Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France

NOTES

NOTES 1. A SONG IN MALTA 1. All names of people and most names of pied-noir organizations are pseudonyms. 2. Pied-noir (or black foot; pieds-noirs, plural) is an appellation for the French settlers of Algeria; its origin is unknown. It may have been used in the early twentieth century (Lorcin 1995, 287n. 31), but became widespread only during the French-Algerian War and was most likely an “exonym” (Proschan 1997), a label granted the settlers by the metropolitan French. It has been claimed since by French from Algeria, including most (but not all) of the people I interviewed, and thus is used here interchangeably with “former settlers of Algeria .” See chapter 7 for further discussion of this label. 3. Although the former settlers claimed the label “Algerian” for themselves, I am using it here to refer to the indigenous population at this period just before independence. This and any other work on a colonial context must grapple with the choice between value-laden terminology from the colonial setting and that which is less offensive but also less historically accurate. Anachronistic terminology is often found in the speech of former settlers. When quoting settlers using this term to denote themselves, I place it in quotation marks. 4. From 1955 to 1959, only approximately 110,000 non-Muslim French left Morocco out of a total preindependence population of 320,000. Three years after Tunisian independence in 1956, 45 percent of the non-Muslim French population remained (Frémeaux 1996, 13–15). 5. Over 80 percent of the settlers of Algeria had left for France by the end of 1962 (Frémeaux 1996, 15; see also Jordi 1993, 32–34). 6. Due to heightened publicity in France regarding torture during the French-Algerian War, there is a rapidly evolving literature on this question. Michaud and Branche 2004, Stora 1992, Sueur 2001, and Alexander, Evans, and Keiger 2002 are good introductions. 7. Ageron (1994, 160–61) estimates Algerian wartime casualties at 203,000. Stora writes that half a million people of all backgrounds, but primarily Algerians, perished in the war. The FLN claims that there were one million martyrs (Stora 1993, 91). Estimates are still debated today (Pervillé 2004). 8. On the revelation that torture had become standard French practice and the difficulty French officials and the public have had in acknowledging this fact, see Stora 1992 and Vidal-Naquet 1983. The topic has gained much public attention recently following the publication of a wartime memoir by Aussaresses (2001). See also Elgey 2001; Weill 2001. 9. The war is known by pieds-noirs as les événements (the events). In French, its most neutral appellation is la guerre d’Algérie (the Algerian War), a name used by French historians and social scientists but only recently accepted by the National Assembly (see Stora 1999). In English this war is sometimes referred to as the “Algerian War of Independence” (Naylor and Heggoy 1994, 20). In Algeria it is often simply the “revolution” (Stora 1992, 121). 10. In fact, the Cranberries are from Ireland. 11. The word harki is derived from the Arabic haraka, to move, and first referred to the mobile units created in 1956 to aid the French in “territorial security.” It is sometimes used more generally to mean all Muslims repatriated with the French. See Hamoumou 2004. Immediately following the war, thousands of harkis were massacred in Algeria. Between 1962 and 1969, over forty thousand harkis and their family members migrated to France through official and unofficial channels (Font 1996, 96–97). Many were given jobs in the forest service and lived in makeshift camps in remote rural areas. Others were placed in guarded highrise apartments in urban areas. 12. Noiriel points out that these periods were all ones of acute economic crisis and change associated with the stabilization of migrant communities and thus their increased visibility in wider society (Noiriel 1996, 190). 13. Census figures reported a total of 93,068 pieds-noirs in the department in 1968, representing 6.3 percent of the total population (Jordi 1993, 108). Many urban areas along the Mediterranean had even larger concentrations by the end of that decade, including 11 percent in Montpellier, 10 percent in Toulon and Perpignan, and 8 percent in Marseilles, Nice, Nîmes, and Marseilles (Lees 1996, 105). Pied-noir organizations in this region often reported a much higher figure of 25 percent in the mid-1990s. 14. This book is based on informal...