Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age / Edition 1

by Herman Lebovics

Overview

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 José Bové—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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822332602
Publisher:	Duke University Press Books
Publication date:	06/23/2004
Series:	Radical Perspectives
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Herman Lebovics is Professor of History at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Mona Lisa’s Escort: Andre Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture; True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945; and The Alliance of Iron and Wheat: Origins of the New Conservatism of the Third Republic, 1860–1914.

Read an Excerpt

Bringing the Empire back home

France in the global age

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By Herman Lebovics

Duke University Press

ISBN: 0-8223-3260-4

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Chapter One

Gardarem lo Larzac!

On this Saturday in August 1974, the sun of the South cast its magical luminosity over the high plateau of Larzac. A few hundred local farmers of this nowhere part of France-specifically, in the Auvergne, at the southern edge of the Massif Central-had organized a two-day celebration of the annual harvest. But the fete that weekend was unlike any other in France that season. First of all, the poster inviting all to participate didn't feature the usual animal judging, carnival rides, and shooting matches, or even the promise of good eats. It announced instead a Festival for the Third World. In big letters one could read "no" four times and "yes" twice: no to French arms sales abroad, no to nuclear tests, no to the extension of military bases, no, to the pillage of the Third World. But yes to real solidarity with the people of the Third World, and yes to a real policy for peace.

Then, equally unusual in this corner of France, 103,000 invited guests from all over the country had come to take part. The local organizers, who styled themselves unfashionably as "Les Paysans de Larzac," rather than the more modern-sounding "Agriculteurs," had dedicated the year's harvest to the Third World. As the visitors arrived at the site of the fete, they saw a scene which could have come out of anEisenstein film: lines of staggered harvesting tractors making their last passes through the golden sea of grain. In their full-page announcements of the festival placed in big-city newspapers-this was the most media-savvy harvest festival the urban French had ever known-the Peasants invited people to bring either a sack of wheat or its money equivalent to go to fellow peasants in the recently decolonized lands. Les Paysans de Larzac collected some sixty thousand francs that weekend.

Since December 1970, local farmers and their allies, come from all over France, had been conducting a struggle to stop the government's planned extension of the large military training base on the plateau. As the progressive self-definition of the resisters developed over the next eleven years, the Movement of Larzac became more and more the microcosm of the new social movements, the new-style antiestablishment politics, of the decades after the cultural explosions of May 1968. Their affinity with the peasants of the Third World, their acts of solidarity with them, and their liaisons with the new post-1968 metropolitan social movements made of the French regionalist of the 1970s a privileged creator of activist stratagems and social experimentation. The government of Vichy had yoked regionalism to its reactionary vision of France. There had even been-as in the case of the Brittany and Alsace during World War II-collaborationist, or even fascist, local movements. The postcolonial and post-1968 movements were something new.

The struggles of the new regionalism of the 1970s transformed the meaning in France of the word "region," certainly, but also that of "colonialism," "anti-imperialism," and "nation." As a result of the changes in meaning of the first three words, the last-the nation-would begin to include new arrivals to the metropole from the old colonial empire. I will go into these changes in the language of regionalism and in the scope of the public sphere in France of the 1970s in a later chapter. And, in the course of the story, even "Paris" will acquire new meanings. But it will be worthwhile to spend some time first with the Peasants of Larzac and their allies.

Why should we take this theater, and regional theater at that, seriously? Every pressure group tries to present its cause as the main hope for humankind, or the oppressed, or the children, or some other worthy group. To begin to understand the specialness of the moment and the actors we have to look ahead nearly fifteen years, after the Peasants of Larzac had successfully blocked the expansion of the military camp, and the time of daily struggle had passed.

