Podcast "The Black Feet of Algeria: Colonization for Memory" on France Culture. The Pain of Exile

FRANCE CULTURE – PODCAST – THE DOCUMENTARY SERIES

Marceau Vassy, ​​the author of this sensitive documentary series, explains in the preamble the reason and meaning of his work: "My mother is a pied-noir: she had to leave the land that was hers but which belonged to another people (...). I want to reconstruct the puzzle of a community, that of the pieds-noirs of Algeria and that of their descendants." And it is both these and these that Marceau Vassy has chosen to make widely heard, from the first part. An episode where the words "exile," "uprooting," "trauma" resonate strongly. Born in France in 1962 to parents from Oran, and today involved in the G2T, a think tank on the transmission of pied-noir culture, Anne-Marie Perez admits: "What is very complicated for us is to say where we come from."

The following episode is the most directly and largely historical, focusing on the year 1962. Abuses and attacks committed by the National Liberation Front and the Secret Armed Organization were on the rise. On July 5, 1962, Algerian Independence Day , pieds-noirs were killed by a crowd in Oran – their number is still uncertain. The slogan "The suitcase or the coffin" was literal, and in 1962 alone, 650,000 French people from Algeria left the country in chaos. In France, they were often frowned upon. Worse, when they arrived in Marseille, the mayor at the time, the socialist Gaston Defferre, uttered these terrible words: "French people from Algeria, go get rehabilitated elsewhere."

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