The Mediterranean separates two worlds in me, one where memories are preserved in measured spaces, the other where the wind and sand erase all trace of men on the open ranges (Albert Camus, The First Man).1

1With these words, colonial Algeria’s most famous war orphan, Albert Camus, encapsulated the struggle of thousands of families across his homeland, both Europeans and indigenous Algerians, who sought to commemorate a loved one lost on the distant battlefields of Europe. For Camus, while France was the land of cypress-lined war cemeteries, his Algerian homeland was marked by memorial anarchy where memory defied official processes of regulation and the forces of nature conspired to undermine aspirations to eternal perpetuation. Behind this lyricism lies a tacit acknowledgement of the very real challenges facing those who seek to elaborate a commemorative discourse in colonial and post-colonial societies where, even more so than in metropolitan societies, rival narratives of past, present and future are constantly struggling for dominance. In this chapter, I will trace the evolution of commemorative culture in colonial and post-colonial Algeria by comparing and contrasting the case studies of the war memorials in the cities of Algiers and Oran. In Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, Winter stressed the importance of writing ‘the life histories’ of war memorials, given that they ‘have both shed meanings and taken on new significance’ over the course of their existence.2 The two monuments considered in this chapter offer what is perhaps one of the best prisms through which to consider the complex, plural and changing nature of colonial memorial discourse, proving once more that while monuments’ sculptural forms may be carved in stone, their symbolic meanings are far from immutable.

French Algeria and the Great War

2Before turning to questions of commemoration, we must first consider the impact of the Great War on Algeria’s different ethnic communities. Over the course of the war, about 73,000 French citizens from Algeria served in Europe, a proportion roughly equal to that of metropolitan France.3 In total, some 173,000 indigenous soldiers had served in French forces by the end of war, with slightly more than half of these enlisting as “volunteers”, though this term is questionable given the recruitment practices employed by colonial administrators.4 Of the indigenous contingent, 125,000 saw active duty on the European battlefields over the course of the war.5 Estimates for the dead among French citizens range between 12,000 and 22,000 while the number of indigenous dead is normally put somewhere around 26,000.6 Furthermore, thousands of indigenous workers took up positions in factories in France, freeing up men to serve at the front and playing an important role in maintaining the supply of essential military and industrial equipment.7

3The experience of the war for the thousands of men who crossed the Mediterranean to serve the Patrie was complex and plural. For the Europeans of Algeria, participation as full citizens alongside metropolitan troops confirmed their full membership of the nation. Their encounter with metropolitan troops exposed them to the range of cultural differences that characterised Frenchmen, convincing them of their legitimate place in the national community.8 If the experience of the European population of Algeria was one characterised by differences of culture but equality of rights and conditions, the same could not be said for indigenous Algerians. Military policy towards indigenous troops was shaped by ‘conflicting impulses’ as administrators drew on a blend of racial prejudice, paternalism, respect for difference and a rhetorical commitment to republican equality to simultaneously acknowledge, reward, discipline and degrade indigenous soldiers.9 Indigenous soldiers found themselves serving the national community without a clear indication of how their service would change their status within it.

4This same tension was evident in the discourse framing indigenous participation. Throughout the war the colonial authorities had stressed the unity of Algerian society behind the war effort. Echoing official discourse in the metropole, they celebrated the existence of a specific Algerian form of the Union Sacrée. Just as political leaders asserted that society in the metropole was united in the defence of the Patrie across boundaries of class, religion and political allegiance so too elites in Algeria, both European and indigenous, declared that society in the colony stood as one, with distinctions of race or citizenship status supposedly forgotten in the face of the existential threat to the French nation.10 In fact, in both cases, discontent with an officially imposed unity bubbled away under the surface of wartime society, occasionally boiling over in the form of industrial unrest or mutinies in the metropole or open armed rebellion in the colonies, as was the case in the brutally-repressed anti-conscription insurrection in the Sud-Constantinois region of Algeria in 1916. Nevertheless, official discourse sought to obscure these fissures in the edifice of the Union Sacrée on both sides of the Mediterranean. In Algeria, colonial officials openly celebrated the “fraternity of arms” between the colony’s communities and proclaimed the equality of all soldiers before death.11 They did not, however, embrace any form of equality for the living. While the duty of indigenous subjects to defend France was constantly proclaimed by the colonial authorities, what rights, if any, the indigenous would receive in return for their service was never specified.

