France's misplaced Empires brings jointly ten essays that jointly examine the old, cultural, and political legacies of French colonialism and, in particular, the endings of the French empire(s). Combining analyses of 3 "lost" territories (Canada, India, and Saint Dominigue) of the "first" French colonial empire, that of the Ancien Regime, with investigations of the decolonization of the "new" colonies of the "second" French in a foreign country empire (specifically in North Africa), the essays offered right here examine the methods in whicih colonial loss has been absorbed and narrativized inside of French tradition and society, and the way nostalgia for that earlier has performed a basic function in shaping French colonial discourses and thoughts. starting with the Haitian Revolution and its historicization throughout the 1820s and finishing with an exam of the "postcolonial" republic on the finish of the 20 th century, the chronological constitution of the amount serves to bare the level to which the stories of territorial loss were sustained all through French colonial heritage and stay obvious in present metropolitan representations and thoughts of empire.
In studying the durability of those tropes of loss and nostalgia, and their significance in shaping France's identification as a colonial strength either in the course of and after sessions of colonization, France's misplaced Empires finds a uncomplicated premise: it isn't easily winning conquest which creates a self-validating colonial discourse; failure can achieve this too. certainly, the pervasive and tenacious nostalgia for prior colonial glories, variously pointed out by means of the members to this quantity, means that, for a few, the emotional attachment to France's colonies has no longer waned and remians this day because it used to be in nineteenth-century France.