Résumé
By simultaneously examining 'literatures of exile' and material collected in interviews, it can be shown that the return to Algeria does not concern all pieds-noirs in the same way. Indeed, their sociological profiles -- like their positions in the space of receptions of colonial history -- are very diverse. The act of returning can be considered a form of 'roots tourism' only when the work of mourning has been carried out independently of heroic accounts in which Algeria is identified as a French creation. Conversely, the skepticism of some pieds-noirs underscores the insurmountable incongruity (in the framework of an affective economy) between an Algeria that has been reconstructed a posteriori and the reality of a transformed country. With their remoteness from family tombs remaining one cause of the suffering of the pieds-noirs, the voyage can also be motivated by the project of collectively caring for the land of the dead. Thus the diversity of the meaning and uses of return, a phenomenon that spans the fugitive experience of re-socialization within a lost Algeria, the transmission of genealogical memory, the shared upkeep of family tombs and the shock of deracination tied to the search for the lost Algeria of an earlier generation. Adapted from the source document.