The French Colonial Imagination : Writing the Indian Uprisings, 1857-1858, from Second Empire to Third Republic / Nicola Frith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Frith, Nicola, 1974- author.

Series:

After the empire

After the empire: the francophone world and postcolonial France

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French prose literature--19th century--History and criticism.

French prose literature.

Colonialism in literature.

Imperialism--Social aspects--France.

Imperialism.

Imperialism--Social aspects.

India--History--Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858.

India.

History.

France.

Physical Description:

vii, 217 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Lanham : Lexington Books, [2014]

Summary:

The Indian uprisings (1857-1858) against British rule in India are an iconic event within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Broadly viewed through British and Indian perspectives, The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance, as well as the possibility that France could undergo a colonial revival and reverse the devastating losses inflicted upon its former empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The extent to which the nineteenth-century French colonial imagination was shaped by memories of such defeats forms a primary concern of this monograph, revealing that France's colonial discourse was determined as much by its visions of the colonized "other" as by the dominance of their British rivals. For journalists, lobbyists, novelists, and historians wrtiting under Louis Napoleon's Second Empire and in the early Third Republic, the uprisings allowed them to speak out against the rapacity of British colonialism, while simultaneously constructing a competing colonial discourse to justify French expansion into North Africa and Southeast Asia. Standing at a crossroads between the "loss" of the Ancien Régime's empire and the Third Republic's ideological investment in overseas expansion, this understudied period of colonial history reveals the centrality of loss, fracture, and political emasculation as core preoccupations haunting French colonial discourse in its quest to regain cultural and ideological ascendancy over its greatest political enemy. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Beyond the Binary-Triangulating Colonial Discourse 1

2 A War of Words: The Politics of Nomenclature 27

3 Villains and Heroes: Ventriloquizing the "Revolutionary" 61

4 Massacring the Myth: Telling Tales of Revenge 99

5 Compensating for I'lnde perdue: France's "Civilizing Mission" 145.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780739180006

0739180002

OCLC:

868038600