Contesting views the visual economy of france and algeria

the visual economy of france and algeria edward welch and Joseph mcgonagle Fifty years after Algerian independence, the legacy of France’s Algerian past, and the ongoing complexities of

the visual economy of france and algeria

edward welch and Joseph mcgonagle

Fifty years after Algerian independence, the legacy of France’s Algerian

past, and the ongoing complexities of the Franco-Algerian relationship,

remain a key preoccupation in both countries A central role in shaping

understanding of their shared past and present is played by visual culture

This study investigates how relations between France and Algeria have

been represented and contested through visual means since the outbreak

of the Algerian War in 1954 It probes the contours of colonial and

postcolonial visual culture in both countries, highlighting the important

roles played by still and moving images when Franco-Algerian relations

are imagined Analysing a wide range of images made on both sides of

the Mediterranean – from colonial picture postcards of French Algeria to

contemporary representations of postcolonial Algiers – this book is the

first to trace the circulation of, and connections between, a diverse range

of images and media within this field of visual culture It shows how the

visual representation of Franco-Algerian links informs our understanding

both of the lived experience of postcoloniality within Europe and the

Maghreb, and of wider contemporary geopolitics

‘Contesting Views is an incisive and timely analysis of visual culture

and its role in the mediation of Franco-Algerian relations, and makes

a convincing case for the importance of visual image and visual forms

in considering the postcoloniality of both France and Algeria.’

Dr James House, University of Leeds

Edward Welch is Senior Lecturer in French at Durham University

Joseph McGonagle is Lecturer in Cultural Studies in the French-speaking

World at the University of Manchester

Cover image by Zineddine Bessạ

Design by Emily Wilkinson

Contesting Views The Visual Economy of France and Algeria

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 27

Series Editors

Manchester Metropolitan University University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A HIGGINS MIREILLE ROSELLO

University of Melbourne Dartmouth College University of Amsterdam

MICHAEL SHERINGHAM DAVID WALKER

University of Oxford University of Sheffield

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and

contem-porary French and francophone cultures and writing The books published in

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical

practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural

and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades All

manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression

are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory The volumes

in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary

culture.

Recent titles in the series:

11 Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Postcolonial Eyes:

Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature

12 Lawrence R Schehr, French

Post-Modern Masculinities: From Neuromatrices to Seropositivity

13 Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in

Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress

14 Andy Stafford, Photo-texts:

Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image

15 Kaiama L Glover, Haiti Unbound: A

Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon

16 David Scott, Poetics of the Poster: The

Rhetoric of Image-Text

17 Mark McKinney, The Colonial Heritage

of French Comics

18 Jean Duffy, Thresholds of Meaning:

Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative

19 David H Walker, Consumer

Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature

20 Pim Higginson, The Noir Atlantic:

Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel

21 Verena Andermatt Conley, Spatial

Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory

22 Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the

Collège de France

23 Hugh Dauncey, French Cycling: A

Social and Cultural History

24 Louise Hardwick, Childhood,

Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean

25 Douglas Morrey Michel Houellebecq:

Humanity and its Aftermath

26 Nick Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique:

Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant

Contesting Views

The Visual Economy

of France and Algeria

Contesting Views

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Contents

I Algerian Pasts in the French Public Sphere

1 Wish We Were There: Nostalgic (Re)visions of France’s

II Mapping Franco-Algerian Borders

in Contemporary Visual Culture

4 War Child: Memory, Childhood and Algerian Pasts in

5 Bridging the Gap: Representations of the Mediterranean Sea 121

6 A Sense of Place: Envisioning Post-Colonial Space in

1 Display of books in Bordeaux’s Mollat bookshop, September 2009

2 Photograph from the cover of Jean-Luc Einaudi, La Bataille de

Paris (Paris: Seuil, 1991) Reproduced by permission.

3 Photograph from the cover of Jim House and Neil MacMaster,

Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford

University Press, 2006) Reproduced by permission

4 Front-cover of Paris Match, 28 October 1961.

Reproduced by permission

5 Both dream and nightmare: Life in wartime Algeria for Ali in

Cartouches gauloises (Mehdi Charef, 2007)

6 Once Messaoud, now Michou: Michou d’Auber (Thomas

9 Zineddine Bessạ, H-OUT: Le Guide de la migration (2010)

10 Reframing the Parisian banlieue: Les Courtillières in Salut

cousin! (Merzak Allouache, 1996)

11 Oran in Paris: The local Algerian café-bar in L’Autre Cơté de

la mer (Dominique Cabrera, 1997)

12 Policing frontiers in Algiers in Beur blanc rouge (Mahmoud

15 Showcasing the city: The Basilica of Notre-Dame d’Afrique in

Il était une fois dans l’Oued (Djamel Bensalah, 2005)

Illustrations

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

The research for this book was funded by a grant from the Arts

and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) between September 2008

and December 2011, ‘France and Algeria: Visualising a (Post-)Colonial

Relationship’ We would like to express our gratitude to the AHRC for

supporting us through the grant and enabling us to undertake this work

We would also like to thank all those who contributed to the project in

different ways, whether as participants in the various projects associated

with it, or as critical friends, readers and interlocutors Particular

thanks are due to Guy Austin, Amanda Crawley Jackson, Charles

Forsdick, Jim House, Amy Hubbell, Nadira Laggoune-Aklouche,

Jonathan Long, Andrea Noble, John Perivolaris, Chris Perriam, Henry

Phillips, Libby Saxton and Helen Vassallo As part of the project, the

authors curated New Cartographies: Algeria–France–UK, an exhibition

of contemporary visual art exploring the theme of the Franco-Algerian

relationship at Cornerhouse, Manchester between April and June 2011

We would like to express our gratitude to all the team at Cornerhouse

for the enthusiasm and support they gave to the project over a period of

some two years

Collaborative research and writing is still a rare enough occurrence

in the humanities for it to have been a source of curiosity and

conver-sation with a number of colleagues during the lifetime of the project

Having emerged enriched from the experience, both authors would

argue strongly for the intellectual stimulation and pleasure to be had in

sharing and discussing ideas over a long period of time, and hope that

both are reflected in the material which follows

Edward Welch would like to add a personal note of gratitude for the love

and support shown by his wife Sophie and mother Christine during the

time of the project and the writing of the book, and to dedicate it to the

memory of his late father Derek

Joseph McGonagle would like to thank his wife Alex, parents Mary

and Hugh Joseph, and sister Kathleen for their love and encouragement

throughout the project and during the book’s completion

Nineteen March 2012 proved to be a notable date in France for two

reasons First, it was marked by extensive coverage in the French media

of the fiftieth anniversary of the ceasefire agreed in the Évian accords

between the French government and the Gouvernement Provisionnel

de la République Algérienne (GPRA) The ceasefire marked the official

suspension of military hostilities in Algeria, and the first stage of the

process towards the declaration of an Algerian republic on 5 July 1962

The extent of the coverage, and the way in which it drew together

diverse perspectives on the war, including those which in the past had

often been marginalised or occluded, suggested that after fifty years

France was finally in a position to recognise and acknowledge more fully

the complexity of the Algerian War, its colonial activities in the country,

and their persistence as a reference point for large sections of the French

population

However, reflection on the war came to be overshadowed by a

dramatic series of events played out that morning in Toulouse in South

West France Following the assassination of three off-duty soldiers the

previous week, three schoolchildren and an adult were shot dead at close

range outside a Jewish school by a lone gunman, Mohamed Merah It

soon became clear that the adult was both father to two of the children

and a teacher at the school, and that the other child was the daughter

of the school’s head teacher Following an armed stand-off at his flat in

the city, Merah would himself be shot dead by a police marksman a few

days later It would subsequently emerge that Merah, a French citizen of

Algerian origin, claimed to have received training at an Al-Qaeda camp

Introduction:

