Europe Lecture 2016 by Prof. Patrick Weil

Europe Lecture 2016

After the 2015 Paris Attacks: What is the Future of the French Republic? 

Prof. Patrick Weil             

Wednesday 13 July, 2016

Dixson Room, State Library of NSW

6-8pm

Abstract: Not all French citizens today feel they are compatriots. Some think, ‘I don’t recognize the country where I was raised,’ and some feel, ‘I am French on paper, but I am not recognized as such.’ In such fragmentation, lie the seeds of discontent and violence. How can we promote a sense of living in a common society that has become more and more diverse thanks to immigration? The answer lies in understanding the sharing of a common history.

Modern France, Weil said, is built on four pillars: Equality under the law; the memory of the French Revolution; a shared language and culture; and the concept of laïcité, which organizes the status of religion. But what unites a country - any country - is a sense of history: a shared story. Many citizens of contemporary France need to hear their stories which are part of the history of the colonial Empire - fully incorporated into the national narrative. Conflicts and injustices of the past must be more understood and told not as an history of blame but as a more nuanced history of progress, of values, and of principles.

Biography: Professor Patrick Weil is a Visiting Professor of Law, Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow, and a Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School, and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Professor Weil's work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and church-state law and policy. His most recent book is The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (2013).

RSVP essential by 1 July to:

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There will be a Post-Lecture wine and canapé reception with the speaker and guests in the Gallery Room of the State Library of New South Wales. Tickets are available (until 30 June) at: https://ipay.uws.edu.au/pgrp_show.asp