Continuing ‘the essential combat’: The Algerian War veterans’ movement in France and the imperial origins of the National Rally (1957-2012)

France deployed over 1.2 million conscripts during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Yet in the throes of decolonization, this imperial nation-state denied the existence of the war it was waging, and the status of the veterans it created. At the conflict’s end, former servicemen posed an embarrassing reminder of France’s failed attempt to preserve empire. Seeking to move on from the troubled Algerian era, the state largely ignored these citizen-soldiers and their memory of the war. And indeed, one would be forgiven for concluding the memory of Algeria no longer impacts French politics. 5 July 2022 marked the sixtieth anniversary of Algerian independence. Legislative elections only two weeks previously had rendered the far right National Rally (National Front until 2018) France’s largest opposition party. This followed campaigning in which Marine Le Pen emphasized economic issues rather than immigration, Islam, or the memory of French North Africa, so central to the National Front’s message under her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Obscuring the Rally’s imperial origins was a tactical decision Marine took in pursuit of Jean-Marie’s original vision––gaining power for the far right through elections. During the conflict in Algeria, French veterans created diverse associations to rally the homefront and elevate veterans as moral witnesses. At the war’s end, the main left wing association campaigned to inscribe its memory of Algeria in the commemorative landscape. But the right wing association continued its combat against the French state itself––becoming a vehicle for the revival and institutionalization of the legal far right. Drawing on oral histories and research in state and veterans’ association archives, this paper examines how the Algerian War veterans’ movement transmuted veterans’ memory of counterinsurgency and the end of empire into a political struggle over the identity of France, one that continues to challenge French republican norms today.