In 1991 the French historian Benjamin Stora observed in a study entitled La Gangrène et l'oubli: “In France, in the seventies and eighties, Pieds-noirs, Harkis and soldiers represent groups that each carry separate memories of Algeria” (Stora 1991, 256). These dissimilarities notwithstanding, fourteen years later the French National Assembly passed the controversial “loi française n° 2005–158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés,” a law meant as an official gesture of acknowledgement for the work and sacrifice of the former French inhabitants of Algeria. After a heated public debate, article 4 of the law, which affirmed the beneficial – in other words, fortunate – influence of colonialism over the territories formerly under French control, was repealed, but the contentious fight over what constitutes the most appropriate symbolic and material forms of national recognition for a formerly marginalized social group is still ongoing, reminiscent of Gilroy's remark that “the problematic of assimilation lost its grip on the postcolonial world long, long ago” (Gilroy 131). The heterogeneous nature of the group itself has long been at the heart of the debate.

In the French imagination, starting from the early nineteenth century, when the memory of Napoleon's campaign in Egypt was coeval with the successful attempts by the Restoration to conquer Algiers, “Algeria lingers there with the ontological strangeness of something missing but still felt: a phantom limb, as it were, and a big one” (Bell 35). Dorian Bell shows that in several novels by Balzac, such as La Cousine Bette, Le Programme d'une jeune veuve, La Duchesse de Langeais, Le Député d'Arcis and Une passion dans le désert, North Africa is often depicted as a deadly yet destiny-fulfilling place for military heroes, gallant adventurers and social-climbing bourgeois or small nobility. Balzac, Bell argues, displays his nationalistic support for the French control of Algeria (“cette seconde France”) in his journalistic writing while at the same time using his novels to delve deeply into the political, economic and moral corruption of the colonial administration. However, Bell further asserts that Balzac's “desert odyssey” presents him with a particular challenge, as the expanding colonial space contests the social stratification and spatial symbolism of realist representation.