‘Tous ceux sans qui la France ne serait pas la France’: The case for a French national museum of colonial histories

Abstract

Although France is known as the country of museums, it has yet to inaugurate a museum of French history. At a time of mounting tensions between an increasingly multiracial and multicultural French population, on the one hand, and an inherently problematic model of French Republican integration on the other, one wonders whose history would be represented. In the wake of one of France’s worst cases of social unrest – the 2005 riots – Paris opened two new national museums (the Musée du Quai Branly and the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration), which held great promise of leading France toward postcoloniality. Unfortunately, neither site advanced the nation’s largely silenced conversation about its colonial history, its enduring effects and its contemporary manifestations. Against a backdrop of increased Islamophobia, exacerbated as much by the 2015–17 terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice as by the anti-’immigration’ rhetoric during the 2017 presidential elections, I examine the call for a new museum and its potential to bring France closer to postcoloniality.