Le mémorial national de la guerre d`Algérie et des combats du

Le mémorial national de la guerre d’Algérie et des combats du maroc et de la Tunisie:
Le Boulet Algerien and Remembrance of a Contested Past
by
Jenny Tang
Professor Elizabeth McGowan, Advisor
An independent study paper submitted
in the Department of Art History
WILLIAMS COLLEGE
Williamstown, Massachusetts
Fall 2012
“L’Algérie c’est la France.”
- French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France, November 1954, at the outbreak of the
conflict in Algeria
“It is now more than three months since I was arrested. I have survived so much pain and so
many humiliations during this time that I would not bring myself to talk once again if I did not
believe that it would serve a purpose, and that by making the truth known I might do a little
towards bringing about a ceasefire and peace. For whole nights during the course of a month I
heard the screams of men being tortured and their cries will resound forever in my memory. I
have seen prisoners thrown down from one floor to another who, stupefied by torture and
beatings, could only manage to utter in Arabic the first words of an ancient prayer.”
- Henri Alleg, La Question, 1958
“As long as we can keep Algeria, we shall remain great, we shall remain strong, we shall endure.
In Algeria we are promised an incomparable destiny.”
- Andre Figueras, Algerie française, 1959
“At the heart of the colonial tragedy was the Algerian War.”
- Benjamin Stora, historian, “Guerre d’Algerie, France, La Memoire Retrouvée?” 1992
“The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the
history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother
country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but
the history of his own nation in regards to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.”
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963
“The postcolonial today is a world of proximities. It is a world of nearness, not an elsewhere.”
- Okwui Enwezor, “What is Avant-Garde Today? The Postcolonial Aftermath of
Globalization and the Terrible Nearness of Distant Spaces,” Documenta 11, 2002
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I. A Surveying of the Landscape
Four decades after the signing of the Evian Accords that declared peace with Algeria,
President Jacques Chirac dedicated Le Mémorial national de la guerre d’Algérie et des combats
du Maroc et de la Tunisie on December 5, 2002 with his remark, “When the noise from the
weapons have been silent for a long time, when the wounds are healed slowly, not without
leaving deep scars, then, comes the time for memory and recognition.”1 At the inauguration
ceremony, the news channel France 3 reported, “France has waited forty years for this national
memorial to the wars in North Africa.”2 Designed by the artist Gérard Collin-Thiébaut, France’s
first national memorial to the Algerian War sits on the riverbanks of the Seine where the Quai
Branly meets the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, only a few hundred meters from the Eiffel Tower
and the popular ethnographic collections of the Musée du Quai Branly. With its minimalist
concrete pillars and scrolling LED lights reminiscent of movie theater marquees, CollinThiébaut’s memorial resembles Archaic Greek funerary stelai refashioned for the digital age
(Figure 1).
Like America’s Vietnam War, the Algerian War is marked by division and dissent. It
does not lend itself to nationalist narratives, but represents the fragmentation of French
metropolitan grandeur. An obsession with French impotence has haunted France’s relationships
with her former colonial world, manifested in what historian David Schalk has termed the
“Algerian syndrome,” a set of debilitating social, psychic and moral symptoms with important
political side effects.3 In “Reflections d’outre mer on French Colonialism,” Schalk questions why
memories of the Algerian War remain so divisive:
… why do the Beurs (second or third generation ethnic Algerians living in France as
French citizens), the Harkis (survivors of the Algerian units which fought for the French
between 1954 and 1962), les foulards islamiques (shawls worn to class by Franco-Islamic
schoolgirls), not to mention those embittered pieds-noirs, still haunt the French
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consciousness? Why has the internal Algerian crisis of Islamic fundamentalism spilled
over into France, with a new wave of terrorist attacks, which began in July 1995 in
metropolitan France?4
What emerges from the portrait that Schalk paints is a sense of tangible aftershock: trauma and
contested memory are physically manifested in the different groups of immigrants that, since
1962, have made their new home in France. In surveying the landscape of Algerian War
memorials, what is immediately striking is the official silence that lasts for thirty years, as if the
government and nation as a whole were attempting to process just what had happened in Algeria.
In the interim, countless local memorials were built that became sites of commemoration for
specific constituents, but there was no attempt to build an all-encompassing memorial that could
facilitate national healing – perhaps haunted by the possibility that collective healing was
impossible. Beginning in 1992, there were clumsy efforts by the French government to
commemorate the war. Yet these efforts read as disjointed, incoherent and insincere.
Schalk writes that there “are actually four criteria … which need to be met before
France’s Algerian syndrome can be pronounced cured,” one of which is the creation of a suitable
site to mourn the loss of Algeria.5 How, Schalk asks, can France “come to grips with that loss,
make it a part of the national memory, and hence begin the process of a genuine pacification of
memory?”6 The language that Schalk uses draws on both medical and military discourse,
painting Algeria as an aberration, a defective part of France’s body politic that must be treated
and integrated. The 2002 memorial on the Quai Branly, then, was meant to address this
fragmentation by providing a site where official narratives and personal memories could coexist. I wish to question, however, whether a genuine pacification of memory can occur when it
comes to France and Algeria. At what expense does France erect its memories?
