Of all the many outcomes of the post-1945 liberation of dozens of African and Asian peoples and territories, the sanctification this phenomenon gave to the nation-state model is perhaps the most durable and successful.^[1] In the 1940s and 1950s, the pressing weight of world wars, the rise and defeat of fascist ideologies and governments, and then the emergence of new international rules, laws, and organizations had widely discredited the liberal promise of a world of nation-states. Political projects premised outside of this model were the norm, whether among European federalists and reformers working to unify (Western) Europe and to transform empires into something different, such as “Eurafrica,” the French Union, or the British Commonwealth, or, from the imperial margins, on the part of Pan-Africanists, Pan-Arabists, and Marxists of various stripes, hoping to build new connections after they had toppled empires. The opposite certainty, that all overseas colonies were destined to become independent states through a structural process termed “decolonization,” first took hold in French discussions about how to end the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). It subsequently sidelined previous claims, articulated in different forms by all sides, about the particular struggles and histories that were at stake across the globe.^[2]
The playing out of what many commentators have seen as a new wave of decolonization, the post-1989 collapse of socialist federal states, has reinforced this development. This movement could have inspired a reexamination of the limits of teleological analyses of the decolonization of European overseas empires, which presume that territories that were part of empires become nation-states. Instead, the potent and troublesome analogy of the “decolonization” of the Soviet “Empire” has encouraged commentators to treat the (mid-twentieth century) “heroic age” of decolonization’s failed promises – the invention of new and more egalitarian economic relations; the extension of “freedom” to people across the globe; or “to change the order of the world,” in Frantz Fanon’s phrase – as merely the best forgotten echoes of now discredited Marxian utopianisms. Corrupt regimes, stultifying bureaucracies, dictatorships, and bankrupt economies, we are led to understand, resulted from this incantatory aspect of decolonization. The undeniable (legal) fact of newly independent nation-states emerging from the decay and collapse of empires, luckily, permits us to continue to narrate decolonization as part of the onward march of progress.^[3]

DECOLONIZATION AND THE NATION-STATE PROBLEM OF COMPARATIVE HISTORY

By treating decolonization as at once inevitable and reducing its actors to homologous units and their leaders – nation-states that either had to (re)gain independence (e.g., India, Algeria, the Ukraine) or those that the establishment of imperial structures to exercise control over “foreign” lands and peoples had led astray from their true national character (e.g., England/Britain, France, Russia) – histories of decolonization have exemplified several troubling aspects of comparativist historical methodology. As its most trenchant critics have shown, self-avowedly comparative histories tend to suppress connections in order to analyze contrasts. Comparisons between nation-states, in particular, obfuscate links between people and institutions that cross national boundaries. Further, the comparativist impulse to explore distinctions and similarities between two or more discrete nation-states often works to anchor and naturalize the idea that such objects are best understood as separate, almost self-contained. In this way, comparison effaces the act of affirming connections – analogies, resemblances, special relationships, or oppositions: the politics of comparison – that such studies depend on.^[4]
The risk with both comparativist approaches and much current work on the so-called end of empires is, of course, misunderstanding the histories in question. The embrace by most historians of decolonization of what I elsewhere have termed the “tide of History” thesis, which emerged from French efforts to get out of Algeria, does more than obscure agency and historical specificity. Fixated on the dozens of case studies that decolonized, which is to say achieved national independence, it impedes attention to transnational phenomena. Concurrently, it imports into historical analyses the contextually-specific ideological stakes that produced this argument: a novel and widely shared French desire to end direct rule over Algeria without admitting either that France (and French “universalist” explanations for why Algeria was French) had failed, or that Algerian nationalists had won.
