Colonial nostalgia and Le Premier Homme

French Cultural Studies

Volumn 9, Issue 26, 1998, Pages 167-189

  Wood, Nancy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149689809     PISSN: 09571558     EISSN: 17402352     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/095715589800902603     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Jean Daniel, 'Retour à Camus', Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 novembre 1978
2. See Albert Camus, L'Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 356, 354
3. Jean-Yves Guérin (ed.) Camus et la politique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1986). See especially the contributions by Paul Thibaud, Annie Cohen-Solal, Hocine Aït Ahmed and Albert Memmi
4. See especially Benjamin Stora, 'Deuxième guerre algérienne: Les habits anciens des combattants', originally published in Les Temps modernes (janvier 1995)
5. and republished in his valuable collection of essays, L'Algérie en 1995: La guerre, l'histoire, la politique (Paris: Éditions Michalon, 1995)
6. This is a point forcefully made in Tony Judt, 'The Lost World of Albert Camus', The New York Review of Books, 6 October 1994
7. Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 6
8. Albert Camus, The First Man (New York: Knopf, 1995), vi
9. Bernard Fauconnier, 'Camus: une enfance en Algérie', Magazine littéraire, no. 322, juin 1994
10. 'The Fall', by Conor Cruise O'Brien, The New Republic, 16 October 1995, 44
11. The following remarks rely heavily on Harvey A. Kaplan's 'The psychopathology of nostalgia', The Psychoanalytic Review, lxxiv (4) (Winter 1987)
12. Renalto Rosaldo, 'Imperialist nostalgia', Representations, xxvi (Spring 1989), 108
13. Edward Said, 'Camus and the French imperial experience', Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Page references to this work are given as parentheses within the text
14. See Roger Quilliot's classic study of this dimension in 'The anguish of Algeria' in The Sea and Prisons (University of Alabama Press, 1970)
15. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1963), 60-1
16. Several stories from L'Exil et le royaume are particularly held open to this accusation. However, for an alternative reading of these, which argues that Algeria is presented in Camus's stories 'as a land in which no one can legitimately claim to be master and no one is destined to be slave', see David Carroll, 'Camus's Algeria: birthrights, colonial injustice, and the fiction of a French-Algerian people' in Modern Language Notes, September 1997
17. As Jean Sarocchi observes in his compelling study, Le Dernier Camus ou Le Premier Homme: 'Le Premier Homme est un texte inconcevable à la période des certitudes coloniales, quand Eugène Etienne prête à l'hagiographie. Il germe dans le moment où l'Algérie française se désagrège, et reçoit sa force germinale d'une obscure volonté de conjurer par l'écriture l'événement.' (Paris: Librarie A.-G. Nizet, 1995), 259-60. I return to Sarocchi's book later in the text
18. Notable exceptions include Judt, op.cit., Patrick McCarthy, 'The pied-noir story', TLS, 24 June 1994
19. and Jeanyves Guérin, 'Des Chroniques algériennes au Premier Homme', Esprit, May 1995
20. Conor Cruise O'Brien, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa (New York: Viking, 1970)
21. I have used Said's translation of this statement which seems to me closer in spirit to the French original. 'Camus and the French imperial experience', op.cit., 217
22. This view is firmly expressed by the esteemed historian of French colonization, Charles-André Julien, in his introduction to Pierre Nora's Les Français d'Algérie (Paris: René Julliard, 1961). After a brief survey of the historical existence of Algerian nationhood, he concludes: 'La nation algérienne s'est forgée dans la lutte qui lui a donné conscience de son originalité et de son unité.' (:34)
23. See Walzer's essay, 'Albert Camus's Algerian War' in The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 146
24. 'Algeria 1958', 144
25. The phrase is from the 'Avant Propos' to Actuelles III: Chroniques algériennes, 1939-1958 (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 23
26. O'Brien, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa, 6
27. The term is Pierre Bourdieu's in his classic sociological study of the Algerian economy and society, The Algerians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962)
28. For lucid - but contrasting - interpretations of Camus's racial sensibility see Susan Tarrow, Exile from the Kingdom: A Political Rereading of Albert Camus (University of Alabama Press, 1985)
