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This thesis looks at how news shaped people's relationship to the world in Algeria under French rule. This territory operated under an uncertain legal status that made it both a part of France and a colony, and within it lived a society divided between European settlers and Muslim natives. Accounts of recent events helped Algerians determine what was domestic and what was foreign in a place where those two notions were highly contested. Colonialism did not close Algeria off from the world or open it up, instead it created a particular geography. In a series of case-studies taken from across Algeria, this thesis investigates a wide range of types of news: manuscripts, rumours, wire dispatches, newspapers, illustrations, songs, newsreels, and radio broadcasts. It focuses on the period in which Algeria's legal status as part of France was most certain, from the end of the conquest and the consolidation of Republican rule in the 1880s to the outbreak of the Second World War. In this period, authorities thought the influence of outside events on Algeria was a bigger threat than disturbances within. Because of this, state surveillance produced reports to monitor foreign news, and these form the backbone of this study. But state attempts to manage the flow of news had unintended effects. Instead of establishing effective censorship, authorities ended up spreading news and making it more politically sensitive. Settlers, supposedly the state's allies, proved highly disruptive to state attempts to control the flow of information. Through a social history of information in a settler colonial society, this research reconsiders the relationship between changes in media and people's sense of community. From the telegraph to the radio, new technologies worked to divide colonial society rather than tying it together, and the same medium could lead to divergent senses of community.

The socio-religious history of Algeria is characterised by a series of identity crises, to which the end of 20th century's civil war represents the paroxysm. Since the suppression of the marabout instances in the 19th and 20th centuries, the population was never able to find the right role of religion in society. The "second war of Algeria" does not only represent the climax of a series of identity crises, but also the result, the consequence, of all the ones which preceded it. The 1980 decade, which had preceded the civil war, was propitious to the growth of social protest in Algeria. Like in most of the social crises that Algeria had known, Islam was then the main vehicle for social protest. / This thesis intends to bring out the historical elements which had led to the civil war opposing religious groups and the government. Through four periods of the Algerian Islamic history, we will attempt to understand the evolution of the Algerian religiosity. A link between these four periods emerges: the quest for the national identity, to which a particular attention will be given. The goal of this thesis is then to bring out the principal events of the Algerian Islamic history in order to understand how a personal and dogmatic Islam became an ideological and political Islam in the 1980's and 1990's. / Therefore, this thesis will focus on Islam as a mobilisation, protestation and resistance agent for the Algerian civil society. More precisely this thesis will analyse how and why the Algerian Islam has been "instrumentalised" either by the government and the religious leaders of the society.

The fact that it took so long, in spite of successive waves of invaders and spirited yet sporadic resistance, to fashion a united national front, points out an anomaly in Algerian society: a divided identity. It took a cruel French occupation, the incompetence of colonial authorities, and the infiltration of European nationalist ideology to fashion a united front, but it was only a front, for immediately after independence, the unity was shown to be a temporary one. / The Berber majority found itself excluded, both culturally and politically, from the new Algerian state. Strangers in their own land, Berbers were faced with a new, more insidious colonialism: Arabization.

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The Algerian war of 1954 to 1962 is generally acknowledged to have been the apogee of France's uniquely traumatic retreat from overseas empire. Yet, despite the war's rapid establishment as the focus for a vast body of literature in the broadest sense, the experience of those years is only now beginning to be acknowledged by the French nation in anything like a balanced way. The present study seeks to contribute to the continuing elucidation of this historical failure of assimilation by considering the specific role played by prose fiction in contemporary and subsequent perceptions of the relevant events. Previous research into this aspect of the Franco-Algerian relationship has tended either to approach it as a minor element in a larger conceptual whole or to attach insufficient importance to its fundamentally political nature. This thesis is conceived as an analysis of the images of the Algerian war communicated in a representative sample of French literature produced both during and after the conflict itself. The method adopted is an ideological one, with particular attention being given in each of the seven constituent chapters to the selected texts' depiction of one of the principal parties to the conflict, together with their attendant political mythologies. This reading is primarily informed by the Barthesian model of semiosis, which is drawn upon to explain the linguistic foundations of the systematic literary obfuscation of this period of colonial history. By analysing points of ideological tension in the fictional imaging of the war, we are able to identify and to evaluate examples of both artistic mystification and demystifying art. It is argued in conclusion that the former category of narrative has never ceased to predominate, thus enabling French public opinion to continue to avoid its ultimate responsibility for the war and its conduct.

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