ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the French collective memory of the Algerian war and its transmission through a case study of history teaching in the 1990s and seeks to answer these and related questions. It focuses on oral sources in the form of interviews conducted with two historians, eighteen teachers and twelve pupils involved in the 'classe Terminale', the final year of secondary school at the end of which the pupils sit the baccalaureat. The historian Henry Rousso has described textbooks and school history programmes as 'le mode de transmission social par excellence’ of memory which, given the age of the surviving participants in the Algerian war, is a question of considerable significance. The Algerian war is marginalised in school, it is precisely to avoid aggravating divisive memories in the classroom. However teachers do have some room for manoeuvre in the way they interpret the programme, and while in general they tend to do similar things in class, some fascinating differences emerge.
