Plus de cinquante ans après son indépendance, l’histoire de l’Algérie coloniale est et, demeure toujours un sujet aussi douloureux et sensible des deux côtés de la Méditerranée. Au fur et à mesure de l’expansion coloniale française, les membres de la société de l’ex-régence d’Alger voient le mode de vie et leur statut changer. Et, ce en fonction des réformes et des dispositions de l’administration coloniale qui à la fois dut conduire une politique à deux niveaux: une politique pour les colons , les nouveaux habitants de l’Algérie, et une autre pour les indigènes qui malgré le fait que le Senatus consulte de 1865 leur ait accordé la citoyenneté, ils n’en restaient pas moins des sujets de seconde zone. A travers cette étude, nous proposons de suivre l’évolution et les facteurs qui ont contribué à l’éveil populaire des masses musulmanes durant la période qui s’étend de 1830 à 1936. Un champs d’études ayant pour cadre les révoltes populaires ; symbole de la résistance populaire des milieux ruraux, la notion de soumission qui reflète une position mitigée de la part des population qui vacille entre résistance et cohabitation face à l’administration militaire puis face à l’administration coloniale civile, Également la perception de la question de l’assimilation chez les Algériens musulmans et les Européens qui revêtit diverses interprétations à partir de la question du royaume arabe et du problème de la naturalisation. La question du nationalisme et la problématique de son existence ou non avant le débarquement des Français. Notre théorie est que tous ces facteurs ont aidé à l’éclosion du nationalisme, processus qui n’a pas suivi un développement linaire mais fut le résultat d’un cheminement complexe compte tenu des différents facteurs tels que le panislamisme, les retombées de la Première guerre mondiale et l’engagement des indigènes dans ce conflit qui à la base ne les concernait pas. Puis, entre les années 1920 et 1930, les formations politiques font leur apparition, intellectuels et réformistes musulmans s’affirment sur la scène politique et engage la confrontation avec l’administration coloniale et le gouvernement de la Métropole. Ainsi , la prise de conscience des masses musulmanes allaient se manifester et s’imposer en dépassant les différences des uns et des autres ; c’est à dire passer d’une pensée particulariste, d’un régionalisme à une pensée collective nationale : se reconnaitre dans une seule et unique identité nationale. / The political awakening of Algerian society through revolts, submission, assimilation and nationalism.1830-1936. More than fifteen years after his independence, Algerian colonial history is and stills always a painful and sensitive subject for the two sides of the Mediterranean Sea. As the French colonial expansion took place, members of society of former regency of Algiers see their way of living changing. And, this in function of reforms and measures of colonial administration which drive a two level policy: toward settlers’ policy; the new inhabitants of Algeria. And another one for indigenous whom still second zone citizen even if the ײSenatus consultײ of 1865 gives them citizenship. Throughout this study, we suggest to follow the evolution of these factors which contribute to the popular awakening of Muslim masses during the period between 1830 and 1936. It is a field of study which includes not only popular revolts, the symbol of rural resistance. But also the notion of submission reflecting à mixed position of populations between resistance and cohabitation with military administration first, then with civil colonial one after, thus the assimilation issue of Algerian Muslims and Europeans, which clothed various interpretations starting by the Arab Kingdom of Napoleon III and the problem of naturalization, and finally, the nationalism issue and the issue of its existence or not before the landing of French. Our theory is that all these features helped the hatching of nationalism, a process which did not follow a linear development but was the result of a complex path according to different factors such as Pan Islamism, the consequences of the WWI and the participation of the indigenous in this conflict which was not their conflict. Then, from 1920 and 1930, political groups appear; Muslim reformers and intellectuals assert themselves in political scene and engage the confrontation with the colonial administration and metropolitan government. Thus, the awareness of Muslim masses will appear and lead up on differences between people; in other move from individual or regional thinking towards a collective national thinking.

