ABSTRACT
The term ‘generation’ has been part of the Algerian political vocabulary for decades. Those who had fought the war were not only referred to as les moudjahidine or les révolutionnaires but were, as younger generations matured, perceived in generational terms as la génération de la révolution.1
Belonging to this generation implied a certain moral superiority vis-à-vis younger generations and demanded the latter’s respect. As a former minister put it, more than forty years after independence: ‘The men who made the revolution still think of themselves as the generation of fire, and everyone else born after the revolution as the generation of ashes.’2 Indeed, President Bouteflika, in a pre-campaign speech, termed his own generation ‘a generation that will for ever remain the source of our inspiration . . . the origin of our historic memory and our frame of reference’.3 The Algerian revolutionary generation and its two successor generations found in the Algerian PRE in the early 2000s presented a perfect example of Mannheim’s (1952: 309) claim that a different generational experience produces a different ‘generation entelechy’, and that the extent to which such entelechies differ from one another ‘is closely connected to the tempo of social change’.