Larzac, Africa, Corsica, New Caledonia-meme combat

Once again it is summer, now June 1988-the climate of Larzac is not very hospitable to outdoor celebrations in most other seasons-a group of the same Larzac farmers and a delegation of Kanak nationalists just arrived from New Caledonia were gathered together for an unusual ceremony on a sheep farm. They stood on land that fifteen years before, squatters-one of whom was Jose Bove of later anti-globalization actions-had occupied, renewed, and defended against its owner, the French army. As an act of solidarity, the one-time peasant militants of the 1970s struggle over the extension of the military base had offered the Kanak people a piece of this hard-won land to remain forever part of the "territoire Kanak."

During the 1970s there had been warm exchanges between the fighters in the two struggles. At various times, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a leader of the major independence organization, the Front de la Liberation Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, other Kanak militants, as well as young Kanaks studying at the nearby university of Montpellier, had come to Larzac to express their solidarity with the local struggle against Paris, and perhaps to learn some strategies for their own liberation struggle.

New Caledonia had-still has-two regional peculiarities, which have caused the island much grief. First, the original population, although fallen into the minority, supports a strong independence movement. Second, the island is rich in nickel ore, perhaps as much as 40 percent of the world's deposits, which has both led to its ecological spoliation and greatly upped the stakes in the fight about its political status. Despite Michel Rocard's crafting of a potentially viable political truce in New Caledonia soon after the Socialists came to power in 1981, the return of a conservative government in 1986 once more ignited the militant struggle for political independence by the indigenous Polynesians.

The island continued its bloody history. There had been the murders in 1984 by whites of a number of Kanak personalities. Then just a few weeks before Tjibaou came to Larzac, on 22 April 1988, the mutually stimulating recklessness of both the extreme nationalists and the police had led to a bloodbath on the island of Ouvea, in which a total of four police officers, two soldiers, and nineteen militants were killed.

That June a peace agreement brilliantly brokered by Michel Rocard was reached. That was probably the reason why Tjibaou was in France that month. Nevertheless, that same peace would lead to his murder by a Kanak extremist in the following year. That summer day in 1988 at Larzac, surrounded by sympathetic comrades, he spoke for the Kanaks. As he cut the ceremonial ribbon marking the boundary of the new Kanak land, he declared, "I hereby take possession of France!"

More spectacle? And yet, we have come to realize how much of politics is, and has always been, theater. The Peasants of Larzac certainly understood this. Politics is specifically the theater of power, but-because rulers never have enough soldiers, police, or guns-states must habituate obedience through engaging fictions. The refusers have always responded in kind. The ceremonies in Larzac those two summers-and many others which we will later see-staged powerful rites of resistance and rebellion. The Harvest dedicated to the Third World staged the drama of colonial oppression, the solidarity of colonized peoples-in France as in the Third World-and the travails of decolonization. Some years later, the Kanak ceremony told an even more nuanced story: the actors for two oppressed peoples, both living under ecological risk, performing on a stage where a great victory had been won against the military; the ritual giving over of a piece of native land in an act of solidarity; and the ironic transvaluation by which the colonized, in their turn, claim the metropole. The celebrants at Kanaky-Larzac enacted the most important contestatory movements of the last third of the twentieth century: anti-colonialism, antimilitarism, the struggles for local power against a central domination, a new internationalized regional consciousness, ecology as a political force, and new media-savvy strategies of resistance.

In the early 1960s, at the high tide of French overseas decolonization, Serge Mallet had begun to write about the radical potential of suppressed regionalism in France, especially the whole of the Midi which he saw as extending from Spain to Italy. He called this greater Provence "Occitanie," to avoid association with the older, largely cultural movement of the late nineteenth century. Mallet died in an automobile accident in 1973 while returning to Paris after having led summer seminars (universite d'ete) dedicated to Occitanie. But his initiative had already been taken up by Robert Lafont, professor of literature at the University of Montpellier. In a series of books as well as in new regionalist political groups, Lafont continued the project for the emancipation of the "colonized" South.

The new-style regionalisms of the 1970s in Larzac, as well as that of greater Occitania, the Bretons, and the Basques challenged both the inherited centralizing and centralized definition of the republic as well as the definition of the cultural heritage which underwrote the polity. And then there was, and is, the Corsican insurgency.