29. and Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954-62 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
30. An earlier discussion of Camus's attitude to the Muslim population can be found in Pierre Nora's Les Français d'Algérie (Paris: René Julliard, 1961). While generally sympathetic, Nora describes Camus as 'Français d'Algérie malgré tout' and cites L'Etranger as a symptomatic expression of the unconscious complexes that had led the pied-noir community to the brink of self-destruction
31. See Jeffrey Issac, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) for an insightful discussion of this point. In the first entry to the 'Notes et plans' [Notes and Sketches] appended to Le Premier Homme, Camus appears to respond to this charge of 'objective culpability' via an imaginary dialogue with an interlocutor who we construe to be a former Muslim friend-turned-FLN militant: Conversation sur le terrorisme: Objectivement elle est responsable (solidaire) Change d'adverbe ou je te frappe Quoi? Ne prends pas à l'Occident ce qu'il a de plus bête. Ne dis plus objectivement ou je te frappe. Pourquoi? Ta mère s'est elle couchée devant le train d'Alger-Oran? (le trolleybus). Je ne comprends pas. Le train a sauté, 4 enfants sonts morts. Ta mère n'a pas bougé. Si objectivement elle est quand même responsable, alors tu approuves qu'on fusille des otages. Elle ne savait pas. Celle-là non plus. Ne dis plus jamais objectivement. Reconnais qu'il y a des innocents ou je te tue toi aussi. Tu sais que je pourrai le faire. Oui, je t'ai vu. (:277)solidaire
32. See Sarocchi's Le Dernier Camus ou Le Premier Homme for an analysis which explores Camus's pied-noir allegiances with considerable insight. Sarocchi notes: 'Le Premier Homme soutient donc un plaidoyer. Sa teneur autobiographique ne se sépare pas d'une entreprise de justification grâce à laquelle une ethnie menacée devrait reconnaître, en-deça de ses droits ou de ses torts officiels, la qualité différentielle qui lui tient lieu d'hoirie.' 144-5
33. The term is borrowed from Stuart Hall in his analysis of Claire Denis's film Chocolat, an autobiographically-based story of Denis's childhood in colonial Cameroon. See D. Petrie (ed.) Screening Europe (London: BFI, 1992). But it is especially relevant to Cormery's account of his own birth, fantasized as the consequence of a loving union between his parents even though later in the novel he declares: ". . . at heart he did not even want to know what there had been between them, and so he had to give up on learning anything from [his mother].'
34. Pierre Nora, Les Français d'Algérie, 189
35. Le Dernier Camus ou Le Premier Homme, 146
36. Cf. Camus's referencing of de Bandicorn, Histoire de la colonisation de l'Algérie in 'Annexes', 269, and in the 'Notes et plans', 278
37. I have drawn on Jean Meyer, Jean Tarade, Annie Rey Golzeiguer et Jacques Thobie, Histoire de la France coloniale, Tome 1. Des origines à 1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991)
38. especially 'La colonisation de peuplement' and Denise Bouche, Histoire de la colonisation française, Tome 2. Flux et reflux 1815-1962 (Paris: Fayard, 1991), especially 'La colonisation algérienne et l'exportation de la crise'
39. Quoted by Daniel Leconte in Les Pieds-noirs: Histoire et portrait d'une communauté (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 61. These emigrants should be distinguished from those republican political prisoners arrested following the June uprising who formed part of the first penal colony established in Algeria, and who were soon to be followed by those condemned following the coup d'état of 1852. These prisoners were amnestied in 1859 and for the most part returned to France
40. See Histoire de la colonisation, op. cit., 151
41. In Histoire de la colonisation française, it is noted that one-sixth died soon after arrival and a third made a rapid return to France, 151
42. Quoted by Leconte, op.cit
43. Histoire de la France coloniale, 416
44. See Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l'Algérie contemporaine, Vol. 1: La conquête et les débuts de la colonisation (1827-1871) (Paris: PUF, 1964), 344
45. Charles-Robert Ageron, 'Français, juifs et musulmans: l'union impossible' in L'Algérie des Français (Paris: Seuil, 1993)
46. Sarocchi makes a similar case when he notes: 'En effet seule la médiation paternelle ouvre à Camus la juste perspective sur l'histoire de la colonie.' Le Dernier Camus ou La Premier Homme, 146