The Algerian Writers and the Democratic Experience in the 1990s

The great majority of Algerian writers supported the stopping by the army of parliamentary elections in 1992, which the Front islamique du salut should have won. Aren’t Algerian writers democrats ? The explanation rely on their status of elites, owing the socialist state of the 1970’s, but also on their writers’ experience : at the more autonomous pole of the literary field, the central value is, more than democratic equality, “tolerance”, promotion of “plurality”, in other words respect of individual liberties that islamists refuse, and for which writers had fought with beginning of success in the 1980’s.