Francaoui

This novel tells the life of a francaoui family in the Maghreb, at the height of the French presence, between 1931 and 1954. This ordinary tale, which evokes an extraordinary era, reconnects the threads intertwined by parents and children.

A thread, singularly, emerges from the motif.

It is woven by Guillaume, who is born on Algerian soil and leaves it at 19. For the others, young and old, North Africa will have been only a happy stay, and life will have resumed its normal course with their return to France.

But Guillaume will be marked by a secret imprint, that of his own Algeria.

You are a Frenchman from France, my comrades used to tell me, both Muslim and French Algerians, even though I had spent my entire youth among them.

It took more than fifty years for me to feel the need to exorcise this singularity in a saga blending reality and fiction, through the vision of a child with a candid, then naive, and finally ingenuous gaze.

Jérôme Tanon was born in 1935 in Paris.

He lived in Morocco, then in Algiers, until the age of 19. After a long career as an engineer in industry, he settled in the South of France.

France-Algeria Collection 42

Novel

310 pages