5In the aftermath of the Armistice, the prospect of colonial reform as a compensation for the indigenous community’s wartime service contributed to the dissolution of the Algerian Union Sacrée among the colony’s political elite.12 The uneasy wartime truce between the leaders of the European settler community and the emergent indigenous Algerian educated elites soon fell apart as both sides struggled to impose their rival visions of a just postwar colonial order. The bitter debates that rallied European conservatives against indigenous elites and their progressive European allies not only scuppered any radical reform of the colonial order but also fatally undermined the public discourse of cross-community fraternity that had underpinned Algeria’s colonial Union Sacrée.13 Indeed, whether such transcommunal unity had ever existed in concrete terms on the ground in the colony during the war is difficult to assess given the lack of non-elite indigenous accounts from the period. Nevertheless, while both politics and daily life in the colony largely returned to the pre-war status quo premised on the racial hegemony of the Europeans, there was one field of public discourse in which the unity of the trenches remained a powerful, if extremely ambiguous, point of reference: commemoration.

Memorialising the War Dead in Inter-War French Algeria

6As in metropolitan France, the first impulse towards the organisation and practice of commemoration centred on the attempts to repatriate the bodies of the fallen to their home villages. For the authorities in Algeria, the process of exhumation of corpses and their transfer across the Mediterranean was potentially far more costly than would be the case for local administrations in the metropole. With this in mind, the vast majority of local authorities in the colony, including in the cities of Algiers and Oran, limited the repatriation back to Algeria of bodies to French citizens, excluding the indigenous Muslim population.14 Thus, from the very outset, the nascent culture of commemoration being developed around the Great War discriminated between indigenous subjects who died for France and their equivalents among the French citizens of Algeria.

7The next phase in the elaboration of a culture of commemoration in the colony would focus on the design, funding and construction of war memorials. As Algeria, unlike the other territories of the French Empire, was officially an integral part of the French Republic, each local commune was charged with the construction of a monument in honour of the fallen. Jansen has discussed the multitude of approaches to this process in different communes across the three departments of Algeria, as local officials sought to reconcile the national discourse of unity with their own visions of the history of the war and of the colony in general.15 This chapter will focus specifically on the colony’s two largest cities, the capital Algiers and the second city Oran. It will show how memorial culture in Algiers, as both the largest city and the administrative centre for the colony, would seek to embody the official discourse of colonial commemoration in its war memorial. Local authorities in Oran, the colony’s most demographically European city and a stronghold of Algeria’s home-grown anti-Semitic extreme-right, would feel far less pressure to conform to the colonial administration’s desire to perpetuate the imagined colonial Union Sacrée in memorial culture.

8In both cities, the selection of a design and a location for the war memorial, along with the crucial task of securing funds for its construction, was delegated to committees that brought together municipal councillors and dignitaries drawn largely from the ranks of the European- dominated veterans’ movements.16 Unsurprisingly, in a settler colonial context where political institutions and civil society both reflected and were constitutive of European hegemony, the membership of these committees largely excluded the indigenous population. The fundraising appeals issued by the committees in Oran and in Algiers framed the construction of war memorials as a continuation of the work of the Union Sacrée. In Oran, a joint committee of veterans’ associations called on the population of the department to contribute to the monument ‘in the name of the generous fusion of races, opinions, religions for the conquest of peace’.17 In its appeal, the Algiers committee stressed the universal nature of grief that impacted mothers, fathers and orphans, regardless of race or religion.18 In both cities, the concept of racial unity was central to the rhetoric of the fundraising drive in favour of the war memorials, even though the structure organising this drive reflected the racial distribution of power within the colony.