Since the euphoria of a hard-won independence and the hopes attached to socialist nation-building, Algeria has experienced liberalisation, increasing inequality and civil war. This thesis sets out to explore memories of post-independence nation-building in the 1970s, interrogating the past-present relationship, by asking how Algerians remember their own recent past, and what these memories reveal about contemporary subjectivities. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the low-income Algiers neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued, the research focuses specifically on memories of politics, urban space and sociability. While the authoritarianism of the period was rejected for its repression of civil liberties, the overwhelming narrative on the period was nostalgic, with the past routinely couched as more positive than the present. Memories of intense social mobility and rising living standards within the context of state-led development, competent urban management and warm neighbourhood relations governed by traditional morality and solidarity were used to critique the present; particularly the retreat of the state from its responsibilities since the 1980s and the fragmented, consumerist society that has emerged from civil conflict since the 1990s. However, social memory also translated a series of principles that demonstrated the continued relevance of the egalitarian claims made by postcolonial nationalism. Popular notions of social justice mapped future aspirations for the Algerian polity. Nostalgia was not only a matter of the past, but of the lost future of material plenty and equality promised by industrial modernisation that once seemed just over the horizon, but is now divorced from present experience. Such memories translated the passing of the dream of mass utopia, even though the modernist principles of equality, justice and progress continued to underpin both daily interactions and the political aspirations of the present.

Ce travail s’intéresse au Mouvement anarchiste en Algérie pendant la période coloniale, attesté par la constitution de groupes politiques organisés et de la publication de journaux libertaires. Cette thèse souhaite renouveler l’approche historique de la colonisation française en Algérie. En effet, l’étude de l’anarchisme est capitale pour une compréhension totale du socialisme, des socialismes en situation coloniale. La première partie concerne l’histoire de l’anarchisme dans la durée par les différents groupes locaux attestés entre 1887 et 1962 (leur composition, leur militantisme, les trajectoires organisationnelles et personnelles ainsi que la répression étatique subie). La deuxième s’intéresse à l’ensemble des journaux publiés par les anarchistes d’Algérie entre 1890 et 1926 (l’analyse de la presse militante, les thématiques abordées dont les fondamentaux de l’anarchisme et la question coloniale). Enfin, la dernière partie tente d’établir un bilan de l’anarchisme politique en Algérie (la réception au sein de la population européenne et algérienne et la conséquence de cette présence politique sur ce territoire). A cet effet, les archives policières, la presse coloniale et les journaux anarchistes ont été consultés. / This work concerns the anarchist movement in Algeria during the period of colonial occupation, as manifested in organized political groups and published anarchist newspapers. It aims to expand the historical approach to French colonization in Algeria. In effect the study of anarchism is essential for understanding fully the nature of socialism and socialisms in the colonial context. The first part concerns the history of anarchism, as composed by different local groups between 1887 and 1962 (their composition, their activism, their organization, their membership, and the state repression they suffered). The second part concerns all anarchist newspapers published in Algeria between 1890 and 1926 (analysis of the militant press and themes about anarchist fundamentals and the colonial question). The last part seeks to present a balance sheet of anarchist politics in Algeria (reception among Europeans and Algerians and the result of its political presence in the territory). For this purpose, police archives, the colonial press, and anarchist newspapers were consulted.

Partant de l’exemple des steppes sud-oranaises, nous avons essayé de démontrer l’existence d’un modèle nomade de la pratique spatiale ainsi que son évolution à travers le temps, avec ses conséquences visibles et substantielles dans cette portion de l’espace algérien. Car les relations que les nomades entretiennent avec leur espace s’établissent selon un système de significations propre à cette société, dont il traduit l’histoire, le parcours, les expériences, les valeurs et les imaginations… au total une culture qui lui est propre et qui, en interférant avec les caractéristiques et les atouts du milieu naturel, donne naissance à un paysage. Or, la société nomade ainsi que son mode d’utilisation et d’adaptation à l’espace fait l’objet depuis une trentaine d’années d’une restructuration qui a provoqué des mutations du genre de vie et une recomposition des territoires ancestraux. La sédentarisation demeure un élément essentiel de ce changement qui a ses répercussions sur l’espace en général et sur celui des sédentaires en particulier. Quoiqu’il perdure, le nomadisme se transforme, prenant d’autres formes et utilisant d’autres outils. Peut-on parler d’une adaptation ou d’une résidualité conduisant à la décadence et finissant par une disparition ? L’espace perçu, vécu et représenté des nomades est-il pris en compte dans la gestion et l’aménagement de l’environnement/territoire ? Ce qui est identifié pour les groupes nomades de la steppe sud-oranaise peut servir d’illustration pour évoquer certains processus communs à plusieurs cultures, ou de point de comparaison avec d’autres sociétés, notamment de chasseurs-cueilleurs, autres nomades confrontés à une culture et un modèle allogènes et puissants. / From the example of the steppes of South Oran, we tried to demonstrate a model of nomadic space practice and its evolution through time, with its own visible and substantial consequences in a portion of Algerian’s space. The relation between nomads and their space settled in a specific meaning system. Its history, career, experiences, values and imaginations… in short, a culture of its own is arise from that relation, which by interfering with the features and advantages of the natural environment rise to a landscape. However, the nomadic society and its mode of space’s use and adaptation have been restructuring since the last thirty years. This restructuration has caused several mutations in their way of life and led to the reconstruction of ancestral territories. The settlement remains an essential element of those changes which impact on space. Although nomadism continues, it turns into other form and other tools. Can we speak of an adaptation or a residuality leading to decadence and ending with a loss? The Nomad’s perceived lived and represented space, is it taken into account in the management and development environment/territory? This identified, the south Oran nomadic society can serve as an illustration to evoke some process common to many cultures, or to compare it with other societies, such as hunter-gathers, others nomads facing an alien culture and powerful models.