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I will first provide historical context, illuminating the interests of the different groups that
have a stake in the memory making of the Algerian War. Next, I will use Pierre Nora’s notion of
the lieu de mémoire as a framework for understanding the splintered memories of the war and the
pressure it puts on the myth of a homogenous French national identity. I will then trace the
development of official commemorations of the war, culminating in an analysis of the 2002
memorial on the Quai Branly, placing it in dialogue with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
Washington, D.C. Ultimately, I argue, what is at stake is beyond the questions of the morality of
colonialism or the ethics of war conduct, but a definition of who is and who is not French in the
twenty-first century.
II. Le Boulet Algerien – The Algerian Burden
For thirty-seven years, the French state referred to the Algerian War only as the “events,”
the “conflict,” or “operations for the maintenance of order.”7 Not until 1999 did parliament
acknowledge that the conflict, lasting from November 1954 until the ceasefire of March 19,
1962, had indeed been a “war.”8 By referring to the war solely as police action, France
effectively denied Algeria’s existence as a state before its negotiated and problematic
independence. This time lag – nearly four decades – between the end of fighting and official
recognition of war is symptomatic of the difficulty that the Algerian War poses to the
construction of collective French memory. Contested memory, as Patricia Lorcin writes, “is as
much about who is entitled to speak for the past as it is about conflicting accounts of what
actually happened.”9 Although no longer “a war without a name,” without proper
commemoration “there remains a gaping wound in our body politic, in our national psyche.”10
The Algerian War created deep fractures in French society, and its legacy has inexorably
shaped the landscape of postcolonial France, pointing to the inadequacies and gaps in official
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memory. In fact, until it was repealed in 2006, Article 4 of the February 23, 2005 law on
colonialism mandated high school curricula to address the “positive role” of French
colonialism.11 This fairly recent law espousing the positive legacy of colonialism seems to echo
the remarkable propaganda produced by French intellectuals during the peak of France’s colonial
expansion, from the Second Empire to the Third Republic.
In the early 20th century, French colonialism was inextricably tied to visions of
metropolitan grandeur: “France, more than any other nation, possesses the genius of colonialism
… The future of France is in its colonies,” wrote Victor Beauregard in his 1924 L’Empire
Colonial de la France. Beauregard spoke of “La Plus Grande France,” a “community of
culture” where each race will enrich “our national genius with new concepts, which will make it
more varied, more comprehensive and truly universal.” Eventually, “distinctions between
Metropolitan France and her colonies will tend to be erased, for the flowering of a great French
nation of one hundred million souls, one and indivisible, although scattered throughout the five
corners of the globe.”12 Political scientist Tony Smith has argued that there existed an irrational
“colonial consensus,” a kind of Durkheimian collective consciousness that was crucial for
French national identity. This “colonial consensus” rendered France’s leadership after 1945
willfully ignorant of the realities of the inevitability of decolonization, and led them to act
against national interest.13 According to Smith, there was a conviction that French decadence
was responsible for the loss of empire.14 There was a pervasive fear that France would become a
third-rate power: a sense of national weakness, the fear of a “loss of virility” which has haunted
the French since their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.15
Losing Algeria, then, would be tantamount to severing a piece of France from itself. It
had been an integral part of France since 1830, when French troops invaded and occupied
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Algiers and surrounding territories.16 The Constitution of 1958 recognized all people born in
Algeria as French citizens and announced the end of territorial distinctions between its colonial
départements and metropolitan France.17 Therefore, the March 18, 1962 signing of the Evian
Accords that effectively ended the war was not just a cease-fire; granting Algeria independence
was recognition that Algerians were so fundamentally different from other French citizens that
they could not be accommodated within the French Republic.18
But the process of decolonization was not as simple as merely granting Algerian
independence. Within Algeria, there was an entrenched group of pied-noirs, those of European
descent that had been born and lived in Algeria before independence. By 1954, there were
984,000 pied-noirs living in Algeria, 79% of whom had been born on Algerian soil.19 The
exodus of the pied-noirs from Algeria to France in the summer of 1962 created a crisis of
identity: this population had, for all intents and purposes, grown up in Algeria, felt Algerian, and
strongly believed in an Algérie-Française, frequently repeating Prime Minister Pierre MendèsFrance’s refrain of “L’Algérie c’est la France.”20 In France, they were considered the “French of
Algeria,” those “blackfeet” who were different from the French proper and dangerous to the
republic.21 As the population began arriving the France, however, the representation of piednoirs shifted. Familial language and imagery was a trope used to provoke solidarity and to
cleanse pied-noirs of their Algerian-ness. As one Gaullist deputy urged, “it is necessary for those
who returned with pain in their souls, with bitterness on their lips, who are somewhat maladroit
because their suffer—they must be welcomed like distressed members of the same family.”22
The second group of immigrants who fled Algeria after the signing of the Evian Accords
was the harkis. This group of approximately 180,000 Muslim Algerian soldiers had fought on the
side of the French, and formed the bulk of the French auxiliary forces. Paid a measly daily wage
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of 750 francs, the harkis were treated as day contractors. For the French, their usefulness was
more symbolic than militarily advantageous: with such a large population of Algerians who were
fighting on the side of the French (nearly four times the number fighting for the nationalists), it
could be argued that more Algerians supported the continuation of French rule than wanted
independence.23 After the signing of the Evian Accords, however, the harkis were simply