Etienne Balibar, in a reflection on French-Algerian connections, compellingly defines what is at stake in contemporary reiterations of the contingent truths about group difference that, by legitimating independence for most (overseas) colonies, did allow some measures of freedom, equality, and human dignity to emerge from mid-twentieth century anti-colonial struggles. In an essay on “Algeria and France, One Nation or Two?” he recognizes that it was vitally important to reject the claims of French imperialists, and French law, that Algeria was simply an element of the French Republic, its people necessarily subsumed into the French nation. It is now, however, equally important to critique presumptions that France and Algeria have two wholly distinct histories, or that they are two undeniably different nations. As he writes, “over time, decolonization has transformed the false simplicity of one and the same into the false simplicity of two.” Current pretensions that France and Algeria are and were simply “two wholly distinct nations,” Balibar reminds us, impede analysis of how formative colonialism was for France and Algeria, “its impact on the so-called West as well as on colonized peoples.”^[5]
More broadly, this legacy of how decolonization is understood has contributed to purging modern European history of its foundational connections to the peoples, territories, and resources outside of Europe, most particularly those that were under direct European control until the late twentieth century. Connections within “Europe,” which sometimes invoke geography, oftentimes existing institutions (the European Union; the Council of Europe), and, increasingly, a shared “civilization,” heritage, or background, are now regularly included in efforts to rethink the past as well as in discussions of the future.^[6] It is along the Mediterranean Sea, which just decades ago was projected as a bridge that would allow the conjoined construction of Europe and Africa to replace European colonial domination, that the boundary appears to be drawn most definitively.^[7]
To explore how this “false simplicity of two” emerged in practice – and on the post-1945 model of encouraging “racial thinking without ‘race’” that Balibar has explored elsewhere^[8] – this article fixates on a story of migration and frontiers, topoï that facilitate thinking about states and people without simply reproducing (national) claims of singularity, integrity, or necessary distinctions between this state and that. It analyzes how, in the months right after the French state and representatives of the Algerian National Liberation Front (F.L.N.) agreed to stop fighting and prepare for independence, French state officials sought, first, to encourage French citizens to remain in soon-to-be-independent Algeria in order, they presumed, to become Algerian citizens; and second, when confronted with the unexpected “exodus” of upwards of one million French citizens fleeing Algeria, embraced familial and ethnic descriptions to explain why some French citizens (“Europeans”) could be repatriated home to continental France, while others (“of Muslims origin”) should stay put in Algeria. In the context of this article, I am most interested in how bureaucrats and politicians stopped, although tacitly and only briefly, relying on certain legal definitions of who was French, which Algerian nationalists had rendered untenable; and instead relied on “origins” and, more specifically, on the difference between “European” and “Muslim” origins to explain which of its citizens the Fifth Republic and other French people should treat as French.
In contemporary France, the legal category of “repatriates” is closely tied to images, lobbies, biographies, and histories that concern people from Algeria, specifically the close to one million so-called Europeans who left in 1962, when direct French control of its most important overseas colony came to an end. Yet the French government first defined the term “repatriate” (derived from the verb “to bring back to the country of origin”) to name people who were not from Algeria. Throughout the 1950s, in Egypt, Pondichéry, Indochina, and then in other colonies and protectorates where anti-colonial agitation ended or diminished direct French domination, French government decisions obligated most “overseas French” to leave their homes.^[9] Among officials in Paris, these officially incited and desired repatriations were the object of concern and, occasionally, action. It was in the name of helping these people from already decolonized areas that, in fall 1961, the government acted to establish a legal definition of “repatriate status.”
Public explanations in the French Parliament that preceded the December 1961 approval of the so-called Boulin Law on Repatriate Status contained almost no references to Algeria. The only legislators who did invoke Algeria were those who opposed the law, on the grounds that it was yet another Gaullist subterfuge on the road to the abandonment of French Algeria. The law was in fact meant to address the Algerian situation, to help put an end to the now seven-year long Algerian Revolution, and to prepare for a cease-fire with Algerian nationalists and eventual Algerian independence.^[10] The Evian Accords – the agreement for an immediate cease-fire and on measures that would quickly lead to Algerian independence – formalized these efforts less than three months later on March 18, 1962. To focus on the debate manqué as evidence of Gaullist subterfuge, however, would ignore the more important reasons why Algeria was not part of the Boulin Law debates. Unlike with previous repatriations, which they thought of as necessary elements of government efforts to manage the French retreat from overseas empire, officials’ attempts to make plans for potential repatriates from Algeria sought to dramatically reduce, and hopefully avoid, any departures from Algeria. Government planners, in considering eventual repatriates from Algeria, were consistent with official thinking about Algeria since the 1830s: Algeria was a wholly unique overseas possession.
