ABSTRACT
People can surely say that they are among those institutions that operate mainly by ideology and partly by violence if they think of archives in light of Louis Althusser's theory of state apparatuses. This chapter discusses two instances related to colonial Algeria and postcolonial France. Both involve massive violence, and each has a different archival (and thus legal) status. One is related to the Algerian uprising of 1871, commonly referred to in the archives (and outside of them) as la révolte kabyle (the Kabyle revolt). The second is related to what is now known as the Algerian war. These two violent events contrast not only in what was achieved or what was not, but because one is open in the archives, available to those interested: the other is not; it is made inaccessible by a set of state laws that have transformed it into a realm of state secrecy.
