Abstract
The often nostalgically reconstructed and diverse city of Oran, Algeria, is also the site of horrific memories. On the day of Algerian Independence, 5 July 1962, a large-scale massacre of its European citizens occurred, which is now being reconstructed and debated by historians and survivors. Historians place the number of dead between 100 and 5000 people. By examining the documentary film, Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire (Algeria, stories that shouldn’t be told, 2006) which tracks the memory of four Algerian men who lived in Oran on that day, this chapter investigates what truths can be told in documentary fifty years after the massacre and how remembrance of trauma can occur when the sites of horror can no longer be accessed.
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Notes
- 1.
Spanish settlers started arriving in 1509 and maintained sporadic control until the Turks arrived at the end of the eighteenth century (Lakjaa 2008). Lakjaa explains that though there were 263 years of Spanish influence, the Jewish settlements in Oran go back to 1391 when the Jews fled persecution in Spain, Andalousia, and Grenada. This moves the Spanish presence earlier than 1509.
- 2.
All translations are my own except for portions of the film Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire, which is subtitled in English.
- 3.
Written and spoken testimony and historical texts about the Oran massacre were primarily published from 2006 to 2013 and include a public debate in the press between Pierre Daum, Jean-Pierre Lledo, and Benjamin Stora among others. Historical texts include books by Guillaume Zeller, Guy Pervillé, Jean-Monneret, and Jean-Jacques Jordi. While Monneret, Jordi, Lledo, and Stora were born in Algeria, Pervillé, Daum, and Zeller were born in France. Zeller is the grandson of André Zeller, a French General who fought to keep Algeria French in the ‘putsch des généraux’ (‘generals’ coup’) in 1961 and was imprisoned for his actions. Daum is a controversial author who has long been writing books and articles that attempt to debunk the decolonisation stories from Algeria. In 2012 he published an article in Le Monde Diplomatique in which he interviewed an unnamed elderly ex-Armée de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Army) fighter. See also Daum’s 2012 book Ni valise, ni cercueil (Neither suitcase, nor coffin, 2012). Pervillé is a French professor of history whose academic career solely concentrates on Algeria. Stora is the most prolific historian on Algeria and president of the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration (National Museum of the History of Immigration) in Paris.
- 4.
In 2008, 46 years after the war ended, scholars such as Eric Savarèse began calling for the Memory Wars to end in L’Algérie dépassionnée: Au-delà du tumulte des mémoires (Savarèse 2008), a volume to which Stora contributed.
- 5.
The memory laws began in 1990 with the Gayssot Law to outlaw the denial of crimes against humanity and the Taubira Law of 2001 to recognise the slave trade as a crime (Guendouzi 2017, p. 237). The most infamous memory law appeared in 2005 demanding that the positive aspects of colonialism be taught in French schools. Guendouzi rightly states this law triggered ‘cries of outrage among historians and other intellectuals on both sides of the Mediterranean’ and was later repealed (p. 236).
- 6.
According to a 6 July 1962 article in the Swiss paper, Le Journal de Genève, allegedly 30-some people were killed (French and Algerians). The only confirmed details were that the shooting started a little before noon at Place Foch amongst a huge excited crowd. The newspaper stated that the numerous journalists and other witnesses present were ‘incapable of reliably stating how it started’ (‘L’Origine des fusillades d’Oran’ 1962). Jean Monneret puts the number of dead at 3000 (Monneret 2006), but Jean-Jacques Jordi in Un Silence d’Etat uses the archives to document 700 Europeans killed and many others missing. Jordi’s number is reproduced in Oran, le 5 juillet 1962 (Pervillé 2014). Recently Benamou stated that the official French government number of dead was 20 and historians have verified 700. See ‘La France doit reconnaître le massacre d’Oran’ (Bruyas 2018).
- 7.
General Katz, often referred to by Pieds-Noirs as the Butcher of Oran, commanded the French troops and was under orders by President Charles de Gaulle to not engage. Multiple sources report that 18,000 French troops were present, and many accounts exist from the soldiers who were locked up during the massacre. Since 2013, a narrative has progressively emerged that the attack on Europeans was carefully planned and coordinated by the Algerians; it had nothing to do with the OAS who had already fled Oran by Independence, and the French government knew about the attack but did not want the war to start back up; see Bruyas (2018).
