Caught between Two Worlds: The Europeans of Algeria in France after 1962

Renée1 was born in Algiers in 1907. She says little about her mother’s family, from Lyon, except that they settled in Algeria after going bank-rupt in France. About her father, who died when she was only five years old, she only knows that he was born in Algeria to a father who was a soldier and a mother who was an orphan. When I met her in France, she told me the history of her family, describing how, over the space of a few years, her family found itself caught up in the contradictions and paradoxes of a story that ended with their departure from Algeria in 1962. This departure, which she refers to as exile, is the focal point for her feeling of being suddenly deprived of the numerous ties of belonging that had linked her, like the other Algerian Europeans, to both France and Algeria, and relegated her, on both sides of the Mediterranean, to the status of foreigner.