Archiving the Algerian War: Propaganda and the Archives

France's war in Algeria from 1954–62 has prompted new historical research and political polemics since 1992. Especially controversial has been an acknowledgement that torture was practised systematically, and the fact that French governments refused until 1999 to admit that Algeria was a real war, not just ‘a law and order problem’. Access to French archives, along with publication of memoirs and collections of letters by conscript troops, has permitted fresh social, cultural and literary perspectives, and new insights about the memory of this war in France and Algeria. The war's strategies and military operations, however, have been neglected. Yet these aspects illuminate the nature of the armed challenges by nationalist insurgents in the era of Cold War and European decolonizations. Algeria reveals the operational success of the responses by the French military forces and psychological warfare service. The war's international diplomacy suggests that another ‘operational theatre’ – that of the United Nations and world opinion – was where the Algerian National Liberation Front really outmanoeuvred France. This ensured that French Algeria's days were numbered by 1960, despite French success in defeating the armed insurrection within Algeria.

The decolonization of Algeria represents a turning point in world history, marking the end of France’s colonial empire, the birth of the Algerian republic, and the appearance of the Third World and pan-Arabism. Algeria emerged from colonial domination to negotiate the release of American hostages in Iran during the Carter administration. Radical Islam would later rise from the ashes of Algeria’s failed democracy, leading to a civil war and the training of Algerian terrorists in Afghanistan. Moreover, the decolonization of Algeria offered an imperfect model of decolonization to other nations like South Africa that succeeded in abolishing apartheid while retaining its white settler population. Algeria and its war of national liberation therefore constitute an inescapable reference for those looking to understand today’s “war on terror” and ever-expanding islamophobia in Western media circuits. Consequently, it is imperative that students and educators understand the global implications of the Algerian War and how to best approach this conflict in school and at home so as to learn from the consequences of misrepresentation at all levels of the memory transmission chain. These objectives are all the more important today given the West’s misunderstanding and mischaracterization of Islam, the Arab Spring, the Muslim-majority world, and, most importantly, the continuing influence of French colonialism—especially in the postcolonial era. Conceived as a case study, The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity argues that comics provide an alternative to textbook representations of the Algerian War in France because they draw from many of the same source materials yet produce narratives that are significantly different. This book demonstrates that although comics rely on conventional vectors of memory transmission like national education, the family, and mainstream media, they can also create new and productive dialogues using these same vectors in ways unavailable to traditional textbooks. From this perspective, these comics are an effective and alternative way to develop a more inclusive social consciousness.

This chapter presents the resistance against the erasure of institutional violence from collective history during the Algerian War in France with the example of the 17 October 1961 massacre of North Africans in Paris. The political foreclosure of the event resulting in a collective trauma tied to the war resurfaces in beur literature and mainstream French fiction from the 1980s onward as memorial fragments naturalized in the novels. The traces of the October 17 event narrativized in postcolonial writing signal a postmemorial mentality where the past bears on the present of the nation’s postcolonial process of correcting the distortions of silenced history. The next section of the chapter briefly outlines ways to generate the reparative potential of postmemorial writing reflected in the ekphrases of the event present in more than twenty novels. The last section explains how this situation of repressed memory spanning more than one generation and repeated in literature resonates with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, as a call to revisit the official history of the traumas of the Algerian War in an unending process of healing and repair of the colonial past. .

An illuminating and provocative account of Germany's role as sanctuary for Algerian nationalists during their fight for independence from France between 1954 and 1962. The book explores key issues such as the impact of external sanctuaries on French counterinsurgency efforts; the part played by security and intelligence services in efforts to eliminate these sanctuaries; the Algerian War's influence on West German foreign and security policy; and finally, the emergence of West German civic engagement in support of Algeria's independence struggle, which served to shape the newly independent country's perception of its role and place in international society. Mathilde von Bulow sheds new light on the impact of FLN activities, the role of anti-colonial movements and insurgencies in the developing world in shaping the dynamics of the Cold War as well as the manner in which the Algerian War was fought and won.

