How did the ordinary population experience the year 1962, when power was transferred from the colonial authorities to the representatives of the Algerian people? In the absence of archive material, Malika Rahal offers us a history rooted in emotions.
The Association of Algerian Ulema played an important role in the process of decolonisation. Its goal: making Algeria into a Muslim society.
From the 1980s onwards, the practice of vacationing in the Maghreb homeland became widespread, and gradually replaced any hopes of resettlement. These summer vacations allowed people to return to their roots in a family setting and temporarily escape the subjugation and social labels they endured in France.
What motivated French colonisers to found schools in the Maghreb and Subsaharan Africa? Carole Reynaud-Paligot shows how their superiority complex ended up overcoming their meritocratic ideals and dreams of diversity.
Last summer, bikini-wearing women on Algerian beaches were a hot topic in the French news. Presented for a while as a feminist revolt against the rise of Islam, this issue is above all symptomatic of the gender relations, but also the class and race relations, structuring Algerian society.
A recent book and two documentaries shed new light on the repression of the demonstration by Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961. By looking at these events in their long-term context, they show that the repression was not some sort of blunder. It was a “colonial massacre” perpetrated by the Paris police acting under the orders of their Prefect (Commissioner), the infamous Maurice Papon.
The Algerian war was more than an episode of French-Algerian history: it brought about the emergence of the transnational system in which we now live. Matthew Connelly, a member of a cohort of diplomatic historians who have struggled to change our view of international relations, invites us to see this conflict for what it really was: the end of empire, but certainly not that of decolonization.
