Cécile Vidal, editor. Français? La nation en débat entre colonies et métropole, XVIe–XIXe siècle

Français? La nation en débat entre colonies et métropole, XVIe–XIXe siècle grew out of a 2008 colloquium held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, itself inspired by a previous meeting at McGill University and the University of Montreal. A transatlantic collaboration that gathers essays by respected French and North American historians, Français? considers how francité, a term used in several of the contributions to denote the political, legal, cultural, and psychological dimensions of French national identity, came into focus in the framework of France's first colonial empire. Collectively, the essays delineate a paradox whereby ideas about who should be considered a French subject or citizen, and what the distinctive qualities of such a subject might be, were forged in contexts of legal and political exception marked by various modes of exclusion. They also show that national identity was produced and operated on various levels. The eight essays explore geographical contexts ranging from Canada and Louisiana to the West African settlements of Gorée and Saint-Louis and France's colonies in the Indian Ocean. Historically, they cover the period from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, or, from the dawn of French colonialism to the aftermath of the loss of France's main possessions in the Americas. This broad scope is one of the volume's strengths. Although Cécile Vidal's claim that historians have neglected France's first colonial empire in favor of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century successor is perhaps less valid today than it was a few years ago, the essays do open up new areas of research by examining sites of empire that have been relatively marginal to the major narratives of colonial and Atlantic history.

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