“A well-written history, whatever its topic, is one that succeeds in making tangible the opacity and, as it were, the thickness of time.”
Georges Canguilhem, Pathologie et physiologie de la thyroïde au XIXe siècle, 1958
Introduction
On 13 November 2015, what has come to be known as the “Paris attacks” involved a peculiar pattern of coordination between suicide bombings at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, apparently random shootings in restaurants and cafés in the 10th and 11th arrondissements, and mass killings and hostage-taking at the Bataclan theater hall in Paris. At the trial for the attacks after six years of enquiry, the chief investigator put forward mobile telephony data to emphasize “one and the same crime scene.”Footnote 1 At 9:19pm, the ISIS-designated groupe Stade de France texted the groupe Omar to let them know that a first suicide bomber had just detonated his explosive belt outside the football stadium. This was the departure signal for the group led by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, alias Abu Omar al-Baljiki (“the Belgian”), charged with carrying out a string of attacks on café terraces. At exactly the same time the Omar group’s black SEAT car started to move down through the 10th arrondissement, a second suicide bomber blew himself up at the Stade de France. In the VIP stand, then-president François Hollande was attending a football match between France and Germany. By then, a third commando squad, the groupe français, had been waiting several hours for a start signal in a black Polo vehicle opposite the Bataclan. At 9:26, the Polo received a call from the same Belgian line which the last Stade de France bomber had phoned following the second suicide bombing. At 9:43pm, the groupe français sent the Brussels coordinator a last text message before throwing their phone in the trash can where investigators found it the next day: “On est partis. On commence.”Footnote 2
The point of the minute-by-minute coordination of attacks, the investigator testified, was to make sure to only strike the main target (in this case, the Bataclan) once first responders and police intervention units were already deployed in mass on other crime scenes to maximize the number of injured and dead victims. Further, the pattern of phone communication was typical of a scheme involving a “situation room” located abroad in Brussels and, at the highest level of command, in Syria. As he commented, the coordinated pattern of attacks was evocative of the attacks of 11 September 2001, on the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia, and the uncertain target of the fourth plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The comparison, however, stops short of explaining the distinctive character of 13 November, namely that all attackers were French or Belgian citizens except for the two Iraqi suicide bombers who, according to this scheme, played only a minor role. Issue no. 13 of the Islamic State-curated magazine Dabiq included a picture of the commandos who carried out the attacks under the headline “Just Terror.” In this imitation of the release poster for The Avengers, a 2012 American film based on the Marvel Comics superhero team, the “nine lions of the caliphate” are identified by their country of nationality: Abdelhamid Abaaoud is Abu Omar al-Baljiki (“the Belgian”), Foued Mohamed-Aggad is Abu Fuad al-Faransi (“the Frenchman”), and similarly for the two other members of the “French group” in charge of the main attack on the Bataclan. Thus, the 2015 attacks projected the longer arc of the “war on terror” in the shadow of France’s counterinsurgency war in Algeria.Footnote 3
But exactly how so? This essay is an attempt to provide an answer to this question, or perhaps more humbly to come up with a better way of asking it. It is an effort not to rely on familiar folds of the mind, but instead to “make tangible the opacity and, as it were, the thickness of time,” in Georges Canguilhem’s phrase. It does so by approaching the question of the trace of colonial pasts in the postcolonial present from an uncharted vantage point: that of reparation for victims. The fact that a sophisticated legal framework for reparation specific for casualties of terrorism existed in France prior to its activation again in the wake of the 2015 attacks has received scant consideration, scholarly or otherwise. And yet, there was a precedent to the aftermath of 2015. Between December 1985 and September 1986, Paris had been the scene of a previous campaign of bombings targeted at iconic sites, including bookstores in the quartier latin, the Tati discount store on the Rue de Rennes, and the Tour Eiffel. Fouad Ali Saleh, a French-Tunisian citizen, was found guilty of coordinating the bombings on French soil on behalf of Lebanese Hezbollah and a cluster of radical Islamic revival movements tied to the Iranian revolution from 1979. It was in this earlier conjuncture that the Prevention of Terrorism Act was adopted in September 1986, establishing the legal apparatus that has regulated the prevention and repression of terrorism in France ever since.Footnote 4 Crucially, the Act also provided for victims’ compensation under the aegis of the Fonds de Garantie des victimes de terrorisme (FGTI) following intense lobbying by Françoise Rudetzki, a prominent figure of victims’ rights who led the case for reparation specific for victims of terrorism from the early 1980s until she passed away in 2022.Footnote 5 But there is more to the French history of compensation for terrorist acts. Following the creation of FGTI, Rudetzki built on her initial success to further advocate for the adoption of the “civilian victim of war” status, a statute that was first introduced at the height of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) for casualties of what was then called “terrorism.”Footnote 6 In other words, most of the framework for victims’ reparation was ready and available long before the 2015 attacks, including the attacks on the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket on 7 and 9 January, 2015. From a scholarly point of view, that in turn means that this legal framework for terror reparation bears an exceptional testimony to the history of the postcolonial present.
