Abstract
In 1978, four years into his term as President of the French Fifth Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing charged legislators with the task of drafting a new law that would “indemnify” the 1.5 million “repatriates,” a term, which referred to the French citizens who left the colonies during decolonization. The vast majority, almost one million, were from former French Algeria. The official definition of the repatriate was: “a citizen who either had to leave or who considered it necessary [estimer devoir] to leave territories that were formerly under French sovereignty, protectorate, or tutelage.”1 On the day the new indemnities law was passed, Giscard appeared on television to make the historic announcement. Reaffirming his commitment to the principle of “national solidarity,” the president proclaimed that he would ensure the Republic’s duties to its repatriate citizens and see to it that “justice be rendered to those compatriots who have contributed to the grandeur of France in the course of the past decades.”2 For the repatriates, and for the French of Algeria especially, it was a long-awaited decision.
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Notes
See Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
The United Nations General Assembly recognized Algeria’s right to independence in 1960, which proved to be a turning point in the war. Starting in 1961, the French faced grave difficulties on all fronts. Inside Algeria, dissenting factions of the French army had staged a coup against the government in a last-ditch attempt to defend Algérie française. The United States, frustrated by military debacles on the French side and mindful of the ascent of the Afro-Asian bloc at the UN, minimized its outward endorsement of the French cause. In metropolitan France, domestic support began to diminish significantly, undermining morale in Algeria. See Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 120; on the various disastrous French military campaigns, see Connelly, 125–133.
For comprehensive accounts of the war, see Yves Courrière, La guerre d’Algérie (Paris, France: Fayard, 2001).
General accounts of the war include Sylvie Thénault, Histoire de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (Paris: Larousse, 2005);
Benjamin Stora and Mohammed Harbi, La guerre d’Algérie 1954–1962 (Paris: Pluriel, 2010);
Benjamin Stora and Mohammed Harbi, L’histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2004).
For literature concerning torture and specific aspects of the war, see Benjamin Stora, La gangrène ou l’oubli (Paris: La Découverte, 2005)
Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’Armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).
For the most recent publication in English, see Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, 1830–1962 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Alain Peyrefitte, Faut-il partager Algérie? (Paris: Plon, 1961), 20.
Sung-eun Choi, “Complex Compatriots: Jews in Post-Vichy French Algeria,” in Journal of North African Studies 17:5 (2012), 863–880.
In 1961, France naturalized over 2,400 Saharan Jews in the M’zab region. It is known that many of these Saharan Jews chose to immigrate to Israel. See Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). Shepard explains that, in contrast, most of the Mozabite Jews left for France, and that many of those who first chose to go to Israel subsequently emigrated to France. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 246.
The concept of “rootedness in the soil,” while commonplace in European and non-European conceptions of national belonging in the nineteenth century, was invoked for different reasons and with distinct ramifications in different countries. Gérard Noiriel attributes the French use of this concept to the entrenched presence of the peasantry in France, well into the late nineteenth century. See Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot; Les origines républicaines de Vichy (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1999).
We know that until the late 1960s, the predominant immigrant groups were the Italians and the Portuguese. For immigration from Europe, see Gérard Noiriel, trans., Geoffroy de Laforcade The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992)
Georges Tapinos, L’Immigration étrangère en France, 1946–1973 (Paris: Institute national d’études démographiques, 1975).
For a brief overview of the Iberian-North African trajectory of Sephardic Jews from the seventh century onward, see Saddek Benkada, “A Moment in Sephardi History: The Reestablishment of the Jewish Community of Oran, 1792–1831” in Emily Benichou and Daniel J. Gottreich, eds, Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 168–176.
For literature that includes accounts of Algerian Jews, see Michel Abitbol, Les deux terres promises: les juifs de France et le sionisme, 1897–1945 (Paris: Tempus Perrin, 2010);
Joëlle Bahloul, Ethnographie d’une minorité éthnique. Les juifs nord-africains en France (Paris: La Kahena, 1981);
Esther Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs de France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997);
Haim Hirschberg, A History of the Jews of North Africa, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1981).
Melissa K. Byrnes, “French Like Us? Municipal Policies and North African Migrants in the Paris Banlieues, 1945–1975.” PhD diss. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2008), 115–116.
Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Race, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992).
Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State, and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 80–104; 186–208.
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Choi, SE. (2016). Introduction. In: Decolonization and the French of Algeria. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520753_1
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