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The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France
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About The Invention Of Decolonization: The Algerian War
Product Description In this account of the Algerian War's effect on French political structures and notions of national identity, Todd Shepard asserts that the separation of Algeria from France was truly a revolutionary event with lasting consequences for French social and political life. For more than a century, Algeria had been legally and administratively part of France; after the bloody war that concluded in 1962, it was other?its eight million Algerian residents deprived of French citizenship while hundreds of thousands of French pieds noirs were forced to return to a country that was never home. This rupture violated the universalism that had been the essence of French republican theory since the late eighteenth century. Shepard contends that because the amputation of Algeria from the French body politic was accomplished illegally and without explanation, its repercussions are responsible for many of the racial and religious tensions that confront France today. In portraying decolonization as an essential step in the inexorable "tide of history," the French state absolved itself of responsibility for the revolutionary change it was effecting. It thereby turned its back not only on the French of Algeria?Muslims in particular?but also on its own republican principles and the 1958 Constitution. From that point onward, debates over assimilation, identity, and citizenship?once focused on the Algerian "province/colony"?have troubled France itself. In addition to grappling with questions of race, citizenship, national identity, state institutions, and political debate, Shepard also addresses debates in Jewish history, gender history, and queer theory. Review "A detailed, inventive, and engaging analysis of the debates surrounding the thorny issue of who could be French and under what conditions that arose as eight years of armed conflict drew to a close." "Although he acknowledges that France's 'civilizing mission' never lived up to its press notices, Todd Shepard is probably correct when he notes that the war exposed once and for all the conceit that France's 'Republican universalism' could unite peoples of different races, cultures, and languages around a single vision of national unity." -- Douglas Porch, Times Literary Supplement, September 21, 2007 "The Algerian War has attracted huge attention in France during the last ten years. Most historians, however, have assumed that their task is simply to describe the workings of an apparently unstoppable process and they have, to a large extent, concentrated on the behavior of the French army. Todd Shepard's book approaches this debate from a new angle. Partly by looking through a wide lens?one that encompasses everything from Brigitte Bardot to Gaston Monnerville?and partly by taking the arguments in defense of Algérie Française seriously, he shows how departure from Algeria helped to create a new idea of Frenchnesss. This is an important book with implications for the current state of France as well as for many aspects of French history between 1830 and 1962." -- Richard Vinen, King's College, London "The need for historically specific accounts of decolonization has arguably never been more urgent. The Invention of Decolonization illuminates how 'the end of French Algeria' reconfigured the social, sexual, and political orders of postwar France. Todd Shepard thereby joins the story of the Algerian War and its aftermath not just to histories of postcolonialism, but as provocatively to contemporary debates about national belonging, racialized citizenship, confessional politics, and state-sponsored efforts at remembrance, repatriation, and reconciliation." -- Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "Todd Shepard, in this highly original and well-researched account, uncovers how France, attempting to hold together its empire after World War II, tried to become more inclu
