“Imagining The Trans-Mediterranean Republic: Algeria, Republicanism and The Ideological Origins of The French Imperial Nation-State, 1848-1870" (original) (raw)
2014, French Historical Studies, vol. 37, no. 2
The making of the French colonial republic in the nineteenth century has often been examined primarily as a metropolitan-centered enterprise, dictating a history focused on Parisian politicians and French elites that excludes the peripheral influences of the settler community. This article looks at the often marginalized dialogue between metropolitan republicans and Algerian activists that grew up during the Second Empire, revisiting an important moment in the making of France’s “modern” republican democracy. Through an examination of the Algerian newspapers and publications, it assess the role that Algerian public opinion played in the “republican renaissance” of the 1860s, detailing how Algerian polemicists consciously tailored the ideological tenets espoused by moderate republicans on the continent to fit the contours of colonial society to elaborate a brand of republican colonialism that would, in time, provide the ideological basis for the colonial republic. In placing nineteenth-century French political history in a trans-Mediterranean framework, this article challenges the customary history of hexagonal France, indicating how Algerian activists encouraged a re-thinking of the French nation and citizenship that would, in time, encourage the conception of a French imperial nation-state supported under the Third Republic.
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