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The French-Algerian War is the great break dividing the lives of the settlers in half: the times before the war, which tend to be remembered tinged with a gilded nostalgia, and the years since, which are discussed with considerably less enthusiasm. Life in Algeria, followed by life in France. “It’s as if we went from life in color, to life in black and white,” one woman explained to me. The war represents a major turning point for the settlers and set the stage for their experience in contemporary France. To fully understand the meaning of the Franco-Maltese social clubs, we must return to this major trauma, which has set the course of the club members’ lives in the aftermath of colonialism. This period continues to shape the settlers’ orientations toward Algeria, the past, and contemporary France and the French, and even dictates the very structure of everyday conversation.1 THE FRENCH-ALGERIAN WAR, 1954–1962 While in hindsight one could argue that the end of French Algeria was inevitable , such a position was not widely shared in France, even in the 1950s. Most French in the metropole as well as those in Algeria were taken by surprise by the November 1, 1954, proclamation from Cairo of the principal objectives of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), which coincided with attacks on French civilians by the associated Armée de libération nationale, for many the starting point of the war of independence.2 Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that French officials did not predict the mass migration from Algeria of nearly a million settlers at the end of the long war. Settlers, officials in Algeria and the metropole, and the general French public all were utterly unprepared for this sudden mass movement , further compounding the disruption it caused. Algeria declared its SIX The French-Algerian War and Its Aftermath  independence from France on July 5, 1962. The seven and a half years between these two dates included periods of calm and optimism, which were punctuated by coordinated attacks by Algerian organizations on European civilians in cities and rural regions, counter-terrorist attacks in Muslim quarters, all-out assaults by the French army, and violent internecine feuds within each faction involved. The conflict exhibited many features of a civil war, and yet war was never officially declared. It remained officially the “operations of the maintenance of order” (opérations de maintien de l’ordre) until 1999.3 Algeria since the Third Republic had comprised three French departments. As some pieds-noirs asked rhetorically, “How could France declare war on itself ?” The conflict remained the “war without a name” (Talbott 1980; Rotman and Tavernier 1992), and French officials labeled those they were fighting “outlaws,” “rebels,” or “terrorists,” but “systematically and deliberately denied them the status of warriors or combatants” (Alexander, Evans, and Keiger 2002, 3). Groups who together, however awkwardly, had formed a common society began to pull apart and battle each other while, at least on the surface, still behaving as parts of a whole: they lived in the same small villages, traversed the same city streets, and patronized the same shops. Algerians continued to work on the farms or in the factories of the very people they were hoping to overthrow. Settlers continued to employ office managers and family servants who, in some cases, warned them about imminent attacks, but who, in other cases, were active participants. Further complicating this period for those living through it was the fact that the sides of the dispute were not as clearly drawn as it might seem. The label Français d’Algérie, “French from Algeria,” theoretically encompassed people of any ethnic origin. Draft laws required young men to serve, regardless of origin, and thus naturalized Muslim Algerians and Muslim career officers in French military service at the time of the war served on the side of the French.4 In addition, thousands of Algerians volunteered to assist the French in various services (and were sometimes referred to generally as harkis).5 Rural security units (groupes mobiles de protection rurale, or GMPR, later groupes mobiles de sécurité, GMS) included thousands of Europeans who did the same tasks as the Arab and Berber men in these units (Hamoumou 2004, 322–23). Finally, substantial numbers of settlers, including members of communist parties and leftist Christian organizations, broke ranks with their fellow settlers and supported the Algerian independence movement...

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