Repatriate status was announced as helping people from former colonies as they returned to their French homeland. It was meant, in fact, to prevent French citizens in Algeria from coming back to continental France (the metropole). To be more explicit, the government wanted to guarantee that the vast majority of so-called European Algerians – the amalgam of people whose ancestors had come to Algeria from France, Malta, Italy, and Spain since the French invasion of 1830, as well as various Jewish migrations, most importantly of Sephardim after 1492 – would remain in Algeria after independence. Government planners saw the establishment of repatriate status as a way to reassure this group of some one million people (who had, by the last years of the war, become more widely know as pieds noirs) that, because they would be welcome to the metropole, they did not have to come. As one haut functionnaire remarked: “The certainty given to French people who feel threatened in Algeria that they will find an efficient welcome, available housing and, above all, the possibility of [jobs], would work to calm the distress of most of them.” To deal with the evident contradictions government experts discerned in planning this aspect of Algeria’s future, the office of Minister of State for Algerian Affairs prepared a special repatriate status so as to “intervene at the governmental level in order to ameliorate” the spotty assistance afforded to repatriates from Tunisia, Morocco, and elsewhere. In addressing the situation of people who had already left decolonized French colonies, the note summarizing the Minister’s concerns continued, “the apprehensions of our compatriots from Algeria over their future situation” will be “calmed.” Repatriate status, then, was first and foremost a guarantee, meant to placate people in Algeria, and not the important category of political and social identity it would become.^[11]
In conjunction with widespread certainty that this and other guarantees would succeed in keeping almost all “Europeans” in Algeria, official discussions of repatriate status, and the Boulin Law of 1961, made no distinction among potential repatriates based on national origin, ethnicity, race, or religion, hewing to republican “color-blindness.” By avoiding any invocation of questions of national origin, ethnicity, race, or religion, discussions of repatriate status, like other preparations for Algerian independence, avoided any explicit engagement with the central argument of die-hard supporters of keeping Algeria French: Algerian territory, unlike other colonies, was legally an extension of the French Republic; since 1865, French law proclaimed all Algerians to be French nationals; after World War II, they were given citizenship; finally, in trying to combat the Algerian revolution, the Fifth Republic in 1958 had extended political rights equal to other French citizens to all Algerians, Europeans and the Arab and Berber majority (people official texts usually referred to as “Muslims”). Which is to say that when government officials sought to encourage Algeria’s one million Europeans to stay in Algeria, they simply acted as if all of Algeria’s eight million “Muslim French citizens” would also stay in Algeria. Officials, in fact, presumed that all of them, Europeans and “Muslims,” would become Algerians if they would remain in what was to become the Algerian Republic.
Yet with everyone certain that Algeria and Algerians were not French, nothing had been done to exclude them from France or from citizenship. The exodus, which confounded official explanations, not only altered this situation: in its response, the French Republic altered its post-1889 commitment to legal definitions of citizenship that ignored “ethnicity” or “race” to embrace a definition of national belonging limited to “Europeans.” Between mid-April and September 1962, a chaotic rush to escape Algeria – a migration that commentators immediately named the “exodus” – brought close to one million people to continental France. No one in France predicted the exodus of the quasi-totality of so-called pieds noirs. Many people and organizations forecast what they considered large numbers of departures, yet even the most perceptive assumed that the majority would end up living in Algeria. An article on plans for “Operation Dunkirk” that France-Observateur published in summer 1961, for example, spoke of plans for a massive air- and sea-lift to bring back almost all French Algerians, but made clear that they meant only the minority of “Europeans” who had “French” ancestry, rather than those with Spanish, Jewish, Italian, Maltese, or other ancestors. The subtitle of a magazine article in the summer of 1962, “From Predictions (400,000 Repatriates in Four Years in 90 Departments) to Reality (400,000 Repatriates in Four Weeks in Four Departments),” gives a sense of the distance between what was planned for and what happened.^[12]

RECOGNIZING THE EXODUS

The arrest of Raoul Salan, former French general and leader of the O.A.S. (the terrorist organization, which since spring 1961 had fought to keep Algeria French) marks, empirically and symbolically, the beginning of what would be recognized not as a variety of discrete phenomena but rather as an event: the exodus. Empirically because, from 20 April on, what would prove to be definitive departures to the metropole went up markedly and “continued with no slow-downs” until the exodus ended.^[13] As a year-end chronicle asked: “Coincidence or consequence? On 21 April 1962, and for the first time ever, the constabulary had to refuse entrance to the Maison-Blanche airport, where numerous Algérois [inhabitants of Algiers] sought to board. Two thousand people were able to leave. The rest, pushed back, camped in their cars...”^[14] Symbolically, because Salan’s arrest not only removed the individual who had embodied popular hopes for the victory of the forces supporting French Algeria, it also ended “European” certainty that this fight would triumph.
