‘History takes its time…’: anti-racist temporalities and historical memory cultures in France, c. 1980–1998

ABSTRACT Historical memory cultures have played a crucial role in French anti-racist activism. Anti-racist movements such as the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA) and the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP) invoked historical memories of interwar antisemitism, the Holocaust and colonial violence in their fight against racism in the 1980s and 1990s. The content and meaning of these memory cultures underpinned late twentieth-century anti-racism, furnishing activism with a profoundly didactic dimension which explicitly connected the racisms of the past to the racisms of the present. Anti-racist print media – from the LICRA’s monthly newspaper, Le Droit de Vivre, and the MRAP’s publications, Droit et Liberté and Différences – provided important discursive spaces within which these diverse historical memory cultures could be identified, articulated and contested. This in turn created a space for the construction of anti-racist temporalities. The legacies of past antisemitism and Islamophobia ensured that the anti-racist activism of the LICRA and MRAP, in different ways, possessed an intensely temporal dimension. This article considers how anti-racist historical memory cultures were articulated in print media in response to events such as the rue Copernic bombing of October 1980 and the Rostock-Lichtenhagen riots of August 1992. Furthermore, the article will explore how divergent Holocaust and colonial memory cultures began to encounter each other on a more frequent basis in the pages of anti-racist publications during the mid-1990s, reflecting national developments in the memorialization of the Holocaust and (albeit to a lesser extent) France’s colonial past. The relationship between time and anti-racist activism was an intimate one and historical memory played a key mediating role in anti-racist responses to contemporary racism. By focusing primarily on the print media of the LICRA and the MRAP, this article demonstrates how both organizations and key figures such as Jean Pierre-Bloch and Mouloud Aounit viewed contemporary racism through the lens of historical memory, thus demonstrating an intimate relationship between late twentieth-century anti-racist activism in France and historical time.


Introduction
Anti-racist activism has long possessed a profoundly temporal dimension. Anti-racists in late twentieth-century Europe were primarily animated by the need to challenge and resist contemporary racism in its myriad forms. However, this activism was not simply about responding to racism in the immediate present. In France, anti-racist activism was deeply historically-minded, rooted in a certain conception of historical time and intimately shaped by past experience. 1 Anti-racist discourses and practices were diverse and heterogeneous and reflected the highly distinctive national, political and historical contexts in which they emerged and developed. 2 In France, movements like the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme (LICRA) and the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples (MRAP) -founded in 1927 and 1949 respectively -emerged as a result of the experiences of interwar antisemitism and the Holocaust as well as, in the post-1945 period, the complex processes of decolonization and the lived realities of those who travelled from the former colonies (particularly in North Africa) to the metropole. 3 These diverse streams of memory poured together to create a deep pool of anti-racist historical memory cultures. The content and meaning of these memory cultures underpinned postwar anti-racism, furnishing activism with a profoundly didactic dimension which explicitly connected the racisms of the past to the racisms of the present.
The role of historical memory, as a phenomenon in time and shaped by its passage, had implications for anti-racist temporalities. The far-reaching shadows of the Holocaust and the atrocities punctuating the narrative of the French colonial experience were inescapable. At both the national and European level, the final decades of the twentieth century were crucial in the broader development of these memories. The 1980s and 1990s saw increasing -albeit uneven -levels of engagement with the historical realities of the Holocaust and France's colonial legacies. 4 Establishing the historical continuities and evolution of racisms past and present was an integral component of the anti-racist mindset. As Catherine Lloyd has noted, the MRAP continually made the point that both colonial racism and fascism were deeply intertwined in the postwar period. 5 The historical memories and legacies of the Holocaust and European colonialism played, in diverse ways, a crucial rhetorical, pedagogical and temporal role in the fight against racism in the late twentieth century. Since the 'memory turn' of the 1970s and 1980s, memory has, for historians, become a fixture of the discipline's scholarly landscape. In 2016, Henry Rousso -whose book, Le syndrome de Vichy (1987) was a particularly forceful catalyst of the 'memory boom' -commented on the emergence over the past thirty years of memory as a 'major political and moral value' in which the act of remembrance and commemoration had become integral to contemporary self-understandings. 6 The development of public consciousness of the Holocaust, for instance, and the nationalization and universalization (as contested as the latter may be) of its memory and legacy is the example of this process in the late twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first. 7 Historical memory has an intimate relationship with historical time. It offers much scope for the development of contemporary historical thinking on temporality. The role of diverse historical memory cultures within social and political movements like anti-racism underscores the centrality of history and historical time to their activism. History and memory cultures were not just effective tools from the anti-racist toolbox: they contributed in a profound way to the development of anti-racist temporalities. Anti-racist print media, in particular, provided an important discursive space within which these historical memory cultures could be identified, articulated and contested. This in turn created a space for the construction of anti-racist temporalities.
