Decolonization and the French of Algeria

The status of the territory called French Algeria generated many peculiarities in its 130-odd years of existence, but one of the oddest emerged at its end: the labelling of people who had grown up French citizens in French départements as ‘repatriates’ when they left Algeria and headed ‘home’ to France—a land that many had never previously seen. Sung-Eun Choi’s perceptive and useful book abounds in such paradoxes. As she explains, ‘repatriate’ as a legal term was improvised at the end of 1961, when French Algeria’s existence no longer looked sustainable. Only when independence arrived in 1962, however, did it become clear that the vast majority of Algeria’s population of European descent (over 900,000 people) intended to relocate en masse to France. Their reception was decidedly mixed, as authorities struggled to provide sufficient accommodation and services, and existing residents’ ‘welcome’ often consisted of social slights. France, in short, did not feel much like home for the new arrivals trying to settle there in the early 1960s. Meanwhile, the new Algerian government’s measures to place ‘abandoned’ land, property and businesses under state control elicited an anger among former settlers that only increased when the government of Charles de Gaulle decided to place the need to co-operate with the Algerians ahead of a defence of lost assets. What Choi calls ‘the obfuscation of the colonial past’ (p. 10) was already well under way as the French state (in whose name the colonisation of Algeria had taken place) entered into a protracted argument with repatriates over the eligibility of their losses for compensation. And yet, as Choi shows, the state put considerable effort and resources into integration, while repatriate representatives proved quite adept at promoting their cause, quickly forming lobbying groups and, at times, aiming to ensure that their interests were placed ahead of—or, at least, never superseded by—those of Muslim Algerian immigrants. It helped that the repatriates were numerous enough to be worth politicians’ while to court as a voting bloc; as early as the 1965 presidential election, François Mitterrand, who could claim a personal history of support for French Algeria, actively sought their backing in his contest with the deeply compromised de Gaulle. In one of the most intriguing sections of Choi’s book, indeed, we see that, when Mitterrand finally became president in 1981, he reaffirmed his commitment to repatriates with the statement that they had a ‘right to the past, and a right to the future’ (p. 114)—a reminder that the left in France has often been no less likely than the political right to promote a beatific view of the nation’s colonial history

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