- 8.
In Un Silence d’Etat (A National Silence) Jordi cautions, ‘only the enlightened confrontation between diverse written archives and individual testimony will allow history to approach the truth of the disappearance of Europeans in Algeria’ (2011, p. 11). Similarly Pervillé (2014) argues that truth comes from diverse sources: ‘Contrary to what certain naïve people might think, when we are looking for historical truth we must, on the contrary, research the broadest possible variety of opinions, authors and sources that we use, because if we can finally state that authors of different opinions manage to agree on such facts, we can then conclude that we are looking at an authentic event’.
- 9.
Lledo’s official English title for this film is ‘Algeria, Unspoken Stories’, but Lledo and his participants demonstrate that traumatic memory is spoken. It is the reception which remains problematic. In view of this, I have opted to translate the title as ‘Algeria, stories that shouldn’t be told’; see Hubbell (2013).
- 10.
See Akagawa’s chapter which demonstrates how memorial museums allow visitors to participate and create meaningful experience while constructing shared memory. With many massacres, there is no place of remembrance where mourning and consciousness of the events can be reconciled. Consequently, experience depicted in art becomes the only space where memory can be contested by survivors and witnesses.
- 11.
Eric Savarèse states that the academic work on the Pieds-Noirs should be read with caution because it is primarily written by the Pieds-Noirs themselves (Savarèse 2002, p. 27). While some claim that the Pieds-Noirs are overly protectionist of the past, and others believe those who intimately know Algeria should write its history, during the ‘wilful silence’ after the Algerian War through to the 1990s, the Pieds-Noirs were among few who published about Algeria.
- 12.
Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper propose: ‘As public recognition of the traumatic experiences undergone by survivors of war has increased, so the ageing of those who lived through the wars of the early and mid-twentieth century has added an urgency and poignancy to the endeavour of collecting their testimony and reflecting on its significance’ (2000, p. 3). Urgently safeguarding a history ‘in peril’ is a primary goal of the Pieds-Noirs today. However, in order to preserve one version of the past, one must be agreed upon, and ‘new accounts’ of the past are constantly arising.
- 13.
According to Ramdani (2011), the initial reported number of dead was 3, but now it is believed at least 200 were killed in Paris on 17 October 1961. See also Cole (2006). An estimated 1020 to 45,000 died in the Sétif uprising in 1945, which has long been depicted in historical and popular texts. See, for example, Alistair Horne’s early history work, A Savage War of Peace (1978).
- 14.
For an in-depth study of how Pied-Noir exiles experience physical return to the sites of their childhood, see Hubbell (2011).
- 15.
Members of the French Cercle Algérianiste National Facebook Group engaged in a heated debate on 18–19 June 2018 after participating in the documentary Oran, le massacre oublié (Oran, the forgotten massacre) by Georges-Marc Benamou and Jean-Charles Deniau, which was screened in Nice on 5 July 2018 and later aired on France 3 television (Benamou and Deniau 2018). Members contested the ways events should be remembered and who was responsible for the massacre. At the advanced screening, historians Jean Monneret and Jean-Jacques Jordi presented historical research (‘Le film “Le massacre d’Oran” relance la quête de vérité’ 2018; Projection du film sur le massacre du 5 juillet 2018).
- 16.
I extensively studied the nostalgic representation of the Chapelle de Santa Cruz; see Hubbell (2015a).
- 17.
It remains unclear if the archives were destroyed, at least partially, by the OAS in June 1962 (Guignard 2015).
- 18.
Lledo believes the attacks were coordinated by the FLN to scare the French citizens away (2011, p. 17).
- 19.
This response was published 15 days after Lledo’s and signed by other personalities. Stora acquiesces that the massacre should be studied historically but not from a partisan perspective that mocks history (Stora 2013).
- 20.
See La Valise ou le cercueil (Cassan and Havenel 2011), which contains graphic survivor accounts from ten witnesses in Oran on 5 July 1962.
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Hubbell, A.L. (2020). Remembering the 5 July 1962 Massacre in Oran, Algeria. In: Hubbell, A.L., Akagawa, N., Rojas-Lizana, S., Pohlman, A. (eds) Places of Traumatic Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_11
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