Agat Films / France 3
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DOCUMENTARY – Face our past to shed light on our present. France 3 is broadcasting this Monday, October 4 a documentary in three episodes, entitled Colonization, a French story, and which The HuffPost is a partner.
Directed by Hugues Nancy, it tells more than 100 years of our history, from 1830 to 1945, during which France led an unprecedented expansion in Africa and Asia. Carried out in the name of “progress” and of the “civilizing mission” they say at the time, this conquest was an extremely violent and murderous adventure.
In three hours, the documentary retraces chronologically the stages of the colonial conquest: from its starting point – motivated by the challenges of geopolitical competition between the great European powers, rich and armed out of the industrial revolution – to the beginnings of its collapse accelerated by the WWII, going through its peak during the Roaring Twenties.
Resistance to colonization
Throughout the story, Chloé Réjon’s voice-over focuses on giving a voice to the colonizers as much as to the colonized. “Often, the story is only told from the point of view of the colonizer”, explains the HuffPost the director Hugues Nancy. “But there was very strong resistance from the start. We wanted to tell these positions and these challenges in the context of the time, without a posteriori judgment. ”
To do this, the three episodes evoke nearly twenty figures among those who resisted in the colonies, in Morocco, Benin, Indochina, Syria or Madagascar. “This story has long been silenced in France, because it did not correspond to the speech of the Republic at the time. In public opinion, we never knew that there had been such resistance and such fights and massacres to stifle them ”, continues the author.
Viewers will thus discover the faces – in sublime photo archives – of the resistant Samory Touré in West Africa in 1893, of the independentist Phan Boi Chau in Indochina in 1908 or of Abdelkrim El Khattabi in Morocco at the beginning of the 1920s. , against whom France will send Marshal Pétain and 200,000 soldiers to the Moroccan Rif to put down the revolt. “It was a real war, obviously murderous and destructive for the civilian populations”, adds Hugues Nancy.
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Agat Films / France 3
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Getting out of collective denial
“In all, these hundreds of thousands of people were killed during colonization and it is time to look this past in the face” for the director, who intends to “get out of collective denial” so that all French people can appropriate this story. and perhaps “find a part of pride”. Between the “pink legend” (of the color of the territories of the empire on the world maps of the schoolchildren) of the “blessed time of the colonies” and the “black legend” of “the immorality of the very idea of colonization” , the documentary filmmaker is convinced that looking our past face to face will “get us out of this opposition”. And also to shed light on the current fractures in our society.
In view of what is at stake, why has it taken so long to see a documentary of this richness arriving for “the first time” on public service television? For Hugues Nancy, who worked for two years at the request of France 3 and with the help of historian Marc Ferro, the explanation is twofold. It is only recently that “archival sources have found reels from the 19th century and digitization has brought back old films”, enough to tell this period in pictures on television.
But technique is not everything. “There is obviously also a political reason”, concludes the director. “It is very difficult to confront this reality because it is a dark part of our history. For a long time, we wanted to make people believe that there was a part of grandiose and power in colonization. It took a long time to face up to it and take responsibility for that ”.
The documentary series Colonization, a French story, in three 60-minute episodes, is broadcast this Monday, October 4 on France 3 and available in replay on France.tv.
See also on The HuffPost: From Algeria to Morocco, colonization also hid a large sex market
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