Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Algeria's war of national liberation (1954–1962) represented a decisive event in the struggle of African and Asian peoples to overcome European colonial rule and achieve political independence free of external control. Yet its bloody character and revolutionary scope left a legacy of political disorder and sociocultural chaos with which Algerians continue to struggle. Indeed, some believe that Algeria's current civil war, involving deadly combat between Islamic radicals and an authoritarian regime that has cost the lives of nearly 150,000, is but a continuation of that country's ongoing effort to overcome its destructive past and reconstitute a viable national identity capable of integrating state and society into a meaningful whole.

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France, too, continues to suffer from the legacy of its 132 years of colonial occupation—more so than those who sought to explain, excuse, justify, and/or rationalize that experience. France's intellectual class was instrumental in contextualizing and deconstructing the Algerian war in ways that dovetailed with its own historical predilections and philosophical biases. In the process, that privileged elite revealed many internal contradictions, including hypocrisies, duplicities, inconsistencies, and plain cruelties. In this eloquent elaboration of the "uncivil war" taking place between as well as within French and Franco-Algerian intellectual circles, James D. Le Sueur provides both an intellectual history and an intimate profile of the people who struggled to reconcile the competing images that French Algeria and then independent Algeria came to represent.

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