Following the reparation statute as a tangible historical trace of the colonial past in the present, this article reconstitutes the different conjunctures, or “problem-spaces,” in which it was first drafted, amended, and rewritten again later on for revived use: the Algerian War in the 1950s; the campaign of bombings known as “Black September” in the 1980s; and the aftermath of 2015. David Scott conceptualizes “problem-spaces” as contexts of argument in which certain ways of asking questions determine a certain field of possible answers, or the configuration of discourse in which these answers can be made to have meaning and purpose. The time of anticolonialism and the postcolonial moment, he suggests, need not be thought of in terms of a historical transition, but as two essentially different problem-spaces, that is, two distinct ways of construing the relation between colonial pasts and the postcolonial present. At the height of the decolonization struggles of the 1950s–1960s, the colonial past was to be overcome to make way for hoped-for, liberated futures. But by the time the collapse of communism and the failure of anticolonial revolutions worldwide became apparent in the late 1980s, a new problem-space was introduced. In this new conjuncture, the arrow of time was reversed. As Scott writes: “Now it is not the future that stands in need of liberation from the present, but the past.”Footnote 7
Classic genealogies of reparation as a form of humanitarian intervention trace its origins back to World War II, and more specifically to the belated reckoning with the Holocaust in the 1980s. In the wake of Annette Wieviorka’s influential book on the advent of the “era of the witness,” many scholars have emphasized the centrality of extermination camp survivors’ testimonies during the Eichmann trial in 1961 in expanding the scope of the event from private suffering to the public recognition of collective trauma.Footnote 8 “The memory of the Holocaust is clearly the starting point for the contemporary manifestation of collective trauma in the public arena,” Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman write at the outset of their pioneering book on the advent of the humanitarian paradigm.Footnote 9 In her own seminal article on the topic, Shoshana Felman likewise analyzed Eichmann’s historical trial as instrumental in rendering private suffering as publicly legible and actionable.Footnote 10 Other interventions have focused a more pragmatic look at how the “constitutive exception” created by the Holocaust set up a new paradigm for financial compensation.Footnote 11 But even as scholars have endorsed an increasingly disenchanted take on the social construction of trauma and suffering, few critics of the moral economy of humanitarianism have so far debated its origins in the belated humanitarian response to the Holocaust.Footnote 12 As a result, the consensus remains that compensation is first and foremost an instrument for providing humanitarian assistance, however fraught this aid may be. By contrast, this essay takes on the issue of reparation from a previously unexplored archive: the unfinished settlement of the wars of decolonization. Susan Slyomovics already explored the theoretical framework of performance to analyze international human rights culture in the context of providing reparation for forced disappearances, imprisonment, and torture during the postcolonial period in Morocco.Footnote 13 Taking seriously the performance of history writing, I uncover compensation as a tool of counterinsurgency in its own right.
I will begin by reconstructing the original case for compensation for victims of terrorism in the late 1980s. Here I weave together a series of open-ended interviews I conducted with Françoise Rudetzki from 2018 to 2022 with documents taken from her personal archive, including procès-verbaux of FGTI meetings as well as her correspondence with then-president François Mitterrand and Minister of Justice Albin Chalandon. I combine these with news coverage of the 1985–1986 campaign of attacks and of the trials that followed suit in 1990–1991, in written and audiovisual form. In a second section, I turn to the archives of the French National Assembly, which contain the minutes of the parliamentary debates of 7 July 1959, when the civilian victim of war status was first voted on to benefit casualties of terrorism. A review of the verbal jousting between lawmakers offers a unique window onto the problem-space for the redaction of the statute in the midst of what was then called “pacification operations” in Algeria. As I show, this move occurred at a particular juncture in the Algerian War when the National Liberation Front decided to take the fight to mainland France. By bringing these findings to bear on the analysis of the palimpsest of multilayered legislation surrounding reparation for victims of terrorism in the wake of 13 November, in the final section I build on Michel de Certeau’s description of the “historiographical operation” to explore the relation of the postcolonial present to the colonial past as a structure of deferment.
A War in Peacetime
The first time I met with Françoise Rudetzki was on a stormy afternoon at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris. “The Invalides,” as it is known, is an imposing complex of buildings, consisting of a military museum, the Dôme des Invalides (the tallest church in Paris), the tomb of Napoléon, and a labyrinth of hospital facilities. Since it opened its doors in 1675, the Invalides has been linked to the medical care, confinement, and discreet concealment of disabled soldiers from public view, even as these practices shifted across the eras of war-making. First designated at the order of Louis XIV for the treatment of combat-injured soldiers, its original purpose was to serve as a hospital and asylum for war veterans: soldiers who served in the king’s military campaigns, the Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, deportees returning from concentration camps, and veterans of the wars of decolonization in Indochina and Algeria. In “Hôtel des Invalides” (1952), director Georges Franju experimented with the film-essai, a short documentary form, to shed a crude light on the savagery of war. Franju’s camera bursts into the “cour de la Victoire,” as the voice-over mocks, then captures a close up on a row of “gueules cassées” attending mass (World War I veterans with severe facial injuries), before slowly panning over the traffic lights of Paris avenues, the Tour Eiffel, and the Arc de Triomphe in a long panoramic shot. The straight lines, abstract and pure, offer a geometrical and logical perspective that is contradicted by the atrociously distorted faces. The montage, that is, reactivates a memory of what superimposed layers of history and habituation have muted: for all its majesty, “the Invalides” is a synecdoche for mutilated bodies. Since the late 1980s, and again in the aftermath of 2015, the Hôtel des Invalides has accommodated victims of terrorism as well.
Rudetzki was waiting for me in the lobby, next to the fireman standing in a glass booth at the entrance of the hospital. She invited me for coffee in the adjacent military club, the “foyer des Invalides.” Not quite in a hurry, but losing no time, she told me her story. On the evening of December 23, 1983, Françoise and Maurice Rudetzki went out to a fancy restaurant, the Grand Véfour, to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. During dessert, a bomb exploded close to the table where they were eating dinner. In the blast, the Grand Véfour’s armored door fell on her legs. A blood transfusion saved her life that night, but she remained in critical condition for several weeks. After years of fighting for her bodily integrity, she finally submitted to the amputation of one of her legs just weeks before our meeting. The year after the injury, in 1984, she found out that she was HIV positive.Footnote 14 The blood bag that saved her life on that night of December 1983 was fabricated from the plasma of about fifty different donors, at least one of them infected with the AIDS virus. In a book she published in 2004, Triple Peine, Françoise calls it the “third penalty,” the first being the decimation of her Jewish family in extermination camps during World War II, the second the 1983 attack, and the third, AIDS.
No one has ever claimed responsibility for the attack. The far-left group Action Directe, which carried out several attacks during this period, denied any involvement. The Venezuelan terrorist Ilis Ramírez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, was a suspect at some point in the inquiry.Footnote 15 But the case file was closed for lack of formal evidence. On 20 October 1984, Le Figaro Magazine published an article in the newspaper’s cuisine column with the headline “Plus de bruit que de mal” (“More Noise Than Harm”). Celebrating the rebirth of the prestigious Paris restaurant, the article showcased glossy photographs of the Grand Véfour’s newly refurbished dining room, with parquet flooring and lush furnishings. Le Figaro offered the owners, the Champagne Taittinger family, a front-page story with a happy ending. The reportage barely mentioned the twelve blast casualties, let alone Françoise’s tale of survival.
