This panel examines three key postcolonial moments in French and francophone history in which various actors opportunistically revived the French colonial past to make claims about their postcolonial presents. The postcolonial period of the 1960s and 1970s, just after African independence from France, produced postcolonial tensions between African immigrant communities from the former colonies and the metropolitan French society that often marginalized them. Gillian Glaes analyzes the anti-colonialist rhetoric of African immigrants living France who found themselves in many ways in a French neocolonial society.  Her paper reveals the impact of anti-colonialist discourse on the immigrant political activism of metropolitan France in the early postcolonial era. Looking at a similar period, Burleigh Hendrickson's paper locates a number of colonial resurrections during the political upheaval of youth movements in 1968. His paper demonstrates how colonial history acted as a weapon for both youth activists (in France, Tunisia and Senegal) and states (in Tunisia and Senegal) for either revolutionary or counter-revolutionary purposes. In 2003, on the eve of the bicentennial marking Haitian independence, French colonial history was again revived by politicians in Haiti to make claims for reparations dating to 19th-century indemnities paid to France following independence. Jean-François Brière's paper explores the negotiations leading to the imposition of indemnities upon Haiti, the recent resurrections of the history of this colonial relationship and France’s refusal to recognize these claims as legitimate. Taken together, these papers shine light on the ways that the colonial past remains culturally and politically relevant in postcolonial francophone societies.