Collective Memory (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France): France and the Algerian War

Jo McCormack’s informative study of the multiple, often conflicting ways in which the Algerian War is remembered sheds interesting light on the complexities of memory politics in contemporary France. With its emphasis on the transmission of memory through the education system, the family, and the media, this clearly written, well documented volume is a welcome contribution to research on the traumatic legacies of the Algerian War and will be of interest to both historians and literary scholars.

The overseas empire, especially French rule in Algeria, was long a marginal subject in French public life, though recent conflicts about migration and multiculturalism have brought colonialism and its legacy vividly to French attention. As France now seeks to work through and come to terms with its colonial past, Jo McCormack’s study of three vectors for the transmission of knowledge about the overseas empire – schools, families and the press – provides interesting insight into the ‘memory work’ that is an essential part of this process. His book integrates theoretical perspectives with evidence drawn, in particular, from interviews with teachers and students and from a content analysis of France’s leading newspaper, and it contributes to a ‘rediscovery’ of colonial history by scholars and the general public alike.

This pioneering study is a welcome addition to the scientific literature of the Algerian War. Drawing on original empirical and archival research, it casts new light on the single most traumatic episode in France’s reluctant retreat from overseas empire. At the core of Jo McCormack’s analysis is pedagogy, understood as the national imaginative paradigm that shapes the way in which the history of the conflict is (or, crucially, is not) taught: an “educational chain” that leads from the most eminent historians and legislators to high-school teachers an their students, and which McCormack productively links to such other essential vectors of deficiencies in official processes of commemoration, and thereby underlines the troubled legacy – and specifically, the still contested memory politics – of France’s final colonial conflict. This volume will be essential reading for students and academics with an interest in decolonization in general and the Algerian War in particular, as well as for all those concerned with the broader challenges of commemoration and reconciliation in the post-colonial world.