“There was a gap in the law,” Rudetzki said to me with her elegant faculty of indignation. “Back in 1983, the Grand Véfour had already purchased a terrorism insurance policy. But with the exception of insurance contracts, the word ‘terrorism’ didn’t exist in French law!” In January 1986, she set up a victims’ association, SOS Attentats, and resolved to turn to the state to advocate for financial compensation for victims of terrorism. It took several more years before she finally got the ear of Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and the reluctant support of President François Mitterrand.Footnote 16 But once she did, the stakes were high. A bombing campaign known as “Black September” had struck Paris. On Saturday, 7 December 1985, a bomb exploded in the tableware department on the lower ground floor of Galeries Lafayette, followed by a second blast in the perfumery department located on the ground floor of Printemps Haussmann, injuring forty-three people. Starting in February 1986, a new wave of bombings, this time claimed by the “Committee for Solidarity with Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners,” targeted the Champs-Élysées, the Tour Eiffel, the Gibert Jeune bookstore in Quartier Latin, and other iconic Parisian venues. The campaign culminated in September 1986 with the “Rue de Rennes” attack against the discount department store, or “bazaar,” Tati on 17 September 1986. In total, the wave of attacks resulted in thirteen dead and hundreds wounded from severe injuries and burns. One television newsflash described the Rue de Rennes attacks as “the bloodiest attacks ever perpetrated against civilians in France.”Footnote 17 Claudie Ragy, Marie-Jo Bouvot, Marie-Valentine Perrot, and Marie-Jo Grandjean, a client and three employees of Galeries Lafayette’s tableware department joined the fight and became pillars of SOS Attentats. Perrot, a young student with third-degree burns to the face, joined Rudetzki on TV in a medical balaclava.
The “Committee for Solidarity with Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners” was a false lead. It initially pointed French investigators to the Lebanese communist militant Georges Ibrahim Abdallah and his armed group the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions.Footnote 18 But a new narrative began to emerge as more material evidence was collected at the crime scenes. The plastic explosive substance used for the bombings, a mixture of octogen and hexogen known as C-4, was then a hallmark of Lebanese pro-Iranian group Hezbollah. Fragments of daily Kuwaiti newspaper Al- Qabas used to wrap one explosive device further pointed to a cluster of radical Islamic revival movements ushered in by the Iranian revolution in 1979. In April 1989, Gilles Boulouque, the judge in charge of the investigation, issued an international arrest warrant for seven members of Hezbollah.Footnote 19 Fouad Ali Saleh, a French citizen of Tunisian descent, was found guilty of coordinating the bombings on French soil. On the first day of his trial, Saleh called his judge a “French Rushdie,” a signature mark of this shift in era.Footnote 20
Here, therefore, were the historical conditions of possibility that made compensation available for terror victims under the auspices of the FGTI: Only in 1986, when a “connecting link” was identified among a series of recent bombings, for which the armed Islamic Jihad was held responsible, were terror victims granted the right to compensation, with retroactive effect back to 1 January 1985 and into the foreseeable future. The 1986 law on the fight against terrorism came in three distinct parts, dedicated respectively to the prevention, repression, and reparation of terrorism. A hybrid structure financed by a levy on property insurance policies (an indirect tax), the FGTI was created in the interest of “national solidarity” under the third reparatory part. What follows is a deliberate attempt to put together into the same frame two main components of the category of “terrorism” as defined by the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1986: compassion and repression.
Civilian Victims of War
Even after the compensation fund was established, Françoise Rudetzki remained profoundly dissatisfied with the State’s response to her quest for reparation. As we spoke, Rudetzki would use the words “compensation” (indemnisation) and “reparation” (réparation) almost interchangeably. But when asked, she made a clear distinction between the two. Compensation for the medical costs of injuries, whether bodily or even for psychic sequelae, was never the center of her negotiations for the recognition of victims’ rights. Her quest was for justice beyond indemnification. She wanted réparation. But reparation for what? In Rudetzki’s view, Iran had led the 1986 campaign of terrorist attacks in Paris in retaliation for France’s politics in the Middle East, in particular its support of Baghdad and its selling of arms to Iraq. France was the actual target of these attacks. Civilian victims of terrorist attacks, therefore, were random casualties of what needed to be called by its proper name: a new form of warfare. That is what the reparation was for. Réparation entailed something more than indemnisation, namely the recognition that victims of terrorist acts were the victims of a new form of warfare affecting a civilian population in time of peace, for which the French State bore a responsibility. In her mind, this involved granting affected civilians the same social status and pension benefits as military veterans. It required giving them access to the kind of specialized combat medical care that only a few hospitals such as at the Invalides could provide. It entailed recognizing them as the civilian victims of “a war in peacetime.”
Rudetzki told me it was she who picked up the “civilian victim of war” nomenclature from the 1959 annex to the military pensions code before she submitted it for adoption by the French parliament: “I boned up on the code of military invalidity pensions and I finally found what I was looking for: the ‘civilian victim of war’ status. The statute was already there in the law. It dated back to the Algerian War.”Footnote 21
In searching for a lifetime pension for victims of terrorism to repair the irreparable, Rudetzki came across the oxymoronic legal aftermath of the decolonization wars. The 1959 annex borrowed from the 1917 military pensions code, which dictated that “civilian victims of war” (World War I, that is) be granted the same rights as military casualties. In practice, the statute granted access to free health care in military hospitals with specialized expertise in the treatment of battlefield wounds, along with benefits associated with the war orphan status (pupille de la Nation) for children orphaned by terrorism. It later applied to civilian victims of bombings during World War II. On 31 July 1959, a new law was passed that made the statute available to victims of “terrorism” (as opposed to conventional wars) for the first time, at the height of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). It was later added to the military pension code in the form of an annex, where Françoise Rudetzki would spot it forty years later. This was the moral recognition she had been fighting for.
