From empire to exile : history and memory within the pied-noir and harki communities, 1962-2012

332 Pages·2017·11.502 MB·English

by  Claire Eldridge

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From empire to exile

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Edited by
David Hopkin and Máire Cross
This series is published in collaboration with the UK Society for the Study of
French History. It aims to showcase innovative short monographs relating to
the history of the French, in France and in the world since c.1750. Each volume
speaks to a theme in the history of France with broader resonances to other
discourses about the past. Authors demonstrate how the sources and interpreta-
tions of modern French history are being opened to historical investigation in
new and interesting ways, and how unfamiliar subjects have the capacity to tell
us more about the role of France within the European continent. The series is
particularly open to interdisciplinary studies that break down the traditional
boundaries and conventional disciplinary divisions.
Titles already published in this series
Emile and Isaac Pereire: Bankers, Socialists and Sephardic Jews
in nineteenth-century France
Helen Davies
Catholicism and children’s literature in France:
The comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874)
Sophie Heywood
Aristocratic families in republican France, 1870–1940
Elizabeth C. Macknight
The republican line: Caricature and French republican identity, 1830–52
Laura O’Brien
The routes to exile: France and the Spanish Civil War refugees, 1939–2009
Scott Soo
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From empire to exile

History and memory within the
pied-noir and harki communities,
1962–2012
CLAIRE ELDRIDGE
Manchester University Press
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Copyright © Claire Eldridge 2016
The right of Claire Eldridge to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 0 7190 8723 3 hardback
First published 2016
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external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee
that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Typeset by Out of House Publishing

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To Peggy and Nora, for all the happy memories
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breaking the silence 139
Even the French public seemed to concur: a poll in 1989 revealed that
42 per cent of respondents considered the harkis a community ‘apart’ and
on the margins of society, while only 34 per cent thought their integration
had been a success.3
Confirming this lack of progress towards integration was the fact that
the practical demands of the 1991 campaigners were essentially the same
as those voiced during protests sixteen years previously. However, the
activists who came to the fore in 1991 were also consciously trying to
do something new in terms of strategy. Deliberately seeking to ‘set a cat
among the pigeons’, this new generation of militants wanted to break
with existing patterns of mobilisation to create a co-operative, federative
and, crucially, independent network. They additionally wanted to reori-
entate harki activism so that it extended beyond demands for material
support and into historical and commemorative arenas.4 Both elements
were underpinned by an insistence on the need for recognition of the
community as French. For children of harkis, this revolved primarily
around measures to ensure that their full socio-economic insertion was
realised. For older generations, the harkis themselves and their spouses,
it was framed in terms of gaining recognition for their history as a means
to validate their contribution to the nation and thus revalorise their
position within it. This latter combat involved a two-pronged strategy
whereby the history of the harkis was to be drawn out of silence at the
same time as control of the resultant narratives was to be wrested away
from external commentators and placed in the hands of the community
itself. To understand this drive for autonomy, both in terms of how harki
activism was organised and the ends to which it was directed, it is nec-
essary to examine the relationships between the community and other
interested parties in the years leading up to 1991.
1975
The French public were first alerted to the plight of the harki community
on a significant scale in 1975 when a spate of demonstrations captured
national media attention.The months of May through to July saw mem-
bers of the harki community engage in marches and strikes, block roads
and occupy symbolic sites within camps, forest hamlets and local munic-
ipalities, beginning in the Bias camp but quickly spreading elsewhere.
In June, the director of the Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise camp and Colonel
Deluc, the secretary general of the Comité national pour les musulmans
français, more commonly known as the Comité Parodi, were taken hos-
tage by youths armed with guns and dynamite. These initial acts were
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140 from empire to exile
accompanied by calls for the closure of the camps, the amelioration of
conditions in the forest hamlets, and concrete measures to facilitate
integration. By August, events had taken a different turn as six Algerian
workers were held hostage. This retaliatory act followed the detention
of Borzani Kradaoui, the child of a harki who had gone to visit family
in Algeria with his mother, but who had been prevented from returning
to France by the Algerian authorities. The release of Borzani, along with
two other harki children detained in Algeria around the same time, did
not immediately calm the situation, as evidenced by the kidnapping of
Djelloul Belfadel, secretary of the local branch of Amicale des Algériens
en Europe (AAE) in Unieux (Loire) on 16 August. Targeting Algerians in
this way was designed to highlight the issue of free circulation between
France and Algeria,which was still denied to the harkis even as measures
were coming into force that permitted family reunification for Algerians
working in France. Viewed together, Régis Pierret argues that these two
strands of the 1975 protests demonstrated the harki community reacting
both to their banishment from Algeria and their rejection by France.5
For most of the 1975 protestors, however, it was their day-to-day liv-
ing conditions that served as the greatest impetus to action. Conditions
in the two remaining camps, Bias and Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise, and in
the various forest hamlets had deteriorated considerably as buildings,
which had only ever been designed as temporary shelters, had now been
in use for more than two decades. A sense of this can be gained from the
1972 annual report for Bias, which requested that showers be installed
in the harkis’ homes, in place of the communal showers that residents
had to pay to use; that the buildings be disinfected; that streetlights be
installed; that a bus into the nearby town of Villeneuve be organised;
and that a new public telephone be provided, the last one having myste-
riously been blown up several months previously.6 Additionally, those
born in these spaces were now reaching adulthood, bringing to the fore
a range of issues that had not been apparent when these settings were
first conceived.7 Chief among these was the marginalisation fostered
by these environments. Describing Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise in 1975, Le
Monde referred to it as ‘a genuine ghetto’ that ‘physically and morally’
isolated the harkis from the rest of the population, reinforcing the per-
ception that the harki community were unlike the rest of the French
population.8 According to one former Bias resident, harkis in the camps
were treated like ‘pariahs’: ‘No one dared to approach us because they’d
been told things about us: that we were savages. People didn’t even dare
to pass in front of the Bias camp, they were really afraid. They’d only do
it in a car.’9
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