the examination of the existence of public silence and the way it developed over time. For Paul Ricoeur, whose influence on French research into memory transmission cannot be overstated, silence forms a part of a mechanism of ‘forgetfulness’, which is based on the psychological idea of the mind’s selection of events to constitute what is worth remembering. In public life, he sees forgetfulness as either a political decision prompted by state amnesties or as a mix of a ‘pathological structure, ideological conjuncture and the media’s staging’.³ While Chap. 2 will pay more attention to the role of state amnesties in the emergence of silence, this chapter will engage more with the social base of silence. However, rather than forgetfulness, and with it Ricoeur’s use of psychological categories to understand societies, this chapter will focus on the effects of silence on the public discourse. Here, Henry Rousso’s methodological observations are helpful in tracing the historical gestation of silence beyond psychopathological explanations. As those who choose to remain silent rarely announce their motives, or even their decision to not speak, collective silences are hard to account for. For Rousso, it is mainly a transition from a previous state of ‘sound’ that helps outline the contours of silence and demonstrate it exists.⁴ In a second phase, outlining silence is only possible through the identification of moments that would otherwise be propitious for addressing France’s colonial past, but in which people either chose not to address colonial history or did not possess the vocabulary to do so.

Demands to ‘break the silence’ on colonial history did not emerge from a climate of all-encompassing silence on colonial history, as the Algerian War was an ever-present theme in French politics and particular groups maintained their memory of colonialism and decolonisation. However, politicians, activists and the media in France of the 1970s and 1980s deliberately chose to avoid the colonial past and its legacies when articulating national narratives. This examination of silence therefore outlines its development in France from the moment of decolonisation to the beginning of the 2000s, focusing on forks in the road, or moments when public actors, whether politicians, activists or the media, could have—in hindsight—chosen to address France’s colonial history. Its main preoccupation is missed opportunities to engage with colonial history specifically and explicitly rather than the examination of undercurrent continuities of colonial attitudes.⁵

In many ways, this chapter traces the ways political actors in France addressed the relationship between the country’s multi-ethnic circumstance and its colonial origins. While far-left and far-right media, who had previously engaged with the Algerian War of Independence, easily de-prioritised colonial attachments in the immediate aftermath of official decolonisation, the rise of the Front national (FN) in the late 1970s—and with it debates over immigration—made it more difficult to avoid mobilising the recent colonial past to explain the present. Indeed, as the rise of the FN marked the beginning of constant debates over France’s multi-ethnic circumstance, both the far right and the beur generation of the 1980s articulated their vision of France through the word ‘immigration’. While the far right repositioned colonial racism without references to colonial history, anti-racist mobilisations like the March for Equality and against Racism (1983) and the subsequent rise of SOS-racisme articulated a belonging to multi-ethnic France with neither the vocabulary of race nor the ties of colonial belonging. In this process, the debate on ‘immigration’ became a main vector for the re-articulation of colonial awareness. It became a vehicle for the reformulation of colonial power relations—and with it colonial racism—in France’s metropolitan space. Following the development of the debate about immigration therefore provides an insight into the euphemisation of colonial vocabulary in a society intent on moving on past defeats of decolonisation.

Disengagement in the Wake of Decolonisation

Decolonisation ended several decades of contradictory messages by the state and the media to which French metropolitan citizens had been exposed. Algeria and other African states achieved independence three decades after the heyday of popular imperialism in the interwar period, when there was continuous confrontation with colonial imagery in films, literature, advertisements and most notably the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris.⁶ Simultaneously, the horrors of the Second World War had discredited racialised and paternalistic support of the idea of the Civilising Mission⁷ that had underpinned French colonial control. This guided the attempt to rebrand the French empire, to gloss over colonial inequalities and to (unsuccessfully) tie the colonies to the French metropole.⁸ The state redeployed old universalist discourse previously used to support France’s Civilising Mission to now support a new form of deracialised attachment between metropole and colonies with a focus on development and welfare.⁹ These developments were only short lived, as colonies became a source of unrest, violence and embarrassment.

