Crowding out the Algerian War in French Memorial Books

Abstract

France's colonial history in Algeria has been the subject of “Memory Wars” since the end of the 1990s. Culminating in 2012 at the fiftieth anniversary of the Algerian War (1954–1962), these Memory Wars contributed to numerous publications about every aspect of Algeria. Large format coffee-table photographic books ( beaux livres), as well as paperbacks full of collected memories of the colonial years and the war, from both French and Algerians, flooded French bookshops. In this article, I engage with the concepts of competitive, hoarded, and multidirectional memory to demonstrate how French memorial books that are especially photo driven appear to place war on display, but, at the same time, bury difficult and traumatic memory. The research examines three French memorial books published between 2010 and 2012, leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, and addresses how traumatic memories are recuperated and still hidden within texts that attempt to fill a memorial void. Despite book titles that claim to examine the memories of war, within the books, Algeria often remains a beautiful, peaceful, and nostalgic backdrop. War is not clearly depicted in the images but emerges in accompanying descriptive texts. In light of France's establishment of the Truth and Memory Commission on the Algerian War in 2022, I examine how diverse versions of the past come into dialogue with each other, while individual memorial books continue to crowd out unspeakable violence.