disbanded, most of them disarmed and sent home.24 After the French army left Algeria, harkis
and their families were slaughtered en masse, with estimates of between 75,000 and 100,000
victims. There were reports of harkis being hacked to death, set on fire, and even being boiled to
death.25 When the harkis turned to the French government for protection, Charles de Gaulle told
his cabinet, “We cannot accept all Muslims who claim they are not getting along with their
government.”26
In contrast to the pied-noirs, who faced discrimination but were still accepted as a priori
French, harkis were only grudgingly given asylum. Government-organized repatriation programs
from 1962 to 1967 brought 25,000 harkis to France, while 63,000 came by unofficial means. At
a January 1963 cabinet meeting, Prime Minister George Pompidou said, “We must not let
ourselves be invaded by the Algerian labor force, even if it pretends to be harkis. If we are not
careful, all the Algerians will settle in France.”27 Nearly all harkis were brought to internment
camps as part of official processing; those who were housed long-term were considered to be
inassimilable: the chronically ill, the traumatized, the aged, and families without male heads of
household.28 These French loyalists ostensibly posed a greater threat to French identity than the
pied-noirs. Pied-noirs, because they were first and foremost European, could be repatriated and
eventually assimilated into French society. Harkis, because they were visibly and irreparably
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Muslim Arabs, could never be French. Today, harkis and their descendants number an estimated
400,000.29
Recognition of the service rendered by harkis to the French state has been one of the
most contentious issues in remembering the Algerian War. With the general amnesty decreed by
de Gaulle on April 15, 1962, those who had slaughtered harkis during the summer of 1962 were
not prosecutable. The amnesty ensured that Algerians involved in criminal actions for Algerian
independence, French members of the police, and members of the army involved in “excesses in
the process of maintaining order” were absolved of wrongdoing.30 For de Gaulle, the amnesty
provided a way to avoid conflict over the merits of the war and the brutality of conduct on both
sides. For harkis and other victims of torture, the amnesty represented an attempt to erase those
horrendous rimes from the national memory. In Alexis Berchadsky’s words, “the desire to forget
replaced the desire not to know.”31
My brief sketch of the history of the Algerian War reveals that any attempt at
commemoration must engage with a contentious history of violence and torture. At the same
time, what becomes prescient now, beyond the memories of the soldiers themselves, is the
contemporary debate about Algerian immigrants in French society. Anxieties over the threat that
Algerian immigrants and their children pose to the unity of French identity pervades French
society. The sociologist Paul A. Silverstein has posited that Algeria and France should be seen as
a single transpolitical space. Although French colonization of Algeria officially ended in 1962,
colonial Algeria and postcolonial France are and have been intimately related, from the moment
the first colonizer arrived on Algerian shores in 1830 and Algerians, in turn, migrated to
France.32
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III. Les lieux de mémoire
With its first volume appearing in 1981, Les lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory)
compiled a history of France through an analysis of the places in which “the collective heritage
of France was crystallized.”33 In emphasizing that France is “an entirely symbolic reality,”
Pierre Nora, the editor and director of this ambitious multi-volume project, sought to create a
“vast topology of French symbolism.”34 Taking the term lieu de mémoire (a site of memory or
memory place) from Francis A. Yates’s The Art of Memory, Nora defines it as “any significant
entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of
time has become a symbolic element of the historical heritage of any community.”35 Indeed, the
volumes include contributions on topics as diverse as the tricolor, Joan of Arc, and Marcel
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. “We have entered the age of historiographical
discontinuity,” declares Nora.36 Historiography begins when history shows itself to be the victim
of memory and attempts to free itself from memory’s grip. Thus, historiography – when history
begins to write its own history – serves to problematize the entrenched belief in the integrity and
wholeness of French history. What Nora terms the “cult of continuity” is responsible for the
origin myth that “gave French society in the process of nationalist secularization its idea of and
need for the sacred. … Through the past we venerated ourselves.”37 Accordingly, Les lieux de
mémoire purports to offer “neither a resurrection nor a reconstitution nor a reconstruction nor
even a representation,” but a “rememoration” – that is, a history “that is interested in memory not
as remembrance but as the overall structure of the past within the present: history of the second
degree.”38
Yet, despite its polyphonic and polysemic aspirations, Les lieux de mémoire does not
succeed in deconstructing French identity. Nora believes that while France has become more
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conscious of its diminished power, tested in recent years by an influx of immigrants “not easily
adaptable to traditional norms of ‘Frenchness,’” there still remains a stable entity we can identify
as “French heritage.”39 As Sino-Vietnamese historian Hue-Tam Ho Tai notes, the overall effect
is, “while there may be many perspectives on France … they have only one object. This is a
France that is indivisible even when understood differently over time and by different segments
of the population.”
Algeria should rightfully be considered a lieu de mémoire for the French past. Despite the
French state’s pursuance of willful forgetting to deal with the Algerian War and its imperial past,
historian Benjamin Stora has argued that the war itself involved too many people to ever be
forgotten.40 Instead, what characterizes memory of the war is “cloistered remembering,” the
division of memory along the lines of distinct group frameworks. In addition, Stora argues, this
“ritualized memory” demands “conformity to preestablished [sic] accounts and symbolic
frameworks” in which “each event acquires meaning only in relation to a legendary organization
of the past.”41 The communities of memory represented by pied-noirs, harkis, and French
veterans are the obverse of Nora’s updated grand narrative, but they too, elide the true
complexity of the past.