Visualising the Franco-Algerian

Relationship

Introduction

in Pakistan, and had sought to avenge Muslim deaths in Palestine, Iraq

and Afghanistan

While giving a precise indication of Merah’s ethnic origins, the Frenchmedia did not pursue the juxtaposition of the two events, and the echo of

history to be heard – intentionally or otherwise – in Merah’s murderous

assault Nevertheless, its concern to signal his background did not

escape the attention of the Algerian press, which commented angrily on

it (Akef 2012; Selim 2012) Nor was it surprising that Marine Le Pen,

the leader of the far-right Front National, was quick to instrumentalise

and capitalise on the events as part of her presidential election campaign

(the first round of which was to take place the following month), using

them to thematise anxieties over the perils of immigration and

multicul-turalism, and the perceived threat posed to French culture by Islam

(Mestra 2012)

Both of the problems posed by the Merah incident – namely, how toaccount for the emergence of such radicalised figures in France’s secular

republic, and the reaction in Algeria to the emphasis placed in France

on his ethnic origin – served to encapsulate the persistent legacies and

complexities of the relationship between France and its former colony,

and the equally persistent difficulties of moving that relationship on to

less sensitive, less unstable ground Ever since Algerian independence

in 1962, the Franco-Algerian relationship has remained fraught with

tension, which manifested itself at various points during the 2000s

alone: in October 2001, at the Stade de France in St-Denis, when France

and Algeria encountered each other for the first time on the football

field, and the French national anthem was booed by large sections

of the crowd; in 2005, during the controversy over the infamous law

passed by the French National Assembly – subsequently repealed by

the Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) – on the ‘benefits’

of France’s historical presence overseas, especially in North Africa;

and again in May 2010, when Hors-la-loi, by Franco-Algerian director

Rachid Bouchareb, was presented at the Cannes film festival Offering a

controversial account of the Algerian struggle for independence, the film

was notable in particular for its evocation of the bloody repression by

French colonial authorities in May 1945 of nationalist protests in Sétif,

and provoked angry responses from politicians on the political right in

France (McGonagle and Welch 2011; Vince 2011: 305–6) As Le Monde

put it somewhat theatrically at the time, referring to the controversy

provoked by the film, ‘entre l’Algérie et la France, le psychodrame est

permanent’.1

We would agree with Jean-Robert Henry (1993: 9) that the (pop)

psychoanalytical perspective signalled by Le Monde’s vocabulary is

not always the most appropriate for analysing societal and

inter-cultural relations; but if we follow it for a moment, and pursue the

analysis of France’s Algerian past proposed by Anne Donadey in the

mid-1990s, we can say that since that time the French have left behind

the phase of repression and denial (Donadey 1996) and entered a far

more garrulous phase associated with the Freudian ‘talking cure’ This is

reflected in the increasingly expansive media coverage at key anniversary

moments related to the Algerian War in 2004 and 2012

Nevertheless, as Benjamin Stora has observed, it is also notable that

the fiftieth anniversary of the ceasefire was met with silence at state level

in both countries, and that any commemorative initiatives in France are

pursed by civil society (for example, veterans’ associations) or at local

political level (through acts such as street naming or the unveiling of

commemorative plaques) (Cailletet 2012: 20) Governmental uncertainty

in the face of France’s colonial legacy, and the simultaneous sensitivity,

particularly on the political right, to lobby groups associated with the

rapatriés of French Algeria, make clear that at all levels the country still

struggles to come to terms with the consequences of the war and the

period of French history it drew to a close.2

In her influential account of decolonisation and modernisation in

post-war France, Kristin Ross has argued that the Gaullist government

‘slammed shut the door’ on colonial history with the end of the Algerian

War (1995: 9), refusing to look back as it marched steadfastly into a

future that was to be technologically improved and technocratically

managed Moreover, as Todd Shepard (2006b) has examined

persua-sively, the regime’s desire for a clean break with its Algerian past was

encoded in the various legal and administrative procedures enacting

Algerian independence and the process of decolonisation, not the least

of which involved establishing clear dividing lines of citizenship between

the different populations in Algeria, and making decisions about who

did and did not have the right to be seen, and see themselves, as French

In an ideal world, one might have imagined the separation of France

and Algeria to be a relatively straightforward matter The clean break

desired by the governments on both sides of the Mediterranean should

have been facilitated by the physical distance between the two countries;

but, as Richard Derderian (2002) has pointed out, it was of course not

to be The desire to shut the door on the colonial past overlooked (or

wilfully ignored) the extent to which it would remain a fundamental

part of lived experience for millions of people – whether as affective and

emotional bonds rooted in memory and myth, or as transnational links

and networks resulting from migration, exchange and passage back and

forth between the two countries Indeed, the complexity and intricacy

of those links proved to be such that in 1998, Étienne Balibar would

question the extent to which France and Algeria could be considered

two separate nations In a way, suggested Balibar, we do not really

cross between France and Algeria at all, but are constantly encountering

and negotiating the legacies and consequences of their shared history,

and their on-going imbrication For him, what he termed ‘l’ensemble

franco-algérien’ exists as a vast ‘frontière-monde’, or frontier world

(Balibar 1998: 81) At once an entity which resembles a vast frontier

zone of contact, co-mingling and métissage, it is also a space with

global resonance through the way it highlights the currents of trade and

migration symptomatic of the contemporary world

The persistent and unavoidable significance of the Franco-Algerianrelationship, both in terms of their shared past and how that past plays

itself out in the present, has been explored at various points in the

previous two decades The attention paid to it reflects both its specific

importance in the history of each country and its exemplarity in terms

of understanding the nature of post-colonial relations and the condition

of ‘postcoloniality’ more broadly.3 Edited volumes by Hargreaves and

Heffernan (1993) and Lorcin (2006) have underscored the historical

depth and intricacy of the relationship in colonial and post-colonial

contexts Silverstein (2004) examines transnational and transpolitical

networks between Algeria and France in the contemporary period, and

considers how France becomes a location in which issues relating to

contemporary Algerian (and especially Berber) politics and identity are

played out and inflected in that context

We would share these scholars’ belief in the centrality of the Algerian relationship, and France’s Algerian past, for understanding the

Franco-past and present of both countries Our aim in this book is to explore it

from a particular vantage point, one that, like Poe’s purloined letter, is

at once strikingly obvious and yet, in many respects, has often remained

unremarked – namely, how the Franco-Algerian relationship finds itself

articulated, expressed and represented through visual means and in

visual form As is often the case in such matters, this vantage point can

emerge in ways and locations which might seem peripheral or ephemeral,

but in fact (and perhaps for that very reason) prove themselves to be at

once revealing and significant

In September 2009, for example, one of the authors encountered a

display of books in Bordeaux’s famous Mollat bookshop on the theme

of the Algerian War and French Algeria (Fig 1) The display had

undoubtedly been motivated by the publication a few weeks earlier of

the novel Des hommes by Laurent Mauvignier, prominently displayed at

the centre of the table Des hommes tells the story of a group of former

conscript soldiers in provincial France, whose memories of their time

in Algeria during their military service continue to haunt them in later

life The booksellers of Mollat clearly saw in the novel’s publication an

opportunity to bring together a number of related books on the theme,

including historical accounts by well-known scholars of the period such

as Yves Courrière, Jean-Luc Einaudi and Benjamin Stora, and classic

texts such as La Question (1958), Henri Alleg’s account of torture at the

hands of the French army in Algiers

Figure 1 September 2009 display in Bordeaux’s Mollat bookshop

The book display was noteworthy for two reasons in particular.

First, it signalled the extent to which France’s Algerian past increasingly

permeates public space in France in a range of ways, from the ephemeral

and opportunistic, to more permanent expressions of collective memory

such as street naming or the inscription of war memorials It offered an

instance of the sorts of traces of Algeria in France which Leïla Sebbar

mapped across three volumes of diaries in the 2000s (Sebbar 2004;

2005; 2008).4At the same time, and crucially, it drew attention to the

role played by the visual image and visual forms in mediating that

presence If the display caught the eye, it was in large part because of the

photographs used on the covers of a number of the books to present and

mediate the historical accounts and narratives they developed

If we dwell on a seemingly fleeting constellation of images and objectssuch as this, it is because it exemplifies a broader phenomenon which our

book sets out to examine The visual qualities of the display underline

and illustrate the degree to which the Franco-Algerian relationship,

and France’s Algerian history, are played out and staged through visual

culture Moreover, they point to a number of questions driving our

investigation: what vision of the conflict do such images articulate?

