A Graphic Novel on Pierre Bourdieu’s Algeria

It All Started with an Image
Starting in 2011, I had the opportunity to teach screenwriting at the International Comic Strip Festival in Algiers. Around the same time, after working on two fiction graphic novels (2005-2008; 2014) with Olivier Thomas, an illustrator, and Bruno Pradelle, a colorist and screen–writer, I wanted to move toward documentary work. The idea of a graphic novel about Bourdieu’s experience in Algeria from 1956 to 1960, during the colonial war — first as a soldier, then as a sociologist — came to me from a photo published in the proceedings of a colloquium on the writer Mouloud Feraoun (2010). This photo, taken in Algiers in 1958-1959, shows Feraoun and Bourdieu. At the time, Bourdieu was teaching sociology in Algiers. He had just completed his military service and published Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958). This image made me realize the significance of Algeria in his career. I was mostly familiar with Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and knew little about his work based on his Algerian field research. I read his articles compiled by Tassadit Yacine in Esquisses algériennes (Bourdieu, 2008), Enrique Martin-Criado’s critical essay Les deux Algéries de Pierre Bourdieu (2008), and Images d’Algérie, the catalog of the exhibition of Bourdieu’s photos at the Institut du Monde Arabe (2003). There was a fascinating subject here for a documentary graphic novel. Olivier Thomas, who viewed Bourdieu as a strong and endearing figure, a committed intellectual from a rural and modest background, was also interested in the project.

Between Reportage and Historical Reenactment
I had in mind the work of Joe Sacco, a pioneer of reportage graphic novels. Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (2009) served as my model. In this book, where he attempts to reconstruct a massacre committed in Gaza in 1956, Sacco incorporates elements of docu–drama: a reportage on the site of the “story,” interviews, archives, and the reenactment of the event. In film, reportage and reenactment do not follow the same process. “Documentary” and “fiction” are semiotically “framed” separately. However, in a graphic novel, reportage and historical reenactment stem from a single process. Sacco does not distinguish graphically between reportage and reenactment, suggesting an equivalence in their relationship to reality. Both are “false” but aim to approach the same truth.
For Bourdieu. Une enquête algérienne, the goal was to be precise about what science allows us to say about Algerian society, the Algerian War, etc., while also engaging with the relationship between the graphic novel and reality. Like Sacco, I wanted to combine reportage and historical reenactment. For the reenactment scenes, the fictional techniques are clear, particularly in the alternation between a neutral narrative point of view and a focus on Bourdieu’s character. The reportage scenes, where I also appear as a character, are, of course, an artifice. But the semiotic framing “indicates” that what is narrated happened as it is told. The presence of the author-narrator as an investigator character places this part of the narrative within the framework of autobiography. Should I remain faithful to this framework? Or diverge from it?

From Documentary Investigation to Finding a Publisher
In 2015, I conducted an investigation in Algeria. I wasn’t looking for new facts about Bourdieu’s experiences — I relied on Amín Pérez’s thesis (2022). Instead, I was searching for documentary material: interviews with sociologists and witnesses, and photos of places where Bourdieu conducted research with Abdelmalek Sayad. I kept a journal because the investigation would form a thread for the script. I carried out this work with the help of a friend, Saadi Chikhi, who was my fixer and is represented as a character in the graphicnovel. A grant from the Institut Français covered half of this stay, and I funded the rest.
At the same time, I read Bourdieu’s and Sayad’s works on Algeria, books on the Algerian War, and articles, especially those by the sociologists I interviewed (Saïd Belguidoum, Kamel Chachoua,
Nadji Safir, Rachid Sidi Boumedine, Tassadit Yacine…). A central theme emerged: precarity. For Bourdieu, the precarity imposed on Algeria by colonialism echoed the precarity imposed later by neoliberalism. This theme gradually asserted itself in the script.
In September 2015, I was hosted in residence by the Agence algérienne pour le rayonnement culturel. I wrote a synopsis and sequences that Olivier Thomas illustrated for the proposal to publishers. We first received a favorable response from a well-known publisher but were asked to remove the reportage element. It was Steinkis Editions that accepted the project as conceived. We also received a rejection from a major publishing group, who argued that there was “no market space” for this book. That turned out to be false. Bourdieu. Une enquête algérienne has already been reprinted four times, exceeding 10,000
copies. It is a commercial success. Publishers underestimated the fact that in France, there is a graphic novel readership, particularly among secondary and higher education teachers, who are also “left-wing” and for whom Bourdieu matters.