Mai 1945 à Sétif : genèse d'une bande dessinée

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the origins of the bande dessinée [comic] album Leçons coloniales (2012), for which the author wrote the script, with illustrations by Djillali Defali. The album focuses on the build-up to the massacres that took place in May 1945 in and near the Algerian town of Sétif in response to nationalist demonstrations in favor of independence from France. The author's parents lived at that time in the nearby village of El Ouricia, where they worked on the farm of a French settler before migrating to France a few years before independence. In the course of researching the historical context for the book, the author made contact with a grandson of the farmer for whom his parents had worked and arranged a meeting in the course of which his elderly mother and the descendant of the settler for whom she had worked reminisced over their childhood memories of El Ouricia.