The Great Erasure

French debates on the colonial legacy rightly focus on the overseas territories and ‘Françafrique’, but they overlook a further domination exercised within mainland France itself. This paper argues that such domination is best understood through internal colonialism theory, and that it forms part of a long-standing French alterophobia rooted in the Revolutionary promise of universalism and still at work across the political spectrum. Brittany illustrates this pattern: territorial dispossession, the eradication of its language, and the internalised self-rejection that followed forced assimilation. Unlike the widely discussed ‘great replacement’, a demographically baseless conspiracy theory, this ‘great erasure’ is empirically documented, yet almost entirely absent from French public debate. The paper contends that this asymmetry is itself a symptom of the alterophobic logic it describes, exposing what national-republican universalism actually works to erase.