ABSTRACT
There are Historical Reasons why “memory work” has proven so central to the many discussions in the past decade about the Algerian Revolution in French history, some of which have become topics of historical and political debate in France and elsewhere. Among the multiple starting points for this recent spate of studies, those focused on the pieds-noirs—the people who in French Algeria were known as colons, “Europeans,” settlers, and so on—have embraced invocations of memory almost without exception. This work includes films such as Brigitte Roüan’s Outre-mer (1990) and Alexandre Arcady’s Lá-bas mon pays (2000); literary echoes of the period in novels such as Claire Messud’s The Last Life: A Novel (1999) and Jean-Noél Pancrazi’s Madame Arnoul (1995), as well as the posthumous publication of Albert Camus’s Le premier homme (1994b); studies of pied-noir writing; and studies based primarily on oral sources, such as Jeannine Verdés-Leroux’s Les Français d’Algérie: De 1830 á nos jours (2001).
