Roundtable on French Election
Dr Pierre Haroche (KCL), Prof Philippe Marlière (UCL), Prof Kate Marsh (Liverpool), Chair: Dr Isabelle Hertner (KCL)
Abstract
Will the French presidential elections mark the next far right breakthrough? In this roundtable, Pierre Haroche will focus on the diffusion of open primaries and on the challenges to the traditional party system, and will also address the role of the EU question in the presidential campaign. Philippe Marlière will discuss the fragmentation of the French party system, the extreme volatility of the electorate, the decline of the French Left and the steady rise of ‘identity politics’ under the guise of ‘republican values’ which plays into the hands of the Front National. Finally, Kate Marsh will locate the rise of ‘identity politics’ in the context of memorial conflicts over the history of French colonialism. She will examine, in particular, how reactions to the terror attacks in France have revealed a resurgence of a discourse utilized in colonial Algeria about the ‘danger’ posed by Muslim populations that is more widespread and pervasive than the rhetoric of the Front National.
Kate Marsh Abstract: A sharing of cultures? The question of empire in contemporary French politics
Bios
Pierre Haroche received his PhD in Political Science from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and teaches Contemporary French Politics at King's College London. His research focuses on France's European policy.
Philippe Marlière is a professor of French and European Politics at University College London. His publications have been mainly on the Parti socialiste in France and European social democracy. He is currently researching the question of Islamophobia in France, and is also writing a book on identity politics and the republican ideology in France today.
Kate Marsh (Professor of French Historical Studies, University of Liverpool) is a specialist in French colonial history. Her research focuses principally on French metropolitan representations of colonialism and on the rivalries and collusions between competing European colonial powers. She is the author of two monographs on the colonial relationship between France and India, Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian Decolonization 1919–62 (2007) and India in the French Imagination: Peripheral Voices, 1754–1815 (2009), and a recent monograph on how the French empire was imagined in three literary representations of French colonialism, Narratives of the French Empire: Fiction, Nostalgia, and Imperial Rivalries, 1784 to the Present (2013). Her current project is a major re-examination of colonial encounters in French port cities during the interwar period.