It is important to stress the plurality of such temporal perspectives. While each antiracist movement, organization and their associated publications possessed a common commitment to the fight against racism and, indeed, frequently expressed their solidarity with each other -even if, for political reasons, certain movements such as the LICRA and the MRAP did not always see eye-to-eye 8 -there were nevertheless notable differences in their approaches to and understandings of contemporary racism. 9 The historical memory culture of the LICRA revolved, for instance, primarily around the Holocaust and historical antisemitism. Founded by the journalist, Bernard Lecache, the LICRA was committed to countering rising antisemitism in the interwar years. 10 The LICRA was also staunchly republican and this comprised an important ideological component of its antiracism. 11 From the late 1980s onwards, the LICRA's commitment to republicanism was made increasingly explicit and tributes to the life of Jean Pierre-Bloch -the longstanding leader of the LICRA between 1968 and 1992 -before and after his death in 1999 emphasized his republican credentials. 12 The French republican conception of citizenship -in which the citizen is viewed by the state as an individual shorn of other external markers of identity such as gender, ethnicity or religion -has largely determined French attitudes towards immigration and the subsequent accommodation of post-colonial and other minorities. 13 It is based, as Maxim Silverman has put it, on the 'acquisition of rights through individual assimilation within the nation'. 14 The guiding principle of this, intégration, was considerably strengthened by the fear of désintégration, the fracture sociale and the ostensible dangers of 'Anglo-Saxon' communautarisme. The latter, in which society is divided along identity-based lines, has long haunted the would-be guardians of a 'one and indivisible' republic. 15 It was also a spectre that haunted the antiracism of the LICRA. 16 However, for post-colonial communities living in France, the liberties and equalities to be enjoyed by citizenship in theory have frequently come up against the reality of racism and enduring socio-economic inequalities. The French republican model, with its constituent principles of intégration and citoyenneté, thus made up, as Adrian Favell has put it, the 'dominant policy framework' through which the post-colonial dilemma was addressed. 17 This was the societal and political model within (and against) which anti-racists were operating in the late twentieth century. Indeed, the republican model possessed its own temporal space within French society, stretching back to the conceptions of citizenship as developed during the revolutionary period two centuries before.
While the MRAP's institutional historical memory culture overlapped with that of the LICRA's, its turn in the postwar decades towards anticolonialism -and, later, fighting for the rights of France's post-colonial communities -saw the development of an anti-racist colonial memory culture which was comparatively absent in the LICRA. The MRAP's close postwar association with the Parti communiste français (PCF) played a significant role in shaping its anti-racist character. 18 Anti-racists were not immune from the broader complex and tortuous developments of remembering and forgetting in postwar and, increasingly, post-colonial Europe. In many cases, their activism and the legacies of past antisemitism and Islamophobia ensured that their anti-racist activism possessed an intensely temporal dimension. In locating continuities between historical and contemporary racism, anti-racists operated in the liminal space between past and present. As Matthew S. Champion has stated, the history of temporalities is, like all human undertakings, 'caught up in the currents of time'. 19 This article therefore seeks to cast a light on the complex role of divergent historical memory cultures within French anti-racism in shaping anti-racist perceptions of historical time and informing spheres of activism.
Taking a textual approach, this article will examine how anti-racist memory cultures and temporalities were articulated in print. The LICRA's monthly newspaper, Le Droit de Vivre -self-proclaimed as 'le plus ancien journal antiraciste du monde' 20 -frequently reported on contemporary racism and antisemitism in France. During the 1980s, its focus increasingly turned towards resisting the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National. The MRAP was extremely prolific, boasting by the early 1980s not just one but two regular publications. The first edition of Droit et Liberté, which became the MRAP's monthly newspaper actually predated the official establishment of the MRAP by just over a year, describing itself as 'le grand hebdomadaire de la vie juive', before becoming the main mouthpiece of the MRAP from 1949 onwards. 21 In December 1980, the MRAP launched a newer and glossier magazine entitled Différences which, for a time, was published alongside Droit et Liberté before the decision was taken in November 1987 to discontinue the latter. 22 While the LICRA's Le Droit de Vivre and the MRAP's Différences and Droit et Liberté reflect only part of French anti-racism's broader discourse, they nevertheless provide a valuable window into how these anti-racist organizations and their print media articulated anti-racist temporalities, situating their own activism within a broader historical, memorial and temporal context. 23 There has been a tendency in English-language literature on French anti-racism to place a heavy focus on the highly popular, media-savvy and telegenic SOS Racisme. SOS Racisme was certainly one of the most immediately recognizable French anti-racist movements for observers elsewhere with its mass mobilizations, organizations of major pop and rock concerts in Paris and popular slogan 'Touche pas à mon pote!'. 24 However, this disproportionate emphasis comes at the expense of historical understandings of what Lilian Mathieu has described as the traditional 'generalist anti-racist organisations' and the complex dynamics between them. 25 Compared to SOS Racisme, there has been significantly less English-language literature on the entwined histories of the MRAP and the LICRA. 26 Through an exploration of the LICRA and MRAP's respective print media over the 1980s and early 1990s, this article will demonstrate not only how divergent anti-racist historical memory cultures reflected the changing dynamics of their institutional identities but how they helped to construct powerful anti-racist temporalities. This article aims to open up new avenues of investigation and the subject of European anti-racist movements in the twentieth century is extremely fertile ground and -like the history of temporalities itself -in need of further historical scholarship. 27

Echoes of the past: anti-racist Holocaust memory cultures
Towards the end of the twentieth century, anti-racist memory cultures of the Holocaust contributed significantly to the construction of anti-racist temporalities. During the 1980s and 1990s, anti-racist memory cultures of the Holocaust developed alongside and were influenced by the twists and turns in Holocaust remembrance on a broader national and European scale. 28 29 This heralded, in the words of Henry Rousso, 'the return of the repressed'. 30 Throughout the 1980s, Holocaust memory in France was largely understood in national terms with reference to the experience of Occupation and Vichy. The emergence of négationnisme (Holocaust denial), the rising electoral fortunes of the Front National from 1983 onwards and the high-profile trials of former Nazis such as Klaus Barbie in 1987 inaugurated a growing engagement in France with the complex politics of memory. 31 In response to the long-awaited trial of Barbie -who stood accused, among other things, of crimes against humanity committed while head of the local Gestapo in Lyons under the Vichy regime -the head of the LICRA, Pierre-Bloch, wrote in Le Droit de Vivre that the fight for historical justice showed that 'l'histoire prend son temps'. 32 This section will explore how Holocaust memory cultures in French anti-racism during the 1980s and early 1990s contributed to the development of antiracist temporalities rooted in the national experience of the 1930s and 1940s.
