This thesis discusses the unmaking of republican citizenship in colonial Algeria and the reverberations of this process in the metropole under the Third Republic, as well as demands and contestations by various populations in the colony concerning participation and rights. The attempt to establish a regime of privileges for settlers and to exclude the Muslim majority led politicians, jurists, and administrators to rely on religion and ethnicity as legal criteria to demarcate the boundaries of French citizenship. In their quest to legitimise the political exclusion of the Muslim population, politicians and legal experts from the late nineteenth century onwards portrayed Islam as an immobile and unmodern religion. Reiterated in mainland France whenever the demand for political reform in Algeria was raised, such theories gave rise to the widely-held view that being Muslim was inherently irreconcilable with being French. At the same time, the thesis examines colonial reform movements and moments of asymmetrical negotiation between populations in Algeria and the state on the demarcation of French citizenry. Both the naturalisation of the Algerian Jews and the backlash against it are re-interpreted here to highlight the pivotal role played by the local and the settler populations. In a similar vein, the thesis discusses debates sparked in the early twentieth century by Algerian Muslim campaigns for political rights, debates which yielded alternative visions of participation in the Republic. The failure of such attempts to accommodate religious difference on the eve of collapse of the Third Republic re-affirmed the colonial order in Algeria and the deep imprint it had left on conceptions of French citizenship.

En France, aujourd’hui, cohabitent des protagonistes de l’histoire franco-algérienne qui ont pu occuper des positions antagonistes, ainsi que leurs descendants ; ils sont communément appelés « algérien », « harki » et « pied-noir ». Cette thèse présente l’étude croisée des processus de construction mémorielle après la guerre d’indépendance algérienne dans ces trois groupes socio-historiques. Les récits des histoires de famille ont été confrontés à l’Histoire écrite par les historiens. Le corpus se compose de personnes nées pendant la période coloniale, ayant vécu la guerre et la migration vers la France hexagonale, ainsi que des personnes de la génération de leurs enfants et de leurs petits-enfants.A partir de la constitution des familles, y compris dans leur dimension transnationale, nous proposons d’interroger les processus de transmission des souvenirs et leurs réappropriations par les individus de ces trois générations. A travers le croisement de ces mémoires, la pertinence de la catégorisation socio-historique est questionnée, qu’il s’agisse de constructions mémorielles ou d’appartenance. Ces mémoires, souvent opposées dans leur regard sur les événements, s’inscrivent sur un territoire au récit national commun, mais dans lequel elles ne se retrouvent pas toujours. Nous nous intéressons également aux représentations de soi et de l’Autre, construites à partir de cette histoire franco-algérienne et à leurs conséquences sur la cohésion sociale aujourd’hui. / Protagonists of the French-Algerian History, as well as their descendants, which occupied antagonistic positions during the independence war, cohabit in France nowadays. They are commonly called « Algerians », « Harkis » and « Black Feet people ». This thesis presents a cross-study of memorial construction processes after the Algerian Independence War within these three socio-historical groupes. Family history narratives have been confronted to History written by historians. The corpus is composed of persons born during the colonial period, having experienced the war and the migrations towards France, as well as their children and grandchildren.We examine the mechanisms of transmiting memories and their re-appropriation by individuals belonging to these three generations. We take into account families relationships and their transnational dimension. By crossing these memories, the relevance of the socio-historical categories is questioned, checking whether they reflect a memorial construction or a sense of belonging. These memories, often in opposition to each other, take part of a common national narrative into which people don’t completely identify themselves. We are also interested in the representations of oneself and otherness as an outcome of French-Algerian history and in their consequences on current social cohesion.