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1. French Secularism in Debate: Old Wine in New Bottles

Author:
Véronique Dimier
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
This article deals with two debates at two different moments in history: the recent 2004 debate on a law proposed by the Chirac government that aimed at forbidding any religious signs (including the Islamic headscarf) worn in an ostensible way at school; and the 1892 debate on native education in Algeria and the opportunity to have a Koran teacher at school. At stake in both debates were two conceptions of Republican laïcité (secularism), one assimilationist, the other more pragmatic.
Topic:
Education and Islam
Political Geography:
Algeria

2. Soixante ans après: pour un état des lieux de mémoire

Author:
Nathan Bracher
Publication Date:
03-2007
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In reviewing various commemorations that highlighted the year 2005 in France, this article points out the major evolutions of memory visible primarily in the press and media coverage of these events. If public memory remains as highly charged and polemical as it was in the 1980s and 1990s, attention is clearly turning away from the Occupation and Vichy to focus more on Europe and on France's colonial past, as we see not only in the ceremonies celebrating the “liberation” of Auschwitz, the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, and the dedication of the Mémorial de la Shoah, but also in the many articles devoted to Russian and Eastern European experiences of the war, as well as to the bloody postwar repressions of colonial uprisings in Algeria and Madagascar. Now that racial and ethnic tensions are exacerbating an increasingly fragmented public memory, the work of history is more urgent than ever.
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Eastern Europe, France, Germany, Algeria, and Madagascar

3. An Enigma Still: Poujadism Fifty Years On

Author:
James G. Shields
Publication Date:
03-2004
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The day began on a solemn note. The laying of a wreath at the war memorial and a minute's silence for the fallen of Saint-Céré, victims of conflicts from the trenches to Algeria. Red, white and blue carnations, laid by Pierre Poujade and his wife, Yvette. Flanking them, two mayors in their Republican sashes, sons of early-day poujadistes. A picture of respectful, patriotic commemoration.
Political Geography:
Algeria

4. From Ravensbrück to Algiers and Noisy-le-Grand: Dialogues with Deportation

Author:
Donald Reid
Publication Date:
09-2004
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz drew on their experiences as deported resisters at the Ravensbrück concentration camp to put forth narratives of deportation with compelling sets of imperatives for survivors and their audiences: Tillion placed the experience of camp prisoners in a continuum of clochardisation preceded by slavery and colonialism, enterprises in which France played a larger role than Germany, while de Gaulle Anthonioz extended the camp experience past 1945 to the creation and maintenance of an underclass in advanced capitalist societies like France. Reflection on their years at Ravensbrück encouraged Tillion and de Gaulle Anthonioz to look upon those left outside of prosperous postwar France - clochards in Algeria and the desperately poor in France - as being of the world they had lived in in the camps. This encouraged them to revisit their experience as providing understanding and insights for the survival and resistance of these disinherited.
Political Geography:
France, Germany, and Algeria

5. Remembering the Battle of Paris: 17th October 1961 in French and Algerian Memory

Author:
Joshua Cole
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In October 1961, an as yet undetermined number of Algerian protesters were killed by the police in Paris while demonstrating for Algerian independence. In the last two decades, these killings have become the focal point of a public controversy in France, as questions about the memory of the Algerian war converged with debates about immigration and citizenship in the 1980s and 1990s and with the willingness of the French state to confront the crimes committed during the last phase of decolonization between 1945 and 1962. Most commentaries have emphasized the connections of this debate with an earlier bout of French soul-searching over the question of the Vichy government's collaboration with Germany during World War II. This connection seemed all the more relevant when the man who was the prefect of police in Paris in 1961, Maurice Papon, was accused and eventually convicted of assisting in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux in 1942-1944. This article argues that the public attention to the connections between Maurice Papon and the Holocaust have obscured the extent to which the debate in France about October 1961 has been driven by developments in Algerian politics in the last four decades. The extent to which historical accounts of the events of October 1961 are shaped by very contemporary political concerns presents particular challenges to the historian, who must find a way of retelling the story without merely reproducing the ideological conflict that produced the violence in the first place.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Paris, France, Germany, and Algeria

6. Torturante mémoire

Author:
Christian Delacampagne
Publication Date:
06-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The regular use of torture by the French army during the Algerian War raises at least two questions: 1) How was such torture made possible? Incapable of facing public opinion–– which was primarily in favor of colonization up until the end of the 1960s––the leaders of the Fourth Republic erred by giving full power to the army to crush the insurrection. It even took General De Gaulle two years to correct the situation. 2) What have we done since then to ensure that this would not happen again? As shown by the following facts, France has certainly not done what is necessary: It never formally recognized its responsibility for torture; it never tried to punish the principal culprits, whether politicians or military; it does not even seem to have learned from its past mistakes. Indeed, successive French governments continue to adopt a complacent stance towards similar practices (torture, summary executions) that consecutive Algerian governments have been covering up for several years – as if the use of torture should not be systematically condemned.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Algeria