On 3 October 1980, a bomb exploded outside the rue Copernic synagogue in Paris killing four and injuring dozens. Despite initial confusion about the identities of the perpetrators (suspicions ranged from neo-nazis to pro-Palestinian terrorist organizations) the bombing nevertheless sparked outrage in France and beyond. 33 The rue Copernic bombing created significant ripples on the surface of Holocaust memory across France. 34 For anti-racists, the event triggered a powerful temporal convergence between historical time and activism. For the MRAP, the resurgence of violent antisemitism raised the spectre of the Vichy past while the LICRA situated the bombing in the context of the growth of négationnisme; the LICRA's president, Jean Pierre-Bloch was especially vociferous in his denunciations of 'les falsificateurs de l'histoire de la dernière guerre'. 35 North of the Channel, the anti-racist and anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight, highlighted the fact that the bombing was the 'worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazi occupation ended in 1944ʹ. 36 There was also a wider European context to the rue Copernic bombing. While the immediate responses of the LICRA and MRAP to the attack interpreted it within the boundaries of the French nation-state, others viewed the bombing and its implications in broader terms. For Maurice Ludmer, the founder and editor of Searchlight, the rue Copernic bombing was confirmation of a growing European farright threat. On 2 August 1980, Bologna railway station had been the target of a far-right terrorist attack resulting eighty-five deaths and hundreds more injured. On 26 September, neo-Nazi Gundolf Köhler died while planting an explosive device at the entrance of the Munich Oktoberfest, killing thirteen other people in the process. 37 Searchlight had also been well-informed about a wave of antisemitic attacks across France over the course of the year and viewed the rue Copernic bombing as 'the bloody climax' of a more recent rise in antisemitism. 38 There was a strong temporal current running through anti-racist responses to the rue Copernic bombing. While it clearly stirred historical memories of the occupation of 1940-44 and the antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s, there was a kind of temporal urgency to immediate anti-racist responses, stressing the necessity of condemning and challenging antisemitism as a way of actively resisting the return of history. In the months following the rue Copernic attack, the Pierre-Bloch -a former deputé whose anti-racist outlook was shaped in a profound way by his personal experience of the antisemitism of the fraught 1930s and of the Holocaust 39 -warned of a continued rise in antisemitism in France. 40 A year after the bombing, a commemoration ceremony was held by anti-racist groups and Jewish organizations. Reporting on the ceremony for the LICRA, Annie Gilbert warned that 'les chemins qui ont conduit à Auschwitz sont toujours devant nous'. 41 Such a metaphor underlined the temporal connections between an instance of contemporary antisemitism and the Holocaust. Three years later, the LICRA placed the events outside the rue Copernic synagogue in a far broader historical context by including the attack in its timeline of racist incidents of the twentieth century. 42 This was particularly suggestive of the significance attributed to the bombing by the LICRA, situating 3 October 1980 alongside the Dreyfus Affair and the introduction of the Statut des Juifs of October 1940. Direct connections were drawn between the Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism, invoking the recent past as a means of drawing moral lessons for LICRA members and activists in their contemporary struggle against racism and antisemitism. 43 Nearly two years after the rue Copernic bombing, on 9 August 1982 the Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant on the rue des Rosiers, an establishment situated in the heart of the Marais, was subjected to a terrorist attack by the Abu Nidal Organization (alternatively known as Fatah, a militant Palestinian nationalist front -a splinter from the main Fatah organization led by Yasser Arafat). Six people were killed and dozens injured. 44 While this also generated a large anti-racist mobilization, the geopolitical context surrounding the event had changed significantly since 1980 due to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. However, the following year, the rue des Rosiers became, for a moment in time, a site of memory and a physical representation of a curiously antiracist temporality. Anniversaries and commemoration ceremonies were important in the transmission of anti-racist memory and in the construction of anti-racist temporalities. 45 Anniversaries offered a temporal space in which anti-racists could reaffirm their humanitarian mission against contemporary racism in the present through the commemoration of the past. Rebecca Clifford, whose research has explored the development of Holocaust remembrance in postwar France and Italy, has noted that commemorative ceremonies 'of all types share a common feature: they unambiguously claim to be the embodiment of a direct continuity with the past'. 46 The centrality of anniversaries to antiracist organizations such as the LICRA served to reinforce institutional identities and reaffirm the continuities in living traditions of anti-racism. These performative reassertions of identity -of specific organizations, religious and ethnic groups as well as those with shared experiences of the recent past -were an important part of anti-racist activism and contributed to the construction of peculiarly anti-racist temporalities through the affirmation of the continuity of the anti-racist struggle.