After Salan’s capture, the exodus began, did not stop, and was definitive. Even in the midst of the exodus, however, French officials’ belief that the pieds noirs necessarily would remain in Algeria was tenacious. Gendarmerie Commander Koch reported that departures towards the metropole were “primarily women and children. The head of the family generally stays behind.” His attention to pied noir men, he made clear, was a hopeful sign that those who had left would return.^[15] The government continued to believe that repatriate status would encourage most who had fled Algeria in fear to return and, more important, that official presumptions about what “Europeans” wanted were correct. After their vacations, politicians and press secretaries repeated, “Algerians” (by which they meant “Europeans”) would return to their now independent homeland, which was Algeria and not France. Even internal government documents referred straight-forwardly to vacations, perhaps envisioning the summer as a cooling down period. In late May, the Oran prefecture, calling attention to the masses of people “descending on the port of Oran and waiting day and night on the docks,” urged the Minister of the Interior “to organize the transportation to France of thousands of women and children for summer vacation.” Others, although asserting that Europeans were “pretending to go on summer vacation” in order “to save face,” still drew attention to “their hope that they will be able to return.”^[16]
Just as experts in the Hexagon continued to plan on no more than 300,000 repatriates from Algeria staying for good in Europe, official reports from Algeria maintained that, as the head of Gendarmes in Oran wrote in early June, “Although many Europeans try to convince themselves that staying in an independent Algeria is impossible, it is certain that in their heart of hearts they hope to stay.” Noting the “massive exodus of Europeans towards the metropole,” he highlighted the “small number of them who declare that they are giving up and leaving definitively.”^[17] In July 1962, the Coordinating Commission for the Reinstallation of Overseas French did insist that “it seems reasonable to expect that some 50% of civil servants... will reinstall themselves in the metropole.” This reasonable estimate was made despite the fact that 80% of civil servants working in Algeria had already requested a transfer to the metropole. Once the current “climate” had passed, the Commission presaged, the conditions for most civil servants to remain in Algeria would reassert themselves.^[18]

“THE MASSIVE EFFORT ASKED OF THE NATION”

On May 30th, an SFIO (Socialist) deputy insisted in the National Assembly that what was occurring was an “exodus... The truth is, there is a wave of panic sweeping over Algeria. Why deny it?,” he questioned Gerard Wolff, Secretary of State for Repatriates, “everyone wants to leave.”^[19] At the 23 May cabinet-level meeting which prepared for this debate, Wolff had told his colleagues that “at this time the situation has changed profoundly.” Now, and in the months to come, “circumstances lead us to predict massive arrivals at a rhythm that could easily be greater than 100,000 to 150,000 per month.”^[20]
The Pompidou Government immediately had decided that its most important task was shaping public understandings of what was going on, rather than committing resources or elaborating new measures. At the 23 May cabinet-level meeting, after enumerating the diverse measures that had or needed to be taken (and paid for), Secretary for Repatriates Wolff emphasized that “for psychological and political reasons” it now was “essential to go before the Parliament to detail the massive effort asked of the Nation.” What was most important, Wolff reiterated, was not what was going to be done: in addressing the National Assembly, the goal was to prevent the legislators from demanding that more be done – or more money spent – than the government recommended. As he said, “any other policy” except appealing to “the Nation” in apocalyptic terms “might lead the Assembly to reject the budget we propose as ridiculously small.”^[21]
There was widespread and powerful resistance to taking any action to assist the repatriates. The archives of two interministerial committees chaired by President de Gaulle reveal the intense conflict among the Fifth Republic’s leaders over the way to respond. As Alain Peyrefitte reminds us, de Gaulle was someone who simply did not believe people from Algeria could be made French; he considered the “pieds noirs” only slightly more French than Algerian “Muslims.” Many on the left drew attention to potential political violence. Socialist (S.F.I.O.) leaders were, according to domestic intelligence reports, “preoccupied” by “the problems posed by the repatriation of refugees from North Africa,” while the C.F.T.C. (left Christian) union warned its locals to be on guard against the threat of “infiltration by repatriates.” A Communist deputy warned against letting “the retreated from Algeria become a reservoir of fascism.” In France-Observateur, the letters to the editor page was filled each week of early 1962 with criticisms of the pieds noirs, the repatriates, and what many readers felt was the left-leaning weekly’s too sympathetic coverage of their situation. Mr. H. C. from Paris, “one of your earliest subscribers,” questioned whether the “exodus” was well founded, given that “the French government has done everything to guarantee their safety and their property.” Opposed to assisting the repatriates, he worried that they would “reinforce metropolitan [O.A.S.] activism, which the press tells us is growing stronger and more violent.” Finally, during the summer of 1962, much of the popular press identified the repatriates as the source of a wave of banditry in the south and around Paris. Against such concerns and fears, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou successfully played on de Gaulle’s concerns about political upheaval to overcome scorn for the pieds noirs and to establish a more varied response to the exodus.^[22]
The plans officials put in place under duress, which did allow most European arrivals to receive some measure of aid, worked most efficiently to eliminate the complicated set of definitions and structures that had emerged since the conquest of Algiers in 1830, and in particular since 1958. In place of existing subtle subsets of French citizens – with Koranic Status, with double nationality, protected by European minority status, etc. – the government embraced a simple division between “Algerians” and “French.” The former were “Muslims” – a term that never appeared in official reports as a religion but always in reference to the majority “community” in Algeria – the latter were not. These categories did not accurately capture some obvious reality, and they did not respect republican principles, nor French law. They did, however, meet the needs of a metropolitan population, which had tired of trying to figure out what was happening with Algeria, for easily understandable – indeed, “commonsensical” – distinctions between “us” and “them.”