What work do they do in shaping perceptions and understanding of the

war? What impression do they convey of France’s colonial expansion

and its relationship to the contemporary period?

In other words, the Mollat book display at once confirms Sebbar’sinsight that France is shot through with traces and memories of Algeria,

and invites us to pursue it further, by foregrounding the central role

played by the visual image and visual culture in mediating those traces

and memories Our book therefore explores how visual culture, in its

range of modes and forms, shapes understanding of the Franco-Algerian

relationship and France’s Algerian past Part I focuses especially on the

role played by the photographic image in this process, for two reasons

First, while historians are beginning to acknowledge the centrality of

the photographic image in mediating French Algeria and the Algerian

War, as we discuss further in Chapter 2, there has been so far relatively

little critical analysis of photographic material from, and of, the period

Secondly, in examining that material, and as we discuss at length

in Chapter 3, our study seeks to push forward recent work on the

relationship between photography and history, and the role played by

the photographic image in shaping historical understanding That is

to say, investigating the visual representation of the Algerian War and

France’s Algerian past offers new insights into how that history has been

articulated and vehicled in the public sphere; and, at the same time, it

sheds light on broader issues relating to the place of the photographic

image within history and historiography

While the photographic image is a key focal point for this book, our

aim is also to situate both still and moving images in relation to each

other as part of a broader spectrum of visual culture We understand

visual culture to encompass a broad array of visual forms and media For

example, we would argue for the need to consider how the photographic

image itself functions across a range of different contexts, from the

disposable or semi-permanent format of the newspaper or magazine, to

the highly valued (in economic and cultural terms) work of documentary

photographers such as Raymond Depardon, or visual artists such as

Zineb Sedira More specifically, we would follow the anthropologist

Deborah Poole in arguing that we need to approach visual material

not simply as constituting a ‘visual culture’, but as forming part of a

‘visual economy’; that is to say, as bound up in processes of ‘production,

circulation, consumption and production of images’ (Poole 1997: 8) In

thinking about the visual economy of the Franco-Algerian relationship,

we need to remain attentive to the different ways in which images – both

still and moving – circulate within and between the two countries, and

what sort of images tend to dominate those flows We also need to bear

in mind another idea implicit within the notion of a visual economy, that

of the often unequal relationships on which those flows are predicated

At various points in the book emerge questions about where images are

produced; who produces them; how they enter circulation; and how, in

doing so, they begin to constitute a form of visual understanding about

France and Algeria, whether it be in relation to the picture postcard

producers of the early twentieth century (Chapter 1), or the independent

filmmakers of Algerian origin at the turn of the twenty-first century

(Chapter 6)

ThebooktracksthevisualeconomyoftheFranco-Algerianrelationship

across different periods, from the colonial to the post-colonial It is also

alert to the relationships and connections between those periods, turning

its attention especially to how the colonial is configured and represented

visually in post-colonial contexts and debates It is arguably here, in

the constant interplay between past and present, history and memory,

where the complexity and specificity of the Franco-Algerian relationship

lie Part I pays close attention to the weight and role of history in the

relationship It considers the visualisation of French Algeria and the

Algerian War both at the time and subsequently, investigating how

historical understanding of these periods takes shape retrospectively

through the visual image Its primary (though not exclusive) emphasis is

on the French context, which reflects in part the extent to which France’s

Algerian past has emerged as a central preoccupation in the country in

recent decades Furthermore, as the subject of each chapter makes clear,

this habitually involves marginalised memories and memory groups of

different kinds

One of the peculiarities of the Algerian War and France’s Algerianpast is the way in which the position of victimhood is taken up by

different, and potentially competing, groups, all of whom feel themselves

to be excluded from historical narratives of the war, and are driven by a

sense of historical injustice, whether real or perceived (Branche 2005: 13;

Derderian 2002) We examine how the photographic image plays a role

in articulating these marginalised perspectives and reinscribing them

into broader historical narratives about France’s Algerian past Chapter

1 explores the restaging of French Algeria in nostalgic photo-books

produced by and for a pied-noir audience.5 In Chapter 2, we see

how the photographic image becomes an important means by which

conscript soldiers can reassert a lived experience of the Algerian War

which was for many years occluded Chapter 3 explores how the

events of October 1961 in Paris, when a peaceful protest by Algerian

immigrants was brutally repressed by the Paris police, are articulated

through photography both at the time and subsequently, as they come

to be recognised as a key episode of the war, and those involved, their

relatives and the activists supporting them, make demands for historical

justice

In Part II, we examine how the Franco-Algerian relationship continues

to be played out in contemporary visual culture We consider how

contemporary visual culture shows itself to be preoccupied both with

the legacy of the Algerian War and with the ongoing intricacies of

the Franco-Algerian relationship in the post-colonial era Chapter 4

draws attention to the striking way in which contemporary cinema

by directors from a range of backgrounds (Franco-Algerian, Algerian

émigré, European) have chosen to restage and present the Algerian

War from a child’s perspective, and the perspective of the male child

in particular The remaining two chapters discuss how the social,

political and cultural configurations produced by the end of France’s

colonial activity in Algeria, and the persistent legacy of that activity in

the post-colonial era, are articulated in visual forms, whether it be in

terms of a mystified relationship with Algeria as mother country among

French youths born to parents of Algerian origin, or the multitude of

familial and cultural networks which bind together France and Algeria

and make negotiating between the two central to the lived experience

of countless individuals The chapters consider too how recent events,

such as the brutal civil conflict in Algeria during the 1990s, render even

more complicated attempts to live through and with the legacies of the

colonial period

These final two chapters foreground especially some of the key

theatres and spaces in which the Franco-Algerian relationship is staged

Chapter 5 highlights the role played by the Mediterranean as a locus

of representation, and explores the dual values it carries: as barrier or

frontier on the one hand, for people on both its French and Algerian

shores; and as bridge, hyphen or point of crossing on the other If,

following Balibar, we need to think through France and Algeria together,

then it is the physical space of the Mediterranean especially which is

arguably one of the most active parts of that frontier world It has a vital

role to play in inflecting individual trajectories and producing complex

post-colonial subjectivities – subjectivities which, as Élisabeth Leuvrey

makes clear in her documentary film La Traversée [The Crossing] (2006),

are predicated on a sense of ‘in-between-ness’ or ‘back-and-forthness’

between France and Algeria

Chapter 6 takes us back to dry land It draws attention to how the

Franco-Algerian relationship is staged through the visual

represen-tation of space in both countries It maps trends over the 1990s and

2000s, during which time the primary stage for portraying the

Franco-Algerian relationship shifted from France to Algeria, and visual culture

offered a means to normalise and even render spectacular a beleaguered

country emerging from its civil war It considers how France and

Algeria are made visible to each other through contemporary visual

culture, and how some visual tropes which emerged during the colonial

period (such as the visualisation of Algiers as a dazzling seaboard

city) continue to play a role in this It considers too how the staging

of the Franco-Algerian relationship is configured by photographers

and filmmakers from different contexts and backgrounds, whether it

be French filmmakers of pied-noir origin; Algerian émigré directors;

or indeed, internationally renowned documentary photographers who

bring to bear on contemporary Algeria a means of viewing and a

technical apparatus designed to emphasise the scale and beauty of the

country, with the hopeful intention of encouraging consensus about its

past, present and future

However, it is with a return to French Algeria that our study begins.

