This project focuses on the forgotten interactions between inhabitants of Algeria on one hand and the legislative power of metropolitan France on the other, and thus on how both the colonial occupier and the occupied negotiated the Third and Fourth Republic's contradictions regarding national identity. I aim to pursue a better understanding of France's dynamics of empire by investigating how legislators and subjects dealt with the French republican ideal of “universal” citizenship, which paradoxically kept excluding Muslim Algerians. How did petitioners from colonial Algeria legitimize or challenge the existing regime and its contradictions in the process of writing letters to the Palais Bourbon (the French Lower House) from 1870 to 1958? How did these petitioners negotiate the meanings of (colonial, universal, republican) citizenship through their personal demands in times when French citizenship was at its most ambiguous?

2022

2025