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During an interview in her tiny high-rise apartment overlooking the Aixois treetops, Louise Marino struggled to describe the time of her family’s departure from Algeria to France, and tried to account for her confusion . “France is our patrie [fatherland, nation], but it isn’t our pays [homeland, country],” she explained. “The most beautiful country in the world is the one in which you are born.” She elaborated, “You see, I am not completely integrated, a part of France . . . to the extent that I don’t feel chez moi [at home]. When I go to California, it’s as if, as if . . . I were in France.” She admitted that California is certainly unlike France: the languages spoken and the food are cases in point, “But, as far as nature is concerned , I feel better in California than in France!” She seemed to have surprised herself with this declaration, and tried to explain: You see, in France, nothing reminds me of my country [pays]. I can go from the north to the south . . . and I don’t find the . . . plains, the, the mountains , the . . . the same landscapes [paysages], the same smells . . . the same colors, like chez nous. So, I get the feeling that I’m always en voyage in France. I’m floating . . . It was surprising for me to hear Louise talking about her life in France in this way. Louise is the woman who discussed with honesty her obsession with de Gaulle, and who, unlike most, was quite open about her difficulties working through her war memories. Over tea, lunch, or apéritifs, she told captivating stories of not only life back in Souk-Ahras, the small town in eastern Algeria where she spent her childhood, but also her years in France studying Oriental religions. Despite her apparently successful adaptation to her new home, it all seemed temporary to her. Louise’s feeling of being a tourist in France, of floating, was echoed by many other former settlers that I met and underscores the feeling of exile, of a rupture from their “home,” SEVEN Diaspora, Rejection, and Nostalgérie  that is such an integral part of the pied-noir experience in the post-Algerian period. And yet, due to their lifelong understanding of themselves—and indeed of Algeria—as unquestionably French, this sense of loss is accompanied , for many of my informants, by ambivalence, and even surprise at their own reactions. Some, like Louise, explain this ambivalence as stemming from the fact that, for them, patrie and pays are not the same place. To understand this population and the degree to which they remain separate from wider French society, we first must take seriously their claim of being a people in exile. The unique nature of this “exile” experience, and the difficulties many former settlers have faced in France since their arrival in 1962, stem from the abrupt nature of their mass migration at the end of the French-Algerian War, and the many gaps that appeared between patrie and pays, giving rise to the formation of pied-noir associations, such as those created by the Maltese. EXODUS AND EXILE Despite the escalating violence during the final years of the French-Algerian War, and the continued departures of thousands of French from the nearby protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, government officials in France had not planned for a mass settler flight from Algeria. Although legislation was already in place in December 1961 (Relative à l’accueil et à la réinstallation des Français d’outre-mer, enacted December 26) that made the reintegration of former colonists an overriding national priority, de Gaulle had estimated that of the 1,075,000 French in Algeria, only one to two hundred thousand would migrate to France at the conclusion of the war (Frémeaux 1996, 21). In fact, during the last months of the war, an effort was made to prevent a mass departure of settlers. As the violence of the war increased in the spring of 1962, French officials requested that trans-Mediterranean ferry companies reduce their crossings between France and Algeria to sixteen per week, and then to seven in March, and to three by April 1962 ( Jordi 2003). Probably reflecting this reduction in ferry service, only approximately sixty-eight thousand settlers left Algeria between January and April 1962. On May 16, however, in response to the ever-increasing demand, the companies decided to increase their services without waiting for government approval, and emigration increased dramatically...

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