Le Silence de la Guerre? French Combatants' Memoirs of the Algerian War, 1954-1988

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Narayanan, Anndal G.
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History

Abstract

Fifty years after the cessation of hostilities, the memory of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) remains an open wound in French society. From the time of the war itself, French veterans of Algeria sought to find their voice in a society largely indifferent to them and their experiences. This thesis examines the evolving memory of the Algerian War among French veterans who wrote wartime memoirs, and seeks the relationship of these narratives with the wider French collective memory of the Algerian War, by closely following the constructed figure of the combatant. This study finds that French veterans' narratives of Algeria, while all expressing various kinds of victimhood, evolved in time from the political to the personal, encouraged by governmental amnesties that depoliticized the memory of the war and contributed to the impossibility of a general collective memory of the Algerian War in France.

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