9But how would these tensions between official discourse and practice be reflected in the architectural form of the monuments themselves? In line with common practice for cities of their size, both Algiers and Oran held a public contest to select a model and an architect for their memorials. The authorities in the colonial capital selected the project proposed by the award-winning sculptor Paul Landowski. Best known today for his Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Landowski was himself a veteran of the Great War, having fought in the battle of the Somme.19 His vision for the Algiers war memorial represented the physical embodiment of the official commemorative discourse articulated by the colonial authorities. Carved from blocks of limestone, the monument portrayed three cavalrymen – an indigenous Algerian spahi, a French chevalier and a winged Victory – holding up a shield on which a dead soldier was laid out. Around the base, bas-reliefs presented scenes from military life, showing the mixing of Europeans and Muslims in the trenches. Landowski’s monument clearly sought to present commemoration as a means of conciliation between the two communities. Its location, at the symbolic heart of the newly constructed administrative quarter, implied that this vision was shared by the colonial authorities.20

10The ceremony that marked its inauguration on Armistice Day 1928 explicitly articulated a conciliatory discourse of commemoration. The speech given by the Mayor of Algiers, Alphonse Raffi, reflects the wider tenor of the event:

They were present in all battles – the French of Algeria whether Frenchmen by birth or Frenchmen by naturalisation from all the towns of the Mediterranean; Kabyles marching down from the harsh mountains whose peaks linger on the horizon; Arabs, slender and supple, from the plains; all responded to the call. They were present in all battles: The Marne, Verdun, the Somme, the Dardanelles, Salonika, wherever men fought and died.22

11Like the monument he was inaugurating, the mayor portrayed the war as a moment that united all the diverse elements of Algerian society in a common cause. Both the grief of the bereaved and the honour bestowed on the fallen were presented as universal, transcending racial and religious boundaries. However, indigenous actors were given no opportunity to shape this supposedly universal form of remembrance. They may have participated in and attended ceremonies around the monument, but the content and form of these rituals of remembrance would always be shaped by the colonial and municipal authorities. The Algiers war memorial became a site where the colonial authorities and their allies in the municipal administration could embrace a commemorative discourse that celebrated the fraternity of arms of the colony’s different communities, while carefully avoiding any suggestion that this fraternity should morph into a form of equality.

12In contrast to their compatriots in Algiers, the local authorities in Oran refused to compromise their unyielding commitment to European hegemony in the name of the colonial fraternity of arms. The project they chose to commemorate the department’s war dead prioritised the celebration of European hegemony over the acknowledgement of the indigenous contribution to the Great War. The work of sculptor Albert Pommier, the city’s war memorial consisted of an eight metre high column crowned with a sculpture of three soldiers, two French poilus and one indigenous soldier, or tirailleur. The two poilus are standing, the one on the left with a weapon at his feet, his companion to the right holding a canne, a sign of martial prowess. Both look inland towards the city and then on to the countryside, asserting their connection to and ownership of the land and their readiness to defend it from the ever-present internal threat. Behind them sits a tirailleur holding a rifle. Unlike his European comrades he faces the sea, looking across the Mediterranean to metropolitan France, ready to defend her from any external threat. A clear sculptural hierarchy, reflecting the social hierarchy of colonial society, is established in a monument which barely pays lip service to the fraternity of arms, while simultaneously highlighting the imperative of safeguarding the dominance of the European community.

13The sculptural form of the monument in Oran directly mirrored the political discourse of what had become the city’s dominant political movement by the time of the memorial’s inauguration. The local administration, under the stewardship of the extreme-right mayor Dr. Jules Molle, was committed to a home-grown Algerian political philosophy known as ‘Latinism’. Grounded in the celebration of the colony’s European community as the fruit of the fusion of European races from across the Mediterranean, Latinism blended a virulent anti-Semitism with an almost total disregard for the indigenous population.23 Coverage of postwar commemorative ceremonies in Molle’s newspaper Le Petit Oranais centred on disputes with the Jewish community and simply did not reference the indigenous.24 In the Latinist tradition, the Union Sacrée had been seen as the coming together of the various European populations in Algeria under the French tricolour, actively excluding the Jews. The Muslim population seemed to stand completely outside it.25