This book unravels the intertwining threads of the protracted agony of France's war with Algeria, the American role in the fall of the Fourth Republic, the long shadow of Charles de Gaulle, and the decisive post-war power of the United States. At its heart is an analysis of how Washington helped bring de Gaulle to power and a penetrating revisionist account of his Algerian policy. Departing from widely held interpretations of the Algerian War, the book approaches the conflict as an international diplomatic crisis whose outcome was primarily dependent on French relations with Washington, the NATO alliance, and the United Nations, rather than on military engagement. It makes extensive use of previously unexamined documents from the Department of State, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and heretofore secret files of the Archives of the French Army at Vincennes and the Colonial Ministry at Aix-en-Provence. The book argues convincingly that de Gaulle always intended to keep Algeria French, in line with his goal to make France the center of a reorganized French union of autonomous but dependent African states and the heart of a Europe of cooperating states. Such a union, which the French called Eurafrica, would further France's chance to be an equal partner with Britain and the United States in a reordered “Free World.” In recent years the Algerian War has reclaimed its place in popular memory in France. Its interpreters have continued to view the conflict as a national, internal drama and de Gaulle as the second-time savior who ended French participation in a ruinous colonial war. But by analyzing the conflict in terms of French foreign policy, the book shows the pivotal role of the United States and counters certain political myths that portray de Gaulle as an emancipator of colonial peoples.

This book unravels the intertwining threads of the protracted agony of France's war with Algeria, the American role in the fall of the Fourth Republic, the long shadow of Charles de Gaulle, and the decisive post-war power of the United States. At its heart is an analysis of how Washington helped bring de Gaulle to power and a penetrating revisionist account of his Algerian policy. Departing from widely held interpretations of the Algerian War, the book approaches the conflict as an international diplomatic crisis whose outcome was primarily dependent on French relations with Washington, the NATO alliance, and the United Nations, rather than on military engagement. It makes extensive use of previously unexamined documents from the Department of State, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and heretofore secret files of the Archives of the French Army at Vincennes and the Colonial Ministry at Aix-en-Provence. The book argues convincingly that de Gaulle always intended to keep Algeria French, in line with his goal to make France the center of a reorganized French union of autonomous but dependent African states and the heart of a Europe of cooperating states. Such a union, which the French called Eurafrica, would further France's chance to be an equal partner with Britain and the United States in a reordered “Free World.” In recent years the Algerian War has reclaimed its place in popular memory in France. Its interpreters have continued to view the conflict as a national, internal drama and de Gaulle as the second-time savior who ended French participation in a ruinous colonial war. But by analyzing the conflict in terms of French foreign policy, the book shows the pivotal role of the United States and counters certain political myths that portray de Gaulle as an emancipator of colonial peoples.

After a nearly 130-year regime of violence and oppression under French colonialism, Algerians began their struggle for independence in 1954. Nearly one million people were killed, centuries-old traditions were broken, and the country was torn apart. The Algerian war has also been described as a “moment in which gendered, religious, and ethnic identities were challenged.” Within Algerian society and the French colonial regime at the time, expectations were deeply ingrained regarding the status and rights of women. Particularly significant is the impact that the war had on shaping Algerian women’s role in society. Both sides used women during the conflict to symbolize a greater cause, appropriating their image to form a particular narrative of events. The idealized constructs of gender propagated by both Algerian men and the French colonial regime were used to project a certain image of women’s social and political roles that served their own interests during the war, with few tangible benefits for women themselves. Although many women suffered and risked their lives in the war against French occupation, their contributions to an Algerian victory did not help them achieve equal rights once independence was declared in 1962. My research provides a chronological historical analysis of the role of women in the Algerian war. I use primary and secondary historical and literary sources to argue that despite participation in the liberation struggle Algerian women remained marginalized in the new independent Algerian society.

French colonization and the consequent War of Independence in Algeria have marked contemporary French society deeply in numerous ways. For decades, the history and memories of these events have been described as ‘padlocked’ by the state. Since the 2000s, academics have observed an increase in the political use of memory. While the literature has often employed psychoanalytical concepts to interpret this resurgence of the repressed, I argue that these readings are in fact designed to be present incursions into the past, serving to legitimate contemporary political projects. This is because new political actors and projects have emerged defending certain visions of the past in order to bolster present ambitions. In recent years, France has also experienced a rise of both far-right nationalist movements and Islamism. These radical formations continue to instrumentalize the history and memories of colonization and the war in Algeria to legitimate their discourses. In a fast-changing world, radical groups promote the rehabilitation of a reassuring past in which racial hierarchies and endogamy are associated with prestige and stability. I contend that while radical elements develop discourses bearing on the past, they thrive on the cultural insecurities of today’s youth and thereby contribute to the reification of identities. Thus, while trying to come to terms with the past, memory policies might actually contribute to its resurgence, as they tend to focus on discourses rather than social frustrations.