IV. The Evolution of Algerian War Memorials in France
On November 11, 1996 President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the first state monument
dedicated “to the memory of the civilian victims and fallen soldiers in North Africa from 1952
until 1962.” (Figure 2) There was still no acknowledgement of the conflict as a “war.” Designed
by Eugène Dodeigne, the monument consists of two white semi-figurative statues that represent
women in mourning. There are no names, no other historical context or details, only two abstract
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menhirs to stand in for grieving mothers. Although they don’t touch, the shape of each statue
echoes the other – an act of repeated mourning, perhaps to represent the sorrow on both sides of
the conflict. Originally meant to specifically honor those who had been repatriated from Algeria,
the pied-noirs and the harkis, the decision was later made to also pay tribute to veterans of all of
France’s conflicts in North Africa.42 In his speech, President Jacques Chirac avoided any
reference to “independence” or “colonization.” Instead, he recalled “the importance and the
richness of the work that France has accomplished and of which she is proud.”43 It was clear that
this was not the monument France needed, one that genuinely acknowledged wrongdoing and
paid tribute to the trauma and discrimination experienced by pied-noirs and harkis. The Square
de la Butte du Chapeau Rouge, where the memorial stands, is a lonely small park in an isolated
corner of Paris. By March 1997, the statues had been defaced with graffiti, which, historian
David L. Schalk has remarked, one could not imagine “would be tolerated at the Vietnam
Memorial in Washington. It suggests that the French … quickly decided this was not the
monument they wanted.”44
Representative Didier Quentin was the first to voice the need for a solution to the
“throbbing problem of a national memorial” to the Algerian War on June 10, 1999, during the
same National Assembly debates that resulted in a unanimously passed Proposition de Loi to
recognize the conflict in Algeria as an official war.45 From the National Assembly debates, a
special commission headed by the journalist Jean Lanzi was created to oversee the construction
of a national memorial. According to the historian David Schalk, the initial preferred site for the
memorial was the Esplanade des Invalides, part of a Haussmannian boulevard that leads to the
Hôtel National des Invalides, a complex of museums and monuments that honor the military
history of France. Built by Louis XIV between 1670 and 1676 to house injured soldiers, the
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Invalides remains a working hospital. From its inception, it was also conceived as a patriotic
monument. Before the Revolution, the Invalides was used for ceremonial occasions such as the
visits of foreign sovereigns or military funerals.46 Post-Revolution, the Invalides became a
necropolis for the military heroes of France.
On the Esplanade des Invalides, the planned memorial would have been part of the grand
axis that links the Invalides to the Grand Palais and Petit Palais on the opposite bank of the
Seine. However, unpublicized difficulties emerged with the siting process, and although seven
locations were suggested none were satisfactory for various reasons.47 According to Lanzi, “it is
not easy … because the French capital is already rich with places of memory.”48 Lanzi’s
comment highlights the difficulty of building new monuments in Paris in truly prominent places
when the hierarchy of space has been so carefully dictated for more than a century.
Instead, a plaque was recast at the Arc de Triomphe “to those who died for France during
the Algerian War and the combats in Tunisia and Morocco.” (Figure 3) It was the government’s
first public acknowledgement that the events in Algeria, had, in fact, been a war. The Proposition
de Loi that allowed recognition of war had been unanimously passed by the Assemblée
Nationale and ratified by the Senate. The expression of unanimity was remarkable, especially
considering the rivalry between President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin.49 The rapporteur for
the bill, Alain Néri, stated:
… We wish to set the record straight and provide just hommage to fighting of the nation
and the Third Republic. … Let us put an end to the hypocrisy reflected in the words
‘events,’ ‘maintenance of order’ or ‘pacification.’ Do not be timid. Dare to break with the
taboo. It is the honor of a people and a nation to accept its history. Yes, Algeria was a
war.50
Following the acknowledgement of war, on September 25, 2001, the government
installed a plaque at the Place des Invalides that specifically honored the harkis (Figure 4): “The
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French Republic bears witness to the repatriated veterans of the auxiliary forces or the victims of
captivity in Algeria for the sacrifices which they have made.”51 September 25th was declared as
the national day of the harkis. Finally, Chirac was acknowledging the failure of the French to
prevent the massacres: “It is true. She did not protect her children.”52 This was a symbolic first
step in repaying the dette d’honneur (debt of honor) owed to the harkis. Although both plaques
were significant steps in recognizing the service of Algerian War veterans, they were just that:
plaques, appended onto existing national monuments with larger agendas.
