Presentation Fields of research Members of the centre Publications Teaching Fellows Guests Ongoing research Mass media Online resources News update

 

Michel Wieviorka

Peut-on encore chanter la douce France ? Etre français hier, aujourd'hui, demain

• Les entretiens d'Auxerre 2006
  Michel Wieviorka (dir.),
  La Tour d'Aigues, Editions de L'Aube, mai 2007
  
  
  
  
  
  Can we still sing the song 'sweet France' ? Being French, yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Auxerre Conference, 2006.
  Can we still sing about 'sweet France' in the words of the song that we grew up with? Is this 'dear country of my childhood?' still so sweet? Present day France no longer deludes itself with these carefree airs. It is a country in crisis, haunted by unemployment and the riots in the suburbs; threatened by economic decline, where national identity has to confront the emergence of ethnic communities and where a powerful orator from the extreme right reached the second round of the presidential elections. It is a country which has difficulty in facing up to its colonial past and which passes dubious and contested laws of remembrance. Finally, it is a country in which the institutions seem to be incapable of responding to the questions raised by the globalisation of trade and migratory flows. Instead of delighting in this rather gloomy picture, in the words of Michel Wieviorka, the editor of this volume, 'it is more appropriate to consider whether our country is capable, and in what conditions, of projecting itself into the future by examining the way in which we confront our past, and by distinguishing between the aspects which belong to the realm of crisis, a state of tension and of fear and those which are part of the changes likely to give or to give back some sweetness to our country, to all its inhabitants and to our image in the world'.

News