A Settler Colonial Memorial Book: The Agricultural School and Museum of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria

Abstract

In French colonial Algeria (1830–1962), a European settler community was made from both displacement and the encounter with Indigenous Algerian collectives. After Algeria's independence from France in 1962, this community was remade by a second displacement and the encounter in France with the metropolitan community. Known as Pieds-Noirs, this community has organized associative life, books, and newsletter publications, and sometimes return visits to Algeria. This article looks at Pieds-Noir settler associations devoted to Algeria's colonial agricultural schools, model farms, and nurseries, and how they reconstitute metropole-colony and colony-metropole through memory and a memorial book. This case study of the agricultural school in the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, former headquarters of the French Foreign Legion, discusses post-independent Algerian responses to return visits, claims, and writings by settlers.