In 1983, Le Droit de Vivre, reported on a ceremony which took place in Paris on 17 April commemorating the 'martyrs de la déportations' and the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. 47 The report is striking for its images of ceremonies held across France. One photograph showed demonstrators on the rue des Rosiers outside the Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant. Among them, a man can be seen wearing the uniform of Nazi concentration camp prisoners. 48 This was a small yet powerful example of the temporal dimension of commemoration ceremonies: an invocation to remember underpinned by an anti-racist or, more specifically in the case of the LICRA's focus, an anti-antisemitic ethos. This commemoration ceremony cut across time and space. It was transnational in outlook (remembering deportations of French Jews as well as the resistance of Polish Jews in Warsaw in the 1940s) and self-consciously connected historical instances of racism past and present. Holocaust memory would, throughout the 1980s, play an important role in the construction of anti-racist temporalities. Just as the commemoration ceremony of 1983 reflected this in physical terms, the LICRA continued to warn readers of its monthly newspaper that the threat of antisemitism was by no means consigned to the recent past. In the spring of 1986, Le Droit de Vivre featured an article about 'les manifestations nouvelles' of antisemitism in France. 49 If, as the article asked rhetorically, the era of pogroms was long gone and the Holocaust no more than a fixture 'dans le pages les plus noires de l'Histoire', then why worry about antisemitism in 1980s France? 50 The article was written as a call to arms for members of the LICRA and was an appeal for anti-racists to safeguard the memory of historical antisemitism and the Holocaust in the face of contemporary antisemitism.

Anti-racist colonial temporalities
The legacies of antisemitism and the Holocaust formed an important component of antiracist memory culture and this had significant implications for the construction and development of anti-racist temporalities. Contemporary events, anniversaries and commemorations contributed in various ways to the creation of a temporal bridge between past and present which intimately connected historical time to the thought and practice of anti-racism. However, the memorial shadows cast by European colonialism and its legacies also loomed over the landscape of anti-racist temporalities. 51 Between the height of imperial expansion in the interwar period and decolonization after 1945 there was a remarkable degree of continuity between racism of a colonial nature and antisemitism. 52 The end of the French colonial empire was a traumatic and protracted affair from the humiliating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu (1954) in Indochina, followed by eight years of colonial warfare in Algeria (1954)(1955)(1956)(1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962). Despite a well-established history of migration from the settlement of Italians and others in France over the course of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-centuries, the large-scale arrival of migrant workers in the 1950s and 1960s established North Africans and especially Algerians as a major presence within the French ational population. 53 By the mid-1970s, with the tightening of immigration policy under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the presence of post-colonial communities became an increasing topic of focus in French politics. In 1974, a temporary suspension on immigration was announced by the French government. 54 As the question of immigration was pushed centre-stage in French political culture and discourse, the presence of North Africans in France came, in the words of one scholar, to reveal 'profound French anxieties about the strength and vitality of the nation'. 55 Diverse postcolonial communities, including Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians among others, became the symbolic representation of an apparent crisis in French national identity. 56 Yet this 'crisis' had begun earlier. Little over two decades separated French anti-racists in the 1980s from the Algerian War of Independence and the dismantling of the French colonial empire. The rush to forget what had happened in formerly French Algeria and the scarcity of explicit reference in French public life to 'la sale guerre' after 1962 signalled the extent to which the rupture had torn through the integrity of French national identity. 57 There was a significant delay in what Elizabeth Buettner has called the 'process[es] of reckoning' with the 'implications and legacies' of imperial and colonial histories. 58 However, in the early 1980s there was a moment in which colonial memory resurfaced and appeared to manifest in the streets of the French capital and stake its claim to recognition.