Within three decades metropolitans witnessed the collapse of the imperial narrative. The racialised, binary worldview that had defined some of the ways French people related to the non-European world lost some of its appeal as it had become both inconceivable on the grounds of being unacceptably racist and unworkable following multiple French defeats. After violent defeats of decolonisation, the reinvention of France as a continental, metropolitan society was swift and remarkably painless (at least for many inhabitants of the former metropole). In this process, the decade following decolonisation saw the near disappearance of references—both official and popular—to French power and control of its colonies. The silencing of colonial history was the result of a state narrative, but it was most notable in the choices of activists on the far left and far right, who perceived their role as that of resistance to the Gaullist state. While activists on the far left considered anti-colonialism a self-evident part of their political DNA, they were busy reinventing a future based on class solidarity. The then fragmented, inchoate and resentful far-right movements were indeed focused on past defeats, but often did not prioritise the imperial past in search of ‘true France’.

This silencing of the debate included the near lack of public contestations of the postcolonial settlement and the loss of France’s colonial power in the 1960s and 1970s. Politically, the Gaullist establishment focused on ‘moving on’ in the context of uninterrupted economic growth and increased attention to the project of European integration. The seemingly broad acceptance of decolonisation—and the loss of Algeria—not only followed fatigue born out of fighting and defeat in the colonies, but also a discursive tool Todd Shepard coined the ‘tide of history’.¹⁰ As the Fifth Republic emerged out of the chaos of the war in 1958, de Gaulle, much like Macmillan in Britain, framed the decision to accept Algerian independence as a self-evident inevitability that placed France on the ‘right side of history’. This ‘tide of history’ was an example of Gaullist mobilisation of an idea that had become popular beyond immediate anti-war circles, that the war was ‘anachronistic’.¹¹ Similarly, the aftermath of decolonisation demonstrated how state intervention to avoid a contestation of these recent events fed into a social fabric that showed readiness to turn a page over multiple colonial defeats. On the one hand, the Gaullist government employed (often unsuccessfully) active censorship since the period of the colonial wars of Indochina and Algeria. On the other, state amnesties not only gave legal basis to the desire to ‘move on’ from the Algerian War of Independence, but also prevented activists from focusing attention on the Algerian conflict through the courts. As the recurrent thematisation of torture throughout the 1960s and 1970s (see Chap. 2) demonstrated, the state’s measures did not make it impossible to address French colonialism in public. They did, however, facilitate the tendency to focus on the changes occurring in metropolitan France and its reinvention within the European project. Simultaneously, former anti-colonial activists who would have been prone to challenge the tendency to turn the page over colonial history did not do so, as they had shifted their attention elsewhere, often temporarily to the tiers-monde.¹² For them, decolonisation offered an opportunity to build better societies in previously colonised territories. Metropolitan opinions therefore mattered less. The very premise of memory politics, which focuses on public awareness and debate, did not figure in the priorities of these activists, who were far less preoccupied with discourse than with the possibility of shaping new revolutionary politics.