The modern Corsican movement for autonomy began in 1973, when an Italian-owned tanker shipwrecked off the cap of Corsica began leaking toxic chemicals which were flowing toward the island. To the jubilation of the island's inhabitants, a secret group of militants dynamited the vessel and sent it and its cargo to the bottom. Next, on the island, these same men demonstrated against the ecologically destructive wine-growing practices used by white settlers come home-if that means anything after so many generations-from decolonized Algeria. In 1975 some of these demonstrators, among them the autonomist leader Edmond Simeoni, shot it out with the police, killing two officers. The National Front for the Liberation of Corsica, the FLNC, took both its name and its example from the recently victorious national liberation movement, the FLN of Algeria. On 5 May 1976, deliberately emulating the Setif massacre of 1954 that had sparked the Algerian uprising, they carried out sixteen killings in one night. "We thought of ourselves as the new sons of Toussaint [L'Ouverture]," recalled Matthieu Filidori in an interview for the powerful documentary aired in 2003 on Canal+, "Generation FLNC." The autonomists avidly studied the Marxist-Leninist movements for national liberation all over the world. In 1977 they produced their own "little green book" modeled after the famous little red book of Chairman Mao. Alain Orsoni remembered that it was "indigestible" and that no one read it. But also, as hooded, cold-blooded killers, ultra-nationalists, racist toward Africans and Arabs, macho, they had also learned much from the movements of the extreme right. The complex Corsican struggle for autonomy, with the exception of a brief honeymoon at the start of Socialist rule, has been treated in Paris as a problem in crime fighting more than as a cultural concern.

Overseas, at the moment of decolonization in the early 1960s, struggles for greater local freedoms broke out in places that would remain regions of France. In 1963 representatives of twenty-four organizations from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Reunion united in Paris to demand autonomy for their homelands. In the year of liberty, 1968, they issued a "Manifesto of Self-Determination." And in 1971 in Martinique, with representatives of the Catholic Church for the first time joining them, autonomist spokespeople from these major overseas departments called for a "united anti-colonist front."

It is clear that there is a direct line of connection from these regionalisms of France back in time to the wave of decolonization of the 1960s and forward to the anti-globalization movements in subsequent decades. The historian Jean Chesneaux valued the impact of the movement of Larzac within France, in Overseas France, and with the nation's relation to the Third World as "this decentering, or rather this recentering."

The story of the "regional" struggles-as we go on, we have to deconstruct the teleology of this word-against the national government in Paris dominated politics throughout the decade of the 1970s. First, in the course of the decade, there grew in the population a powerful nostalgia for a lost France. We see just the external, and successfully commercialized, traces of the sentiment in the rampant "mode retro" of the period. The economic depression beginning in the mid-1970s increased popular skepticism about the promise of growth forever. The depopulation of the countryside had paradoxical effects: more and more of the city people who could afford to buy residences secondaires in dying old farming villages saw firsthand the world they were losing, and regretted the loss.

The usual story of regionalism versus centralization under France's first four Republican governments casts regionalists as rightists with local power bases resisting the Jacobin steamroller roaring down on them from Paris. In periods when post-Revolutionary France was ruled by kings or other sorts of powerful conservatives, the left in the provinces challenged the power of Paris. The defeat of 1940 added an additional plot line: decentralization was forced upon France during the incremental German occupations of 1940-44. Then the economic development of the postwar years dotted the country with new industrial centers and, as a result, spread the sophisticated and educated population more widely throughout the nation. The final chapter-in the normalized tale-introduces a second, primarily cultural, refounding of the nation. In the 1960s President de Gaulle and his culture minister, Andre Malraux, began to reel in the provincialism of the war years. All roads, and for that matter all trains and planes, still led to Paris, to be sure, but the population of the regions now obtained increased access to new modalities of vertical, horizontal, and electronic mobility. Today, people living in the regions can more easily get to things Parisien, and Paris can get to them more readily. The student rising of May 1968-which we should remember began in Strasbourg and erupted for local reasons in many cities around France-was above all a protest against the top-down nature of these cultural changes and of the consecration of a new technocratic elite, which was being introduced in the guise of "democratizing the culture."

