6 - The Empire after the Empire: 1962–Present

Summary

France and its empire have continued to shape each other’s trajectories, longer after formal “decolonization.” Millions of people from the colonies migrated to France during the postwar economic boom. They and their descendants have helped turn France into a multicultural society. Some domains never decolonized at all and remain French national territory as Départements et Territoires d’Outre Mer (DOM-TOM). The republic has proved surprisingly tolerant of local political cultures, though most DOM-TOM remain far more economically dependent on the French state as national territories than they ever were as colonies. Yet none of the DOM-TOM appear to want full independence. In postcolonial Africa, policies known collectively as Françafrique have involved interference at the highest levels of postcolonial governance, substantial development aid, and an array of dubious business dealings. Françafrique made France a partner in genocide in Rwanda, and later required it to deal with some brutal postcolonial regimes fighting militant Islam in the Sahel. Independent Algeria essentially inherited and refined the colonial state, most violently in the civil war of the 1990s. The history of the French empire, to date, does not really have an end, as former colonizer and formerly colonized continue to contest its memory.