In a letter to François Mitterrand dated 11 May 1987, Rudetzki invoked “the precedent created by the law of 31 July 1959 in relation to the events occurring in Algeria” to substantiate her case for victims of terrorism to be granted civilian victims of war status.Footnote 22 A draft legislation tabled by Member of Parliament Jean-Pierre Bechter on 4 June 1987 likewise made the citation explicit in proposing “to apply certain provisions of the law no. 59-901 of 31 July 1959 to victims of terrorist acts perpetrated since 1 January 1985.” On Rudetzki’s account, the Algerian paradigm was met with intense resistance from the Parliament. It took several more years before the law officially granting victims of terrorism the “civilian victim of war” status was passed on 23 January 1990. By then, reference to the 1959 law had been removed. Instead, lawmakers preferred to introduce the bill as an uncomplicated complement to the 1986 Prevention of Terrorism Act. Even if the provisions from 1990 are a faithful restatement of those of 1959, in other words, the law as it was passed stopped short of citing its legislative original. And yet, the palimpsest between both texts—the posterior one still retaining traces of its earlier form—is plain for the trained eye to observe.Footnote 23
Even after putting together these archives, both personal and institutional, several aspects of the status remained mysterious, including the reason why it was first adopted in 1959. At the time, Algeria consisted of three French départements or administrative divisions; members of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) were qualified as terrorist perpetrators of attentats (the French word for “terrorist acts”); and the war itself was labeled “the events in Algeria.” It was not until 1999, forty years after the fact, that the Algerian struggle for independence was officially called a war; that is to say, a conflict that opposed, in retrospect, two nation-state armies.Footnote 24 Why 31 July 1959? Who was the law tailored to include? Who was excluded from its purview? But also, how could a bill from 1959 possibly refer to “civilian victims of war” in the first place, at a time when only “pacification operations” were officially acknowledged to be ongoing? As a review of the parliamentary debates leading up to the final drafting of the law of 31 July 1959 shows, extending the benefits already available to civilian victims of conventional wars to victims of “terrorism” in the midst of the Algerian War did not go without trouble.
1959: The Battle of Paris
The Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), a cause célèbre of anticolonialism, is best known for the Battle of Algiers. Casting real ex-members of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film The Battle of Algiers made the episode famous worldwide. The fame and veneer of accuracy of Pontecorvo’s fictional film was such that, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Pentagon held a private screening of the movie prior to sending U.S. troops to Iraq in a bid to avoid repeating the same mistakes as the French army in Algeria.Footnote 25
By contrast, the minutes of the ordinary session of 7 July 1959, when law no. 59-901 on reparations for casualties was voted on, look at the Algerian War of Independence from the metropolitan front. They shift our attention from the more classic focus on the Battle of Algiers (1956–1957) and its aura of anticolonial prestige to a different episode in the Algerian Revolution: the “Battle of Paris.”Footnote 26
The background for the vote in parliament, as rapporteur and government advocate Jean Le Duc made clear before the National Assembly, was the spillover of the Algerian War into mainland France. Ex-FLN militant Ali Haroun’s book of memoirs from 1986, La 7e wilaya: la guerre du FLN en France, 1954–1962, offers some context for the vote.Footnote 27 According to Haroun’s testimonial volume, what pushed the FLN into scaling up the terrorist campaign and opening up a “second front” in mainland France was the referendum of 28 September 1958 on the constitution of the current French Fifth Republic. As then-president Charles de Gaulle had made clear, the referendum on the proposed constitution was also a vote on the future of France’s overseas territories. In proposing that all French nationals from Algeria, who previously only had “local civil status,” would become full citizens who could maintain their status in Algeria as well as in the metropole, articles 3 and 75 of the new constitution clearly addressed Algeria as a fully-fledged part of the French Republic. The very promise of full integration of Algerians as citizens of France—a threat, from the FLN’s point of view—precipitated the FLN’s decision to take the fight to the metropole beginning in late summer 1958.Footnote 28
At midnight on August 25 of that year, the French Federation of the FLN launched coordinated armed attacks across French territory. In the Paris area, they targeted police stations in the 18th arrondissement as well as military infrastructures, assembly lines, and warehouses in Vincennes (la cartoucherie) and Ivry.Footnote 29 Fuel stocks and refineries were set on fire in Rouen (Northern France), the Étang de Berre, and Lavéra (on the Mediterranean coast) as part of Operation “Orage.” Yet the most spectacular action targeted Mourepiane, a Marseille suburb where a major oil depot was set ablaze in a suicide attack. On the side of the FLN, the operation saw six killed and nine injured. One French police officer died, and another was injured. The arson of oil infrastructures in Southern France killed a firefighter and injured another nineteen civilians, among them the mayor of Marseille, Gaston Defferre. In total, according to Ali Haroun, the “Battle of France” claimed eighty-two lives between 21 August and 27 September 1958.Footnote 30
In putting forward the government’s case for the bill, rapporteur Jean Le Duc explicitly linked the referendum of September 1958 and the spillover of the conflict to metropolitan France. Notably, he invoked the recent killing of a dozen conscripts on furlough in the mainland in the month preceding the referendum of 28 September 1958: “These attentats,” Le Duc affirmed, “were manifestly orchestrated by the FLN, for they took place at the same time as other attentats, such as a string of arsons against oil infrastructure, and they occurred roughly at the same period, that is, in the month preceding the referendum, obviously to impact the public opinion. Moreover, they all occurred in the same neighborhood, around the Gare de Lyon in Paris, and were perpetrated against soldiers rejoining their units following a leave from military service.”Footnote 31
The application of the “civilian victims of war” statute to soldiers at home on furlough was hotly debated. Rapporteur Le Duc made the argument that those conscripts who were killed in the vicinity of Gare de Lyon on their journey back to the Algerian battlefront were targeted as part of the “Battle of France.” But by the bill as it was submitted to parliament, the government would not treat them as combatants, pure and simple, but instead put them on equal footing with members of the national police, who, as civilians by status and a favorite target of the French Federation of the FLN for over a year, already benefited from an order dated 7 January 1959 that accorded them the same pension benefits as civilian victims of war.Footnote 32 In other words, the bill as initially redacted proposed to extend the order from January 1959 so as to grant the French military in the metropole the status of “civilian victims of war.”
