Résurgence de l’Histoire dans la fiction: les massacres du by Michel Laronde

Abstract

Reviewed by: Résurgence de l’Histoire dans la fiction: les massacres du by Michel Laronde Jennifer Howell Laronde, Michel. Résurgence de l’Histoire dans la fiction: les massacres du 17 octobre 1961 à Paris. L’Harmattan, 2021. ISBN 978-2-343-23538-7. Pp. 226. On 17 Oct. 1961, the French Federation of Algeria’s Front de libération nationale (FLN) led a peaceful demonstration against a curfew that unfairly targeted Algerian Muslims living in the French capital. Thousands of people, including women and children, participated in the march. Under orders from Prefect Maurice Papon, the French police and the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité attempted to block access to the city by securing subway and train stations and raiding public buses. Many protestors were brutally attacked, their bodies thrown into the Seine. The next day, official sources reported three deaths and sixty-four wounded. Yet, according to the FLN, journalists, and eyewitnesses, the death toll was considerably higher. Despite government attempts to efface the event from national history, it would later resurface in fiction beginning in 1982 with Georges Mattei’s La guerre des gusses. These works are the focus of Laronde’s study that comparatively analyzes twenty-four novels published between 1982 and 2012, and in which the massacres appear (Laronde ends his study in 2012, the year François Hollande became the first French president to publicly acknowledge [End Page 197] the massacres). The resurgence of 17 Oct. 1961 in French national history, Laronde argues, stems from the progressive development of a corrective discourse of the event in (historical) fiction. Inspired by historical omission, these works reveal the role that literature can play in the processes of individual, collective, and institu- tional remembrance. Through a sustained reading of novels that fit within narrow spatiotemporal and thematic parameters, Laronde’s analysis is perhaps best de- scribed as a case study of the relationship between postcolonial fiction and the workings of memory and postmemory. Similar to Marianne Hirsch’s model of remembrance in second-generation Holocaust literature (explained in the introduc- tion), Laronde understands the repetition of fictional references to the day of the massacre as the product of historical trauma. However, references vary significantly in narrative form and function. These differences—each defined according to one of three ekphrastic paradigms presented in chapter one—form the basis of chapters three and four. The author’s methodology is the subject of chapter two. Interestingly, Laronde notes in the conclusion that his study did not confirm his initial hypothesis. His chronological reading of novels by year of publication failed to reveal the emergence, development, and successful realization of a new literary discourse on 17 Oct. 1961. Rather than finding evidence of a corrective discourse evolving over time, Laronde discovered that reactions to the event’s erasure from national history depend on author identity. His analysis suggests that Franco-Maghrebi writers seek to reintegrate this forgotten chapter of French history so that personal, familial, and communal memory are no longer excluded from the national memory. In contrast, the writing of a corrective discourse by Franco-French authors establishes that “mainstream” cultural production has nevertheless evolved toward a more inclusive national discourse on colonial history, one that is decidedly postcolonial. Published nearly sixty years after the event, Laronde’s work is timely and contributes to our understanding of the processes of remembrance and historicization. Jennifer Howell Illinois State University Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French ...