The Impossible Republic: The Reconquest of Algeria and the Decolonization of France, 1945–1962
McDougall discusses the reconquest of Algeria and the decolonization of France. Much recent scholarship on the colonial state and decolonization in the French empire, and in relation to Algeria in particular, has focused both on the military aspects of war and counterinsurgency and on the simultaneo...
Saved in:
| Published in: | The Journal of modern history 2017-12, Vol.89 (4), p.772-811 |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | McDougall discusses the reconquest of Algeria and the decolonization of France. Much recent scholarship on the colonial state and decolonization in the French empire, and in relation to Algeria in particular, has focused both on the military aspects of war and counterinsurgency and on the simultaneous unfolding of late colonial reform, antiracism, and the origins of the developmentalist state. In respect of the former, some historians have perhaps too simply stressed the practice of violence as a monochrome history of total victimization practiced by a "militarized colonial state," "a tenor matrix with torture at its core." In respect of the latter, others have perhaps conversely been too ready to accept the claims of late colonial reform as having credibly attempted, until the last moment, "to make real the principles of equality and universality" that the imperial Republic had always claimed to embody, only to abandon those ideals at the eleventh hour. While both developmental reform and repressive violence were often central to late colonialism, the logic of events in Algeria, as strikingly illustrated by the tragicomedy of El Ouennane in 1960, provides a particularly stark case of the extremes to which each, together, could be taken. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0022-2801 1537-5358 |