Colonial Myths: History and Narrative

Colonial Myths: History and Narrative. By Azzedine Haddour. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. 197 pages.

July 5, 1962, marked the independence of Algeria and the end of more than a century of French rule. For the settler society, more than one million pieds noirs, independence led to repatriation, the return to France, a mother country many French Algerians barely knew. Much has been written about the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and the tense relationship between colonizer and colonized that defined the colonial period, as well as the violent seven-years war that resulted in Algerian independence.

Azzedine Haddour's study, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative, provides readers with an important analysis of assimilation, an ideology doomed to fail in a colonial society in which the European colonizer and the colonized native lived side by side with few, if any, true links of communication between them. For both the student and scholar of Algerian history, culture, and literature, Haddour's critical analysis offers solid grounding and crucial insights into the complex and complicated cohabitation between colonizer and colonized. Although the critic covers ground that has been examined well by at least two major critics of French colonialism, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, Haddour recapitulates their ideas clearly as he traces the effects of French legislation and administration in the colony, charts the rise of Algerian nationalism from 1920 through World War II, and examines the francophone literature that emerged during the colonial period.

Reminding his readers that history is an active agency which brings the past into the present, Haddour focuses on two interrelated issues: the exclusion of the colonized from the diachronic progress of history and the mummification of their past. As the critic explains, an examination of Algeria's colonial past reveals that the French policy of assimilation never meant to assimilate the indigenous population but rather to confiscate Algeria's fertile land for French settlers. Hence, the senatus-consulate of 1865 subjected colonized Algerians to French laws but denied them the rights of political citizenship. In addition, the Cremieux laws, instituted in 1870, granted citizenship to Algerian-born Jews, thus creating a wedge between these two native communities. As Memmi, Fanon, and Pierre Nora...