
Repeating Revolutions
The French Revolution and the Algerian War
Timothy Scott Johnson(Author)
Routledge (Publisher)
1st Edition
Published on 16. January 2025
Book
Hardback
230 pages
978-1-032-43598-5 (ISBN)
Description
Repeating Revolutions examines how activists, intellectuals, social scientists, and historians looked to France's Revolutionary past to negotiate Algeria's struggle for decolonization from the 1930s to the 1960s.
The French Empire justified their claims over Algeria in part through messages of universal progress marked by the political visions tied to the French Revolution. Supporters of Algerian independence confronted those historical claims by identifying the Algerian cause with the French Revolution and by highlighting the apparent contradictions between the history of 1789 and imperial rule. Far-right activists, meanwhile, saw the movement to decolonize Algeria as another manifestation of the revolutionary disorder stemming from the French Revolution. Behind these analogies lay broader changes in the study of North African society and contemporary political relevance of the French Revolution. The focus on analogies to the French Revolution puts different sets of actors in conversation with one another and offers a fresh take on how people's experiences and expectations changed throughout the Algerian War.
This book will appeal to readers interested in the intellectual history of decolonization, the historiography of the French Revolution, the historiography of North African studies, and questions of historical comparison and conceptual change.
The introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
The French Empire justified their claims over Algeria in part through messages of universal progress marked by the political visions tied to the French Revolution. Supporters of Algerian independence confronted those historical claims by identifying the Algerian cause with the French Revolution and by highlighting the apparent contradictions between the history of 1789 and imperial rule. Far-right activists, meanwhile, saw the movement to decolonize Algeria as another manifestation of the revolutionary disorder stemming from the French Revolution. Behind these analogies lay broader changes in the study of North African society and contemporary political relevance of the French Revolution. The focus on analogies to the French Revolution puts different sets of actors in conversation with one another and offers a fresh take on how people's experiences and expectations changed throughout the Algerian War.
This book will appeal to readers interested in the intellectual history of decolonization, the historiography of the French Revolution, the historiography of North African studies, and questions of historical comparison and conceptual change.
The introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Postgraduate
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
529 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-032-43598-5 (9781032435985)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Book
approx. 07/2026
1st Edition
Routledge
€57.00
Not yet published

E-Book
01/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€52.49
Available for download

E-Book
01/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€52.49
Available for download
Person
Timothy Scott Johnson is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. His work focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of postwar France. Previously, he translated Francois Ewald's The Birth of Solidarity (2020).
Content
Introduction 1. Debating the Revolution's Legacy 2. The Soul of the Republic and the Algerian Crisis 3. Dual Revolutions 4. "To Be French Today Is to Be Algerian" 5. Broken Mirrors 6. Revolution and Counter-Revolution 7. Rewriting North African History 8. Constructing the Third World from the Third Estate. Conclusion: Rewriting the Revolution: Analogies as Historiographical Operations