news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051021/ap_on_re_eu/france_gilding_history
AP France Orders Positive Spin on Colonialism By ELAINE GANLEY, Associated Press Writer 10 minutes ago PARIS - France, grappling for decades with its colonial past, has passed a law to put an upbeat spin on a painful era, making it mandatory to ens hrine in textbooks the country's "positive role" in its far-flung coloni es.
But the law is stirring anger among historians and passions in places lik e Algeria, which gained independence in a brutal conflict. Critics accus e France of trying to gild an inglorious colonial past with an "official history." At issue is language in the law stipulating that "school programs recogni ze in particular the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa." Deputies of the conservative governing party passed the law in February, but it has only recently come under public scrutiny after being denounce d at an annual meeting of historians and in a history professors' petiti on.
President Jacques Chirac has called the law a "big screw-up," newspapers quoted aides as saying. E ducation Minister Gilles de Robien said this week that textbooks would n ot be changed. But the law's detractors want it stricken from the books something the minister says only parliament can do. The measure is one article in a law recognizing the "national contributio n" of French citizens who lived in the colonies before independence. It is aimed, above all, at recognizing the French who lived in Algeria and were forced to flee, and Algerians who fought on the side of France. Unlike other colonies, Algeria, the most prized conquest, was considered an integral part of France just like Normandy. It was only after a bru tal eight-year independence war that the French department in North Afri ca became a nation in 1962, after 132 years of occupation. Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has equated the law with "mental blindness" and said it smacks of revisionism. The Algerian Parliament ha s called it a "grave precedent." The friction comes as France and Algeria work to put years of rocky ties behind them with a friendship treaty to be signed this year. "Morally, the law is shameful," said University of Paris history professo r Claude Liauzu, who was behind the petition, "and it discredits France overseas." France was once a vast empire, including large holdings in Indo-China and Africa. However, France suffered ignominious defeats in Indo-China and Algeria. P aris only called the Algerian conflict a "war" in 1999. Throughout the f ighting, and for decades thereafter, France had referred only to operati ons there to "maintain order." In colonial times, French textbooks typically depicted the French presenc e in the colonies as that of benevolent enlightenment, with a clear miss ion to civilize. The newspaper Liberation this week published drawings from "France Overse as," an illustrated colonial Atlas of 1931 that showed "before" and "aft er" drawings, one a sketch of Africans cooking and eating another human being, the second a school house on a well-manicured street with a Frenc h flag flying overhead. The Association of History and Geography Professors has asked that politi cians "end the practice of manipulating history" and abrogate the law. The separate petition by history professors gathered 1,000 signatures in three weeks, said Liauzu. "They say the law won't be applied but it's up to lawmakers to cancel it." Beyond the real concerns over the political manipulation of historic even ts, there is another danger of falsely misrepresenting French colonizati on, Liauzu said. "France is a country profoundly marked by immigration" with the majority of French from immigrant stock, Liauzu said. By failing to tell the trut h, children of today's immigrants "are deprived of any past."
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