TO ENDREPENTANCE COLONIALEby Daniel LefeuvreEd

TO END

REPENTANCE COLONIALE

by Daniel Lefeuvre

Ed. Flammarion, 232 pages,

18 euros.

TYRANNY

THE PENANCE

by Pascal Bruckner

Editions Grasset, 260 pages,

16,90 euros.

Calls to repentance today multiply to the point that it eventually no longer know what they nonsense. So just ask the SNCF to repent to ride the trains carried the resistant to concentration camps during the last war. Will soon require all parents whose children have failed in life do act of repentance for not having given them adequate education. It includes that a Pascal Bruckner or a Daniel Lefeuvre can be frustrated by this "tyranny of penance", but this justifies it, provided that he should repent of repentance

Taking the activists of the colonial repentance for target, historian Daniel Lefeuvre had beautiful game to show how they feed our feelings of guilt, have disguise unscrupulous history of colonization. Accumulating data, documents and evidence, he tackles a few ideas. No, the conquerors of the Algeria have not committed genocide and have never sought to exterminate the indigenous population. No, the metropolis was not shamefully enriched by exploiting the colonies to be bled. She succeeded no more rebuilding post-war with the contribution of a labour force that she would be gone searching for Africa to deny it then. On all these points, the historian is records strong enough to convince us. But, also useful as it is to have corrected the exaggerations and returned the complexity of the story, this allows to "put an end to the colonial repentance" and finally absolve the colonizers

Permanent masochism

The aim of Pascal Bruckner is much more radical. It looks less to restore historical truth to analyze and denounce what he considers a major Western bypass: a permanent masochism which leads him to be guilty of all the woes of the world. With a cruel verve, book us a ruthless array of Western tortured by remorse for the atrocities committed by his father or himself. He we shown as powerless to condemn the fanatics who would that return against him the weapons that he was the first to use, paralyzed by his conscience to punish behaviour that he thinks itself caused by the humiliations inflicted on others, etc. The dramatic result of this auto-flagellation is that Westerners come to desist from any action that could not be a replica of their previous crimes. "Penitence is ultimately a political choice: that of the abdication.". Only America is through his eyes to the extent that leaving would not begin by doubt, she continues to have faith in his universal mission and is not afraid to confront the ambiguities of the action: "America is a project, Europe is a grief.

Even if criticism of Pascal Bruckner fall often just, cannot fail to find excessive and, in turn, masochistic his painting of a Europe wallowing in the consequent. Rest it requires the reader to confront a difficult question: far be faithful to the duty of remembrance Fear of the author is reveling in the memory of the past may be only "a narcissistic maceration" and "dig up the corpses, it's dug up all haines". He would prefer that it was based on Renan formula: "One who is to make history should forget history." This does not prevent it but recognize that own genius of Europe is this capability of self-reflection which allows "be not fooled by its areas of shadow" and collect "the fragility of the barriers that separate it from its own nastiness." Perform duty of memory and repentance, it is finally remind the world that "no people can escape the duty to think against itself."