The abrupt transformation of the application of repatriate status captures this effort to clarify who was French. On 2 April 1962 the government had extended the status of “repatriate” to people who arrived in the metropole from Algeria.^[23] While the December 1961 law which had created the category “repatriates” did so in the name of standardizing treatment, it had in fact individualized the process of obtaining benefits: potential repatriates would need to prove that they left under duress in order to receive full assistance. Officials in the metropole were to assess each case and this judgment would directly affect the amount of benefits for which each repatriate was eligible. The exodus destroyed this individualized system, creating a uniform class of “repatriates from Algeria.” All repatriates now were eligible to receive specified benefits. As distinctions within repatriate status disappeared, the division that emerged instead was between those inside and those outside of membership. “Repatriates” came to refer almost exclusively to “Europeans,” while “Muslims” became “refugees.”^[24]
The government responded to the exodus of “Europeans” with an ardent reaffirmation of the classic French theory of assimilationism and its corresponding policies. French authorities at all levels reiterated this principle and made clear their reasoning: the need to avoid the danger of any “pied noir community” emerging in the metropole. Some articulated this imperative as necessary to overcome bitterness and home-sickness (“le mal de pays”), while others feared the implantation of a far-right pro-O.A.S. constituency in the nation. Both positions shared the same remedy: economic assimilation. Published proposals and popular discussions of the repatriates repeatedly raised cultural problems to the assimilation of a “Mediterranean” and “colonial” population. To address this threat, policies were planned to avoid pied noir ghettos and to disperse families from Algeria. Officials worked, as one late August 1962 memo to de Gaulle explained, “to incite the repatriates to settle themselves throughout the metropole,” so that cultural and political particularities that might encourage a pied noir identity would melt away. It was, let us note, a presumption that closely paralleled the still present certainties that, if the pieds noirs would only return to Algeria, they would become Algerian.^[25]
Numerous journalists and commentators encouraged the government to act aggressively to assimilate the new arrivals. Philippe Hernandez, journalist at France-Observateur, explicitly linked a call for assimilation and anti-communitarian (more accurately, anti-corporatist) language. In April 1962, presenting a group interview with recently repatriated pieds noirs, the self-identified pied noir writer called on “Frenchmen” to “lend an ear,” to argue that “tomorrow, the thousands of pieds noirs who are going to arrive will group together and organize themselves because no one will help them, I don’t like that one bit.” He urged that action should be taken by the nation to address their problems because, as he wrote, “I would rather prefer that any future associations made up of French of Algeria have nothing better to do than to organize an annual cocktail party.”^[26]
Observers attributed responsibility for metropolitan resentment, dislike, or suspicion of the pieds noirs to the pieds noirs. Accusations varied; what one witness referred to as “the black legend of the ‘pied noir,’ vain and exploitative” – the bad colonist, in short – grounded certain accusations. A call for understanding published in the pages of France-Observateur inspired one reader to write that bad feelings between metropolitans and new arrivals could be avoided, “but on one condition: once he sails for France, the Pied Noir throws overboard his superiority complex, that of the colonist,” offering as an example “that driver with the 9A [Algiers] license-plate who, when I signaled for room to pass him, told me ‘I’m in the right!’ while hogging the middle of the road.” This complaint was joined by references to their use of the racial epithet bougnoule and similar belittling references to “Arabs.” It ended with the correspondent’s bitter memory of being “refused bottles of water by Pieds Noirs... during the long marches of our military service [during the Algerian War].”^[27] Even the most serious and thoughtful observers held any and all signs of pied noir “particularisme,” or difference, responsible for metropolitan reactions. One volunteer charged with organizing efforts to respond to the exodus argued that while “the misery and the disarray of most of those arriving today” largely had undermined the credibility of the “black legend,” to end it would necessitate “making ‘pied noir’ particularities disappear, on the one hand by breaking up all concentrations of refugees, on the other hand, by reregistering all automobiles brought over from Algeria as soon as they arrive.” Separate them one from another, and separate them from all signs that they were from Algeria: that way, French drivers, for example, would see rude drivers simply as bad citizens and not as emblematic of an “un-French” group of people, identifiable by their license plates.^[28]
Previously certain that Europeans would not leave, now faced with their total failure to convince them that they could remain French in Algeria, French officials encountered enormous difficulties in mobilizing transportation and accommodations to counter the “psychosis of the exodus.” Over the summer, the government put in place aggressive social and political responses to the exodus. The government, supported by a broad range of media sources, private agencies, and politicians, addressed metropolitan opinion to insist on the importance and the necessity of massive mobilization to help “French people in distress.” What, in the eyes of planners and officials, were the conditions that would make this population assimilable? What made them seem enough like other French people that assimilation would work? The pieds noirs were, after all, deeply distrusted and resented. It is a question that must be posed at the very moment that the Fifth Republic abandoned France’s most ambitious attempt at assimilation, that directed since 1830 at Algerian “Muslims.” It was not their status as citizens, this the history of the exodus makes clear: it was less their legal rights than the “European” origins they shared with metropolitan French people.
