Herman Lebovics

Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age

Thirty years ago, an international antiglobalization movement was born in the grazing lands of France’s Larzac plateau. In the 1970s, Larzac farmers were joined by others from around the world in their efforts to prevent the expansion of a local military base: by ecologists, religious pacifists, and urban leftists, and by social activists including American Indians and South American peasant leaders. In 1999 some of the same farmers who had fought the expansion of the base in the 1970s—including Jose Bove—dismantled the new local McDonald’s. That gesture was part of a protest against U.S. tariffs on specified French exports including Roquefort cheese, the region’s primary market product. The two struggles—the one against expanding a French army camp intended to train troops for postcolonial wars, the other against American economic might—were landmarks in the global campaign to preserve local cultures. They were also key episodes in the decades-long attempt by the French to define their cultural heritage within a much changed nation, a new Europe, and, especially, an American-dominated world. In Bringing the Empire Back Home , the inventive cultural historian Herman Lebovics provides a riveting account of how intense disputes about what it means to be French have played out over the past half-century, redefining Paris, the regions, and the former colonies in relation to one another and the world at large. In a narrative populated with peasants, people from the former colonies, museum curators, former colonial administrators, left Christians, archaeologists, anthropologists, soccer players and their teenage fans, and, yes, leading government officials, Lebovics reveals contemporary French society and cultures as perhaps the West’s most important testing grounds of pluralism and assimilation. A lively cultural history, Bringing the Empire Back Home highlights not only the political significance of France’s efforts to synthesize the regional, national, European, ethnic postcolonial, and global but also the chaotic beauty of the endeavor.

Building the History Museum to Stop History: Nicolas Sarkozy’s New Presidential Museum of French History

When he ran for president in 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy promised to build a museum of French history. He declared that he was troubled by the lack of a coherent account of the nation’s great moments and great heroes. On being elected, he started the planning process, finally settling on the Hôtel de Soubise, part of the Archives nationales, as the site of the future Maison de l’histoire de France. Although his project was supported by a certain number of intellectuals, many university scholars, especially the historians, raised strong objections to a concept that returned to the old Third Republic civic history in the style of Ernest Lavisse. The future museum was to offer visitors old-fashioned narrative history of male achievements, with no account taken of new insights that women’s, gender, social, cultural, colonial and immigration history have added to any discussion of what France is or might be. It rejects the idea that there have been, and can be, many ways of being French. The critics of the museum project deplored the instrumentalisation of the nation’s past – one of several such presidential ventures – for short-term political gain. The strike of archive employees, which lasted for several months, scuttled that site as the future home of the history museum. The story is not finished. The discussion of the presidential museum initiative is placed in a larger context in which increased economic neo-liberalism, greater state interventions at home and overseas, and the propagation of a nostalgic-conservative vision of the nation’s past reinforce each other, even as they coexist in uneasy union.

“Agrarians” Versus “Industrializers”

In his book Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution Thorstein Veblen argued that the relative lateness of the advent of German industrialization permitted her to avoid “the penalty of taking the lead”. She could borrow on a massive scale from the accumulated knowledge and technology of already industrialized societies. While this judgment may hold true on the purely technological level, it is not true that German society made the transition from the basically agrarian-commercial society of the mid-nineteenth century to the predominantly industrial society of the twentieth century without penalties. In recent years specialists on the developing nations have directed our attention to the dislocation, hardships, and complexity which the processes of industrialisation, urbanization, and modernization are introducing into traditional societies. In our scholarly concern for the problems of development in the non-Western world, we have, until quite recently, tended to forget that large segments of the populations of European societies had to be “dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century”, to use Adlai Stevensons telling phrase. In the case of Germany around 1900 only part of the nation was brought into the new era while another sizeable portion of the population, to Germanys later misfortune, was aided by the Imperial Establishment in its efforts to build a protective wall around itself to keep out the new machine age. I shall argue that the strongest part of that wall was erected in the years between 1894 and 1902, between the fall of Caprivi and the passage of the protective tariff of 1902. In these years German society endured an economic and intellectual crisis which extended beyond merely the selfish attempts of the East Elbian Junkers to maintain their economic and political position. Peasant proprietors were deeply involved. Artisans were affected. And even the leading theoreticians of the Social Democratic party stood confused before the crisis.

Imperialism and the corruption of democracies

Preface ix Acknowledgments xix 1. Not the Right Stuff: Shrinking Colonial Administrators 1 2. Pierre Bourdieus Own Cultural Revolution 22 3. Jean Renoirs Voyage of Discovery: From the Shores of the Mediterranean to the Banks of the Ganges 34 4. Frances Black Venus 60 5. John Locke, Imperialism, and the First Stage of Capitalism 87 6. Why, Suddenly, are the Americans Doing Cultural History 100 Afterword 113 Notes 121 Selected Works of American Cultural History Writing 155 Index 159

Will the Musée du Quai Branly show France the way to postcoloniality

Abstract France has, arguably, struggled to negotiate its colonial history more than any other former colonial power. This article questions the declared purpose of the Quai Branly Museum to be Frances first new museum of the twenty-first century, exploring its conceptualization, the complicated political and scholarly debates its opening triggered. The Quai Branly Museum wants to be a museum, but neither of purely art objects nor of social artifacts (most of which were collected by marine officers, missionaries, and anthropological expeditions during the colonial era). Architect Jean Nouvel has tried boldly to transcend that old disjunction, but his problematic architecture has much to reveal concerning the unconscious ways in which perceptions of non-Western cultures, which naturally informed the colonial expansionist enterprise, continue to inform contemporary debates on cultural and social diversity. The question remains as to whether the museum can evolve into an entity that will eventually foster more egalitarian and more culturally sophisticated aspects of the relationship between France and the formerly colonized.

The future of the nation foretold in its museums

With the opening of several new musées de la société in France we gain an exceptionally rich and revelatory way of understanding the society-wide debates about what France is and what it should be in the new millennium. Each of the museums discussed offers pieces of the contested stories of a new France in a new age. Taken together, they ask whether it is possible, or even desirable, today to tell a single and teleological national narrative, the roman national of the patriot-historians of the Third Republic. What did immigrants contribute to the making of today’s nation? What is the relationship of postcolonial France to its one-time colonial empire? How did biological and cultural evolution combine to make human societies? And now, with the opening of the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, how did, and how do, French vernacular cultures relate to those of Europe and the Mediterranean world? The article argues that a way of understanding this complex of questions is to follow the stories that the new museums tell – or the disagreements about what stories they ought to tell. For these questions go to matters of high state policy, international economic interests, cultural outreach, the relations of regions to capitals, tourism, and indeed claims about what it means to be French today.

Biology and culture at the reinvented Musée de l’Homme

After being closed for renovations for six years, the ‘reinvented’ Musée de l’Homme reopened in October 2015 with a completely new layout and narrative. Its principal account is that, while biological evolution guided human development, culture must be taken into account. With this explanation it makes the new biocultural turn. Throughout, the permanent exhibitions insist that members of humanity, as we know it, are one, and at the same time we are marked by differences. Our article reviews both how successfully the museum presents its story and what is left out. Although the authors agree that the museum is well placed to serve as an institutional form of Foucault’s specialised intellectual on the important questions it addresses, we find weaknesses and omissions in the treatment of gender, ‘race’, ethnic identities, and economic and political power.