14Nevertheless, the administration in Oran could not completely insulate itself from the dominant commemorative discourse promoted by the colonial authorities in Algiers. In his speech at the inauguration of the city’s war memorial, Dr. Molle only referred to the specific contribution of the indigenous to the war in passing, dedicating more time to highlighting his municipality’s financial contribution to the monument.26 Of the other three local figures from the political and civil society elites of the city, only one made mention of the indigenous war dead in his speech. None mentioned the Jewish communal contribution.27 However, given the city’s position as the colony second population centre, the colonial authorities also had a stake in promoting their commemorative discourse. In contrast to the local speakers, the Governor General’s address at the inauguration stressed the unity of Christians, Muslims and Jews that had marked Algeria’s participation in the war, implicitly criticising the local administration’s anti-Semitism by denouncing ‘controversies that descend into hatred’.28 The Governor General was largely alone in his embrace of the racial fraternity of arms in a local political environment where the primacy of the European community over both the Jewish and the indigenous Muslim populations was the dominant feature.

15The seeming dichotomy between the official discourses of eternal European hegemony in Oran and cross-community commemoration in Algiers were, in reality, more reflective of differing nuances of commemorative policy than of radically distinct visions of Algeria, past, present and future. The celebration of the Centenary of the French invasion of Algeria in 1930, a highpoint of triumphalist colonial commemoration, would fundamentally undermine the universalist pretentions of the Algiers monument. Landowski’s memorial was the point of departure for a torch relay in June of that year to the monument to the invading force twenty kilometres to the west in the town of Sidi-Ferruch (now known as Sidi Fredj).29 The inclusion of the memorial marked its incorporation into a commemorative ‘privileged axis of colonialism’ that sought to wed the celebration of the fraternity of arms to a homage to the glory of French colonial rule.30 The acknowledgement of the role that Algeria’s indigenous community had played in safeguarding France against subjugation by the Germans was coupled with a tribute to the valour of those Frenchmen who had crushed and subjugated that same community a century earlier. Thus, the Algiers’ monument, for all its declared commitment to honouring the wartime contribution of Algeria’s different communities equally, was subsumed into a wider colonial commemorative culture in which European hegemony was loudly and proudly celebrated.

16Even prior to the pomp and ceremony of the Centenary, indigenous political activists had come to challenge the concept of perpetual European hegemony. In the mid-1920s, among the many indigenous Algerian migrant workers in the factories of metropolitan France, the first nationalist political movement, L’Etoile Nord-Africaine (ENA), emerged under the aegis of the French Communist Party. The new movement quickly developed its own narrative of Algeria’s past, emphasising the long struggle against French colonial occupation over indigenous participation in the Great War.31 When the Great War was mentioned, it was only to underline the fact that the promises of the French administration could never be trusted.32 While the ENA’s influence remained largely restricted to its base among migrant workers in the metropole for much of the interwar period, its historical narrative, and, in particular, its attitude to the Great War would, as we shall see, shape the discourse of Algerian nationalism for the rest of the century.

Memorials and the Algerian War of Independence

17In the wake of the Second World War, memorials across France and the Empire, including those in both Algiers and Oran, were updated to incorporate the names of those who fell in the campaigns to defend and, subsequently, liberate France. Once more, official commemorative discourse stressed the unity of all races and creeds behind the French tricolour in defence of “civilisation”. However, the events of May 1945 in the Northeast of Algeria would taint the attempt to articulate a cross-community commemorative discourse. On the morning of 8 May 1945, a crowd gathered to celebrate Victory in Europe Day in the indigenous dominated town of Sétif. Among the 8,000 strong crowd gathered outside the city’s mosque with a view to marching to the war memorial to lay a wreath in honour of the war dead, many bore nationalist banners. When French gendarmes attempted to seize the offending items, scuffles broke out and in the ensuing chaos a young Algerian member of the nationalist scouting organisation was killed.33 What began as a cross-community commemoration, including the obligatory visit to the war memorial, descended into a chaotic moment of ethnic strife, in which elements of the indigenous crowd indiscriminately beat, raped and killed Europeans in an insurrection which spread throughout the region. The estimated death toll was 103 with a similar number injured.34 The response of the French forces – the burning of villages, summary executions and reprisal killings – was completely disproportionate to the original crimes. Although the final death toll is disputed, it cannot be denied that the extreme repression marked a generation of indigenous Algerians and furnished Algerian nationalism with one of its foundational myths.35 That the occasion of a commemoration at a war memorial could lead to such atrocities, on both sides but in radically different proportions, showed that, though often a site of conciliation, war memorials could also be a site of division, where existing tensions spilled out into the open, resulting in extreme violence.

