»Algerians Settling Accounts with Algerians«? Algerian Migrants in France During the Algerian War (1954-1962)

The spectacular murdering of the Algerian colonial politician Ali Chekkal by an algerian migrant, Mohamed Ben Sadock, on May 26, 1957, in a Paris football stadium serves as starting point for analysing the impact of the Algerian war on everyday interactions between Algerian migrants and French civilians in French metropolitan society. It is argued that the perception of violent acts by Algerians, resulting mostly from the intra-Algerian struggle about political leadership of the FLN, and its sudden increase during 1957 reinforced ethnicized images of the Algerian as violent by nature, inducing the construction of a North African »problem« within French society. Together with the increasing intra-Algerian violence, the reiterated efforts to maintain internal peace and normalcy in French society resulted paradoxically in normalizing an exceptional situation, a process which contributed to the weakening of democratic structures of the Forth Republic that fell into ruins only half a year later.