Contenu du sommaire : Vadenay,Saint-Maurice l'Ardoise, Thol, le Larzac : L'internement en france pendant la guerre d'indépendance algérienne

Between their arrest and their arrival at an internment camp, the Algerians could pass through different places of detention. The police stations were the first of them. Some of the police stations have even been raised to the status of “centres of selection” where the arrest could last up to fifteen days. In Paris area, the famous Centre of Vincennes (CIV) has been the biggest of all and has had a particular role because of its administrative attachment to the Police Prefecture of Paris.

Out of fear to see the internment camps being transformed into “seminaries of the FLN”, the French public authorities undertook a so called “social and educational” action. The mission was entrusted to agents considered to be experts in “muslim affairs” because of their former experience in the North African territories. This action failed not only for material reasons but also because it was based on the false conception that the interned persons had been pushed towards nationalism only because of fear of the FLN's terror.

Based on the reports of the Renseignements Généraux (the security branch of the French police force), this paper questions the notion of the co-management of the camp by the FLN, which put in place its own prisoner supervisional structures and enrolled its delegates in different tasks. However, the goal was not co-management only but also (and foremost?) to exert power over the prisoners who were enlisted in protest movements coordinated with the outside world, and submitted to a strict internal discipline.

This article presents —from the perspective of the FLN— how the responsibility for supporting the internees was taken. As the Federation of France of the FLN was also a machine of mobilization of the manpower provided by the Algerian emigrants in France, an enemy territory, it also aimed at fighting against the emigrants' isolation in order to keep them under its control and to extend the struggle for independence in the prisons as well as in the camps. In this perspective, the Algerian families themselves were at stake and therefore received assistance.

Since the attempted coup of April 1961, the supporters of French Algeria were also subjected to internment, mainly in the camp of Saint-Maurice l'Ardoise, that had been emptied from its Algerian internees. However, the conditions of their detention could not be compared, if only due to low enrollment. The numerous escape attempts, one of which was successful and therefore controversial, reveals the indulgence shown to the supporters of French Algeria in Saint-Maurice.

As a lawyer, Jean-Jacques de Félice describes the ambivalence of the institution of the camps for the contemporaries of the Algerian War: their existence was widely known, they remained however impenetrable, mainly for the lawyers, because of the arbitrariness regulating the procedure of internment and its execution. According to Jean-Jacques de Félice, in many ways the camp was worse than the prison. He went himself to Larzac, however, in order to pay visit to his “friend and boss” Mourad Oussedik.

The archives of Jean-Jacques de Félice, that are entrusted to the BDIC, allow us to reconstitute the commitments of this lawyer, both in the exercise of his profession and in his activism. As far as the Algerian War is concerned, the records of his customers help us to put back together the complex repressive ways that the arrested Algerians could be forced to follow, between the detention in the Centre of Identification of Vincennes, the convictions they had from the Justice and the internment in the camps of house arrest.

The ACNV (non-violent civic action) was completely isolated in its demonstrations against the camps in Larzac, Thol, Vincennes, etc. Tramor Quemeneur analyses the roots of such a commitment that laid, about fifteen years after the end of the World War Two, to the attachment to the humanist convictions with no concession, the demand for a deep moral sense and the faith to the non-violence against all forms of oppression.

If the “camp” is indeed part of the anticolonialist literature of the Algerian War era, referring also to the camps of the World War Two, the distinctive nature of the internment camps was not perceived by the contemporary people. If so, had they been a hardly known reality but also a neglected one compared to the denunciation of torture? Not exactly, according to Nicolas Hubert, according to whom the camps were included, as part of a whole, in the denunciation of the war.