After Deaths, After-Lives

From the beginning of this century, French public discussions have returned frequently – and with impressive intensity – to questions involving the country's colonial past. Angry political debates, numerous novels, frontpage media coverage, films including such landmark features as Rachid Bouchareb's 'Days of Glory' (2006) and, most brilliantly, Michael Haneke's 'Caché ' (2005), and even scholarly productions have contributed to this phenomenon. The 'events' of fall 2005 were more significant than any of these, in terms of participation, media echo and political, intellectual and social consequences, leading some English-language newspapers to write of 'France in Flames' and others to speak of a 'French Intifada', or a 'Muslim uprising' in the banlieue, France's housing-project rich (but otherwise dramatically underserved) suburbs. As the keystone of its response, the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin dug up a 1955 law passed during the Algerian War to impose a curfew. It seemed to many that continuities between the present and the colonial past had finally ended what some dub the 'colonial fracture': that, is the contemporary French propensity to erase all references to its overseas foundation and, thus, to avoid thinking about the contributions that the sacrifices and suffering of its colonial subjects have made to the country's present.

The pasts shared by French and Algerian people in particular have been at the centre of recent French concerns. One obvious reason for this is that, unlike other holdings, Algeria, France's most important overseas possession, was defined as an integral part of French territory, with many French people even thinking of it as France. This made leaving more complicated. The end of direct French control over Algeria, in 1962, resulted from a vicious and bloody war (1954-62), which left at the very least 250,000 Algerians (along with some 17,000 French soldiers and 5,000 'European' inhabitants of Algeria) dead, many more wounded, and countless more deeply affected by what they had survived. A second crucial factor that keeps Algerian histories ripe for French debates is that a significant proportion of people now living in France have direct ties to Algeria, most through the processes of 'repatriation' in 1962 or migration (which reached large-scale proportions during the war and has remained important since), and others because they served there under French rule.

Most contemporary discussions of the Algerian War turn around its multivalent violence. The most fraught debates concern French forces' systematic use of torture on Algerians suspected of participating in or collaborating with nationalist activism. (Meanwhile those seeking to qualify criticisms of the Army's actions emphasize that its opponents, the National Liberation Front, or FLN, had embraced terrorism and targeted civilians, most of them fellow 'Muslims'.) Historian Joshua Cole explains this fixation on torture as a product of the political tensions surrounding recent memorial debates; he identifies 'a tacit consensus that all of the most controversial questions about what France's colonial past means for contemporary French society – the possibility of integrating Muslims into the polity, the meaning of national citizenship in a postcolonial world, the treatment of people of North African descent by police and other government officials – refer ultimately back to a primal scene established by acts of torture during the war years'.¹

Another constellation of debates has focused on the war's effects and after-effects in France itself. Conflicts over 'history' and 'memory' include recent efforts in some southern French cities to unveil monuments commemorating the violent Secret Army Organization (OAS), which killed thousands (most were civilians and Algerians, although it acted in the metropole and against the French Army as well) in its futile attempts to prevent, first, government discussions with FLN representatives in 1961 and then the application of the 1962 Evian Accords, which established a cease-fire and set the stage for independence. A second metropolitan-centred discussion concerns the post cease-fire treatment of Algerians who fought on the French side (termed 'harkis') and sought refuge...