Alessandro Brogi's Confronting America presents an exhaustively researched and masterful account of the two-way traffic between the United States and West European (Italian and French) Communism from the end of World War II until the 1980s. This is a work about anti-Americanism and soft diplomacy in which Brogi documents U.S. efforts to fight French and Italian Communism and influence politics in both countries. His work is more complicated than traditional diplomatic histories in that he does not examine the dealings between two governments. Instead, he looks at the interactions between one government and two political parties that were, for the most part, not in power.The struggle between the Western and Eastern alliances serves as the book's tension, and Brogi devotes more attention to the dynamics of the Communist camp than to the Western. Washington's alliance was more intricate than Moscow's. U.S. allies, such as the Italian Christian Democrats and, above all, the French center-right and Gaullists, cooperated but did not march lock-step with the hegemon. The Communists, on the other hand, generally spoke with one voice, although this was more the case during the early Cold War than later. Despite great differences in outlooks, the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) acted more as instruments of Moscow and sounded more like cheering sections for the USSR than the Gaullists and Christian Democrats ever did for the United States. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 modified the situation for the PCI and PCF somewhat, particularly for the Italians, but not fundamentally and not in their anti-Americanism.The U.S. government's anti-Communist crusade took different paths. The blunt style associated with the Truman administration gave way in the mid-1950s to Dwight Eisenhower's slicker “New Look,” but Brogi contends that, as public diplomacy assumed greater importance, the “New Look” ultimately continued to give greater emphasis to propaganda than to cultural exchange. Although Washington's subsidies, public and covert, created “an aura of pax Americana,” its cultural inferiority complex burdened its propaganda war in France and Italy as did the fact that most of the leading French and Italian artistic and intellectual figures identified with the Left. Cracking that wall led to projects that sometimes succeeded, such as the Fulbright Program and the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center, but that in other cases engendered new problems, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Brogi concludes that the U.S. approach was remarkably flexible and tolerant.Brogi also investigates the larger picture of the “American model of modernization” and myriad Communist reactions to it. The United States of the 1920s, symbolized by Henry Ford, had a great allure for Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the PCI and a leading Marxist thinker. For the “technological and societal experimentation” of the United States, Brogi writes, for its pragmatism and its technological prowess, Gramsci saw “an enemy, perhaps more insidious, but, for that reason, fascinating” (pp. 40–41). During the rise of European fascism in the 1930s the Left considered U.S. cinema and literature as liberating and attractive, in contrast to some of the clumsier U.S. efforts in the 1950s. Writers such as Ernest Hemmingway, whom Italo Calvino considered “a sort of God” (p. 42), challenged many Communist assumptions. Moreover, even though later U.S. government efforts often fell flat, U.S. popular culture continued to fascinate. As the British historian Stephen Gundle has also shown, Brogi finds that even in the most vulgar characterizations, such as U.S. tabloids’ lurid crime tales and cheesecake, Communist journalists wondered “why not, if it boosts circulation?” and so they infused some of their own reviews with more glamor and gloss all'americana. Later, other developments in the United States, such as the Civil Rights movement, attracted Communist interest and further confused images of the Western superpower.Nationalism also complicated the Cold War confrontation, particularly as Brogi's story moves from the late 1950s into the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond Europe, the image of the United States benefitted from the Suez crisis and Algeria's independence movement, whereas Vietnam was a U.S. propaganda disaster. Struggles in the Third World also caused splits among European Marxists, pitting more aggressive factions against pacifists and moderates, particularly in Italy. Brogi makes a good point in reminding us that the PCF considered itself, paradoxically, dogmatically Marxist but also nationalist, reacting adversely, for example, to U.S. support for German revival. Integrating Germany back into the European fabric was high on the U.S. agenda, but U.S. policymakers needed to tread lightly because Italian and French self-esteem also needed cultivation. The answer turned from “fostering self-reliant allies” toward a “commitment to interdependence” (p. 64). In downplaying nationalism and encouraging European cooperation, U.S. officials believed they could drive a wedge between Communists and moderate leftists such as Leon Blum and Giuseppe Saragat and their followers. French Communist suspicion of European integration was stubborn and fierce. “Traditions of nationalism and the nation-state,” Brogi states, “and even the nationalist belief that revolution had its roots in France, aggravated the PCF's imperviousness to any transnational option” (p. 321). Suspicions eased somewhat in the 1960s after a PCI faction led by Giorgio Amendola began to preach a European “Third Way” as a way out of the Cold War vice. Such efforts and the experience of the Prague Spring in 1968 had some effect on the PCF.Brogi contends that Communists faced their most “insidious, and for that reason insurmountable challenges” in consumerism and “the theories of alienation against the consumerist society that turned upside down the conventional socioeconomic Marxist understandings of revolution” (p. 285). Inspired by Herbert Marcuse and others who discussed “private desires over collective struggles,” these arguments wreaked havoc with the more orthodox French, whose rigid ideological positions were losing their appeal among rebellious youth. The economic slump and tight job market in the 1970s also worked against ideological fervor. Nevertheless, the Italians again seemed to handle things better than the French. Rossana Rossanda's exciting tenure at the Gramsci Institute was controversial among the old hardliners, but was characterized by artistic experimentation and mending fences with old renegades such as Calvino and Elio Vittorini. If the U.S. approach was flexible and tolerant, the PCI certainly aided its success.

