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François Maspero is best known as the owner of the radical Latin Quarter bookstore La joie de lire and the founder and editor of Éditions Maspero, but he was also a writer, a translator, and a journalist. Maspero published several novels and wrote for media outlets like Le Monde and France Culture. He wrote about his travels throughout Eastern Europe, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, and the Caribbean, and published literature reviews, obituaries, and even his testimony of the events of 17 October 1961. This article is the first comprehensive analysis of his work as a print journalist for Le Monde, notably as a travel writer. While Maspero critiqued journalism in both of his novel-travelogues, Les passagers du Roissy-Express (1990) and Balkans-Transit (1997), this article argues that his journalism was a breeding ground for his novel-writing and vice versa. The intersection between journalism, novel writing, and militancy also allowed him to create a multidirectional activism, which reanimated past militancy to understand contemporary political crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

French history textbooks occupy a pivotal position in the colonial fracture. They impart difficult knowledge about the Algerian War of Independence, knowledge that impacts the relationships between the communities of memory in France today. Textbook analysis has focused on their verbal content and, recently, in the work of Jo McCormack, on corresponding teaching practices. This article highlights graphic design as one layer of visual knowledge production and primarily contributes to the methodology of textbook analysis with an exemplary multimodal analysis. It reveals a hidden narrative about the postcolonial relationship that is not expressed in words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Algerian War, Nafissa Sid Cara came to public prominence in two roles. As a secretary of state, Sid Cara oversaw the reform of Muslim marriage and divorce laws pursued by Charles de Gaulle's administration as part of its integration campaign to unite France and Algeria. As president of the Mouvement de solidarité féminine, she sought to "emancipate" Algerian women so they could enjoy the rights France offered. Though the politics of the Algerian War circumscribed both roles, Sid Cara's work with Algerian women did not remain limited by colonial rule. As Algeria approached independence, Sid Cara rearticulated the language of women's rights as an apolitical and universal good, regardless of the future of the French colonial state, though she-and the language of women's rights- remained bound to the former metropole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2005, scholars and politicians have employed a framework of "memory wars" to interpret conflicts over the colonial past in France. The case of the Harkis, Algerians who fought with the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence, and their descendents, challenges basic features of this paradigm. Disputes among children of Harkis about how to interpret the French colonial project in Algeria and their fathers' motivations for supporting the French reveal the limitations of considering the Harkis and other participants in the Algerian War as unified memory camps, a constituent element of the memory war model. Conceiving of memory debates in terms of a "war" also obscures the ways in which narrating the past can constitute an act of reconciliation and signal a desire for inclusion, as it has for Harki sons and daughters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers new insights about the demonstrations organized by the FLN's Fédération de France in October 1961. Thousands of Algerians rallied in Paris streets to protest against a discriminatory curfew. The French police repressed these demonstrations with shootings and other lethal practices. Dozens of demonstrators were killed in one of the most brutal massacres perpetrated in Western Europe after the Second World War. Since the end of the 1980s, historians and activists proposed narratives of these events that mainly portray the Algerians as victims of a colonial repression that should be recognized by French authorities. But these demonstrations were also a moment of national pride for Algerians who had emigrated to France. They contributed to the political battle for Algerian independence through the echoes given by the international press: French authorities were challenged in Paris streets and they recognized they lost a symbolic battle. The reports written by men and women who demonstrated provide the main archival materials for a new narrative focused on the political agency of Algerian immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers two famous works published in France during the Algerian War and forever after interpretively linked: Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Jean-Paul Sartre's Preface to Fanon's book. It argues that yoking together the two texts has distorted key features of each, in particular as they relate to the multiform problem of violence. To overcome a misreading of Fanon's position by Sartre, the analysis presented here uses the under-examined clinical case studies in the final chapter of Wretched to emphasize Fanon's acknowledgment of violence as a source of trauma, not only a means by which trauma is transcended. It then attempts to explain Sartre's reinterpretation of Fanon's message in light of ongoing postwar debates within the French intellectual Left about the revolutionary potential of violence in metropolitan France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost all of Algeria's estimated 140,000 Jews had immigrated to France by the end of the Algerian War in 1962, many of them to the Paris region. Their arrival was a source of ambivalent hope for metropolitan Jewish religious and community leaders. This article demonstrates that the period of decolonization was one in which metropolitan Jewish leaders tried to simultaneously celebrate and efface Algerian Jewish difference. This struggle took place in local religious sites, where French and Algerian Jews were accustomed to a variety of liturgies, melodies, and