The future of the nation foretold in its museums

The completion of the new Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM) in Marseilles in June 1913, the year the city was named ‘Capitale européenne de la culture’, highlights a national project begun at the start of the millennium that seeks to display a new France for a new age. I will not use the discredited term ‘national identity’. The debacle of President Sarkozy’s attempt to depict this idea in a museum of national history has, I hope, put paid to that foolish ideology (Bancel and Lebovics, 2011). No one has just one identity; we are who we are in ever-changing contexts. How then can a modern and complex nation of nearly 65 million be constrained in such a straitjacket? But we can follow the clashes, stand-offs and convergences among policymakers – coming as they do from the whole spectrum of French public life – about the appropriate identity stories to tell in the visual narratives found in France’s new musées de la société built for the new millennium (Calhoun, 1994).

The stories put forward in these museums – which are not, in the first instance, about art, but about people – raise and respond to what Germans call Schicksalfragen – questions about the fate of the nation. Taken together – for they are, after all, projects of the leaders of the political class – they ask: is it possible, or even desirable, today to tell a single and teleological national narrative – the roman national of the patriot-historians of the Third Republic? What did immigrants contribute to the making of today’s nation? What is the relationship of postcolonial France with its one-time colonial empire? How did biological and cultural evolution combine to make human societies? And now, with the opening of the MUCEM, how did, and how do, French vernacular cultures relate to those of Europe and the Mediterranean world?

I shall argue that an exceptionally rich and revelatory way of understanding the society-wide debates about this complex of questions is to follow how the stories that the new museums tell – or the disagreements about what stories they ought to tell – are responses to them. For these questions concern matters of high state policy, international economic interests, cultural outreach, the relations of regions to capitals, tourism, and indeed claims about what it means to be French today. For what better location than a museum to find all these factors – cultural, societal, economic, political, and transnational – bought together in symptomatic displays. With their carefully crafted permanent and changing exhibitions, their often rich websites, their theatrical decor, and their very architecture the new French musées de la société are – if not André Malraux’s cathedrals of our time – perhaps the Gesamtkunstwerke of our millennium.

The museums’ exhibits can be legible, if, as Pierre Bourdieu has taught us, we have learnt the codes (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1966). The closing (2009) and refashioning of the Musée de l’Homme (re-opening 2014), the dedication of the Musée du Quai Branly (2006), the opening of the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (2007), President Sarkozy’s attempt to found a museum of national history (2007–12), and the formal opening of the new museum of vernacular cultures of the Mediterranean in Marseilles on 7 June 2013 – each contribute to the shaping of a new local, national, European and global story about France for both the French and the world to see. To begin the decoding process, let me take you for a very brief visit to each of these new institutions. After that I will suggest how we might combine their contributions to the project of a France in the new millennium (Lebovics, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010).

Let us start in Paris at Jean Nouvel’s striking museum on the Seine at the Quai Branly. The structure of the Musée du Quai Branly follows the bend of the river. Its external architecture, along with the exotic garden surrounding it, hints at the themes of old-fashioned ‘primitivism’ developed inside. Beginning with the curved architecture, and continuing inside, Nouvel took the snake as his key motif. It is pervasive, if sometimes hidden in the museum’s jungle-like darkness. Here the reader should understand the word ‘primitivism’ to be the name mid-twentieth-century art historians gave to the ways modern Western artists incorporated aboriginal artistic themes and motifs into their work (Goldwater, 1938; Rubin and Vanedoe, 1984; Martin, 1989). ¹ The artistic gesture echoes the surrealist search for what is more deeply psychological and cultural in the art of aboriginal peoples, who are supposedly better in touch with their unconscious than we, the ‘civilised’, are. Inside the museum, handsome objects from formerly colonised cultures are displayed in glass cases with all the minimalist museology and hushed reverence of the most up-to-date museum of modern art.

