Recent scholarship of popular imperialism has identified annual public celebrations of Western European colonial empires as important tools for the shaping of new 'imperial' national identities. ...Building on the analyses of British Empire Day and Belgian and Italian colonial days, this article offers the first overview of the French week of pro-Empire celebrations, La Semaine coloniale française, and assesses its reach during the interwar period (1927-1939). In thinking through the fate and transformations of French Colonial Week, from an outdoor public spectacle, to a pale replica of Empire-Day school celebrations (Journée scolaire de la France d'Outre-mer), I will focus on two aspects specific to cyclical vectors of pro-Empire propaganda in Europe more broadly: the transnational context within which they developed between the wars, and their recursive nature. After an account of the event's foreign origins, devolved organisational model and regionally-inflected public celebratory practices, I will examine more closely the two most enduring and wide-reaching traditions that it produced: the Colonial-Week radio broadcasts and school campaigns. Reading La Semaine coloniale française through this comparative and diachronic framework, I will reflect on social, political and logistic reasons why it never coalesced into as ritualised and widely-observed a festival as Empire Day in Britain.
In creating the Grand prix de littérature coloniale (1921-1938) and appointing the award's panel, the Minister of the Colonies, Albert Sarraut, endowed littérature coloniale with its first ...institution and ushered in new synergies between the political centre of the Empire and writers self-identifying as 'colonial'. Pan-colonial in scope and bundling all overseas territories into a single entity that only made sense in relation to the metropolis, the form of literary colonialism that the metropolitan Grand prix promoted and its claim to universal authority over the textual representations of the Empire were contested by regional cultural awards mushrooming across French colonies and protectorates in the interwar period. The author argues that the fast-changing politics and policies of the Grand prix and the discourse surrounding its attribution were all weapons through which this battle for the ownership of colonial literature between the métropole and its periphery was fought, quickly outweighing discussions about aesthetic merit. They also show why metropolitan colonial literature and its regional variants gain from being analysed jointly, in their interrelatedness, by exploring understudied links between geographical space (both real and imagined) and the distribution of financial and symbolic capital across the French Empire during the interwar period.
In 1909, the colonial newspaper La Dépêche coloniale launched an enquiry entitled La Littérature coloniale de la France comparée à celle d'Angleterre. It was through this initiative that the idea of ...a 'French colonial literature' first caught wider public attention and generated polemics in literary circles and beyond. The aim of this article is to study the aesthetic and ideological agendas driving the enquiry and the polarised reactions it produced, from a sociological perspective inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's work. The author argues that La Dépêche coloniale's questionnaire encoded a set of assumptions designed to guide the answers and impose a vision of colonial literature, rather than elicit debate. One of the respondents, Pierre Mille (1864-1941), preferred provocation: in a piece published in a high-circulation daily Le Temps ahead of the results of La Dépêche coloniale's enquiry, he proclaimed Rudyard Kipling to be the model colonial author, only to conclude that French colonial literature was inexistent. The ensuing debate marked a watershed in the conceptualisation and the institutionalisation of French colonial literature, by setting in motion a process that would be brought to completion in the interwar period.
This article explores the pioneering role that the literary and intellectual circle formed by Marius-Ary Leblond around the journal La Grande France (1900-1903) played in the gestation of both la ...littérature coloniale of the Third French Republic and postcolonial Francophone
literature. Following a bio-bibliographical account of the circle and its members, it will present the journal's aesthetic and ideological programme with a particular emphasis on theoretical reflection about colonial literature, with a view to reassessing the circle's legacy. In
addition, through a study of the main agents (Pierre Bourdieu) behind La Grande France, and their affiliations, both colonial and extra-colonial, it aims to document and reflect on the unlikely connection between colonial ideology and avant-garde aesthetics and business model, and on the consequences
of this cohabitation.Cet article se propose d'explorer le rôle liminaire que le cercle littéraire et intellectuel fondé par Marius-Ary Leblond autour de la revue La Grande France (1900-1903) a joué dans la gestation de la littérature coloniale
de la Troisième République et de la littérature francophone postcoloniale. Après une présentation bio-bibliographique du cercle et de ses membres, il s'attachera à décrire la plateforme esthétique et idéologique de la revue,
en s'intéressant en particulier à la réflexion théorique sur la littérature coloniale qui s'y ébauche, afin de revisiter le rayonnement intellectuel du cercle et sa postérité. En outre, à travers une étude des
agents (Bourdieu) principaux de la revue, et de leurs affiliations coloniales aussi bien qu'extra-coloniales, il se donnera pour tâche de documenter des liens inattendus qui se tissent entre l'idéologie coloniale, et l'esthétique et le modèle économique
avant-gardistes, et d'engager une réflexion sur les causes et les conséquences de cette cohabitation.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's first book, Voyage à l'Ile de France (1773), published anonymously and with illustrations by Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune, has often been hailed as an 'abolitionist ...manifesto', yet the author devotes only a modest portion of the text to the condition of black slaves in Mauritius, under French colonial rule. To explain the predominantly abolitionist readings of Voyage à l'Ile de France, I propose to turn to the hitherto understudied period reception of the book, in order to posit that the original illustrations and the interaction between these and the text may have played an important part in orienting the interpretation of the work. In addition to addressing a lacuna in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre criticism, the following reflections on the reception of Voyage à l'Ile de France as an imagetext may also be viewed as a case study, making a contribution to the broader area of research into modes of reception of illustrated books in the Eighteenth century.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierres first book, "Voyage à lIle de France" (1773), published anonymously and with illustrations by Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune, has often been hailed as an "abolitionist ...manifesto," yet the author devotes only a modest portion of the text to the condition of black slaves in Mauritius, under French colonial rule. To explain the predominantly abolitionist readings of "Voyage à lIle de France," I propose to turn to the hitherto understudied period reception of the book, in order to posit that the original illustrations and the interaction between these and the text may have played an important part in orienting the interpretation of the work. In addition to addressing a lacuna in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre criticism, the following reflections on the reception of "Voyage à lIle de France" as an "imagetext" may also be viewed as a case study, making a contribution to the broader area of research into modes of reception of illustrated books in the 18th century. Publication abstract
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