Publié le 14 janvier 2025–Mis à jour le 21 février 2025
Deux présentations, "Uses and abuses of Irish history during French colonial rule in Algeria" par Slimane Hargas et "'All that my family has done and suffered': Examining a manuscript primary source" par Ciaran Farrell
Date(s)
le 5 mars 2025
5 mars 2025, 17h-19h
Lieu(x)
Bâtiment Ida Maier (V)
Salle V210, Bâtiment Maier
Séance du séminaire OAB
Slimane Hargas, MCF Paris Nanterre Uses and abuses of Irish history during French colonial rule in Algeria
Drawing analogies with the Irish precedent was a fairly common feature of the French colonial period in Algeria (1830-1962). In the 19th century, they were politically harn Eamon De Valera, featured in Ahmed Tawfiq Al-Madani’s “Niḍāl Irlandā” (“Ireland’s Struggle”), published in Tunisian newspaper Al-Fajr (1923) Eamon De Valera, featured in Ahmed Tawfiq Al-Madani’s “Niḍāl Irlandā” (“Ireland’s Struggle”), published in Tunisian newspaper Al-Fajr (1923) essed by opposing groups: the advocates of French withdrawal from Algeria, the defenders of the indigenous population, and the French colons who settled in the North African colony as well as their supporters in Paris. Dark prophecies about the future of Algeria by way of the Irish precedent had so powerful an impact that they would continue to be discussed well into the twentieth century. In the latter period, Algerian nationalists also started to take a keen interest in matters pertaining to Ireland. For them, that newly independent nation was at once a source of inspiration, a model in terms of its long resistance to British imperialism, and a counter-model in terms of the unsatisfactory peace Treaty its representatives had signed in 1921. But the Irish precedent was also evoked to serve more rhetorical purposes. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s Ireland was repeatedly referred to on the international stage to sway public opinion. Indeed, the diplomatic representatives of the GPRA sometimes construed the Algerian war of independence in relation to the one Ireland had waged against Britain, in an endeavour to strike a chord with Irish and more broadly Western audiences.
In this paper, I shall use the analogical references to Ireland’s past throughout the hundred and thirty years of French colonial presence in Algeria as a case study to show how they were manipulated to align with various political agendas and how, beneath the veneer of seemingly insightful reasoning, they often tended to warp and distort historical facts.
Short biography
Slimane Hargas is a newly appointed Lecturer in British and Irish history at Paris Nanterre University. He completed his PhD “Jeux de miroirs, représentations croisées : histoire des (anti-)analogies entre les conflits anglo-irlandais et franco-algérien” in 2022 and has published several articles in such journals and magazines as Études irlandaises, Littérature, histoires des idées, Images et Sociétés du monde Anglophone (LISA e-Journal) and Orient XXI.
Ciaran Farrell, doctorant CREA Paris Nanterre "All that my family has done and suffered”: Examining a manuscript primary source
(descriptif à venir)