Faute de travaux scientifiques, Constantine, capitale de l’Est algérien, a quelque peu disparu de la bibliographie archéologique ces dernières décennies. Il est vrai que l’étude archéologique en milieu urbain n’est pas aisée. Pour palier cette absence, cet exposé propose un état des lieux des travaux antérieurs sur le sujet, afin de mettre en place l’ébauche d’une recherche sur la topographie urbaine de la ville, dans l’Antiquité. Le point de départ de ce travail correspond à une prise de conscience de l’éparpillement des sources et de la difficulté à les consulter. Ainsi, regrouper les sources anciennes et récentes était nécessaire pour créer un répertoire de notices de découvertes, agrémentées ou non de planches. Ces notices forment chacune un site à reporter, dans la mesure du possible, sur une carte, elle-même divisée en plusieurs parties, correspondant à diverses sections, mises en place pour faciliter l’organisation de cette étude. Ce catalogue, première évaluation du potentiel archéologique de Constantine, permet finalement former quelques hypothèses qui pourront servir d’appuis aux travaux archéologiques à venir. / For lack of scientific works, Constantine, capital of eastern Algeria, has somewhat disappeared from the archeological bibliography these last decades. It is right to say that the archeological study in urban areas isn’t that easy. To overcome this lack of research, this presentation offers an inventory of fixtures of the previous works on the subject, in order to produce the outline of a research on the urban topography of the city, in Antiquity. The starting point of this work represents an awareness of the dispersal of the sources and the difficulty to consult them. Thus, gathering the old and the recent sources was necessary to create a notebook of discovery notes, accompanied or not by «boards». These notes each form a site to copy out, when possible on a map, that is divided in several parts, corresponding to different sections, made up to facilitate the organisation of this study. This catalog, first estimation of the archological potential of Constantine eventually allows us to establish a few hypothesis that will be used as a support for further archelogical research.

Composée de cinq parties, notre étude commence par s’intéresser à la transcription du « retour de la violence » en Algérie dans les littératures orale et écrite qui refusent toute forme de nihilisme. Ce refus amène le poète-chanteur kabyle Lounis Aït Menguellet et l’écrivain francophone Tahar Djaout à ouvrir leur espace à l’altérité. C’est là que commencent les ruptures spatiales dans le texte poétique, qui alors éclate en plusieurs espaces insulaires. Mais la souffrance et l’angoisse de la mort sont partout et marquent de leur présence l’espace textuel, par exemple en bouleversant l’organisation rimique. Le lecteur-auditeur se retrouve de nouveau dans un espace-temps fermé sur le Même. En effet, et à cause du manque des récits historiques en Algérie, les deux auteurs sont condamnés à inventer leur propre langage sacré et à léguer au groupe social des vestiges verbaux. Ces vestiges devraient aussi leur garantir l’immortalité du Nom. Notre dernière partie porte sur la position du poète dans une histoire de violence, son engagement littéraire et la continuité de cet engagement hors-texte. / Composed of five parts, my outline starts with the algerian “historical return of violence” issue, as transcribed in both oral and written literatures, which rejects any nihilist position. Such a radical stance brings therefore the kabyle singer and poet Lounis Aït Menguellet as well the francophone novelist Tahar Djaout to open their inner space to otherness. From then on, the literary text can be defined as many island-shaped poetic space breaks. However, pain and fear of death remain, disrupting structures and rhymes organization within the text, so that space and time are closed. The decline of historical narrative in Algeria does actually lead the authors to forge their own verbal vestiges and sacred language; what should ensure the remaining/lasting of the Name. The last part of this work sheds light on the poet’s position towards a violent history, his presence as a protagonist within his texts, and his involvement in and out the literary field.

