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# Cohen Muriel, *Des familles invisibles : Les Algériens de France entre intégrations et discriminations (1945-1985)*

Amelia H. Lyons

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OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/remi/27013
DOI: 10.4000/12htp
ISSN: 1777-5418

**Publisher**

Université de Poitiers

**Printed version**

Date of publication: October 1, 2024
Number of pages: 261-263
ISBN: 978-23-81940-27-4
ISSN: 0765-0752

**Electronic reference**

Amelia H. Lyons, "Cohen Muriel, *Des familles invisibles : Les Algériens de France entre intégrations et discriminations (1945-1985)*", *Revue européenne des migrations internationales* [Online], vol. 40 - n°2 et 3 | 2024, Online since 01 October 2024, connection on 11 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/remi/27013; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12htp

This text was automatically generated on December 11, 2025.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.
Cohen Muriel, Des familles invisibles :
Les Algériens de France entre
intégrations et discriminations
(1945-1985)

Amelia H. Lyons

REFERENCES

Cohen Muriel, *Des familles invisibles : Les Algériens de France entre intégrations et discriminations (1945-1985)*. – Paris : Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020. – 448 p. ISBN : 979-10-351-0519-8

1 Muriel Cohen's book contributes to a burgeoning scholarship about Algerians' place in France in the 20th century. It is part of a historiography that grapples with France's troubled and troubling history as an imperial nation state. Cohen identifies her goal "to bring out the uniqueness of Algerian family immigration" by considering both their interaction with the state and the "multiple pathways" they took (p. 22). In other words, she reminds us that Algerians' experiences have been more diverse than depictions—in the media and in political circles—have allowed.

2 Cohen's work traces the medium durée (p. 19) from the end of World War II through the early Mitterrand administration. It builds on previous scholarship.¹ Structurally, the book has three sections which follow chronologically. The first examines the period of the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962). Her chapters focus on key problems the French administration identified—housing, social services, and education—via a case study of bidonvilles west of Paris. As a result, Cohen convincing demonstrates the "diversity" of Algerians' experiences in Nanterre (p. 157).

3 While Cohen did extensive research in governmental archives, her use of two archival collections allows readers to see this diversity through the voices, experiences, and
even images of Algerians who persevered in the bidonvilles. The first, which to my knowledge has not been previously used in a scholarly monograph, is a collection of precious oral histories with Algerians who lived in Nanterre.² The other is Cohen's effective use of Monique Hervo's archive.³ Beyond her memoir, Hervo conserved a portion of her records. For many years, Hervo hesitated to have her photographs published, worried that she would betray the privacy of these families. But I think Hervo, Cohen, and the publisher ultimately made an excellent decision to share Hervo's portraits of these families, their homes, and their daily lives with the world. They offer powerful evidence that celebrates Algerians' integral place in France and pushes back against rhetoric that erases Muslims' long roots in the metropole. These photos, like Cohen's book, help us to see Algerians as regular families who made lives for themselves even as they have faced institutional discrimination.

In the second part, Cohen uses housing to examine how the state managed Algerian family settlement or reunification—a term associated with the idea that this process began in earnest after the global economic downturn of the mid-1970s. She frames her analysis in the question of whether Algerian families became “foreign families like others from the point of view of immigration institutions” (p. 163) following the collapse of French colonial rule. Over three chapters, Cohen demonstrates how French authorities worked to limit the instillation of Algerian families by successively increasing the bureaucratic hoops through which they had to jump. The state “mobilized” the issue of housing to regulate Algerian family settlement, making housing a “principal instrument of the policy to limit Algerian family immigration” (p. 201). Many families, particularly those who had lived in bidonvilles and in the transitional housing parks, faced “ethno-spatial segregation” (p. 220) “inherited from the colonial period” (p. 231). On the other hand, Cohen traced seven hundred families who settled in the Hauts-de-Seine after the war. They found better housing due to help from other Algerians (from extended family or people from the same region or town). These families navigated new selection policies, which rested on housing certificates and the male head of household's stable work at large, national companies. Again, Cohen shows the diversity of experiences, and concludes that some Algerian families, despite bureaucratic efforts to prevent permanent integration, became a part of their communities by the early 1970s. They existed; “they remained invisible” (p. 288).

