Abstract
Renée1 was born in Algiers in 1907. She says little about her mother’s family, from Lyon, except that they settled in Algeria after going bank-rupt in France. About her father, who died when she was only five years old, she only knows that he was born in Algeria to a father who was a soldier and a mother who was an orphan. When I met her in France, she told me the history of her family, describing how, over the space of a few years, her family found itself caught up in the contradictions and paradoxes of a story that ended with their departure from Algeria in 1962. This departure, which she refers to as exile, is the focal point for her feeling of being suddenly deprived of the numerous ties of belonging that had linked her, like the other Algerian Europeans, to both France and Algeria, and relegated her, on both sides of the Mediterranean, to the status of foreigner.
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Notes
Charles Robert Ageron, La France Coloniale ou Parti Colonial?, (Paris: Puf, 1978), 51.
Robert Tinthoin, ‘Création d’une Région Française, le Bas Chélif’, Amicale du Bas Chélif (eds), Une Province Française en Algérie. Le Bas Chélif 1848–1962, (Périgueux, 1992), 22.
Many of them were from the countries of the Mediterranean basin. In 1836, for example, there were estimated to be 8,000 Spanish, Italians and Maltese out of a total of 14,500 Europeans. See Emile Temime, ‘La Migration Européenne en Algérie au XIXème siècle: Migration Organisée ou Migration Tolérée?’, Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée, 43, 1987,31–45, esp. 37.
Joëlle Bahloul, La Maison de Mémoire. Ethnographie d’une Demeure Judéo-Arabe en Algérie (1937–1961), (Paris: Métaillé, 1992).
Arnold Van Gennep, En Algérie, (Paris: Mercure de France, 1914), 39.
Terms used by M. Roux-Freissineng, deputy of Algiers, in 1929. See Daniel Leconte, Les Pieds-Noirs, Histoire et Portrait d’une Communauté, (Paris: Le Seuil, 1980), 142.
Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, (Paris: Julliard, 1961), 84–85.
This moral conception of colonisation, generated by the competition between imperialist countries, far pre-dated 1830, according to Yvonne Turin, Affrontements Culturels dans l’Algérie Coloniale: Écoles, Médecines, Religion, 1830–1880, (Paris: Editions Maspéro, 1971).
The demographer Ricoux, 1880, quoted by Xavier Yacono, Histoire de la Colonisation, (Paris: PUF, 1969), p. 75.
Robert de Caix, Journal des Débats, May 1899, quoted by Bernard Sasso, Stora, (La Seyne-sur-mer: B. Moutet, 1980), 55.
Robert Garcia, L’arrachement. Genèse de l’Exode des Européens d’Algérie (1830–1962), (Nice: Gileta, 1982), 159–160.
According to the 1954 census, there were 1,042,500 Europeans, of whom 983,000 were French citizens. In 1960, the European population exceeded 1.2 million, of whom 6 per cent were non-French, out of a total population of about 10 million. See Jean-Louis Miège and Colette Dubois (eds), L’Europe Retrouvée, les Migrations de la Décolonisation, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 80.
Jacques Frémeaux, ‘Le Reflux des Français d’Afrique du Nord’, in Jean- Jacques Jordi and Emile Temime (eds), Marseille et le Choc de la Décolonisation, (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1996), 13–28.
Jean-Louis Miège and Colette Dubois (eds), L’Europe Retrouvée, les Migrations de la Décolonisation, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 80.
Jacques Frémeaux, ‘Le Reflux des Français d’Afrique du Nord’, in Jean- Jacques Jordi and Emile Temime (eds), Marseille et le Choc de la Décolonisation, (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1996), 13–28.
150,000 departures between 1956 and 1961; 651,000 in 1962; 76,000 in 1963; 35,500 in 1964; 22,988 in 1965; 7,416 in 1966 and 4,832 in 1967, making a total of 947,736. See Jean-Louis Miège and Colette Dubois (eds), L’Europe Retrouvée, les Migrations de la Décolonisation, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 92.
Marcel Homet, Afrique du Nord. Terre d’Attente, (Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1935), 186.
Gaston Esnault, Dictionnaire Historique des Argots Français, (Paris: Larousse, 1965).
Michèle Assante, ‘Pied-Noir: Une Expression en Quête d’Origine’, Cahiers d’Anthropologie et de Biométrie Humaine, 3–4, 1987, 219–230; Michèle Baussant, Pieds-noirs. Mémoires d’Exils, (Paris: Stock, 2002); Guy Pervillé, ‘Pour ne Finir avec les “Pieds-noirs”!’, 2005, at http://guy.perville.free.fr/spip/article.php3?id_article=34.
Maréchal Bugeaud, quoted by Jacques Frémeaux, ‘Le Reflux des Français d’Afrique du Nord’, in Jean-Jacques Jordi and Emile Temime (eds), Marseille et le Choc de la Décolonisation, (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1996), 13–28, esp. 25.
Jacques Frémeaux, ‘Le Reflux des Français d’Afrique du Nord’, in Jean- Jacques Jordi and Emile Temime (eds), Marseille et le Choc de la Décolonisation, (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1996), 13–28.
Andrea Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe, Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France, (Indiana University Press, 2006).
J. Améry, quoted by Jeanine Altounian, La Survivance. Traduire le Trauma Collectif, (Paris: Dunod, 2000), 86.
Jean Pélégri, André Adam, Denise Basdevant, Albert-Paul Lentin, Jean Déjeux, André Gauthier and Claude Semnoz (eds), L’Algérie, (Paris: Larousse, 1977), 91.
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© 2012 Michèle Baussant
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Baussant, M. (2012). Caught between Two Worlds: The Europeans of Algeria in France after 1962. In: Glynn, I., Kleist, J.O. (eds) History, Memory and Migration. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010230_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010230_5
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