Citizenship and difference in France: colonial histories and postcolonial controversies

ABSTRACT

The debate over the place in French society of people from North and sub-Saharan Africa is also a debate about history. One side–including people on both the right and the left–evokes a tradition of republican egalitarianism dating to the Revolution of 1789 and dismisses calls to recognize cultural or social difference among citizens as ‘communitarianism’. The opposite side argues that French republicanism has always been exclusionary and discriminatory, bound historically to colonization and enslavement. This article points to what this present-day clash obscures: uncertainty and conflict over what the concepts of citizenship, nation, state, republic, and empire actually mean. It stresses citizenship as a claim-making construct. Colonized people and their descendants from 1789 to the collapse of French empire claimed the rights of the French citizen, thereby opening up a long debate over the relationship between citizenship and difference in a polity that proclaimed liberty, equality, and fraternity, a debate that still echoes in post-colonial France.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• difference
• Africa
• France

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a perspective on citizenship in world history that makes clear the imperial context, see (Cooper 2018).

2. Forgetting was particularly important in the case of the Algerian war. (Stora 1998).

3. On the controversies, see for example Le Monde, February 26, 6 January 2021, 2022, Libération, 11 June 2021. The Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, which was asked by the Minister of Higher Education to conduct the investigation, refused, and instead published, in English as well as French, a critique of the concept of islamogauchisme. https://www.cnrs.fr/en/islamo-leftism-not-scientific-reality-0, 27 February 2021. Accessed 16 December 2021.

4. Le Monde, 20 May 2021, 2022.

5. Two organizations, Les Indigènes de la République, and the Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France, both founded in 2005, helped to bring this line of argument to public attention.

6. For a well-known academic’s attack on ‘decolonial’ and certain anti-racist arguments, see (Taguieff 2020).

7. The last part of the story is told at greater length in (Cooper 2014). See also (Semley 2017).

8. As Todd Shepard (2006) argues, Algeria had been considered an integral part of the French Republic, but when France gave up its effort to maintain control, it had to redefine Algeria as a colony in order to proclaim that it had decolonized and was therefore no longer tainted by colonialism.

9. There is a notable parallel with the British Nationality Act of 1948. See (Hansen 2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frederick Cooper

Frederick Cooper is Professor Emeritus of History at New York University. His research has focused on 20th-century Africa, empires, colonization and decolonization, and citizenship. Among his books are Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005), Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (with Jane Burbank, 2010), Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (2014), Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (2014), Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (2018), and Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (2nd ed., 2019).