The invention of decolonization: the Algerian War and the remaking of France

Abstract

When the French government recognized the independence of Algeria in July 1962, the idea of what it meant to be French changed radically. Todd Shepard explores how this happened–and how deeply it reached–in this monograph based on his 2002 Rutgers dissertation. Shepard demonstrates convincingly that the discursive strategy employed to justify the abrupt volte-face in French policy towards Algeria overwhelmed over 130 years of legal standards, institutional structures, and political practices developed to align the reality of colonialism with republican traditions, the consequences of which continue to affect notions of French national identity and citizenship. An even broader consequence of this discourse, which articulated “the tide of history” as its basis, was the introduction of “decolonization” as a natural, even inevitable, world historical development, an assertion that Shepard challenges as occluding the role that contingency plays in the outcome of events. Shepard provides a cogent and methodical analysis of how history quite literally “gets made” and how it can affect conceptions of identity and policies rooted in those conceptions.

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