Nostalgérie: l’interminable histoire de l’OAS par Alain Ruscio (review)

Reviews 225 d’une trilogie, nous propose tout bonnement une philosophie de la nature. Le deuxième tome, qui a pour titre Décadence, suggère une philosophie de l’histoire. Quant au dernier volet, Sagesse, l’auteur nous promet une vraie philosophie pratique. Voilà de quoi satisfaire les lecteurs. Oregon State University Nabil Boudraa Ruscio, Alain. Nostalgérie: l’interminable histoire de l’OAS. Paris: Découverte, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7071-8564-8. Pp. 316. 21 a. The specter of the OAS (Organisation armée de libération) reappears in Ruscio’s book, which details the organization’s responsibility in hastening the freedom of Algeria and the exile of its sizeable pied-noir population. Ruscio does not mince words about the identity of the culprits in the mysterious assassinations of French Algerians in the last years of the Algerian war of liberation, nor does he absolve the organization from the mass killings of Algerian Muslims. With an emphatic verdict thoroughly substantiated by historical facts and political events, he investigates a clandestine organization that embraced terror and targeted killings in order to silence its detractors in Algeria and intimidate those in France opposed to the idea of l’Algérie française. Among the murderous acts meant to send a message: the repeated and failed attempts by the OAS to take the life of its nemesis, General de Gaulle, to whom it gave the contemptuous epithet “Grande Zohra,” and to one of its assassination attempts the code name: “Opération Grande Zohra” (171). Its targets also included eminent intellectuals and writers, such as Sartre, Camus, and Mauriac. Colonel Trinquier, one of the strategists of revolutionary wars, reputedly said: “La première personne que je fusillerai, c’est Mauriac” (216). Five weeks after denouncing the OAS in his Diary, Mouloud Feraoun fell victim, execution style, to a commando attack on March 15. To read Ruscio’s book is to descend into the underworld of an organization that spared no effort in its attempts, first to keep Algeria under the French flag, and second to flood it with white Europeans in order to dilute the composite ethnicity of its aboriginal people.As if sensing the arduous task of criticizing the champions of the colonial past, Ruscio imputes the cacophony that surrounds French colonialism to the intransigence of the vociferous members of the OAS, some still alive today, who managed to repackage French colonialism in the ongoing discussion on terrorism, immigration, identity, religion, and laïcité, hence the significance of the book’s subtitle. For Ruscio, the history of colonialism is ubiquitous in twenty-first-century France and exemplified by“Mohamed,”“Fatima,”“Mamadou,”and“Nguyen”who do not have“à s’en justifier ni à prouver leur identité [...] L’histoire coloniale n’est plus dans les vieux manuels d’hier, elle est dans leur vie d’aujourd’hui, dans leurs rues, dans les bus, dans les cours des écoles et lycées. Impossible de détourner les yeux”(247–48). The OAS managed to convert its crushing defeat in Algeria into a caustic discourse that found a host in the acerbic rhetoric of the Front national. Now that the colonial legacy has penetrated the mainstream, Ruscio sees an opportunity to“débloquer l’histoire,”a process that could enable French society to be free from the demons of its past. University of Maryland, Baltimore County Zakaria Fatih Serres, Michel. Le gaucher boiteux. Paris: Pommier, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7465-0695-5. Pp. 280. 22 a. Despite the potentially misleading nature of its rather peculiar and comical title, this book is one of the most rigorous and thought-provoking essays that Serres has written during the latter part of his career. In this sequel to his most commercially successful work Petite poucette (2012), which landed the philosopher on the bestseller list in France, Serres probes the conditions that facilitate invention. As the aforementioned title unequivocally suggests, Serres posits that one serendipitously stumbles across or discovers novelty when straying from the well-worn epistemological paths that stifle innovation. For Serres, every great feat of human ingenuity has always been the result of a bifurcation that eventually led to unexpected and unpredictable discoveries. The philosopher maintains that...