V. The 2002 Memorial on the Quai Branly –
The French Equivalent of “Washington’s Grand Black Wall”
Unlike earlier commemorations of the Algerian War, the 2002 memorial on the Quai
Branly stands alone; it is neither part of larger park landscape nor is it an appendage to a preexisting monument. There are no walls or fences that separate the monument from its site on a
walkway along the Seine. Instead, the memorial space is delineated by inlaid light beige paving
stone that Collin-Thiébaut has described as a virtual dock, meant to remind veterans of the dock
where they first boarded ships bound for Algiers53. (Figure 5) Across the face of the concrete
columns, the names of deceased soldiers scroll upwards in alphabetical order, separated by the
year of death. At a computer terminal next to the third column, visitors can search for the name
of a soldier – if found, the sequence on the column resumes with the name requested.54 (Figure
6)
There are striking similarities between the Algerian War and America’s Vietnam War. In
the actual overture to widespread hostilities, both wars were escalated after legislative votes that
seemed to indicate greater popular support than what actually existed.55 In America, the Gulf of
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Tonkin Resolution passed on August 7, 1964 (by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and unanimously
in the House of Representatives) allowed President Lyndon Johnson to move toward full U.S.
military commitment in South Vietnam.56 In France, the Special Powers Laws (passed by a vote
of 455 to 75 in the Chamber of Deputies) gave the French army free reign in suppressing the
rebellion in Algeria.57 Both wars were fought by cohorts of draftees.58 Throughout both conflicts,
officials and politicians expressed a blind optimism: In France, there was repeated reference to le
dernier quart d’heure (the last fifteen minutes); in America, the standard phrase was “the light at
the end of the tunnel.”59 Fought within a decade of each other, both wars have been perceived as
episodes in an ongoing, global process of decolonization. In his 1965 introduction to Frantz
Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, in which Fanon chronicles the fifth year of the Algerian
Revolution, Adolfo Gilly wrote: “Vietnam is today the center of the global struggle between
revolution and counter-revolution. In a certain sense, it is today what Algeria was … in 1959.”60
Finally, the most important comparison to be made is how both wars generated
widespread division and dissent, the legacy of which has complicated subsequent efforts at
public commemoration. For Marita Sturken, the uncontested narratives of the Vietnam War are
“the irony of war, the pain and subsequent marginalization of the Vietnam veteran, and the
divisive effect the war had on American society.”61 How can a nation honor the veterans of a war
for which the central narrative elements are shame and a strong desire to forget?
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Algerian War memorial occupy disparate urban
contexts, with the built environment of each city (Washington, D.C. and Paris, France,
respectively) determining the place of each memorial in national memory. Built in 1982 at the
impetus of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the Vietnam Memorial occupies the
Constitutional Gardens on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (Figure 7). It consists of two
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walls of black granite nested into the earth at a 125 degree angle, forming a V extending almost
500 feet. The walls are inscribed with the names of all American solders who died in the war,
listed chronologically beginning from the right-hand side of the hinge and ending at the center
again, so that the name of the first soldier killed in 1959 is adjacent to the name of the last soldier
killed in 1975.62 (Figure 8) As a city planned from the outset as the permanent seat of the
national government, Washington, D.C. bears a particular burden as the embodiment of
collective American identity. The architecture of the city itself proclaims the values of selfgovernment, individual rights, and freedom: permanent monuments to a country of the people,
by the people and for the people, never to perish from this earth.
In Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s 1792 plan for the city, a grid system is overlaid with
diagonal thoroughfares, their intersections creating ample space for public parks and national
monuments (Figure 9). L’Enfant articulated the National Mall in its first incarnation, calling for
two boulevards that would emanate in a radial pattern westward from the Capitol, creating a
massive plot of green that extended to the Potomac River, bisected by a central east-west
promenade (Figure 10). L’Enfant’s vision for the Mall was taken up again in 1901, when Senator
James McMillan created a special commission to redesign the Mall and its surrounding areas.
The resulting McMillan Plan was to a great extent influenced by Daniel Burnham, Frederick
Law Olmsted, Jr., and Charles McKim’s vision for the Chicago World’s Exposition that began
the City Beautiful movement.63 It eliminated the conglomeration of garden design elements that
had accumulated on the Mall over the previous century, restoring the open monumental scheme
and wide green space envisioned by L’Enfant (Figure 11). 64 Thus, the Plan realized L’Enfant’s
intentions for the Mall as a space that would simultaneously commemorate the nation’s founding
and prophecy its fate as “this vast empire.”65 With the completion of the Lincoln and Grant
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memorials in 1922 and the Jefferson memorial in 1943, “the Mall acquired a dramatic sense of
closure that was emblematic of the nation’s closing frontier ethos.”66 Washington, D.C., then, is
a city self-consciously designed as a lieu de mémoire, the epitome of what Nora terms the “cult
of continuity” for American identity. It is a city set aside for memory and memorialization, a
place for sanctified official narratives of history.
In contrast, Paris offers a distinct challenge to national memory making. Although a
veritable city of monuments, the urban planning programs that have shaped the city since the
early nineteenth century have been pre-occupied with the idea of the urban environment as a
threat to morality and, in many cases, a threat to the republic itself. In 1853, Napoleon III,
wishing to rebuild and transform the city, appointed Baron Georges Haussman as Prefect of the
Seine.67 The first motive for Napoleon III’s undertaking to re-plan an entire city was an
awareness of the menace that the city of Paris posed to the regime in power, should Parisians
decide to once again take their grievances to the streets. The narrow streets of the city, along
with its decrepit slums, were areas where “human misery was acute,” and large bodies of people
could quickly assemble for protests and violence.68 In response, Haussman cleared the city center
of its slums, constructed barracks that would protect the center of the city as the center for
strategic command, and built a new highway system based on concentric roads that dramatically
changed the geography of the city.69 In fact, Haussman had a generally poor opinion of Parisians.