But the Musée du Quai Branly was meant to be more than an aesthetic tribute to the art of the global South. President Jacques Chirac, who had the museum built, wanted to make it a monument to honour ‘once despised’ peoples, as he put it in his address at the opening – a marker that France has reached ‘postcoloniality’ (Chirac, 2006). Severe critics, mostly anthropologists, spoke of the museum as a kind of neutron bomb – the objects remain intact but the people are gone. Let me confess that I agree with the commentators who wanted to know more about the societies than what seemed to be presented as their mimeses in the displays (Clifford, 2007) Nevertheless, we are left with the haunting conundrum that Lévi-Strauss’s conferring his imprimatur on the Quai Branly project evokes: if contemporary anthropologists no longer naively read a people’s culture from their artefacts, are we not free to show these cultural objects without a story, as it were, as things of beauty created in that society the way the Louvre would show an uncontexted Renaissance Madonna and Child or the Pompidou Museum would show a Jackson Pollack drip painting, ² unless we accept that, contrary to the canon of aesthetic modernism, no work of art is an island, sufficient unto itself? In this case, as William Truettner has proposed, a new episteme of art understood in its own particular world and the understanding of the world deepened by art is how we can transcend the conundrum presented to visitors by the Musée du Quai Branly (Truettner, 1997).

The museum dedicated to art from the former colonial world was inaugurated in 2006. A year later the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI) opened its doors. This was not a museum mandated by a President of the Republic, but rather the good faith project of mostly left-leaning intellectuals to honour a segment of the population that had been increasingly integrated into society and yet increasingly stigmatised. On the one hand, the immigration museum gives a largely optimistic, if often troubled, account of the successful integration over the last two centuries of immigrants to France. On the other, there are not many exhibits that point to the general acceptance of a culturally diverse France. Moreover, the newly elected President Sarkozy and members of his government boycotted its official opening; and to date few ordinary citizens have visited it. The museum’s mixed message – uncertain integration into the cultural landscape and official denigration – thus mirrored the social situation in France of the immigrants and their French offspring from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. The Socialist government, which came to power in 2012, has been lavishing attention and funds on the CNHI, beginning by renaming it the Musée de l’Histoire d’Immigration, promoting it to full museum status, administratively equal to the other great Paris museums, and increasing its budget. That the musées de la société in question are cultural battlefields is well evidenced in the changing fortunes of the immigration museum. These dramatic shifts at the site of the official story of the meaning and place of immigrants in the making of today’s France appear to repeat visitors to be a kind of stage set with changing tableaux showing the immigrants in different picture stories.

The Musée de l’Homme, in its mid-1930s incarnation, had been the Popular Front’s attempt to mitigate the power relations of colonialism by recasting its collection as objects of scientific enquiry. With the end of French colonialism in the early 1960s, this ethnographic museum of societies of the South seemed to many less relevant to the story of the metropolitan nation. Visitor numbers declined, as did its upkeep. Finally, in 2009, it was closed and resituated in the constellation of musées de la société displaying new messages about the past and future of the nation. Bereft of most of its cultural treasures, which went largely to the Quai Branly, ³ in 2015 it will reopen as a museum telling an up-to-date scientific tale of the long biological and cultural history of humankind. How the planners balance and intertwine the biological and cultural themes will be interesting to see. In the light of the high drama in the world’s universities about the relative weight of each paradigm in explaining human action, the Musée de l’Homme will make an important contribution to an ongoing debate about how we explain the dynamics of both the long-past and the contemporary history of France and of humankind.

When Nicolas Sarkozy ran for the presidency of the Republic in 2007 he announced his intention of creating a museum dedicated to the victories and heroes of France’s past. He saw the Maison de l’Histoire de France as his presidential museum in the same way as the Pompidou Museum and the Quai Branly were created by his predecessors. This journal, whose splendid 25 years of publication we celebrated in June 2013 in Marseilles, published the article that Nicolas Bancel and I wrote about the planning history of this institution (Bancel and Lebovics, 2011). Nicolas and I were very pleased that French Cultural Studies agreed to publish our historical account of a museum that did not yet exist. Fortunately, our account was validated in early 2013 by the complete cancellation of the project as one of the first acts of the new government.

But an event that did not happen can bear as powerful a message as something that did. First, early in the planning, scholars strongly criticised this one-dimensional vision of the history of France (De Cock et al., 2008; Konareé and Boilley, 2008). Then trade unionists at the National Archives’ Hôtel de Soubise, the planned home of the new history museum, blockaded the site for over six months. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the national elections that removed President Sarkozy’s majority in the Assemblée nationale, the plan to put the museum at the head of an elaborate organisational network subsuming major historical museums around the nation was cancelled (Le Monde, 2012). And not long afterwards a brief decree issued on Christmas Eve 2012, and signed by the minister of culture Aurélie Filippetti, the minister of economy and finance, Pierre Moscovici, and the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, declared the ‘dissolution de la Maison de l’histoire de France’ (Décret, 2012). Finally, when I accessed the museum’s website on 7 January and again on 5 July 2013 I read, ‘Suite à la dissolution de la Maison de l’histoire de France, son site internet n’est plus accessible au public.’ ⁴ The project is now literally invisible, but it leaves many important traces.