There's a certain validity to this account. But it elides a much more fascinating and, finally, more coherent modern story which links the postcolonial movements for self-determination in Brittany, in Alsace, in New Caledonia, and in Occitanie, where Le Larzac lies, with that of decolonized Senegal, Madagascar, and Guinee. The better story-it should more properly be called "Postcolonial Regionalism"-also adds an as yet unwritten chapter to the history of the development of the French left and especially to that of the ecology movement. One of Marx's lasting insights points to the dialectical nature of power. Foucault started his own theory of control and resistance from this insight, although he tells us only half the story. If there is oppression, we should look for the resistance to it which makes the repression necessary. Reciprocally, from the ways people resist, we can learn how power is organized and works in a society.

L'Etabli

To understand the state's sudden interest in the cultural heritages of the regions-after so many centuries of trying to dissolve them-we have to revisit two events that shattered postwar French society: the effects of both the student rising of May 1968 and the end of the old colonial empire. These seemingly separate events came together and were forever entwined far off from Paris in the poor grazing lands of the Southwest. In the entire decade of the 1970s, the sheep farmers of Larzac, aided by ex-'68ers, held the attention of the nation with their movement of resistance. The Larzacians fought to keep their land in the face of the government's efforts to expropriate them in order to have a larger terrain to train troops in the technological warfare that it expected to fight in the Third World.

First, briefly, the consequences of May 1968. Whatever the long-term cultural successes of the student rising-and there were many-the radicalized students' effort to change the political order failed when the gates of the Renault factory in Paris were closed against them. They could not form an alliance with the young workers, which might have transformed a primarily middle-class youth movement into a powerful national political force. Various leftist groups, and in particular the Maoists, interpreted 1968-despite their having driven de Gaulle from power-as a defeat for the working class.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

About the Series xi

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

1. Gardarem lo Larzac! 13

2. “What You Did in Africa, Can You Come Back to France and Do It?” 58

3. Combating Guerilla Ethnology 83

4. The Effect Le Pen: Pluralism or Republicanism? 115

5. The Dance of the Museums 143

Conclusion 179

Notes 191

Acknowledgments 219

Index 223

Editorial Reviews

As usual, Herman Lebovics gives us an innovative and stimulating new perspective, now, on France in the age of globalization.”—Patrick Weil, senior research fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research (University of Paris I-Sorbonne) and author of Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (What is a Frenchman? The History of French Nationality from the Revolution to the Present Day)


“How—and even whether—to preserve their once-homogeneous culture in today’s open world is one of France’s supreme challenges today. With five sharply-etched case studies of cultural conflict—from the world soccer cup to museums to the defense of the Larzac plateau—Herman Lebovics casts penetrating light on French struggles to establish who they are and who they want to be.”—Robert O. Paxton, author of Europe in the 20th Century


“Scholars have been talking for some time about the colonial ‘legacies’ of the postcolonial present. French scholars have only recently and tentatively entered that conversation. Bringing the Empire Back Home makes an analytic and political leap as it takes us to new terrain of insight and locations of connection. Herman Lebovics’s version of what counts as French history is compelling, powerful, sensible, and deep. In setting out the direct lines between decolonization in the l960s and the antiglobalization movements that followed, he traces what joined New Caledonian separatists and Larzac farmers, protests against the ‘postcolonial military-industrial complex’ and the rise of the radical right, the new regionalisms in France in the l970s and the folk hero Bové who smashed McDonald’s windows. He identifies how imperial and capitalist expansion have been challenged in forms of popular demonstration, ingenuity, and spectacle that have repeatedly called into question what the ‘Republic’ is, who has a right to decide its boundaries, and who has what rights in it today. This is a must read that redefines the tenor and terrain of postcolonial scholarship.”—Ann Laura Stoler, author of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things

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