Lost in Fire, Lost in Letters: Archives of the Algerian War

Abstract

Abstract

This article explores the status of the Jeanson archives. Sartrian philosopher Francis Jeanson (1922–2009) was the leader of the most prominent network of metropolitan French nationals who actively supported the Front de libération nationale (FLN) during the Algerian War (1954–62). Three dates are seminal when it comes to the Jeansonian trajectory, the Algerian War, and the issue of collecting archives: 2009, 1966, and 1965. In November 2009, three months after Jeanson’s death, his house was severely damaged in a fire that destroyed part of his archives. The year 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the law of June 17, 1966, that granted amnesty to the members of the “Jeanson network.” The amnesty involved an attempt at national reconciliation by trying to erase controversial historical traces of his role during the war. In 1965 Jeanson produced an epistolary novel, Lettre aux femmes (Letter to women), which draws on his experience during the Algerian War but without any of the specifics. Hence, the novel can be understood as a space of both memory and forgetting and constitutes an archive in its own right. What was so threatening about the Jeanson archives that political authorities should find themselves granting them amnesty? Why should these archives surface in the one work of fiction of Jeanson’s considerable oeuvre, and what is behind their partial disappearance in a house fire whose cause remains unresolved?