Opponents of the bill objected that, precisely because the draftees had died because of the conflict spreading to the mainland, they should be granted the same rights as soldiers killed on the battlefield. Which is to say, they should be treated as combatants, not as civilians (as was the case for members of the police). A legal status was already available for the military in Algeria: the law of 6 August 1955 “relating to the benefits granted to the military personnel involved in the maintenance of order outside of the metropole.”Footnote 33 This law, Le Duc’s contradictors contended, simply needed to be extended to include metropolitan France. A Colonel Bourgoin tabled an amendment to the bill in this spirit: He asked that the legal status of 1955 for the military outside of the metropole, not the 1959 legislation for civilian police in the mainland, be the model—the appropriate “precedent,” that is—for the bill. The problem was, metropolitan France was not officially at war. But nor was Algeria, or at least not quite, hence the resort to circumlocution and such euphemisms as “the maintenance of order,” “pacification operations,” or “the events” in Algeria. A fascinating exchange ensued between Colonel Bourgoin and then-Minister of Veterans Affairs Raymond Triboulet about how to deal with a war that was not technically a war at all, but in which soldiers should nevertheless benefit from all the privileges accruing to troops in combat. More generally, the verbal jousting between government representatives and dissenting deputies provided the occasion for a rare exegesis of this intractable problem, even as events compelled the military itself to come up with solutions on the ground. A clarification came as tempers flared hottest.
Colonel Pierre Bourgoin took the floor to deliver an ironic plea:
One wonders why the Government chose to rule out the text from 1955. This is because, originally, the law only applied to the military serving outside the metropolitan territory. Successive decrees made it possible to enforce this text in Indochina, Cameroon, Tunisia, in Morocco, and finally in Algeria, but it can’t be applied to the metropole. Why? Because the metropole, officially, isn’t at war! As we all realize here, where a hundred Muslims are murdered every day, we are not at war! Of course, the population is not informed! It certainly still believes that young recruits are kept under the flag for thirty months only to improve their skills in the peeling of potatoes! … France knows it is at war and all mobilized French citizens should be compensated on equal footing when they are victims of attentats. (Applause from the Left, from the Center, and from diverse benches.)Footnote 34
Bourgoin’s allusion to “a hundred Muslims murdered every day” in the metropole requires clarification. Since 1956, Paris had been the site of a campaign of bomb attacks and assassinations in Parisian cafés known as the “café wars” (les guerres de café). These attentats opposed the FLN and its rival the Mouvement Nationaliste Algérien (MNA).Footnote 35 In the months leading up to the Battle of France, the guerilla warfare grew more intense between the FLN and the MNA for the leadership over the community of four hundred thousand Algerian workers and students living in mainland France.Footnote 36 Containing the warfare in the metropole had so far meant French authorities essentially insulating the broader public from the dreadful realities of the infighting between the FLN and the MNA. In the main, they had succeeded in effectively carrying out this task up to this point. This was to change with the Battle of Paris.
The Minister of Veterans Affairs Raymond Triboulet’s response to Colonel Bourgoin’s plea is expressive of precisely this concern: “The important point, as Colonel Bourgoin just reminded us, is that the Government cannot consider that military operations are occurring in the metropole. Consequently, to extend the 6 August 1955 legislation to the metropole is hardly justifiable from a juridical point of view. For it is directed at a theater of operations—one should not say of war, but of maintenance of order (correcting Bourgoin).”
Rapporteur Jean Le Duc and Minister of Veterans Affairs Raymond Triboulet found themselves increasingly isolated over the course of the debate, while Colonel Bourgoin and those deputies who followed suit were greeted with rounds of applause from all benches, especially when Jean-Paul Palewski, a Member of Parliament close to Charles de Gaulle, brought up the “moral” question. Palewski embarked on a long speech in which he tied the issue of compensation to the “very particular” nature of the conflict. Emphasizing the specificity of the “subversive and revolutionary war” going on in Algeria, which affected civilians and soldiers alike, whether “on mainland soil, in Algeria, or in any other place of the territory,” he called for an extension of benefits to match the extension of terrorism. He declared obsolete the laws that used to apply to previous, conventional wars: “We need to adopt different principles of compensation than those we relied on in times past,” the illustrious veteran of the World War II Free French Forces pleaded. “This is why I ask you to revisit this issue of compensation for victims of terrorism, and not by way of a legislation that applies differently across different parts of the territory, or that makes a distinction between those victims who wear a uniform and those who do not. All French citizens, when they are fighting terrorism, should be accorded equal rights to compensation,” he concluded solemnly to the applause of the audience.
Palewski’s impassioned appeal gained the widespread adherence required to shift the vote in favor of Bourgoin’s amendment. Yet throughout the debate, Triboulet stood firm on the French state’s position: “Victims in the metropole and servicemen in Algeria, that is the distinction. Now, this distinction is due to a conflict which, all the same, has a peculiar juridical character, as you know perfectly well. You are too seasoned a member of the parliament, Mr. Palewski, to ignore that the so-called operations ‘of maintenance of order in Algeria’ raise tricky juridical problems and no less tricky diplomatic issues. In this context, we are drawn to set up juridical solutions which, obviously, are peculiar and rather new.”Footnote 37
Triboulet’s call for “peculiar and rather new” juridical solutions to match the “peculiar juridical character” of the conflict needs to be contextualized within a series of exceptional regulations, many of which were already in force by July 1959. Particularly infamous was the “special powers” legislation of 1956, by which the French parliament gave the army free rein to repress the Independence movement in Algeria. As is now well documented, this included the widespread and systematic use of torture as a counterinsurgency method in Algeria.Footnote 38 These circumstances would have been known to those deputies who participated in the 1959 vote through various sources. A report by Roger Wuillaume, then-General Inspector of Administration, detailing the methods used by the French counterespionage in Algeria was submitted to lawmakers as early as 2 March 1955.Footnote 39 Aimé Césaire, who served as deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique from 1945 to 1993, likely borrowed from Wuillaume’s report when revising his Discourse on colonialism for publication at Présence Africaine in 1955. “Electricity,” “the bathtub,” and “the bottleneck” [la baignoire, l’électricité, le goulot de bouteille], all context-specific code words for the torture of Algerian nationalists at the hands of the French army, only appear in the 1955 second edition, which was widely circulated at the time.Footnote 40 Closer to the 1959 debate, in January 1957 Éditions de Minuit took the lead of the battle for public opinion against the methods of the French army by publishing Jacques Vergès and Georges Arnaud’s Pour Djamilah Bouhired. The book was a pamphlet denouncing to the French and international public the torture of the FLN militant Djamila Bouhired in jail before her trial. In 1958, Minuit published Henri Alleg’s La Question, an autobiographical account by a communist journalist at the prison of El-Biar in Algiers, the pages of which he managed to smuggle out with the help of his lawyers. The book was instrumental in revealing the extent to which torture was used by the French Army in Algeria and became a subject of lively debate in France.Footnote 41 Finally, just a month before the vote in June 1959, Éditions de Minuit again published La Gangrène, a pamphlet documenting the use of torture, now in the metropole. The book included the collected testimonies of five Algerian students who were tortured at the hands of officers of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire between 2 and 12 December 1958. This time the scene did not take place in far-off Algeria but Rue des Saussaies in Paris.Footnote 42 Despite quickly being censored, La Gangrène was circulated widely off the books. In sum, evidence abounds that the counterinsurgency methods first experimented with in the colonies were well and thriving in the metropole by the time Le Duc and Bourgoin had their argument at the parliament in early July 1959. It would have been known, at least to lawmakers sitting in the National Assembly—and Aimé Césaire was one of them—that the “gangrene” had set in the metropole.