Was the dissolution of the history museum a political act, as some conservative critics claimed? The government changed and public policy priorities changed; that is how politics works. But beginning with his electoral campaign, when Nicolas Sarkozy announced his plan for a museum that would tell the correct story of how the national identity came into being, was not the Maison de l’Histoire de France a political project? Are not all museums, especially state museums in France, in important ways political projects – that is, about how power works in society?

With leading intellectuals, workers, and – with the elections – the legislators of the nation uniting to kill an attempt to construct a reactionary and tendentious vision of France, ‘the official story’ – the demise before its birth of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential museum of great heroes and political glories –makes a strong positive statement both by and about the many in France who want to create a culturally rich, inclusive and forward-looking nation.

Finally, we make our last stop at the new museum on the Vieux Port in Marseilles, the MUCEM. In many ways, it is still embryonic, but we can mention the one or two things we know about it already. As the 1980s became the 1990s, and the museum of regional folklore, the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires located in the Bois de Boulogne received ever fewer visitors, planning began to close its doors and remove its collection to a new setting. In the spirit of cultural decentralisation prevalent at the turn of the millennium, Marseilles was finally identified as a possible new site. Moreover the nation’s enhanced role as a power in the region was also at stake.

France had actively participated in the EU initiative of 1995, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, often referred to as the Barcelona Process, to link its members politically, economically and culturally with non-member nations of the Mediterranean area. Always well-attuned to opportunities to put France’s abundance of cultural capital to good use – especially to achieve warmer relations with lands bordering the southern Mediterranean – policymakers pressed forward with the plan to expand the scope of the new institution dedicated to popular cultures beyond France to the lands to the nation’s south and south-east. In 2005 the French Mediterranean museum formalised the project by adding ‘European’ to its title.

In the first half-decade of the millennium progress on realising the Marseilles museum project slowed down. Local and regional authorities, whose cooperation and budgetary contributions were essential, were not sure that the museum the Parisians were sending them was the best possible gift to a city with so many pressing social concerns to address. The museum in Marseilles remained a marginal project – that is, until the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as President of the Republic in 2007. Just as this energetic man had a plan for displaying the successive manifestations of the eternal essence of the nation in a history museum, he also came to office with an idea for a new use for the MUCEM. It would be the cultural face of his plan for a French-led Mediterranean Union. The old EU scheme of better connections, perhaps playing a role in aiding development and even fostering peace in a neighbouring region, had borne little fruit. Accordingly, on 20 December 2007, President Sarkozy, ever the great proposer of great projects, undertook to re-create the old Roman mare nostrum, with France of course representing the possessive pronoun nostrum.

He entrusted the project to his special advisor and principal speechwriter, Henry Guaino. Perhaps Guaino is better known as the brain behind the notorious ‘discours de Dakar’ (Konareé and Boilley, 2008), the appropriation of Republican heroes like Jaurès for the nationalist right, and the Guy Môquet gambit. Moreover, we must also credit him with giving political heft to the campaigns to discredit the spirit of May ’68 and to end the supposed discourse of repentance about France’s colonial past. So the Marseilles museum was swept up in this new French plan, especially its budget.

But Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany took strong exception to the Sarkozy proposal of a revised Mediterranean Union now under French guidance. On 3 March of 2008, at a private meeting, the German Chancellor pointed out to the French President that regional unions outside the purview of the European Community, moreover ones excluding some members of the community, could be divisive, and in any case violated the spirit of the Community’s Barcelona Process. Other members of the EU signalled their opposition to the French scheme. Under these diplomatic pressures, the Sarkozyian idea was jettisoned. On 13 July 2008 a new agreement encompassing 47 nations – all 27 EU members, plus North African and Balkan states and Turkey – united in a reaffirmed diplomatic friendship, now under the name Union for the Mediterranean (Joint Declaration of Paris Summit, 2013). Like the failure of the plan to erect a museum of French history to advance a domestic political agenda, a project for a coup in international diplomacy had to yield to a more pluralist, collaborative and open-ended project for displaying the varieties of cultural life in the Mediterranean region. In an important way – on both domestic and international levels – it was a case of le même combat.