This thinking also manifested itself in the attitudes of the student left in France in the immediate post-68 period, which did not display any lack of awareness of colonialism or of the Algerian War of Independence. However, this recent history of the students’ parents’ generation did not inform the goals of their activism or figure highly in their priorities. The few casual comments on the Algerian conflict found in publications like the Gauche prolétarienne’s press organ, La cause du peuple , often served to illustrate the Gaullist (and often older) ‘enemies’, as when one reader noted a racist incident in a bar by claiming it was an example of police boredom since police officers had been unable to ‘beat up Arabs at will’ since the end of the Algerian conflict.¹³ Otherwise, mentions of the Algerian conflict in far-left organs of the period are used as a rhetorical device to underline current support for Algerian workers in France. Particularly after 1968 and its moment of some cooperation between French and immigrant workers,¹⁴ the theme of unity between French and specifically Algerian workers abounds ‘against the common enemy: the boss’.¹⁵ These returned to the Algerian War as a federating moment between the French left and Algerian ‘brothers’. Just as notably, references to the Algerian War were used to define the ‘fascist’ right in mobilisations of the nascent anti-racist left.¹⁶ For example, a special report about a demonstration in July 1972 to protest the murder of the Algerian worker Arezki Rezki was introduced under the headline ‘for the first time since the Algerian War, we were 2,500 to demonstrate against the racists’. It created a dichotomy between racist Lyon, ‘the city of the O.A.S. and Soustelle and the city where cops tortured most during the Algerian War’, and the voice of workers claiming that ‘France occupied Algeria for 162 years [sic.]. But it was the capitalists, it was not us, workers, who occupied it’.¹⁷ Just as student activism of 1968 abounded with references to police officers as ‘torturers’,¹⁸ this same generation of far-left activists was aware of the Algerian War of Independence as a founding moment that could be appropriated and mobilised. For them, however, anti-colonialism was self-evident as a thing of the past and did not figure as a priority for any new programme.

The de-prioritisation of colonial history in the late 1960s and early 1970s was even more pronounced in the activism of the struggling far right and its resentment of the Fifth Republic with its Gaullist hegemony. Even as this period is often referred to as the French far right’s ‘crossing of the desert’, due to its political marginalisation following the discrediting of the Vichy regime and the crushing defeat of its ‘new hope’, Jean-Louis Tixier Vignancour in the 1965 presidential elections, the different factions of far-right movements used this period to constantly formulate new criticisms of modern life. Unlike activists from the far left who were focused on what they perceived as an attainable future, the far right focused on the past to inform contemporaneous resentments. In this constant attention to the past, the secondary (and often invisible) role assigned to colonial history is even more telling. In fact, the de-prioritisation of the colonial past in comparison to other matters is one of the few issues various far-right movements held in common in this period, as they fought with one another over whether the ‘real’ enemy was communism and the Soviet Union, the ‘anti-European’ character of American imperialism or any iteration of ‘Jewish conspiracies’.¹⁹

In the same vein, different far-right publications in the period did not show the same attention to colonial history as later avatars would after the 1990s. The most militant attention to the memory of colonialism and French Algeria emanated from the marginal student movement Jeune Europe , whose goal was to create an alliance of white Europeans against ‘American militarism’ and Jewish influence (thus supporting Arabs as potential allies against Jews and Israel). Its publication actively condemned other groups’ ‘nostalgia for French Algeria’, claiming that ‘French Algeria is dead’, and that remembering it would only serve the ‘Zionist state’.²⁰

Other far-right publications, however, showed very little interest in remembering France’s colonial grandeur. The most influential far-right publication of the time, Rivarol , perceived itself primarily as a ‘journal of national opposition’ and as such dedicated most of its space to incessant anti-Gaullism as much as to rabid anti-communism, lambasting any leftist sympathies or complicity with government politics. This line could have left much space, theoretically, for attacking de Gaulle for the ‘abandonment’ of France’s empire and for addressing lost imperial grandeur, in a way that would later become staple discourse for the French far right. Very rarely, marginal contributions addressed French Algeria when reviewing books or films,²¹ yet the Algerian past was relegated to the margins even in personal attacks on de Gaulle’s record that took the form of recurrent, semi-sarcastic pieces. Such articles filled whole pages with lists of the ‘crimes’ of de Gaulle, like an article that celebrated his departure in May 1969. There, the litany of de Gaulle’s crimes focused on his ‘misdemeanour’ in the Second World War that showed his ‘dislike for France’. While a whole page was dedicated to Gaullist ‘selfishness’ and ‘anti-Frenchness’, only two lines addressed Algeria: ‘he began [his presidency] […] by destroying our empire, which doubtlessly would not have been able to survive under its old form, but which he liquidated carelessly, for his own glory as liberator of peoples’.²²

