Once upon a time, young Algerians came to France to try their luck and live a better life. The story takes place between 1945 and 1962, just after World War II and just before their country’s independence. But several hundred of them will see their desire for discovery and emancipation come to a complete halt. Arrested for vagrancy or petty crimes, they find themselves placed by a judge in a strange observation center where educators, social workers and psychologists scrutinize them with questions, each more inquisitive than the last.
Thousands of archives were thus created and found years later by the historian Mathias Gardet. Archives that tell a little-known part of the history of immigration and juvenile justice in a colonial situation… with the voices of RFI to embody the voices of Algerian youth exhumed by Mathias Gardet in his book We came to France published by Anamosa editions.
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