The 'grande guerre sainte

Over the past decade the debate about collective memory and identity has intensified in France. Now, more than during any earlier period in French history, different social groups are claiming their own collective identity and histories in the face of a homogeneous and national historical discourse vulgarised even more powerfully by the media and mass culture.1 Maurice Crubellier, La Me ́moire des Français: Recherches d'Histoire Culturelles (Paris: Henry Veyrier 1991). It is now often recognised that some accounts of the past can be forgotten while others can be embellished, and that French history is in a constant process of being rewritten. The emergence of different historical memories in France can be seen as part of a challenge to the traditional republican dreams of a common French nation and its ideals. They challenge the false consistency of a culture and the dominant representation of history as an important edifice of that culture and identity. But the search for different memories is also part of an epistemological break in the field of social history in France.2 Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Me ́moire (Paris: Gallimard 1984). The Eurocentric view of writing the history of the two world wars has excluded other histories of colonised peoples as major participants in these wars. Asians, West Africans, North Africans and others fought and died next to Europeans. The dramatic context of the wars facilitated the ground for the ‘importation’ of the colonial encounter from the colony to the metropole and gave therefore a new dimension to those relationships of power. More than any other European colonial power, France made great use of its ‘native troops’, not only in the African theatres of operations, but also in Europe. While the European conflict was not just a ‘white man's war’, there is still a collective amnesia at the level of ‘official history’.3 There are, however, few exceptions to the dominant narratives of war in Europe. See, for example, Marc Michel, L'Appel a l'Afrique (Paris: Sorbonne 1982); Anthony Clayton, France, Soldiers and Africa (London: Brassey's Defence Publishers 1988); Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Se ́ne ́galais in French West Africa 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann 1991), and Charles John Balesi, From Adversaries to Comrades-in-Arms: West Africans and the French Military (Waltham, MA: Cross Roads 1979

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