In this dissertation, I map the experimental margin of Algerian cinema between 1965 and 1979 against the paradigmatic film about Algeria, Gillo Pontecorvo and Yacef Saadi’s The Battle of Algiers (1965). I focus on the period immediately following the successful conclusion of an eight-year war waged by the Algerian National Liberation Front against France. It is known as the “Golden Age” of Algerian cinema, a span of nearly fifteen years after the film industry was nationalized when culture was generously financed by newly exploited petrochemical resources in the Sahara. This mapping has two aims, the first of which is straightforward: I read four films made in Algeria by Algerian filmmakers closely in light of their socio-political contexts and I argue that together they represent a significant and overlooked minor history in Algerian film. The films are Tahia Ya Didou! by Mohamed Zinet (1969), Omar Gatlato by Merzack Allouache (1976), La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua by Assia Djebar (1976), and Nahla by Farouk Beloufa (1979). They are significant formally and in terms of their critical reception at the time and since the late 1960s and early 1970s among Algerian filmmakers, but they are crucially significant as ambivalent testimony about life after the colonial period and about the traumatic effect of the long and violent struggle for liberation. Second, I read these films against the Battle of Algiers in its socio-political context. I argue that the aspects of the War of Liberation that fall out of this canonical portrait of decolonial resistance are precisely those taken up by the experimental margin I examine elsewhere in the dissertation. My reading of Pontecorvo and Saadi’s classic film is critical not only in terms of its representation of violence perpetrated by the French but also in the aspects of Algerian history it occludes, namely the history of women. If the margin provides a space for testimony for the trauma of the war, the Battle of Algiers reifies a Fanonian understanding of revolutionary violence, an understanding that is constitutively exclusive of women’s role in the war. I read extensively with Karima Lazali on the clinical situation of Algerians post-war. I draw on archival materials from Algeria and France including production notes and documentation of contemporary reception, especially by Algerians. On contextual questions, I read Algerian sociologists, politicians, filmmakers, and film critics as much as possible. My commitment to de-centering especially a French perspective on Algeria allows the rich semiotic exchange between filmmakers, artists, architects, and political activists to emerge and to challenge the hegemonic perspective that Algerian culture post-war was entirely dominated by its authoritarian government.

This dissertation offers readings of novels by Pierre Guyotat, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano and other lesser-known French authors of the twentieth and twenty-first century, analyzing the representation of the “appelés d’Algérie,” the last citizens of France to be mobilized in a wartime draft. Dating back to the Third Republic, military service played a key role in turning both metropolitan and colonial populations into Frenchmen, though clearly not under the same conditions or in the same way. A historically informed account of military service’s role in citizenship formation can provide a useful analytic frame for clarifying literary engagements with contemporary French “identity-talk,” i.e. political and discursive deployments of identity and identity politics, as well as debates around laïcité, universalist assimilationism, and “communautarisme.” In early literary responses to the Algerian War, the character of the conscript serves to criticize the rising tide of consumerism and Americanization in postwar France. In novels by Daniel Anselme and René-Nicolas Ehni, draftees participate in a homosocial republicanism in which “fraternité” trumps both atomized individualism and the normative heterosexual couple, a locus of consumption. In novels by Perec and Modiano, resistance to conscription enables a critique of universalist citizenship, as the figure of the insubordinate or ambivalent conscript provides an opportunity to reckon with Jewish identity and French anti-Semitism. My analysis addresses the unequal and uneven distribution of political rights based on “identity” factors as well as the asymmetrical deployment of the term “communautarisme.” Certain of Guyotat’s texts are perceived to respond politically and aesthetically to the Algerian War, even though they refuse the conventions of realism, verisimilitude, and even representation. Using Foucault to read Guyotat, my analysis of his work provides an opportunity to address twentieth-century French debates concerning engaged and autonomous art, as well as the relationship of radical politics to radical form. I turn in my last chapter to recent novels by the prize-wining French novelists Alexis Jenni, Laurent Mauvignier, Jérôme Ferrari, and Alice Ferney. Set in part during the Algerian War, these novels draw explicit parallels between colonial violence and race-based violence in France today. These rhetorical parallels can obscure historical contingency and complexity, such as the evolving construction of the concept of “race.” Likewise, these novels contrast a virile, homogenous military and an effeminate, fractured republic and can be read as parables for the rise of the Front National in contemporary France. My analysis shows how these works can both participate in and critique particular racialized and gendered views of the French republic.

