J-01. Keeping up with the media circus.

Only four and a half years since Prime Minister Raffarin commissioned a report into the viability of an immigraion resource centre/museum the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration opens its doors tomorrow. And after a long period when only a tiny handful of people seemed to have heard of it suddenly it is headline news. There have been several articles in Le Monde, including an interview by Laetitia van Eckhout with Jacques Toubon, which cut straight to the heart of the matter:

Ce projet est-il encore porté, soutenu par le pouvoir actuel ? Le jour de son ouverture, la Cité ne sera pas officiellement inaugurée, ni par Nicolas Sarkozy ni par le ministre de l’immigration, Brice Hortefeux.

Ma préoccupation, ma priorité est d’ouvrir la Cité, de la faire vivre. En faire un événement politique m’importe peu. Mon souhait est que la Cité accrédite son propre message et qu’on ne lui en impose pas un. L’histoire a une force en elle-même qu’il faut absolument protéger. Ce faisant, quelle que soit l’apparence du discours politique aujourd’hui, je ne pense pas qu’ait disparu cette idée que la France est une société de diversité. Il est certain que le discours actuel insiste davantage sur l’idée de fermeture que sur celle d’ouverture. A entendre Nicolas Sarkozy devant les Nations unies, il semble néanmoins qu’il y ait davantage une continuité qu’une rupture avec les années Chirac, sur tous ces sujets concernant les valeurs fondamentales. En tout cas, depuis l’installation du nouveau gouvernement, je n’ai rencontré aucune difficulté, ni explicitement ni implicitement.

I can’t be the only person who finds it hard to believe a politician when he says “I’m not interested in making a political event of it”. I also find the idea that “history has a force of its own which must be protected” strange, as I have whenever Toubon has used the discourse about a “duty of history” or reprsenting “the whole of history” on the numerous occasions when I’ve heard him speak or read his interviews. All sorts of theorists of historiography, from Barthes to Hayden White via Foucault have shown precisely how this naturalization/autonomization of the discourse of history is used to disguise its mythological (in the Barthesian sense) function. History, very simply, does not have a ‘force of its own’ because as a discourse it does not exist outside of the mediation of historians in a specific political context. Wouldn’t it be more intellectually honest to admit this, not least because it is this idea of the autonomous realm of national history that was for so long responsible for excluding all sorts of subordinate narratives?

But I digress. The main point is that the Cité is currently everywhere. On France Culture this morning (thanks Franziska), in the press, everywhere. And trying to keep up with the publicity at the same time as writing an article and finishing two chapters by Monday is proving a bit much (not least since I can’t access Le Monde on my new server. grr). So apologies if the coverage on this site is not as comprehensive as it might be. But I am off to Paris tomorrow, armed with camera and laptop and will do what I can to record my impressions here. Even if you’ll have to look elsewhere for everyone else’s.

Explore posts in the same categories: French politics, Museums