Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age

“How—and even whether—to preserve their once-homogeneous culture in today’s open world is one of France’s supreme challenges today. With five sharply-etched case studies of cultural conflict—from the world soccer cup to museums to the defense of the Larzac plateau—Herman Lebovics casts penetrating light on French struggles to establish who they are and who they want to be.”—Robert O. Paxton, author of Europe in the 20th Century

“Scholars have been talking for some time about the colonial ‘legacies’ of the postcolonial present. French scholars have only recently and tentatively entered that conversation. Bringing the Empire Back Home makes an analytic and political leap as it takes us to new terrain of insight and locations of connection. Herman Lebovics’s version of what counts as French history is compelling, powerful, sensible, and deep. In setting out the direct lines between decolonization in the l960s and the antiglobalization movements that followed, he traces what joined New Caledonian separatists and Larzac farmers, protests against the ‘postcolonial military-industrial complex’ and the rise of the radical right, the new regionalisms in France in the l970s and the folk hero Bové who smashed McDonald’s windows. He identifies how imperial and capitalist expansion have been challenged in forms of popular demonstration, ingenuity, and spectacle that have repeatedly called into question what the ‘Republic’ is, who has a right to decide its boundaries, and who has what rights in it today. This is a must read that redefines the tenor and terrain of postcolonial scholarship.”—Ann Laura Stoler, author of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things