The Marche pour l'égalité et contre le racisme of 1983 was an important moment in the development and expression of an anti-racist colonial memory. While it was a direct response to rising racist violence in the early 1980s, it was also a manifestation of a curiously anti-racist temporality. Setting off from Marseille in October 1983 and picking up fellow marchers along the way, the Marche des Beurs (as it was popularly called), arrived in Paris with some 100,000 demonstrators to greet them. Significantly, leaders of the march were invited to the Elysée Palace to meet President François Mitterrand and discuss their concerns and demands. As an expression of political and cultural identity, the Marche pour l'égalité proved to be a crucial moment for North African visibility in France. 59 In many respects, the past was made present through the march as the legacy of France's colonial past and the continuity of colonial thinking in the present. The youthfulness of its participants was also a significant factor. These were the children and, in some cases, the grand-children of first-generation North African migrants in France and the majority had been born in France. The march was a moment in which the descendants of Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans laid claim to their rights as French citizens while positively asserting their own cultural identity. 60 Between 1982 and 1983, racist violence against North Africans had been intensifying and reaching epidemic proportions in France. 61 In his recollection of the months preceding the march, the author and activist Bouzid Kara recalled that 'l'été 1983 fut intenable'. 62 The LICRA expressed its solidarity with the marchers stressing the importance of defending 'le droit à la différence dans le respect de la dignité humaine'. 63 The MRAP, reflecting continuities with its anticolonial stance during decolonization, praised the march as a triumph. 64 In 1984, marking the MRAP's thirty-fifth anniversary, an article in Droit et Liberté recounted the MRAP's origins in 'le traumatisme du génocide' and its 'action courageuse et tenace' during the wars in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s. 65 It drew clear parallels between France's colonial past and the reality of its post-colonial present. The MRAP's anti-racism was rooted in its 'prise de conscience' following its experience of charting France's particular experience of the occupation, Nazi racism, antisemitism and colonial racism. 66 The intersections between these various historical events and processes and the anti-racist struggles of the present reflect the tying together of different memorial strands within the MRAP's complex activist relationship between past and present.
Unlike the MRAP, however, the LICRA, had relatively little to say about France's colonial past. Colonial memory was largely absent from its anti-racist memory culture. This can be explained largely by reference to the LICRA's preoccupation with challenging antisemitism and its legacies. However, this was not to the total exclusion of reporting on other racisms in France. In Le Droit de Vivre, the LICRA reported on contemporary racism against North Africans and published reports on the socio-economic realities of life for North Africans and other minorities living in France. Indeed, its name change in 1979, from the Ligue internationale contre l'antisémitisme (LICA) to the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme was a testament to Pierre-Bloch's desire to the see the LICRA broaden the horizons of its anti-racism. 67 Yet notwithstanding this name change, antisemitism remained, for the LICRA, the primary focus of its anti-racist activism: reflecting the particular personal and institutional memory culture of the organization. In December 1981, the LICRA expressed solidarity avec toutes les victims de toutes ces formes de racisme, avec les Français juifs ou musulmans, les Français des DOM-TOM, avec les travailleurs noirs et maghrébins, avec les Gitans, français ou étrangers, avec les immigrés de toutes nationalités. 68 While making its claim to an anti-racist universalism, it nevertheless remained the case that the LICRA's relationship to French colonial history and memory was complex even when it centred on one of the most notorious instances of racist violence during the colonial period.
In 1991, the LICRA marked the thirtieth anniversary of 17 October 1961. On this date, a peaceful demonstration by Algerians in Paris against a curfew imposed by the Police nationale during the latter stages of the Algerian War of Independence descended into what has been described as 'the bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in Western Europe in modern history'. 69 A small report in the December 1991 edition of Le Droit de Vivre is striking for what it did and did not say. 70 The LICRA drew parallels between the events of the 17 October 1961 and the unravelling of Kristallnacht on 9-10 November 1938 as well as the Vel d'Hiv roundups of July 1942. Such comparisons were not new and other anti-racist organizations, such as the MRAP, had drawn similar parallels at the time of the Algerian War of Independence. 71 During the Algerian War, the LICRA's reactions to anti-Algerian repression in the 1950s and 1960s was, as one characterization has put it, 'timid'. 72 In the 1991 anniversary report, the LICRA called upon anti-racists to remember the 'barbaric acts' of the 17 October and to 'ask forgiveness' of the victims and their families 'for the honour of humanity and . . . France. Let us remember'. 73 While the statement was a powerful exhortation to remember the events of 17 October, it made no reference to the Algerian War of Independence or France's colonial legacy. In comparison to the LICRA's alertness to antisemitism and the frequent connection of antisemitic incidents, statements or violence to the Holocaust, the Vichy regime and the Second World War more broadly, the lack of reference to the colonial origins and context of racism in France was conspicuous. The LICRA's representation of 17 October 1961, stripped of the surrounding historical context, did not tell the full story. Despite the distinctly moralistic tone of the LICRA's appeal to remember the 17 October for the sake of humanity and France's 'honour', no connection was made between this event and the historical reality and continuity of (post)colonial racism and violence. The fact that during the 1930s, the LICA had been a defender of France's 'mission civilisatrice' and was committed to the republican and universalist ideals of the French colonial empire may, in part, account for the LICRA's inability over half a century later to confront France's colonial past. 74 The LICRA rarely failed to connect the memory and commemorations of antisemitism to its endurance in contemporary France. Holocaust memory served as the LICRA's default point of moral and temporal reference and was used to mobilize anti-racist actors in a powerful and effective way. The history and memory of French colonialism -judging by its relative absence in the pages of Le Droit de Vivre and in the rhetoric of leading members of the LICRA in the 1980s and early 1990ssimply did not hold the same degree of memorial or rhetorical significance.
