Found postcards, 4’’ x 6’’
Postcards documenting Versailles, bourgeois leisure, cathedrals, chateaux, and the gardens of the Barbizon school of landscape painters. Each reads “À utiliser seulement dans le service intérieur,” or “Use for internal service only.” Only to be circulated within France, Algeria, and Tunisia, these are artifacts of an enduring conception of Algeria and Tunisia as interior to France, a result of the French colonial empire and its postcolonial present.
As Kateb Yacine writes, French language remains one of many Algerian “spoils of war.”