On the one hand, France is the supreme bearer of universal Rights and Reason—“bearer even of a new category of time for the indigenous populations”;54 on the other, its various administrative avatars—assimilation, association, integration—deny those same populations the right to emerge as “French citizens” in a public sphere of their own ethical and cultural making. The principle of citizenship is held out; the poesis of free cultural choice and communal participation is withheld.