The MRAP had been quick to draw parallels between the experiences of Algerians living in Paris during the war of independence and of Jews in the 1940s. In 1991, the MRAP covered the thirtieth anniversary of the 17 October 1961 in far greater detail. In Différences, Chérifa Benabdessadok explored how the former president of the MRAP, Charles Palant, -a deportee and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald -had responded to the events of 17 October by likening them to the ratonnades of the 1940s: 'the total form of the pogrom'. 75 Palant had not shied away from drawing direct parallels between the actions of collaborators and colonizers. While the French government was quick to bury the story of the 17 October, Palant was adamant that it was an event 'that every antiracist must be concerned about'. 76 Thirty years on, while Benabdessadok remarked that Palant's use of the word 'pogrom' to describe the 17 October may well appear 'too strong, even shocking' to some, it nevertheless captured the essence of an event for too long 'forgotten by collective memory'. 77 In contrast to the LICRA's marking of the thirtieth anniversary of the 17 October 1961, however, the MRAP devoted an entire issue of Différences to the event's thirtieth anniversary, situating it directly within the context of the Algerian War of Independence and the legacies of French colonialism. 78

Convergence? Remembering the Holocaust and colonial atrocities
Notwithstanding the importance of historical memory cultures in shaping the discourse and practices of the older and more traditionalist anti-racist organizations, there were nevertheless those who criticized what they saw as an excessive focus on historical memory within anti-racist activism more generally. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pierre-André Taguieff was actively involved in French anti-racism and was a member of the MRAP's Committee on Racism and Antisemitism. 79 In the late 1980s, he underwent an ideological turn towards 'national republicanism' during which he became one of the most high-profile intellectual critics of anti-racism. 80 However, Taguieff was by no means an anti-anti-racist as various British intellectuals and commentators on the political right labelled themselves during the 1980s. 81 Indeed, he made clear that his desire was to see anti-racism in France reformed in intellectual and ethical terms. 82 He therefore formulated his critiques of anti-racism as someone highly familiar with the terrain. Taguieff's writings contributed to a developing literature of anti-racist critique in France. 83 However, while Taguieff elaborated his views on contemporary antiracism in books such as La force de la préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (1987), many of his critiques were either originally featured in or elaborated upon in anti-racist publications such as the MRAP's Différences and the LICRA's Le Droit de Vivre.
In La force de la préjugé, Taguieff explored in detail the nature of racism and antiracism in France, reflecting in particular on what he viewed as the deficiencies and failures of the latter. 84 In relation to the role of historical memories in shaping anti-racist discourse and practice, Taguieff expressed scepticism regarding the efficacy of what he described as 'anti-racisme commémoratif'. For Taguieff, an anti-racism which depended on the invocation of the memories of Nazism, the Holocaust and biological racism, disarmed itself in the face of cultural racism. 85 A development in this line of thought can be seen in a speech he gave to the LICRA's annual conference in 1989. Far from strengthening the contemporary struggle against racism, Taguieff argued that the antiracist approach of drawing temporal connections between past and present through memory culture had in fact been a hindrance. It had, he claimed, 'frozen' the vocabulary of anti-racism for decades. 86 In temporal terms, Taguieff saw the anti-racist tendency to invoke the historical memories of antisemitism or colonial racism as more of a hindrance than a help when it came to countering racism in the present.
The 1990s was a period in which memory cultures of the Holocaust and European colonialism began to encounter each other on a more frequent if uneven basis. While Michael Rothberg has argued that it was the memory of the Holocaust which 'contributed to the articulation of other histories' and helped to open up conduits of colonial memory, both memory cultures -particularly when understood in the context of anti-racist circles -developed and emerged on their own terms. 87 As historical events and processes, both the Holocaust and European colonialism were defined, in different ways, by their 'racialized violence and horror'. 88 In France, le devoir de mémoire ('the duty to remember') became a widely established principle in the early 1990s. The official recognition by the French president, Jacques Chirac, of France's complicity in the Holocaust in 1995 and the high-profile trial of Maurice Papon -a former senior police official under Vichy who had collaborated with the Nazis to deport French Jews -between October 1997 and April 1998 for crimes against humanity were interpreted as moments in which France finally accepted national responsibility for the collaboration of the Vichy regime with the Third Reich. 89 The encounters between Holocaust and colonial memory cultures within the antiracist circles of the LICRA and MRAP bore significant implications for the development of anti-racist conceptions of historical time. It was during the early 1990s that the general secretary of the MRAP, Mouloud Aounit, drew increasingly explicit parallels and connections between the memories of colonialism and those of the Holocaust and Vichy. The first half of the 1990s saw a number of significant historical anniversaries. 