The progression of the naming of the Marseilles museum is interesting to follow. The old Paris museum of ‘popular traditions’ – note, not regional cultures – was replaced by one dedicated to the popular cultures, now labelled ‘civilisations’ of near neighbours, and then most of Europe and much of the Middle East, including Turkey. The MUCEM’s first planning director, Michel Colardelle, a man who in the past had worked closely with Jack Lang, had insisted on the word ‘civilisations’ in the title to assert the parity of the cultures of the South with the grand ‘civilisation’ ruled from Paris. This specialist in European archaeology, who had first proposed the Mediterranean museum and had championed its construction since 1999, resisted the political instrumentalisation of his museum by the new President. One morning in 2009 he received a telephone call from the Élysée Palace informing him of his transfer to a new job. He was immediately to proceed to his new position as head of the Direction régionale des Affaires culturelles of – Guyana. He was replaced as head of the MUCEM by a trusted (by the Sarkozy government) administrator, Bruno Suzzarelli.

With the political baggage of the last government for the most part tossed overboard, we may soon be able to see how the new MUCEM further develops its theme of cultural circulation, mutual cultural respect and critical enquiry, ⁵ especially about the lands bordering the Mediterranean, which, as its planned layout and future exhibition schedule suggests, will again be its main focus.

Let me conclude, then, by braiding the strands of the stories that the museums tell into the cable that is being pulled in many directions to move the nation towards its uncertain future. In the repositioned Museum de l’Homme we shall read an official (according to the staff of the Museum of Natural History) understanding of how biological evolution and culture interacted to create modern humankind, which includes, of course, French humanity. The establishment of the immigration museum marks the institutional recognition that France is a nation, if not made by immigrants, at least with many in its population. To be sure, it is more about how immigrants became French than how France integrated the changes the new settlers brought with them. But – as evidenced since 2012 by the ‘refounding’ of the institution at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes – the Socialist government wants to make more visible the contributions of immigrants to French history. ⁶ The episode of the aborted Sarkozy museum of French ‘identity’, the museum that never existed, is actually taking an important next step. Through the storm of intellectual revulsion its plan to tell the story of France evoked, and then the complete dissolution of that desperate gambit of identity politics, the nation’s elite in effect accepted if not a fully pluralist story of France, at least a multifaceted one. The immigration museum made visible, and celebrated, the millions of the nation who were not the fabled ‘Français de souche’. The sharp rejection of a museum of history that was premised on the idea that there was, and is, only one way to be French further validated the vision of a more plural past, present and future.

‘La plus grande France’ disappeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the dissolution of imperialism, and the linked collapse of the fourth attempt at Republican rule, France had to face the necessity of beginning the painful process of reinventing itself as a nation framed primarily by its ties to Europe and its near neighbours around the Mediterranean. Except for the publications of a few historians and literary scholars, ‘post-empire’ was not a theme of much public discussion in the decades until the 1990s. The creation of the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006 marked an important stage towards a postcolonial France. Despite its many flaws, not least of which was its anti-historical posture, the building of the Quai Branly Museum nevertheless put an aspect of the era of colonialism on display. Still too sensitive for a fully historical integration into the national story, a highly aestheticised snapshot of the colonial situation is what visitors are given to see.

And now, mostly recently, we come to Marseilles, where we held our celebration of 25 years of French Cultural Studies. The Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée further enriches the story of the new France. Here are celebrated the folk and vernacular cultures of France and the peoples living around the shores of the Mediterranean as well as other European populations. It is also important to note the concrete act of pluralism in locating France’s first national museum located outside Paris in this diverse city.

Architect Rudy Ricciotti has designed a striking building on a spit of land at the entrance to the port that has linked so many places in the South to metropolitan France. It is a great cube of dark glass and black filigreed concrete designed to protect what is inside from the bright sun and strong winds of the South. But the building on Marseilles harbour signals another connection: when, at a distance, we observe the imprint of the structure against the bright blue sky, are we not reminded of the form of the massive black stone of the Kaaba in Mecca, where pilgrims from all over the world come in peace and unity?

I hope our perhaps too brisk march through the new museums of the millennium challenges the old modernist idea that culture shelters us from an ugly world. Cultural policy is politics, and politics is beholden to culture for its contexts, its reach and, often, its successes and failures.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The MUCEM, a black cube silhouetted against the blue Mediterranean sky, with Marseilles Cathedral in the background. Photograph by the author.