Just as left-wing student activists addressed the Algerian War of Independence as a point of reference, so did men on the far right. However, they rarely prioritised colonial events for the framing of current battles. Moreover, unlike left-wing activists, who were focused on the articulation of a future project, this is even more significant in the ranks of the far right, which was far more focused on unearthing past resentments. The pages of Rivarol , and to some extent Minute and other publications, abound with celebrations of past great men, but in this period they were often related to French Vichyism and the interwar far right. The most recurrent celebration of the past figures focused on Robert Brasillach,²³ the pro-fascist journalist who was executed in 1944 for collaborationism following de Gaulle’s refusal to grant him a pardon. As far-right voices in this period focused on symbols rather than broader policies, and that these symbols all reflected past defeats, the choice of focusing on Vichyite figures rather than colonial ones reflected the priorities of activists intent on constructing a memory culture. This did not show that these men were unaware of—or uninterested in—the very recent loss of France’s empire,²⁴ but that they saw it as less relevant to their attempts to re-establish a far-right movement under Gaullist hegemony. In this, they joined left-wing activists and de Gaulle himself, who saw no reason to contest France’s transition from empire to a European mid-sized nation. These choices mattered because these actors were aware of their role in shaping a new consensus in the decade after France’s retreat from empire. The choice to relegate explicit references to empire and decolonisation to back pages, passing comments or footnotes did not make them ‘forget’ the experience of empire and its loss. Nonetheless, it contributed to the creation of a discursive space that did not perceive empire as a relevant political explanation of current events. This was not a new phenomenon in France, as political actors had tended to prioritise metropolitan explanations. Nonetheless, it contributed to a later understanding of French ‘silence’ over its colonial past.

Immigration and the Colonial Settlement

If public conversation in France accepted the premises of disengagement from empire, few things more clearly illustrated the complex relationship between France and its imperial history, and eventually forced a political engagement with it, as colonial and postcolonial immigration. Simultaneously, the debate on immigration provided an outlet for the re-articulation and euphemisation of colonial vocabulary, imagery and power relations into the language of immigration. New debates about immigration thus reflected issues relevant to exploring the meaning of colonial history for French society, yet without framing these as continuities of a colonial past. The reason for the focus on the gestation of the immigration debate when considering French ‘silence’ is twofold. First, when colonial history eventually informed the political conversation in France, it was addressed through the prism of immigration. Second, immigration of former colonial subjects into the metropole challenged the notion of disengagement from France’s colonies. The presence of these people in France served as a reminder for France’s colonial past, while the reactions to their presence reflected continuities of colonial power relations and racism. However, just as the British case demonstrates, the politicisation of immigration did not inevitably lead to a debate about colonial history. When French activists and historians later sought to ‘break the silence’ on colonial history in France, they perceived that very immigration debate as a barrier to public engagement with the links between colonial history and immigration.

While the appropriation of the term ‘immigration’ in the 1970s was initiated by actors looking to channel both legacies of colonial racism and the resentments created by the defeats of decolonisation into political gains, the traditional use of the term in France did not necessarily evoke connections to France’s colonial position. First, up to the 1990s, the bulk of immigration to France was European in origin.²⁵ Second, despite a long history of absorption of immigrants since the nineteenth century that was uneven, with recurrent outbursts of violence and calls to curb flows of immigrants, especially in times of economic downturn,²⁶ the politics of immigration followed economic rather than social rationale. French governments perceived and regulated flows of immigrants according to economic and demographic necessity, while discussion of immigrants treated them foremost as workers.²⁷ The change in the 1970s, following the economic downturn of the Oil Crisis, saw the introduction of concepts otherwise defined under the broad banner of ‘race relations’ in Anglo contexts into the umbrella term ‘immigration’ in France, focusing on the spectre of immigration from Algeria and the presence of former colonial subjects in the metropole.