We investigate how it has been portrayed, staged and restaged, as it

recedes into history and persists as an object of controversy

part i

Algerian Pasts

in the French Public Sphere

Postcards from the Colonies

As France established itself in Algeria during the nineteenth century,

visual culture came to have a central role in shaping perceptions and

understandings of the new colony It helped to transform the country,

its landscapes and people into objects of knowledge, spectacle and

consumption, playing out once again the fundamental interconnection

of visuality and imperialism analysed most notably by Mary Louise

Pratt (1992) Deborah Cherry (2003) notes how rapidly Western artists,

tourists and photographers began to arrive in Algeria, and the excitement

with which they set about depicting what they saw With the subsequent

dissemination and circulation of their images, the colony not only ‘entered

into visuality’ (Cherry 2003: 41), but did so within an established Western

set of aesthetic frameworks and modes of representation such as landscape

and portraiture, motivated especially by a sense of the ‘picturesque’

Moreover, the emergence of what David Prochaska terms an ‘Algérie

imaginaire’, or imaginary Algeria, was fuelled especially in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the technical advance of

photography as a medium, and its use in the equally new and fast

expanding industry of picture postcard manufacture, which both resulted

from and responded to the development of Algeria as a tourist destination

(Prochaska 1990; Terpak 2009) Images of Algeria were produced in

ever increasing numbers both locally and by the major metropolitan

publishers, including Lévy frères and Neurdein in Paris, and Combier

in Mâcon, many of whom employed their own photographers to take

1

Wish We Were There:

Nostalgic (Re)visions

of France’s Algerian Past

Wish We Were There

pictures ‘in the field’ (Prochaska 1990: 375–6).1The material produced

fell broadly into the genre of scènes et types, constituted both of views

of Algeria’s cities, towns and landscapes (scènes) and of images depicting

different occupations, ways of life and social ‘types’, particularly among

the country’s indigenous populations The most notable and notorious

examples of the latter, of course, are the exoticising and eroticising

images of Algerian women which Malek Alloula set out to ‘return to

sender’ with the publication of Le Harem colonial [The Colonial Harem]

in 1981

In some respects, the visualisation of Algeria through picturepostcards was simply part of the broader enthusiasm for this new

form of mass visual medium which took hold towards the end of the

nineteenth century Prochaska (1990: 375) notes the startling growth

of picture postcard production in France, from 8 million in 1899 to 60

million in 1902, for which the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris was

largely responsible As Naomi Schor has argued, the opportunities for

self-promotion and display afforded by the ‘postcarding of Paris’ (1992:

215) at this time played a key role in efforts to underline the country’s

economic and political power and to assert its nationalistic and

imperi-alistic ambitions (1992: 195); but ‘postcarding’ had an equally important

role to play in relation to those places where France’s ambitions were

in the process of being exercised and realised, one exemplified by the

Algerian case For Prochaska,

Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Algeria functions

as a kind of colonial laboratory in which various elements – art andphotography, capitalism and colonialism – interacted to create a colonialdiscourse distinctive to Algeria, but which at the same time constituted

a subfile of the larger visual archive of the world and its peoples whichnineteenth century photography was assiduously assembling (Prochaska1990: 375)

The production and circulation of picture postcard images weretherefore not just symptomatic of colonial activity, but constitutive of it.2

Postcards might at first appear to be the most mundane form of visual

culture, not least because of their ubiquity and potentially ephemeral

qualities; but it is precisely their ubiquity – the extent and reach of their

circulation – which lends them their distinctive importance in establishing

or consolidating certain ways of seeing That picture postcard images of

Algeria had particular agency during the colonial period is reflected

in Alloula’s suggestive (though unsubstantiated) argument that the

circulation of so-called ‘harem’ images began to decline in the 1930s,

‘once their mission is accomplished’ (Alloula 1986: 129 n 5); in other

words, once they had served to reinforce relationships of knowledge

and power both within the colonial context and in terms of how the

conquered lands of Algeria were made visible to metropolitan France for

consumption

Implicit within Alloula’s observation is an understanding of the

historical specificity and mutability of these ways of seeing, and the

ideological frameworks in which they are constituted He points to a

sense in which colonial postcards come to have their day, appear as relics

of a bygone era, or lose their value as currency once the historical era

which gave them meaning comes to an end Indeed, the publication of

Le Harem colonial in 1981 was itself indicative of such a shift, as Alloula

set out to provoke the re-evaluation of colonial postcards in the context

of post-colonial and post-Foucauldian critical debate.3It seemed that if

the visual culture of the colonial era were to have any kind of life in the

wake of Le Harem colonial, it would most obviously be as material to

be read symptomatically; that is to say, as material which could be used

to understand the discursive and social formations of colonialism within

the French context, but which also offered insights into the visual,

political and cultural economy of colonialism more broadly, and its

operation as a system for the production and circulation of knowledge,

meaning and value

Yet, at the same time, a large amount of visual material from the

colonial period continues to survive and circulate in a rather different

context, and has a different role to play in relation to France’s Algerian

past The last two or three decades have seen a growing industry in

photo-books depicting French Algeria They draw extensively on picture

postcards, particularly from the early twentieth century, as well as

stock and archive images from other sources for decades up to Algerian

independence in 1962 Reproducing images in black and white for the

most part (with the occasional exception of images used as cover art or

retouched in colour), the volumes restage French Algeria for the viewer,

focusing usually on the major cities of the North (Algiers, Oran and

Constantine) and the regions associated with them

As some of their titles would suggest, these volumes are frequently

produced by and for a pied-noir audience In offering a return to

colonial Algeria, they both respond to and themselves foster a sense

of nostalgérie, that nostalgia among pieds-noirs for the lost homeland

provoked and crystallised, as Jean-Jacques Jordi (2003) has argued, by

the rapid and dramatic exodus during the summer of 1962, when the

vast majority of the European settler population, faced with the prospect

of Algerian independence, fled to France Photo-books such as Jacques

Gandini’s Alger de ma jeunesse, 1950–1962 [Algiers of my Youth]

(1995), Teddy Alzieu’s Alger: mémoire en images [Algiers: Memory in

Images] (2000) and Élisabeth Fechner’s Souvenirs de là-bas: Alger et

l’Algérois [Memories of Over There: Algiers and the Algiers Region]

(2002a) invite reader-viewers to revisit and resituate themselves in the

spaces, environments and landscapes of French Algeria, and, in doing

so, offer an opportunity to assert French Algeria as a place of individual

and collective memory, of belonging and origins As the cover blurb

for Alger: mémoire en images puts it, ‘à travers cette sélection de lieux

familiers, les Français natifs d’Alger pourront retrouver avec nostalgie

des images précieuses, indispensables racines de leur passé “pied-noir”’.4

Indeed, paratextual material such as this may often give the

non-pied-noir reader an uncomfortable impression of sitting in or intruding on

a private moment of reminiscence by a group which is happy to define

itself in quite precise historical, social and cultural terms The explicit

construction of its target audience, often through the use of the first

person plural ‘nous’, establishes a viewing position in relation to the

images which includes (and by extension, excludes) on the basis of

common ground, experience and understanding

At stake in these photo-books, then, is the construction andexpression of a nostalgic vision, a way of seeing which reflects a shared

understanding of what France’s Algerian past looked like, and how it

could or should be remembered by those for whom it represents home

The first aim of Chapter 1 is to explore this nostalgic vision, and the

ways in which France’s Algeria is portrayed for and by the pied-noir

community in nostalgic photo-books At first sight, it is perhaps easy

to dismiss such publications as marginal or symptomatic phenomena

at best, and at worst as historically and morally suspect Mary Vogl,

for example, is quick to condemn the ‘wilful nostalgia’ of pied-noir

photo-books and the occlusion of history they display (2003: 174)

