Posted on 11/29/2005 1:09:44 PM PST by SmithL
PARIS -- France's parliament voted Tuesday to uphold a law that puts an upbeat spin on the country's painful colonial past, ignoring complaints from historians and the former French territory of Algeria.
The law, passed quietly this year, requires school textbooks to address France's "positive role" in its former colonies.
France's lower house, in a 183-94 vote, rejected an effort by the opposition Socialists to kill the law. Passage would have been unusual, since the effort to overturn the law came from the conservative government's political enemies.
The law has embarrassed conservative President Jacques Chirac and threatens to delay the signing of a friendship treaty between France and the North African nation of Algeria. France's one-time colonial jewel won independence in 1962 after a brutal eight-year conflict France only recently called a war.
Education Minister Gilles de Robien said last month that textbooks would not be changed, despite the law. However, the Socialists said the measure was offensive to former colonies and French citizens with roots there, and should be erased.
The debate comes on the heels of three weeks of unrest by youths in France's poor suburbs — many of them immigrants or of North African origin. The troubles were widely seen as a desperate cry for equality by a population shunted to the margins of mainstream society.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, head of the Socialist group in the National Assembly, the lower chamber, said the law was a political and educational aberration.
"Today we can repair this mistake, because it is a mistake," he said on France-Inter radio before the debate.
"Our history, if we want it to be shared by French citizens as a whole, must recognize both glorious achievements, but also the darker moments with lucidity, without there being an official history decided by parliamentarians."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Why are all former French colonies such unhappy places?
Does that 'colonial past' in include the muslim riots in France a few weeks ago...
Rwanda and Burundi were Belgian colonies.
I stand corrected.
Thank you
But . . .
http://www.afrol.com/articles/16082 http://www.guardian.co.uk/rwanda/story/0,14451,1188187,00.html http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=23212
The first step to a complete revision of history.
Welcome to Free Republic.
Some of the grimmest figures for infant mortality and life expectancy in the world are found in the former French colonies. For example, for infant mortality (per 1,000 births):
Mali...118
Niger...122.7
Djibouti...105
Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)...97.1
Compare Haiti (former French colony) with the Dominican Republic (former Spanish colony sharing the same island): Haiti's infant mortality rate is 74.4 vs. the Dominican Republic's 33.3.
What? No Vanity?
; )
Welcome to FR.
"Spoon-feeding a populace a sanitized history makes further learning impossible."
Like what newspapers do.
I don't know how anyone can take French historical scholarship seriously from now on.
Like what newspapers do.
I don't know how anyone can take French historical scholarship seriously from now on.
Like we ever did !
France had more Arab and Muslim colonies than the rest of the world combined.
I have an old atlas which gives population figures...I'm not sure of the exact date but they seem to be around 1910 (the US figures are for the 1910 census and they include the German empire, which disappeared after WWI). This is what they have for the various European colonial powers (population):
British Empire: 434,686,650
French colonies: 54,240,700
Dutch colonies: 38,000,000
Belgian Congo: 15,500,000
German colonies: 14,546,000
Portuguese colonies: 9,675,000
Italian colonies: 1,767,000
Spanish colonies: 276,000
Danish colonies: 143,143
They have separate figures for Great Britain and Ireland, and for the self-governing dominions like Canada, so the figure for the British Empire is probably just for the non-self-governing colonies like India. British India probably had a lot more Muslims than all of the French colonies combined.
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