Fallout from the Algerian War:The Misery of Historiography on Postcolonial “Maghreb” (1962-2010)This “Habilitation à diriger des recherches,” or post-doctorial thesis qualifying for Full Professorship, deals with French historiography on colonial and postcolonial “Maghreb” (former French North Africa) since 1962, without neglecting North African and other Western contributions. The first objective is to probe and reconstruct its “institutional inheritance,” referred to as a “solid framework inherited from colonial times.” The author makes an overview of the four main institutions which were instrumental in building scientific knowledge on “indigenous” societies: the Army, high-ranking civil servants, the Church, and the University. This powerful intellectual infrastructure was partly swept away after 1962. Within Academia, colonial forms of knowledge were replaced by a rather ideological historiography characterized by a Third-World, Marxist bias. The second aspect of the work focuses on “Men and History,” analyzing the various modes of “transmission and rupture” within the field. This part dwells on the four generations of professional historians of colonization who have succeeded each other in 20th century France, in the wake of the first of them, Charles-André Julien. Groups and schools of historians are also examined, with particular attention being paid to their ideological, political, geographic, and intellectual affiliations. In a third part, the author looks into the contemporary “exogenous estrangement factors” of former French North Africa, mainly reguarding the historian’s discipline and discourse. This failing has brought about the emergence of discourses in the political and legal sciences, a long-lasting neglect of religious questions, a quick loss of language skills, and multiples forms of estrangement “in the shadow of the Algerian trauma.”The Annexes mention a large number of MA and PhD theses devoted to contemporary North Africa, particularly from the Sorbonne. To which is added a list of more than 200 academics who have done research on former French North Africa, both in colonial times and after Independence, in the course of the century. A bibliography and several documents put the final touch to these Annexes.
