Sung-Eun Choi. Decolonization and the French of Algeria: Bringing the Settler Colony Home.

Abstract

Sung-Eun Choi’s Decolonization and the French of Algeria: Bringing the Settler Colony Home is part of a burgeoning field of Anglophone scholarship on the history of Algeria that seeks to understand the local, regional, and transnational impact of one of the most significant struggles to end colonial rule (Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order [2016]; Matthew James Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era [2002]; Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria [2016]; Jennifer Johnson, The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism [2016]). Rather than position the nationalists at the center of her study as others have done, Choi’s work examines two understudied groups whose experiences during and after the war shaped France in dramatic and unanticipated ways. The author focuses on the pieds noirs, literally the “black feet,” settlers of European origin who had lived in Algeria dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, and on the harkis, Algerians who fought with the French military between 1954 and 1962. She also demonstrates how President Charles de Gaulle and his administration initially thought little about those groups’ places in post-1962 French society. But, as Choi and others, including Claire Eldridge, Giulia Fabbiano, Yann Scioldo-Zürcher, and Todd Shepard, explain, de Gaulle and the larger French public had to confront the fate of the pieds noirs and the harkis immediately after the war’s end, when close to one million of them fled independent Algeria for the southern shores of France. Moreover, de Gaulle and his government had to reverse their earlier claims that the settlers “would not be able to assimilate in the Metropole,” and search for ways to “now admit they were in fact French” (7).