removed
restructured
rewind
reconsider
recover
Administrative and juridical systems are key mechanisms of the colonial system: they hide the violences inflicted on stolen lands and exploited populations behind laws, regulations and rights to make those violences appear acceptable and legitimate. In the words of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 'these devices are used to render violence into acceptable political landscapes'1. One of the claims of colonialism is that its mission is to make the soil fertile again; France wanted to accomplish this by creating hundreds of 'villages of colonisation', offering parcels of stolen land to French settlers at a cheap price or even for free through the creation of official documents to state their legitimacy. Berthelot was one of those villages, where my great-great-grandfather, the soldier and photographer Émile Berthélémy, lived between 1919 and 1927. Emile was a banal coloniser. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes:
'The perpetrator is not conceived here as an aggrandized persona, but rather as an ordinary man or woman, a citizen-perpetrator, whose actions seem ordinary to herself or himself. They take part in or acquiesce to crimes they have learned to see as proper law enforcement or part of missions accomplished in their fields of expertise.'2
In the social and political context of post World War I, Algeria was a place where many French citizens could attain a dominant position and a comfortable life-style compared to the metropole. Colonial violence was common and profitable. Albert Memmi describes the figure of the settler colonial:
'If the small colonizer defends the colonial system so vigorously, it is because he benefits from it to some extend. His gullibility lies in the fact that to protect his very limited interests, he protects other infinitely more important ones, of which he is, incidentally, the victim. But, though, dupe and victim, he also gets his share.'3