It is undoubtedly the case, as we shall see later, that they display

some obvious blind spots in relation to the historical realities of the

colonial dynamic However, we would also argue that it is not enough

to dismiss them as exercises in wilful, or in Kimberly Smith’s terms,

‘mere’ nostalgia (Smith 2000) Rather, we would agree with Smith

that nostalgia should be taken seriously as a mode of remembrance

and historical understanding, and that we need to get to grips with its

forms of expression, its politics and ethics Such issues are all the more

timely given, as we discussed in the Introduction, both the persistent

presence of images of French Algeria in the broader public sphere in

France and its increasing visibility in French culture Material such as

Nicole Garcia’s film Un balcon sur la mer (2010), which returns us to

the ghostly streets of French Oran, or recent photo-books evoking the

final days of French Algeria by prominent figures of French culture such

as Pierre Bourdieu (2003), Raymond Depardon (2010) and Marc Riboud

(2009), point to an ongoing preoccupation with how French Algeria is

visualised, and therefore remembered and understood, in French society

more generally The chapter draws on the alternative perspectives

opened up by these latter volumes in order to capture the modalities

of more nostalgic photo-books, the visual and narrative strategies they

adopt in order to restage French Algeria, and the issues they raise in the

process about photography, memory and place

Photo-books and the Visualisation of Nostalgérie

Despite what is sometimes assumed, the concept of nostalgérie does

not emerge as a consequence of the repatriation of European settlers

to France at the time of Algerian independence Both Philip Dine and

Amy Hubbell locate its first appearance in the 1930s, even if they credit

different writers with the coinage of the term (Dine 1994: 150; Hubbell

2011: 160 n 1);5 but the nostalgic longing for the lost homeland of

Algeria it describes certainly came into sharp focus among the pied-noir

community in the decades following the end of the Algerian War It

was fuelled by a double trauma, the longing for the homeland made

all the more acute by the impossibility of return With the granting

of independence to Algeria, the past for the pied-noir community had

literally become a foreign country in which, despite the assurances

supposedly built into the Évian Agreements about the place of the

European community in a sovereign Algeria, they felt themselves, for the

most part, to be unwelcome.6

Moreover, dislocation from the land of their birth was compounded

by the distinctive political and historical context in which the end of

the war and repatriation took place, and the ambiguous status acquired

by the pieds-noirs as a result On the one hand, the political situation

in independent Algeria itself made them feel that return was out of the

question; on the other, France’s own attempt to deal with the end of its

colonial adventures by reconfiguring itself, as both Frederick Cooper

(2003) and Todd Shepard (2006a) have argued, as a post-imperialist and

essentially European country – one whose future lay at the heart of the

new European project – left them marooned on the political and social

margins of French society, an unwanted legacy of a tiresome chapter in

France’s recent history

The scenario of dislocation and marginalisation with which the

pied-noir community was confronted inevitably proved to be fertile

ground for a growing sense of nostalgia, which found expression across

a range of cultural forms Indeed, expressions of nostalgic longing and

regret provided the precise foundation for a sense of shared identity among

the exiled pied-noir community It was in the literary field in France

where nostalgic evocations of French Algeria emerged most obviously

As Dine reminds us, an extensive literature by pied-noir writers quickly

appeared in the years following independence and repatriation (1994:

150–4), and was in large part preoccupied with themes of loss, injustice,

regret and self-justification

The sustained exploitation of visual material to portray French Algeria

was initially more sporadic Paul Azoulay’s La Nostalgérie française

[French Nostalgeria] (1980) drew on picture postcards of the scènes et

types style to restage French Algeria, and in particular its indigenous

populations, in an un-self-consciously Orientalist and exoticising way

(a point to which we return below) In 1988, Marie Cardinal, perhaps

the most high-profile pied-noir writer in terms of making Algeria and

her relationship to it a sustained focus of her work, published Les

Pieds-noirs, a substantial and lavishly produced coffee-table book which

made use of a range of visual material, including archive photographs

and picture postcards, in its depiction of European settler life in Algeria;

but for the most part during the 1980s and 1990s, publications which

set out specifically to exploit photographic material in their evocation

of French Algeria were the product of a cottage industry Many of the

photo-books produced during this period are defined by relatively low

production values, reflected in often poor-quality image reproduction,

low print runs, and finishing more reminiscent of magazine or

brochure-style publications (stapled bindings in the case of Tudury 1994, for

example) More prolific authors such as Jacques Gandini embarked

on self-publishing ventures, Gandini producing a series of volumes

beginning with Alger de ma jeunesse, 1950–1962 (1995) that focus

explicitly on the final years of French Algeria; but his more substantial

volumes (hardbound and large format) nevertheless reflect a small-scale

output in their design and production

The material qualities of these publications are an indication of their

economically and culturally marginal status, in terms of their viability

and interest for a mainstream commercial publisher At the same time,

it is also true to say that authors such as Gandini appear unconcerned

by their marginal position in the field of cultural production As the

prefatory material in both Alger de ma jeunesse and Oran de ma

jeunesse, 1945–1962 (1997) makes explicit, his volumes are perceived

above all to perform a service to a self-recognised community Writing

in Alger de ma jeunesse, Francette Mendoza, national president of

the Amicale des Enfants de l’Algérois, an association of pied-noir

expatriates from the region of Algiers, observes that

C’est tout un programme que nous permet de découvrir Jacques Gandini

au travers son ouvrage ‘Alger’ ‘jeunesse’ deux mots clés empreints

de souvenirs: nos racines et l’insouciance d’une ville heureuse qui la

favorisait En flânant, il retrouve en photos et avec plaisir pour le lecteur,

la promenade traditionnelle des Algérois (Gandini 1995: 3)7

In Oran de ma jeunesse, Geneviève de Ternant, editor of the monthly

pied-noir magazine L’Echo de l’Oranie, comments that ‘le témoignage

d’amitié que nous donne Jacques Gandini, c’est d’avoir fait siens des

souvenirs qui sont nôtres, c’est d’avoir fait revivre une ville disparue

qu’il a retrouvée dans nos pensées et dans nos cœurs’ (Gandini 1997:

3).8 His volumes are recognised as binding the community together

through shared memories, and facilitating both individual and collective

remembrance (underscored by the use of the first person plural pronoun

in both prefaces) through the visual re-presentation of the cities of French

Algeria While the titles of his volumes assert a link between French

Algeria and his own personal history, the two prefaces point to the fact

that his individual connection with and memories of the places portrayed

will also inevitably constitute shared memories The Algiers of his youth

will be recognisable as that of his pied-noir peers, forced to abandon the

city during their adolescence and early adulthood Furthermore, a sense

of collective endeavour is expressed again at the end of the volumes on

Algiers and Oran in Gandini’s request for readers to submit photographic

material for subsequent volumes on each city In effect, we can see in this

call a desire to produce work which is collectively authored, and in which

images, almost like those in a family album, serve as shared or common

ground for a community of reader-viewers

In the decade since 2000, two noticeable trends are apparent concerning

nostalgic photo-books of French Algeria The period has seen continued

growth in the number of such publications on the one hand, and, on the

other, the growing professionalisation of that production, in terms both

of more sophisticated production techniques and support from more

well-established, commercial publishing houses At the same time, the

field remains the domain of a relatively small number of prolific authors,

all of whom have pied-noir origins or connections Also notable is a

certain consensus in terms of their approach, which, following Gandini,

is geographical or place-based, with volumes focusing on specific cities,

towns and regions across Algeria; and, like Gandini, as the blurb for

Alzieu’s 2000 volume indicates, they continue to be oriented primarily

towards a particular (pied-noir) audience; but they also reflect shifting

political, historical and social contexts in intriguing ways Three figures

from the period stand out in particular

The writer Élisabeth Fechner followed her largely text-based volume

of 1999, Le Pays d’ó je viens [The Land from which I Come], with a

series of softbound photo-books on each of the three main Algerian cities

and their surrounding regions Produced by the long-standing Parisian

publishing house Calmann-Lévy in 2002, and making use of images

from a range of archival sources and personal collections, they were

clearly intended to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Algerian

independence Indeed, Fechner is at pains to argue in her introduction

to Alger et l’Algérois that the volumes reflect a turning point in relation

to memories of French Algeria, a ‘passage au souvenir apaisé’ (Fechner

2002a: 9),9 not just for the pied-noir community, perhaps, but also

within France more generally

Teddy Alzieu has proved to be the most prolific author of nostalgicphoto-books on French Algeria since 2000, with some sixteen titles

produced in the ten years to 2010, all of which are published by Éditions

Alan Sutton Like Fechner, Alzieu focused initially on Algeria’s major

cities, gradually expanding his coverage to include a number of smaller

towns and provincial areas Alzieu’s volumes make extensive use of

picture postcard material, as well as archival material and images (such

as aerial photography) from public and private agencies Finally, the

historian Philippe Lamarque, author of illustrated histories on a range

of subjects, published two photo-books towards the end of the decade,

the first on French Algeria as a whole (2006), the second focusing on

Algiers (2009) Unlike Alzieu and Fechner, he draws exclusively on

picture postcard material from the Belle Époque period, that ‘heyday’