Many of them, he declared, were nothing more than nomads, devoid of civic sentiment. The city
that he built was based on a paternalistic notion of what the population ought to want.70
Therefore, the planning of the city was not seen as a symbol of the civic qualities of its
inhabitants, but was an expression of the regime’s very doubt and distrust of its citizens.
Moreover, the landscape of monuments in Paris is very different from that of Washington, D.C.:
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many monuments stand as traces of bygone regimes that have been violently overthrown, in
contrast to the tenets of democracy and federalism that undergird the city of Washington.
Set against this backdrop, the significance of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall
becomes clear: by occupying the vast empty space between the various monuments and
memorials on the Mall, the memorial opened up the possibilities for alternative narratives of
American identity. Vietnam veterans, returning home from war, found themselves not
celebrated, but alienated. Their war experiences were incommunicable – it had been an
“inconceivable kind of war, a war that fit no prior images of war.”71 According to Sturken,
stereotyping of the veteran as a psychopath was a kind of scapegoating that absolved the
American public of complicity and sustained the master narrative of American military power.
Implied in the conflicting narratives, writes Sturken, is the question of whether the veterans
should be perceived as victims or complicit with the war.72 Therefore, there was very much a
need for a memorial that would remember, not just the war, but the mistreatment of veterans
once they returned home, the shame they felt for having fought in an unpopular war.
Similarly, the need for a national memorial to the Algerian War is not just a need to
commemorate the war itself, but a need to acknowledge the sacrifice of the harkis – beyond the
sacrifice of the body, the harkis sacrificed their identities: “In Algeria we are traitors, in France
we are Arabs.”73 They were burdened by the position they had taken in the war: Were they
traitors or were they patriots? Therefore, the harkis pose a unique problem to French
remembrance. Whereas there were no obstacles to accepting Vietnam veterans as American,
French xenophobia has made the same acceptance difficult for the harkis. Press coverage of the
inauguration of the national memorial on the Quai Branly hailed it as “the French equivalent of
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that grand black wall of Washington.”74 Like the Vietnam
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Veterans Memorial, this national memorial included a list of names of all soldiers who died
fighting for France – including, controversially, the name of known torturers. Secretary of State
to Veteran Affairs, Jacques Flock, explained that “the names will not be important. It should
include everyone, unless a decision of justice intervenes. It is necessary that France accepts its
history of the Algerian War. Even if it hurts.”75
It is in its roster of names that this memorial draws frequent comparison with the
Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. Like in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
there is no further elaboration upon the names — no details of place of origin, birth, or rank.
Sturken has argued that in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial the lack of military rank “allows the
names to emerge from a military narrative and to represent the names of a society.”76 In
Washington, the etching of names onto stone creates a negative space that allow the deceased to
“achieve an historically coded presence through their absence.”77 The diversity of names is
subsumed into a narrative of the American melting pot, the permanence of etching on stone
echoing the affirmation that these veterans do indeed belong to American history.
In contrast, the materiality of Collin-Thiébaut’s memorial does not connote permanence
but changeability. The electronic display means that names can be easily added — or removed.78
He has called it a “monument for the third millennium.”79 Yet what seems most pivotal about the
easy addition or removal of names is the still polarized nature of the dialogue surrounding
remembrance of the war. It begs the question: On what terms can names be removed, and on
what basis do they deserve to be added? Who, exactly, has the right to say? While debates about
the inclusionary/exclusionary (inclusionary of torturers, exclusionary of civilian victims) nature
of the roster of names are ongoing, it is evident that this is first and foremost a state memorial,
mobilizing the visual, temporal and spatial dimensions for political purposes. In many ways, the
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work of memorials parallels the work of colonialism – both seize control of space, physically and
symbolically. In a recent volume, Places of Public Memory, Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and
Brian L. Ott write that places of memory “mobilize power because they are implacably
material.”80 State-erected memorials bind and mediate the body politic; they determine who
“belongs” to the nation and on what terms.81
In July 2010, the French senate held an emergency session to determine the fate of the
memorial in relation to the memory of the victims of the OAS (Organisation armée secrète), the
French paramilitary organization known for its use of torture and violence that had so
vehemently sought to prevent Algeria from gaining independence.82 On March 26, 2010, Hubert
Falco, the Secretary of State for Defense and Veterans, re-inaugurated the national monument to
include the names of civilian victims of the March 26, 1962 massacre on the rue d’Isly. Seven
days after the official ceasefire in Algeria declared by President Charles de Gaulle, militant OAS
soldiers had opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of pro-French pied noirs trying to force
their way through French roadblocks. The senate denounced the inclusion of these civilian names
on the national memorial to the Algerian War, declaring “victims of the massacre on March 26,
1962 in Algiers cannot be assimilated to those who died for France.”83 It considered the actions
of Falco a “revisionist theory developed by extremist organizations.”84
The names of the dead that run across the surface of the memorial are unified and
identified only as those who “died for France.” While in the Vietnams Veterans Memorial, the
lack of extraneous information or markers to accompany the names insists that these soldiers
were first and foremost American, in the Algerian War memorial the names are emptied of
meaning so as to elide the potential for controversial identification. This recent debate
surrounding the 2002 memorial shows that conflicts over remembrance of the Algerian War are
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far from over. Although it has been more than fifty years since the official end of war, the
fraught nature of this history is evidenced less in what has been commemorated than in what has
been forbidden from entering the realms of public memory.
