Official French colonial memory remains unchanged into the 1990s

Evidence

This list contains few surprises, but in light of the arguments put forward in this book, it invites several comments. On the most ele- mentary level, what is striking is how little official French discourse has changed, despite the disappearance of the empire. The benefits it brought to West Africa, France still maintains, were education, health care, railroads, and democracy. The only discordant note sounded here by the minister relative to the governors general of the first part of the century is the praise accorded Diagne’s successful election to the Chamber of Deputies. At the time, French administrators were sure that this was not how to go about democratizing African societies. More subtle, but equally revealing in the minister’s review of French colonization, is the long gap in his narrative between the founding of Institut Pasteur in 1924 and the next date-cle-1938, when Dakar innovated in the realm of female education. From 1924 to 1938 there was, apparently, nothing to commemorate. We now know why: association and human mise en valeur left few legacies of which the French could conceivably be proud, and the interwar years were among the most coercive of the colonial period. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 867

Categorization

• SEED: The 1924-1938 commemorative gap is a vivid indicator for an essay on what colonial memorialization leaves out.
• XREF: connects to: The colonial past frames present-day French debates but rarely German ones — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 102