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RECREATING ALGERIA IN FRANCE The settler interest in forming associations is not unusual for France, where these institutions form a general template for all voluntary organizations . However, many French from North Africa told me that these activities are more important for repatriates in general and the pieds-noirs in particular. Lucette Buttigeig is a middle-aged nun of Maltese heritage who was born in Tunisia but who spent much of her adult life in Algeria following independence. I met her in Tunis, where she offered perhaps the most dispassionate analysis of this pied-noir activity. She has many siblings who migrated from Tunisia to France upon independence and who now demonstrate little interest in repatriate clubs. She finds them and their children to be well-adapted to the new culture, while, on the other hand, feels that settlers from Algeria will require two to three more generations to reach the same level of integration. François Xuereb concurred that piedsnoirs need such organizations more than repatriates from Tunisia: Well, you see, the French from Algeria, when they went to France, they were considered to be foreigners. They felt like foreigners in France. So they quickly saw the need to get together, with each other, people from their country. You see? To give each other some support. Because the French never finally accepted them . . . They said, “You are colonialists, you are this, you are that!” These statements echo those of Louise Marino, quoted in the previous chapter, who explained this experience to me as a loss of cohesion: “Since we were repatriated, we no longer have any points of reference. Families for the most part have splintered, and everyone is dispersed. We used to live in colony [en colonie]! In other words, we were all banded together.” A man EIGHT Settler Ethnicity and Identity Politics in Postcolonial France  who grew up in Algeria had a more powerful way of explaining this same fact: “Nowadays people walk past each other on the street, and they don’t even know that they are related, that they are cousins.” Many settler clubs represent an overt attempt to recreate the social “points of reference” they lost in the diaspora. For some, connecting with an entirely new social matrix was just too hard, and many people still think in terms of their colony-based sociogeographical coordinates. This can explain why people today are still classified by location as well as ethnicity. “Rose the Maltese” might not identify a woman as clearly as “Rose the Maltese from Philippeville.” For pieds-noirs especially, organizing around colonial geographic or institutional affiliation makes sense, since French Algeria was so vast. Travel was a difficult luxury, and many people I interviewed who had lived in eastern Algeria had never even visited the capital, Algiers. Because it would be difficult to bring members to meetings from throughout France, settler clubs typically are based in a region of France as well, and unite people in that region who were originally from the same place in the colony. Examples include the Amitiés oraniennes de la Côte d’Azur or Amicale des batnéens de la région parisienne (uniting people from Oran living along the Côte d’Azur, and people from the Algerian city of Batna living near Paris). Others are organized around schools, such as the Amicale des anciens élèves du Lycée Duveyrier de Blida (former students of Duveyrier High School in Blida, Algeria). Amicales of a religious nature are often linked to a specific parish or patron saint, and thus are similarly localized, such as L’association des amis de Notre-Dame d’Afrique (a basilica in Annaba ). André Fischer, a man from eastern Algeria whom I met in Bouc-belAir , a Marseilles suburb, described his desire to reconnect with old friends from his home town. He is a heavy-set man with white hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion, of German and Alsatian descent. He worked in the central train depot in Souk-Ahras, but grew up in the village of Mondovi, where Albert Camus once lived. After several years in France, he decided to try to find his former friends and neighbors. It started as his own private game as he tested himself to see just how many names he could remember of the hundreds of settlers who once lived there. He explained his method: he concentrated hard on his former village, which he recreated in his mind’s...

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