Pied-Noir Pilgrimages, Commemorative Spaces, and Counter-Memory

The individuals now generally referred to as Pieds-Noirs — a term ‘in search of its roots’1 — represent a host of different groups, some of them with no common ancestry or territory apart from those forged in Algeria.2 These are people of French and foreign immigrant stock; those in the latter category were from different European and Mediterranean countries and it was in Algeria that many of them acquired French nationality, even if they continued to identify both with the places they settled in and those associated with their origins. On leaving Algeria they found themselves lumped together according to their links with the past and labeled Pieds-Noirs — a category not acceptable to all of them.