Remembering French Algeria. Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile

Abstract

Algeria is the symbol of the collapsing French colonial empire. Its past under French colonial rule therefore is mostly discussed as a story of fighting oppression. The idea of Algeria as a lost French department is still a taboo. In her work Remembering French Algeria. Pieds-Noir, Identity, and Exile, Amy L. Hubbell attacks this blind spot in French History and sheds light on a total different narrative: the one of a lost home to many French citizens who left independent Algeria to ‘the Hexagon’ in 1962, a move which they themselves perceived as ‘exile’. This literary study depicts how French Algeria has been remembered in literature and film since 1962. Hubbell aims to analyse the construction of a collective identity through memory of those so-called Pieds-Noirs, and their oscillation between the feeling of exile and the desire to return to a (forever lost) Algerian past. In contrast to the understanding of ‘Pieds-Noirs’ as French compatriots living in Algeria under French colonial rule, Hubbell defines the repatriation of the Français d’Algérie to the Hexagon after Algerian independence as the key moment for a collective identification. An (originally pejorative) appellation became particularly relevant and almost a sacred affiliation for those coerced to leave their trans-Mediterranean homeland. Suffering from Nostalgérie (‘references to the sun, the heat, the winds, the sea, and the different parts of the largest cities, such as Algiers or Oran’ to describe the repatriates’ nostalgia) constituted the main element for a strong Franco-Algerian double-bind collective identity. The ‘dual trauma of leaving Algeria and being rejected in France’ was then passed on from generation to generation. Hubbell uses the concept of ‘postmemory’ to explain why it is obvious to analyse the memory of French Algeria from its origin in 1962 to the present, when Pieds-Noirs descendants born in the Hexagon still cling to this identity of a ‘paradise lost’ like to a ‘phantom limb’. Interestingly, instead of former ethnic origins, in France, the specific Algerian city they had left became the new origin, the ‘paradisiacal [geographical] point of reference’; unfortunately, Hubbell does not explore this any further.