Images of the Algerian War

by Philip Dine

This is the first full-length survey in any language of the fiction and film generated in France by the Algerian war (1954 - 1962). Although part of a much wider process of decolonization, the conflict was so traumatic decolonization, the conflict was so traumatic that it brought France to the verge of civil war. Its memory continues to haunt French society today. Like America's experience in Vietnam, it has been understood as a paradigm of the collapse of Western certainties in the post-war period. Philip Dine's ground-breaking study examines the novels and films which deal with the war in an attempt to understand the lasting impact of the conflict. By locating texts within institutional and public discourses, it addresses issues of historical agency and ideological dissemination and casts light on the mechanics of literary mystification. Among the writers discussed are Camus, Etcherelli, Millecam, Peree, Cesbron, Clavel, Ikor, Larteguy, Saint-Laurent, and Jules Roy, and the book also