PETITE GUERRE · Experiences and Memories of French and Algerian Veterans. Remembering the 'petite guerre' in the Aurès-Nememcha

Experiences and Memories of French and Algerian Veterans. Remembering the 'petite guerre' in the Aurès-Nememcha

This project investigated the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) from a new perspective. It framed a transnational history of the war, going beyond both the opposing French and Algerian national narratives, to resituate the war in its Mediterranean, European, and eventually its global contexts. This general research objective has been achieved by using a microhistorical approach: instead of looking at the conflict as a generic “whole” and examining its reverberations in an elusive “collective memory”, the project focused on a specific region, the Aurès-Nememcha in the Algerian south-east. At the core of this project were the specific experiences and memories of French and Algerian veterans who fought each other for eight years in this mountainous, Berberophone area. With a view to articulating this general objective, the project followed three interrelated lines of enquiry and pursued three specific research objectives: 1. A close reading of the “petite guerre” in the Aurès-Nememcha. By means of a microhistorical approach, a three-dimensional investigation focused on: (a) the Chaouïa, the Berber population of the region; (b) the geographical and geopolitical location of the Aurès-Nememcha, and its translocal links with other “worlds” (first of all Berber, but also African, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and European); and (c) the French presence and rule in the region with respect to its complex colonial relationship in Algeria. 2. Counterinsurgency warfare and veterans’ experiences. By means of an historical anthropology of combat, this project pursued a close study of the fighters of both sides. This innovative approach offered fresh insight into both the place of warfare in societies and on the cultural—mobile and conflicting—construction of the enemy (the Other) and of selfhood. 3. A multilayered memory framework. The micro-scale approach shed new light on the individual and collective processes of the memorialisation of the war, in contemporary Algeria and France. Far from the authoritarian synthesis so often presented as the “collective memory”, the project rooted memories in a precisely located framework and then looked at how they are worked through in individual and local life-histories. In so doing, the project paid particular attention to two dimensions of veterans’ memorialisation.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union