Large-scale immigration of Algerians mirrored and followed the entanglements of France and Algeria, beginning in the 1940s and increasing steadily thereafter. The Algerian War gave Algerians in the metropole a different kind of visibility, between the FLN’s activities there and police repression. However, despite increasing numbers, the state and the press hardly considered Algerian immigrants to be a political—or even social—preoccupation after the end of the war.²⁸ During this time of continuous economic growth of the trente glorieuses, immigration of non-European former colonial subjects generally did not become the subject of public enquiry.²⁹ Immigrants began seeking a greater public voice in the late 1960s, when they went on strikes together with French workers in May 1968,³⁰ or when immigrant activists began forming the sans-papiers movement together with left-wing intellectuals in the early 1970s.³¹ Just as immigrants mainly organised as workers in this period, the state and the media viewed immigrants first and foremost as workers who made sense only within an economic logic, both for centre-right government interested in growth and for the left interested in workers’ unity.

This same economic logic led to the onset of restrictive immigration policies and the ending of free flows of immigration following the Oil Crisis of the 1970s. Only at this moment—as the process of immigration had de facto ended—did the term immigration begin to penetrate French political speak. It then stopped denoting actual processes of migratory flows, and instead began describing the transformation of France into a multi-ethnic society. As Alec Hargreaves noted, it turned into a catch-all phrase pertaining to what the Anglo world defines as ‘race relations’, while the republican context did not allow for any explicit engagement with the concept of ‘race’.³² Just as importantly, however, was the implication of the transformed far right—and most notably the party Front national (FN) and its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen—in the re-appropriation of the term in the late 1970s. This process of reformulation of the term immigration to channel notions of racism in public was another component of the notion of French ‘silence’, as it masked a debate about the specificities of the colonial roots of France’s transformation. This applied to constituencies nursing resentments over the end of empire as much as to a new generation of French citizens from the former empire who sought to articulate their belonging to France.

After the foundation of the FN by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972 and its subsequent struggle to gain political traction in the first years of its existence, Jean-Marie Le Pen turned to the term ‘immigration’ to unite and gain support from the different factions of the far right—intégristes, monarchistes, poujadistes, Vichyites and Algérianistes. Being reduced to insignificance after the defeat of Tixier-Vignancour in 1965,³³ Le Pen believed many people in France were susceptible to the ideas of the far right, but were frightened by the label. He therefore formulated the goal of brand detoxification, whereby he claimed that the way to unify different ‘natural’ constituencies of the far right was to ‘change the wrapping paper [of the far right] to reassure the public’.³⁴ In other words, the new party’s programme needed to keep the elements that rallied supporters of the far right while rejecting those which Le Pen believed would turn away potential voters. In the first years of the FN’s existence, the party programme treated immigration as a marginal issue compared to its rampant anti-communism and anti-Semitism.³⁵ Tellingly, Le Pen personally dismissed immigration as a priority.³⁶ In the context of dédiabolisation, or detoxification, he believed the public welcomed anti-Semitism and anti-communism, but would not accept anything broadly ‘racist’. In 1973, when activists of the far-right student group Ordre nouveau planned an event under the title ‘Stop savage immigration’ and printed out pamphlets with the inscription ‘Bougnoule go home!’,³⁷ Le Pen feared this action would be counterproductive and was recorded saying, ‘you are going too far, you are walking on eggshells. You will be discredited as provocateurs’.³⁸ In fact, the lack of attention to immigration as a priority in the early 1970s was visible throughout far-right publications, which were less concerned with appearing racist. Scandals like the asphyxiation of Africans in Aubervilliers in 1970 triggered reactions to the presence of sub-Saharan Africans and Algerians in the metropole that reflected disdain, but did not yet prioritise any calls to resist immigration as a phenomenon.³⁹