Not surprisingly, given Cohen's conclusion about Algerians who quietly acquired better housing, stable work, and became increasing integrated, the third section of her book takes welcome aim at the durable myth of family reunification. Tearing it to pieces, Cohen makes clear that the context of the border closure in 1974, the global economic downturn, and the rise of “anti-Arab racism” (p. 291) are the keys to unraveling the myth. In her final chapters, Cohen argues Algerian families, who increasingly became a part of France's working and even middle classes, put down roots, and improved their economic situation during the booming economy of the 1960s. During the latter part of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, new economic hardships and rising public hostilities destroyed the stability that some Algerians had begun to acquire and made the most fragile families the most visible. To explain the creation and durability of the myth, Cohen argues that contemporary observers, including experts and the media, did not see Algerian families settled since the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, state, scholarly, and popular depictions created the dominant vision of Algerians based on the most visible :

4

5
new arrivals, rebellious unemployed young men, and families living in dilapidated,
aging, suburban housing enclaves.

In the end, Cohen's effort to demonstrate how families became vehicles for integration fits with the larger body of scholarship, and allows her to trace how Algerian families, often quietly, inserted themselves into French society even as they grappled with institutional discriminatory practices. Here lies what Cohen aptly calls the central paradox of this story: Algerian families have been at once depicted as inassimilable even as, once we dig in, we learn they are “deeply rooted” in France (p. 22). Her work shows, even if she does not frame it as such, that France cannot avoid its own history of racial discrimination, it cannot continue to pretend that race is not a constituent element of the social landscape. As Vergès (2020) has argued, the experiences of women of color in France lays bare the “racialist dimension of republican postcoloniality”. The state’s management of Algerians, particularly after 1962 “illuminates the coloniality of power” long after the official end of colonial control (Vergès, 2020: 3; 46). Cohen’s research reminds us that claims of universality and secularism do not shield France from discriminatory practices. Instead, both attempt to paper over institutional discrimination. Finally, it is vital that work like Cohen’s is published in French, so it becomes part of larger conversations that push back on the myth of family reunification in the 1970s and on the myth that racism is not central to France’s past or its present.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vergès Françoise (2020) *The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism* (Kaiama L. Glover, trans.), Durham, Duke University Press.

Nasali Minayo (2016) *Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship and Everyday Life in Marseille since 1945*, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Franklin Elise (2017) *A Slow End to Empire: Social Aid Associations, Family Migration, and Decolonization in France and Algeria, 1954-1981*, PhD diss., Boston, Boston College.

Harris Dustin (2018) *Muslims in Marseille: North African Immigration and French Social Welfare in the Late Colonial and Postcolonial Eras*, PhD Diss., Toronto, University of Toronto.

NOTES

1. Her book misses some critical anglophone work, including Nasali (2016), Franklin (2017) and Harris (2018).

2. Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, Cohen's dissertation advisor, led a team that conducted the oral histories in 2011/2012. They are available for consultation at La Contemporaine (formerly BDIC), on the campus of the Université de Paris Ouest, Nanterre: http://www.lacontemporaine.fr/

3. Hervo's archive is preserved at the Institut d'histoire du temps présent (IHTP): https://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/. Hervo passed away March 20, 2023. Cohen penned this piece about her life's
work: https://histoirecoloniale.net/Deces-de-Monique-Hervo-cette-Francaise-qui-a-manifeste-avec-les-Algeriens-du.html

## AUTHORS

### AMELIA H. LYONS

Historian, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Central Florida, Orlando, United States;
amelia.lyons[at]ucf.edu