While France claims to be the nation of universal human rights, its historical intimacy with imperialism would suggest otherwise. The discourse of Republicanism is therefore what allows France to erase and smooth out rhetorical and material incongruities, allowing it to retain its national integrity. This article thus examines the discursive continuities between two constitutive realms of French power: colonialism and nuclearism. I argue that, rather than being separate, these two matrices must be understood as one continuum traversed by the same questions. I analyze their conjoined structure through two historical speeches which both rely on universal Republicanism as justification: Jules Ferry’s 1885 intervention at the National Assembly defending his imperial legacy; and Charles de Gaulle's speeches in Papeete, in 1966, promising a radiant future to Tahiti in the postcolonial era. Republican universalism as a discursive tool, however, is not impervious to porousness: it is always haunted by the violence it inflicts and the peoples it affects. An attention to the ghosts that live inside the social fabric produced by this discourse, thus, helps us critically engage Republican universalism and reorganize the hidden, paradoxical aspects of French (post)colonial memory. Haunting, in other words, becomes a decolonial praxis for recovering what has been negated and interrupting the appearance of narrative cohesion that France relies upon.

虽然法国声称是一个普遍人权的国家，但它与帝国主义的历史亲密关系却表明并非如此。因此，共和主义的话语使法国得以抹去和抹平修辞和物质上的不协调，使其能够保持其国家完整性。因此，本文考察了法国权力的两个构成领域之间的话语连续性：殖民主义和核主义。我认为，这两个矩阵不能分开，而是必须被理解为由相同问题遍历的一个连续统一体。我通过两个都以普世共和主义为理由的历史演讲来分析它们的联合结构：朱尔斯·费里 1885 年干预国民议会以捍卫他的帝国遗产；以及 1966 年戴高乐在帕皮提的演讲，承诺在后殖民时代，大溪地将拥有灿烂的未来。然而，作为一种话语工具的共和主义普遍主义并非不受多孔性影响：它总是被它所施加的暴力和它所影响的人民所困扰。因此，关注生活在这种话语所产生的社会结构中的幽灵有助于我们批判性地参与共和主义的普遍主义，并重新组织法国（后）殖民记忆中隐藏的、矛盾的方面。换句话说，令人难以忘怀的是一种去殖民主义的实践，用于恢复被否定的东西并打断法国所依赖的叙事凝聚力的出现。