Le récit historique et les intentions des acteurs. Réponse à François Buton

The response offers to go back over three issues: sources, intentionality of the actors and tension between plausibility and truth. Writing colonial Algeria’s history is to confront oneself with the inequality of the traces conserved depending on different places and periods. The population is still rural as a majority in the region of Palestro, sources are either oral, based on a small number of indigenous notables, or administrative. The crisis context enables to understand that, from a French viewpoint, the collective imagination has tended to focus on memories and images which associated this place to the violence of the indigenous population. The issue of individual intention here seems not only out of reach through sources but also little pertinent in the chosen analytical context, focusing on groups and collective identities. If the colonial context is structuring for the actors as a whole, the autonomy of the villagers is to be found in their manner of positioning themselves on the construction of a collective identity over which the FLN claims to exert an exclusive direction. No simple causal link is offered to explain the mutilations: the event remains fortuitous and identifying the transmission of a violent past with some individuals does not allow to say whether all have acted according to that past.