Overview

Disintegrating Empire examines the entangled histories of three threads of decolonization: the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria, and the French social workers who mediated between the state and their Algerian clients. After World War II, social work teams, midlevel bureaucrats, and government ministries stitched specialized social services for Algerians into the structure of the midcentury welfare state. Once the Algerian Revolution began in 1954, many successive administrations and eventually two independent states—France and Algeria—continuously tailored welfare to support social aid services for Algerian families migrating across the Mediterranean. Disintegrating Empire reveals the belated collapse of specialized services more than a decade after Algerian independence. The welfare state’s story, Elise Franklin argues, was not one merely of rise and fall but of winnowing services to “deserving” clients. Defunding social services—long associated with the neoliberal turn in the 1980s and beyond—has a much longer history defined by exacting controls on colonial citizens and migrants of newly independent countries. Disintegrating Empire explores the dynamic, conflicting, and often messy nature of these relationships, which show how Algerian family migration prompted by decolonization ultimately exposed the limits of the French welfare state.  

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9781496233141

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Reviews

“A pathbreaking history of Algerian families who migrated to France during and after the Algerian War and the welfare services created to assist them. With prodigious research and keen insight, Elise Franklin explores the full expanse of this subject. . . . Disintegrating Empire makes a major contribution to the field of French history and to the study of migration and the welfare state more widely.”—Herrick Chapman, author of France’s Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic “The role that women and social welfare policies played in France’s war to crush Algerian nationalism are among the most compelling debates among scholars of how the Algerian revolution reshaped France and, more broadly, the world. In this marvelously argued and written history, Franklin unpacks the dynamic relationships between gender, social policy, Algerians, and the very concept of care to show how colonial relationships and violence—and their erasure—reshaped social work and understandings of the family in post-decolonization France and Europe.”—Todd Shepard, author of Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 “Making a stunning contribution to the historiography of long decolonization, Franklin pursues interlocking arguments about France’s midcentury welfare state, Algerian families’ experiences in the metropole, and social workers’ relationships to their clients and the state.”—Amelia Lyons, author of The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization “Disintegrating Empire approaches the subjects of decolonization, social welfare, and immigration in Modern France with a fresh focus. Bringing these topics together offers new ways of thinking about the postwar welfare state and the period of the Trente Glorieuses in France.”—Margaret Cook Andersen, author of Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic

Author Information

Elise Franklin is an assistant professor of history at the University of Louisville.  

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