of picture postcards, to borrow Prochaska’s term (1990: 416) Like those

of Alzieu, however, Lamarque’s volumes are notable for being produced

by a commercial publisher (HC Éditions) established in a particular

niche market Both HC Éditions and Éditions Alan Sutton specialise in

producing richly illustrated but relatively affordable soft and hardbound

books focusing on popular history, which take the form especially of

anthologies of old photographs and picture postcards depicting past

times and places Indeed, Lamarque’s second volume, Alger d’antan

[Algiers of Yesteryear], is positioned explicitly as part of a series entitled

‘La Collection d’antan’, offering portraits of French cities and regions

in times past through the medium of picture postcards Likewise, a

number of Alzieu’s volumes for Alan Sutton, in terms of both format and

approach, find a place alongside similar visual depictions of ‘France of

yesteryear’ published in recent years by the firm

Striking here, and indeed explicit in the case of Alger d’antan, is

the way in which these volumes serve to reincorporate and rehabilitate

French Algeria into the historical and memorial geography of France

more generally Placed on an equal footing with other great French

cities and regions which constitute France’s sense of national identity,

Algiers is acknowledged as a legitimate part of provincial French

history As such, its incorporation marks a challenge to the vision

of spatial and therefore national identity established after the loss of

Algeria in 1962, when the assertion of France’s European-ness by its

political leaders was reinforced by the currency rapidly acquired by the

figure of the hexagon to describe the country’s geographically neat and

self-contained shape.10 Indeed, the normalisation or neutralisation of

French Algeria represented by the publication of these volumes would

perhaps confirm the mood of apaisement in relation to French Algeria

identified by Fechner in 2002, and arguably facilitated, as Claire Eldridge

notes, by the shifting political context in France during the decade, as

politicians on the mainstream right fostered and encouraged debate on

the ‘positive aspects’ of French colonialism, culminating in the notorious

law voted by the National Assembly in February 2005 (Eldridge 2010:

133–4).11 The trends of the last decade, and the gradual re-emergence

of French Algeria into the broader public sphere facilitated by nostalgic

photo-books such as these, raise significant questions not just about how

French Algeria might be viewed nostalgically by a specific constituency,

but also about the place a nostalgic vision of the former colony might

have in contemporary France as a whole Central to these questions are

the nature, role and function of nostalgia itself, and colonial nostalgia

especially, issues to which we now turn

The Nostalgic Vision: Suspicion and Resistance

Nostalgia is a mood or attitude which seems frequently to be viewed

with suspicion, particularly among those of a more progressive political

persuasion The term has come to be imbued with negative connotations;

to be nostalgic is to be trapped between memory and fantasy in a way

which is unhelpful and unhealthy, and which almost inevitably implies

a conservative and reactionary politics As Kimberly Smith (2000: 507)

remarks, ‘nostalgia has come to mean a universal but aberrant yearning

for an irrecoverable past; a reality-distorting emotionalism triggered by

thoughts of home, small towns, and rural life; an understandable but

destabilizing force infecting our politics with irrationality, unreality and

impracticality’ Svetlana Boym (2001: 3) notes that, when it was first

diag-nosed as a medical condition towards the end of the seventeenth century,

‘nostalgia was said to produce “erroneous representations” that caused the

afflicted to lose touch with the present’ In failing to reconcile themselves

with the loss of the past, the nostalgic not only lose touch with present

realities, but tend to view that past and their place in it in a deluded way

The desire to hark back to a golden past is what Boym defines as

‘restorative’ nostalgia, which ‘attempts a transhistorical reconstruction

of the lost home’, and sees itself as defending ‘truth and tradition’

(2001: xviii) It is tempting, as Amy Hubbell does, to see nostalgérie as

a manifestation of restorative nostalgia (2011: 149), in its attempts to

reassert the continuing existence and relevance of a lost past without

properly recognising the impossibility of doing so; or, indeed, as Vogl

does, to dismiss pied-noir representations of the past not just as erroneous

but as morally and ethically wrong in their portrayal of French Algeria

However, as we noted above, it is equally problematic simply to dismiss

nostalgérie and its cultural forms in this way Smith calls for more careful

reflection on the formation of nostalgia as a concept, drawing attention

to the ways in which it was produced as a discursive category within

progressive political debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

She underlines the central role it came to play in defining which memories

were valid and whose perspectives counted To be labelled nostalgic

was to be called into question as a legitimate voice For Smith, nostalgia

emerges as ‘an important weapon in the debate over whose memories

count and what kinds of desires and harms are politically relevant’ (2000:

507) Indeed, echoes of the progressive orthodoxy concerning nostalgia

can be heard in Vogl’s critique of nostalgérie, which performs precisely

the gesture of silencing to which Smith draws attention

It is arguably more fruitful to reflect on the role and place of nostalgérie

within the broader French cultural dynamic At stake above all is what

it means to be of minority heritage within post-colonial France As

a minority group, of course, the pieds-noirs have fared rather better

than others struggling to establish themselves in the post-colonial

French Republic, thanks to their possession and exploitation of greater

economic, social and cultural capital (reflected not least in their activities

in the sphere of cultural production in France) They would nevertheless

perceive themselves to be relatively marginalised, as their persistent

struggle for recognition within the political arena would suggest, and at

constant risk of being disregarded or silenced by the majority, victims of

the ‘forgetfulness’ which Henry Rousso has famously identified as

consti-tutive of historical memory, and the ‘dominant’ memory of the nation

state especially (Rousso 1987; Lorcin 2006: xxiv) From this perspective,

nostalgérie appears as a form of resistance to official history, taking on

the disruptive quality identified by Kimberly Smith as it challenges the

silences and opacities of national memory Herein lies the interest of the

form taken in particular by the Alzieu and Lamarque volumes, and the

seemingly unproblematic way in which they reincorporate French Algeria

into the historical geography of the French nation They open up and

operate in a gap between collective memory and national memory by

maintaining in circulation a vision of France’s colonial past which – until

the middle part of the 2000s at least – remained on the margins of the

mainstream political sphere

So nostalgic photo-books have an important role to play asserting a

vision of French Algeria, and of maintaining that vision in circulation;

but a number of significant questions remain to be considered How do

they work to produce a nostalgic vision of France’s Algeria? How do

we recognise it as such? And, perhaps most fundamentally, why might

the visual image and the photo-books emerge as privileged locations

for nostalgic evocations of French Algeria? Central to these questions is

the complex relationship between memory, photography and space, one

which these authors clearly recognise as significant, even if they never

quite spell out why

Photography, Past and Presence

Essential to the relationship between photography, memory and nostalgia

is that which each one holds to space, time and temporality Boym (2001:

xv) argues that while nostalgia might appear to be about yearning for a

lost place, it is in fact about yearning for a different time More precisely,

we might say that it is about attempting to recapture lost time through

space, and, in particular, through memories of place The emphasis

of nostalgia is not so much on lost locations as on lost moments in

those locations – on what went on there Fechner captures this idea

rather nicely when she suggests, introducing her photo album on French

Algiers, that while people might forget the names of streets or districts,

everyone remembers the name of ‘la première fille qu’on avait prise dans

ses bras […] Ce rêve d’un soir, allez savoir comment, restait à jamais

fixé sur la pellicule’ (2002a: 9).12Lurking within Fechner’s observation

is the established understanding of photography as a medium which is

primarily about time, and which makes us sensitive to the passage of

time precisely through the way in which it arrests time Photography,

from this point of view, is about making brief incisions into the flow

of time, and capturing moments which are already significant, or will

have significance bestowed upon them They are simultaneously to be

treasured for the way in which they store these moments, and feared for

the way in which they remind us continually of our growing distance

from them – Fechner’s ‘à jamais’ is a cry at once triumphal and plaintive.13

Yet the photographic image is also, fundamentally, about space

If a photograph captures or arrests time, it does so by spatialising

it, by rendering time in spatial terms Not only is the product of the

photographic act an object which renders the moment in two-dimensional

form,14but the moment that object represents is one which is located in

space: photographs are always of something, someone or somewhere.

