Narratives of the French Empire: Fiction, Nostalgia, and Imperial Rivalries, 1784 to the Present <i>Narratives of the French Empire: Fiction, Nostalgia, and Imperial Rivalries, 1784 to the Present</i> . By K <scp>ate</scp> M <scp>arsh</scp> . (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France.) Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. xvii + 131 pp.

At the intersection of literary and historical studies, Kate Marsh's monograph offers refreshing and meticulously researched insights into France's imperial pasts. Presenting an alternative perspective to current scholarly discussions on France's history of overseas expansion from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the study locates three fictional texts representing, on the one hand, key historical moments (after 1763, after the loss of Haiti, and the inter-war period), and, on the other, different geographical locations (Tahiti, Martinique, and Pondicherry) within their ‘political, social and cultural locus of production’ (p. xii). Thereby Marsh's study examines the circulation of ideas across different colonial sites and demonstrates persuasively how perceptions of French colonialism were shaped by conflicts and compromises between rival European powers. Central to the book's thesis is the fact that imperial nostalgia, which modulates strategies of representation, was used not only to ensure that French colonialism survived but also to show that it was ‘different from that practised by the British’ (p. 36). The Introduction and first chapter set out the study's disciplinary contexts and methodological relevance succinctly and efficiently, while each of the remaining chapters is dedicated to individual novels. Marsh's methodical reading of fiction's — Mme de Monbart's Lettres taïtiennes, Louis de Meynard de Queilhe's Outre-mer, Georges Delamare's Désordres à Pondichéry — connections with perceptions of Empire published in contemporaneous journals, newspapers, political texts, and other forms of literary expression throws light on intra-European exchange in eighteenth-century Tahiti. She argues that in Martinique the proximity of British colonies makes the English ‘an obvious target of French patriotic rhetoric’ (p. 59), and establishes that nostalgic imaginings of Pondicherry in the 1930s ‘serve[d] as a synecdoche of the whole of the French Empire’ (p. 84). One of the most noteworthy aspects of this study is its historical range, which includes both periods of French expansion, one under the Ancien Régime and the other after 1830. By providing a longitudinal and comparative analysis of the selected novels, Marsh's study illustrates, most remarkably, the presence of enduring tropes in the representations of France's imperial enterprise, continuities that are perceptible up to the present day. The inclusion of literary texts from eighteenth-century Nouvelle France and Isle de France, whose histories suggest similar interactions between rival European powers, could eventually offer an interesting complement to the works studied: did Tahiti, Mauritius, and Quebec in the eighteenth century influence French imaginings of colonization in the same way? In short, Narratives of Empire is a thought-provoking work and undoubtedly a very rich and original contribution to the study of afterlives of Empire.

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