France, which has the largest Muslim minority community in Europe, has been in the news in recent years because of perceptions that Muslims have not integrated into French society.The Civilizing ...Mission in the Metropole explores the roots of these debates through an examination of the history of social welfare programs for Algerian migrants from the end of World War II until Algeria gained independence in 1962.
After its colonization in 1830, Algeria fought a bloody war of decolonization against France, as France desperately fought to maintain control over its most prized imperial possession. In the midst of this violence, some 350,000 Algerians settled in France. This study examines the complex and often-contradictory goals of a welfare network that sought to provide services and monitor Algerian migrants' activities. Lyons particularly highlights family settlement and the central place Algerian women held in French efforts to transform the settled community. Lyons questions myths about Algerian immigration history and exposes numerous paradoxes surrounding the fraught relationship between France and Algeria-many of which echo in French debates about Muslims today.
After over 120 years of French colonial rule in Algeria, the growing aspirations for independence culminated in the Algerian Revolution of 1954, which lasted until 1962. In order to combat the ...uprisings, the French civilian and military authorities reorganized the entire territory of the country, swiftly erected new infrastructures and pursued building policies that were ultimately intended to stabilize French dominance in Algeria. The study describes the architectural responses undertaken in the midst of this protracted and bloody armed conflict. It analyses their origins, evolutions and objectives, identifies the actors involved and reveals the underlying design methods.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee ...of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
La guerre d’indépendance algérienne est la seule guerre de décolonisation qui a eu lieu à la fois dans la colonie et sur le territoire métropolitain. Or, jusqu’à présent, les études historiques se ...sont principalement concentrées sur Paris et la répression policière de l’activisme algérien, laquelle culmine avec le massacre du 17 octobre 1961. La publication, depuis 1962, de plusieurs écrits autobiographiques rédigés par d’anciens militants du FLN, condamnés à mort par le Tribunal permanent des forces armées de Lyon, invite à réorienter les analyses sur la province et notamment sur Lyon. Au carrefour d’une histoire de la justice, du carcéral et du militaire, cet article propose alors, à partir du cas Montluc (une caserne, un tribunal militaire, une prison), une histoire sociale de la justice militaire et de l’incarcération des Algériens en métropole durant la guerre d’indépendance algérienne, une histoire de ceux qui la pratiquent comme de ceux qui la subissent. Il repose sur des sources très variées dont les dossiers de procédures judiciaires conservés aux archives de la justice militaire, les actes de jugements ordonnés dans des séries statistiques, des entretiens oraux menés auprès d’avocats ou d’anciens condamnés à mort algériens, des rapports ministériels conservés aux archives nationales ou départementales, des dossiers d’inhumations conservés dans les archives des cimetières lyonnais. Au fil des lectures, il apparaît que le militaire a aussi joué sa partie en métropole.
Today the Algerian War of Independence remains a powerful symbol for both the former empire and its last colony. Many Algerian guerrilla soldiers were tortured and murdered during the eight-year ...conflict that ended more than a century of colonization, while in France the events became emblematic of a national failure. Cinema played an active role in representing and re-forming the public’s understanding of the conflict. The Franco-Algerian War through a Twenty-First Century Lens probes this cinematic discourse to shed light on topics such as immigration and national identity as shown in recent depictions of the war from both sides of the Mediterranean. This involves following the sons of draftees reconstructing the war to understand their fathers (Mon Colonel, L’Ennemi Intime) and Algerian immigrant directors filming in their ancestral homeland (Cartouches Gauloises, Hors-la-loi). Nicole Beth Wallenbrock examines production details, box office figures, and narrative analogy to demonstrate the relevance of the Algerian War of Independence to historical and contemporary questions of Algerian and French national identity. This book is essential for academics and students interested in the history of war and historical representation.
Intersects with very active areas of research in history and anthropology, and links these domains of inquiry spanning Europe and North Africa in a creative and innovative fashion. -- Douglas Holmes, ...Binghamton University Maltese settlers in colonial Algeria had never lived in France, but as French citizens were abruptly repatriated there after Algerian independence in 1962. In France today, these pieds-noirs are often associated with Mediterranean qualities, the persisting tensions surrounding the French-Algerian War, and far-right, anti-immigrant politics. Through their social clubs, they have forged an identity in which Malta, not Algeria, is the unifying ancestral homeland. Andrea L. Smith uses history and ethnography to argue that scholars have failed to account for the effect of colonialism on Europe itself. She explores nostalgia and collective memory; the settlers' liminal position in the colony as subalterns and colonists; and selective forgetting, in which Malta replaces Algeria, the true homeland, which is now inaccessible, fraught with guilt and contradiction. The study provides insight into race, ethnicity, and nationalism in Europe as well as cultural context for understanding political trends in contemporary France.
A Semite Guénoun, Denis; Smock, Ann; Smock, William
2014., 20140506, 2014, 2014-05-06
eBook
In this vivid memoir, Denis Guénoun excavates his family's past and progressively fills out a portrait of an imposing, enigmatic father. René Guénoun was a teacher and a pioneer, and his secret ...support for Algerian independence was just one of the many things he did not discuss with his teenaged son. To be Algerian, pro-independence, a French citizen, a Jew, and a Communist were not, to René's mind, dissonant allegiances. He believed Jews and Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity and could only realize a free future together. René Guénoun called himself a Semite, a word that he felt united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected a shared origin. He also believed that Algerians had the same political rights as Frenchmen. Although his Jewish family was rooted in Algeria, he inherited French citizenship and revered the principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French lycée in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. His steadfast belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity led him into trouble, including prison and exile, yet his failures as an activist never shook his faith in a rational, generous future. René Guénoun was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle East during World War II. At the same time, Vichy barred him and his wife from teaching because they were Jewish. When the British conquered Syria, he was sent home to Oran, and in 1943, after the Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought in Europe. After the war, both parents did their best to reconcile militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands of work and family. The Guénouns had little interest in Israel and considered themselves at home in Algeria; yet because he supported Algerian independence, René Guénoun outraged his French neighbors and was expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary Organisation Armée Secrète. He spent his final years in Marseille. Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into his father's life and times, Denis Guénoun re-creates an Algerian past that proved lovely, intellectually provocative, and dangerous.
