1Muriel Cohen’s book contributes to a burgeoning scholarship about Algerians’ place in France in the 20th century. It is part of a historiography that grapples with France’s troubled and troubling history as an imperial nation state. Cohen identifies her goal “to bring out the uniqueness of Algerian family immigration” by considering both their interaction with the state and the “multiple pathways” they took (p. 22). In other words, she reminds us that Algerians’ experiences have been more diverse than depictions—in the media and in political circles—have allowed.
- 1 Her book misses some critical anglophone work, including Nasali (2016), Franklin (2017) and Harris (...)
2Cohen’s work traces the medium durée (p. 19) from the end of World War II through the early Mitterrand administration. It builds on previous scholarship.1 Structurally, the book has three sections which follow chronologically. The first examines the period of the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962). Her chapters focus on key problems the French administration identified—housing, social services, and education—via a case study of bidonvilles west of Paris. As a result, Cohen convincing demonstrates the “diversity” of Algerians’ experiences in Nanterre (p. 157).
- 2 Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, Cohen’s dissertation advisor, led a team that conducted the oral histo (...)
- 3 Hervo’s archive is preserved at the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHTP): https://www.ihtp.c (...)
3While Cohen did extensive research in governmental archives, her use of two archival collections allows readers to see this diversity through the voices, experiences, and even images of Algerians who persevered in the bidonvilles. The first, which to my knowledge has not been previously used in a scholarly monograph, is a collection of precious oral histories with Algerians who lived in Nanterre.2 The other is Cohen’s effective use of Monique Hervo’s archive.3 Beyond her memoir, Hervo conserved a portion of her records. For many years, Hervo hesitated to have her photographs published, worried that she would betray the privacy of these families. But I think Hervo, Cohen, and the publisher ultimately made an excellent decision to share Hervo’s portraits of these families, their homes, and their daily lives with the world. They offer powerful evidence that celebrates Algerians’ integral place in France and pushes back against rhetoric that erases Muslims’ long roots in the metropole. These photos, like Cohen’s book, help us to see Algerians as regular families who made lives for themselves even as they have faced institutional discrimination.
4In the second part, Cohen uses housing to examine how the state managed Algerian family settlement or reunification—a term associated with the idea that this process began in earnest after the global economic downturn of the mid-1970s. She frames her analysis in the question of whether Algerian families became “foreign families like others from the point of view of immigration institutions” (p. 163) following the collapse of French colonial rule. Over three chapters, Cohen demonstrates how French authorities worked to limit the instillation of Algerian families by successively increasing the bureaucratic hoops through which they had to jump. The state “mobilized” the issue of housing to regulate Algerian family settlement, making housing a “principal instrument of the policy to limit Algerian family immigration” (p. 201). Many families, particularly those who had lived in bidonvilles and in the transitional housing parks, faced “ethno-spatial segregation” (p. 220) “inherited from the colonial period” (p. 231). On the other hand, Cohen traced seven hundred families who settled in the Hauts-de-Seine after the war. They found better housing due to help from other Algerians (from extended family or people from the same region or town). These families navigated new selection policies, which rested on housing certificates and the male head of household’s stable work at large, national companies. Again, Cohen shows the diversity of experiences, and concludes that some Algerian families, despite bureaucratic efforts to prevent permanent integration, became a part of their communities by the early 1970s. They existed; “they remained invisible” (p. 288).
5Not surprisingly, given Cohen’s conclusion about Algerians who quietly acquired better housing, stable work, and became increasing integrated, the third section of her book takes welcome aim at the durable myth of family reunification. Tearing it to pieces, Cohen makes clear that the context of the border closure in 1974, the global economic downturn, and the rise of “anti-Arab racism” (p. 291) are the keys to unraveling the myth. In her final chapters, Cohen argues Algerian families, who increasingly became a part of France’s working and even middle classes, put down roots, and improved their economic situation during the booming economy of the 1960s. During the latter part of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, new economic hardships and rising public hostilities destroyed the stability that some Algerians had begun to acquire and made the most fragile families the most visible. To explain the creation and durability of the myth, Cohen argues that contemporary observers, including experts and the media, did not see Algerian families settled since the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, state, scholarly, and popular depictions created the dominant vision of Algerians based on the most visible : new arrivals, rebellious unemployed young men, and families living in dilapidated, aging, suburban housing enclaves.
6In the end, Cohen’s effort to demonstrate how families became vehicles for integration fits with the larger body of scholarship, and allows her to trace how Algerian families, often quietly, inserted themselves into French society even as they grappled with institutional discriminatory practices. Here lies what Cohen aptly calls the central paradox of this story: Algerian families have been at once depicted as inassimilable even as, once we dig in, we learn they are “deeply rooted” in France (p. 22). Her work shows, even if she does not frame it as such, that France cannot avoid its own history of racial discrimination, it cannot continue to pretend that race is not a constituent element of the social landscape. As Vergès (2020) has argued, the experiences of women of color in France lays bare the “racialist dimension of republican postcoloniality”. The state’s management of Algerians, particularly after 1962 “illuminates the coloniality of power” long after the official end of colonial control (Vergès, 2020: 3; 46). Cohen’s research reminds us that claims of universality and secularism do not shield France from discriminatory practices. Instead, both attempt to paper over institutional discrimination. Finally, it is vital that work like Cohen’s is published in French, so it becomes part of larger conversations that push back on the myth of family reunification in the 1970s and on the myth that racism is not central to France’s past or its present.