Press discussions of the exodus, joined by government policy choices, presented the “Europeans” of Algeria as part of the same family as other French people. To make this argument, representations of the “Europeans” themselves as part of normal, heterosexual families proved critical: this normalizing representation of gender relations countered earlier widely publicized media discussions of “European” Algeria as a male homosocial society that, in its perversion, bred male violence; representations that had shaped metropolitan rejection of the pieds noirs in the months leading up to the exodus.^[29]

PIED NOIR MEN INTO FRENCH FAMILIES: REAFFIRMING THE FRENCHNESS OF (EUROPEAN) REPATRIATES

Metropolitans and the French press were fixated on the exodus. The reactions varied enormously, although overall the press was much more welcoming than the people. The emerging official line, cobbled together once the collapse of all previous predictions became undeniable, urged metropolitans to welcome the pieds noirs. The mythic heterosexual family was the principal register that legitimated such appeals. Days after the “exodus” exploded, Paris-Match responded to “the announcement that some families from North Africa have begun to settle in the metropole.” The editors dragged old-time natalism out of its post-1945 “bébé boum” (baby boom) provoked retirement with an editorial titled “There are not enough French people.” The editors wrote that “today, economic progress depends on abundant manpower and the number of solvent consumers.” In these months, “Have confidence in the future,” the editorial’s final line, was the mantra of Match.^[30] Paris-Match consistently urged its readers to embrace “the repatriates of Algeria,” and its editorials, photos, captions and, less singularly, its articles struggled to fabricate “the friendship of French people for French people.”^[31] Every element of the photo-weekly’s 2 June cover worked to produce compassion: a blond baby holding a stuffed animal, a young, tall, dark (but not too dark) and handsome man, a young, petite, Jean Seberg-coiffed woman in a suede-vest, both in profile, leaning on a railing, eyes fixed on land. The headline reads “FRANCE, DOES SHE STILL LOVE US?,” with the promise of a “Major Report” not on, but “with the repatriates from Algeria.” The front-page caption explains “They met and were married in Algeria, he, a military man, she, pied noir. They were teachers, today they return to the coasts of the mиre patrie.” Who could think they were in any way connected with France’s enemies?^[32]
Images of “whole” families, men with women and children, were repeatedly produced to describe the people coming to France. While not historically unprecedented, the use of familial descriptions to explain official responses to the exodus was particularly intense, working to extricate O.A.S. from pieds noirs and acting to reinsert the latter in classic, comforting and hierarchized gender relations. Men joined their women and children in metropolitan France. The separation between men, fighting for the O.A.S. in Algeria, and women and children in France waiting to return to Algeria after their summer vacations, had too successfully contributed to metropolitan certainties that the pieds noirs were un-French. Both pro-government and pro-Algérie française deputies worked to distinguish the innocent French refugees flooding into the metropole from recent and vivid descriptions of violent anti-French fanatics, who like the refugees were “Europeans” and from Algeria. Deputies from all sides, except the far left, called for French fraternity and solidarity. One Gaullist deputy urged, “it is necessary for those who returned with pain in their souls, with bitterness on their lips, who are somewhat maladroit because they suffer – they must be welcomed like distressed members of the same family.” More than mere words, there was an institutional vector to this discursive deployment, as the State sought to cement depictions of the refugees as French families.^[33]