18While May 1945 remains an important event in the history of Algerian nationalism, it is undoubtedly overshadowed in the nationalist narrative by the totemic date of 1 November 1954. The outbreak of a violent nationalist rebellion in Algeria, under the stewardship of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), would have a transformative effect on all aspects of politics, including commemoration, in the colony. Coming at the beginning of the ‘commemorative season’ – the fortnight surrounding All Souls’ Day, the anniversary of the Allied landings in North Africa (9 November) and Armistice Day (11 November) – the FLN’s first military actions inevitably shaped the ceremonies of commemoration that followed in their wake. These public rituals incorporated a homage to those killed in the FLN attacks while also stressing cross-community spirit, showing a people united in defiance against the criminal nationalists. The hard-line L’Écho d’Alger, which months earlier had not specifically mentioned Muslim participation on Bastille Day,36 now trumpeted their presence at the Armistice commemoration at the foot of Landowski’s memorial:

The anniversary of the Armistice of 1918 has allowed the world to see the attachment of the populations of Algeria to the motherland… Muslim veterans remain loyal to their flag.37

19Participation in a ceremony honouring the dead was construed as an endorsement of the colonial system. As was nearly always the case in the public mise en scène of the loyalty of colonial subjects, the Algerian Muslim was but a prop to support the colonial government’s propaganda, never offered the opportunity to convey his or her own narrative of Algeria’s past. This was especially true in the case of indigenous Algerian war veterans, who were closely controlled by the colonial and military authorities. In the wake of the attacks of 1 November 1954, the war memorial had become the altar around which Muslim loyalty to the French cause was showcased for all to see.

20As the conflict escalated over the course of 1955, the French government floundered and the European population grew ever more restless. The arrival of Socialist Premier Guy Mollet in Algiers on 6 February 1956, coming just days after the announcement of his deeply unpopular appointment of General Catroux, a noted reformer, as Governor General, saw the political instrumentalisation of the city’s war memorial by the European community reach a new height. The solemn ceremony led by Mollet in honour of the dead at the foot of Landowski’s monument was drowned out by the enraged crowds shouting ‘Mollet au mer’ and ‘Catroux au poteau! ’. A hail of tomatoes rained down on the Premier as the crowds surged forward, barely restrained by the security forces. Minutes after his departure, the crowd broke through the barriers and kicked the wreath to shreds.38 This act of popular destruction, ironically foreshadowing the iconoclasm that would follow Algerian independence, symbolised the European community’s belief that the programme of colonial reform pursued by Mollet and Catroux, which was in practice accompanied by brutal military and police repression, represented a betrayal of their community’s blood sacrifice, both in the conquest of the colony and on the battlefields of Europe.39 By storming the monument and destroying the wreath, the Europeans had reclaimed ‘their’ war memorial from the hated Fourth Republic. For Horne, it was this day which cemented the transformation of the war memorial from site of conciliation to site of protest: ‘this sombre example of necrological architecture so dear to French hearts was to become ritualistically the focal centre of all pied noir protest henceforth’.40 In the capital, the war memorial had become the property of the proponents of an unchanged colonial Algeria, a society where the ‘intimate hierarchy’ that had defined cooperation on the battlefields and was immortalised in the monument, would reign supreme.41

21While the European mob had imposed its will in the colonial capital, the authorities in Oran focused on articulating a new commemorative discourse that could appease the European community without driving away their indigenous allies. Oran’s Armistice Day ceremonies in 1956 at the foot of Pommier’s monument promoted ‘the spirit of mutual and necessary understanding between the Frenchmen and the Muslims sealed by the blood spilled in common’, referring no longer solely to that spilled at Verdun or Monte Cassino but now also to that which stained the streets of Algiers and Oran.42 The monuments aux morts were rapidly becoming memorials to those who died at the hands of the FLN.

