Revisiting Race in France

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in "scientific" studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category "race," despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as "races" groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a "race?" Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the "metalanguage" of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention

Economic geography · Geography · Political science · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Race, History, and American Society