"Leur Histoire est Notre Histoire"
Immigrant Culture in France Between Visibility and Invisibility
in French Politics, Culture & Society
On the leaflets announcing the opening in 2007 of a new Center for Immigration History in Paris, one can read the following sentence: “Leur histoire est notre histoire: la place des immigrés dans la construction de la France” [Their history is our history: the place of immigrants in the construction of France].2 What may appear, initially, as a trivial opposition between “their history” and “our history” reveals in fact a great deal about the underlying assumptions of the project.