22Over the years that followed, the various factions that vied for control of the European community and the political institutions that governed the colony used the war memorials in the colony’s principal cities as staging posts for their attempts to conquer power. European crowds, whether rallying to De Gaulle in May 1958, against him in January 1960 or in favour of the abortive Generals’ putsch in April 1961, saw the war memorial as the key symbol that legitimized their cause. In a vain effort to evoke the cross-community fraternity of arms that had long dominated official commemorative discourse, the most ardent defenders of European hegemony sought to mobilize Muslim veterans in defence of their vision of French Algeria. The case of the violent disturbances of January 1960 in Algiers, the ‘Week of the Barricades’, is illustrative. Seeking to refute allegations of extremism and racism, the supporters of the most radical partisans of the colonial order celebrated ‘Franco-Muslim fraternity’ by reporting the rallying of Muslim veterans to the cause at the base of the city’s war memorials.43 Horne paints a rather different picture of Muslim assistance to the rebels:

With a big effort, a few pathetic handfuls of elderly veterans were drummed up, many of them maimed and of First World War vintage; but, on the other hand, large groups of Casbah urchins gathered to chant at a discreet distance: Algérie Arabe !44 In an increasingly dichotomized Algerian society, the Algiers war memorial had become intertwined with the campaign to maintain European hegemony.

Memorial Politics in the Post-colonial Era

23The arrival of Algerian independence in 1962 and, with it, the dream of constructing a new society ‘purified’ of its colonial past, resulted in popular acts of iconoclasm directed against the most visible expressions of French domination in the urban space. Independence was greeted in cities across Algeria by a symbolic reoccupation of the colonial townscape. Forced out initially by the military and subsequently by the civil authorities, the indigenous masses visibly manifested their victory by ‘returning’ to the spaces of symbolic power in cities, towns and villages across the country.45 In Algiers, all the major colonial monuments were covered with Algerian flags, most memorably in the case of Joan of Arc, who was ritualistically veiled in the traditional Algerian head covering, the haïk.46 The following month the most prominent vestiges of the colonial regime were targeted by popular mobs: the statues of Joan of Arc and the Algiers-born former Prime Minister René Viviani were symbolically beheaded before being toppled from their pedestals.47 This destruction or profanation of monuments was a means of ritualistically realising the passage from one world to the other, of publicly proclaiming the end of one era and the beginning of another.48

24While in smaller towns across the colony, war monuments were torn down, refashioned as monuments to the martyrs of the Revolution49 or ‘repatriated’ to the metropole by the French Army’s Service Historique de la Défense,50 the memorials in Algiers and Oran survived the wave of iconoclasm intact. In July 1962, a report for Les Actualités Françaises on Algerian independence opened with a striking image of the Algiers war memorial crowned with green and white flags, symbolically representing for a French audience the end of colonial dominance in Algeria.51 Later that month a crowd did attempt to remove the monument from its pedestal, but it proved far too sturdy.52 Its removal would only be possible with machinery and official approval and these were not forthcoming. The new authorities in both Algiers and Oran seemed to extend an unofficial protection to the cities’ war memorials, in direct contrast with their policies towards other monuments in the post-colonial public space. Since the foundation of the ENA in the interwar period, Algerian nationalists had largely avoided mention of the Great War and throughout the struggle for independence their indirect heirs in the FLN had never targeted war memorials. This is because, unlike the harkis, indigenous Algerians who served in French forces against the FLN, those who fought on the battlefields of Europe in the First and Second World Wars were not considered traitors to their nation, but rather victims of colonial oppression and false promises. Thus, the monuments that paid homage to their wartime service could not simply be dismissed as relics of colonialism. The ambiguous place of war memorials in the colonial commemorative landscape, incorporating both a tribute to the indigenous Algerians’ wartime sacrifice and an implicit or, in the case of Oran, explicit celebration of French colonial rule, granted them a limited reprieve from the new Algerian state’s purge of its colonial past.

