Abstract
At the turn of the century, scholars, journalists, and other public figures commented rather optimistically on the way the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) appeared in the public sphere. Many historians and public observers saw the dawn of a new age in French attitudes toward the nation’s Algerian heritage. In the late 1990s, the French state had stopped denying its bloodiest war of decolonization and started to actively commemorate it; academic research had made considerable progress in understanding the war, including some of its most sensitive aspects; public media and the cinema had begun to address the Franco-Algerian colonial past; and in 2000 the French public had just started to engage in an intense debate about the systematic use of torture as part of French warfare in Algeria. Many commentators used expressions such as the return of a ‘repressed’ past, an ‘end of amnesia’, or an intense collective ‘work of mourning’ (travail de deuil), a difficult but also healing process of coming to terms, of confronting a deliberately ‘forgotten’ past that would finally become less emotionally charged.1 Some even saw the beginning of France’s general emotional disengagement and reconciliation with its conflict-ridden colonial past as a whole.
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Notes
See, for instance, David L. Schalk, ‘Has France’s Marrying Her Century Cured the Algerian Syndrome?’, Historical Reflections, 25 (1999): 149–64;
Benjamin Stora, ‘Guerre d’Algérie: les instruments de la mémoire’, Historiens et Géographes, 96(388) (2004): 247–54;
Neil MacMaster, ‘The Torture Controversy (1998–2002): Towards a “New History” of the Algerian War?’, Modern and Contemporary France, 10(4) (2002): 449–59.
The best analysis of these events is provided by Romain Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire: la controverse autour du ‘fait colonial’ (Bellecombe-en-Bauges, 2006).
Cf. Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, eds, Les guerres de mémoires: la France et son histoire (Paris, 2008);
Benjamin Stora, La guerre des mémoires: la France face à son passé colonial: entretiens avec Thierry Leclère (La Tour d’Aigues, 2007);
Eric Savarese, Algérie, la guerre des mémoires (Paris, 2007).
On the place of post-Algerian memories within the French post-colonial ‘encounter’, see Eric Savarese, La rencontre postcoloniale (Bellecombe-en-Bauges, 2014).
See, for example, Antoine Raybaud, ‘Deuil sans travail, travail sans deuil: la France a-t-elle une mémoire coloniale?’, Dédale, 5–6 (1997): 87–104;
Gilles Manceron, Marianne et ses colonies: une introduction à l’histoire coloniale de la France (Paris, 2003), 267–82.
On this aspect, see Todd Shepard’s chapter in this volume. On the term of ‘deterritorialization’, see Jan C. Jansen, ‘Politics of Remembrance, Colonialism, and the Algerian War in France’, in Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, eds, A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York, 2010), 275–93, here 275.
A good overview on this period is provided by Frank Renken, Frankreich im Schatten des Algerienkrieges: Die Fünfte Republik und die Erinnerung an den letzten großen Kolonialkonflikt (Göttingen, 2006).
Classical interpretations are Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 1991); Schalk, ‘Syndrome’. For a critique, see
William B. Cohen, ‘The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory’, Historical Reflections, 28 (2002): 219–39.
For the big picture, see Christian Meier, Das Gebot zu vergessen und die Unabweisbarkeit des Erinnerns: Vom öffentlichen Umgang mit schlimmer Vergangenheit (Munich, 2010), chapter 1.
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Enjeux politiques de l’histoire coloniale (Marseille, 2009), 24–35.
Cf. Benjamin Stora, Le dictionnaire des livres de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 1996).
On the ‘representation’ via associations and their representativeness, see Claire Eldridge’s chapter in this volume. On the constitution of these groups as social actors via mobilization, see Eric Savarese, L’invention des Pieds-Noirs (Paris, 2002).
For a survey of different forms and media, see Andrea L. Smith, ‘Settler Sites of Memory and the Work of Mourning’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 31(3) (2013): 65–92.
Jan C. Jansen, Erobern und Erinnern: Symbolpolitik, öffentlicher Raum und französischer Kolonialismus in Algerien, 1830–1950 (Munich, 2013), 1–2, 477–80;
Alain Amato, Monuments en exil (Paris, 1979).
Raphaëlle Branche, La guerre d’Algérie: une histoire apaisée? (Paris, 2005), 25–7.
On such synergetic interactions between Holocaust and decolonization memories, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, 2009).
Frédéric Rouyaud, ‘La bataille du 19 mars’, in Jean-Pierre Rioux, ed., La guerre d’Algérie et les Français (Paris, 1990), 545–52.
Robert Aldrich, ‘Le musée colonial impossible’, in Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds, Culture post-coloniale, 1961–2006: traces et mémoires coloniales en France (Paris, 2005), 83–101, here 98–9.
For a short overview on the following events, see Branche, Guerre; Jansen, ‘Politics of Remembrance’; Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France (Basingstoke, 2005), 328–34.
Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire, 61–84. On the law, see also Gilles Manceron, ed., La colonisation, la loi et l’histoire (Paris, 2006);
Claude Liauzu, ‘Les historiens saisis par les guerres de mémoire coloniale’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 52(4) (2005): 99–109.
On recent French ‘memory laws’ in a European context, see Stiina Löytömäki, Law and the Politics of Memory: Confronting the Past (Abingdon, 2014).
For an overview, see Olivier Dard and Daniel Lefeuvre, eds, L’ Europe face à son passé colonial (Paris, 2008); Stephen Howe, ‘Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France’, Histoire@Politique, 11 (2010), http://www.histoire-politique.fr/index.php?numero= 11&rub= pistes&item= 17 (accessed 30 April 2015).
On the event and its commemoration, see Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Postcolonial Memories (Oxford, 2006).
Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès, La république coloniale: essai sur une utopie (Paris, 2003);
Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds, La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris, 2005);
Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, La république impériale: politique et racisme d’état (Paris, 2009).
Gérard Noiriel, ‘Itinéraire d’un engagement dans l’histoire: entretien avec Gérard Noiriel’, interview by Smaîn Laacher and Patrick Simon, Mouvements, 45–6(3) (2006): 209–19, here 217–18.
Daniel Mollenhauer, ‘Erinnerungspolitik in der postkolonialen Republik — Frankreich und das koloniale Erbe’, in Claudia Kraft, Alf Lüdtke, and Jürgen Martschukat, eds, Kolonialgeschichten: Regionale Perspektiven auf ein globales Phänomen (Frankfurt, 2010), 119–41.
On the competitive dynamics of self-victimization, see Martha Minow, ‘Surviving Victim Talk’, UCLA Law Review, 40 (1992–3): 1411–45.
For overviews of the US and France, see Jean-Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes: génocide, identité, reconnaissance (Paris, 1997);
Johann Michel, Gouverner les mémoires: les politiques mémorielles en France (Paris, 2010).
Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, Dekolonisation: Das Ende der Imperien (Munich, 2013), 125–6.
On the international commemoration of slavery, see Ana Lucia Araujo, ed., Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York, 2012).
On reactions to the speech, see Makhily Gassama, Mamoussé Diagne, Dialo Diop, and Koulsy Lamko, eds, L’Afrique répond à Sarkozy: contre le discours de Dakar (Paris, 2007);
Jean-Pierre Chrétien, ed., L’Afrique de Sarkozy: un déni d’histoire (Paris, 2008).
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Jansen, J.C. (2016). Memory Lobbying and the Shaping of ‘Colonial Memories’ in France since the 1990s: The Local, the National, and the International. In: Borutta, M., Jansen, J.C. (eds) Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137508416_13
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