1
Jacques Chirac, "Discours De M. Jacques Chirac, Président De La République, À L’occasion De
L’inauguration Du Mémorial National De La Guerre D’ Algérie, Des Combats Du Maroc Et De La Tunisie,"
http://www.harkis.com/article.php3?id_article=107. Translation by the author.
2
"5 Decembre 2002 Reportage. Le Président Jacques Chirac a Inauguré Aujourd'hui, Quai Branly, Le
Mémorial De La Guerre D'algérie, Rendant Hommage À La Mémoire De Soldats Morts En Algérie, Au Maroc Et
En Tunisie Entre 1952 Et 1962. Commentaire Sur Images Factuelles.," (YouTube video, 1:49: posted by
"Inahistoire," July 2, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVqcnUYYuhU).
3
David Schalk, "Has France’s Marrying Her Century Cured the Algerian Syndrome?" Historical
Reflections 1, no. 25 (Winter 1999): 150.
4
———, "Reflections D'outre-Mer on French Colonialism," Journal of European Studies 28, no. 1/2
(1998): Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 9 Mar. 2011.
5
———, "Of Memories and Monuments: Paris and Algeria, Frejus and Indochina," Historical Reflections
2, no. 28 (Summer 2002): 243.
6
Ibid., 248-49. Emphasis my own.
7
Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Collective
Memories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 135.
8
Ibid.
9
Patricia M. E. Lorcin, ed, Algeria & France, 1800 – 2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia (Syracuse, N.Y.:
Syracuse University Press, 2006), xxi.
10
Schalk, "Of Memories and Monuments: Paris and Algeria, Frejus and Indochina": 244, 248.
11
R. Darrell Meadows, “[Untitled],” Review of Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French
Enlightenment, by Louis Sala-Molins, New West Indian Guide 83 no. 3 & 4 (2009): 299.
12
Victor Beauregard, L’Empire Colonial de la France (Paris, France: Société d’Éditions Géographiques,
Maritimes et Coloniales, 1924), quoted in Schalk, "Reflections D'outre-Mer on French Colonialism": 5.
13
Ibid., 17.
14
Tony Smith, The French Stake in Algeria, 1945-1962 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978),
quoted in Schalk, “Reflections d’outre-mer on French Colonialism.”
15
Ibid.
16
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 20.
17
Shepard, "Pied-Noirs, Bête Noires: Anti-"European of Algeria" Racism and the Close of the French
Empire," in Algeria & France, 1800 - 2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia M. E. Lorcin (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2006), 151.
18
Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France, 6.
19
Benjamin Stora, Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell
University Press, 2001), 8.
20
Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France, 6.
21
Shepard, "Pied-Noirs, Bête Noires: Anti-"European of Algeria" Racism and the Close of the French
Empire," 153.
22
Quoted in ibid., 160.
23
William B. Cohen, "The Harkis: History and Memory," in Algeria & France, 1800 - 2000: Identity,
Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia M. E. Lorcin (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 164.
24
Ibid., 165.
25
Ibid., 166.
26
Ibid., 168.
27
Ibid., 169.
28
Ibid., 170.
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29
Ibid., 169.
Cohen, "The Algerian War, the French State, and Official Memory," Historical Reflections 28, no. 2
(2002): 222.
31
Ibid., 223.
32
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1967), 4.
33
Cohen, "The Harkis: History and Memory," 169.
34
Pierre Nora, ed, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Englishlanguage, edited and with a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), xv.
35
Ibid., xviii, xv.
36
Ibid., xviii.
37
Ibid., xii.
38
Nora, xxiv
39
Nora, xxiii
40
Richard L. Derderian, "Algeria as a Lieu De Mémoire: Ethnic Minority Memory and National Identity in
Contemporary France," Radical History Review 83(2002): 29.
41
Ibid., 31.
42
Jean-Dominique Merchet, "Chirac Ou La Nostalgie Des Colonies. Il a Exalté, Hier, Lors D'une
Inauguration, 'L'oeuvre Civilisatrice De La France' Au Maghreb," Libération, November 12, 1996.
43
Quoted in ibid., translation my own.
44
Schalk, "Has France’s Marrying Her Century Cured the Algerian Syndrome?" Historical Reflections 1,
no. 25 (Winter 1999): 162
45
Quoted in Schalk, "Of Memories and Monuments: Paris and Algeria, Frejus and Indochina," 247.
46
Avner Ben-Amos, "Monuments and Memory in French Nationalism," History and Memory 5, no. 2 (Fall
- Winter 1993): 57.
47
Schalk, "Of Memories and Monuments: Paris and Algeria, Frejus and Indochina," 249.
48
Letter correspondence between David Schalk and Jean Lanzi, 18 February 2000, quoted in ibid.
49
Schalk, "Has France’s Marrying Her Century Cured the Algerian Syndrome?" 163.