With distinctive insight, Frantz Fanon identified the Battle of France as a major shift in the Algerian War of Independence from very early on. As he observed in El Moujahid dated 10 October 1958: “Having seized power in order to make peace in Algeria, de Gaulle provokes the extension of the conflict in France. Since 24 August, the French economic and strategic bases have been sabotaged by the action groups of the FLN. With war in Algeria and war in France, colonialism, its expeditionary corps, and its support bases are feeling the blows of the Algerian Revolution. Peace in Algeria, peace in France today, depend on the recognition by France of the independence of Algeria.”Footnote 43 French authorities reasoned similarly, although to diametrically opposed conclusions. After the FLN took the fight to the mainland in August 1958, the methods used to handle Algerians suspected of assisting the independence movement were brought along to the metropole.
Beyond the case of the five Algerian students, the archives of the Paris Police Prefecture are unambiguous on that point. Various techniques of monitoring and controlling the whereabouts of the Algerian population in the Paris region were already enforced well before the Summer of 1958. Yet, as I mentioned, they had thus far been aimed at containing the FLN-MNA warfare within the perimeter of the Algerian diaspora.Footnote 44 Following the August 1958 campaign, efforts to prevent the war’s spillover in the metropole took on a new scale. As Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman put it: “Since the war is now in France, they use the methods first experimented with during the Battle of Algiers.”Footnote 45 On 1 September 1958, the government placed the so-called “North-African” population under curfews in the departments of the Seine, Seine-et-Oise, and the Rhône. In the following months, thousands of Algerians were rounded up and encamped in several sites including the Winter Velodrome, an infrastructure built for the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics and grimly associated with the city’s biggest roundup of Jews during World War II.Footnote 46 Police repression culminated in the “pogrom” of 17 October 1961, when between 30,000 and 40,000 Algerians took to the streets of Paris in a peaceful protest against the curfew.Footnote 47 Establishing a definitive figure as to how many demonstrators were beaten unconscious and thrown into the Seine to drown on that night has been the topic of much historical debate. But as Joshua Cole has pointed out, the traditional historiographic focus on this day alone, anyway, does not allow an adequate grasp of the systematic pattern of policing and control over the entire immigrant Algerian population in the Paris region at this juncture.Footnote 48 In their thoroughly researched book Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (2006), Jim House and Neil MacMaster have effectively expanded the scope of their analysis to establish that “during September and October well over 120 Algerians were murdered by the police in the Paris region.”Footnote 49 I suggest to expand the analytical frame even further to propose that the aftermath of the 1958 campaign saw a shift in practice from population control and harassment to downright crackdown, by all means available.
Seen in this light, the issue of compensation takes on distinctive contours and a new salience for the analysis of terrorism as a relatively recent warfare technology. As I showed, the 1959 debate was a direct response to the FLN’s 1958 campaign of France. Thus, the government’s choice of legislative precedent (rapporteur Jean Le Duc’s proposal to extend the “civilian victim of war” status to members of the army in the metropole, that is) amounted to disavowing the warfare being waged in the mainland. Otherwise put: It denied the reality of the FLN’s success in its campaign to bring the war to France. As such, French authorities’ strategic choice of legal means tapped into reparation law as yet another tool to further their goal of containing the conflict’s spillover to the metropole. The paradox, however, is that the war de facto expanded to Paris at the very pace at which “pacification operations” stepped up. Evidence of the coercion exercised by French police on members of the French Federation of the FLN, or for that matter increasingly on anybody looking “North African,” is thus as accurate an indicator of the actual spreading of the conflict at this crucial juncture as were the heightened pace and magnitude of the attacks themselves. So was lawmakers’ readiness at the time to come up with “peculiar and rather new” juridical methods, as rapporteur Le Duc had it, to meet the unprecedented nature of the warfare.
Reparations for terrorism, in other words, need to be interpreted as integral to a broader apparatus of counterinsurgency methods still in the making, and hence subject to debate. Current lines of inquiry have focused exclusively on the guerilla techniques honed in the colonial context. In doing so, they have downplayed the possibilities offered by the juridical playbook in denying the enemy’s legitimacy, a crucial component in any counterinsurgency warfare.Footnote 50 Yet as the 1959 argument makes plain, reparations were weaponized as an integral part of the war on terror.
On War and Terror
As we just saw, the debate about reparations in the late 1950s served the purpose of denying the then-ongoing warfare opposing France and the Algerian FLN. It played a crucial role in inventing the grammar of domestic terrorism as a powerful discursive tool for containing the spillover of the French-Algerian war in the metropole. Starting in the late 1980s, I now wish to suggest, reparations became part and parcel of a new narrative beginning for the first time to set the colonial era solidly in the past. Although in the new conjuncture, maintaining the pacification narrative involved a different kind of move—a gesture of a fundamentally historiographic nature.
After the FGTI was established, Françoise Rudetzki continued to advocate for the adoption of the “civilian victim of war” status for victims of terrorism. Earlier in this essay, I cited her letter from May 1987 to François Mitterrand in which she invoked the legal precedent of 31 July 1959 to substantiate her case. It was Minister of Justice Albin Chalandon who wrote back in September 1987. Chalandon initially denied her demand by objecting that the 1959 law “had been adopted in connection with the events taking place in Algeria.” “Therefore,” Chalandon reasoned, “there existed a link [back then] with the policy undertaken by France,” implying that such a link no longer existed in the present.Footnote 51 While still using the officialese from the 1950s in speaking about the “events taking place in Algeria,” Chalandon began for the first time to effectively introduce a distance vis-à-vis the colonial past. To assert that the link no longer existed in the present amounted to conceding, however timidly and reluctantly, that it had effectively existed in the past. Characteristically, it did so by contradistinction with present-day terrorism.
