The colonial divide French society through the prism of colonial heritage Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Sandrine Lemaire

Fifty years after the Indochinese defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the start of the Algerian War, France remains haunted by its colonial past, particularly by this complex relationship with the Other, yesterday indigenous, today "savage". Why such a situation, while other post-colonial societies in the West are working to come to terms with their overseas history?

This is the question that this book attempts to answer, in which Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire, starting from an investigation conducted in Toulouse – and presented here – decided to examine the contemporary extensions of this past through the different expressions of the colonial divide that is currently crossing French society. In this perspective, they have brought together the original contributions of specialists from various disciplines, who question the thousand ways in which colonial legacies are making their effects felt today: intercommunity relations, ghettoization of the suburbs, difficulties and blockages of integration, manipulation of memories, conception of national history, foreign policy, humanitarian action, place of the French Overseas Territories in the national imagination or debates on secularism and Islam in France...

The authors also show that the contemporary situation is not an identical reproduction of the "colonial time": it is made up of crossbreeding and intersections between practices resulting from colonization and contemporary issues. For the first time, an accessible work deals with French society as a postcolonial society and opens up new avenues of reflection.