France's Lost Empires (Electronic book text)

This collection of essays investigates the fundamental role that the loss of colonial territories at the end of the "Ancient Regime" and post-World War II has played in shaping French memories and colonial discourses. In identifying loss and nostalgia as key tropes in cultural representations, these essays call for a re-evaluation of French colonialism as a discourse informed not just by narratives of conquest, but equally by its histories of defeat.