This entry focuses on the resistance against the erasure of institutional violence from collective memory during the Algerian War in France with the example of the 17 October 1961 massacre of North Africans in Paris. As part of an ongoing effort to correct the state’s misrepresentation of the event to the nation, a plaque was inaugurated by the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, on October 17, 2001, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the event. The image of the plaque that reads ‘In memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961’ resonates also in other cities around Paris as a corrective act of the great national narrative. Plaques and the renaming of streets, squares and public loci as ‘17 October 1961’ are memory initiatives that ensure the transition from state lie to the historical transformation of one of the traumatic situations embedded along the fractured lines between the colonial and the post-colonial. Plaques are akin to sites of memory, part of the process of healing traumas by keeping them alive in the present and represent the engagement of the post-colonial period towards correcting the distortions of silenced history.

Jean-Paul Sartre's renown and intellectual celebrity grew as a function of his engagement in Third World struggles. Sartre's public image as a champion of the oppressed is so entrenched that it might seem self-evident that he played a leading role in the anti-apartheid struggle. However, his actual contribution to the South African struggle appears to be at odds with the way it is inscribed in collective memory. This article examines the incongruity between Sartre's actual involvement in the struggle against apartheid and his enduring image as a champion of the anti-racist struggle in South Africa. Archival research into Sartre's publications, public appearances and travels in France and abroad notes only three occasions on which Sartre made a direct reference to apartheid—the first in June 1963, the second in October 1964 and the third in November 1966. Tracing Sartre's involvement chronologically, the article seeks to map more precisely the nature of Sartre's contribution, commitment and responsibility to the French anti-apartheid movement, to uncover different facets of Sartre as a celebrity and a public intellectual, and to offer a better understanding of the period following the Algerian War in France with regard to Third World struggles.

Battered by Geopolitical Winds, Bulgaria Struggles to Restart Much Needed Reforms

In the Maghreb, the struggle for independence was the starting point for a new relationship between people and institutions. Three different ways of developing a new state – in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco – are the result of a new social and political landscape that is being designed in the Mediterranean basin: from a monarchy in Morocco legitimised by religion, to a liberal republic in Tunisia and a socialist-populist regime in Algeria. During the 1970s and 1980s, both the internal and the international situation forced these countries to confront the difficulties of economical and political central control. The lack of liberties, the economic crisis, the fight for power among the political and social forces inside these countries, and the Western Saharan conflict limited the development of the area. Two decades after independence, in the 1990s, we witness a political, cultural, economic and social crisis considered by scholars to be the catalyst of social processes such as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism or migration to Europe. The civil war in Algeria and the fight against Islamic terrorism are alibis for the authoritarian policies implemented by these regimes. Nowadays, limits on civil jobs, control of the Islamic presence in the political arena and new economic adjustment programmes related to European Union policy in the area, are all attempts to solve the critical situation.

Lies propagated at the national level were an important tool of colonial exploitation. If France was enforcing a race-based segregation in the colony of Algeria, similar practices within France were leading to the violent subjugation of people of Algerian origins. In Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), a film about France's official denial of colonial crimes of the Algerian War, the presence of multiple cameras reminds us that colonial truth is perspectival. Spatial analyses reveal Georges Laurent participating in a colonial psychosis that produces Majid as the orphaned product of France's war on Algeria. The space between the viewer and the film performatively reminds us that just as the colonizer and the colonized form a mutually inflecting relation, we, too, shall forever remain implicated in the subject of our gaze.

Matthew Connelly's thoroughly researched and gracefully written volume adds an important dimension to our understanding of Algeria's struggle for independence. While the Algerian revolution has been the subject of numerous scholarly accounts, relatively little attention has been paid to the nature and context of the diplomatic efforts that played such an important role in the outcome of the conflict. It is here that Connelly makes an important and highly original contribution.