Abstract :
In the years following 2000, French society finally started to address problematic issues emanating from its colonial past (massacres, slavery, and forced labor) and to question what it means to be a postcolonial nation. The discussion of such pointed and problematic subjects had for so long been repressed by successive French governments who feared civil unrest among France s postcolonial immigrant communities and who were often composed of and influenced by powerful and nostalgic ex-settler pressure groups. The concept of “postcolonialism” also challenges the fundamental ideals of the French Republic whereby citizens should meld into the dominant social norms of French society and renounce their respective individual history or culture. Members of the first generation of postcolonial immigrant groups were themselves unwilling and unable to evoke their own memories of the colonial period because of their low literacy levels, their fear of retribution in the form of expulsion, or because of the sheer material difficulties that they faced in their everyday lives
