THE PRESS IN ALGERIA DURING THE FRENCH COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION: A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS (1830-1962)

This study analyzes the power structures established in the media domain during the French colonial rule in Algeria (1830–1962) and the continuities of these structures in the postcolonial period, within the framework of postcolonial theory. The theoretical foundation of the study is grounded in Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, Homi Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and mimicry, Robert J. C. Young’s idea of epistemic colonialism, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s theory of silenced histories. The media is examined not merely as a tool for information transmission but as an apparatus of colonial power legitimization and a formative element of collective memory. The French colonial administration strategically utilized media to suppress the historical, linguistic, and cultural memory of the indigenous population. The exclusion of Arabic from the public sphere, the normalization of French-language press, and the criminalization of resistance constituted key elements of this strategy. The transformation of the media field in the post-independence period reveals how the postcolonial state restructured its memory politics. Newspapers such as El Moudjahid, which played a revolutionary role in the anti-colonial struggle, later became vehicles for official state ideology, thereby limiting pluralistic representations. The national liberation war was selectively glorified through the media, while the historical contributions of Berber, communist, and women's movements were systematically marginalized. Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) is employed here to reveal how institutionalized forms of forgetting rather than remembering were constructed. The analysis of the French press highlights that media discourse was not monolithic. This article moves beyond viewing media history as a linear trajectory of technological or institutional development and conceptualizes it as a field of power where political imaginaries are shaped and collective memory is produced. Media assumes a foundational role in constructing collective identity through the political structuring of meanings attributed to the past. In the Algerian context, media functions as part of the continuity from colonial epistemic violence to the ideological apparatuses of the postcolonial state. Building a democratic media order requires a critical deconstruction of these historical memory regimes and the deeply entrenched epistemic inequalities.