The end of French Algeria is at the center of both Professor Todd Shepard’s first book and the book he is now finishing. Each attends to how the National Liberation Front’s anticolonial war forced the French to discuss the paradoxical role of empire in republican governance. These debates led directly to massive legal and institutional reforms that pretended to leave empire behind—all in a failed, and retrospectively futile, attempt to keep Algeria French. When Algerian rejection of these plans forced the French to leave, there were new reforms accompanied by intense efforts to deny that Algeria or empire had mattered to France and to present the loss of empire as, in fact, a French victory. French public debates in other areas, notably around the sexual revolution, referenced and drew inspiration from the Algerian revolution. The seminar will map how and why Algerian histories of France remain important even after Algeria’s independence from empire.