Unspeakable Tragedies: Censorship and the New Political Theatre of the Algerian War of Independence

Abstract

The word ‘unspeakable’ is ubiquitous in accounts of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). In this context, unspeakability works as shorthand for legal and political issues that are still deeply contested, and are indexed to the use of torture by the French army and the guerrilla war led by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). The Algerian war had roots in colonial realities and French assimilationist aspirations — more precisely, in the tiered system of civic and voting rights that categorized the majority of Algerians as French subjects, but not French citizens, in Algeria’s distinctive administrative status as a French province, rather than a colony or a protectorate, and in the dedication of the large community of French settlers or pied-noirs to a French Algeria.¹ In French public discourse, the word ‘war’, largely banished, was commonly replaced by euphemisms such as the ‘Algerian problem’, ‘counter-insurgency operations’, a ‘law-and-order problem’ or ‘pacification’, in order to avoid giving credence to the idea that a civil war was tearing the nation apart.² The Evian Accords ending the war in 1962 did not address its obscured status but declared a moratorium on the prosecution of all acts of violence committed during the ‘events’ and opinions voiced about the ‘events’ before the 1961 referendum on Algerian self-determination.³