Opened in 2007, the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration has taken tentative steps at poking holes at the French republican ideal. It is also a welcome contrast with the Paris grands projets and major cultural destinations. The Museum’s narrative - which highlights immigrant experiences in France - distinguishes itself from other Parisian museums (revolution, revolution, liberté, fraternité, egalité!) by foregrounding the long history of immigration to modern France (Italy, Poland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, South America, Vietnam, and sub-Saharan Africa). This in itself is a disruption of the very notion of A French identity rooted in common ideals without difference. In various parts of the exhibit, the museum even attempts to question state regulation of immigration, and the impacts of demanding increasingly excessive levels of documentation and state control of the bodies of status and non-status immigrants.
Equally compelling is the side script detailing the postwar urban renewal projects and the expansion of high-rise apartment blocks on the Parisian periphery through comprehensive housing programmes, and the construction of the (in)famous HLMs. (The current temporary exhibit, by Patrick Zachmann, is a fascinating overview of his past 20 years of photography of the everyday life in the banlieue, which forces the viewer to questions popular representations of life in the French ‘burbs. Zachmann’s exhibit is also a wonderful juxtaposition of the stigmatizing code visual of life in the immigrant, working class suburbs, such as Champigny-sur-Marne, circa 1950, which led to the ambitious programme for constructing eight new towns)
The importance of the built environment, however, is not only contained within the Museum walls. La Cité is housed in a building that was part of the International Colonial Exposition of 1931. As the Museum’s audio-guide tells you, after the expo, the building, and especially the grand hall depicting French contributions to the world (travail, égalité, etc), was used to host various social and diplomatic events. However, disappointingly, the visitor is told very little beyond the architectural history of the building: the bizarre and brutal nature of the colonial exhibits (importing villages for display), colonial ideas of superiority represented in the murals in the main room, are not mentioned. In other words the messy, and ugly colonial underpinnings of the building, and the ideas represented in its frescos, architecture, and purpose, remains hors-texte. A (post) colonial défrichage is left to the viewer. Considering that many visitors are unequipped to decipher these complex meanings, more was needed here. Even some additional information on the nature of the colonial exhibits would point to the nasty nature of colonialism.
Perhaps this silence is less about the museum that about the state of politics. The absence of this critical view of the colonial period is reinforced by the fact that no major national politician was present at the opening of the Museum. Their ambivalence to some of the ideas and issues gingerly addressed in the Cité denotes an appalling unwillingness by the political elite to confront their colonial history. No great surprise, I guess, where, in face of ongoing questions about France’s colonial past, President Sarko recently argued that France “should be proud of its past and stop this nonsense about repentance.” Perhaps, hopefully, la Cité is a
small-work-in-progress-rock being thrown at the wall of chauvinist republicanism.
Link:
La Cité: colloquims and articles