The politicisation or the term ‘immigration’ took on a new life at the end of the 1970s, mainly through a new strategy of the FN, which sought to capitalise on the sense of decline brought about by the economic staling and anxieties of the 1970s. A new strategy, which instrumentalised the word ‘immigration’ to explain French decline, was the initiative of Le Pen’s protégé, the former history-geography teacher François Duprat, who joined the ranks of the movement in the mid-1970s and assumed charge of the party’s programme. For the 1978 legislative elections, Duprat turned immigration into the party’s rallying issue, but urged activists and Le Pen to concentrate solely on its ‘social costs’ to avoid being branded as racist.⁴⁰ In this first phase, campaigns such as ‘a million unemployed are a million immigrants too many’⁴¹ spoke of immigration without explicitly targeting any specific group of immigrants, making the term synonymous with unemployment and insecurity. On the other hand, it drew on a pool of racist colonial imagery of the Arab man as simultaneously lazy and violent: a knife-wielding welfare recipient. After the assassination of Duprat in 1978, the party’s new generation—most notably the candidate in Dreux, Jean-Pierre Stirbois—turned this vocabulary into the perfect version of ‘little-man’ populism. It was simultaneously less inflammatory and less articulate than previous far-right discourse, while retaining its core racist imagery. Abandoning derogatory names such as ratons, bougnoules or bicots—the latter two of which were imported directly from the Algerian context—in favour of the simple immigrés gave the FN a novel kind of respectability in comparison with former far-right groups’ culture of defence of the ‘white race’ and street violence. As the FN’s predecessors had set a low bar, even its more inflammatory calls, such as Stirbois’ ‘immigrants from the other side of the Mediterranean, return to your ditch!’⁴² in 1981, could be defended as they did not actively and openly enshrine violence. Ultimately, the adoption of the term ‘immigration’ as a seemingly ‘technocratic’ word presented a clear slate which did not directly expose any overt continuities with the far right’s Vichyite or Algerian past. In fact, one of the main characteristics of the turn to debating ‘immigration’ was its appropriation as a novel phenomenon, and therefore ahistoric. By focusing on the effects of immigration on the struggles of the welfare state in the 1970s, the debate that ensued did not open any avenues for addressing the colonial dimensions of the presence of former colonial subjects in the metropole. It focused neither on the reasons for the movements of these populations into the metropole nor on the continuities between colonial racism and policing and the power relations postcolonial immigrants were subjected to in France.

This new discourse helped the FN to its first breakthrough in the 1983 municipal elections with gains for Le Pen in Paris’ 20th arrondissement and for Stirbois in Dreux. Following this success, Le Pen and FN rhetoric were able to reach an even broader public. The most valuable form of exposure turned out to be the invitation of Le Pen to the popular TV programme L’Heure de vérité on Antenne 2. On 13 February 1984 he delivered a speech on the dangers of immigration in front of 3 million spectators.⁴³ Quickly thereafter, Le Monde acknowledged the party’s sudden penetration into popular consciousness. The newspaper published a dossier spécial entitled ‘The Le Pen Effect’⁴⁴ in which the whole second page was dedicated to a group of intellectuals⁴⁵ who debated the newly found respectability of the FN. The dossier highlighted the FN’s surge as a danger to democracy, as the contributors analysed continuities between Le Pen and the extreme right from the 1930s, notably between Le Pen’s racism and traditional anti-Semitism. Interestingly, none of them flagged any links to Algérianistes. This pattern was repeated in many commentaries on the increasing popularity of Le Pen and showed how contemporary ongoing public debate about Vichy—rather than the colonial roots of anti-Arab racism—was being framed as the key to understanding the FN’s rise.