Boualem Sansal entre tardivement en littérature, ce qui lui confère un certain recul sur les difficultés auxquelles se trouvent confrontés le roman algérien francophone de la décennie noire. Aux yeux de l’auteur, la première de ces difficultés serait l’aphasie, corrélative d’un référent aussi opaque que douloureux. Cette aphasie serait aussi la conséquence du relativisme prudent des romanciers démocrates-laïques qui se traduirait, sur un plan littéraire, par des romans muselés par le doute et l’autocensure. Et, quand bien même ces romanciers parviendraient à dépasser l’indicible, un autre écueil les guetterait : leur statut linguistique particulier les exposerait à n’être véritablement reçus ni en Algérie, ni en Occident. L’ensemble de ces phénomènes formerait alors une zone inaccessible. Mû par la volonté de défendre ses convictions de démocrate laïc, l’auteur met tout en œuvre pour entrer dans cette zone. Mais même si, la notoriété venant, il s’ouvre à l’essai ainsi qu’à une abondante parole médiatique pour diffuser l’engagement qui conditionne sa démarche, c’est sur le terrain du roman que s’exerce principalement sa recherche. Le chemin qu’emprunte le roman sansalien passe par une revalorisation complémentaire du discours engagé et de la fiction, entendue comme droit à inventer et à renouer avec tous les plaisirs du romanesque. Décidé à trouver un équilibre entre un roman à thèse autoritariste et un roman sans thèse relativiste, Boualem Sansal théorise également, et ce dès son premier roman, le rôle du lecteur. C’est lui qui, seul, permettrait de sortir véritablement de l’impasse. L’auteur transforme alors son œuvre en une propédeutique qui forme à des pratiques de réception responsables et autonomes, pratiques que le lecteur est invité à réinvestir dans sa vie citoyenne. / Having entered literary world quite lately in his life, Boualem Sansal has benefited from a precious hindsight on the difficulties experienced by Algeria’s black decade novelists. Dealing with an extremely intricate and painful political context that threatened to result in a muffled and self-censored literature, these latter has also had to tackle an awkward position between Algerian and Western countries’ public expectations making them unheard on both sides. Eager to defend and disseminate his secular-democratic vision of the society, Sansal has spared no effort to break with this deadly aphasia. Even if, with increasing recognition, he has decided to explore new forms of expression such as essay and to be more present on the media sphere, he soon realized that the real way-out of impotence is to find precisely in his literary work by reconciling a strongly committed speech with the power of pure literary fiction. Pursuing, novel after novel, his endeavour to reach this zone, he theorises a new key role for his reader to whom he asks to become more autonomous and responsible in his practice. Reading experience thus become a training area to acquire necessary skills for an active citizenship, the only way, in Sansal’s mind, to break general apathy threatening his democratic ideal.

This study analyzed the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya (North Africa) beginning in late 2010. The first part of the study focused on variables that the North African revolutions shared. These variables were "personalistic-style of dictatorship", "sizable percentage of youth in population", and "economic context". These factors were then discussed as major descriptive variables that caused the revolutionary events in North Africa. The second part of the study assessed why each North African revolution resulted in varying levels of violence. Concluding thoughts were made regarding the similarities and differences between the 2009 Iranian Green Revolution, events in other North African Arab-majority states such as Algeria and Morocco, and the on-going Syrian Revolution to the North African Revolutions