Contenu du sommaire : Dossier : Besoins d'histoire

Since the end of 2010, Tunisia and Egypt have pursued different but simultaneous revolutionary processes. Constantly alternating between urgency and expectation, enthusiasm and deception, certainty and doubt, these events have deeply impacted the rhythms of life and perceptions of history. On the margin of political and social transformations, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions have led to an intense rewriting and rereading of their respective national histories. The present article examines political, social and cultural mechanisms by which the past has become a major source of contention for the revolutions.

Since the collapse of the authoritarian regime of Ben Ali, references to national history, particularly in the contemporary period are very present in the public debate in Tunisia and calling for re-readings of the past. This interest in history and the need to rethink it raises the question of access to sources. The recent opening of contemporary public records does not seem to arouse curiosity in the current transition period, except the police and court records and documents that may help to disqualify political opponents. The quick inventory of contemporary Tunisian national archives that we offer would promote the necessary renewal of the historiography of modern Tunisia.

How do we enter the Tunisian Revolution from the point of view of history? This problem enjoins us to question the rules of the discipline and the contours of contemporary history. Assuming her subjectivity, the author provides an overview of recent historical events and highlights the timid awakening of current history, a category which has, up to now, been poor in Tunisian historiography. The article suggests new directions for research to benefit from this taste for immediate history while deepening one's perspective on the issues, cross-examining memories and multiplying ways and means of contemporary investigation.

This article analyzes the first three mandates of Abdelaziz Bouteflika through the prism of the epistemological crisis that has affected Algeria, which is to say the squandering of an historical opportunity and the resulting failure of sense. A review of the political temporalities that surround the figure of the Algerian president allows us a better apprehension of the scope and limits of symbolic state power. The article begins with a review of the origins of the epistemological crisis, from the war of independence to the civil war. It then looks at Bouteflika's rise to power and the restoration of order, a staged return to the glorious past and the vanquishing of the black decade. This restoration of order was also linked to political paralysis, the dynamics of which would have been both institutional and fortuitous in so far as they linked to the head of state's illness. Finally, if the President helped the ruling coalition to remain in place for an extended period, he did not resolve the epistemological issues: rather than restore credible political authority and political meaning, he has come to incarnate the misappropriation of historical legitimacy and the survival of a demented and grotesque order.

In 1999, the publishing house Tarik was founded in the specific context when men and women between 18 and 65 years of age, mostly living in Rabat and Casablanca, started to write their life stories. Tarik house was not an exception. Before Tarik, between the mid-eighties and late nineties, a number of publishing houses were founded, including, among others, Le Fennec and Ediff Marsam. Some forty publishing operations were founded over a period which coincided with a remarkable flowering of literary production. This literary effervescence raises several questions: how can one explain this phenomenon? To which writing practices does it refer? Who are those so called «authors»? Was the terminology properly applied? Through which resources were they writing? And what were they writing about? This article analyses the meaning of these practices and their implication for understanding the extent to which these imply a redefinition of the relationship, on the one hand, between society and its recent past, and on the other hand, between society and its popular narrative.

This article provides an assessment of the revolutionary production of Messali Hadj and his partisans who were confronted with eclipse, stigmatization and rehabilitation. The text deals more particularly with the congress of Hornu to show the determinist character of the first narratives before turning toward a growing Messalist reappropriation which has accompanied the movement against authoritarianism in Algeria as well as the recent trend of literary popularization through the example of Mohammed Benchicou's last novel.

From the very beginnings of Algerian independence, Algerian nationalists emphasized the country's Arab-Moslem identity. The islamization of North Africa was the very foundation upon which the Algerian nation was to be built. The region's ancient past was almost entirely excluded from oral memory and written history. Thanks to James McDougall's work, History and Culture of Nationalism in Algeria, the foundational work on national construction by Tawfiq al-Madanî (d. 1983) is well documented. Yet the writings of another historian close to the Association of Algerian Ulemas, Mubârak al-Milî (d. 1945) were no less important. His Histoire de l'Algérie dans les temps anciens et modernes, written at the end of the 1920s, deals with the Maghreb's classic and pre-Islamic history, exposing a peculiar and original viewpoint. Contrary to nationalist historiography, imposed following independence, al-Milî's work bears witness to the crystallisation of parallel and competing narratives for the ethnogenesis and cultural history, this very process being the consequence of social and political rivalry. His ideas and discourse on the ancient history of Algeria not only overturns the values and arguments advanced in the colonialist discourse, but assimilates the ethnic categories and scientific theories advanced by French scholarly societies of the 19th century. The European narrative of ethnogenesis provided a model for conceptualization of the Algerian people's collective memory. Our contribution is an attempt to analyse this ethnic engineering, and so to examine the modes by which this ethnic group was reactivated to culturally express an ethnic group and “imagined community”, which was itself dominated socially and politically.