90 The thirtieth anniversaries of the events of 17 October 1961 and the Charonne metro station massacre of 8 February 1962 -in which police violence against pro-Algerian independence demonstrators resulted in nine dead -prompted a resurfacing of colonial memories in France. This coincided with the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the Second World War, during which time intense public interest was roused by the 1994 trial of Paul Touvier, a former milicien, which raised difficult questions about France's collaborationist legacy. 91 For the MRAP, contemporary racist violence in France and in Germany was the immediate stimulus for an increasingly nuanced historicist anti-racist response. One of the major flashpoints of post-Cold War racist violence had taken place outside France in the formerly East German city of Rostock. 92 In August 1992, an asylum hostel and its two-hundred inhabitants were subject to firebombing and violence by the far-right. 93 Writing two months later, in response to the 'actes barbares' of antiimmigrant violence in Rostock, Aounit placed contemporary European racism in a broader historical context arguing that l'oubli de la mémoire taraude aussi le racisme. En France, le racisme anti-maghrébin se nourrit aussi du non-dit et le l'amnésie collective autour de la guerre d'Algérie. Les brèches antisémites qui s'ouvrent aujourd'hui en France relèvent de la contre-offensive des révisionnistes, du blanchiment de Touvier, du piétinement dans la recherche des auteurs de la profanation du cimitière de Carpentras. 94 In referring to, for example, the painful legacies of the Algerian War and the more recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Carpentras in May 1990, Aounit brought together antisemitism and colonial racism across space and time, highlighting the long history and shared experiences of marginalization and discrimination for Jews and Muslims in France. 95 Aounit wrote on this subject in a highly philosophical way, reflecting on the intertwined legacies of antisemitism and colonial racism which crossed national and temporal boundaries. 96 Anti-racist mobilization around historical memory reflected, for Aounit, how central history and memory were to understanding contemporary racism both in its colonial and antisemitic contexts. This articulation of anti-racist temporalities brought historical memory and time to bear on the events of the present. Anti-racists had a fundamental duty, Aounit suggested, not only to remember the racism of the past but to actively draw upon these historical memories in an instructive and didactic way in order to challenge the racism experienced by post-colonial minorities, Jews, refugees and asylum seekers in the present.
Entwining the historical and cultural threads of European antisemitism and colonial racism, Aounit suggested that the work of anti-racists in the 1990s depended upon recognizing both of these histories, their particularities and points of intersection. Through his editorials for Différences, Aounit articulated the relationship between historical time and anti-racist activism. He also demonstrated what Max Silverman conceptualized as 'palimpsestic memory' and reflected an increasingly dynamic approach to Holocaust and colonial memory underpinned by an anti-racist ethic. 97 The Vel d'Hiv roundups of July 1942 and the massacre of Algerian demonstrators on 17 October 1961 were historical flashpoints exposing the centrality of racism and colonialism to France's twentieth-century experience. Aounit's emphatically historicist approach to anti-racist thought and practice was also grounded in current events. This remembering of the early 1990s was intensified by the rise in racism and hostility towards migrants across western and post-communist Europe. 98 Events at Rostock -carrying as they did significant echoes from the past -were yet a further stimulus for Aounit's reflection on the parallels between the France's colonial legacy, Vichy years and European antisemitism. Le 17 octobre 1992: 31ème anniversaire d'un massacre orchestré par un certain Papon où périrent 200 Algériens, où une rafle aussi méthodiquement menée que celle du Vel d'Hiv entraîna 11000 arrestations et 400 disparus . . . Le 9 novembre, nous commémorerons le 54ème anniversaire de la tragique 'nuit de cristal'. Une riposte antiraciste à l'échelle européenne sera organisée. Le Mrap fera de cette date un point de départ de reconquête de la lutte contre toutes les exclusions de la mémoire. Pour que la mémoire ne s'efface pas et que ne se renouvellent pas l'horreur et la honte. 99 In bringing together the 17 October 1961, the Vel d'Hiv round-ups of 16-17 July 1942, the Algerian War of Independence as well as the events of Kristallnacht on 9-10 November 1938, Aounit presented these different historical events and processes as stepping stones of anti-racist memory which cut across historical time and space. Aounit's reference to 'a certain Papon' illustrated the notoriety Papon had acquired well before his trial began in 1997. While this does not so much reflect 'multidirectional memory' as it does clusters or 'knots' of memory, it nevertheless revealed an increasingly multi-layered and transnational perspective on anti-racist historical memories. 100 New streams were pouring into the pool of anti-racist historical memory culture. In the above example, a peculiarly anti-racist interpretation of Europe's twentieth century experience was being articulated in highly memorial and temporal terms. Revolving around a specific moment in time -a racist and anti-immigrant riot in a German city -Aounit interpreted his and the MRAP's anti-racist response through the kaleidoscopic prism of history and memory. Significantly, this suggests a transnational anti-racist consciousness with events across Europe, whether in northern Germany or the south of France, awakening a broader European memory.
