Guest seminar

The CSI Guest Seminar will welcome

Guillaume Lachenal

Laboratoire SPHERE, CNRS, Université Paris Diderot

for a discussion of his book

Le médecin qui voulut être roi

Sur les traces d’une utopie coloniale

7 November 2017, 11:00 -13:00 – Mines ParisTech, Salle St-Jacques

 

The physician who wished to be king

In the footsteps of a colonial utopia

 

Introduction to the seminar discussion: Félix Boilève

 

“During the Second World War, a doctor governed an entire region of Cameroon alone. He tried to realize an utopia where medicine would guide all politics and where politics would become social therapy…” The story of Doctor David resembles a dream fulfilled: that of a world reinvented by physicians. It recalls that, for the heralds of public health, the colonies were spaces of exception freed from the constraints of ordinary politics, favourable to life-size experiments. Those of this officer of the colonial troops were total. The French authorities presented them as successes. The archives and testimonies give a more disturbing picture.

 

Intersecting the itinerary of the supervisor and the fascinating narrative of a field survey that took him from Africa to the Pacific islands, Guillaume Lachenal retraces here the destiny of an utopia. In the places and sites marked by Dr. David’s Imperial adventures, in the vegetation, objects, songs, memories or ruins, he discovers that this story is conjugated to the present. It is an always lively story, made up of impossible promises, violence, dreams of grandeur, a desire for failure and missed appointments, where the expectation of the future is engulfed in the tragic comedy of power.

2017, Seuil, Sciences humaines, Histoire, coll. L’Univers historique

The seminar is open upon registration to all interested persons

Contact and registration: Mathieu Rajaoba or Nassima Abdelghafour

2017-2018 Seminar Program