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This thesis investigates how algorithmic transparency is performed in French public sector organisations. I analyse the practices, methods and performative style of public disclosures in an ethnography initiated at Etalab - the French Open Data task force - and conducted in 2018. The study starts by considering recent controversies about unfair administrative algorithms. This research shows that to be effective, calling for algorithmic transparency requires the staging of identities, issues and algorithms. I describe how information about algorithms is disclosed through the mise en scène of citizens' motivations, the placing of controversial requests on public bodies, and a regulatory framework redefining administrative procedures as "algorithms". In a second empirical chapter, I unpack the dispute about unfair calculations of the housing tax. This dispute provides an opportunity to understand how the performance of transparency is purposefully planned by Etalab and the General Directorate of Public Finance. When these two organisations realise that full accountability of the housing tax algorithm is impossible, they set the boundaries of what should be made public. I posit that to be performed, algorithmic transparency requires the negotiation of its limits and the scripting of disclosures. I then study how the housing tax algorithm was disclosed in practice. Since full accountability is not attainable, algorithmic transparency is not longer defined as a bureaucratic duty but performed through a proclaimed exemplarity. Disclosures provide occasions for actors to brand transparency as an honourable achievement, but one that is disconnected from accountability requirements. On this basis, I develop the argument that algorithmic transparency is best understood, not as an accountability device, but as a political force shaping new narratives about public sector digitalisation. The performance of algorithmic transparency serves as an incentive to reorder public services, and, an attempt to refresh the technologies supporting administrative action in the public sector.