25The fate of the war memorial in Algeria’s second city would largely be decided across the Mediterranean, in the council chambers of the metropole’s second city, Lyon. As early as May 1964, two years after Algerian independence, local councillors in Lyon began to discuss the possibility of ‘repatriating’ the Oran memorial to France.53 It was hoped that such a move would help integrate the estimated 30,000 Europeans of Algeria who had resettled in the city since independence.54 A delegation led by a municipal councillor was sent to Oran to negotiate the monument’s transfer in the summer of 1967.55 Within months, permission had been received from both the local Popular Communal Assembly and the centrally appointed Prefect, on the sole condition that the monument’s pedestal be left intact.56 Plans were made to dismantle and ship the monument across to Marseille from where it would be transported by train to Lyon. There, it would be installed in the new neighbourhood of La Duchère, largely populated by Europeans resettled from Algeria. A new inscription would be added to the monument reading: ‘So that they will conserve the memory of their homeland, the City of Lyon to the children of Oran, who she has fraternally welcomed’.57 By virtue of this mutually beneficial deal, the city of Oran rid itself of a potentially problematic public monument without desecrating the memory of the fallen while that of Lyon secured a means of integrating its new population into its commemorative landscape.

26The task bestowed on the new monument, to achieve the civic integration of the so-called ‘repatriates’, was not a simple one. As the rival inauguration ceremonies at the newly-installed memorial in La Duchère would demonstrate, commemorating aspects of colonial Algeria’s history would continue to prove controversial. The official inauguration took place on 13 July 1968. The ceremony, which brought together local officials, including the Mayor, and the representatives of the various groups representing the ‘repatriates’, mobilized the European community’s participation in the two World Wars and the city’s recognition of this as a symbol of the unity between the established population of Lyon and the new inhabitants of La Duchère.58 However, the associations of ‘repatriates’ would assign an altogether different meaning to the monument when they gathered for its unofficial inauguration on 9 November, later that year. In the presence of General Jouhaud, the Oran-born leader who had participated in the abortive coup against De Gaulle in April 1961, the associations declared their fidelity to the colonial ideal of L’Algérie Française. The General himself addressed the crowd, recalling the last ceremony he had attended at the monument in its original location, where ‘Muslims and Europeans, fraternally united, driven by the same faith’ paid a joint homage to Oran’s fallen.59 Here, as in many of the commemorative ceremonies organised by the ‘repatriate’ community in the metropole, a sanitized and idealised vision of the colonial past was mobilized to legitimate the defence of continued French imperial rule and its corollary, European hegemony. The Oran memorial, now installed in the heart of La Duchère, was particularly appropriate for the elaboration of a discourse that sought to cloak the defence of colonial rule in the legitimacy of the wartime fraternity of arms.

27The fate of Landowski’s memorial in Algiers differed radically from that of its counterpart in Oran. For the first sixteen years after Algerian independence, the monument itself remained untouched, although the lists bearing the names of the war dead, European and indigenous intermixed, were chipped away, by whom it is not clear.60 In 1978, as the city prepared to host the All-Africa Games, the authorities planned to remove the monument that was thought to be too overt a mark of colonialism in a city showcasing itself as the cradle of revolutionary anti-colonialism. The local artist M’hamed Issiakhem, who wished to safeguard the monument for its sculptural significance, mobilized members of the artistic community and convinced the authorities to allow him to preserve the monument under a concrete casing. On the outside of this Brutalist hulk, he carved two fists symbolically breaking the chains of colonial oppression.61 Thus, Landowski’s memorial was only saved from destruction by virtue of its transformation into a monument to the destruction of the French colonialism that had made possible its construction in the first place. It now stood as a powerful symbol of the eclipsing of one national narrative, the unity of the subjects and citizens France on the battlefields of Europe, by a new, diametrically opposed, narrative celebrating the victory of the Algerian people over colonial oppression. It was as though the new Algerian state had scrawled over the fading slogan of Union Sacrée with the revolutionary credo ‘Un seul héros: le peuple’.