Hence, perhaps, the productive convergence of nostalgic yearning and

photography If the photographic image serves as the ideal vehicle for the

nostalgic’s journey back in time, it is because its transformation of time

into space coincides with the nostalgic’s pursuit of time through space

At the same time, other consequences emerge from the distinctivespatio-temporal qualities of the photographic image By rendering past

moments in object form, the photograph facilitates not simply a return

to the past, but also, and perhaps more significantly, the presence of the

past in the present In mobilising the notion of presence here, we are

drawing on the stimulating work of Eelco Runia, who has argued that

historians have failed properly – both in historical analysis and

histori-ography – to engage with and account for the various ways in which

traces of the past remain in the present One consequence of doing so,

contends Runia (2006: 9), is to rethink history and historical change not

as a linear narrative, but in terms of contiguity and discontinuity; that is

to say, to adopt a perspective which envisages history in spatial as much

as temporal terms Runia identifies the rhetorical trope of metonymy

as an important, yet largely unrecognised, vehicle for ‘presence’ in

historiography and historical discourse: by foregrounding an element of

a whole, or displacing attention on to a particular aspect or quality of

something, it serves to draw attention to that thing or phenomenon as

a whole, and, in doing so, reminds us of its presence in absence More

than that, it can cause a ripple in our understanding by presenting that

thing or those phenomena in a new or unexpected way, and in doing so

becomes, as Runia puts it, ‘conspicuous’ or ‘just slightly “out of place”’

(2006: 16)

However, as Runia also points out, metonymy is not a purely linguistic

phenomenon Metonymic qualities, and above all, the peculiar ability

at once to stand for and embody the entity referred to, can inhere in

any object Moreover, physical objects of all types, from monuments

to photographs, are particularly rich in terms of their metonymic

qualities, thanks to their ability to persist in time, and their existence

as physical traces of the past For Runia (2006: 17), they ‘make past

events present on the plane of the present, fistulae that connect and

juxtapose those events to the here and now’ Indeed, Andrea Noble

(2010: 156–7) has argued persuasively that Runia’s call to pay attention

to how the past persists in the present, and his focus on metonymy as a

device which helps us do so, offer powerful insights into the ontology of

the photographic image and the role it has to play in shaping historical

understanding The qualities noted above – the spatialisation of time,

and the transformation of past moments into object form – make the

photograph a strikingly effective vessel for the resurgence (or, to use

Runia’s term, the ‘leakage’) of the past into the present Moreover, the

photograph is itself inherently metonymic in nature; that is to say, an

image of a single location or moment in time (a city square on a busy

morning, for example) can easily come to stand for places, times or

events as a whole (the European quarters of French Algiers as a thriving,

industrious and modern metropolis) Photographs can be endowed with

a level of generality and authorised to stand for or sum up the whole

We might say, following Runia, that they acquire the status of ‘common

places’, not so much in the established sense of ‘commonplace’ as cliché

or banality, but in the stronger sense of locations which serve as common

ground open and recognisable to a wide range of people, and therefore

as vehicles for collective memory As Runia puts it (2006: 13), ‘common

places’ are ‘the places where history can get a hold of you’; but, as Runia

suggests, and nostalgic photo-books themselves illustrate, the past which

photographs allow back into the present, and the narratives they permit,

have the potential to open up alternative and potentially disruptive

ways of seeing and understanding both the present and the historical

narratives it has composed How then is French Algeria returned to us

through photography? How do nostalgic photo-books stage the country

for us, and what is at stake when this vision of France’s past enters

circulation in the present?

Envisioning Memory and Space

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of nostalgic photo-books is their

insistent foregrounding of space Both Alzieu and Lamarque offer us a

tour of the different districts of Algiers, working back and forth across

the city from the imposing boulevards of the harbour front Fechner and

Lamarque take us beyond the city boundaries to the surrounding region

(Fechner) and Algeria as a whole (Lamarque) This shared focus on the

towns and cities of French Algeria serves to organise pied-noir memory

in spatial terms, from specific streets and quarters of the major cities to

provincial towns settled and developed by the colons (colonial settlers)

in the decades following occupation in 1830 In doing so, they at once

restage familiar locations, and assert the nature and extent of Algerian

development under colonial rule

As we noted earlier, if the spaces of French Algeria are a sharedconcern, the manner in which they are depicted varies in interesting

ways First, we have the sustained use of picture postcards from the first

decades of the twentieth century by Alzieu and Lamarque The effect in

Lamarque’s volumes especially is to offer a consistent vision of French

Algeria at a specific point in its history, when extensive urban planning

and design had given its cities, and Algiers above all, a look which was

recognisably French The image of cosmopolitan sophistication they

create is perhaps the most potent example of the blending of memory

and fantasy, which Boym (2001: xiii) argues is constitutive of a nostalgic

vision Of course, if Lamarque can build a volume from vintage picture

postcards, it is because of the wealth of material available; but, as

Prochaska suggests, that material is itself symptomatic of the historical

moment it depicts The volume of visual material produced at once bears

witness to and makes manifest the triumph of the colonial project in

Algeria It signals the high-water mark for the political and social order

of French Algeria, ‘the period when the settlers established their de facto

hegemony in Algerian affairs over both the Algerians and metropolitan

France’ (Prochaska 1990: 416) From a nostalgic perspective, the

attrac-tiveness of the period depicted in the postcards lies in its coherence and

stability They capture a world in which the natural balance had yet to

be challenged either by world historical events (the Second World War,

nationalism and the dismantling of empire) or by the French state itself

(last-ditch strategies of modernisation, containment and pacification

during the war of independence in the 1950s) They articulate a vision

not just of how things were, but of how things might have stayed had

the world taken a different path – what we might call the ‘if only’ of

nostalgia

Where Lamarque invites us to dwell on the French Algeria of the Belle

Époque, Jacques Gandini focuses on the look of French Algeria in its

final years Moreover, the titles of his volumes give his project an overtly

autobiographical dimension, as they intertwine those last decades with

his own youth To remember one, he suggests, is to remember and to

understand the other Gandini’s biographical investment in the places he

depicts reflects Yedes’s observation that the particular trauma for many

pieds-noirs lies in being uprooted not just from their homeland but also

from their childhood To be wrenched from French Algeria is to be cut

off from that childhood: ‘now they could connect with childhood only

in memory with no more physical space to relate to’ (Yedes 2003: 247;

emphasis in the original) As Gandini’s project would suggest, and as

we discuss further below, the popularity of nostalgic photo-books lies

precisely in the opportunities they afford for restaging the spaces and

places of those memories At the same time, his project is concerned to

display and celebrate colonial action in French Algeria The city of his

youth, the one presented to his readers, is the one defined and shaped in

particular by the modernising ambitions of the colonial authorities in

the last decade or so of French rule It is the 1950s’ Algeria of extensive

urban development and the nascent Plan de Constantine, launched by

the Gaullist government in 1958 as the final attempt to retain colonial

authority in Algeria by means of interventionist urban planning, housing

construction and economic growth.15If the triumph of French Algeria,

for Lamarque, is to be found in the untroubled period of the Belle

Époque, it is located for Gandini in the final, heroic period of struggle to

save Algeria’s colonial soul

The overriding preoccupation with colonial French space and place

in nostalgic photo-books of the past two decades marks a significant

shift away from the organising principle of typological categorisation in

terms of scènes et types, focused on colonised populations and reflected

both in the captions and labels given to postcards produced during the

colonial era and in the early retrospective portrait of French Algeria

produced by Paul Azoulay Indeed, the concentration in Azoulay’s La

Nostalgérie française almost entirely on local populations and their

ways of life makes the volume curiously anachronistic, not so much a

product of post-colonial upheaval as a remnant of the colonial way of

seeing mimicked with intentional (albeit risky) irony by Alloula in Le

Harem colonial.16

So how are we to account for the shift towards space and place asorganising principles for the visualisation of French Algeria’s past?