Chalandon’s response to Rudetzki epitomizes the historical stalemate that the matter of providing reparation for the 1985–1986 campaign of attacks ultimately unlocked. In spite of Bourgoin’s successful plea from 1959 before the National Assembly, and even after Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, it was not until 1999 that the “Algerian events” were renamed “the Algerian War” in official parlance. Former conscripts in the colonial wars thus remained servicemen of “pacification operations” in North Africa. In a recent book, historian Raphaëlle Branche puts the paradox this way: “There are no veterans of the maintenance of order in Algeria.”Footnote 52 At the turn of the 1990s, the series of legal writings surrounding the framework for terror reparation opened up a path for redressing this anomaly.
Concretely, Rudetzki joined forces with military psychiatrists with a background in the decolonization wars in Indochina and Algeria from very early on in her advocacy. In order to support its case for the creation of a compensation fund, SOS Attentats commissioned an epidemiological study of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in victims of terrorist attacks. The study, which paved the way for what was to become the FGTI, was carried out by Rudetzki’s brother, epidemiologist William Dab. In establishing a questionnaire based on the criteria for PTSD, Dab solicited the scientific guidance of Louis Crocq, a respected military psychiatrist who went on to be one of the pioneers of psychiatric victimology in France.Footnote 53 Before he became SOS Attentats’ best advocate, Crocq was most famous for his expertise in the treatment of traumatized soldiers returning from the battlefield. A closer look at his writings from the early 1960s demonstrates a wide range of therapeutic experience with conscripts and military officers as well as with “harkis,” or native Muslim Algerians who served in the French army. It reveals the extent to which his psychiatric thinking remained informed by his practice as battalion surgeon working with conscript soldiers during the Algerian War. This extended body of original research on war neuroses provided the immediate background for Crocq’s support of the victims’ movement represented by SOS Attentats.Footnote 54
The study that SOS Attentats commissioned for review by the French parliament was aimed explicitly at demonstrating that terror victims suffered long-term psychological wounds similar to those experienced by veterans of counterinsurgency wars.Footnote 55 To do so, it used the diagnostic criteria for PTSD as listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM-III), initially published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 and translated into French in 1983.Footnote 56 The authors also referenced Louis Crocq’s own psychiatric writings on “trauma war neuroses.” As evidenced in the procès-verbal of a meeting of the FGTI’s board of directors dated 27 October 1987, when Dab and his colleague Lucien Abenhaim (then a professor at McGill University) were called to testify to a preliminary report on the results, the study was instrumental in establishing the prevalence of a post-traumatic syndrome specifically affecting survivors of terrorist attacks.Footnote 57
For this reason, Françoise Rudetzki and her advocacy for the creation of the FGTI figure prominently in Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman’s account of the rise of humanitarianism as a new moral economy in the late 1980s (The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, 2007). In their view, Rudetzki’s activism would have fallen on deaf ears had it not been for what they describe as a fundamental transformation of witnessing in connection with the memorialization of survivors’ experience of concentration camps during World War II. The rise of Holocaust awareness around the 1980s and with it the unprecedented credibility given to the manifestation of trauma in the public sphere, they suggest, was instrumental for her struggle to become visible and expressible in the first place. As they write: “It seems to us that the way in which the concept of trauma became shared knowledge forms part of deeper—what we might call anthropological—transformations that made [Rudetzki’s] activism effective and even possible.”Footnote 58 Further, as they detail, in the aftermath of another high-profile campaign of bombings claimed by the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) on the Saint-Michel RER station and other sites in Paris in Summer 1995, Louis Crocq became one of the main architects of medical and psychological emergency units specializing in the administration of on-site psychological care that are still active to date.Footnote 59 Thus, Rudetzki’s and similar contemporary struggles need to be contextualized within the rise of what they conceptualize as a new problematization in Foucault’s sense: “A new alliance forged between words and things, enabling one to see and to say.”Footnote 60
In emphasizing Louis Crocq and Rudetzki’s contribution to the field of psychiatric victimology over the 1990s and in contextualizing the struggle for the rights of victims of terrorism within the broader shift from the 1950s–1960s paradigm of self-determination to humanitarian assistance, Fassin and Rechtman read this sequence of events prospectively, as it were. While such a treatment encourages certain lines of novel inquiry, it closes off others—such as the significance of the wars of decolonization for the genealogy of the present. In looking back on the wars of decolonization in the 1950s from the vantage point of the late 1980s, my aim is not to return to earlier debates on combat neuroses beyond the rupture of the 1970s–1980s in the history of human rights that Didier Fassin and Samuel Moyn have established.Footnote 61 Rather, I am interested in shifting the emphasis from the usual focus on the aftermath of World War II to reassess the importance of the belated settlement of the colonial wars for the turn to “humanitarianism.” A number of historical interventions have already emphasized the “invention of decolonization” in the late 1950s as a key site from which to investigate the postcolonial present.Footnote 62 Furthermore, attacks perpetrated by armed groups hostile to the FLN such as GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé) in the 1990s should be contextualized within the “civil war,” also known as the “Black Decade” (1992–2002), that tore Algeria apart on the ashes of the myth of the national revolution. Even if a comparative analysis of the politics of reparation and remembrance in relation with the violence unfolding on both sides of the Mediterranean in the 1980s–1990s is beyond the scope of this article, in the remainder of this essay I analyze the humanitarian achievements on behalf of victims of terrorism at the turn of the 1990s as deeply entangled with new claims articulated in the same period by veterans of France’s colonial wars.Footnote 63
Quite clearly, the immediate epistemological precedent for the study of posttraumatic stress in victims of terrorism in the early 1980s was not World War II and the experience of concentration camp survivors but the wars of decolonization and the experience of drafted soldiers—not victimhood per se but the trauma of perpetration.Footnote 64 And if the wars of decolonization provided the epidemiological precedent necessary to back up the case for civilian victims of terrorism in 1986, the reverse is also true. All the while supporting Rudetzki’s cause, Louis Crocq and other prominent military psychiatrists such as Claude Barrois never ceased to remain focused on improving the welfare benefits available to former conscripts. It is no exaggeration to say that Crocq and Barrois used the case of civilian victims to further their own goals. This is perhaps best seen in L’Effroi des hommes (Human Dread, 1990), a documentary film that Crocq, Rudetzki, and Barrois helped to put together as scientific advisers. In casting together an American Vietnam veteran, French veterans of the wars in Indochina and Algeria, and women suffering from the psychological repercussions of the 1985–1986 wave of attacks in Paris, the forty-nine-minute television film by Jean-Bernard Andro is exemplary of how the issue of providing reparation to victims of terrorism in the 1980s–1990s became increasingly entangled with new claims articulated in the same period by veterans of France’s colonial wars.Footnote 65
And indeed, the achievements owing to Rudetzki’s lobbying in turn benefited soldiers who took part in the 1950s decolonization wars, and increasingly so over the course of the 1990s. In 1992, the Ministry of War Veterans achieved a decree bringing the military scale for trauma compensation into line with the new benefits won for victims of terrorism.Footnote 66 William Dab himself emphasizes the reversed logic of the decree: “Once Françoise was granted PTSD compensation, the Ministry of War Veterans began to lobby for a revaluation of psychological sequelae based on the new scale established for terror victims.”Footnote 67 The law of 10 June 1999 that substituted “the maintenance of order in North Africa” for “the Algerian War” needs to be read in light of these developments. While Branche calls it a “semantic bill,” it should not be understood as the crowning achievement of a longstanding work of memory.Footnote 68 Instead, as Chalandon already delineated in his quietly trailblazing response to Rudetzki from 1987, the 1995 attacks by the Algerian GIA more likely played a part in adding new force to the desire to separate the colonial past from present-day terrorism.