The inhabitants of the Canary Islands, located off the African coast, have been mentioned in many narratives about Berber history and identity. These however, are not often studied with a view of uncovering the causes of this link or how it came about. This proposes an analysis of how historiography has included Berber/Amazigh components in a story of origins. In this paper the author describes the genealogical and chronological development of this historiographical process, emphasizing how the implementation of different discourses made sense for community ownership. Finally, we assess the consequences of this process on Canary Islanders identity.

This article examines the relationship between archeology, politics and historiography in the contemporary Maghreb from the standpoint of Paul-Albert Février. By analysing the professional path and work of the learned archaeologist and historian of late antiquity with the numerous political and academic reappropriations of his work by contemporary authors, this paper analyzes the question of history, its relationship to the past, its uses and the «need for history» in the Maghreb. The author points to the absence of a reflexive historiography in the study of North African antiquity, and sheds light on the difficulties encountered by the human sciences, today as yesterday, in addressing issues raised by those who, in a generation marked by the independence movements of the Maghreb, assumed the choice of a story that does not deny the reality of the present by enclosing themselves in a dead scholarship.

This article first appeared as an online research blog, Textures of Time. It assumes the form of an ego-history. Herself one of the «children of October» (October 1988 and the heavily repressed Algerian youth riots), the author reflects upon the possibility of being both Algerian and French on one side and the other of the Mediterranean in the context of emigration, and on the necessity for all historians working on Algeria to be self-critical about their generational, national (or transnational) and social engagements. * Ego-histories are commissioned biographical essays in which the author is invited to explore his or her vocational choices. The essay form was invented by French Academician, Historian and Editor, Pierre Nora for a collection published in 1987 as Ego-histories.

In 1974, Abdallah Laroui and Hichem Djaït, two emerging Maghrebi historians and intellectuals wrote political essays affirming the necessity of re-historicizing the national projects of Tunisia and Morocco. These two countries faced what was framed then as a “crisis of modernity”, at a time when these countries were consolidating national authority. These intellectuals' participation in the public space was seen as innovative and daring. In this article, we look at their ideas and practices in relation to each other. The article allows us to establish the specific mechanisms of consultation that were put into place between intellectuals, authorities and the public with lasting implications. On the one hand, these essays took on special meaning for these intellectuals whose lives would be marked by disillusionment and alienation resulting from the confrontation of their idealist convictions upon completing their studies in France and the stark realities of the Maghreb of the early sixties. On the other hand, these authors placed history and the historical principle of change at the center of their analysis, thus avoiding any claim that the “crisis” was the product of the intellectual limitations of national political elites. These two axes of study will allow us to frame the issue of the social demand for history in a wider perspective, while arguing that the constituent elements of the historicity regimes in the Maghreb were put in place as early as the seventies.

This article proposes a comparative study of the history of visual arts in Algeria and Tunisia from the 1960s to the 1980s. By drawing on texts produced in the wake of Algerian and Tunisian independence (e.g. exhibition catalogues published in-country or abroad, monographs and essays on art history) we aim at analysing the shaping and evolution of discourses regarding art within two culturally close countries. If an initial assessment leads to an identification of common issues in each case, a more detailed study of sources allows us to reveal differences relating to their particular histories. This study also questions the homogeneity of reference works produced since the 1980s and how a history of the visual arts in each of these two countries has been formed and transmitted. Indeed, the authors of such works have established the timeline and refer to such a limited number of historical actors that it seems unlikely that these would be the only ones responsible for the emergence and institutionalization of the modern and contemporary art worlds. We support the assumption that an analysis of the literature and its evolution will offer a key to understanding the process by which the "glorious history" of the Algerian and Tunisian artistic movements was formed. We therefore propose to rethink the implementation of this dominant history by studying the process of writing art history.

The colonial history of North Africa, because of its violence and because of the huge transformations it caused within North African societies, shaped a vision of the past that obscured other historical processes far more deeply rooted than colonial processes. This paper not only aims at emphasizing the impact of these other, deeper historical processes, it also suggests that by taking into account this "longue durée", we should reconsider the analytical frameworks and our broad understanding of Maghreb history in general and its colonial history in particular. The first section of the paper analyzes the outlines of the colonial history; it examines the limitations of the spatial framework and the timeline markers used within this field of research. The second section examines the new vistas of research opened through serious consideration of the legacy and persistent effects of early modern history in North Africa. It explores these new perspectives in terms of time and space and our interpretations of North African primary sources.

This text studies historiographical conditions of the limited interest that represent nowadays, relationships between Morocco and its international connections during XVth-XVIIth century period. The study suggests also some elements and topics concerning Morocco inspired from new tendencies in global and connected history.