{"id":10984,"date":"2010-12-22T22:23:42","date_gmt":"2010-12-22T22:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10984"},"modified":"2010-12-31T20:03:25","modified_gmt":"2010-12-31T20:03:25","slug":"les-enfants-de-la-colonie-les-metis-de-l%e2%80%99empire-francais-entre-sujetion-et-citoyennete-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10984","title":{"rendered":"Les Enfants de la colonie: Les m\u00e9tis de l\u2019Empire fran\u00e7ais entre suj\u00e9tion et citoyennet\u00e9 [Book Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les Enfants de la colonie: Les m\u00e9tis de l\u2019Empire fran\u00e7ais entre suj\u00e9tion et citoyennet\u00e9 [Book Review<\/a><\/em><\/strong>]<\/p>\n

H-France Review<\/a>\u00a0(Society for French Historical Studies)
\nVolume 8, Number 162 (November 2008)
\npages 654-657<\/p>\n

Marie-Paule Ha<\/a><\/strong>
\nThe University of Hong Kong<\/em><\/p>\n

Emmanuelle Saada<\/a>, Les Enfants de la colonie: Les m\u00e9tis de l\u2019Empire fran\u00e7ais entre suj\u00e9tion et citoyennet\u00e9<\/a><\/em>. Paris: Editions de la D\u00e9couverte, 2007. 335 pp. Notes and bibliography. 24\u20ac. ISBN 978-2-7071-3982-5.<\/p>\n

While the question of m\u00e9tissage<\/em> has in the last two decades generated a significant volume of scholarly works from a diverse range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, Emmanuelle Saada\u2019s monograph, which grew out of her 2001 doctoral dissertation at the \u00c9cole des Hautes \u00c9tudes en Sciences Sociales<\/a>, is quite unique in that it provides the first systematic and in-depth investigation of the judicial aspects of what was referred to as \u201cla question m\u00e9tisse.\u201d[1] Drawing on a wide array of materials ranging from archival and juridical sources to works from legal studies, history, anthropology and sociology, the author reconstructs the highly complex and tortuous trajectory that transformed the legal status of the empire\u2019s m\u00e9tis<\/em> from that of native subjects to being French citizens during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Given the book\u2019s focus, the term \u201cm\u00e9tis\u201d in Les Enfants de la colonie<\/em> is used to refer not to mixed-race children in general, but to the m\u00e9tis non reconnus<\/em>, that is, those born out of wedlock that had not been legally recognized by their European fathers and were abandoned by them. As a result, this group of m\u00e9tis<\/em> was given by default the status of native subjects. It was the plight of this particular category of illegitimate and racially mixed progeny of European men that became the object of the interventions of administrators, philanthropists and legal professionals in the colonies.<\/p>\n

The starting point of Saada\u2019s investigation of \u201cthe m\u00e9tis<\/em> problem\u201d is the 8 November 1928 decree which made it possible for the m\u00e9tis non reconnus<\/em> born in Indochina<\/a> to be granted French citizenship if one of their parents, legally unknown, could be presumed to be of \u201cFrench race.\u201d According to the decree, this presumption could be established \u201cpar tous les moyens,\u201d which include \u201cle nom que porte l\u2019enfant, le fait qu\u2019il a re\u00e7u une formation, une \u00e9ducation et une culture fran\u00e7aises, sa situation dans la soci\u00e9t\u00e9\u201d (p.13). The momentous interest of this legal text was twofold. On the one hand, it constituted the first occurrence of the word \u201crace\u201d in French legislation. On the other hand, the term was deployed not for an exclusive purpose, but rather to justify the integration of certain subjects of the empire in French citizenry…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Les Enfants de la colonie: Les m\u00e9tis de l\u2019Empire fran\u00e7ais entre suj\u00e9tion et citoyennet\u00e9 [Book Review] H-France Review\u00a0(Society for French Historical Studies) Volume 8, Number 162 (November 2008) pages 654-657 Marie-Paule Ha The University of Hong Kong Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie: Les m\u00e9tis de l\u2019Empire fran\u00e7ais entre suj\u00e9tion et citoyennet\u00e9. Paris: Editions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,5,28,459,1467,8,26],"tags":[4790,96,4789,4788],"class_list":["post-10984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-europe","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-politics","tag-emmanuelle-saada","tag-france","tag-h-france-review","tag-marie-paule-ha"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}