While at face value the technical terms ‘immigration’ and ‘immigrants’ did not refer to any specific group, the targeting of Arabs was one of its greater non-dits (unspoken rule). The focus on immigration in the public sphere quickly revived anti-Arab racism, with its colonial tropes in tow. The self-evident connection between immigration and Arabs manifested itself in the title of the Nouvel Observateur’s editorial from 30 November 1984: ‘Immigrants? You meant Arabs!’ The magazine had prepared a special dossier on immigration to thematise the increased attention the term had been receiving since the surge in popularity of the FN. Yet in the introduction, Jacques Julliard and Anne Fohr noted: ‘Let us be frank: two months ago, we launched a questionnaire on immigrants in France and here we are today with an enormous special edition on Arabs.’⁴⁶

The dossier’s main article analysed the number of testimonies collected by the Nouvel Observateur journalists. This diversity of voices helped Jacques Julliard and Anne Fohr highlight many facets of anti-Arab racism in France. They included a self-proclaimed left-wing voter who claimed that ‘it is not racist [...] to take issue with noise, disorder or other people’s odours’, people who articulated different levels of overt fear and loathing, and others who reported scenes of everyday racism in their communities. The individual testimonies also attempted to explain the roots of this anti-Arab racism. A fair number of letters claimed that Arabs were inherently violent and ‘unassimilable’, unlike other immigrants. In this modern-day re-articulation of colonial stereotypes of the violent, fanatic Arab, the one thing missing was the link to actual colonial experiences. Indeed, not a single quoted letter referred directly to colonialism or the conflicts of decolonisation in the Maghreb. Only Julliard and Fohr made explicit connections to the Algerian War of Independence when asking about the roots of anti-Arab racism: ‘But why Arabs? Because of colonial wars […] and notably this civil war that was the Algerian War’.

Silence and the Generational Shift of the 1980s

For the generation that came of age in the 1980s, both colonial control and the economic optimism of the trente glorieuses were events in a past they had not experienced first-hand. However, talk of economic decline—and the necessity to reverse it—kept the affluent post-war years at the centre of young people’s historical awareness. In fact, this generation was the first to come of age in a France that was, discursively at the very least, a mid-sized European power that was settling into decades of economic stagnation. As such, it was also the first generation for whom the big events of the mid-twentieth century, whether the Second World War, wars of decolonisation or even May 1968, were history with little to no living memory. This generation was therefore the first one that lived with the legacies of colonialism rather than with its immediate memories, which they often associated with their parents’ generation. Speaking of ‘silence’ in this period thus makes sense through an examination of ways new generations of activists sought to challenge issues that had links to France’s colonial past, mostly the multi-racial character of French society, but also the rise of racism and of the FN. On the one hand, ‘silence’ was the result of their focus on understanding the present as a novel period that was different to their parents’ period of turbulent change. On the other, choices not to mobilise the past to explain the present were also the result of a lack of a broad memory vocabulary of the kind that would crystallise in the 1990s (see Chap. 3). In other words, as memory had not yet become a priority in the political conversation, young people in the 1980s did not think of memory as a tool in fighting racism.

Later works like Stora’s Le transfert d’une mémoire (published in 1999)⁴⁷ would look back at the 1980s as a period that illustrated the toxic legacies of colonialism, particularly through the rise of the FN and the increase in racist violence. However, young people on the right and left alike were often more preoccupied with ascertaining the novelty of their own period than mobilising the past to explain it. One such example of generational divide on the right was reflected in the FN’s appeal to many young people,⁴⁸ who defined their affiliation with the renascent far right differently than the older generation. One work that provides access to some of their voices is the journalist Anne Tristan’s book, Au Front (published in 1987). The book was one of many commentaries about the connection between the FN’s euphemising discourse on ‘immigration’ and violence against Arabs, which increased in the years after the party’s initial success in 1983. One of the goals of these works was to observe the phenomenon of the rise in racism and racist acts and describe the FN’s immediate influence on French society. Tristan’s book was the fruit of the journalist’s six-month undercover mission posing as a frontiste activist in Marseille.⁴⁹ It appeared in 1987 and quickly became a media success, turning Tristan into a well-known young expert on the FN. The testimonial, written in the first person, describes the process the journalist underwent in order to penetrate the lines of the FN’s grass-roots organisations in Marseille and examine the motivations of FN activists and