| dc.description.abstract | As it is well-known, France has been one of the most important lands which welcome refugees. Within the French republican integration policy models, many immigrants settled and gradually became naturalized French citizen. During the 1970s, due to civil wars and political instability, migratory waves from Vietnam and Cambodia arrived in France. According to Valéry Giscard d′Estaing, President of the Republic during that period of time: ＂France declared that it considered itself as receiving country for those who tried to flee from Indochina which had been submerged by the Communist victory of spring 1975.＂
Apparently, in public opinion, these two refugee populations fleeing from dictatorship after resisting the American Imperialism and the communist regime were not perceived as other migration groups consisting of foreign workers. On the contrary, the current of empathy towards them created relatively more favorable conditions for their integration within the French society. As the population of our research did not suffer marginalization nor stigmatization, we start to ponder how the members of these second or third generations, mostly educated in France perceive themselves as members of within the French socio-political space, how active is their citizen participation, and their opinion on the French education which holds principally the Republicanism vision? Hence, we will focus on the transmission of the national identity in the textbooks of history and geography, and on the perception of the French of Vietnamese and Cambodian origins. The first chapter shows how national identity is produced by analyzing the history of immigration and the evolution of the policy of integration. The second chapter analyzes representations of national identity in the education system, focusing on education policy and the content of a selection of textbooks since 1960. The third chapter observes the question of the identity of our research population by fieldwork interviews and questionnaires.
Key words: Identity, nation, France, immigration, Cambodia, Vietnam | en_US |