To recapitulate: Even if Chalandon initially denied Rudetzki the status she was requesting, the wording of his response nonetheless set the stage for the historiographic work of relegating the colonial period to the past. This made it possible just a couple of years later on 23 January 1990 to finally extend the military pension code to victims of terrorism under the “civilian victim of war” category.Footnote 69 For if Rudetzki’s demand that terrorism be recognized as a new form of war affecting a civilian population in peacetime was to be met, it became not so much morally overdue as strategically unavoidable to relegate “the Algerian events” into the “past” of colonialism. Otherwise said, the official recognition of the Algerian War much after the fact in 1999 was not a response to a suddenly imperious need to bring closure to a four-decade-long denial.Footnote 70 Rather, it met the new and more urgent imperative of distinguishing between past colonialism and present-day terrorism. It became inevitable, in retrospect, to call these “events” a “war” so that the present warfare could be called “terrorism” as if for the first time.
A Historiographic Operation
The rise of terrorism in the late 1980s did not simply offer another occasion to repeat the denial of the colonial past. It was the effective change that precipitated the distancing of the French-Algerian war. In Michel De Certeau’s words, it introduced the kind of “social change” that “provides historical distance in relation to what is becoming an entirely past time.” De Certeau’s description of the historiographic operation will help to illustrate my point. “More important than the reference to the past,” he writes in The Writing of History (1975), “is the introduction of the past by way of an assumed distance. A gap is folded into the scientific coherence of a present time, and how could this be, effectively, unless through something that can be objectified, the past, whose function is to indicate alterity?” Thus, he continues: “The historical operation consists in cutting the given according to a present law that is distinguished from its ‘other’ (the past), in assuming a distance in respect to an acquired situation, and thus in marking through a discourse the effective change that precipitated this distancing.”Footnote 71 In precipitating the distancing of the colonial past—only much after the fact and by contradistinction with the “new” terrorist warfare—the uptake in 1990 of the civilian victim of war status from 1959 performed what we might call, after Michel de Certeau, a “post-colonial operation.”
In the wake of the 2015 attacks, the “civilian victim of war” status was activated yet again, now on a greater scale than ever before. Once more, a revision of the Military Pensions Code provided the occasion for a critical reworking of the colonial past. This time, an ordinance from December 2015 abrogated the law of 23 January 1990 in favor of a core revision of the code.Footnote 72 As we saw, both the 1959 law article and its uptake from 1990 were introduced as mere addenda to the pensions code. As such, their status remained derivative and secondary to the core legal text. Up until 2015, that is to say, civilian victims of terrorism had been like civilian victims of conventional wars, not quite victims of war in their own right. This changed after the 13 November 2015 attacks. A new category for “victims of terrorism” was carved directly into the Military Code, where it now stands on its own as a self-standing category separated, on the one hand, from the previously existing categories of “civilian victims of World War I” and “civilian victims of World War II”; but also, on the other hand, from yet another newly introduced category: that of “civilian victims of the Algerian War.”
No one seemed to notice the difference, least of all the lawyers who advocated for victims’ right. Not even Françoise Rudetzki. Still, the Algerian War was further codified into law, quietly achieving the material recognition for which remembrance advocates had long been asking. In the operation, it was further separated from contemporary terrorism. The legal rewriting from 2015, in other words, brought the postcolonial operation full circle.
In availing myself of De Certeau’s insights on the efficacy of history writing, let me make clear, however, I am not suggesting that the work of history is simply reducible to that of fiction. It is important to note, in this regard, that the historical operation has a double-edged effect. On the one hand, by staging the present of a lived situation against the backdrop of that which, in the process, becomes “the past,” it creates the retrospective illusion of a break from the newly present past. The past, in that sense, is “not so much a ‘given’ as a product,” as De Certeau has it.Footnote 73 But on the other hand, what the historical operation effectively introduces is not so much a rupture or a break as, essentially, a new relation of past and present—what David Scott theorizes as a “problem-space,” allowing us to hear the polysemy of the word “relation.” In the world-historical juncture that concerns us here, the postcolonial operation created the retrospective illusion of a separation from the colonial past. Now if the signature shape of the postcolonial relation between past and present is one in which the past “stands in need of liberation from the present,” it is at least in part owing to the structure of deferment that I have attempted to capture it in this essay.Footnote 74
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was supported by a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship by the Social Science Research Council, a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant by the National Science Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. In addition to audiences at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, at the Max Planck Institute in Halle, and to the members of the Criminalization & Militarization seminar at Columbia University who discussed an early draft of this article, I am indebted to many insightful suggestions by David Scott, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Emmanuelle Saada, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Carol Gluck, Brink Messick, Margaux Fitoussi, and the reviewers for CSSH.
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