Élise Marienstras. Mémoire sans mémoire

Economic Aryanization has long been the poor cousin of the historiography devoted to the fate of Jews during World War II. Although it is little known, it was one of the major cogs in the Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic policy. In Algeria, the archives of the “Service des Questions juives et des sociétés secrètes” of the Constantine département are now kept at the Archives nationales d’outremer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence. They were saved unexpectedly, unlike those of Algiers and Oran, the two other departments, which the administration of the Free French government (set up in Algiers in May 1943) ordered to be destroyed. Their richness, combined with their diversity, enables us to appreciate as accurately as possible the range of assets targeted by the Aryanization measures, the professional range of candidates, and the ideological guarantees they were required to provide. The provisional administrators appointed by order of the Governor General of Algeria were assisted in their mission by a whole team of partners, who were characterized by their meticulous legal approach: auditors, liquidators, auctioneers, architects, lawyers, and notaries. The strategies devised by the “administered” in order to escape the measures of dispossession, as well as those of the “governed”, are also described

Cousin · Governor · Historiography · Ideology · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · North African History and Literature