Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories Robert Aldrich Palgrave, 2005 Reviewed

by Ian Coller, History Department, University of Melbourne Nations have notoriously poor memories for the less appetizing elements of their past, and the story of colonial memory in France is a case in point. From an almost universal and sometimes hysterical enthusiasm about Frances self-appointed civilizing mission during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this topic was suddenly plunged into near-total obscurity after decolonization. It is only recently that this memory has been made to speak again in the work of historians such as Benjamin Stora, Yves Benot and Alice Conklin. But historians illuminating the more disturbing elements of this history have met fierce opposition: most recently in new legislation approved by the French parliament this year which mandated a more positive view of French colonialism. In a France mixing millions of postcolonial migrants with repatriated settlers, these statements have the highest political resonance. This conjuncture makes Robert Aldrichs Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France, as the first major work to chart the landscape of colonial memory on the French mainland, all the more timely. France, as Aldrich points out, never succeeded in founding the large settler colonies which made British imperialism so irreversible in North America and the Pacific. Most of the French settlers in Africa, the Maghreb and Indochina were repatriated to France, leaving only the small French colony on New Caledonia as a permanent settler society. Yet this apparently clean decolonization is rather like the resistancialist myth which once dominated both official and popular understandings of the Vichy period a convenient fiction written over far more messy, painful and unresolved memories. Aldrich is the author of the most comprehensive recent account of French colonial history in English: now he takes this history back to the metropole, exhaustively cataloguing the monuments, museums and other traces of the colonial past in contemporary France. He inventories an unexpectedly rich variety of colonial traces: Parisian street names and architectural debris from colonial exhibitions; the chic new museums of arts premiers and the statues resettled from North Africa into provincial towns along with thousands of pieds noirs. The opening chapters of Aldrichs book provide snapshots of Paris and the provinces, followed by thematic chapters on war memorials; colonial statuary; museums; and permanent and temporary exhibitions. The books greatest strength is in gradually building a picture of the fantastic multiplicity and variety of these traces of the colonial past, comprehensively refuting any sense that colonialism can be considered outside the mainstream of French historical experience. It shows just how imbricated the colonial was in everyday life from the eighteenth-century onwards, from the slave-trading economies of western France and the Mediterranean commerce of the Midi, through to the colonial troops who fought in French wars from the Crimea to the Liberation of 1944. If these descriptions occasionally overwhelm in their sheer volume, it is worth persisting for the indelible scenes which emerge: Franois Mitterand placing a rose on the tomb of the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher; the return of statues from Algeria daubed with FLN

slogans; the remains of the Jardin Colonial rotting on the outskirts of Paris; French and Algerian comments in the visitors book at the new museum of the Mediterranean in Marseille. Aldrichs descriptions are very concrete (though illustrations are regrettably few), but he articulates very effectively the gaps and silences of museums and cityscapes, as well as the critical contestation of these spaces. At a crucial moment in French colonial memory, this is an essential text for those who wish to negotiate a question of French - as of Australian - history which will just not go away.