The government announced that its repatriation program had opened “15,000 dossiers for heads of families...,” “we have had 19,000 families, about 50,000 people... each head of family receives 50,000 old francs, each person in their charge 20,000.” One Algerian deputy called into question the functionality of such a system: “I would like the Minister for Repatriation to note that in order to receive these allocations, it is necessary that the head of the family be in the metropole. It would be just and it would be reasonable if these benefits were equally available to repatriated families where the head of the family has not come.”^[34] The genealogy of this dispute is compelling. Directing payments to the male head of the family was not the norm for French social spending. Only in the late 1930s, after the collapse of the Popular Front, did the Daladier government, under great pressure from the traditionalist Catholic and royalist right, began to utilize familial allocation. Earlier in the twentieth century, the French government had opted repeatedly to give money to needy mothers directly, whether married or not. Thus while the deputy’s complaints made sense within the recent history of France, their political origins were novel. The pro-French Algeria right, not the secular left, was calling for a policy that ignored family status.^[35]
Rather than a reflection of ahistorical privileging of the traditional familial order, or a choice made on the basis of efficiency, this criterion was forged in discursive necessity. Indeed, within weeks, certain payments to repatriates began to be distributed whether or not the male “head of the family” had arrived. Yet the government’s initial policy, insofar as it broke with standard practice, political and bureaucratic, suggests how critical it was for responses to the unexpected “exodus” of “Europeans” to present them as grouped in heterosexual families. Representations of the pieds noirs as deviant men had been widely convincing, understandings that offered vivid proof that they were not French and were a threat to France. To be male and pied noir was enough to be associated with “fascist” O.A.S. terror. Although French Algerian men on their own were undeniably citizens, legally entitled to enter the metropole, it was only as “heads of family” that they could be welcomed. In late 1961 and January 1962, government reports on departures from Algeria had specified how many of those concerned were “Israelites,” which reflected official concerns that Zionist groups were trying to scare Jewish Algerians into moving to Israel; in June and July 1962, domestic intelligence reports on “repatriates from Algeria arriving in France” distinguished the number of “men older than seventeen.”^[36]
Counter-representations that normalized these men as healthily heterosexual were at the heart of efforts to provoke metropolitan solidarity with people who although from Algeria were, it needed to be proven, French. This familial language worked to assert that the pieds noirs were directly linked to other French people, feeding into affirmations that they were “members of the same family.” Familial images were readily articulated to disentangle the mass of pieds noirs from the actions of the O.A.S. As one Algerian deputy noted: “Already, in spite of official declarations and proclaimed optimism from the higher ups, stories abound of facts that shame us... In Marseilles, the [repatriates] have to sleep on the roadside in front of packed hotels or ones that refuse to accept refugees.”^[37] Through the multiple resonances of familial imagery, the repatriates were positioned, not as violent, but as weak and child-like, and as profoundly French, all exemplified in the words of one deputy urging his audience to look at the exodus and understand:

“Today, you can see the French who arrive on the docks of Marseilles, or the grounds of our major airports, poor and often miserable, their only baggage several sacks in which they were able to save the modest belongings that, over there, was all they owned. You need only to look at them to know that these are lower middle class Frenchmen, little people for whom life consists of work, of effort, and suffering... do not forget that these French people, our compatriots, our brothers, are the children of those who went before, pushed more by the need to give [to France] than greed.”

