This dissertation is a study of one of the most important but largely overlooked legacies of decolonization in French Algeria--the displacement of almost one million settlers and pro-French natives who fled the colony after independence and the history of their troubled insertion in postcolonial France. It probes the strategies of the French Fifth Republic (1958- ) to incorporate the colonial population after decolonization, and contends that the French from Algeria are central to understanding the postcolonial politics of national belonging and national identity in France, and the dual politics of commemorating and effacing the empire in narratives of national history after decolonization.
The French from Algeria was made up largely of European settlers of diverse origins but included some 100,000 Jews and a handful of pro-French native subjects, including over 50,000 native recruits who fought for France during the Algerian War later known as the harkis . When Algeria obtained independence from France in 1962, this diversely constituted colonial citizenry no longer served their purpose as incarnations of French civilization and jurisdiction in Algeria and became vestiges of the empire, and undesirable for continental citizens who wished to abandon Algeria. Between 1962 and 1963, almost the entire French community evacuated Algeria and became exiles in the newly reconfigured borders of their nation. The French government, meanwhile, labeled these citizens of diverse cultural backgrounds as "repatriates," a legal category that indicated an innate commonality of "Frenchness" at the same time it differentiated them from the French of the metropole. Rather than unite the two French populations of North African France and continental France, decolonization foregrounded fragmented conceptions of imperial nationhood, French supremacy, and postcolonial national identity.
Using government documents as well as oral interviews and literary writings of the European, Jewish and Algerian repatriates from Algeria, I show that not only immigrants, but also the French from Algeria are key to understanding the shifts and fragmentations in French identity and memory of colonialism today.
My Research