Joëlle Bahloul (1996) has underlined the important role played by the

spatialisation of memory among diasporas and communities in exile,

especially among those for whom return to the homeland is (perceived

as) impossible In her work on memories of colonial Algeria among the

exiled Algerian Jewish community, she develops Maurice Halbwachs’s

emphasis on the fundamental relationship between memory and place

to explore what she terms the ‘architecture of memory’ – namely, how

memories take shape by being mapped on to and constituted through

specific spaces and places, and, inversely, how specific locations become

identified with particular memories As Nancy Wood puts it, discussing

Bahloul’s work,

The ‘uprooted memories’ of a diasporic community […] must compensate

for lack of access to their own lieux de mémoire and the more ‘intangible

relation to the past’ that such physical distance may impose, by summoningmemories whose key locus is the very spatial parameters from which thecommunity is physically estranged (Wood 2003: 263)

For Bahloul, the domestic context provides the primary site fordiasporic memory, which is grounded in the intimate activities of the

domestic sphere and private life Nostalgic photo-books, on the other

hand, while confirming the centrality of space as a vector for memory

through their restaging of French Algeria, also make clear how public

spaces and places can be reconstituted as a theatre for remembrance

which is at once private and collective, offering common ground familiar

to many where individual memories might also be located Of central

concern here is how the public spaces and places of French Algeria take

shape through photography

Both Alzieu and Lamarque use the device of the walking tour to

structure their portrait of Algiers In fact, Lamarque’s text explicitly

adopts the tone and conventions of a guidebook at times, introducing the

figure of the wandering tourist to focalise the description and discovery of

the city.17The tour begins (as it does in all these photo-books) with shots

of the harbour front, dominated by the imposing façades of the buildings

on Boulevard de la République and Boulevard Carnot above the arcades

which serve the port It progresses gradually around the European

quarters and the most significant districts of the city – significant, that is

to say, for our implied or intended readers The effect of this conceit is to

foreground the individual’s encounter with, and bodily location within,

the city and thereby to open up perspectives and viewpoints on the city

from which memory and recollection might emerge Yet it also raises the

question of precisely how the viewer is positioned in the city, in terms of

the perspectives they are invited to adopt and what can be seen (not to

mention, as we discuss below, what can be less readily so)

Central to the nostalgic restaging of colonial space is a principle

of iteration which we can see at work across all these volumes By

this, we mean the repetition not necessarily of precisely the same

images from one volume to another, but certainly the same views and

perspectives For example, there emerges a certain way of photographing

the seafront esplanade in Algiers, looking down the length of Boulevard

de la République towards the Djema-Djedid mosque and Place du

Gouvernement to capture the facades of the grand European buildings,

the bustling port activity and the supposedly harmonious intermingling

of Western and Eastern cultures symbolised by the mosque gleaming

white in the sun.18Likewise, a certain way of visualising the Basilica of

Notre-Dame d’Afrique emerges when we compare images in the books

by Cardinal (1988: 142) and Fechner (2002a: 31) While the images

themselves are different, one taken at a greater distance than the other,

the perspective they share is similar Viewed from a higher point, the

Basilica is positioned prominently not in relation to the broader urban

context of Algiers but against an expansive backdrop of sea and sky

What we are invited to see above all is its exalted and elevated position

Indeed, the origins of this way of seeing the Basilica can be found in

earlier picture postcard images reproduced in volumes by Alzieu (2000:

85) and Lamarque (2009: 74)

Thus, through the material they exploit, repeat and recirculate,

nostalgic photo-books are both grounded in, and help to perpetuate,

visual commonplaces, established ways of seeing and understanding

spaces and places by constituting and foregrounding not just familiar

and significant locations but familiar perspectives on those locations.19

Moreover, they are views and perspectives which come to stand in for

or represent the place as a whole; in other words, which acquire an

important metonymic role The repetition of particular perspectives on

particular locations (‘cette sélection de lieux familiers’, as the blurb for

Alzieu’s Alger: mémoire en images puts it) helps to produce and sustain

a recognisable place and a shared understanding of what French Algeria

looked like – and, more specifically, looked like from the pied-noir point

of view

Another important constituent of the nostalgic perspective is aerialphotography It is certainly the case, particularly in volumes drawing

extensively on picture postcard material, that the perspective proposed

for the viewer is from street level, and, occasionally, from elevated

positions afforded by upper floors or rooftops Such perspectives offer

a naturalistic way of positioning the spectator in the cityscape, thereby

grounding their authenticity as a view as if from the turn of the street

corner, for example However, Fechner makes abundant use of aerial

shots in her visualisation of Algiers, and they appear too in books

by Alzieu and Gandini All three authors favour panoramic views of

Algiers taken from above the port harbour, with the city spreading out

along the bay and tumbling up the hillside, the European quarter with

its imposing seafront buildings holding back the comparatively more

unruly dwellings and streets of the Casbah.20Fechner’s volume extends

that panoramic, aerial perspective beyond Algiers into the surrounding

regions We catch a glimpse of towns in provincial Algeria nestled in

rural areas or set amongst well-established agricultural landscapes

In many such shots, the key landmarks in these settlements – civic

buildings, churches, municipal spaces – are located in the centre of

the frame, with the infrastructure of French colonisation (road and

rail networks) spreading out to the edge of the frame and beyond as it

connects them to the rest of the country

Now, the mapping of French Algeria in this way undoubtedly performs

a documentary function in the first degree: that is to say, the images

situate colonial settlements with which the viewer might have personal

or family connections within a broader geographical context Also

implicit within the use of aerial photography in both Fechner’s volumes

and elsewhere, however, is a reassertion of the commanding gaze of

colonial authority In encompassing the territory as a whole, from above

and at a distance, aerial photographs (like maps) abstract out or render

invisible the different populations coexisting in those settlements, with

their differences, inequalities and antagonisms: precisely the differences

and antagonisms on which the colonial project itself would ultimately

founder Indeed, we might say that it is in the very restaging of the

colonial view – a view which, in the context of a nostalgic photo-book,

can only ever be once-commanding – that a sense of loss and nostalgia is

communicated most clearly The easy loftiness of the aerial perspective

offers a powerful reminder of the spaciousness and capaciousness of the

land they once inhabited

(Not) Seeing the Casbah

The legacy of a colonial way of seeing can also be felt in the engagement

with, and portrayal of, the Algiers Casbah Long established as the

historic core of the city, the Casbah has been a persistent source of

fascination, anxiety and myth since the beginning of the French colonial

period, as both Victoria Thompson (2006) and Zeynep Çelik (1997: 21;

2009a) have made clear Its role as a vehicle for myth is one it continues

to play in retrospective visions of the city, though its presence takes

noticeably different forms across the corpus It has much greater presence

in volumes which draw for the most part on picture postcard material,

and whose engagement with the Casbah is primarily in the mode of

the picturesque The principles of iteration and repetition noted above

emerge once more, as conventional views of the Casbah are reproduced:

narrow, winding streets shaded by overhanging eaves; local populations

going about their business, most notably Algerian women dressed in the

enveloping white hạk; Moorish architectural details, especially in the

form of elaborate doorways

The accumulated effect of these images is to assert the Casbah as a

space of closure and opacity The foregrounding of doorways underlines

their symbolic significance as markers of secrecy, mystery and promise

In Lamarque’s Alger d’antan, pages on the Casbah follow on from an

exploration of the neighbouring European quarters, re-enacting again

the geographically naturalistic order of the walking tour; but, unlike

the introduction to the European quarters, the reader-viewer’s first

encounter with the Casbah is not so much with buildings, spaces and

places as with its inhabitants We are confronted with the full-page

image, captioned ‘Alger – Rue arabe’, of an Algerian family standing

at the bottom of a stepped street which appears to make its way up

and a teacher at the school, and that the other child was the daughter

of the school’s head teacher Following an armed stand-off... (Chapter 1), or the independent

filmmakers of Algerian origin at the turn of the twenty-first century

(Chapter 6)

ThebooktracksthevisualeconomyoftheFranco-Algerianrelationship... marginalised memories and memory groups of

different kinds

One of the peculiarities of the Algerian War and France? ??s Algerianpast is the way in which the position of victimhood is taken