behaviors. The tensions that erupted when Algerian Jews asserted their right to religious particularism should be read as evidence of the paradoxes of decolonization. While a near-century of colonial citizenship had made many Algerian Jews 'French,' decolonization and migration to the metropole made them Arab in the eyes of many metropolitan Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With roots in the transformation of France during and after the Algerian War, the opposition by the farmers of Larzac and their largely urban allies throughout France to the expansion of a military camp into their lands is an emblematic event in the broad 1968 stretching a decade on either side of that year. It was particularly significant at Larzac, where a community of resistance remains today. Drawing on progressive Catholic thought and a new representation of the paysan, the conflict resonated in a France negotiating the terrain of a post-colonial era, a new relationship between the rural and the urban, and the feminist expectations of many supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the policies that the French government pursued to house repatriates from Algeria in 1962. These initiatives took place in the context of a French society overwhelmed by eight years of war, OAS terrorism that sought to overthrow the established order in metropolitan France, and the arrival of more than 600,000 people during the spring and the summer of 1962, a migration that challenged the social and economic balance of the country. To spare the repatriates the need to settle in shantytowns that would have put them on the fringe of society, the government opened collective housing and other centres d'hébergement. These efforts served the purpose of a policy of integration established through the 26 December 1962 law for people who were paradoxically both migrants and members of the national community. This policy in fact helped facilitate their integration into the metropolitan society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French government placed 20,000 of the approximately 100,000 harkis repatriated to France following the Algerian War in the Rivesaltes camp. Located in rural French Catalonia, it had previously lodged foreigners and French citizens whom the government removed from society. The decision to house the harkis in this camp, made during summer 1962 as the French government extricated itself from its 132-year empire in Algeria, symbolized that they were aliens: Berber and Arab repatriates, nearly all of whom obtained French nationality shortly after they arrived in France, were targeted by government housing policies that distanced them from public view. The camp's architecture, living conditions, isolation from French citizens, military oversight, and 'reeducation' classes, beyond functioning as powerful symbols, reinforced-and contributed to-the government's treatment of the harkis as aliens. Over the twenty-seven months it remained open, Rivesaltes fostered an exilic existence for these harkis and socially excluded them from French society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Algerian War, films and published photographs documenting brutalities committed by French forces were exceedingly rare, due to censorship and strict controls on journalistic access to the military. However, a dramatic exception to this state of affairs came at an early moment in the war, after a Fox Movietone cameraman captured footage of a French gendarme as he summarily executed an Algerian with a bullet in the back. When the journal L'Express printed frames from the film in December 1955, a scandal ensued that implicated the sitting government in Paris and stoked French anti-Americanism. This article explores the reasons for the scandal, its anatomy, and its longer-term implications for French representations of the violence of the Algerian conflict. It argues that widespread French assumptions about the appropriateness of France's role in Algeria ultimately served to neutralize the story told by the images, even as they were recognized as incontrovertible evidence of atrocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), France mobilized tens of thousands of native Algerian soldiers, known as the harkis, for counterinsurgent operations directed against their own countrymen of the National Liberation Front. As recruits for the French army, the harkis were given French status, which was then revoked when Algeria gained its independence. France later accepted the harkis as veterans and 'repatriates,' only to confine them in camps until the 1970s. The abuse of the harkis has been noted as a 'forgotten' episode in French postcolonial history. This article argues that the harkis were far from having been 'forgotten,' and in fact were considered important throughout the Fifth Republic as a powerful counterpoint to the more problematic immigrant Algerian population in France. The harkis represented the key tension in postcolonial France between the notion of an irrevocable civil status and a national identity that favored a Eurocentric culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Simone de Beauvoir's involvement in the case of Djamila Boupacha, an FLN militant who was tortured by the French Army in 1960, in the context of the repeated revelations of torture in course of the Algerian War. Drawing on Beauvoir's writings on ethics and other contemporary denunciations of torture, the essay illuminates how Beauvoir worked to overcome wide-spread public “indifference.” By focusing public attention on the Army's sexually degrading treatment of Boupacha, Beauvoir figured torture as a source of feminine and feminizing national shame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on public apologies made by the French government concerning historical events and the impact it has on the reconciliation of France with its past. In 1995, former French President Jacques Chirac made an official apology for the anti-Semitic policy of France during the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1944. According to the article, this apology created a need for an official apology for the Algerian war. The article provides an analysis of these events and their historical context.