Contributions by:

Keanu Heydari

Timothy Scott Johnson’s Repeating Revolutions: The French Revolution and the Algerian War

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Repeating Revolutions examines how France’s revolutionary past became a working political language during Algeria’s struggle for decolonization from the 1930s through the 1960s. Johnson’s central claim is that invocations of “1789” mattered because they operated as historical analogies that shaped political perception and legitimated action. Defenders of empire appealed to revolutionary universalism to portray French…