50
Quoted in Schalk, “Of Memories and Monuments,” 247-8. Translation my own. The original text reads:
… nous tenons à rétablir la vérité et à render le juste homage de la Nation et de la République à
la troisième génération du feu. … Mettons une fin à l’hypocrisie que traduisaient les mots
‘évenéments,’ ‘maintien de l’ordre’ ou ‘pacficiation.’ Ne soyons pas frileux. Osons rompre un
tabou. C’est l’honneur d’un people et d’une nation d’assumer son histoire. Oui, en Algérie c’était
la guerre.
51
Translation my own. The original text reads:
La République française témoigne reconnaissance envers les rapatriés anciens membres des
formations suppletives et assimilés ou victims de la captivité en Algérie pour les sacrifices qu’ils
ont consentis.
52
Quoted in Jean-Dominique Merchet, "Harkis: Chirac Reconnaît Une "Dette D'honneur"," Libération
September 26, 2001. Translation my own. The original text reads: “C’est vrai. Elle n’a pas su protéger ses enfants.”
53
Gérard Collin-Thiébaut, "Mémorial National de la Guerre d'Algérie," (Paris, France: Gérard CollinThiébaut), 3. Translation by the author.
54
Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Collective Memories,
152.
55
Ibid.
56
David Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 15-16.
57
Ibid., 15.
58
Ibid., 16.
59
Ibid., 29.
60
Ibid.
61
Adolfo Gilly, "Introduction," in A Dying Colonialism, ed. Frantz Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 1965),
14.
62
Marita Sturken, "The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,"
Representations, no. 35 (1991): 119.
30
Tang 22
63
Ibid.
Matthew T. Witt, "America's Palimpsest: Ground-Zero Democracy and the Capitol Mall," Public
Administration Review 65, no. 5 (2005): 523.
65
Ibid., 524.
66
Ibid., 518.
67
Ibid., 525.
68
Brian Chapman, "Baron Haussmann and the Planning of Paris," The Town Planning Review 24, no. 3
(1953): 180.
69
Ibid., 182.
70
Ibid., 183.
71
Ibid., 185.
72
Sturken, "The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial," 129.
73
Ibid., 130.
74
Quoted in Jean-Dominique Merchet, "Un Mémorial Peu Pacifique Sur La Guerre D'algérie," Libération
May 12, 2002.
75
Quoted in ibid. Translation my own. Original text reads: “les noms ne seront pas gravés. On devrait y
faire figurer tout le monde, sauf si une decision de justice intervient. Il faut que la France accepte de se raconteur sa
guerre d’Algérie. Même si cela fait mal.”
Quoted in ibid.
76
Sturken, "The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial," 127.
77
Ibid.
78
Collin-Thiébaut, "Mémorial National De La Guerre D'algérie: Pour Un Mémorial Lumineux,"
http://www.gerardcollinthiebaut.com/pages/biograph/2002_MemoGarAlg_QBranly.htm.
79
Ibid.
80
Carole Blair et al., Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa,
Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 29.
81
Ibid., 28.
82
Guy Fischer, "Proposition de loi: fixant la destination du Mémorial national de la guerre d'Algérie et des
combats du Maroc et de la Tunisie et relative à la mémoire des victimes de l'OAS (Organisation armée secrète)," in
N° 618, ed. Sénat (2010), 1.
83
Ibid., 4.
84
Ibid., 5.
64
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———. "Harkis: Chirac Reconnaît Une "Dette D'honneur"." Libération, September 26, 2001.
———. "Chirac Ou La Nostalgie Des Colonies. Il a Exalté, Hier, Lors D'une Inauguration,
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Tang 24
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s
Figures
Figure 1. Gérard Collin-Thiébaut, Le Mémorial national de la guerre d’Algérie et des combats
du Maroc et de la Tunisie, 2002. Paris, France. Image courtesy of Gérard Collin-Thiébaut.
Tang 25
Figure 2. Eugène Dodeigne, Monument aux Victimes de l’Afrique du Nord, 1996. Paris, France.
From Jumbl’Art, jumblart.com.
Figure 3. Plaque installed at Arc de Triomphe, 1999. Paris, France. Photograph by author.
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Figure 4. Plaque installed at Place des Invalides, 2001. Paris, France. From Flickr, by MarieHélène Cingal.
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Figure 5. Gérard Collin-Thiébaut, Plan of Le Mémorial national de la guerre d’Algérie et des
combats du Maroc et de la Tunisie. Image courtesy of Gérard Collin-Thiébaut.
Figure 6. Computer terminal at Le Mémorial national de la guerre d’Algérie et des combats du
Maroc et de la Tunisie, 2002. Paris, France. From Académie Rouen, http://arts-plastiques.acrouen.fr/.
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Figure 7. Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982. Washington, D.C. Photo by Fredrik
Öberg.
Figure 8. Detail of inscribed names, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982. Photograph by Xavier
de Jauréguiberry.
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Figure 9. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, Plan of the City of Washington, March 1792. From Library of
Congress online archives.
Tang 30
Figure 10. Detail, National Mall area. From Library of Congress online archives.
Tang 31
Figure 11. McMillan Plan of 1901. From National Capital Planning Commission.
Tang 32