28While the post-colonial histories of the war memorials of Oran and Algiers are radically different, when considered jointly, they are particularly appropriate symbols of the commemorative discourse surrounding Algeria’s colonial past. The capital’s memorial physically embodies the replacement of one totalising political narrative of the past with another; the celebration of Algerian resistance to colonial rule quite literally effaces the colonial state’s commemoration of the cross-community fraternity of arms. The ‘repatriation’ of the Oran monument to the French metropole exemplifies the new Algerian state’s willingness to divest itself of the memory of the indigenous contribution to the First and Second World Wars, favouring a commemorative discourse constructed around the celebration of the unambiguously nationalist Revolution. The ceremonies that followed the monument’s installation in Lyon speak to the long-running tension at the heart of commemoration in the metropole between the ‘repatriate’ community and official state discourse. Together, the war memorials of Oran and Algiers bear testament to the semantic shifts that transform the symbolic significance of monuments as they move across spaces, both temporal and physical.

29The centenary of the Great War has reactivated wider debates around Algerian participation in that conflict. In particular, the decision of President Bouteflika to send Algerian troops to participate in the commemorations in Paris on Bastille Day 2012 proved extremely controversial, with many Algerians demanding an apology from France for the crimes of colonialism as a pre-requisite for any form of commemorative cooperation.62 Yet to this day, these monuments continue to play a role in the constant evolution of commemorative discourse on both sides of the Mediterranean. ‘Repatriate’ groups still gather every year at the Oran memorial in La Duchère to commemorate their dead, whether these fell in the Great War, the Second World War or indeed in the violence that marked Algerian independence.63 In Algiers, the restoration of Issiakhem’s monument in 2012 briefly revealed elements of Landowski’s memorial, still intact under the concrete casing, drawing press attention to the monument’s complex history and underlining the extent to which discussions about the Great War in Algeria always take place in the shadow of the War of Independence.64

Conclusion

30The ‘life histories’ of the Algiers and Oran serve as excellent prisms through which to consider Algeria’s complex historical relationship with the memory of the Great War.65 The efforts of each successive regime, whether a local, colony-wide or national level, to impose its own vision of Algeria’s past, and thus shore up its own legitimacy, can be traced through the history of these two monuments. It has proven impossible, however, to trace how these changes were received by the Algerian public and more specifically, the families of those who had died in the conflicts commemorated by the two memorials. In both the colonial and postcolonial contexts, the function of these war memorials as spaces for the expression of individual and collective grief is overshadowed by the need to integrate them into wider historical narratives. While both the colonial and post-colonial archives frame participation in commemorative acts in terms of the politics of identity and belonging, the history of these monuments is more about national political change and less about the simple, and profoundly personal, desire to remember and honour the war dead.

31Nevertheless, as the memories of the war attenuated with the passing of time and as new, even bloodier conflicts swept the country, the original role of the war memorials as sites of mourning faded and they became imbued with new and highly contested meanings that often had little to do with the Great War. Ironically, it was this versatility that ensured that these monuments survived when so many others fell in the wake of independence. The complexity of experiences and multitude of political interpretations that surrounded Algerian participation in the Great War allowed its memory, and by extension that of its two principal memorials, to survive intact beneath the surface (quite literally in the case of Algiers) of wider nationalist political and commemorative discourses. Because the Great War was never purely a war of colonial oppression nor a war for national self-determination, its memory, and the monuments that commemorated it, proved better equipped to resist the ‘wind and sand’ of Algeria’s tumultuous twentieth century than many other elements of commemorative culture.