Complicity and memory in soldiers’ testimonies of the Algerian war of decolonisation in Esprit and Les Temps modernes

Abstract

In the closing phase of the Algerian War in March 1962, Jean-Marie Domenach, director of the journal Esprit, upbraided his counterpart at Les Temps modernes, Jean-Paul Sartre, for failing to understand the greyness of most human actions and the pervasiveness of knots of complicity. Concern for the complexity of complicity was also apparent in Les Temps modernes circles, however, and it was precisely complicity, both in the form of violence of French troops and of the habituation or indifference of the broader French public, that editor Simone de Beauvoir termed a ‘tetanus of the imagination’. Strikingly, she suggested that a means of countering this affliction of getting used to the unconscionable were testimonies of soldiers returning from Algeria in both Les Temps modernes and Esprit. This article examines this mutual concern for the complexities of complicity and investigates its relationship to memory through the curious importance de Beauvoir placed on such testimonies in these two journals. The discussion looks at the mobilisation of the memory of the Second World War in these testimonies, including analogies with fascism and Nazism, and argues that, rather than merely fashionable hyperbole, they powerfully depicted a multifaceted crisis: in Algeria, of French youth, and of France itself. The second part of the article investigates the testimonies’ representation of military institutionalisation – including its detrimental effects on imagination and the facilitation of violence. These representations of systemic or institutional complicity are contextualised alongside scholarly claims that the Algerian war involved a renegotiation of the memory of Vichy France. I argue that the example of these testimonies calls for a qualification of such claims; though they prefigured later conceptions of a complicity memory trope, or ‘the grey zone’ of Vichy France, they did not override the dominant Second World War memory characterised by heroes and victims.