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If Italy officially administrates Libya in 1912, it does not succeed in submitting the whole population. The coming to power of B. Mussolini in 1922 has the country enter in a new colonial era. Firmly decided to dominate the Libyan territory, he wages violent campaigns in the north-west region (Tripolitania) and in the south-west (Fezzan). In 1929, he engages the country in a new campaign to submit the last region in resistance: Cyrenaica. Unable to subdue the resistance despite a brutal policy, the Italians decide in 1930 to create concentration camps to confine tens of thousands of the inhabitants of the region (submitted or in resistance) and to succeed in establishing its power. The thesis falls within the post-colonial history movement and resorts to a transimperial approach in order to analyse the French gaze (by which we understand the state’s institutions and public opinion) on those camps. In those years of high tensions in the North African region, but also of European and Franco-French preoccupations, what was the French discourse on the violent colonial policy of the rival Italian power? The French civilizational ideology of the 1930s, and its own concentrational past, are not the only ways to understand the press and state silences. France’s interest is also in maintaining cordial relations with Italy, and in the weakening, if not, the annihilation of its old Saharan enemy: the Sanusiyya. The mystic brotherhood to which the majority of the interned are affiliated, embodies a common enemy for the two empires. Moreover, the migrations that ensue from the implementation of the concentration camps are profitable, even if concerning, for the French colonial power. The press and state archives therefore allow for very few spaces of denunciation and only in the context of the instrumentalization of the Italian policy to the benefit of France.

Accepted: 2024-07-15T14:35:32Z