Theorizing Race in Nineteenth-Century France: Music as Emblem of Identity

Abstract

Long before the postmodern and postcolonial preoccupation with hybridization, the impact of migrations and urban expansion, as well as the notion of Western culture as a product of the colonized and the colonizers, related concerns permeated notions of race and national identity in nineteenth-century France. Within French debates about race lay a deep-seated anxiety about the racialized Self as much as the racialized Other. While the French have wanted to believe in the Revolutionary notion of the Republic as "one and indivisible," 1 they have had to come to grips with a history characterized not by homogeneous coherence, but by invasions, conflict, and accommodation. Celts, Gauls, Romans, Franks, Southerners, and Northerners, the people and the nobility, colonized peoples and émigrés, each of these has formed part of the fabric of identity developed over the centuries, and yet each is the subject of intense ongoing controversy. Some French in the nineteenth century, particularly republicans, saw these cultural collisions as nourishing, inducing progress; others, especially those nostalgic for the Ancien Régime, insisted on certain continuities as responsible for "the genius of the race." Historians struggled with the transnational nature of peoples like the Celts who, living in northern Europe and southern Germany as well as France, raised questions about the relationship between race, culture, and nation. 2 Also difficult, colonial theorists had to acknowledge that colonialism, at least theoretically, necessarily involves reciprocal influences. 3 Underlying these concerns, nineteenthcentury French intellectuals sought to understand how their nation emerged from successive confrontations of Self and Other, difference and similarity, and how its hybrid people unsettled these binary oppositions over time through both resistance and assimilation. In the context of emerging nationalism, then, race was not only an imperialist construct and a product of colonial consciousness. The French were deeply concerned with who they were vis-à-vis their European neighbors, especially Germany. With the near-impossibility

Epistemology, African Scholarship in Human and Social Sciences and demands from African Societies

“…This does not however absolve them of many errors committed but should be acknowledged. Then came the missionaries with their civilizing mission and its epistemology, which can be summarize in the belief of Leroy-Beaulieu that the people who colonize the most are the leading people [92]. In this sense, Christian missionaries would only create knowledge that was globally biased toward ensuring the supremacy of the race of the people they represented.…”

Music Hall, Jigs and Strippers: English Low-Brow Music in French Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing

“…4 When it comes to music, then, England is surely the antithesis of France, the nation of Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Gounod, D'Indy, Massenet and Boieldieu; as Jann Pasler has noted, both Renan and Taine saw a love of the beautiful and the sublime as distinctively French traits, French musicians were proud of their superiority in musical lyricism, and the ideas of the French musical elite gradually became an internationally-recognized marker of good taste. 5 With this in mind, in music as in so many other ways in their long shared history, England therefore provided the French observer with an inverted mirror image of what it meant to be French and what was great about France. 6 Jane Fulcher has observed that in Third Republican France, 'music became a symbol within an internal struggle over conflicting notions of identity and the legitimate state', leading to deeply embattled ideological and political conflicts between factions in France.…”