The family – and above all the necessary place of males within it as fathers, brothers and even children – was a privileged trope, mobilized to cleanse the pieds noirs, in particular the men, of the O.A.S. stain and to guarantee their Frenchness. Familial discourse offered tentative resolution to one of the key questions the Algerian revolution forced France to address: who could be French and why?^[38]
The government’s response to the unexpected exodus and, perhaps more important, the explanations that shaped public discussions about these acts helped the French put the war – as well as the history of France in Algeria and as an empire – behind them. France had long defined itself as including territories across the globe, most particularly across the Mediterranean. This episode offered a clear explanation for why the country now was a (almost) wholly European “Hexagon.” The French people, the exodus demonstrated, were Europeans. Membership in the European family provided the reason for why people born on “foreign” soil and with roots from around the Mediterranean could be welcomed home to (continental) France. The dramatically different welcome given to tens of thousands of other people who had French nationality and came from Algeria further reinforces the suspicion that “organic” European-ness was more important than legal status in understanding French reactions to the exodus: in many of the very same boats that brought Europeans to metropolitan ports, Algerian “Muslims” who had worked with the French administration and armed forces to oppose independence and their families, the so-called harkis, arrived and were (when allowed to stay) quickly denied their legal rights as French citizens. They were instead treated as foreign “refugees,” and eventually asked to apply to re-obtain the French nationality they had been born with. Many more, those who could not leave, were identified as traitors and collaborators in Algeria and suffered imprisonment, torture, and, for tens of thousands, death.^[39]
“From Empire to Hexagon” was the title of one of the numerous books published in the 1970s and 1980s that harshly criticized France’s supposedly unnecessary 1962 “abandonment” of its Algerian departments; writing about the term “the Hexagon,” historian Eugen Weber identifies 1962 as the moment when it became widely used and understood as a synonym for France. Both references make legible how “decolonization” redefined the physical boundaries of the country, anchoring it on European soil. Similarly, my analysis of French official and popular responses to the exodus, which marked the end of France’s most important overseas colony, reveals how a definition of which people were French retracted inward from a definition that laws and history had expanded, to settle on grounds that might appear more natural, less open to debate. The exodus at the end of French Algeria saw the French marginalize legally-codified definitions of membership in the nation – citizenship – in order to rely on “organic” and familial versions of who could be French (Europeans). Doing so reinforced the new Mediterranean boundary between what had been two sets of French départements, the metropole and Algeria, by tracing a (commonsensical) frontier between groups of (legally) French people that aligned with the division between Europe and North Africa.^[40]
A France within Europe and made up of people of “European” origins: both claims were not wholly true then, and the second claim has became even less certain since. Yet such pretensions were, I argue, quite important in helping the French get out of their overseas entanglements and, in the short term, out of a bloody and vicious eight-year war that ended some thirteen decades of claims that parts of North Africa were part of France. Their usefulness then might now help us think about how the period of decolonization – when France became the type of nation-state that, historians tell us, the French Revolution had established as the universal norm – coincided with the inauguration (1957) and the reinvigoration (by de Gaulle, with Adenauer in 1962; and against Great Britain in 1963) of the European Community.
A vision of Europe as made of “Europeans” and, more specifically, not “Muslims,” not “North Africans,” contributed to an understanding of what Europe was supposed to be. Europe’s institutionalization, like that of the nation-states that participate in it, has been bound up with the work of circumscribing and defining who “Europeans” are in conjunction with deciding how they should be governed. A small number of historians and political scientists discuss what some have called the “colonial heritage” of the European Union (EU), or what the Dutch scholar Louis Sicking, writing about the first years of the European Economic Community (EEC), terms the “colonial echo.” Swedish political scientist Peo Hansen affirms that there is a veritable “bond between European integration and colonialism and decolonization” (although his evidence is more gestural than demonstrative).^[41] Moving away from an earlier focus on how or whether the EEC was neo-colonialist in its relation to now formally independent former colonies, more recent studies, which tend to focus on the end of the French Empire, attend to a “transfer” of understandings or personnel and practices from ex-colonies to the institutions of the Common Market. (Placing officials in Brussels was, of course, related to the much broader shift of functionaries from French overseas service into different metropolitan bureaucracies.^[42]) As with much of the recent historiography of European colonialism, this shift in focus from neo-colonialism to the “transfer” of personnel and practices reflects the scholarly turn away from explicitly economic questions towards more attention to the histories of institutions and discourse. Attending to how decolonization contributed both to fixing a (southern and Mediterranean) territorial boundary and in linking French national identity to the broader European family, offers new insight into how these institutional and discursive questions had real effects on subsequent European realities.
Carol Cosgrove’s 1969 discussion of the EEC’s “colonial heritage” begins with the affirmation that “the contemporary phenomenon of nationalism and, paradoxically, the concurrent move towards regional integration are unprecedented.” Yet today it seems clear that the deepening or loosening of European integration does not result from an international phenomena; rather, it is worth exploring the historically specific ways that have allowed “Europe,” alone among the various efforts at regional integration that flourished in the mid-twentieth century, to negotiate and survive in a world of nation-states. A comparative approach would investigate this development by taking various non-national state structures as case studies. What is necessary, instead, is close attention to the ebb and flow of frontiers and migrations, within as well as across established administrative boundaries. Such studies would suggest how global developments – for example, the world-wide debate about racism, imperialism, and inequality that in the 1950s and 1960s, however briefly, forced a redefinition of state practices and a questioning of national certainties in the United States and Europe, as well as in the so-called Third World – and local decisions and complications interacted, redefining who was the same as whom, who was different, and why, as well as shaping the institutions and practices of government.