By the 1990s, the continued unwillingness of the French state to face up to its colonial past in a meaningful way contrasted sharply with efforts to address the legacy of Vichy. In 1994, François Mitterrand's role in the Vichy administration before turning to the resistance was under national and international scrutiny. 101 The tortuous proceedings against Paul Touvier had also cast a spotlight on the role of French citizens in the milice and their complicity with the Third Reich. However, Albert Lévy -Aounit's predecessor as general secretary of the MRAP -was particularly alert to the comparative lack of national engagement with France's colonial legacy and recognized the challenges involved in raising the issue of France's colonial past and the atrocities committed in Algeria, Madagascar and elsewhere. Eclipsed as these colonial historical memories were by the memory of Vichy and the pressing question of French collaboration, he nevertheless expressed his hope that 'un jour viendra . . . où ce passé sera franchement débattu, comme aujourd'hui Vichy après un demi siècle'. 102 Two years later, Lévy continued in this vein when, in an article for Différences entitled 'Le négationnisme et la mémoire', he called upon France to 'reconnaître les faits de l'histoire coloniale' alongside those of the Holocaust. 103 The context in which Lévy was writing is important. The development of French colonial memory in the 1990s has to be understood in the context of the growing recognition and institutionalization of Holocaust memory and commemoration, as well as the eruption of a decade-long civil war in Algeria. Crucially, it was also a consequence of what Benjamin Stora has characterized as 'la crise du modèle républicain français de l'assimilation' which emerged in the late 1980s with the bicentenary of the revolution and l'affaire du foulard. 104 Furthermore, the unravelling of genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in 1994 intensified evocations of Holocaust and colonial memory in the mid-1990s. 105 Such events called to mind the recent past in Europe and strengthened the place of historical time in contemporary antiracist discourse and activity. In Le Droit de Vivre, Pierre-Bloch made an appeal for 'une pédagogie de la Mémoire', calling for greater Holocaust education for younger members of the LICRA so that they could be more alert to the potential for racism in a post-Holocaust world to lead to similar atrocities. Indeed, this message was made all the more poignant through Pierre-Bloch's reference to ongoing ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. 106 Alongside events in Sarajevo, the attention of anti-racists was soon diverted to Rwanda where Hutu extremists waged a massacre against Rwandan Tutsi. Around 800,000 Rwandans died between April and June 1994. 107 Between the Balkans and Central Africa, Aounit condemned the return of 'purification ethnique' and connected Europe's colonial past to the violence in Rwanda where 'les cicatrices du colonialisme s'ouvrent, laissant jaillir le sang entre communautés'. 108 Such events contributed to the framing of anti-racist Holocaust and colonial historical memory cultures in increasingly transnational and global terms.

Conclusion
French anti-racist discourse and practice was consciously rooted in the past. Anti-racist memory cultures were important to French anti-racist movements like the LICRA and the MRAP in divergent ways. This, in turn, reflected the divergent memory cultures of the Holocaust and colonialism in French society at large. However, as shown, there is evidence to suggest that there were increasingly frequent encounters between Holocaust and colonial memory cultures within anti-racist discourse by the mid-1990s. The didactic function of antiracist historical memory cultures and the connections drawn between the past, present and future meant that anti-racists operated quite self-consciously in the liminal temporal spaces between the past and future. An understanding of where racism had led to in the past or the history of anti-racist movements allowed activists to situate themselves historically and resist contemporary racism in highly historicist terms. As seen in anti-racist responses to the rue Copernic bombing in 1980, the chez Jo Goldenberg attack in 1982 and the Rostock riots of 1992 (to name only a few), the relationship between time and anti-racist activism was an intimate one and historical memory played a key mediating role in anti-racist navigations of the racist present. At times, the struggle against racism appeared to reside within a temporal dimension where anti-racism -certainly by the end of the twentieth century -consisted of traditions of intergenerational resistance and solidarity spanning across past, living and future generations.
Temporality, through the conduit of historical memory, thus revealed itself in different ways -through the appeals of anti-racist print media, activism and formal commemorationand underpinned anti-racist activism, its discourses and practice. Historical memory cultures furnished French anti-racists with a uniquely historicist temporality creating a fascinating dynamic in anti-racist conceptions of historical time. This can be illuminated by a spatial metaphor. The Dreiländereck in Basel marks the site at which the French, German and Swiss borders meet. In his book, History of the Present (1999), the historian Timothy Garton Ash employed this site as a metaphor to describe the peculiar position of the contemporary historian, cutting across the disciplines of history, journalism and literature. 109 However, it also captures the nature of anti-racist temporalities. Time and again, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, French anti-racists situated themselves at the dreiländereck of time: standing athwart the past, present and future. History and memory served a pedagogical and didactic function in which the racism of the present could be interpreted and challenged through reference to the past. In exploring the highly memorial and temporal institutional mindsets of the MRAP and the LICRA in particular, this article offers further ground for future research. Historical memory cultures of the Holocaust and European colonialism, however articulated and applied, stoked the embers of the anti-racist demand for justice in the present. The scope of anti-racism extended far beyond the temporal confines of the present.

Notes
1. While the importance of history to the anti-racist struggle has been well-noted in the surrounding academic literature on European anti-racism, the more specific didactic and ethical function of anti-racist historical memory has not necessarily received the attention it deserves. For reflections on the role of history and memory within anti-racism, see Alastair, Anti-Racism, 9; Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, 59; and Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, 3.

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