Declassified documents on the Algerian War at the Service historique de la Défense archives in Vincennes, France
Academic Articles
“Networking the Counterrevolution: The École Supérieure de Guerre, Transnational Military Collaboration, and Cold War Counterinsurgency, 1955-1975,” Journal of Social History, Vol 56, no. 3 (Spring 2023): 607–636.
Over the past several decades, scholars have devoted considerable attention to tracing the influence of French counterinsurgency practices developed in Indochina and Algeria on other militaries during the Cold War. This article builds on that literature to offer an explanation for why French counterrevolutionary knowledge circulated so broadly, and to connect the French military more concretely to an emerging literature on anticommunist internationalism. At the center of French efforts, this paper argues, stood the Army’s École Supérieure de Guerre (ESG) in Paris, which trained growing numbers of high-ranking foreign officers after 1945. The ESG taught counterrevolutionary warfare directly, but as this paper argues, it also helped constitute an audience abroad for such ideas by cultivating affective bonds, strategic preferences, and personal connections over the longer term. In tracing the partnerships cultivated through the ESG in this period, this article also illustrates the broader entanglements between counterinsurgency, international military cooperation, and professionalization at midcentury. For military partners seeking to professionalize their own forces, the attractiveness of French doctrines lay as much in the easily accessible set of materials, training, and expertise the French military offered as in their capacity to combat subversion. By tracing the transnational networks of exchange knit together by military academies in this period, this article concludes, scholars can better historicize the rise of counterinsurgency as a key paradigm of cold warfare.
Winner of a 2024 Society of Military History Vandervort Prize for outstanding journal article in the field of military history.
“Think Global, Fight Local: Recontextualizing the French Army in Algeria, 1954–1962,” French Politics, Culture, & Society Vol 38, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 56-79.
For many within the French military, the war over Algeria's independence that raged from 1954 to 1962 appeared global: not an isolated conflict, but one front in a broader subversive war waged by Communist revolutionaries. As historians have long noted, this perspective was inaccurate. For that reason, the social and cultural contexts that defined military practice during the early years of the conflict have not been fully explored. This article argues, however, that these global narratives mattered, and can help historians to trace both how global events shaped military thinking about Algeria and how the war helped forge more concrete transnational connections. As they honed their operational doctrines in Algeria, French military leaders looked abroad: not only to understand the war in Algeria, but to promote their own practices as a universal response to the social upheavals of the era.
“Hidden traumas, appelés, and the Algerian war in recent French fiction: a book review essay,” Journal of North African Studies, vol 25 no. 1 (2018): 145-150.
In this review essay, I discuss the recent wave of novels focused on appelés, or draftees, who fought in the Algerian War. These novels focus on generational silences, but also attest to the lasting fascination with the Algerian War.
“The ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Italian Peril’: Vichy, Italy, and the Jews of Tunisia, 1940-1942,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, vol. 2 (2015): 234-258.
During the Second World War, the Vichy government published many of the same antisemitic laws in Tunisia as it did in the metropole. But in Tunisia, the ‘Jewish Question’ also became a question of maintaining control over the French Empire. Vichy racial legislation aimed at the Protectorate’s multinational Jewish population did not only reflect the state’s antisemitic policies; rather, these laws were inextricably bound up in France’s colonial rivalry with Italy. In a colony where French political and economic hegemony had been only tenuously secured in the preceding decades through strategic naturalization, Vichy racial laws presented French authorities with a radically new avenue to consolidate power in the Protectorate; however, they also threatened to upend Tunisia’s economy and provoke Italian intervention. This article explores how the frequently-delayed and often partial application of Vichy anti-Jewish laws in Tunisia resulted from the difficulties of reconciling the aims of economic aryanization with the exigencies of protecting French rule against the pretensions of Fascist Italy.
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