MASSACRES AND THEIR HISTORIANS Recent Histories of State Violence in France and Algeria in the Twentieth Century

Historians cannot resist violence.* Not simply because of a voyeuristic interest in the dramatically lethal, but also because many of the most vexing questions about the writing of history converge in the crucible of violent events. Historians are attracted to the subject because they hope that it might tell them something about the fundamental problems in their discipline: questions about causality, agency, narrative, and contingency; about the readability of the past and the conclusions that one can draw about complex social phenomena from fragmentary and often one-sided bits of evidence. Inevitably, however, some historians who write about violence will find their work taken up in broader public debates, and these discussions can take them far from the libraries, archives, and classrooms where they are most comfortable. In this way, historians are ushered, some more willingly than others, into turbulent public forums where their status and claims for expertise make them both sources of legitimation and targets of attack. Regardless of the success of historians in addressing the questions raised by violence, the nature of their efforts, and their varying claims for objectivity or completeness, make them irresistible reference points for others who have a different axe to grind. Historians cannot resist violence, but others who speak of violence cannot resist historians, either. This tension between public debate and historical research is clearly visible in recent work about violence and the French colonial empire. Since the thirtieth anniversary of Algerian independence in 1992, a steady stream of works dealing with colonial violence has appeared, with much attention devoted to the volatile period between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, when most of France’s colonies gained their independence. At least two