Overview

Over the course of the Great War, a quarter of million settlers and subjects from Algeria served in French forces. Thousands more crossed the Mediterranean to work in the war industries of metropolitan France. On the Algerian Home Front, men, women, and children of all ethnic, religious, social, and political backgrounds contributed to the imperial war effort. Mobilising Memory is the first study to explore how the mass mobilisation of Algerian society during the First World War transformed politics in the colony. It asks how actors across the colony's racial, ideological, and class divides sought to legitimise their competing visions for Algeria's future by evoking their wartime service. Without diminishing the coercive power of the colonial state, it stresses the agency of the citizens and subjects of Algeria who sought to leverage their contribution to the war to enhance their positions within colonial society. In doing so, Mobilising Memory explores the consequences, often unintended, of framing political, social, and economic demands in a language rooted in the experience of the Great War. It argues that the predominance of this shared political language - grounded in notions of loyalty to and sacrifice for France - meant that most actors in interwar Algeria sought not to break with the Empire but rather to renegotiate their place within it. While these efforts rarely proved successful, the volume demonstrates how they radically reshaped the practice of politics in the colony.

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9780198831686

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Hassett's book is concise but well-researched, informative and sincere. ... the book is a valuable addition to the increasingly intersectional works on the colonial and military history of the twentieth century * Sneha Reddy, War in History *

Author Information

Dónal Hassett is Lecturer in French at University College Cork. Originally from Dublin, he holds a BA and MPhil in European Studies from Trinity College. He completed his PhD in history at the European University Institute in Florence. He subsequently spent two years working as Lecturer in French Political and Cultural History at the University of Bristol before taking up his current role in Cork. His research focuses on the political, social, and cultural legacies of conflict in the French colonial empire.

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