Law on Teaching Rosy View of Past Is Dividing France

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the early front-runner in the 2007 presidential race, was forced by the controversy to cancel a trip to Martinique and Guadeloupe, Caribbean islands that are part of France. Leaders there said they would boycott meetings with him, and dozens of groups called for street demonstrations.

Sarkozy, who caused a storm in October by referring to rioting youths, many of whom were from immigrant families, as "scum," seemed unfazed. "This permanent repentance, which means we have to apologize for France's history, borders on absurdity," he said in an interview with France 3 television.

A week ago, trying to cool tensions, President Jacques Chirac created a commission "to evaluate the action of Parliament in the fields of memory and history" and ordered it to report back within three months. "In the Republic, there is no official history," Chirac said. "The law's job is not to write history. The writing of history is the task of historians."

His conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) has a sizable majority in the National Assembly and was largely responsible for passing the law.

Some of the criticism of conservatives' attitude toward the colonial past parallels recent complaints about treatment of the country's immigrant population -- particularly French youths with parents who came from former colonies in Africa.

On the one hand, anger over the law "is a prolongation of the debate about religion and immigration" that the riots touched off, but on the other, "it's a way of hiding what France did in terms of slavery and racial discrimination," said Vincent Tiberj, a political scientist at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.

French history is taught in a much more balanced way today than it was 30 years ago -- when the war in Algeria and the French Vichy government's collaboration with Nazi Germany were typically soft-pedaled or ignored, Tiberj said. The new law seems aimed at rolling back gains made since then, he said.

But during the debate in Parliament, UMP lawmaker Christian Kert said the law was needed more than ever, given the recent unrest around Paris.

"Is it not useful to recall France's positive role to many young French people with an immigrant background, who are most exposed to messages underlining the negative aspects of the colonial period?" Kert said. "How can they feel any pride to be French if historians only present France to them as a state which exploited their countries of origin and tortured their ancestors?"

Special correspondent Gretchen Hoff contributed to this report.